Colin Patrick reviews Doug
Henwood's exposé of Hillary Clinton and her long and sordid history as the best
friend a ruling class could ever ask for.
August 24, 2016
WITH THE Trump campaign
sputtering while Hillary Clinton mops up support from traditional Republicans
and center-right swing voters, it is looking ever more likely that the Clinton
family will be returning to the White House in November.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders
supporters and other left-wing voters are being browbeaten into supporting
Clinton as the "lesser evil"--and assailed if they don't as sexist,
privileged, hopelessly idealistic and/or detached from reality, with the
underlying threat that they will be scapegoated if she somehow finds a way to
lose.
In this context, My Turn, Doug
Henwood's sharp exposé of Hillary Clinton, is especially welcome.
In a dispassionate account of
Hillary's political career that is both concise (150 small pages) and
well-documented (332 footnotes), Henwood reviews Clinton's entire career, from
her early days as an Arkansas corporate lawyer supporting her husband Bill's
political career to the 2016 campaign.
The picture that emerges is of
a politician who is steadfastly ruthless, duplicitous, frighteningly militaristic
and contemptuous of democracy. Clinton's actual history, Henwood writes,
"is an important antidote to liberals' fantasies about her as some sort of
great progressive"--a fantasy that is largely the product of the shrewdly
triangulating image-management that she, her husband and the Democrats more
generally have perfected since the 1980s.
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EARLY IN the book, Henwood
explains that he has focused on Clinton's past actions rather than her current
policy proposals because it's this tangible track record that should lead us
not to receive her more progressive-leaning proposals "with anything but
profound skepticism."
Review: Books
Doug Henwood, My Turn: Hillary
Clinton Targets the Presidency. OR Books, 2016, 150 pages, $15.
This skepticism is justified
not only because Clinton's record is that of a corporate-friendly war hawk, but
also because she has a long history of giving deceptive explanations of that
record. (The fact that the Clinton's infamous "triangulation"
strategy requires such duplicity is one reason why the issue of her use of a
private e-mail server is more than just a right-wing sideshow.)
Consider, for example, her
vote in favor of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq
resolution that handed Bush the power to wage war in Iraq at his own
discretion. Clinton
has since described this vote as "a mistake," for the
conveniently blame-shifting reason that Bush did not sufficiently pursue
diplomatic alternatives to preemptive war.
While the authorization
resolution was under consideration, however, Sen. Carl Levin introduced an
amendment that would have made any U.S. invasion contingent on a United Nations
resolution approving the use of force, giving Clinton a perfect opportunity to
show--in deeds and not just words--her aversion to the unilateral use of
American military force.
Not only did Clinton vote
against the Levin Amendment, which failed by a wide margin, she justified her
vote years later with a jingoistic arrogance and a contempt for international
law that would not have been out of place in a Bush administration press
release, explaining
on Meet the Press: "The Levin amendment, in my view, gave the Security
Council of the United Nations a veto over American presidential power."
Henwood also notes that
Clinton helped to spread the falsehood that Saddam Hussein had ties to
al-Qaeda, "essentially siding with Bush and Cheney to a degree that no
other Democrat, even Joe Lieberman, approached," he writes.
She even chose not to read the
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that downplayed Iraq's nuclear
capabilities before casting her vote--even though many of the senators that
voted against the resolution did so because of what it contained. "It's
hard not to conclude," Henwood writes, "that she wanted to vote for
war more than she wanted to know the truth."
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SUCH AN approach to military
engagement--the subversion of diplomacy and the selling of war on a raft of
lies--would be better described as a war crime than a mistake, and it's an
approach Clinton would repeat in Honduras and Libya in her role as secretary of
state.
In Honduras, Clinton's
State Department actively stalled the efforts of the Organization of American
States to reinstate the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya.
Instead, she supported the
effort to impose elections--rife with fraud and intimidation--meant to
legitimate the coup that deposed him, which were presented to the public under
the guise of "restoring democracy." Henwood quotes Greg Grandin, a
historian of Latin America:
[E]arly on in the 2009 coup
against Zelaya, when there was a real chance of restoring the reformist president,
[Clinton] was working with the most retrograde elements in Honduras to
consolidate the putsch...
Democrats who support Clinton
for president would be sympathetic to the coalition that was trying to reverse
the coup: environmentalists, LGBT activists, people trying to make the
morning-after pill available, progressive religious folks, anti-mining and
anti-biofuel peasants, and legal reformists trying to humanize Honduras' lethal
police-prison regime. And Clinton betrayed them, serving them up to Honduras'
crime-ridden oligarchy. Hundreds of good people have since been murdered by the
people Clinton sided with in late 2009 and 2010.
Two years later, as armed
conflict raged in Libya in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, the regime of
Muammar el-Qaddafi regime approached the U.S. with a proposal for a peaceful
transfer of power, in return for regime leaders being able to leave the country
safely. "Was the offer genuine and workable?" David
Mizner asked in an important article for Jacobin. "We'll never know,
because Clinton shut down the negotiations."
Instead, Clinton subverted
even the Pentagon's efforts at de-escalation, and infamously out-hawked
Bush/Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates in favor of a more aggressive
approach.
Henwood reports that the
offensive was sold to the public with what were later revealed to be a raft of
lies. The falsehoods included a rumor, fed to Clinton by Sidney Blumenthal,
while he was coincidentally collecting $10,000 a month from the Clinton
Foundation, that Qaddafi was giving Viagra to his troops to encourage rape.
It's also worth noting that as
a senator in 2007, Clinton voted, along with every Republican senator and 14
other Democrats, against an amendment to a military appropriations bill that
would have sharply restricted the use in densely populated areas of cluster
bombs, which are notorious for leaving behind unexploded shells that years
later have killed tends of thousands of people who come across
them--disproportionately children, who often mistake them for balls or toys.
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CLINTON'S HISTORY of
neocon-style hawkishness is matched by her consistent record of putting the
interests of the rich and powerful ahead of the public good.
While at Rose Law Firm in
Arkansas, Hillary defended local businesses from a power rate hike, on the
grounds that increases in their rates amounted to an unconstitutional
"taking of property." "This is now a common right-wing argument
against regulation," Henwood notes. "Hillary was one of its earliest
architects."
As a senator, Hillary was one
of only a few Democrats to support Bush's proposal to expand the work
requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients--despite
the downturn in the economy. Of course, TANF itself was the weakened social
safety net that remained after Bill
Clinton "ended welfare as we know it"--with Hillary's vocal
support.
Senator Clinton also voted in
favor of making it more difficult for individuals and families to file for
bankruptcy, a gift to banks and credit card companies that was sharply
criticized at the time by then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren.
Henwood details an
under-discussed element of the Clinton family's long involvement in Haiti: the attempt
by the Hillary Clinton's State Department to rescue Fruit of the Loom, Hanes
and Levi's from an "attack on their property" that came in the form
of the Haitian parliament unanimously passing an increase in the minimum wage
to $5 a day.
Even after the Haitian
government backtracked with a more modest, tiered proposal, the U.S. Embassy
remained opposed, dismissing it as an economically unrealistic effort to pander
to the "unemployed and underpaid masses."
Using international diplomacy
to promote Corporate America's interests by overriding other nations' ability
to pass labor, environmental and fair-use copyright regulations is of course at
the heart of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an abomination that
Hillary declared herself against last year after having helped to negotiate
and promote the TPP as secretary of state.
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THERE IS so much more. My Turn
is both a quick read, but compact: nearly every line contains something you'll
want to share with the Clinton supporters in your life. (You'll also want to
tell them the ironic
story behind the book's cover art, which some Clinton supporters have
complained is sexist.)
But this raises a question of
whether it's an effective method of weaning people away from the Democratic
Party to simply inundate them with ever more facts about the record of people
like Hillary Clinton.
In recent weeks, I've heard
liberal supporters brush aside the fact that Bush-era
neoconservatives are backing her candidacy--even though, 16 years ago,
these same liberals used the threat of these same neocons to browbeat the left
into supporting Gore over Nader.
I've also heard self-described
radicals agree that Hillary is an extreme hawk who may well "start World
War III," but then say that we still have to support her given who she's
running against. I can almost hear their retort at the end of each paragraph I
write in this article: "So do you prefer Trump?"
Here, we should keep in mind
Henwood's note that while his book "is a polemic directed at a prominent
figure," it is nevertheless vital to realize that "Hillary is not The
Problem...By all orthodox measures, she is a highly intelligent and informed
senior member of the political class. That is the problem."
Indeed, the problem is a
system that narrows our choices to various shades of capitalist imperialism and
austerity every election year without fail.
Until we manage to organize a
genuine political alternative to it, we can expect the same dismal
"choices," the same pressure to support the one that is (or at least
seems to be) a bit less bad and a lot of ridicule from those who think it is
level-headed and wise to surrender to the utter political alienation and
defeatism of voting, year after year, for the "least worst" option.
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