SEPTEMBER 13, 2016
Hillary Clinton and the Russian Specter
by ERIC DRAITSER
Evan El-Amin | Shutterstock.com
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don’t think I do, sir, no.
General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
– Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; 1968
While it may no longer be our precious bodily fluids under attack by the big bad Rooskies and their ever-scheming leadership, it is clearly our political system that is in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.
However detached from reality such an interpretation might seem to a clear-headed American, that is precisely the notion that Hillary Clinton and her gaggle of political guinea worms have endlessly droned on about. Listening to the Clinton campaign, and its public relations employees masquerading as corporate media journalists, one would think that World War Three had already begun on the battlefield of US electoral politics.
And this is not by accident. The Clinton campaign is trading in the worst forms of chauvinism, paranoia, and conspiracy theory in an attempt to deflect attention away from the rapidly expanding dumpster fires that are the series of scandals plaguing her White House bid.
The Democratic Party conspired with the Clinton campaign to sabotage Bernie Sanders? Why, that’s little more than a Russian-Wikileaks plot to expose, well, the truth. But still, you know, Putin!
The Clinton Foundation is exposed as a pay-for-play scheme involving some of the world’s most powerful politicians and various other assorted degenerates? Why, that is undeniably the work of those borscht-eating ex-commies.
Hillary illegally destroyed emails that were already illegally being stored on a private server? It was her black predecessor’s fault! But Putin was probably behind that too, somehow. Of course, Colin Powell should take heart – at least Ms. #ImWitHer didn’t call him a superpredator.
The fact is that only the most dim-witted dullards are entranced by the shiny objects of Clintonian propaganda. The more sophisticated, or even moderately informed, political observers understand that all the talk of Russian espionage is an attempt to both deflect from the scandals as well as the fact that Clinton offers very little that is truly progressive or even moderately beneficial to the vast majority of Americans. She’s a Goldman-Sachs Girl, and everyone knows it.
Hillary for America? Hillary Fleeces America
If the Russians really wanted to destroy Hillary Clinton’s chances at the presidency, rather than sophisticated spying and subversion, they could simply refer American news consumers to Hillary’s campaign website and note that nearly every single policy proposal listed is a completely and utterly vacuous lie, distortion, or inversion of reality. Indeed, Clinton has managed to insult the intelligence of Americans while simultaneously papering over a sordid record as one of the country’s most insidious operators on behalf of finance capital against the interests of workers and the poor.
Take for instance the policy plank under the heading “A fair tax system” highlighted by Hillary sitting and chatting with three African-American workers. Under the heading is a hilariously ironic quote – no doubt the irony is lost on Hillary & Co. – from Hillary in which she stated, “It’s outrageous that multi-millionaires and billionaires are allowed to play by a different set of rules than hardworking families, especially when it comes to paying their fair share of taxes.” Indeed, it is outrageous Madame Secretary, almost as outrageous as your hypocritical populist pandering while you yourself are a millionaire many times over, one who has also avoided paying your fair share of taxes.
Consider for instance the Clinton Foundation which, aside from being nominally a charity, is in fact a tax exempt money-making venture in which wealth is accumulated, power concentrated, and influence peddled like cheap goods at a flea market, or empty rhetoric at the Democratic Convention. Consider the findings of renowned financial investigator Charles Ortel who recently published a detailed report on the Clinton Foundation. Among many findings, Ortel noted the following:
[The Clinton Foundation] is a case study in international charity fraud… the Clinton Foundation illegally veered from its IRS-authorized mission within days of Bill Clinton’s departure from the White House in January 2001… All told, declared donations to Clinton Foundation entities from 1997 through 2014 are greater than $2 billion; but this vast amount is likely a pittance when compared to sums sent to affiliated “charities” and relief efforts around the world… the Clinton Foundation entities are part of a network that has defrauded donors and created illegal private gains of approximately $100 billion in combined magnitude, and possibly more, since 23 October 1997.
Perhaps these inconvenient truths are precisely what the Clinton media machine is attempting to hide in plain sight with accusations of Russian meddling and dirty tricks. Sorry Hil, the Russians aren’t trying to steal your essence, it’s those pesky Americans with some modicum of decency and belief in fair play who are consistently calling out your lies.
Pray tell Madame Secretary, how much did you and your husband pay in taxes on those untold millions you received, and on the billions you raised for the financial elites who line your pockets and pave the way to the White House for you? Oh, that’s right, your foundation is “tax exempt”, so you paid absolutely nothing in taxes. And I presume you’ll claim that you did not benefit personally or financially from those contributions? Thought so. How convenient.
Maybe Vlad, Dmitry and the rest of the gang could also point people’s attention to policy planks like “Fixing America’s infrastructure” and “Hillary Clinton’s plan to strengthen manufacturing.” No need for sophisticated Russian propaganda, just a recapping of the 25 years of economic devastation wrought by NAFTA, GATT, and other free trade agreements championed by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the Wall Street hyenas they represent will suffice.
Would Hillary like to take a stab at explaining how she intends to fix America’s manufacturing when her own policies were, according to the Economic Policy Institute, responsible for the loss of at least 700,000 mostly manufacturing jobs, the driving down of wages and slashing of benefits, and the dislocation of millions of Mexican workers who today are scapegoated by the right and, sadly, large segments of the working class? Yeah, I thought not.
Considering this bitter little pill, it comes as no surprise that the Clintonistas stoop to Cold War-style demagogy to distract attention from the sheer audacity of Hillary’s own hypocrisy. Russia as the shiny object to be dangled in front of the infantile gaze of America’s liberals.
And then, of course, there’s that eternally powerful election year balderdash known as “reform.” Saint Hillary includes in her program “Wall Street reform”, “Campaign finance reform”, “Immigration reform”, and energy reform to deal with climate change.
We don’t need the KGB man Putin to highlight the fact that, far from reforming anything, Hillary and her political kaiju are merely going to deepen the problems that already exist – problems they themselves are responsible for – all while looking for an even weaker candidate than Donald Trump to run against in 2020; I hear Charles Manson and Nickelback have been looking to get into politics.
The only reform of Wall Street that Hillary Clinton might be interested in is reforming the fee schedule for her paid speaking engagements for the various lampreys, nematodes, and roundworms that infest Lower Manhattan during normal business hours. How could we forget the glorious achievements of Bubba and Hil who are directly responsible for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the single most important decision leading to the rise of financialization of the economy and the ongoing recession/depression we see today?
As for campaign finance reform, it seems more a cruel joke when spoken by Hillary, rather than a simple campaign promise. Take a gander at the list of the Joint Victory Fund (Clinton political committee operated in tandem with the DNC) donors to see the likes of the Pritzker Group, Saban Capital Group, and other major players in finance capital and industry. And how many millions in dark money has flowed into the pockets of Clinton’s fiendish coterie of political ghouls? Expecting Clinton to reform campaign finance is like asking the energy industry to move away from fossil fuels. Oh wait…
Clinton actually believes (with some justification) that people won’t notice that when she pays lip service to climate change and the threat to civilization that it presents she is simultaneously propping up the energy industry. There’s the uncomfortable fact that Clinton has a long track record of pushing dirty, environmentally damaging technologies such as fracking all around the world. As The Intercept revealed in May 2016:
[Clinton] State Department officials worked closely with private sector oil and gas companies, pressed other agencies within the Obama administration to commit federal government resources including technical assistance for locating shale reserves, and distributed agreements with partner nations pledging to help secure investments for new fracking projects…The [Clinton State Department] campaign included plans to spread the drilling technique to China, South Africa, Romania, Morocco, Bulgaria, Chile, India, Pakistan, Argentina, Indonesia, and Ukraine.
So much for reform in tackling climate change. And it is only because of the fierce challenge from her left posed by Bernie Sanders and the movement around his campaign that forced Hillary to ditch the “all of the above” energy policy, an un-ironic code word for pro-Big Oil policies. Don’t worry oil fiends, she’ll be sure to ditch that campaign pledge just as soon as she and her potato sack dress wardrobe ease into the Oval Office.
And before Clinton and her Hillarrhoids start to wax poetic about the need for a path to citizenship for migrant workers, perhaps she might like to explain why the very policies she and her husband championed in the 1990s are directly responsible for creating the wave of migration from Mexico. Additionally, Clinton could answer for her backing of the right wing coup government in Honduras which has caused untold thousands of refugees to flee for their lives from the Central American country. In short, before the Hillbots pat each other on the back, they should ask themselves whether they are, in fact, counting on the fox to both guard the hen house and oversee its transformation into a hen palace.
And, with typical Clintonian mendacity, Hillary’s program includes “racial justice”. I wonder whether her policies would include the dismantling of the New Jim Crow and the prison-industrial complex of which she and her husband were the architects. I wonder whether the mothers and fathers of the “superpredators” know just exactly who it is standing beside them. As the late Hugo Chavez famously said of George Bush, “The devil came here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today.”
Finally, foreign policy should be considered, even though the only mention of it in Hillary’s program is the jingoistic statement “We should maintain the best-trained, best-equipped, and strongest military the world has ever known…And I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country.” There’s a word for what Clinton is describing here, and it rhymes with schmimperialism. Throw in a little neocolonialism and deepening exploitation and oppression under the auspices of humanitarianism and you have a recipe for a continuation of all the worst aspects of US foreign policy from both Democrats and Republicans. A Clinton foreign policy will be a fire-breathing chimera of neoconservative bloodbaths and liberal imperialist justifications. Bush’s head on Obama’s body.
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops.” General Buck Turgidson, played by the inimitable George C. Scott, hilariously embodied the essence (pun intended) of a major school of military-industrial thinking at the height of the Cold War. Luckily, cooler heads on both sides of the Iron Curtain prevailed and the world was not destroyed.
Sadly, nearly 50 years later, the Strangeloves and Turgidsons are now in command, with Hillary “Queen of Chaos” Clinton the used car dealer selling war and death to the rubes in voting booths. And somehow it is the Russians who are at fault?
No, America, it’s not Russia…it’s us. |
