Hillary Clinton’s favorite “Hitler” these days is Putin, with Assad in close second. Her days of giggling triumphantly over the murder of Gadaffi may be behind her. And one of her favorite ways of demonizing Putin has been denouncing his opposition to gay rights. Yet Hillary, along with Rick Santorum, was a supporter of proposed legislation that might have legalized the recently hyped refusal of a government employee in Kentucky to allow a gay couple to marry. Hillary has long favored bombing places that lack civil liberties, and sponsored legislation to criminalize the burning of a U.S. flag.
Some contradictions in U.S. politics (President Obama allowing Arctic drilling and then visiting the Arctic to lament his own destruction of the earth’s climate, for example) appear easily explained by sheer soulless corruption via the simple transfer of dollars. Other contradictions (the eagerness of Hillary and her then-president husband Bill) to launch a war over fictional atrocities in Yugoslavia but not over real ones in Rwanda) require at least a bit more analysis.
Diana Johnstone’s forthcoming book, Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, succeeds in providing an understanding of Hillary Clinton’s own worldview like nothing else I’ve read — and it does so despite being largely not about Hillary Clinton. Johnstone’s book is culture and political criticism at its finest. It’s a study of the American neo-liberal, with a particular focus here-and-there on Clinton. I strongly recommend reading it, whatever your level of interest in the “Queen of Chaos” herself, for its illumination of the ideologies underlying U.S. adventurism, exceptionalism, and “responsibility to protect” obsession with identifying believable threats of “genocide” in nations disloyal to Washington or Wall Street.
Johnstone has little interest in “proving” that a woman can be president, a point that she takes to be obvious. “Avoiding World War III is somewhat more urgent,” she maintains. Why World War III? Isn’t everything well with the world, other than a few evil Muslims trying to kill us all? And wouldn’t a woman president help ease tensions?
Johnstone’s account of Clinton’s record moves from her support of a right-wing military coup in Honduras to her active engagement in facilitating a right-wing military coup in Ukraine. In between, Johnstone looks in-depth at Clinton’s backing of her husband’s illegal war on Yugoslavia, and the lies she’s told about it, which go much deeper than her false claim to have braved sniper fire at an airport. Johnstone also examines the 2011 war on Libya for which she gives Clinton significant blame. (And lest we forget, here’s video of Clinton promoting the 2002 authorization for an invasion of Iraq.)
Then there’s Clinton’s allegiance to the right-wing Israeli government agenda, on exhibit in her speech this week and in Queen of Chaos:
“In July 2014, billionaire Haim Saban declared in a Bloomberg TV interview that he would contribute ‘as much as needed’ to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016. This is significant because both Saban’s fortune and his zeal seem to be inexhaustible. Saban declares proudly that his greatest concern is to protect Israel through strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. ‘I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.’ . . . Saban showered seven million dollars on the Democratic National Committee, donated five million dollars to Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library, and above all, founded his very own think tank, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy within the Brookings Institution, previously considered the most politically neutral of major Washington think tanks. This was accomplished by a record donation to Brookings of thirteen million dollars. . . . As things look now, the 2016 presidential race could be a contest between Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson. In either case, the winner would be Israel.”
Johnstone does a good job of bringing out Clinton’s belief in the rightness of all U.S. wars, past and possible. In 2012 Clinton gave a speech in which she claimed that a “small group” was preventing the U.S. from going in and saving Syria from Hitler/Assad, a small group consisting of Iran, Russia, and China:
“She went on to say that: ‘we are also increasing our efforts to assist the opposition,’ before adding that if we are successful, ‘Assad will increase the level of violent response.’ At a moment like this, one must ask whether she realizes what she is saying. She is admitting that U.S. military aid to the opposition intended to prevent violence will provoke more violence. If there is indeed a possibility of ‘genocide,’ which is doubtful, this possibility will be increased by that very assistance to the opposition Hillary is calling for, since it will increase the overall violence.”
When asked about bombing Libya on Meet the Press, Clinton said, “Let’s be fair here. They didn’t attack us, but what they were doing and Gaddafi’s history and the potential for the disruption and instability was very much in our interests … and seen by our European friends and our Arab partners as very vital to their interests.’ In short, bombing the hell out of a sovereign country that did us no harm is perfectly okay if we consider it to be in our ‘interests,’ or in the ‘interests’ of our ‘European friends’ and our ‘Arab partners.’ Not only that, but bombing a country, arming rebels and overthrowing its government is the way to prevent ‘disruption’ and ‘instability.'”
Clinton is open about her view of the world, but would prefer the details remained unknown. She has condemned Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing as criminal and even suggested that he should face prosecution under the Espionage Act.
One way of grasping where Clinton is coming from is to examine, in her case, what she herself admits is the major corrupting factor in U.S. elections: money. Who funds her? Here’s Johnstone:
“Take a look at the list of Clinton Foundation donors who have contributed millions of dollars, supposedly for charity – the sort of charity that begins at home. These are philanthropists who give in order to get. Eight digit donors include: Saudi Arabia, the pro-Israel Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, and the Saban family. Pinchuk has pledged millions to a branch of the Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, for a program to train future Ukrainian leaders according to ‘European values.’ Seven digit donors include: Kuwait, Exxon Mobil, ‘Friends of Saudi Arabia,’ James Murdoch, Qatar, Boeing, Dow, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart and the United Arab Emirates. Cheapskates paying their dues to the Clintons with contributions above only half a million include: the Bank of America, Chevron, Monsanto, Citigroup and the inevitable Soros Foundation.”
For an example of how Clinton does the bidding of her funders, look at the case of Boeing, examined by the Washington Post.
Does this help explain why Republicans on Wall Street are backing her?
Here’s a list of horrible governments to which Hillary supported transferring weaponry once they had donated to her foundations.
Can you get more corrupt that that? Hillary Clinton can. Here’s a collection of examples how.
For a deeper understanding of where candidates like Hillary Clinton, her husband, the three Bushes, Obama, and others come from, I also strongly recommend another forthcoming book called Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, by Laurence Shoup, who co-authored the 1977 book, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy.
The CFR, according to Shoup, is the world’s most powerful private organization. It has about 5,000 individual members and 170 corporate members, a staff of 330, a budget of $60 million, and assets of $492 million. It began at the end of World War I and included both wings of the wealth-and-war party, dedicated to spreading U.S. dominance and influence around the globe for the good of the heathen.
Madeleine Albright brought Bill Clinton into the CFR in the 1980s, and the contacts he made there, in Shoup’s view, brought him the media, funding, and insider advisers that made him president, not to mention his post-presidential fortune. Co-Chair of CFR Robert Rubin led Clinton’s National Economic Council and his push for NAFTA before being made Secretary of the Treasury and pushing the repeal of Glass-Steagall before moving on to the board of Citigroup — listed as a major Clinton-foundation funder above. Fifteen of Bill Clinton’s top 17 foreign policy officials were, like him, CFR members, five of whom had been or would soon be directors. Daughter Chelsea Clinton became a CFR member in 2013.
What’s wrong with CFR broadcasting its views on National Public Radio and holding its elitist meetings with movers and shakers? You might as well ask what’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy, because the policy of the past decades has in fact been largely the policy desired, proposed, and enacted by the CFR and its members. And it is not what the U.S. public has wanted.
In 2013, a Pew-CFR effort polled CFR members and the general public. Among the public, 81% wanted protecting U.S. jobs to be a priority, but only 29% of CFR members did. Among CFR members, 93% favored corporate trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a much higher percentage than among the general public believed that drone murders make the United States safer. These results line up with the 2014 peer-reviewed study done at Princeton and Northwestern Universities, which found that the United States is not a democracy, but an “oligarchy,” that the demands of the wealthy are met by the government, whereas the desires of everyone else are ignored.
Changing that will require a nonviolent revolution, not a particular outcome from an almost completely corrupted electoral (and communications) system. But with the current corporate media behaving as if we need to know something more about Hillary Clinton before rejecting her, let me just say this to the infinitely annoying plague-like medium known as the email: My Dear emails, you little maggots eating away the minutes of my day, if your scandal rids us of the risk of installing Hillary Clinton in the White House, all shall be forgiven.
