Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State pushed for the worst policies that turned into total disasters. She was always in the lead pushing for interventions that simply created more and more misery.
This is explained in this video by activist Abby Martin she did after putting together a documentary about Clinton’s corruption.
Now Clinton says she is a progressive for the people. “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.” So said Hillary Clinton to Anderson Cooper at a CNN Democratic debate in late 2015, as Sam Levine wrote in The Huffington Post. She paints herself as a ‘progressive,’ only to make a statement that implies that, for the most part, progressives don’t actually get things done. Otherwise, why make the distinction? They’re words stupefying in their arrogance, and could only be said by a woman whose progressive credentials are nothing more than tokenism. And that’s the problem with Hillary Clinton – she’s about as progressive as Donald Trump is quiet and unassuming.
There is no denying it: Hillary Clinton’s track record on war and militaristic interventionism has been stoic enough to make a moderate Republican blush. Jeffrey Sachs, a noted progressive Columbia University economics professor, encapsulates the ‘Hillary Doctrine’ best by saying that, “There’s no doubt that Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street. Even more dangerous, though, is that she is the candidate of the military-industrial complex. The idea that she is bad on the corporate issues but good on national security has it wrong. Her so-called foreign policy “experience” has been to support every war demanded by the US deep security state run by the military and the CIA”.
Bill Scher wrote in Politico how, “Clinton’s 2002 vote in the Senate to authorize an invasion of Iraq was the first big crack in her bond with the Democratic base” . By 2003, Hillary was a staunch supporter of that war in (read: invasion of) Iraq, which even at that time many progressives viewed as a sham war that was in blatant contravention of international law. As Sachs wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Hillary’s record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern US history”. He continues by saying that, “Hilary [sic] was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria” .
Many leftwing liberals/progressives are in agreement: Hillary Clinton is a warmonger funded by defense contractors who is tool of the power elite. Paul Craig Roberts wrote in Counterpunch about how outspoken progressive, Glenn Greenwald, has accused Clinton of being “the presidential candidate of the banksters and warmongers” . In a podcast on Infowars Margaret Howell and Lee Ann Mcadoo stated how, ‘“If you are big on foreign wars, arming our enemies against us, or arming our enemies against each other, Hillary Clinton is your candidate for president”. That’s pretty damning stuff from some very respected progressive voices. Sachs is resoundingly unforgiving of her when he states that, “Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring American war adventures explains much of our current security danger”.
Too much of Clinton’s foreign policy is cause for concern for many progressives. Roberts warns how she forms an integral part of the Washington establishment and national security state bureaucracy that is hell-bent on targeting countries like Russia and China as potential enemies and ‘threats’ to American security. This is madness. These are hugely influential and powerful countries with strong military capabilities and, heaven help us all, formidable nuclear arsenals. What lunatic game of brinkmanship is this, and why are so many supposed liberals and her fervent supporters so willing to look the other way? Roberts has said how, “The hardening anti-Russian rhetoric issuing from Washington and its punk EU puppet states places the world on the road to extinction” . For Roberts, this is how bad she is: “Hillary as president would mean war with Russia. With neocon nazis such as Robert Kagan and Max Boot running her war policy and with Hillary’s comparison of Russia’s president Putin to Adolf Hitler, war would be a certainty” . And Hillary Clinton is head cheerleader for all this infantile, positively dangerous pro-war, neocon posturing. She and her campaign team have even gone into overdrive about Donald Trump’s supposed links to Russia and Vladimir Putin himself. It has been strongly suggested by the Clinton camp that Trump’s campaign has been financed and even influenced by Moscow. To what end, Hillary?
Naomi Klein, an acclaimed author and social activist with impeccable progressive credentials, points out that a Clinton win would be very bad news for America’s commitment to combating climate change. For Klein, it’s all about the enormous conflicts of interest that will almost certainly impede (not to mention heavily influence) Clinton and her actions on climate change. As Klein observes, “one of Clinton’s most prominent and active financial backers is Warren Buffett. While he owns a large mix of assets, Buffett is up to his eyeballs in coal, including coal transportation and some of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country. Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years, Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron have all contributed to the (Clinton) foundation” . As Klein rightly notes, “taking on powerful corporations goes against (Hillary’s) entire worldview, against everything she’s built, and everything she stands for. The real issue, in other words, isn’t Clinton’s corporate cash, it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology.” She is at the top of the system of inverted totalitarianism representing the iron triangle marriage of corporations, political leaders, and officialdom.
It is interesting to note that there has been a vicious and acrimonious split during this presidential cycle between those progressives and left-wing liberals who support a vote for Clinton and those who do not. Andy Smolski lambastes the likes of Noam Chomsky for stating that progressives must vote for Clinton, even if they hate her, if only to keep Trump out of power. He states how, “Hillary Clinton is a living refutation of the logic of lesser-evilism, since her candidacy as the most rightwing Democratic nominee since Harry “A Bomb” Truman is the inevitable consequence of decades of lesser-evil voting”. When Chomsky, a quasi-patron saint for progressive intellectualism, gets attacked for essentially being a sellout, then you know that Clinton is highly divisive amongst progressives. Agitprop filmmaker and author Michael Moore has admitted that he will vote for Clinton, even though he vowed never to vote for her again after she voted in favour of the war in Iraq – and he’ll only do so to make sure Trump doesn’t get in . It’s exactly this logic of compromise that unnerves many fellow progressives.
There is a saying to the effect that one should judge others by the friends they keep. That may be a tall order in a world as duplicitous and often morally bankrupt as politics, and one in which compromise and the strangest of bedfellows are often the norm. But there is truth to this when one notes the people who’ve seen fit to gravitate to the Clinton campaign in recent weeks. These are proven warmongers who are the very antithesis of progressive beliefs and politics and yet they have openly and happily endorsed Hillary Clinton. As Howell and Mcadoo wrily note, “Neocons, like Iraq War architect under George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, announced he is a Hillary Clinton supporter. Wolfowitz joins a chorus of neoconservatives who have offered Clinton their endorsement” . Political expediency by Washington D.C. insiders in light of the ‘threat’ that is a Donald Trump presidency? Or the comfort and knowledge by an elitist neoconservative establishment that the endorsement of Clinton is the endorsing of one of their own? This writer will pick the latter as the far more likely.
Jodi Jacobson wrote how, “The selection of [Tim] Kaine would be the first signal that Clinton intends to seek progressive votes but ignore progressive values and goals…Clinton will signal that she values progressives in name and vote only”. And we all know who she picked as her VP choice. That’s how much she cares about progressives. Hillary Clinton is an opportunist of note. And we need to stop with the cliché that she’s a highly intelligent woman. No, she’s not. Her disastrous foreign policy stances to date make that very clear. She genuflects to the highest bidder and she knows how to play the establishment game. Her recent excuses regarding her laxity with top security e-mails are laughable and make a fool of her, not us. Brilliant she is not. As Napoleon Bonaparte himself said, “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap”. Everyone needs to remember that.
Hillary Clinton is a woman who has had a front row seat to the unmitigated disaster of Iraq, the quagmire that Afghanistan continues to be and the failed state that is post-Qaddafi Libya. Yet she remains resolutely a hawk through and through. She continues to support the ongoing fiasco that is regime change for Syria, and she delights in being openly confrontational with Russia. How could any progressive or true liberal be comfortable in supporting such a dangerously hawkish neocon-in-disguise, even if by means of tired, weak compromise?
Here is the fully Abby Martin documentary.
