by Jeff Cohen
In her speech claiming victory
after the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton proclaimed herself “a progressive who
gets things done.” I had to laugh. And it wasn’t just because former President
Bill Clinton – the centrist Triangulator-in-Chief – was standing behind her,
beaming and clapping.
A quick review of Hillary
Clinton’s record shows that much of what she gets done is anti-progressive (not
unlike President Clinton in the 1990s). For example:
Promoting Fracking Worldwide
is Not Progressive: On behalf of Chevron and other US oil companies, Secretary
Clinton and the State Department pushed fracking globally, as Mother Jones has
documented: “How
Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World.”
Boosting Corporate-Friendly
Trade Deals is Not Progressive: Secretary Clinton repeatedly
praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – as it was being negotiated by
the US Trade Representative and her
State Department – and she recruited countries into the deal. In October,
with Bernie Sanders climbing in the polls, Clinton said she no longer supported
the pact, and prevaricated
about her earlier boosterism.
Enabling Military Coups is Not
Progressive: When she headed the State Department, it enabled
a military coup in Honduras that overthrew democratically-elected President
Manuel Zelaya, a progressive. Clinton was briefed
on the dishonesty
that allowed aid to illegally reach the coup government.
Pocketing Millions from
Corporate Lectures Fees is Not Progressive: When Wall Street, Big Pharma
and other corporate interests paid
a soon-to-be presidential candidate an average of $230,000 for a speech,
did Hillary Clinton think it was for her brilliant stand-up comedy? Or was it
more akin to political bribery? Clinton now says these firms just wanted to
hear the views of a former Secretary of State on our “complicated
world” – or about the Bin Laden raid. But Politico
reported in 2013 soon after one of her three speeches to Goldman Sachs: “Clinton
offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to
accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so
popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish.”
(Releasing the
speech transcripts would help settle the matter.)
Escalating the Afghan War is Not
Progressive: As insider books on the Obama administration have revealed,
Secretary Clinton was among the
most hawkish of Obama’s advisors in country after country – for example,
vociferously urging the failed and pointless 2009
troop surge in Afghanistan.
Chaotic Military Intervention
in the Middle East and Libya is Not Progressive: If not for Hillary
Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote in support of Bush’s Iraq invasion, Obama would not
have defeated her in 2008. As if having learned nothing from the post-invasion
chaos in Iraq, Secretary Clinton was one of the strongest voices in 2011 urging
Obama to militarily depose Qaddafi in Libya, a country now in total, deadly
chaos.
On the campaign trail lately,
Hillary Clinton is doing her best to sound much more progressive than her
record in office, but she’s a rank amateur compared to her husband’s slickness
on this score in the 1990s. President Bill Clinton did “get things done” – but
some of his biggest initiatives were the opposite of progressive:
1993: Passage of the
corporate-friendly trade deal NAFTA, which passed mostly with Republican
support against the votes of most Democrats in Congress.
1996: Passage of the
Telecommunications Act, the biggest change in media law since the 1930s, which
helped big media companies grow even bigger. Bill Clinton got this done by
working closely with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as both major
parties received large
donations from media and telecommunications corporations.
1996: Repeal of
federally-guaranteed welfare in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC), a program enacted in 1935 during Franklyn Roosevelt’s New
Deal. The Children’s Defense Fund – a group Hillary Clinton worked with and repeatedly
invokes to shore up her “progressive” credentials – vehemently
denounced repeal.
1999-2000: Deregulation
of Wall Street, working closely with right-wing Senator Phil Gramm. Among other
things, President Clinton ended
the 1933 Glass-Steagall legislation which had separated Main Street banks
from the more speculative Wall Street banks (a measure Hillary Clinton says she
is opposed to reinstituting). Dereg led directly to the 2007/2008 economic
meltdown.
I’m open to the argument that
you can’t blame Hillary Clinton for these policies of her husband that were so
hurtful to poor and working-class women and men – policies that she publicly
defended or went quiet on. But she wraps herself today around the Bill Clinton
presidency. And it’s not unprecedented for a first spouse to object to White
House policy: Barbara Bush went public that she opposed
her husband’s anti-choice position on abortion.
One policy from the 1990s that
Hillary and Bill get joint custody of is healthcare; President Clinton chose
Hillary to lead his administration’s healthcare initiative in 1993. Working
with the biggest insurance companies (five giant firms had formed the Alliance
for Managed Competition), Hillary Clinton proposed a convoluted proposal that
kept big for-profit
insurers in the heart of the system. Her “Managed Competition” scheme was
so complex and bureaucratic that it never got out of committee in a
Democrat-controlled Congress – but it did sideline a single-payer Medicare for
All bill, a truly progressive measure that was backed by 100 members of
Congress, labor unions, Consumers Union, and a grassroots movement.
"The great news for
progressives is that large numbers of young activists are joining a 'political
revolution.' Whether Bernie wins or loses, let’s hope these young people not
only transform the Democratic Party, but also the organizations that purport to
represent the poor and working class, oppressed racial and sexual minorities,
and the environment."
Like her husband, Hillary can
come off as either centrist or progressive depending on the audience. And
depending on the season – left-leaning during primary election season, and
corporate centrist in office. Her current campaign for president has helped
reveal not just a split between corporate Democrats and progressive Democrats,
but a chasm between the leadership of liberal constituency groups and the
progressive base of these groups.
Some labor unions have poured $5.5
million into the pro-Hillary SuperPAC, for example – funding a woman who
sat on the board of one of our country’s worst union-busters, Walmart.
The Human Rights Campaign, a
gay rights group, endorsed Hillary over Bernie despite the fact that it took
her until
2013 to support gay marriage, while Bernie had joined a minority of
Congress members who voted against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act signed
by President Clinton in 1996.
The League of Conservation Voters
endorsed
Hillary over Bernie despite the fact that she pushed fracking worldwide
while he staunchly opposed it, and he fought against the Keystone XL pipeline
and its dirty oil from the beginning while she took until a few months ago –
during campaign season – to express opposition.
The great news for
progressives is that large numbers of young activists are joining a “political
revolution.” Whether Bernie wins or loses, let’s hope these young people not
only transform the Democratic Party, but also the organizations that purport to
represent the poor and working class, oppressed racial and sexual minorities,
and the environment.
When that happens, the next
time a corporate politician pretends to be a “progressive” during primary
season, these groups will not be complicit in the masquerade.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Jeff
Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park
Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch
group FAIR, and former board member
of Progressive Democrats of America. In
2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). He is the
author of Cable
News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media - and a cofounder of
the online action group, www.RootsAction.org.
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