Bernie Sanders, whose campaign
for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is on a roll following a
stunning if narrow win in last Tuesday’s Michigan primary, where he embarrassed
pollsters who were predicting a double-digit rout by Hillary Clinton only a day
before the voting, has famously said he’s “not interested” in the issue of his
opponent’s exclusive use, during her five years as Obama’s Secretary of State,
of a private, instead of government email account and server.
He should be. But forget about
the right-wing charges of leaked diplomatic cables — the big issue is what kind
of diplomatic favors she was selling, and to whom.
Clinton’s achilles’ heel is
the widespread feeling even among many of those Democrats voting for her, that
she is basically “not trustworthy.” People have good reason to feel that way,
and it’s not just the way she changes her tune, her positions, and her accounts
of her prior positions faster than an octopus or Chameleon. She is demonstrably
a serial liar.
Take Clinton’s claim that she
opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership, a new NAFTA-like trade pact being pushed
by the Obama administration and most members of Congress, which threatens to
essentially gut the right of the US and other signatory nations to enforce or
even enact worker safety, environmental protection and other laws. The TPP
would accomplish this abrogation of national sovereignty by allowing
corporations — even foreign subsidiaries of US corporations — to sue over such
laws and claiming massive damages, on the grounds that they violate the terms
of the TPP. The treaty even allows them to bring their cases to
non-governmental arbitration panels, which could overrule national courts.
Clinton may claim on the campaign trail that she’s against this horrific
treaty, but as Secretary of State, when her office was helping to negotiate it,
she was calling it “the gold standard” of trade treaties. Or take her initial
claim, when Sanders began calling her out for giving speeches to Goldman Sachs
and other mega-banks for which she was paid as much as $225,000 a pop.
Initially she made the absurd excuse that these paid speeches were delivered
“before I had decided to run for president.”
Actually, she gave three of
those speeches, for a total of $675,000, to Goldman Sachs in late 2013, after
she had left the Obama State Department precisely in order to prepare for her
presidential run. Even the suggestion that she wasn’t planning to run earlier
than that is an insult to the intelligence of the voter, but it was in any
event widely known that her departure from State was so she could start working
— and building up a campaign war chest — for a 2016 presidential campaign. In
fact, that’s what she was doing negotiating and gathering in those fat speaking
fees (though because she had not formally announced yet as a candidate, neither
she nor the banks had to report the money as campaign swill).
The reason Sanders should now
start pressing her about the emails, which he earlier chivalrously dismissed as
a non-story, is that the Clintons don’t do anything by accident. Hillary
Clinton has defended her use of a private email system while she was Secretary
of State as nothing new. “Everyone did it,” she has said dismissively,
“Including (G. W. Bush’s Secretary of State) Colin Powell.” But while it’s true
her predecessor Powell and her successor, John Kerry, may have at times used
private email for their personal correspondence, they didn’t, as Clinton did
for five years, use a private email system exclusively. Bit difference!
And there is good reason to
suspect the reason she went to such lengths to keep full control over her email
has to do with money and corruption.
Hillary and Bill Clinton
didn’t just go off to write their memoirs after Bill left the White House.
Rather, they set up an organization called the Clinton Foundation, headed by
Bill and later their daughter Chelsea, which is a money-vac, sucking up huge
donations denominated in millions of dollars (and paying themselves magnificent
salaries along the way) from major domestic entities and individuals as well as
foreign leaders and governments (many of them unsavory repressive regimes like
Kuwait, Oman and Qatar).
In classic Clinton fashion,
they have skirted close to the edge legally. Clinton reportedly promised the
Obama administration, when she was being considered for the Secretary of State
post, that the Clinton Foundation would not accept any donations from foreign
governments during her tenure unless those governments had already given money
to the foundation prior to her appointment. That was already a pretty loose
standard for avoiding any appearance of undue foreign influence over diplomatic
policy, but even that low standard was violated when, in 2010, the foundation
accepted a $500,000 gift from the government of Algeria, which, it must be
noted, was at that moment embroiled in lobbying the US to cut it some slack in
terms of any condemnation for its human rights abuses (a determination that is
made annually — you guessed it! — by the State Department).
Clinton and the foundation
admitted, when this donation was exposed, that it had been “a mistake” to take
that money, but then excused themselves saying that the money had just been a
donation for Haitian earthquake relief, and that it had all been “passed
through” to Haitian relief efforts. But that begs the question of why a
government like Algeria’s could not have given those funds directly to relief
organizations, like the Red Crescent or the Red Cross of the UN. It beggars
belief to hear it claimed that Algeria felt that the best way to offer relief
to suffering Haitians would be to give half a million bucks to the Clintons.
It is also a virtual certainty
that negotiations over and instructions concerning the terms of that donation
would have been among the conversations automatically stored on Clinton’s email
server.
We’ll probably never know what
corruption Clinton was involved in as Secretary of State though, because she
deleted some 30,000 emails, saying they were reviewed by not a State Department
lawyer but rather by her private attorney. Right there we almost certainly have
the commission of a whole bushel of crimes involving destruction of evidence,
since a private attorney is hired to determine what is and is not a matter of
private or government business, but rather is hired to protect the interests of
his or her client. If those emails were properly wiped by an IT expert, there
is no way to recover them. That may effectively protect Clinton from
prosecution, but it should not protect her from political attack and political
damage.
Sanders should be putting her
on trial in the campaign, demanding that she explain why she left it to her
private attorney instead of the a State Department legal office to decide which
of her emails (if any!) to delete. Let the voters be the jury. He should do
this if for no other reason than because we can be sure, if he doesn’t, and if
she wins the nomination in July, whoever wins the Republican nomination will be
doing the same thing he should have done every day of the general election
campaign.
The same goes for the
transcripts of all those richly-compensated speeches Hillary Clinton gave to
some of the nation’s largest, most reprehensible and most crooked banks. If, as
she says, there is nothing embarrassing that she said in those speeches, she
should have no qualms about releasing the transcripts. If she won’t release
them, it’s obvious that they are hugely embarrassing. At best, they are
probably examples of the most fawning sucking up to power and wealth. At worst,
they are promises to protect these companies which criminally wrecked the US
and global economy in the first decade of this century, from any serious
regulations and enforcement actions that might prevent them from doing the same
thing again.
Clinton, by the way, also lied
about the availability of transcripts of those speeches she delivered. When the
issue first came up, she said she would release them if she could determine who
controlled access to them, and if those parties would agree. Only later did it
come out that the making of transcripts of her talks was stipulated by her
agent, at her request, because she wanted them available for when she someday
wrote her memoir. Now that it’s clear that she owns the copyright to her talks,
and has full control over whether to release them (and no doubt has copies of
her own anyhow, given her plans for later use of them), she is saying she’ll
only do so if all candidates release theirs. And isn’t referring to just her
Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, but to all the remaining Republican
candidates too.
Maybe the Sanders campaign,
which is flush with cash, should offer a bounty, either publicly or on the QT,
to anyone at Goldman Sachs or the other banks where she has spoken for a fee,
who can provide copies of the transcripts. When it comes to bankers, money
talks, and it’s a good likelihood that the embarrassing documents would
magically appear if such a reward were on offer.
In any event it is clear that
it’s time for the Sanders campaign to start playing hardball. Clinton and her
increasingly desperate neoliberal backers in the leadership of the Democratic
Party, are going to stop at nothing to try and derail Sanders, as his campaign
continues to build and win more primaries. He is going to need to hit Clinton
where it will really do the most damage, and that is on her lack of
trustworthiness and integrity.
Of course, if he does that,
and she still manages to win the nomination, it would be hard for Sanders to
then turn around and support her in the general election, but that would be a
good thing. In fact, it would be critical in accomplishing what Sanders claims
is his real goal: creating a revolution in American politics. If he wins the
nomination, then there really will be a kind of revolution, as the decades-long
neoliberal death grip on the Democratic Party will be history. If he loses, and
does not back Clinton’s candidacy, his movement will live beyond the election,
perhaps in the form of a new genuine progressive labor party.
Dave Lindorff is a
founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!,
an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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