In the Democratic primaries, where Hillary Clinton’s victory is a foregone conclusion, Bernie Sanders is playing the role of the sacrificial lamb candidate familiar to citizens of dictatorships that hold phony elections in order to confer legitimacy upon their regimes.
Right-wing groups are feeding material attacking Hillary Clinton from the left in the hope that it will weaken her support among progressives. What are liberals supposed to do, ignore her perfidy because they’re learning about it from conservatives?
Acknowledging that she isn’t viewed as likeable enough, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is launching a charm offensive to convince Americans that she is a regular Jane Sixpack, just like us.
Bill and Hillary Clinton “earned” — can a mortal earn such stratospheric sums? — “at least $30 million over the last 16 months, mainly from giving paid speeches to corporations, banks and other organizations,” The New York Times reports. “They have now earned more than $125 million on the [lecture] circuit since leaving the White House in 2001.”
This is an important issue. But the big story has little to with what actually matters.
Coverage of the Clintons’ spectacularly lucrative speaking career has focused on how it affects Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign — specifically the political damage caused by the public’s growing perception that Hillary is out of touch with the common man and woman. It is a promising line of inquiry for her detractors (myself included).
Hillary is out of touch. She hasn’t been behind the wheel of an automobile for nearly 20 years, is a multi-multi-millionaire who nevertheless considered herself “dead broke” and still believes that she and her husband are not among “the truly well off.” (Maybe Bill still drives.) Ostentatious wealth coupled with tonedeafness didn’t help Mitt “47%” Romney in 2012, or John “I can’t remember how many houses I own” McCain in 2008 — and they were Republicans, a party that gleefully despises the poor and jobless. For a Democrat under heavy fire from her party’s progressive base — with Elizabeth Warren, Bill di Blasio and Bernie Sanders leading the charge — this stuff could be politically fatal.
But the media ought to focus on the real issue. FDR was wealthy, yet he created the social safety net as we know it (what’s left of it, anyway). JFK and RFK came from money, yet no one doubted their commitment to help the downtrodden. Liberals distrust Hillary due to her and her husband’s long record of kowtowing to Wall Street bankers and transnational corporations, supporting jobs-killing “free trade” agreements, backing the NSA’s intrusions into our privacy, and as an unrepentant militarist. Her progressivism appears to have died with her law career.
Conflict of interest: that’s why we should be concerned about all those $250,000 speeches.
The big question is: why do corporations and banks shell out a quarter of a million dollars for a Hill Talk?
Corporations and banks don’t pay big bucks to Hillary Clinton because they’re dying to hear what she has to say. After having been front and center on the national political scene for a quarter century, she and Bill don’t have new insights to share. And even if I’m wrong — even if you’re a CEO and you’re dying to learn her ultimate (new) recipe for baking cookies — you don’t have to invite her to speak to your company to get the dish. You can ask one of your CEO pals who already had her speak at his firm — or pay to attend one of the zillions of other lectures she gives.
This is not about Hillary’s message.
Corporations and banks bribe the Clintons to buy political favors. The speaking racket is a (flimsy) cover.
Like, there’s the time Goldman Sachs paid $200,000 for a Bill Talk a few months before the financial conglomerate lobbied Hill when she was secretary of state. At least 13 companies paid Bill and Hill at least $2.5 million in similar sleazy deals.
Those are just the brazen quid pro quo deals.
Among the companies that have lined Hillary’s pockets over the last 16 months are “a mix of corporations (GE, Cisco, Deutsche Bank), medical and pharmaceutical groups (the California Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association), and women’s organizations like the Commercial Real Estate Women Network,” the Times says. “Mr. Clinton’s speeches included a number of talks for financial firms, including Bank of America and UBS, as well as technology companies like Microsoft and Oracle.”
GE, Cisco and Deutsche Bank aren’t run by idiots. Nor are lobbying groups like the female realtors. Their boards know that Hillary may well become president. Even if she loses, those bribes — er, speaking fees — are a smart investment in DC influence. The Clintons have strong ties at the highest levels of the Democratic Party establishment and on Wall Street. If you’re GE, it makes sense to make nice with people whose help you might want someday, so they’re likelier to pick up the phone when you call to, say, grease the skids for a merger in danger of getting derailed by antitrust laws.
Laws governing the sale of political access are relatively clear, but rarely enforced. The ethics, however, are simple: honest people don’t take money from people they may be charged with governing or regulating in the future.
“Behind every great fortune,” Balzac maintained, “lies a crime.” If there were any justice, the Clintons would be in prison for a generation of criminal activity that has left America a corrupted, Third Worldified nation, poorer for having been looted by the companies and banks whose criminality they aided and abetted.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly been caught lying about, among other things, her emails as secretary of state, yet 48% of Americans and 4 out of 5 Democrats describe her as “trustworthy.” Do they even know the meaning of the word?
Edward Snowden has been vindicated.
This week marks the first time that a court – a real court, not a sick joke of a kangaroo tribunal like the FISA court, which approves every government request and never hears from opponents – has ruled on the legality of one of the NSA’s spying programs against the American people.
Verdict: privacy 1, police state 0.
Yet the police state goes on. Which is what happens in, you know, a police state. The pigs always win.
A unanimous three-judge ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, states unequivocally that the Obama Administration’s interpretation of the USA Patriot Act is fatally flawed. Specifically, it says, Congress never intended for Section 215 to authorize the bulk interception and storage of telephony metadata of domestic phone calls: the calling number, the number called, the length of the call, the locations of both parties, and so on. In fact, the court noted, Congress never knew what the NSA was up to before Snowden spilled the beans.
On the surface, this is good news.
It will soon have been two years since Snowden leaked the NSA’s documents detailing numerous government efforts to sweep up every bit and byte of electronic communications that they possibly can — turning the United States into the Orwellian nightmare of 1984, where nothing is secret and everything can and will be used against you. Many Americans are already afraid to tell pollsters their opinions for fear of NSA eavesdropping.
One can only imagine how chilling the election of a neo-fascist right-winger (I’m talking to you, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker) as president would be. Not that I’m ready for Hillary “privacy for me, not for thee” Clinton to know all my secrets.
Until now, most action on the reform front has taken place abroad, especially in Europe, where concern about privacy online has led individuals as well as businesses to snub American Internet and technology companies, costing Silicon Valley billions of dollars, and accelerated construction of a European alternative to the American dominated “cloud.”
Here in the United States, the NSA continued with business as usual. As far as we know, the vast majority of the programs revealed by Snowden are still operational; there are no doubt many frightening new ones launched since 2013. Members of Congress were preparing to renew the disgusting Patriot Act this summer. One bright spot was the so-called USA Freedom Act, which purports to roll back bulk metadata collection, but privacy advocates say the legislation had been so watered down, and so tolerant of the NSA’s most excessive abuses, that it was just barely more than symbolic.
Like the Freedom Act, this ruling is largely symbolic.
The problem is, it’s not the last word. The federal government will certainly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could take years before hearing the case. Even in the short run, the court didn’t slap the NSA with an injunction to halt its illegal collection of Americans’ metadata.
What’s particularly distressing is the fact that the court’s complaint is about the interpretation of the Patriot Act rather than its constitutionality. The Obama Administration’s interpretation of Section 215 “cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program,” said the court ruling. However: “We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously.”
Well, ain’t that peachy.
As a rule, courts are reluctant to annul laws passed by the legislative branch of government on the grounds of unconstitutionality. In the case of NSA spying on us, however, the harm to American democracy and society is so extravagant, and the failure of the system of checks and balances to rein in the abuses so spectacular, that the patriotic and legal duty of every judge is to do whatever he can or she can to put an end to this bastard once and for all.
It’s a sad testimony to the cowardice, willful blindness and lack of urgency of the political classes that the New York court kicked the can down the road, rather than declare the NSA’s metadata collection program a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
The knee-jerk reaction of Hillary Clinton supporters who primarily want a first woman president to those who question her less than progressive stands on a host of political issues makes one wonder: where is the limit of identity politics?
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is spreading the media meme that a woman president would be “cool.” Yes, it would – but shouldn’t we hold out for a woman president, or any president, whose politics are more appealing?
The revealing headline: “Hillary Clinton Will Run; She Still Has to Explain Why.”
The money quote from the story beneath that headline: “For months, Mrs. Clinton has lamented the stagnant wages holding back lower-income people and the concentration of wealth among a sliver of the wealthiest, a sentiment echoed in her first public remarks as a 2016 candidate.”
Linger on that sentence’s introductory phrase: “For months.”
Months?
!
What?
Hillary has been a political animal for decades. She’s been a possible future presidential candidate since at least 1996 — the year she last drove a car. She’s just getting around to figuring out what her politics are?
(By the way and speaking of which, someone in Hillaryworld needs to clue in She-Who-Must-Be-Driven to basic automotive vernacular. When one is a passenger, one does not say, as Secretary Clinton did yesterday, “when I was driving here.” Driving is something one does, not something that is done to you. Unless you are actually, you know, driving, the correct phrase would be: “when I was riding here.” Unless, of course, this is one of those misremembering “dodging sniper fire” senior moments.)
Maybe I took high school civics class too seriously, but I thought the correct order was:
First, come up with list of ideas, policies, and bills that you would, as President of the United States, promote, enact and propose.
Second, run for President of the United States.
This, however, is no longer how a professional political class so removed from the lives of the average citizen that they not only don’t drive but don’t even know words about driving — who think being worth $25 million equals “dead broke,” and that earning $12 million a year makes you “not truly well off” — sees it. First, they fundraise. Second, they run. Third, they figure out what they believe in.
With a campaign warchest likely to set new records, the task of selling influence in a 2017-2021 first term is well underway. Unless she dies or gets hosed by a new scandal, Hillary has the Democratic nomination all sewn up. Which means it’s time for the last priority: ginning up a platform.
At this writing, Clinton says she wants to be a “champion” for “everyday Americans.” What does that phrase even mean? As opposed to what — Americans who live outside the standard Sunday-to-Saturday space-time continuum? Is there some special eighth-and-a-halfth day for one percenters?
There are, she told Iowans, “four big fights that I think we have to take on.”
Hillary’s big fight #1: “We need to build the economy of tomorrow, not yesterday.” Question: will there be flying robots? If there are flying robots, I’m in! But not flying robot murderers, like we use to kill Pakistanis and Yemenis. Too much tomorrow.
Big fight #2: Strengthening families. “When families are strong, America is strong.” You’ve been warned, single people who drain America’s strength — Hillary is coming for you! “Because it’s your time. And I hope you’ll join me on this journey.” Hell-o, Oprah!
Big fight #3: Campaign finance reform. “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all – even if that takes a constitutional amendment.”
Big fight #4: National security. “We need to protect our country from the threats that we see, and the ones that are on the horizon.”
With all due respect — in other words, none — Hillary’s “platform” reads like a mash-up of Dick Morris’ focus-grouped pabulum and a schoolchild answering test questions about a book she didn’t read.
The “big fight” thesis gets an F: Who’s against “an economy of tomorrow”? Does anyone oppose stronger families? If a presidential candidate has ever run in favor of letting threats go unanswered, it’s news to me.
Of Hillary’s “big four fights,” only a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United decision has substance. But campaign finance reform is a low priority for Americans. What Americans care most about, polls have shown consistently, is the economy. People want more jobs, higher wages, better job security.
In all fairness, Hillary isn’t the only run-first-think-second presidential contender. With the exception of Rand Paul, there isn’t much beef on the Republican side either.
Still, Hillary’s lameness towers above the rest if for no other reason than the fact that she’s had at least 20 years to think about what she’d do as president. If this is all she can think up after all this time, how slowly will she react when she gets that hotline phone call at 3 a.m.?
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
He’s considered a hero, and rightly so. Still, when French General Charles de Gaulle gave his most famous speech, the Appeal of 18 June 1940, not everyone was moved. “Nothing is lost for France!” the future leader of the Free French intoned into the BBC microphone to the people of France, who had just lost their country to the Nazi invasion. “The flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished!”
“Easy for him to say!” my grandfather raged. “He’s sitting over there in London, sipping tea! Here we’ve got the krauts up our ass!”
He changed his mind later. But still: terrible first communiqué.
Communications 101: If you hope others to follow you as a leader, remember who and where and what you are.
If you don’t, others will.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz forgot self-awareness with this week’s clumsy rollout of the coffee conglomerate’s “Race Together” advertising campaign featuring social media hashtags and handwritten cups — and stepped in something that looked and felt like a pile of day-old coffee grinds but smelled worse on Twitter.
What could go wrong? Schultz wanted to spark a discussion about race in America. The slogan, though cloddish, was something few would argue with: Unity is good. But then: everyone hated it. “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well,” tweeted the usually placid PBS NewsHour host Gwen Ifill.
“The brand has been called tone-deaf and obnoxious,” reported The New York Times. “Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly white, while many of its baristas are minorities.”
Oh, that.
Which is also a class thing: Schulz “earned” $28.9 million in 2012 alone. The average barrista gets $10 an hour.
What went wrong? Starbucks in general, and Schultz in particular, didn’t have the social standing — the political legitimacy — to declare a national conversation on race.
Starbucks is too white. Too unequal. Without a history of engaging customers on political issues, it jumped straight into one of the most fraught, complex and emotional: America’s original sin. “The last person I wanna discuss race with is a snotty condescending 18 yr old barista that corrects me when I say ‘large’ instead of ‘venti,’” one Twitterer tweeted.
And there’s that “Together” thing. Zillionaire Schultz and thousandaire me? We’re not even a little “together” — even though we both cash in on white male privilege. And he’s a lot less “together” with the African-American community — members of which he isn’t hiring enough of, and not paying enough to when he does.
Who the hell was Howard Schultz to lecture us about race?
Nobody.
Similarly, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has turned herself into a national laughingstock by forgetting who she is and who’s she talking to.
It began with “Lean In,” her book/PR campaign/wannabe movement to encourage working women to break through the glass ceiling by being more assertive in demanding raises, promotions and responsibility. Now the zillionaire feminist is promoting “Choreplay,” in which sex-starved husbands are encouraged to buy sexual favors from their tired working wives by performing household duties like cleaning the dishes and doing the laundry.
Let’s set aside the facts that the “girls make passes at guys who wash and dry dishes and glasses” meme (a) is way old and (b) has been decisively debunked. From a 2013 study in the American Sociological Review: “Couples in which men participate more in housework typically done by women report having sex less frequently. Similarly, couples in which men participate more in traditionally masculine tasks—such as yard work, paying bills, and auto maintenance—report higher sexual frequency.”
Nothing destroys credibility like spouting outdated nonsense.
The point is: who the hell is Sheryl Sandberg to tell us anything?
The Washington Post’s book critic sussed out Sandberg’s no-moral-standing problem in her book: “By the time she describes the pangs of guilt as a mother working outside the home — some of her most poignant passages — it is impossible to forget that she, like many of the female friends she quotes, is a wealthy, white, married woman with a ‘vast support system.’ Surely she could have included a story or two about successful women who are more likely to have been born to nannies than to hire them. Or at least more who didn’t graduate from the Ivy League.”
If you’re tonedeaf, at least be nice. (It might give you standing.) Which Sandberg was not: immediately after collecting a cool $90 million in stock sales, her new foundation posted ads looking for interns.
In other words, slaves.
Like Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Sandberg doesn’t see that as a billionaire who owes her spectacular wealth and privilege, including household staff, to her friendship with an even wealthier man who leads a company whose tiny workforce isn’t unionized, works “at will,” and is increasingly outsourced overseas at insanely low wages, she shouldn’t telling working-class (or middle-class) women what to do.
She ought to shut up and listen.
Then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton’s latest scandal, Emailgate.
She’d already blown the moral standing thing as a “feminist icon” who’d be unknown to the world had she not married well, and as a millionaire — at least 25 times over — who claims to have recently gone from “broke” to “not well off.”
Then she defended her decisions not to use government email as secretary of state, and delete thousands of contemporaneous private emails as attempts to protect her privacy — something every American could identify with.
“No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy,” she said.
Indeed we do.
Unfortunately, Clinton has as much moral standing on privacy rights as Dick Cheney has as a peacemaker. She voted for the Patriot Act, which unleashed the NSA monster that reads everybody’s emails, everywhere, all the time, and even called Edward Snowden a traitor for letting us know what the NSA is up to. She’s a hypocrite. Worse than that, she’s made herself look ridiculous.
Before you open your mouth to lecture anyone, remember the cautionary tales of tonedeaf elitists like Schultz, Sandberg and Clinton. If you don’t have standing to talk, you’ve got nothing to say.
