August 29, 2016
Hillary Clinton may be
enjoying a comfortable lead in national
polls, but she is far from enjoying a comfortable night’s sleep given the
ever-widening maelstrom of scandals engulfing her presidential bid. And
while Clinton delights in bloviating about a decades-long “vast, right wing
conspiracy” against her, the fact is that it’s the Clinton political machine’s
long and storied track record of criminality, duplicity, and corruption that
haunts her like Lincoln’s ghost silently skulking through White House bedrooms.
The latest in a string of
embarrassing scandals is centered on the powerful Clinton Foundation, and the
obvious impropriety of its acceptance of large donations from foreign
governments (and wealthy individuals connected to them), especially those
governments universally recognized as oppressive dictatorships whose foreign
policy orientation places them squarely in the US orbit.
Of particular note are the
Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar whose massive donations belie
the fact that their oppression of women runs contradictory to Clinton’s
self-styled ‘feminism’ and belief “that the
rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st
Century.” Is collaborating with feudal monarchies whose subjugation of
women is the stuff of infamy really Clinton’s idea of feminism? Or, is it
rather that Clinton merely uses issues such as women’s rights as a dog whistle
for loyal liberals while groveling before the high councilors of the imperial
priesthood?
What the Clinton Foundation
hullabaloo really demonstrates is that Clinton’s will to power is
single-minded, entirely simpatico with the corruption of the
military-industrial-financial-surveillance complex; that she is a handmaiden
for, and member of, the ruling establishment; that Clinton represents the
marriage of all the worst aspects of the political class. In short, Clinton
is more than just corrupt, she is corruption personified.
Clinton’s Dirty Dealing and
Even Dirtier Laundry
In a hilariously pig-headed,
but rather telling, statement, former President Bill Clinton responded to
allegations of impropriety with the Clinton Foundation by saying,
“We’re trying to do good things…If there’s something wrong with creating jobs
and saving lives, I don’t know what it is. The people who gave the money knew
exactly what they were doing. I have nothing to say about it except that I’m
really proud.”
Leaving aside the fact that
such an arrogant comment demonstrates Bill Clinton’s complete contempt for
ethics and the basic standards of proper conduct, the salient point is that the
argument from the Clintons is that the foundation is inherently good, that it
helps people around the world, and that, as such, it can’t possibly be corrupt
and unethical. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire – except when it comes
to the Clintons who stand proudly enveloped in billowing clouds of smoke
swearing up and down that not only is there no fire, but anyone who mentions
the existence of flames is both a sexist and Trump-loving Putin stooge.
But indeed there is a fire,
and it is raging on the American political scene. And nowhere is the heat
more palpable than in the deserts of the Middle East where wealthy benefactors
write massive checks for access to America’s 21st Century Queen of Mean
(apologies to Leona Helmsley).
Consider the 2011
sale of $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, a
gargantuan deal that made the feudal monarchy into an overnight air
power. Were there any doubts as to the uses of the hardware, look no
further than the humanitarian nightmare that is Yemen, a country under
relentless air war carried out by the Saudis. And, lo and behold, the
Saudis had been major contributors to the Clinton Foundation in the years
leading up to the sale. And it should be equally unsurprising that just weeks
before the deal was finalized, Boeing, the manufacturer of the F-15 jets that
were the centerpiece of the massive arms deal, donated
$900,000 to the Foundation.
Of course, according to Bubba
and Hil, it’s all conspiracy theory to suggest that the Clinton Foundation is
essentially a pay-for-play scheme in which large sums of money translate into
access to the uppermost echelons of state power in the US. As the
International Business Times noted:
The Saudi deal was one of
dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed
weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton
family philanthropic empire…Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department
approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose
governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation…That figure — derived
from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from
October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of
American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department
during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.
The Clinton-led State
Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for
16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143
percent increase in completed
sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush
administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American
military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143
percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an
80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.
Additionally, as Glenn
Greenwald explained earlier this year,
The Saudi regime by itself
has donated
between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, with
donations coming as late as 2014, as she prepared her presidential run. A group
called “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” co-founded
“by a Saudi Prince,” gave an additional amount between $1 million and
$5 million. The Clinton Foundation says that between $1 million and $5
million was
also donated by “the State of Qatar,” the United Arab Emirates, and the
government of Brunei. “The State of Kuwait” has
donated between $5 million and $10 million.
The sheer dollar amounts are
staggering. Perhaps then it comes as no surprise just why nearly every
single influential figure in the military-industrial-financial-surveillance
complex – from General
John Allen to death squad coordinator extraordinaire John
Negroponte, from neocon tapeworms such as Max
Boot, Robert
Kagan, and Eliot
Cohen to billionaire barbarocrats like the Koch
Brothers, George
Soros, and Warren
Buffett – is backing Hillary Clinton. Not only is she good for
Empire, she’s good for business. And ultimately, that’s what this is all
about, isn’t it?
But of course, Hillary’s devotion
to the oil oligarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf goes much deeper than
simply an exchange of money for weapons. In fact, Hillary is deeply
committed to the Saudi royal family’s foreign policy outlook and tactics, in
particular the weaponization of terrorism as a means of achieving strategic
objectives.
Libya provides perhaps the
paragon of Clintonian-Saudi strategy: regime change by terrorism. Using
terror groups linked
to Al Qaeda and backed by Saudi Arabia, Clinton’s State Department and the
Obama Administration managed to topple the government of Muammar Gaddafi,
thereby throwing the former “jewel of Africa” into turmoil and political,
economic, and social devastation. To be fair, it was not the Saudis
alone involved in fomenting war in Libya, as Hillary’s
brothers-from-other-mothers in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were also directly
involved in sowing the seeds of the current chaos in the country.
And of course, this strategic
partnership between Clinton and the Gangsters of the Gulf extends far beyond
Libya. In Syria, Clinton’s stated policies
of regime change and war are aligned with those of Riyadh, Doha, and Abu
Dhabi. And, of course, it was during Clinton’s tenure at the State
Department that US intelligence was involved in funneling
weapons and fighters into Syria in hopes of doing to Syria what had already
been done to Libya.
Huma Abedin: Clinton’s Woman
in Riyadh
Just in case all the political
and financial ties between Clinton and the Gulf monarchies wasn’t enough to
make people stop being #WithHer, perhaps the role of her closest adviser might
do the trick. Huma Abedin, Clinton’s campaign chief of staff, has
long-standing ties to Saudi Arabia, the country where Huma spent her childhood
from the age of two. As a Vanity
Fair exposé revealed earlier this year:
When Abedin was two years old,
the family moved to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, where, with the backing of Abdullah
Omar Nasseef, then the president of King Abdulaziz University, her father
founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a think tank, and became the
first editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs…After [Abedin’s
father] Syed died, in 1993, his wife succeeded him as director of the institute
and editor of the Journal, positions she still holds… Abdullah Omar
Nasseef, the man who set up the Abedins in Jidda…is a high-ranking insider in
the Saudi government and sits on the king’s Shura Council, there are claims
that Nasseef once had ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—a charge that he has
denied through a spokesman—and that he remains a “major” figure in the Muslim
Brotherhood. In his early years as the patron of the Abedins’ journal, Nasseef
was the secretary-general of the Muslim World League, which Andrew McCarthy,
the former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the “Blind Sheik,” Omar Abdel
Rahman, in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, claims “has long
been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation
of Islamic supremacist ideology.”
Consider the implications of
this information: Clinton’s closest adviser comes from a family connected at
the highest levels with the Saudi royal family as well as the Muslim
Brotherhood. While right wing pundits portray the Muslim Brotherhood as
some sort of straightforward international terror organization, the reality is
much more complex as the Brotherhood is more an international political
movement whose tentacles stretch into nearly every corner of the Muslim world.
Its vast reserves of cash and political influence, backed by Gulf monarchies
such as Qatar, allows the Brotherhood to peddle influence throughout the West,
while also being connected to more radical salafist elements. An obvious
two-for-one for Clinton.
In effect then, Abedin
represents a bridge connecting Hillary with both the ruling elites in Riyadh,
as well as influential clerics, businesspeople, and political leaders
throughout the Middle East. Perhaps then it makes sense why Abedin, in
contravention of every standard of ethics, was employed
by Teneo Holdings – a pro-Clinton
consultancy founded by former Clinton aide Doug Band – while also working
for the State Department. Such ethical violations are as instinctive for
Hillary as breathing, or calling children superpredators.
Trump, Assange, Putin, and
Clinton’s Sleight of Hand
Despite being embroiled in
multiple scandals, any one of which being enough to sink the campaign of most
other candidates, Clinton and her army of fawning corporate media sycophants,
have attempted to deflect attention away from her own misdeeds, corruption, and
nefarious ties by instead portraying everyone who opposes them as puppets,
stooges, and useful idiots.
Let’s begin with Republican
nominee and gasbag deluxe, Donald Trump, who Clinton trolls have attempted
to portray as a stooge of Russian President Putin. While it’s
indeed quite likely that the Kremlin sees Trump as far less of a threat to
Russia’s interests than Clinton – just look at Clinton’s roster of neocon
psychopath supporters to see that Putin has a point – the notion that Trump is
somehow a creation of Putin, or at the very least is working for him is utterly
absurd.
And the “evidence”?
Trump’s connections with wealthy Russian oligarchs. I suppose those who
have made their homes under rocks these last 25 years might not know this, but
nearly every billionaire investor has gone to Russia in that time, forged ties
with influential Russians, and attempted to make money by stripping clean the
bones of what was once the Soviet Union. Sorry Naomi Klein, I guess the
Clintonistas expect no one to have read Shock Doctrine which details the sort
of disaster capitalism run amok that took place in Russia in the 1990s.
And then, of course, there’s
that great confabulator Julian Assange who has also been smeared
as a Putin puppet by the #ImWithHer media somnambulists. I guess the
lords of corporate capital didn’t like the fact that Assange and WikiLeaks have
managed to expose countless dirty deeds by Clinton’s Tammany Hall of the 21stCentury.
From using the DNC as a political appendage of the Clinton campaign (as
revealed by the WikiLeaks
dump of DNC emails) to his recent promise
to make public the “most interesting and serious” dirt on Hillary, Assange has
become a thorn in the side – or thumb in the eye, as it were – for Hillary.
And what would a rundown of
the specters haunting Clinton’s dreams be without mention of the rabid bear of
Russia, big bad Vlad? Clinton recently
referred to Putin as the “grand godfather of this global brand of extreme
nationalism.” Leaving aside the asinine phraseology, Clinton’s attacks on
Putin reveal the weakness of the Democratic nominee, the hollowness of her
arguments, and the unmitigated gall of a hypocrite for whom casting stones in
glass houses is second nature.
For, at the very moment that
she takes rhetorical swipes at Putin, Clinton herself is implicated in a
worldwide network of extremism that promotes terrorism, rains death and
destruction on millions of innocent civilians, and moves the world closer to
global conflict. If Putin represents the éminence grise of a “global
brand of extreme nationalism,” then Clinton is the fairy godmother of global
extremism and terror. It’s a good thing she has access to the best personal
grooming products Goldman Sachs money can buy as it is not easy to wash
decades-worth of blood off your hands.
And so, the quadrennial danse
macabre that is the US presidential election has turned into an embarrassing
sideshow of dull-witted infantilism. But amid the idiocy there is wanton
criminality and corruption to be exposed before the world. For while
Trump is undoubtedly the bearded lady of America’s freak show, Hillary is the
carnival barker.
She knows the ring toss and
other games are rigged, but she coaxes the feeble-minded to play
nonetheless. She knows the carnies are drunk and reckless, but she urges
the children to pay for another ride anyway. She understands that her job
is to sell a rigged game, and to call security when someone challenges her
lies. And, unfortunately, whether you want it or not, the Hillary Roadshow is
coming to a town, or country, near you.
Eric Draitser is the
founder of StopImperialism.org
and host of CounterPunch
Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City.
You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.
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