http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/hillary-clinton-and-the-northern-strategy/
For decades now, we liberals
have been shaking our heads in wonder at the working stiffs who give the rich
pashas atop the GOP their votes. There’s hardly a liberal alive who can’t
recite what’s the matter with Kansas: the parable of the downtrodden whites in
their double-wides, so enraged by their dwindling slice of the American pie
that they vote for hucksters who vow to keep Negro hands off their lily white
daughters, homosexual hands off their wedding cakes, Mexican-rapist hands off
their orchards, atheist hands off their crèches, guvmint hands off their
assault weapons. The hucksters, with the votes in hand, go off to D.C. and sock
it to the suckers who sent them there—shipping their jobs abroad, rigging the
tax code against them, gutting their schools, taking swipes at their Social
Security and Medicare. It’s not that the con men don’t throw the rubes some
nourishing scraps. They block a bill to register firearms here, pass a Defense
of Marriage Act there, decry the War on Christmas with their fellow shriekers
on Fox. Donald John Trump is just the latest in a long parade of flimflammers
to adopt the Southern Strategy. His only innovations are speaking bluntly
rather than in code and cranking up the volume. It’s a pitiful farce, no?
But here’s an equally pathetic
farce you don’t hear about much: Democrats are just as conned, only in politer
tones. Ask a group of liberals what they want in a candidate, and you’ll get a
sketch of a champion who will fight for income equality, rein in big banks,
defeat ruinous trade agreements, restore our battered civil liberties, look to
diplomacy before war, and stop the devastation of our climate. Sure enough, in
every election year Democratic candidates come along peddling such wares as
these, and the winners go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent
them—shipping their jobs abroad with NAFTA and TPP, deregulating the banks that
are screwing them, gutting welfare, ignoring calls for a living wage, logging
old-growth forests, drilling the Arctic, spying home and abroad with abandon,
beating back calls for universal healthcare, canning whistleblowers, fighting
endless wars, torturing prisoners, and much, much more. Like the Republican con
men, their Democratic counterparts will defend the worst assaults on Roe v.
Wade (and avert their eyes as the states whittle Roe to nothingness—parental
notification, anyone? waiting periods? admitting privileges?), will pass a
family medical leave bill (unpaid, naturally, and applying only to businesses
with 50 or more employees), will make the most token of gestures against global
warming (must “nonbinding” precede every international “agreement”?)—in a word,
scraps. This program, like the beast, goes by many names: triangulation, the
Third Way, “reaching across the aisle,” “getting things done.” But its true
name should be the Northern Strategy, for it’s the Dems’ own version of the
Southern. Any leftist who wonders why her voice isn’t heard in Washington
shouldn’t be asking what’s the matter with Kansas. She should be asking what’s
the matter with New York.
And at this particular moment,
there’s something particularly the matter with New York—and Massachusetts and
Pennsylvania and Florida—that’s worth asking about: why are so many liberals
lining up to buy the same snake oil in 2016 that they’ve bought since at least
1992? This time around the shyster hawking it is the Northern Strategist par
excellence, a scammer who has been exposed time and again for the Tory wolf in
Labor clothing that she is. I speak, of course, of the Hon. Hillary Rodham
Clinton. In this respect at least, she is little better than a Trump (or Ryan
or McConnell or any of the GOP big men). She is quieter, to be sure, but the
same in dangling tempting bait while pursuing another, under-the-radar agenda
utterly at odds with the voters she is duping.
So often has Clinton’s faux
liberalism been laid bare that I hesitate to do it again. But her poll numbers,
although delightfully dropping, show a great mass of the Democratic base are
still being gulled. So here’s a précis of Hillary’s more egregious frauds, a
veritable case study in how to work the Northern Strategy:
She bills herself a champion
of Main Street over Wall Street, but she has been a lackey of Wall Street her
entire political life.
Candidate Clinton has put
forward what she calls a bold plan to reform the excesses of Wall Street,
including a tax on high-frequency trading. Just one problem: “her proposal is
very narrowly targeted to one specific practice, in which a trading computer
tells a marketplace that it’s going to make a large number of trades but then
cancels them before they go through,” writes
Alan Pyke at ThinkProgess. “All other forms of HFT would be free to continue as
normal under the proposal.” Only a dupe would have expected otherwise.
Clinton’s Wall Street record has been littered, in and out of the Senate, with
such gems as refusing
to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (whose elimination contributed mightily to
the crash of 2008 and our current Great Recession), rebuffing
calls to break up big banks, and helping big banks screw
their customers by making it ridiculously hard to declare bankruptcy and
renegotiate crushing credit card debts. In fact, thanks to Senator Clinton and
others, it’s easier for a bank to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate its debts
than it is for you. Does it surprise you that four
of her top five donors over the last 16 years are Wall Street firms? If so,
count yourself among the duped. Are you shocked that among the truly
unscrupulous tycoons she has taken cash from is one Donald Trump? The Don, in
addition to giving big to her senate campaigns, gave
between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Populist babble may
burble off Clinton’s lips on the campaign trail, and Democrats may fall for it,
but “[d]own on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute,” Politico’s
William Cohen writes.
What’s more, “the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want
her to be president.” (Many
are the reports
that have said
the same.)
I don’t know what’s sadder—that Big Money is smarter than the average Dem, or
that average Dems will be shocked when she chooses Wall Street over them if she
lands in the Oval Office.
She says she’ll protect
workers from bad trade deals, then pushes those deals through—and workers over
the cliff.
Make no mistake: trade deals
like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership are all about sending American
jobs to cheap-labor countries and using the threat of outsourcing to drive down
the wages of whatever jobs remain. Trashing environmental regulations is a
pleasant effect too. Does anyone remember that as first lady in the 1990s, she
backed NAFTA as full-throatedly
as her husband did? Or that as senator she went to India and defended
outsourcing, saying, “[W]e are not in favor of putting up fences”? On the
2008 campaign trail, however, she claimed to have seen the light: NAFTA, she
said, was a mistake,
and she just hated
seeing telemarketing jobs sent to places like India. But when the campaign was
safely behind her, Secretary of State Clinton had another Damascene conversion
and threw her weight behind the devastating Trans-Pacific Partnership no fewer
than 45
times. But the woman’s capacity for flipping is outdone only by her
capacity for flopping. Back on the campaign trail last year, she said
she was now reserving judgment on the TPP. In the end, she mustered all of her
courage and declared she was against the deal—after it had passed. The balls on
that woman. Could we have expected anything different from an eminence who
served six years on the board of Wal-Mart and remained silent as
that anti-worker colossus waged a virulent campaign against unions?
Clinton likes to cut the
figure of a restrained diplomat, but she was and remains a trigger-happy hawk.
Now and then she makes a
strong show of advocating diplomacy over belligerence, as when she recently blasted
the GOP for looking at Cuba through an “outdated Cold War lens” and pursuing a
policy of force-first rather than diplomacy-first: “We cannot afford to let
out-of-touch, out-of-date partisan ideas and candidates rip away all the progress
we’ve made. We can’t go back to cowboy diplomacy and reckless warmongering.”
But cowboy diplomacy and reckless war-mongering have been the hallmarks of her
work in affairs foreign. Not only did she vote for the Iraq War, but years
after it was plain to everyone that the war was a disaster—and a disaster sold
to the American people with a knot of lies—she still defended her vote.
Not until 2014, as she prepared to face a Democratic electorate thoroughly
disgusted with the war did she do the Clinton pirouette and lament her vote as
a mistake.
She has uttered no laments for her warmongering while secretary of state. Among
the highlights:
successfully pushing Obama to wage war in Libya in 2011 (which turned out just
ducky, provided you like a power vacuum and the anarchy of hundreds of armed
militias fighting for supremacy), successfully pushing him to escalate the war
in Afghanistan in 2009 and slow the drawdown in 2010 (fabulous results, those),
and pushing but, alas, failing to get him to wage war in Syria in 2012 (and
what could have gone wrong with invading a Middle Eastern country to overthrow
its tyrant du jour)? Her résumé was well summed
by right-wing blowhard “Morning Joe” Scarborough: “Hillary is the neocon’s
neocon. It’s going to be fascinating—if she decides to run and she gets the
nomination—that she will be more of a sabre-rattler and more of a neocon that
the Republican nominee. . . . There’s hardly been a military engagement that
Hillary hasn’t been for in the past 20 years.”
She loves to declare that
global warming is a fact, that Republicans are nuts for denying it, and that it
must be addressed—but at best she has twiddled and diddled while the earth
burns and at worst has lit a fistful of matches under the global fire.
Clinton has recently and
prominently displayed her climate change bona fides by declaring that global
warming has contributed to the Syrian refugee crisis and that Obama is right to
curb power plant emissions. Nice words indeed. But as senator she voted
in favor of such lovelies as offshore oil drilling, and as secretary of state
she led
an effort to open up other countries to fracking (she held up the U.S. fracking
industry as a model) and supported
the calamitous Keystone XL pipeline. But once more, back on the campaign trail,
she went mum about the pipeline. “You won’t get me to talk about Keystone,” she
said
last year, counting on the dupes not to think too hard, “because I have
steadily made clear that I’m not going to express an opinion.” Only after it
became plain that not only did Democrats overwhelmingly oppose Keystone but the
pipeline was going down to defeat anyway did she claim she opposed
it. Her record on climate change is so piss-poor that she touts as her biggest
climate accomplishment her supervision of the U.S. negotiations at the 2009
Copenhagen climate talks—one of the mightiest
failures in the history of the climate change fight, largely because she
and others U.S. officials deep-sixed the negotiations even before they began.
Is it merest coincidence that Clinton has long been in bed with Big Oil? Merest
coincidence that, per a Mother Jones report,
nearly all—nearly all—of the lobbyists who are bundling campaign cash for her have
worked in the fossil fuel industry? Merest coincidence that oil
companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, to say nothing of oil-rich
countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have given tens of millions of
dollars to her charitable foundation? Count yourself among the chumps if you’re
surprised that her current plan
for climate change not only lacks an utterly essential carbon tax but even a
specific commitment to cut greenhouse gases. Instead, she wants to give
incentives for solar panels and wind turbines. Perhaps she’ll strew some
daisies while she’s at it. “Just
plain silly” was the nicest thing that noted climate scientist James Hansen
could find to say about it, presumably because “just plain shit” wasn’t fit for
genteel print.
She has long argued that
everyone should have access to healthcare, and for nearly as long she has
worked against it.
Give a devil her due: She
supported Obamacare, which is more than you can say for most other Republicans.
But for two decades she has consistently argued against the only system that
would provide universal health care—a single-payer system—notwithstanding that
a single-payer Medicare-for-all program is supported
by 81 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of all Americans. In the past, she
has deflected calls for single payer by trafficking in extremely
modest reforms; her current campaign proposal is more
of the same. Her incrementalism has allowed voters to think she really
wanted universal health care, but, gosh, the political situation just wouldn’t
allow it now. (Incremental Obama agreed, even though he had the votes to pass
it or at least make a good run at it.) But last week Clinton revealed her true
colors (blood red) when her campaign ripped into Bernie Sanders and his
Medicare-for-all plan with a mixture of ferocity and outright lies that would
do a Republican proud.
The motivation for her attacks? Tanking poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire.
One suspects the $1 million she has taken from Big Pharma and $2.7 million from
insurance companies probably weren’t bad incentives
either. Would it stupefy you to learn that she often leads
all-comers, even Republican comers, in taking bag money from healthcare
profiteers?
I could go on. She vaguely
suggests our civil liberties may have been somewhat intruded upon, but neglects
to say she voted
to eviscerate them with the USA Patriot Act in 2001 and its reauthorization in
2006; she also says the leaks of the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden were
“outrageous” and an aid
to terrorists. She says the harsh prison sentences that she and her
pot-smoking husband pushed for petty drug-deals and the like were misguided,
but she opposes
the legalization of pot and ardently backs
the death penalty. She trumpets her support for diversity and human rights, but
she opposed gay marriage until it was a liability not to (until 2013,
to be precise). She says all working Americans should earn a decent living, but
as recently as last year she said
that raising the minimum wage to a living wage would be inappropriate, and she
flatly refused
to say what she thought our pathetic $7.25 minimum should be raised to. Only
after Sanders’s call for a $15 minimum had gained irresistible momentum did she
reluctantly support
a $12 wage.
Put simply, on issue after
issue Hillary Clinton is a Republican in all but name. How does this consummate
Northern Strategist keep getting away with it? The same way the Southern
Strategists do. On a few of vital issues, she votes with the Democratic base,
sometimes even sincerely, just as an evangelical Southern Strategist may
sincerely vote against The Gay Agenda. She backs abortion, she supports
Obamacare, she has been good on gun control.
Are these scraps enough to
divert voters this time around—enough, that is, to distract them from the
real-deal populist Bernie Sanders, a man who for many a year has called for
breaking up the big banks, killing anti-labor trade deals, pulling back from
eternal war, taxing carbon into the ground, giving everyone health care,
legalizing pot, ending the death penalty, stopping unchecked spying on
Americans, and much more to warm the chambers of the progressive heart? Every
day it seems less and less likely that Clinton’s scraps will suffice. Even
general-election voters are swinging Sanders’s way, as polls
now show that Sanders, if the general election were held today, would fare
better in head-to-head matches against Republicans than Clinton would. I don’t
know which prospect is more appealing: that Sanders could write Republicrat
Hillary Clinton’s political obituary or that he could write the Northern
Strategy’s. In a sense the difference between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns
is simply this: she’s betting liberals are too dumb to see her for what she is;
he’s betting they’re smart enough to see him for what he is. It’s anyone’s
guess which is so.
Steve Hendricks is the
author, most recently, of A
Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial. His website is SteveHendricks.org.
