The biggest problem in the U.S. now is corruption. The public know
this, and are therefore unprecedentedly cynical about their government;
they (as will soon be documented here from a Gallup survey)
overwhelmingly view our government as being corrupt. However,
conservatives accept corruption as the natural order of things,
something that must simply be accepted, because the rich have the most
property to protect and therefore (in the view of conservatives) the
rich have the right to rule so as to protect their property (since they
have the most of it). Furthermore, conservatives think that the rich
have earned their wealth by selling what people want, and have therefore
already proven their superiority -- they've
earned their control
over the government. In the view of conservatives, poor people have the
least property to protect, and should therefore have the least say in
government. The poor are also failures economically; nobody
wants to be poor; and so conservatives are
doubly
favorable towards rule by the rich. However, conservatives rarely vote
Democratic; so, the people who don't mind our government's corruption
aren't actually prospective voters for the Democratic Presidential
nominee in 2016 anyway. The Democratic Party thus should simply ignore
those voters, because they belong, unalterably, to the Republican Party.
Non-conservatives ("liberals"), however,
don't think that
the only role of government is to protect wealth; so, since Democrats
are overwhelmingly not conservatives, they overwhelmingly do find
disturbing that their government is corrupt, and they are therefore much
more disinclined to vote for a corrupt person than non-Democrats are.
Thus, if the Democratic Party were to nominate a corrupt person to
represent the Party in the 2016 Presidential election, voter-turnout for
the Democrat against the Republican would be significantly depressed by
that fact. The Republican Party can safely nominate a corrupt person
(it won't depress their vote), but the Democratic Party simply cannot
safely do that. For example, Barack Obama wasn't clearly corrupt until
he became President; if the public had known back then that he's
corrupt, John McCain might have beaten him, instead of having been
beaten by him. Hillary Clinton has a clearly corrupt record, but Barack
Obama, back then, simply did not. Obama's record was ambiguous. This was
crucial to Obama's victory.
Now will be presented the latest of the many surveys that show that the
U.S. Government is widely recognized by the American people to
be corrupt: A Gallup poll issued on 18 October 2013, was headlined
"Government Corruption Viewed as Pervasive Worldwide,"
and Gallup buried near the end of it in a table (and they didn't even
make note of the fact) showing that among the 129 countries that they
surveyed, each of which nation had over a thousand citizens answering
their poll in each given country, the United States was viewed by its
citizens as being even a bit more corrupt than the people elsewhere in
the world viewed their own country. 73% of Americans said "Yes" when
asked: "Is corruption widespread throughout the government in the United
States?" The people in only 62 other nations answered "Yes" at an even
higher rate than 73%, so citizens in the U.S. are actually slightly more
cynical about our government than citizens worldwide are about theirs.
(Gallup also reported that countries that had a controlled press weren't
able to fool their publics, who recognized their government's
corruption notwithstanding the controlled press' trying to hide it.
Corruption-perceptions were unaffected by press freedom or lack
thereof.)
Although Republicans and other conservatives might not be terribly
disturbed that the U.S. Government is corrupt (and they therefore aren't
so opposed to "corporate lobbyists," the Supreme Court's
Republican-majority "Citizens United" decision in 2010, etc.), the
people who vote
for a Democratic Presidential nominee are very disturbed by our government's corruption; and those people will be turned off to a Democratic Presidential nominee
if that
nominee becomes exposed, during the 2016 Presidential campaign, to have
a clear record of corruption. Republicans won't be voting for the
Democratic nominee anyway, but
non-Republicans will at least
consider
voting for that person; and, if that nominee becomes exposed during the
campaign to have a long record of corruption, then the turnout of
voters for that person will be significantly reduced on Election Day,
because
non-Republicans
do care, a lot, about whether or
not a particular nominee is corrupt. Although Republicans might not be
disturbed at all to know that a political candidate is controlled by the
super-rich (and Romney's voters certainly did not care),
non-Republicans will be
very disturbed if they find that a Democratic candidate is corrupt. These voters will be disheartened to know that
both
of the major parties' Presidential candidates are corrupt. Especially
after America's experience of the 2008 collapse, the TARP, and the lies
by the G.W. Bush Administration about "Saddam's WMD," etc., the public's
finding out that
both parties have corrupt nominees to become President will depress the
Democratic vote far more than it will depress the
Republican vote.
Consequently, it makes no sense at all for a Democrat who has an
extensive and incontrovertible record of corruption to be chosen by
Democratic voters in the 2016 primaries to become the person who will
represent the Democratic Party in the general election contest against
the Republican nominee. If Democratic primary voters don't learn of
their nominee's corruption
before the primaries, then the
Democratic Party could well end up being stuck, in the general election,
with a nominee who will be extremely vulnerable to the Republican
Party's exposure of that person's corrupt record,
during the general-election campaign.
Hillary Clinton's corruption thus far has not been exposed by the
Republican Party, because they've had no need to do so: she hasn't been
the Democratic nominee for President. But there is also another
important reason:
The Republican Party is naturally reluctant to expose a Democratic
politician's corruption if the chief beneficiaries of it have been major
Republican donors. For example, Wall Street has benefited
enormously from Obama's protection; like he told Wall Street's
chieftains in a private meeting at the White House, on 27 March 2009,
"My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
Obama was courting there the very same people who had donated a far
higher percentage of the McCain campaign's cash than they had donated of
the Obama campaign's cash; Obama might have been aiming to pull more of
their money his way next time; but, in 2012, Wall Street went
overwhelmingly for Romney, because Romney was offering them an even
better deal than Obama did. Republicans won't accuse Obama of corruption
that benefits their own big donors. For example, how would the
Republican Party have been able to attack Obama for his corruption, if
their own nominee, Romney, was an even bigger sell-out to those very
same donors? Consequently, the Republican Party has instead accused
Obama only of alleged "corruption" to environmental industries, such as
solar-power firms, irrespective of whether any corruption at all was
actually involved there.
It is likely to be different if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic
nominee. In one important respect, however, she is just like Obama: her
corruption has been chiefly in service to big Republican donors. Ever
since her husband entered the White House in 1993 with that strategy, it
has been the dominant strategy for major Democratic Presidential
aspirants; Hillary's corruption in shaping her health-care plan to
benefit the private HMO industry, and Bill's corruption shaping his
deregulation of Wall Street to benefit Citigroup and other Wall Street
titans, has been a winning political strategy. Obama has merely been
doing what Hillary would have been doing if she had become the
President. In that sense, they are virtually the same. But here is how
the situation would be different if Hillary Clinton would become the
Democratic Party's nominee for the Presidency in 2016:
Hillary has an established record, whereas Obama did not. It is a
corrupt record (even more corrupt than her husband's); and here it is:
I'll start with the credit-card industry's passage of "bankruptcy
reform," which was finally voted on in the U.S. Senate on 10 March 2005,
while Hillary was the junior Senator from New York. This legislation
had begun when Republicans pushed for it under her husband, who clearly
and vigorously opposed it. (His wife was typically more conservative
than he; and it was so in this case.)
Just before George W. Bush entered office, the AP headlined on 20
December 2000, "Clinton Vetoes Bankruptcy Bill," and reported that
President Bill Clinton did so "because he said it was unfair to ordinary
debtors and working families who fall on hard times. ... The president
said the bill would allow debtors who own expensive homes to shield
their mansions from creditors while debtors with moderate incomes,
especially renters, must ... comply with rigid payment plans. ... 'This
loophole for the wealthy is fundamentally unfair and must be closed,'
Bill Clinton said." Then G.W. Bush became President instead of Al Gore,
the U.S. public elected a Republican Congress in 2002, and so the
Republicans had their way. Hillary Clinton was planning to run for the
Presidency in 2008 and she wanted to have Wall Street's backing. 17
Democratic Senators voted outright in favor of this Republican
legislation, in order to be able to raise enough campaign cash from the
banksters so as to retain their Senate seats. The Democratic 2008
Presidential contenders Senators Chris Dodd and Barack Obama, unlike
Senator Hillary Clinton, voted against this Republican bill. Senator Joe
Biden was amongst the 17 Democratic whores who voted in favor of it,
and this alone should have disqualified him from consideration to become
the Democratic Presidential nominee, except that he virtually had to
vote for it because he represented Delaware and thus relied especially
heavily on credit card companies to finance his campaigns.
This is how anti-abortion murderers and CEO crooks finally secured all
their sought-for exemptions from "bankruptcy reform," which offered only
Republican "tough love" for the middle class and poor - and an outright
kick in the teeth to people bankrupted by medical bills, by job loss,
or by divorce, the three biggest causes of bankruptcies, which studies
showed accounted for almost all filings. (In fact, nearly half of all
personal bankruptcies were due simply to medical expenses; and because
of this new law, most of those cases would henceforth produce something
akin to slavery capping the patient's misery.) Still, a large share of
the total dollars involved in bankruptcy cases were assets held by the
very few super-rich going bankrupt, and the Republican "bankruptcy
reform" protected those bankrupts, so that MBNA and the other banks
which had pushed so hard for this legislation received only limited real
benefit from it. Perhaps the executives of those banks, who were
protecting themselves from risks they were imposing upon others, were
even more concerned to protect themselves in the event that they might
need bankruptcy protection themselves, than they were to enhance the
bottom lines of the companies they managed. This was a failure of their
fiduciary obligations.
On 30 September 2002,
BusinessWeek reported (p. 112), concerning
the new U.S. bankruptcy law that seemed about to be passed in a
Republican Congress and supported by the Republican President, "The
legislation is especially harsh on lower-income debtors."
The lobbyists who actually shape - if not write - the laws, are hired by
the relatively few people who have the financial wherewithal to employ
lobbyists' services. Those lobbyists are real soldiers in this authentic
class war. And most of the other real soldiers consist of the think
tanks (like the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise
Institute), and the numerous political action committees, that the
conservative rich hire to indoctrinate, and to pump money into, the
election campaigns of their supportive politicians.
For example, was it pure coincidence that the biggest single
contributor, at $240,675, to the G.W. Bush 2000 Presidential campaign,
was MBNA Corp., the bank that lobbied the hardest for this bankruptcy
"reform" bill? (Enron gave Bush less in that campaign, but was his top
career giver, because Enron had financed Bush's Texas rise.) Was it
coincidence that, in addition, MBNA's CEO, Charles Cawley, personally
raised $369,156 from others for Bush? Another MBNA executive, Lance
Weaver, was also a Bush "Ranger," having raised over $200,000 for Bush.
After all, Bush's Democratic predecessor, President Clinton, had vetoed
similar Republican legislation. But, ironically, the corruptors ended up
being defeated this time around, by their own internecine war on this
matter: when big-business bucks went up against Religious-Right bucks
and votes, the whole deal crumbled. It turned out that violent
anti-abortion protesters were seeking a special exemption in the new
bankruptcy bill, to protect their assets from bankruptcy seizure by
their victims (such as by abortion-doctors they shoot), but the banks
(allied with Democrats on this point) opposed such an exemption. The
Religious Right, and big business, customary allies, split here, and so
the entire bill bombed.
However, this legislation was revived after Republicans increased their
majority in the Senate in 2004, and the biggest barrier to passage in
its reincarnation consisted of some of the corrupt executives
themselves, who were determined to shield their personal assets from
possible civil suits by stockholders and by others, including corporate
creditors. Thus, on 2 March 2005,
The New York Times headlined
"Proposed Law On Bankruptcy Has Loophole: Wealthy Could Shield Many
Assets in Trusts." The main sponsor of this revived bill was, of course,
a Republican senator, who claimed ignorance of that provision. How odd,
then, that his bill would protect banks against only poor deadbeats,
while letting the richest ones off. So, whom had these banks been
lobbying so hard to protect themselves from? - it was from the kinds of
people they never met and didn't want to meet: the middle class and
poor. Bankers seemed far less interested in protecting their
institutions against people such as themselves. After all, they're God's
People; and, as for debtors who might have to lose their homes in order
simply to pay catastrophic medical bills, or whatever - God is
evidently not so fond of those people anyway. Thus, on 8 March 2005, the
U.S. Senate voted 53 to 46 to defeat a proposed Democratic amendment
which would have removed the bill's shield for anti-abortion murderers.
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch called this amendment a "poison pill"
aimed solely to protect deadbeats by blocking passage of "bankruptcy
reform." The next day, another Democratic amendment aimed to preserve a
longstanding bankruptcy provision, which even the SEC acknowledged to be
necessary in order to prohibit corruption by investment banks in
certain bankruptcy cases. As the
Washington Post headlined March
10th, "Senate Delays Action on Bankruptcy: Bipartisan Amendment Would
Limit Advice By Investment Banks." It reported, "Earlier yesterday, five
other proposed changes to the bill were voted down. ... [Among the]
amendments that were defeated, largely along party lines, [was one]
would have given elderly people more protection to keep their homes
during bankruptcy."
Passage of this bill, and its signing into law by President Bush,
represented Republican victory at the end of a lengthy campaign by large
banks against their non-wealthy customers. The final version of this
bill passed the U.S. Senate on 10 March 2005, vote #44, at 6:12 PM, and
74 Senators voted for it, and only 25 voted against it -- all 25 were
Democrats (see this record of the roll-call vote:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/109-2005/s44).
Each and every Republican in the U.S. Senate voted for it. The only
Senator who avoided voting was the Wall Street Democrat Hillary Clinton,
who was the only one of the 100 U.S. Senators shown as "Not Voting" on
this legislation - so that it could pass but without her vote being
recorded on it. Even the senior Senator from her own state of NY, Chuck
Schumer, who was well known to support Wall Street on almost everything,
voted "Nay" on this monstrosity against the middle class. There were 54
Republicans in the U.S. Senate, and 54 of them voted "Yea" on this.
There were 45 Democrats: 19 were "Yea," 25 "Nay," and 1 "Not Voting."
There was one Independent Senator (former Republican James Jeffords of
Vermont): 1 "Yea." So, on this bill, which had 100% Republican support,
and which was opposed by 25 of the 45 Democrats, or by 56% of the
Democrats, Hillary was a no-show.
On 28 August 2006, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
headlined "Senator Hillary Clinton: All Show and no Substance," and the
well known government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, along with the
organization's board member William Weaver, condemned her as: "an
elected senator who has served six years in her seat, never taking a
strong stand in support of her constituents on any serious or
controversial issue; a senator who has used her record-breaking TV
public appearances to say 'nothing' ... an elected official who has no
record of conducting investigations into cases that are matters of great
concern to her constituents and to our country ... a politician who has
spent all her focus and energy on a campaign of shallow publicity
glitz." Examples cited included James J. DiGeorgio and Carl Steubing,
who "were subjected to illegal drug experimentation by employees of the
Stratton Veterans Affairs Center in Albany, New York; killed by servants
of the very government they fought to protect. Scores of other veterans
were injured in these experiments. ... Between 2000 and June 2006,
numerous contacts with Senator Hillary Clinton over the Stratton tragedy
went unacknowledged, or glossed over. ... No less than five Clinton
staff members heard presentations and received documentation about the
experiments, and Senator Clinton is personally aware of the detailed
facts of the case. This personal knowledge did not translate into
action. ... Senator Clinton's failure concerning Stratton is not an
isolated event; it is part of a pattern of studious avoidance of
principled action in the face of serious government misconduct, and the
refusal to come to the aid of those people who expose the misconduct."
Among the cases also discussed were: Bunnatine Greenhouse, Sergeant
Samuel Provance, and Russ Tice - some of the most egregious examples of
whistleblowers whom the Bush Administration wronged. Hillary Clinton
bent so far backward to win the support of Republicans, that she should
have made a Yoga video, but all that she thereby gained (besides support
from a large number of Democratic fools who believed - if they believed
in anything - that win-at-all-costs was what politics was all about,
and that democratic principles don't really exist) was increased
contempt from Republicans.
Click on
this,
and you'll see who owns Hillary Clinton; it's what you would expect
from what I've just reported. But if you're too tired to click, here it
is, pasted below:
Here is the
similar list for Elizabeth Warren:
Obviously, no one is owned by such organizations as Emily's List,
MoveOn.org,
Harvard University, and MIT. However, Emily's List is now committed to
Hillary Clinton, because they're purely female-sexist and want only to
be with any "winner" who is female and not Republican; all that they
care about is the two X chromosomes and the "Democrat" label. But, at
least, Wall Street is nowhere to be found there. Perhaps the question
is: If Wall Street doesn't want her in the White House, do we? My answer
to that one is easy: YES!
Hillary's corruption goes beyond that, however.
When a fascist putsch, a coup d'etat, overthrew at gunpoint the popular
progressive democratic President of Honduras on 28 June 2009, and all
countries of the world except Israel and the United States promptly
declared the junta-installed government illegitimate, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton refused to join all other nations in rejecting the
fascist regime. As I previously
reported this matter in detail,
the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras told her in a cable, that President
Manuel Zelaya had been illegally replaced by the junta-appointed stooge
Roberto Michelettti, yet she still refused. The Ambassador's urging to
her said: "The actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d'etat.
... It bears mentioning that, whereas the resolution [by the junta]
adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove the
entire executive branch. ... His forced removal by the military was
clearly illegal, and [puppett-leader Roberto] Micheletti's ascendance as
'interim president' was totally illegitimate." However, instead, she
joined with then-Senator Jim DeMint (now head of the Heritage Foundation
and the chief sponsor of the political career of Texas U.S. Senator Ted
Cruz) in propping up the fascist regime. Promptly Honduras descended
into hell, suddenly having the world's highest murder-rate, and becoming
a haven of narco-trafficking. What was Hillary thinking? She expressed
contempt for Zelaya, but what was really happening here was that
American international companies liked paying their Honduran contractors
sub-human wages to workers at their plants in Honduras. The Honduran
aristocrats owned those factories, and the U.S. aristocrats shared with
them the profits from this "free-market" slavery. What did Hillary care
about the ongoing terror, murders, and soaring narco-trafficking?
Furthermore, as I headlined on 11/11/13, "The Kochs Have Bet Big that
the Earth Is Doomed," and I documented that the Obama Administration
were fighting to help them win that bet. Hillary Clinton had been part
of that effort. As I reported on 26 March 2013, Hillary Clinton's State
Department produced an environmental impact statement on the
Koch-proposed Keystone XL Pipeline that was
a triple-hoax:
It refused to estimate the impact that the Pipeline would have on
global warming; it was itself subcontracted out to an oil company
services firm; and that petro-friend subcontractor had no climatologist.
The coup de grace of her sell-out on global warming, however, might be
this:
On 2 October 2013, Joe Romm at Think Progress headlined
"More Bad News For Fracking: IPCC Warns Methane Traps Much More Heat,"
and he reported that, "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) reports that methane ... is far more potent a greenhouse gas"
than previously known, so bad it "would gut the climate benefits of
switching from coal." And then, just five days after that stunning
report, Jon Campbell in upstate New York headlined
"In Oneida County, Hillary Clinton Touts U.S. Oil-and-Gas Production,"
and he reported that at Hamilton College she praised fracking for
methane, by saying, "What that means for viable manufacturing and
industrialization in this country is enormous."
People who don't mind being raped might want Hillary Clinton to rule
over it, instead of Barack Obama or George W. Bush. But everyone else
will instead want to give Elizabeth Warren a chance to prosecute such
people and to put a stop to the raping of the public that has now become
routine by this nation's aristocracy. When you have the Kochs being
served by politicians such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, isn't it
time, at long last, for a real change? An authentic change?
Do Democrats want change, or do they want just more of the same? If they
want the latter, more corruption, then Hillary Clinton will be a fine
choice. Otherwise, they will unite around a progressive 2016 candidate
in order to beat her, then beat the Republican nominee, and finally
restore democracy to the United States again, with a progressive
President in the White House. That will give the nation a President who
can use the bully pulpit, because the criminality that has been in
charge can finally instead be charged, and most of it will be
Republican, which will have them howling and flailing, because the facts
will be 100% on the side of that President, no further lies will be
necessary in order to win the political battles.
----------
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of
They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of
CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
