His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda

Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for. Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass think that should stop.

https://socialistworker.org/2016/10/20/his-horror-show-hides-clintons-rotten-agenda

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On enforcement, Clinton joins Republican and Democratic politicians alike in calling for tougher border controls. In 2013, she supported legislation that included a path to citizenship, as she said in the debate--but on the condition that billions of dollars be devoted to new surveillance equipment and fencing (otherwise known as a wall) along the Mexican border, along with 20,000 more border agents.

The consequences of these policies are deadly. Since January, officials say that fewer people attempted to illegally cross the border between the U.S. and Mexico, but more have died trying to make the journey. According to the Pima County medical examiner in Arizona, 117 bodies have been recovered along migration routes in southern Arizona so far this year, an increase over last year.

This is the true face of Clinton's promise to "protect our borders"--death and misery for people fleeing persecution and poverty.

Clinton supporters focus on the nightmare of a Trump presidency for immigrants. But the nightmare is already happening. Trump may have blustered about the actual number, but it's true that Barack Obama has presided over the deportation of well over 2 million people, more than all the presidents of the 20th century combined.

And forfeiting immigrant lives in the name of border security is hardly unique to the latest Democrat in the White House. It was Bill Clinton who imposed "Operation Gatekeeper" in 1994, pandering to the right wing by pouring more millions into border enforcement and, yes, wall-building.

With friends like these...well, you know the rest.

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What Clinton Told Goldman Sachs

Okay, okay, the real news story is how WikiLeaks got hold of e-mails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and transcripts of Clinton's paid speeches, not what was in them. Clinton herself said the most important question of the final debate was whether Trump would condemn Russian espionage to hack her e-mails.

But hey, bear with us.

It's not news that Clinton has deep ties to Corporate America going back decades. But with Clinton touring the country and telling her supporters that America is "already great," it's worth remembering who America is really great for.

In a speech at Goldman Sachs three years ago, Clinton did everything but apologize for the weak banking regulations imposed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. "More thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don't kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here," Clinton pandered to an audience of banksters.

Explaining that Dodd-Frank bill was passed for "political" reasons, Clinton assured the investment bank aptly referred to in 2010 as "a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity" that she believes the best overseers of Wall Street are...wait for it...Wall Street itself.

"There's nothing magic about regulations--too much is bad, too little is bad," Clinton said, and one assumes that she emphasized the "too much is bad" part.

For all the working-class families who bore the burden of underwater mortgages during the housing crisis, Clinton has signaled, if anyone was still wondering, whose side she's on--the parasites on Wall Street.

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The Return of Roe

Remember reproductive rights? It was pretty shocking to hear the words "abortion" or "Roe" and "Wade" uttered in last night's debate. So far this election, we've heard precious little about this essential health care question for women.

It's not for a lack of things to talk about--Texas shuttering its clinics because of punitive legislative restrictions, an Indiana woman facing murder charges for having a miscarriage, congressional Republicans smearing Planned Parenthood with fabricated video.

But you wouldn't know about any of that from the two presidential candidates, including the Democrat who says she supports a woman's right to choose.

Last night, Trump admitted that he would nominate Supreme Court justices who would, without doubt, overturn legal abortion. By comparison, Clinton seemed, well, actually human. But as a result, the limitations of her defense of the right to legal abortion, now and in the past, were overshadowed.

Clinton helped perfect the modern-day Democratic strategy of searching for "common ground" with conservatives on the issue of abortion--an issue on which any sincere defender of women's rights shouldn't find common anything with the right. She helped coin the slogan of "safe, legal and rare" as the goal of pro-choice Democrats.

The "common ground" arguments haven't saved reproductive rights--instead, they've given up ideological ground to the right and made the pro-choice side weaker.

If you want to know how important reproductive rights are to Hillary Clinton, look at her vice presidential choice Tim Kaine. In 2005, he ran for Virginia governor promising to lower the number of abortions in the state by promoting abstinence-only education. The state's chapter of NARAL withheld their endorsement because he "embraces many of the restrictions on a woman's right to choose."

But of course, nothing is getting in the way of the mainstream women's organizations backing the Clinton-Kaine ticket to the hilt this year. They don't care if reproductive rights are part of the debate. But a lot of women out there do--and many of them are fed up with the way the Democrats take them for granted at election time, and don't lift a finger to stem the attacks when they come.

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Remember the $15 Minimum Wage and All That Socialist Stuff?

It's almost obliterated from our memory, thanks to the monstrosity that is Donald Trump, but during the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton had to talk about some of the issues that supporters of the Democratic Party care about

The socialist message of the Bernie Sanders campaign put these questions in the spotlight and forced the most corporate of Democrats to address them--and also answer for her own terrible record on a number of things that didn't come up at the debate. For a time, the brewing anger at corporate greed and the corrupt political status quo--given expression in grassroots movements like the Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter--found a voice in the political mainstream.

With a few weeks to go before the election, that seems like a long time ago.

Part of the reason is Hillary Clinton, but another part is Bernie Sanders. He's stopped his sharp criticisms of Clinton and tells his supporters that now is the time to stop Trump, not make demands on Clinton. In the debate, when Trump repeated one of his routine sound bites about Sanders saying Clinton had "bad judgment," Clinton smiled smugly and pointed out that Sanders was campaigning and urging a vote for her.

There were many issues that Clinton had to address this year only because people mobilized to make sure they couldn't be ignored--like anti-racist activists who made sure she was reminded of her support for Bill Clinton's crime bills, or Palestinian rights supporters who confronted her support for Israeli apartheid.

Those issues were invisible at the October 19 debate, but so were many others that people care about. They don't come up within the narrow confines of mainstream politics in the U.S.--where the politics of fear of what's worse forces voters to settle for what's hopefully less bad.

The two-party duopoly is organized to squash political debate and dissent outside the mainstream--which is why it's up to us to raise both, before the election between Clinton and Trump is decided, and especially after.

David Harvey Lecture 3: Value and Its Monetary Expression

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oemxH2dYYRw

Žižek on refugees, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/10/slavoj-zizek-terror-refugees-trouble-neighbors

Mother Jones: What, specifically, is the biggest problem that the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in North America, has exposed?

Slavoj Žižek: It's an issue with democracy! When people complain Europe is not transparent—if, right now, you organized elections all across Europe, the first result would be to throw all the immigrants out. Unambiguously. This is the problem! I spoke with some Slovenian representatives in Brussels when they were negotiating to help Greece and immigrants. And they told me they were making deals in closed sessions, but if the debate were to be public, it would have been much worse for Greece and for immigrants, because public opinion in countries like Slovenia and Poland was much more against immigrants and against helping Greece. What shocks me is that the very same people who complain that the democratic process in Europe should be more transparent at the same time want more rights for immigrants.

MJ: And what does this mean for democracy?

SZ: The state wants to impose basic anti-racist measures, and then local communities controlled by right-wing fundamentalists block that. I am here on the side of the state, which I am ready to endorse up to the crazy end. We have to accept that the people are quite often not right. I believe in democracy but in a very conditional way. There are elections that are a miracle, in the sense that you can see that people were really, authentically, mobilized. For example, in spite of all the compromises that occurred later, the Syriza elections—this was an authentic choice. So miracles do happen, but they are exceptions. Don't fetishize the people. Don't mythologize the people, they are not right! Don't mythologize the immigrants. This is the big motive running through my book.

MJ: This is one of those positions that won't be too popular on the left.

SZ: My point is precisely that the ultimate racism is to endorse the immigrant other, but the idealized version of that other. They are ordinary, shitty people like all of us. The point is not to like them. The point is to accept them the way they are and try to help them. That's why I don't want to open my heart to the refugees. That's for liberals to do. Let's open our purses to them. Give them money! Let's not get into this emotional blackmail.

MJ: You first bring up the term "double blackmail" in the book with regard to the supposedly irreconcilable opposition between secular capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Please explain that.

SZ: Although I'm totally opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, I don't buy the story of stupid, radical leftists who claim Islamic fundamentalism is one of the big anti-capitalist forces. I think this is empirically not true. I read reports of Daesh [ISIS]. The nearest approximation is that they operate like a big mafia corporation, dealing with artifacts, cultural monuments, oil. Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, they are not traditional. Forget about their ideology; look at their organization! They're a brutal centralized power. They are ultramodern in their mode of functioning.

The second reason I think the opposition is wrong is that a new form of capitalism is emerging. It's a wrong, racist term, but "capitalism with Asian values," which simply means capitalism no longer ideologically perceives itself as this hedonistic individualism. More and more, you can combine a certain religious, ethnic, or cultural commitment. Like India's prime minister, Narenda Modi, my hero in a horrible sense. I am totally opposed to him. He is a neoliberal economist and Hindu fundamentalist. So again, this entire disposition of oppositions like "liberal permissive capitalism" versus religious fundamentalism is wrong—it doesn't function like that. This is not where capitalism is moving.

MJ: An interesting illustration of this contradiction is Uber, which recently caught flack for taking $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia. So we have the technological vanguard of Silicon Valley in bed with one of the world's most infamously regressive Islamic regimes, and yet Uber's services in the kingdom have been portrayed as a social justice issue, since women aren't allowed to drive.

SZ: So let me play the devil here. As Saudi Arabia I will tell you, "Fuck you. You preach multicultural tolerance. Such a role of women is an immanent part of our culture. Where is your tolerance for different cultures?" And in a way, I would be right! Because you cannot say, "We will correct women's role in society and otherwise we leave to Saudis their culture." A shameful story is how American feminists supported the invasion of Iraq, claiming it would bring liberation to Iraqi women. They were totally wrong. Saddam was still, with all the horrors, a secular leader. Women held public posts in Saddam's Iraq. If anything, now the role of women is much lower. They are much more oppressed now. Isn't this a beautiful irony?

The main social effect of the American occupation of Iraq was to worsen the position of women and, because of the rise of more orthodox Islam, most of the Christians left Iraq. Christians were a considerable minority there, a couple million of them for thousands of years. It took American intervention to see them thrown out. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister, was an Iraqi Christian. We should never forget this. The two states which are disappearing now in the Middle East, Iraq and Syria—are you aware that these are the only two states which were formerly secular? Assad was also horrible, but neither Syria nor Iraq defined themselves as Islamic states. They defined themselves as secular states.

MJ: Yet in your book, you focus as much on the impact of economic policy in creating these problems as you do on the impact of military intervention.

SZ: Economic trade agreements are more destructive; they're even worse. I'm not even a priori against military interventions. Take the Republic of Congo. The state is simply not functioning—it's the closest you can get to hell on earth. But of course nobody wants to intervene there because Congo's local warlords all make deals with big companies who get minerals—like coltan for electronics—much cheaper. I would have nothing against a nice military intervention into Congo to simply establish it as a normal functioning state with basic services. But this I can guarantee will never happen. Big powers become interested in human rights violations only when there is some economic interest behind it.

MJ: Let's talk about the American election.

SZ: When I was young, decades ago, my leftist friends were saying that those in power speak the official polite dignified language. To provoke them we should be more vulgar with words. But today it's the opposite. Right-wing populism introduces vulgarity into public space. Trump is obviously a pure ideological opportunist. You know he makes the move to the right, then a little bit to the left. At some point he supports raising minimum wage, then he's lowering it. At some point he said we should have more understanding for Palestinians; now he says we should recognize Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel. He is an opportunist, and I think that even with his provocations, he is nothing extraordinary. I don't think there is anything remotely radical in his position. I am infinitely more afraid of people like Ted Cruz. Trump is a vulgar opportunist. Cruz is a monster. Do you think Ted Cruz is human?

What I find problematic about this demonization of Trump is that through this demonization, Hillary Clinton succeeded in building a common front. This is the only time I sympathize with Trump. When Bernie Sanders supported Hillary, Trump said, "It's like Occupy Wall Street supporting Wall Street." Hillary succeeded in building this totally ideological unity, from [Clinton Foundation donations from] Saudi Arabia to LGBT, from Wall Street to Occupy Wall Street. This consensus is ideology at its purest.

MJ: What do you make of the argument that, beneath all the racial animus we're seeing toward immigrants and refugees, there's some vague, misdirected frustration with neoliberal policy?

SZ: This is always how racism works. Take anti-Semitism: The Jew was always the ersatz for the capitalist. The big achievement of anti-Semitism was to take class resentment and rechannel it into race resentment. Here we come to the true greatness of Bernie Sanders. Instead of just despising the ordinary farmers who fell for [racist rhetoric], he got them on his side. He got those who by definition are conservative fundamental Republicans to the moderate left. This is a mega achievement. He is the answer for the left. To get this infamous silent majority on your side should be our strategy. The left should reappropriate things like public decency, politeness, and good manners. We shouldn't be afraid of this. Capitalism has become an extremely vulgar space.

MJ: Back to the question of refugees. Nowhere do you advocate opening borders, or posit that everything will work itself out.

SZ: There are real cultural problems. You know in Cologne, Germany, the New Year's scandal. This was of course not a rape attempt—if you want to rape you don't go to the place full of light and people at the center of the city. This sort of thing happens all the time. It was happening at the anti-Mubarak protests at Tahrir Square. This is a typical lower-class Arab carnival ritual. You dance around women; you maybe pinch them a little bit, but you don't rape. Of course, this is unacceptable for us. But we need to talk openly about this, because if we don't talk about this we feed the opponents, the right-wing paranoiacs, Islamophobia. An open, honest debate should be risked here. And the first mistake we make is if we think we understand ourselves, we definitely don't. Yes, criticize Islamic fundamentalists. But at the same time analyze ourselves.

MJ: So can progressive values and Islam be reconciled?

SZ: If you look at the Muslim tradition, there are terribly progressive elements of it. Islam is not a religion of family; it's a religion of orphans, which is crucial—Muhammad was an orphan and so on. There is tremendous emancipatory potential in that. The Haiti revolution, the key ideologist was a guy named John Bookman, a slave who knew how to read, that's why they called him Bookman. But you know which book he was reading? The Koran. Islam played a key role in mobilizing slaves in Haiti. Right now, I think we live in dangerous times. Who knows what turn it will take. But I think there is a chance for the left.

Žižek: Ontological Incompleteness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG0xMqkx3is