Hilary Clinton: The Goldman Sach's presidential hopeful.

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Well, the Clintons are such pillars of integrity.  Hilary, looking to be the first female president of the USA is on record saying that she is her own person and, “…would neither favor nor shy away from rooting out Wall Street abuses.” according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Such a statement might be believable from a person not beholden to the 1%, a candidate of a political party that represents the interests of the 1% and ostensibly an integral member of the ruling class in the US.

The Clinton’s raised between $2 billion and $3 billion over the last two decades according to a Wall Street Journal/Center for Responsive Politics report published last Wednesday.  Between $1.3 billion and $2 billion came from Industry the report says. The bloodsucking Goldman Sachs has been the Clintons’ top Wall Street donor over this period along with other banks, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Chase, depositing at least $208 million in to their accounts.

One might ask whether or not there is a conflict of interest here. 

All of these characters receive hundreds of millions of dollars from speaking fees after they leave office, not just conservatives like Newt Gingrich.  The charismatic and very sharp Bill Clinton has been paid $23 million by the US financial sector for speeches made since he left office.  Goldman Sachs paid him $1.35 million in the period we are covering here for 8 speeches----not bad.  After leaving office these characters also promote the US capitalist class abroad. That’s what Hilary was doing in Myanmar, creating opportunities for US capitalism to plunder that society. A WalMart in Rangoon is a dream come true.

One thing that frustrates me about the liberals and with my friends that feel they have to vote for the Democrats and justify it on the basis of the lesser of two evils argument, is that in their columns or in conversation, the social crisis is all Republican’s doing.  This is the problem with supporting the lesser evil, one has to cover for this evil, has to ignore its role. It’s very difficult to include the party and candidates you are supporting, voting or campaigning for.  The muckrakers like Stewart, the Zionist Maher and Bill Moyers are really all campaigners for the Democratic Party. The best you can get with the lesser of two evils approach is a slower death.

No worker believes that after receiving billions from corporations Hilary Clinton or any other politician is going to take them on. “The one who pays the piper calls the tune” as the old saying goes.  This dictatorship of capital when it comes to the political arena is one of the reasons some $138 million people never voted in the last election cycle.  Unfortunately many workers have drawn the conclusion that the cause of this is money itself and individual character flaws.  It’s human nature that the individual cannot reject the desire for wealth and power.  “We need someone with integrity” is the rallying cry.  They have drawn the mistaken conclusion that all politics is bad, all politicians are bad, there’s just some that are worse than others. But there are many people with integrity, who made promises they believed they would keep.  It’s not a personal issue, it’s a political one.

A political party does not exist in a vacuum; it represents social forces.  We can see from these few statistics which social forces Hilary Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Party represent. Hilary Clinton has been a powerful representative of the US ruling class supporting disastrous wars against former colonial peoples and a domestic war at home.  Clinton and her party supported the ruthless Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak referring to him as a good friend.  The same with numerous other undemocratic and violent leaders. She never condemned the horrific murder of Iraqi’s, mostly women and children, during the years of US imposed sanctions on that country and she never condemned Madeline Albright’s disgusting comment that the death of half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”. She says practically nothing about the mass incarceration of workers in the US with a huge percentage of these workers of color.

Her party controlled both houses and the US presidency in the past, under Carter and the first two years of Bill Clinton’s first term.  Bill Clinton in the late nineties after he betrayed US workers on NAFTA and threw working class women off welfare, went on to support the repeal of the two provisions of the Glass/Steagle act restricting affiliations between banks and securities firms. We had numerous strikes in states with Democratic governors like the Hormel strike in Minnesota. Governor Perpich helped crush that strike with the National Guard. Democratic governors of major cities have also participated inn the assault on workers living standards.

A by-product of this political vacuum in the US is the domination of identity politics.  If you’re going to be poor no matter who gets in then other issues become the focus. The right wing religious fundamentalists are so extreme, especially when it comes to women’s rights, that many women will vote for the lesser evil on that issue alone.  Gays will do the same, as will proponents of the second amendment.  Others will pick one side or the other based on what they consider “moral values” whatever that means. Obama is an architect of death when it comes to children in Pakistan or the Arab world but all that is put aside because he supports a persons particular individual rights, normally non economic issues of course.  When it comes to attacks on workers’ living standards no matter what the religion, race or sexual orientation, the Democrats are part of the offensive against us.

An important aspect of the struggles that lie ahead is the building of an independent working people’s political party. This is a development that will take place organically as a movement against the capitalist offensive begins on the ground.  Independent candidates opposing the two Wall Street parties will likely arise out of the different movements around various issues housing, education, health care, etc.  Uniting this movement nationally and any independent political arm that arises from it is crucial.

The election of Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council as an open socialist is a positive development but this campaign must be used to build a broader, democratic direct action movement that can challenge capital in the workplaces, communities and schools and confront the elements, (the labor hierarchy and left Democrats) that enter this movement to temper it, undermine its militancy and direct it politically in to the Democratic Party morass. Fresh obstacles face the Sawant campaign and the socialist organization (the CWI) to which she belongs as traditionally these organizations tend to be very undemocratic and opposed to forces that threaten their top down control.  The many new fresh people joining the Sawant will come up against this problem and if a democratic and open organization is not built the recent successes in Seattle can die as quickly as they were born.

The struggle for an independent alternative to the two Wall Street parties will in itself bring reforms from, reforms aimed at derailing the independent movement of the working class. The problem is that the climate does not lend itself to reforms, just the opposite. In the period from 1950 to the 70’s when US capitalism stood triumphant, the wealthiest and most powerful economy in history, it was unable to provide a secure life for millions of its citizens. The US working class must pay for the crisis of the system and the cost of maintaining US capitalism’s declining influence on the global stage.  The 1% is intent, as we have said many times, in driving the US workers and middle class back to conditions that prevailed prior to the rise of the CIO and industrial unionism in the 1930’s and the Civil Rights movement that followed.

Hilary Clinton is already opportunistically distancing herself from Obama who is considered weak, a bit of a wimp.  She will be more “Assertive” when dealing with global issues, she told an audience last week.  “….Some people can paint a beautiful vision..” she said last month, “…and thankfully we can all learn from that. But then, can you with the tenacity, the persistence the getting knocked down/getting back up resilience, can you lead us there?”  This is for the hawks she will be working with.As she offers this tough front she talks about the people's insecurity and needs.  She is appealing here to her party colleagues, the new populists like Warren and Reich who are concerned that capitalism and the profit system is threatened by the increasing concentration of capital.  "How much inequality can we have and still have capitalism" says Reich.

Make no mistakes; Hilary Clinton is a ruthless bourgeois politician.  The usual farce will follow. A couple of billion will be spent on media ads savaging their opponents with personal attacks and 20 second sound bites.  The 125 to 150 million that have withdrawn from the electoral process in disgust will not be appealed to as the two political wings of Wall Street and the 1% battle it out in states or areas where the gap between their supporters is narrowest. 

Another year passes where US workers have no political voice.