Warrior Empress of Austeria

Before she became a progressive for purposes of collecting votes, Secretary Hillary Clinton traveled the globe for the purposes of collecting a record number of frequent flyer miles in the service of banks and multinationals.

Reading a blog-post by her staunch surrogate Paul Krugman the other day, about how those crazy Republicans try to sell such bogus products as "expansionary austerity" for the masses in order to jump-start economic growth, I was reminded of the time in 2011 when Hillary Clinton went to Greece and compared austerity to life-saving chemotherapy.

As if that rhetoric was not slimy enough, she also praised the failing, cash-strapped, indebted Greek government for devoting its scarce resources to helping her bomb the hell of Libya, and also for militarily preventing a humanitarian aid flotilla from leaving port to deliver lifesaving supplies to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Even then, the Empress-in-Waiting wore three crowns: neoliberal scold and protector of Big Global Finance; staunch friend of the right-wing Israeli government and punisher of starving Palestinians; and hawk extraordinaire who never met a regime she didn't want to change or a war she didn't want to fight.

What was kind of unusual is that she would tout all three sadistic credentials in  just one short speech. In light of her and Bill's past domestic record now coming under some much-deserved scrutiny, I think it's worth taking another look at this episode in her international antics as well.

When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and Goldman Sachs load corrupt governments up with debts that they can never repay, the result is always the same. The creditors, back up by the governments who serve them, impose draconian cuts in social programs for the citizens of said country, and then allow the predators to swoop in and seize everything from water to electricity to ports to real estate to oil to precious historical artifacts and monuments.

Hillary Clinton, in a sort of job interview/debut for all those post-State lucrative, boosteristic speeches she gave at Goldman Sachs and other companies, performed perfectly to all their specifications in July 2011:

The steps ahead will not, they cannot, be pain-free, but there is a path forward to resolve Greece’s economic stability and to restore Greece’s economic strength. I have faith in the resilience of the Greek people and I applaud the Greek Government on its willingness to take these difficult steps. Greece has inspired the world before, and I have every confidence that you are doing so again. And as you (addressing her Greek foreign minister counterpart) do what you must to bring your economy back to health, you will have the full support of the United States.....

 We believe that the recent legislation (another bailout for Eurozone banks and the global investor class predicated on austerity for working people) that was passed will make Greece more competitive, will make Greece more business-friendly. We think that is essential for the kind of growth and recovery that is expected in the 21st century when businesses can go anywhere in the world and capital can follow. We think that will provide a firm financial footing on which Greece will be able increasingly to attract businesses and create the jobs that Stavros said are absolutely important for the Greek people. Because businesses seek consistent, predictable regulatory and taxation regimes. Investors seek a level playing field. They expect transparency, streamlined procedures, protection of commercial and intellectual property rights, effective contract enforcement, all of which was part of your reform package.

 Therefore, I am not here to in any way downplay the immediate challenges, because they are real, but I am here to say that we believe strongly that this will give Greece a very strong economy going forward. There are lots of analogies – having to take the strong medicine that tastes terrible when it goes down and you wish you didn’t have to, or the chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer. There are all kinds of analogies. But the bottom line is this is the best approach and we strongly support it.

If this speech sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it's because I also wrote about it last summer. But in light of her current populist message, I think her pro-business message bears repeating. Once an austerian and friend of the banks, always an austerian and friend of the banks. As much as Krugman loves to rail against Paul Ryan and the scamming Republicans as the causes of all that ails us, the GOP could never survive without Democratic complicity. The Duopoly serves identical plutocratic masters.

Unfortunately for some private investors in Clinton World, however, the betting on Greece didn't pay off particularly well. A hedge fund owned by son-in-law Marc Meszvinsky, a Goldman Sachs alum, lost a ton of dough betting on Greek debt and beaten-down bank stock. Oh well... maybe there was a hedge fund betting against the hedge fund for all we know.

  Although Krugman's main thrust in yesterday's post was how wrong it is to criticize Donald Trump solely about his protectionism, I seized upon Krugman's parochial blaming of horrible austerity policies on just the GOP: (and got plenty of pushback for my efforts; read the replies from the usual suspects if you have any time to kill.) My published New York Times response:

The Democrats might boast of being a big tent for a coalition of liberal policy wonks, but let's not forget that they, too, got caught up in the "expansionary austerity" craze not too many years ago.

Before Hillary Clinton became a born-again populist, she, too, dictated pain as a cure. And I'm not just talking about the domestic welfare "reform" of the 90s which plummeted millions of women and children into permanent poverty, or her foisting of partial blame for the housing collapse on subprime mortgagors/evictees.

As Secretary of State, Clinton also assigned blame to the victims -- not the plutocratic perpetrators -- of the entire global financial meltdown. In Greece, in 2011, she grotesquely likened austerity to "chemotherapy" which not only kills unhealthy cells but is a magical elixir which will help the body economic to grow.

 When she started running for president, she quickly changed her tune and said oh dear, what a Greek tragedy, as though it were never orchestrated by the IMF, the oligarchs, the big banks and the wonks of the rentier class.

Yes, Republicans are scary dudes, especially Cruz. But let's not limit the critique to them. There's plenty of pathology to go around. All around the world, where 80 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half combined.

(When the Syriza Party was elected on its anti-austerity platform, Clinton wasted no time pivoting from her gushing support of the deposed Papandreou government to pretending to lecture the Troika on its responsibilities to suffering Greeks. It was all part of the co-optation of that particular populist uprising while waiting for even more austerity measures to be imposed. The power players always must be perceived as having "tried." That is their passive-aggressive modus operandi. And as State Department emails reveal, their concern was geared more toward geopolitical war strategy than toward the suffering of Greek citizens. They were worried about a possible Grexit and potential collapse of the Eurozone and exodus of their fig-leaf NATO allies --  for purely profit and power-driven reasons, of course.)

Meanwhile, back in 2011, Clinton was commending Prime Minister Papandreou for helping her help the Libyan people to "secure a better future" by way of NATO-bombing the country into an anarchic band of extremist factions. This was before she uttered her bone-chilling words on the gruesome death of Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died."

And she'd concern-trolled the Papandreou's blocking of the aid flotilla (including one ship called The Audacity of Hope!) bound for Gaza by saying: "We commend the Greek Government for seeking a constructive approach in consultation with the United Nations to addressing the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza and working to avoid the risks that come with attempts to sail directly to Gaza."

Apparently those risks included about a million Palestinian families getting some desperately needed food and medicine. Too audacious for words. 

When I refer to Hillary Clinton as the Empress-in-Waiting, I am not kidding. 

When our rigged, super-delegated, brokered convention political system "elects" a president, the multinationals are indeed anointing the leader of their free world. 

Since the world is their oyster, no wonder they're clutching their pearls over an upstart named Bernie Sanders.

Hillary Clinton's Malpractice

Last week, a Michigan physician named Farid Fata was sentenced to 45 years in prison for prescribing unnecessary chemotherapy to hundreds of patients he had deliberately misdiagnosed with cancer. The motive was the usual one: pathological greed.

Four years ago this month, an American secretary of state named Hillary Clinton traveled to Greece to prescribe what she called "chemotherapy" to millions of otherwise healthy Greeks. She deliberately misdiagnosed their economic suffering at the hands of Eurozone leaders as a disease to be cured, paradoxically enough, by those same banksters and their partner in malpractice, the USA-centric International Monetary Fund. The motive for their toxic prescription of austerity was, and is, the usual one: pathological greed.

Even though Hillary Clinton's Rx has proved ultimately deadly -- both literally and figuratively -- she is living proof that the love of finance capital means never having to say you're sorry. Hillary, of course, isn't going to jail, or even being scorned by the Establishment for proclaiming that austerity is good medicine which fosters fiscal growth and healing. She is running for president. And she has a good chance of winning office, thanks to voter apathy and unlimited bankster money, and the GOP opposition being even more pathological than she is.

Her good friend Donald Trump has already served his own usefully idiotic purpose: that of being so vile that the other vile Republicans in the race are beginning to look vaguely, miraculously human. Hillary must run against someone who appears vaguely human -- otherwise, people might notice that this so-called democracy of ours is a big fat sham. 

The reason that I'm bringing up Hillary Clinton's relatively recent visit to Athens in July 2011 is because of the frenzied "apology war" currently being waged on her behalf by the usual liberal suspects and proxies. They're claiming that the 90s years of Clintonian right-wing neoliberism are so far in the distant past that it is patently unfair to blame her for the tragedies that her husband's malpractice (Wall Street deregulation, his criminalization of poverty via welfare "reform", his embrace of globalization/NAFTA) have spawned in the interim. Now that she is verbally repudiating "Third Way" centrism in her stump speeches, we are supposed to believe that she has evolved into the progressive she has always wanted to be. The ultimate proof of her good intentions, supposedly, is in The Speech she gave last week, vaguely and feebly echoing Elizabeth Warren's populism. (see my previous post, The Extreme Centrism of HC.)

But four years ago -- seems like only yesterday because essentially, it was  -- Hillary Clinton, like a reanimated Maggie Thatcher, was lecturing the world on the therapeutic benefits of free market unregulated capitalism and the necessity of punishing "ordinary" people with toxic chemo. She promised the austerity cure, yet the disease of wealth inequality spread.

It gets even worse. When Hillary Clinton traveled to Athens only four years ago this month, she also congratulated the unpopular Greek government for preventing a ship called The Audacity of Hope from joining the humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza, then under cruel lock-down by the Israeli government. As people demonstrated in the streets against neoliberalism, she congratulated the unpopular Greek government for joining her misbegotten air war on Libya, even as the Troika's imposition of economic martial law on ordinary citizens sent them reeling. Belt-tightening orders from non-elected banksters did not prevent NATO (aka the American War-for-Profit Industry) from ordering Greece to use its American-made weaponry get involved in Hillary's war on Libya while Greek citizens were going without food and medicine.

Bill Clinton felt your pain. Hillary Clinton, just four short years ago, wanted the pain to be felt -- with a vengeance. From her July 2011 press con with former Foreign Minister Stavros Lambrinidis:

The steps ahead will not, they cannot, be pain-free, but there is a path forward to resolve Greece’s economic stability and to restore Greece’s economic strength. I have faith in the resilience of the Greek people and I applaud the Greek Government on its willingness to take these difficult steps. Greece has inspired the world before, and I have every confidence that you are doing so again. And as you (addressing her Greek foreign minister counterpart) do what you must to bring your economy back to health, you will have the full support of the United States.....

 We believe that the recent legislation (another bailout for Eurozone banks and the global investor class predicated on austerity for working people) that was passed will make Greece more competitive, will make Greece more business-friendly. We think that is essential for the kind of growth and recovery that is expected in the 21st century when businesses can go anywhere in the world and capital can follow. We think that will provide a firm financial footing on which Greece will be able increasingly to attract businesses and create the jobs that Stavros said are absolutely important for the Greek people. Because businesses seek consistent, predictable regulatory and taxation regimes. Investors seek a level playing field. They expect transparency, streamlined procedures, protection of commercial and intellectual property rights, effective contract enforcement, all of which was part of your reform package.

Therefore, I am not here to in any way downplay the immediate challenges, because they are real, but I am here to say that we believe strongly that this will give Greece a very strong economy going forward. There are lots of analogies – having to take the strong medicine that tastes terrible when it goes down and you wish you didn’t have to, or the chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer. There are all kinds of analogies. But the bottom line is this is the best approach and we strongly support it.

"Hmm... I wonder if our chemo line will fit in that bottom?"

How is the Neoliberal Project which Hill and Bill helped rev up into overdrive back in the roaring 90s any less evil than the sadistic project of the gruesome Michigan cancer doc? Farid Fata left his patients suffering from brittle bones and fried organs...  and in some cases, he literally killed them. The neoliberal chemo inflicted by Hillary Clinton and her cohort has left Greece with an unemployment rate worse than that of the Great Depression, an increase in suicides and premature deaths due to lack of proper medication, and the transformation of a sovereign nation into a colonial client state run by an organized crime cabal of bankers and technocrats. 

Where's the justice?

Not only is Hillary able to transform herself into a progressive heroine with the help of the fawning corporate media owned by the same oligarchs that own her, but her family's slush fund charity actually continues to accept money from a couple of Greece's (and the world's) richest oligarchs. They are shipping and steel magnate (and UBS banking official) Theodore Angelopoulis and his lovely wife Gianna, Greece's "ambassador at large." 

The Theodopoulis' Super-yacht Okto

 
Like Hillary, Gianna "evolved," once having served as a right-wing member of Parliament, but now purporting to be a born-again afficionada of the Syriza political establishment. Gianna had been hoping to host the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) for its annual confab in Athens this spring, but the event was cancelled out of concern for Hillary's election chances.

These people are not stupid. They know they're flim-flam artists who need to hide their fraud during campaign season. They know full well that austerity is not a growth industry for anyone but the plutocrats.

Gianna recently ran a contest through the CGI for suffering Greek youth. Among the "entrepreneurial" winning entries were a website curating freebies for unemployed young people, and a scheme for delivering discarded restaurant food to the hungry. While apparently not espousing the idea that Greek oligarchs actually pay their back taxes out of their bloated offshore bank accounts, or that her family bail out Greek working people, Gianna has donated millions to the Clintons themselves. She has a website called, appropriately enough, My Greek Drama. (And not to be outdone is a site devoted to her hubby's yachts.)  Rumor has it that she would like to run for president of Greece someday, under a new Clinton-inspired party called the Democratic Party.

Go figure.

Random Thoughts on Greece

The truth is finally out there: the German hegemon is a Frankenstein monster sewn together with the body parts of every Batman and James Bond villain ever dreamed up by a Hollywood nightmare factory.  Now that Angela Merkel and her henchman Wolfgang Schauble have turned Greece into a German colony, with global hedge funds and too-big-to fail banks its de facto occupying force, will this tiny country now be officially known as Griechenland? Will the Acropolis be transformed into the latest Goldman Sachs bank branch?

The Neoliberal Monster: Die Slowly or Die Quickly, Just Surrender Already

Puppetized Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is either being hailed as a steely pragmatic operator, pitied as a pathetic beaten dog, or damned as a rich phony who brought a latte to a knife fight.

The New York Times is certainly confused. Juxtaposed with a stunning front-page photo of a starving woman collapsed on the street is a Panglossian, even cheery, article about Greeks sipping their lattes and waxing rueful-to-hopeful:

Jubilation, almost immediately followed by wariness, filled the streets as Greeks learned of the agreement in Brussels early Monday.

Many people were having their midmorning cafe frappé, while others were standing in the ubiquitous bank lines, as the news spread that after a week of agony — a tense referendum, sparring political rallies, bank closings — and a weekend of all-nighters in the Greek Parliament and among the eurozone leaders, a deal to address the country’s debt crisis and keep it in the eurozone had been reached.

(Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press)

 Wait till they find out that they can't use their dwindling Euros to make online purchases any more, and the wariness will escalate faster than they can order a double latte or collapse on the street from illness or hunger. Will Starbucks establish a concession next door to the Goldman Sachs Acropolis? Will American fast food multinationals start a greedwashing campaign urging euro-an-hour baristas to tell customers to embrace the multicultural suck as they help drive locally-owned tavernas out of business?

 This is a nation in numbed shock. Is it proper even to call it a nation any more?  It's sort of a hybrid between a failed state and ripe, paralyzed prey for Romneyesque vulture capitalists. Think of Greece as a Staples chain with a lot of soon-to-be privatized beaches for the pleasure of the oligarchs.

Given that the marathon negotiating session leading to the deal has been likened to a mental waterboarding of Tsipras, I wonder if the corrupt American Psychological Association was brought in as an enhanced sadism technical adviser. You really have to hand it to Tsipras, though: he exhibited no outward, physical signs of cracking as he capitulated to the demands of the global oligarchy. 

Meanwhile, more people are starting to talk about the Goldman Sachs connection. MoveOn, that erstwhile smarmy veal pen for Democrats, is even starting an ad campaign lambasting Wall Street's role in the manufactured Greek crisis. Robert Reich writes,

People seem to forget that the Greek debt crisis—which is becoming a European and even possibly a world economic crisis—grew out of a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein.

Several years ago, Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt—and in the process almost doubled it. When the first debt deal was struck in 2001, Greece owed about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it had borrowed. Goldman then cooked up an off-the-books derivative for Greece that disguised the shortfall but increased the government’s losses to 5.1 billion euros.

Reich didn't mention that Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, a Goldman alum, is in the cabal of hedge fund predators which stands to profit from the most recent bailout (of creditors and investors, not ordinary Greek citizens.) He didn't mention that Hillary Clinton has collected huge speaking fees from Goldman or that her family's slush fund charity has humanized Blankfein as an honored "thought leader."

Hillary was slated to deliver her own populist economic manifesto today, albeit with little to no mention of either Wall Street or the economic coup against Greece. I'll write more about her verbiage later.

Lloyd and Hillary Share a Tender Cackle

Links/Open Thread

Wall Street Powers Higher on Greece Hopes: because The Market is a sadist.

Greek crisis worse than the Great Depression: Plutocrats of the World, unite!

Tsipras Just Destroyed Greece: It seems that the popular referendum against neoliberalism was just a head fake, and that the Syriza leader never really expected hoi polloi to reject austerity. Perhaps the lefties over at the World Socialist Website were right about Tsipras being an Obama clone all along. I hear tell that the Masters of the Universe might even give him a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes, using the leftover confetti from today's World Cup festivities. Only kidding, of course. But at the very least, he can probably expect a commiserating congratulatory phone call from Obama, whose own bank-protecting economic policies he says he greatly admires. If, that is, the Troika doesn't pull a fast one and reject an austerity offer even better than the last one. The lunatics have definitely taken over the capitalistic asylum.

I nominate the people of Greece for the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite their own hardships they are welcoming refugees with open arms, feeding and clothing them and sharing their dwindling medical supplies. Over here in the USA, meanwhile, the corporate media give Donald Trump unlimited air time to vomit out his xenophobia, while the Obama administration has quietly imprisoned Central American women and children in privatized border internment camps. As Hillary Clinton has so hawkishly proclaimed, we have "to send them a message" that this land is not their land.

Down with the Confederate Flag, that odious symbol of racial oppression and slavery.

But, up with actual slavery: President Obama plans to deny the existence of human trafficking in Malaysia in order to grease the skids for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As long as slave-owners promise to tone it down a tad, maybe even abolish it by the next century, Obama can live with it. I somehow doubt that Michelle Obama will be holding up another one of her "Bring Back Our Girls" signs in solidarity with the kidnapped victims being smuggled through Malaysia. The Market could not bear it.

If the ruling class can declare victory over racism by simply taking down a flag, how easy it then becomes to declare victory over slavery the wide world over by a simple stroke of the pen. Orwellian possibilities for blanket deniability in the name of profits for The Market are legion, and they are endless. 

As Pope Francis saliently observes, unbridled capitalism is "the dung of the devil."

And he also took a swipe at Obama's "free trade" deals and the finance cartel's assault on the Greek people while he was at it:

The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers
and the poor," he said.

Oxi To Austerity

That's Greek for the unmistakable overwhelming No to the banking cartel currently trampling all over democracy, all over the world, one nasty grind of the hyper-capitalistic heel at a time.

 The Greeks not only stood up for themselves, they just did the whole rest of the world a giant favor, too. They exercised some good, old-fashioned, bottom-up democracy. They spoke out against a group of very powerful, very sadistic people who thought that they could exercise their will through the instillation of fear and mass suffering. The pluto-sadists still do think that, but at least they've been rendered a little more uncomfortable as they bask in their pathology.

The victorious Greek referendum makes me wish that we had a parliamentary system of government right here in the Birthplace of Freedom for the Propertied Classes. How awesome it would be, for example, if the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its evil offshoots were subject to a popular referendum instead of a quickie  ratification by a corrupt Congress! How democratically old-fashioned if we could all vote "no confidence" the next time the clowns manufacture their own debt crisis as an excuse to cut food stamps and unemployment insurance! Those aristocratic Founding Fathers that some of us celebrated yesterday knew exactly what they were doing when they invented "representative" democracy.

It's still too early to tell if democracy will prevail in Greece, the birthplace of true, bottom-up democracy. After all, remember when some naifs were silly enough to predict that such corrupt regimes as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup had gasped their greedy last back in 2008 when they were caught red-handed, wrecking the global economy?

 And then, spitting in the face of all that is decent and moral and humane, these same entities and their various subsidiaries were allowed to rise up again, bigger and more gruesomely powerful than ever before? 

Never satiated, the hedge fund operators, the private equity moguls, the too big to fail banks, the oligarchs, the rentier and investor class of billionaires --  are on a rampage, bleeding their victims dry before grinding them into pulp.

The financial terrorism now being practiced on Greece is nothing new. It got its start decades ago with the "Washington Consensus" method of plundering Latin American countries under the guise of "aid" provided by the International Monetary Fund (part of the troika imposing austerity on Greece). In exchange for loans to strapped or corrupt governments, the banksters  demanded and got "fiscal discipline" to curb budget deficits; a reduction in public expenditures; deregulation of the finance sector and the economy, with interest rates determined by "the market"; trade deals that favored American multinationals over local companies and sovereign governments; promotion of direct foreign "investment" with an ironclad guarantee of property rights for corporations.

This Washington Consensus (thought to have been discredited when Argentina told it to eff off) has been duly exported to the rest of the world, which of course now also includes such Wall Street-devastated All-American cities as Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore. Can you imagine if there were a Greek-style referendum in which people could just say "Oxi" to school closings and water privatization?

Legend has it that vampires die when they're exposed to the light. Dracula Neoliberalus has become so monstrous and so strong that it probably will require multiple exposures to light (and a banshee wail of populist outrage) before finally crumbling.

It needs multiple stakes of truth through its corrupt heart. It's become so used to getting its own way, sucking up bailouts and corporate welfare with such bloodthirsty abandon that it thinks it is invincible. And it very well might be.

So there is much work to be done. The first task is to debunk the propaganda which dictates that the world is one vast open-air marketplace devoid of national legislatures and judiciaries and governments for the greater good of all. Trickle-down prosperity is a lie that won't easily die. Repeat early, repeat often: the production and sale of goods is not the heart of civilization. People are.

Rather than pursuing the public good, neoliberalism employs technocrats (the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, etc.) who treat individual governments as businesses ripe for the plucking.  They treat people as consumer-workers who must pay the price whenever the bankers and the bosses (whose greed has made them terminally stupid) make their inevitable bad deals and bad choices.

Engaged, caring citizens are anathema to Neoliberalism. We must refuse the directive to become "entrepreneurs" acting in our own self-interest, clawing our individual ways up ladders of opportunity.

The banksters running the world have three distinct Washington Consensus-spawned policies that perpetuate their reign of error and terror: deregulation, corporatization via "free trade," and privatization of public goods and services. Social safety nets are slashed in favor of welfare-to-work schemes paying subsistence wages. Interest rates are kept artificially low to keep the non-existent inflation "bogeyman" in check. Offshore tax havens sheltering trillions of dollars in hoarded wealth are set up. All of this is done with the cooperation of "think tanks" and a media-political conglomerate that broadcasts the neoliberal agenda in forms designed to alternately tease, appease and enrage a victimized, exhausted public. (Things will get better someday.... but here's some health insurance for a lucky few to "consume".... we must close our borders to "those" people, but not ever to profits....  meanwhile,watch TV,  make friends on Facebook, drink, take brand-name prescription drugs at a 1000% markup.)

The Greeks said Oxi. Not only do they deserve debt relief, we owe them a huge debt of our gratitude. 

Democracy is catching on. Plutocracy is trembling in Dracula's Castle.

Here, for example, is what happened at a Brussels conference promoting the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: