Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Bill Clinton's Ruling Class Lament

As part of the great national wokeness serving to expose and shame the predators in the highest echelons of media and political power, the New York Times has graciously allowed former President Bill Clinton to perform his own reckoning, in his own words.

Clinton reckons that the biggest problem America faces is not that the powerful and the rich and the criminal are exploiting and assaulting the poor and the defenseless. It's that defenseless Americans like you and me just can't seem to get along with one another. Forget about coming clean about his own sordid past as an accused rapist. This man won't even come clean about how his administration's neoliberal, wealth-serving policies have directly created some of the worst human misery in the history of our young republic.

Regular readers of this blog might remember that one of my regular features was the deconstruction of Barack Obama's weekly addresses to the nation. Unlike Donald Trump's self-centered bombast, Obama's messages sounded,  on the surface, very reasonable and eloquent  and even empathetic - until you carefully read between the lines, and realized that they were largely dog-whistles of support to Wall Street and jingoistic drumbeats for the perpetual war machine.

So, when I read Clinton's op-ed in the New York Times, it was like deja vu all over again. Let the deconstruction begin!

Americans Must Decide Who We Really Are, by Bill Clinton.
America has a lot going for it.
We are in the second year of rising incomes across all income groups. Our work force is relatively young, hardworking and productive. America’s universities and other research institutions are strong in areas like materials science, software development, nanotechnology, biotechnology, genomics and many other fields that are important to our future economic growth and employment. We continue to move toward more energy independence and cleaner energy, with advances in battery storage for solar and wind power and a vast untapped capacity to generate electricity from both.
This sounds like a subtle dig at Obama, who oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the working classes to the rich in all of American history, as well as a subtle compliment to Trump's second year in office coinciding with the second year of allegedly rising incomes. If any low-income workers have gotten slight raises in the past few years, it's been largely the result of their own Fight for 15 movement and not the result of any beneficence of employers like the Walton family. This retail dynasty now owns as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population combined, but their workers rely on government-funded programs like Medicaid and SNAP to barely survive. Of course, it helps that the Walton clan have been big funders of the Clinton clan over the past several decades.

Bill Clinton fails to mention that the technological research being conducted in public universities is for the ultimate benefit of private corporations, which, thanks to patent laws written by their lobbyists, will continue to milk the public for generations to come. Meanwhile, the skilled but onerously indebted graduates of such institutions will work until they drop.

And that's the good news. Clinton now proceeds to give lip service to his neoliberal version of the dark side:
 We also face serious economic challenges: severe inequalities in income and wealth; low work force participation by adults without college degrees, especially white men; dramatic differences in growth between prosperous urban and suburban regions and counties full of small towns and rural areas; gaping shortfalls in our national infrastructure, from inadequate roads and bridges, to rusty, dangerous water pipes, to an electrical grid incapable of moving the cleanest, cheapest energy from where it can be produced most efficiently to where it is most needed, to the absence of affordable, rapid broadband internet in areas that desperately need to be included in the national economy.
Whenever neoliberals want to avoid a true reckoning, they employ the weasel word "challenges." This allows them to avoid the reality that it has been their own policies (deregulation of the financial sector; privatization of public spaces, and housing stock, and public schools; the deliberate creation of a carceral state in which one out of every three black men now spends part of his life locked up in prison; the bipartisan whittling away of social insurance benefits) which have created the "challenge" of so many millions of people now needlessly suffering. These "challenges" have come about precisely because of leaders like him. Rather than admit this, Clinton blames the victims by pointing to the convenient "skills gap" canard.  This malarkey suggests that only a costly college education can ever bring neoliberalism's victims out of their own doldrums. Oh, and maybe a little broadband rural Internet. That should keep the "folks" hoping against all hope and against all reason. Maybe they'll vote Democrat next time, instead of for Republican demagogues like Donald Trump. Right?
There are human resource challenges, too. Our K-12 education system includes some of the world’s best schools, but that excellence has been hard to replicate across districts and states with widely varying conditions.
Bill Clinton would not be the loyal neoliberal ideologue he is if he didn't define human beings in purely market-based terms. We are not people - we are "human resources"  who must be ready, willing and able to be mined to our very depths. Never mind that these "challenges" will get even worse with the new tax legislation. Among its other atrocities, the GOP plan is expressly designed to destroy public education as we know it, by limiting the local and state property tax deduction to a measly $10,000, and thereby depriving neighborhood schools of most of their revenue for infrastructure and teacher salaries.

Clinton goes on to complain that although the Affordable Care Act has brought a modicum of medical coverage to a select and lucky portion of the population,  
... we have wasted too much time fighting over efforts to repeal that progress when we should be fixing the problems that remain and preparing for the aging of our population. 
 He studiously avoids any mention of Medicare for All, the true government-sponsored single payer health care being touted by progressives like Bernie Sanders, and which is widely supported by the public. On the contrary: what Clinton vaguely calls preparing for those old folks sounds ominously like a willingness to wheel and deal with the GOP on just how much funding it might be feasible to cut from Medicare for the Few.
 The future of undocumented immigrants — including the “Dreamers” and millions of people who are working hard and paying taxes — is uncertain at a time when our work force cannot grow without them; the birthrate among native-born Americans is barely at replacement levels.
Again, Clinton simply cannot resist couching social policies and problems in strictly economic terms. Only those immigrants who "work hard and pay taxes" are deserving immigrants. He does not mention the global refugee humanitarian crisis at all, probably because by doing so he would have to admit that American wars, both direct and proxy, are responsible for it.  He complains about the declining American birthrate without mentioning that people who do not make a living wage at a steady job simply cannot afford to have children  - especially when they are burdened by lifelong college debt. He also doesn't mention that the highly skilled foreign workers he wants to enter the country usually earn much lower salaries than native-born workers.
From Charleston to Charlottesville, we are reminded that the racial divide remains a curse that can be revived with devastating consequences. And the opioid crisis and its progeny, heroin and fentanyl, are killing and disabling Americans at a staggering rate. For several years we’ve known it’s a huge public health challenge, yet almost nowhere do we have the resources and organization necessary to turn the tide.
That was a very Obamesque alliteration - Charleston to Charlottesille. Its glibness masks the reality that our "racial divide" was actually just the ticket for Clinton's victory in 1992. He ran on a racist platform of "ending welfare as we know it," and he also championed the Crime Bill, which has sent record numbers of black men to prison on minor drug charges. Hillary Clinton's own "super predator" rhetoric did its own racist, ultra-right, placatory part.

As economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have established, the opioid epidemic and worsening death rate are largely the result of working class despair - a despair partly engendered by the offshoring of jobs and the closing of factories brought about by Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement. (NAFTA) But to Clinton, it's just one more "challenge." And as a sop to the centrist deficit hawk crowd, "almost nowhere do we have the resources to turn the tide."  If he were honest, he would acknowledge that the "resources" are there, but they've been earmarked for providing billionaires and corporations with more tax reductions, more art collections, more luxury homes, more private jets, and more super-yachts.
Finally, we have a serious set of security challenges, from nuclear proliferation, to terrorism, to climate change, to cybersecurity, the last of which may prove the most daunting because it puts all the systems we need to deal with the other problems, and our very democracy, at risk.
This, unbelievably, is how Bill Clinton ends his op-ed. It's as if by glossing over nukes and terrorism and climate change, he is deliberately avoiding the fact that the US itself has committed a trillion dollars' worth of our allegedly dwindling "resources" into modernizing our nukes. It's as if he can't bear to admit that the US has deliberately exempted itself not only from accountability before international war crimes tribunals, but exempted the military from environmental standards meant to reduce America's giant carbon footprint all over the world. The Pentagon is a major contributor to man-made climate change.

Clinton hilariously complains that breaches in our cybersecurity system put our  "democracy" at risk. If he were truly honest, he'd just complain that an upstart billionaire named Donald Trump has put Clinton's faction of the oligarchy at risk. If he were being extra, extra honest, he'd just cut to the chase and say that he's still mad as hell that Hillary lost, and that there has been no Clinton Restoration.

This is the same guy Donna Brazile thinks can help save the Democratic Party by going around the country and campaigning for all the challengers to Republican seats.

Maybe if the Democrats could refrain for a minute from calling people and all kinds of deliberately manufactured human misery mere "challenges," then they might actually start to claw back a few of those thousand seats they've lost in the past decade. Otherwise, they'll end up not with a bang, but with the same kind of whimper with which Bill Clinton concluded his insipidly awful Times op-ed.

Reading it to completion was like a depressing slog through mental quicksand. It was a real challenge.


Party On


6 comments:

voice-in-wilderness said...

I don't see who the emerging leaders are for the Democratic party. We have the Clintons and Obamas representing the neoliberal past and with enormous amounts of baggage attached to them. We have Schumer, Pelosi, Feinstein, etc as other representatives of the past. Warren and Sanders as examples of the kinds of views I would like to hear, but past the leadership age I'm thinking of.

I also have to wonder why someone good would wade into the toxic mess in Washington. I'm here in NH and we are in the remarkable moment where both our senators and both our representatives are women. But what can they achieve in the minority party, while they have a front row seat to watch the GOP racing recklessly to the bottom?

Where can I find some hope for the Democrats?

Comrade said...

Internet - Why doesn't Clinton or any other Democrat address the steep cost for internet access? Due to cable companies losing revenue from customers cutting tv, these companies are compensating by increasing internet charges. I have internet only and it costs me nearly $70 a month which is outrageous. 'Access' to high speed broadband internet, like 'access' to health care is shorthand for expanding markets for business profits. Internet should be free considering how much the Gov't expects us to use it to access government information, services, apply for jobs, etc. The costs to us never even enters their greedy Capitalist consciousness.

Religious Freedom Restoration Act - Clinton signed the RFRA to "ensure that religious freedom was protected" from burdensome government regulations and laws. That must have won Clinton and the Democrats either religious voters or religious donor$, but it also emboldened states to pass their own strict RFRAs such that now there are Capitalist Christian Talibanis all over the country. Some of them are even refusing to bake cakes for gays because, by some religious or satanic miracle, the cake turns gay and condemns the business' soul to eternal Hell and Damnation. Yes, heathens, gay cakes have that power. That's why the business(man) needs protection from having to treat us equally. No gay soup for you! Or gay cake either. (h/t Seinfeld)

In all seriousness, and as God as my witness! (ok, so religious fantasy plays a role), Capitalism is anathema to everything I believe in. I claim the God-given right to be protected from the burdens of amoral Capitalism that the new Ruling Class government is forcing on us, like forcing us to buy a private health insurance product for profit instead of providing health care for all. I'd also put financial support for endless war profiteering, bankster bailouts, and other massive corporate welfare at the top of my gigantic List of Grievances.

Since the RFRA "holds the federal government responsible for additional obligations to protect religious exercise", my religious exercise as a Home Buddhist (a new sect founded by me, you heard it here first) starts by refusing to pledge allegiance to or support a Ruling Class Capitalist global empire passing itself off as a government. It violates my religious beliefs. Why should I have to be condemned to Hell and Eternal Damnation for supporting the sins and crimes of this Empire against humanity?

Speaking again with my religious crown on, U.S. Ruling Class Capitalism is a mortal sin and serious burden to anyone with sincere religious sentiment of any kind, whether 'Christians' are aware of it or not. We need a great lawyer to put together a great case using the RFRA to overthrow the Ruling Class Capitalist system that bought our former democracy. I almost wish the baker wins his gay cake case, because then those of us with sincere religious beliefs might actually be able to use Bill Clinton's RFRA to walk through the Supreme Court doors and legally challenge and overthrow the Ruling Class, Inshallah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Freedom_Restoration_Act

paintedjaguar said...

Re the photo: Who's the meany trying to pop the Clintons' balloons? And that guy in the back looks like a BernieBro to me. Clearly not feeling the wonderment of Bill & Hill.

Comrade said... "Why doesn't Clinton or any other Democrat address the steep cost for internet access?" Uh, because they're getting a cut of the profits? And because letting the common folk have that much media access leads to Too Much Democracy, just like shared prosperity does? You know that one of the goals of the Clinton/Gore Reinventing Government campaign was shifting costs to citizens, oops, I meant to say "consumers".

Comrade said...

May I join in on the edit game?

Bill Clinton's says:

"In spite of our [Ruling Class] overall economic progress [stock market profits soaring] since the 2008 crash [massive bank fraud], all these challenges [hiding how trillions in bailouts were re-invested in stock buybacks and other self-serving investments] have contributed to declining economic mobility [chronic joblessness, , underemployment}, increasing political and social alienation [voting means nothing, anti-Capitalist sentiment growing] and more personal insecurity [homelessness or price gouging by landlords, poverty, hunger] for millions of our fellow citizens [consumers]. These forces [the Ruling Class] have increased our divisions [resentment, frustration, tribalism], and make it even harder to recover our sense of common purpose [supporting Capitalism and the Ruling Class]."

Hey, Bill! It was the financial crimes of the Ruling Class, incredibly destructive crimes that Obama, Clinton, and the Democrats winked at and rewarded, and were rewarded for, that brought us to this point. Here are some of the crimes that the banksters committed that Bill doesn't figure into the equation, as if he's somehow forgotten:

Money laundering for drug cartels and rogue nations
Illegally evicting homeowners
Selling fraudulent mortgages and mortgage-based securities
Manipulating vital interest rates
Insider trading
Facilitating off-shore tax evasion
Loan sharking payday loans
Financial strip mining by stock buybacks to increase shares and enrich themselves - EXACTLY what they'll do even more of after their new tax cuts kick in.

Since Obama and his very own Ruling Class regime was willing to add ~10 trillion to the national debt by printing more money for known criminals to play with (including foreign banks), they could have instead sent $100K to every homeowner in the country and saved trillions in national debt while saving homes and life savings from being wiped out.

Instead those were lost forever, and they wonder why voters didn't want more of the same from a President Hillary Clinton? Voters were in no mood for more of the same as they got from Obama. He hoodwinked and bamboozled many star-struck Democrats, but not much of the rest of the country. The Big Bank Heist was more traumatic than politicians are willing to admit and the effects are still being felt. The fact is (truthful or not), Trump campaigned as having been against the TARP bailout and that helped him win. Democrats defended Obama's policies. The rest is history.

So Bill Clinton now thinks we need to "decide who we really are". Guess what, Bill? We have decided who YOU guys really are - the Ruling Class. We got stomped into the ground and we're still down, just where they want us to be. Except now they want us all to be happy and forget about it even though it's likely to happen again because they're fully in charge. That's what makes them the Ruling Class.

So what's the Ruling Class really concerned about? They don't care about us unless it affects them, so maybe they fear we're going to elect more Bernie Sanders types and go all anti-Capitalist on them. They needn't worry too much. Democrats are fully on board with endless wars for profit which are the economic foundation of our global empire. They won't get any Resistance there. You can take that to the bank.

Comrade said...

It's Noam Chomsky's 89th birthday today. His latest book is 'Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change'.

Halfwits get interviewed every day on American tv, but people like Chomsky are rarely seen or heard. That's how the corporate media makes sure that endless wars and oligarchy are normalized.

Comrade said...

Speaking of the Ruling Class which, by the way, isn't confined to our USA, I have an announcement.

I have a new conspiracy theory! Of course it's one that Democrats can't touch with a ten-foot pole despite mounting evidence. Not only would they not risk offending the Ruling Class, but their senses are so deadened by their Russia obsession and hysteria that they can't smell the stinky smoke wafting from Mueller's office after Mike Flynn slunk out with a guilty plea.

It was recently reported that Flynn and Jared Kushner colluded with Israel to pressure Russia to block a critical UN resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements. Real collusion! With Israel! Trump was in on it! But that's not my conspiracy theory. That's just facts already established. The media didn't do much with that, and neither did Democrats. But something big has happened that relates.

So are you ready? Trump's rash, inexplicably one-sided giveaway to Israel by suddenly declaring that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and moving our embassy there could be an indication of concession to blackmail by Bibi. Call in a Special Prosecutor! Of course now that he received his ransom, Bibi will cover for Trump and Trump is safe, and just in the nick of time!

Trump's giveaway is the giveaway. There's no sense to it. Isn't it starting to stink? I smell a smoking gun. Someone should look deeper. The Deal Maker didn't even do a deal - unless it was a secret, personal one. If anyone knows how to wield power and turn the screws for Israel, and get the timing perfect, it's Bibi. He's ruthless and cunning.

Just look at the timing. Look at the new direction towards Israel, then combine that with a few other factors:

Bibi enjoys the cooperation of the powerful corporate media which is largely owned by several Jewish billionaire Ruling Class members. They downplayed the connection Mueller just made.

Israel is also not one of the Five Eyes because they superseded that arrangement. They have a special agreement with the NSA to receive the full Eye of God raw digital data of everyone in the USA, unmasked. That was revealed during the Snowden era, although the NYT only gave it cursory coverage. The agreement was ostensibly for Israeli national security reasons to cut red tape, but it could also have been so that Israel could skirt laws restricting our own IC, like extraordinary rendition of data. Who facilitated that arrangement? I'd ask Chuck Schumer. He might know.

It was the Obama regime that started all this when they asked for unmasking Trump related communications (Susan Rice, et al) and one thing led to another until here we are with Russian fading and Israel desperately hiding behind the curtain hoping not to get noticed. Oh what a tangled web! Obama may come to using Hillary's sneaky law firm to help intermediate payments involved in this twisted Russia scheme but it's twisting the wrong way.

It's no wonder Trump was slurring his words the other day, attributed simply to "a dry throat" according to his press secretary. Hey, fear can do that! Israel has something on him and just cashed in at the height of its market value. Stroke of genius by Bibi. I just hope Trump's slurring wasn't a TIA and precursor to a major stroke, because then we'll end up with Holier than God Pence, ready to usher in the Second Coming of Jesus for his evangelicals by laying down the red carpet himself in Jerusalem.

That said, Trump is safe even if our country and the world isn't. Too bad the Democrats can't go anywhere near Trump's Israeli collusion and possible blackmail without messing with their golden goose. It would also create a huge crack in the shiny Ruling Class golden egg that could finally let the light shine in.