The stench of political hypocrisy…
Hillary Clinton, Democratic candidate for President.
The contradictions and outright hypocrisy permeating contemporary politics are staggering. Hillary Clinton, for example, is the antithesis of what progressives stand for, yet so-called “progressives” are supporting her. And the Republican candidates are fawning over the evangelicals, and vice versa, who promote policies totally antithetical to Jesus Christ’s teachings.
Clinton: All rape victims should be believed, except…
Clinton recently said that “all rape victims should be believed.” But in the 1990s, when several women accused Bill Clinton of accosting them sexually, Hillary Clinton directed the shaming campaign against the accusers, who were referred to as the “Bimbo eruptions.” Today Clinton, via her surrogates, is still shaming young women in crassly sexist and harsh terms. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem maintains that young women are supporting Bernie Sanders only because that’s “where the boys are.” Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright excoriated young women who support Sanders, telling them that there is “a special place in hell” for women who don’t support Clinton.
Clinton: Women don’t deserve $15 per hour wage
Clinton’s opposition to raising the minimum wage to $15 is anti-women. UC Berkeley economics professor Dr. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton (Economix, March 7, 2014), reports that:
Women are the biggest demographic group among minimum wage workers and account for 75 percent of workers in the 10 lowest-paid occupations and about 60 percent of minimum-wage workers. About three-quarters of female minimum wage workers are above the age of 20, and about three-quarters of these women are on their own. Many are taking care of children.
Clinton makes anti-women policies for Wal-Mart
One of the worst employers with respect to worker wages and treatment of workers is Wal-Mart. Women make up 57% of Wal-Mart’s U.S. workforce, most in low-paying positions. Wal-Mart spent millions lobbying the federal government in opposition to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, paycheck fairness, and paid sick leave, and the Wal-Mart PAC disproportionately supports anti-women politicians. And in Wal-Mart supplier factories around the world, women workers face discriminatory treatment and work in virtual-slavery sweatshops (makingchangeatWal-Mart.org/womens-issues, May, 2013).
These anti-women policies are formulated and imposed by the Wal-Mart Board of Directors. Hillary Clinton served as a compensated member of the Wal-Mart Board of Directors from 1986 to 1992. In gratitude for her long service to Wal-Mart and its policies, just this week, Clinton was endorsed by a Wal-Mart lobbyist.
Yet, feminists who purport to advocate for women support Clinton?
Clinton: Join a union and “You’re fired!”
Wal-Mart is militantly anti-union. Wal-Mart fires employees who even utter the word “union” or speak to a union representative and spends millions to oppose the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, paycheck fairness, and paid sick leave, all of which are union staples.
As a member of the Wal-Mart Board of Directors, Hillary Clinton was paid handsomely to formulate Wal-Mart’s union-busting and other anti-union policies.
Clinton’s anti-unionism doesn’t stop with her service to Wal-Mart. The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promoted by Bill and Hillary Clinton was and is a workers’ and unions’ nightmare, as is the contemporary incarnation of NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Robert E. Scott, in just the first 10 years after NAFTA was implemented, it caused the loss of 879,280 U.S. jobs, most of which were high-wage manufacturing union jobs. Scott reports that NAFTA is a major contributor to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers’ collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions. (“The high price of ‘free’ trade: NAFTA’s failure has cost the United States jobs across the nation,” Economic Policy Institute, November17, 2003) The TPP will do the same, yet Hillary Clinton supported the TPP, calling it “…the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade.” (Lauren Carroll ,“What Hillary Clinton really said about TPP and the ‘gold standard’,” PolitiFact, October 13, 2015) Just recently and only for political purposes did Clinton lamely say she opposes the anti-worker, anti-union TPP.
Yet, unionists who purport to advocate for workers support Clinton?
Clinton owns the black and Latino vote?
President Clinton passed welfare reform legislation that impacted single mothers.
The pundits and TV talking heads repeat, like a religious mantra, Clinton’s claims of owning the black and Latino vote. The fact is that Bill Clinton, with the full support and help of Hillary Clinton, savaged inner-city blacks—and particularly single mothers—when they joined hands with the Republican right wing to pass the welfare reform legislation that was Clinton’s domestic hallmark. That legislation was based on Ronald Reagan’s racist stereotype of the black “welfare queens” who ostensibly used their welfare checks to purchase Cadillacs and other luxuries.
Unlike Clinton, Bernie Sanders has been consistent over decades in standing for civil rights and stood for civil rights when it took courage. Compare the Then and Now:
THEN: In the 1960s, while Bernie Sanders was organizing resistance to housing segregation and other civil-rights violations in Chicago and marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., Hillary Clinton was working to elect Republican Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Voting Rights Act and other civil-rights legislation. NOW: Three contemporary civil-rights issues highlight the huge differences between Sanders and Clinton: racially discriminatory incarceration rates; “redlining” by financial institutions, and Central American refugee children.
Per the NAACP: Racial Disparities in Incarceration
It is well documented that mass incarceration policies—initiated in great part by President Clinton, with the full support of Hillary Clinton—have resulted in the incarceration of African Americans at a much higher rate than any other group. In fact, NAACP reports that African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. This discrimination also applies to Latinos, per the NAACP: African Americans and Latinos comprise 58% of all prisoners, even though African Americans and Latinos make up approximately one quarter of the U.S. population. (NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet. 2009-2016)
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is heavily funded by for profit prison enterprises.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is heavily funded—to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars—by for-profit prisons. The fuller the prisons, the more money they make. As I write this, a lobbyist for for-profit prison Corrections Corporation of America endorsed Clinton (CCA has contributed $133,000 to Clinton’s campaign). Sanders has never taken money from the prison lobby, and has introduced legislation to end the “private, for-profit prison racket.” His position is simple: “Criminal justice and public safety … should be carried out by those who answer to voters, not those who answer to investors.”
The racist practice of Redlining…
Redlining is the practice of denying services such as home and other loans by banks and mortgage companies to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. In essence, redlining amounts to economic racism. While redlining practices affect Latino and other minority communities, they fall most heavily on the African American community.
The Wall Street bankers and other financial vultures who have contributed millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton (both to her campaign and to her personally through speaking fees), and against whom the NAACP has filed several lawsuits, are the engineers of the racist practice of redlining.
Not surprisingly, Clinton was recently endorsed by lobbyists for Purdue Pharma, who makes the highly addictive opioid OxyContin, for Navient, the student-loan firm, and for Big Tobacco giants Lorillard Tobacco and Philip Morris–all cousins of the Wall Street vultures who prey on minority families.
“Send them back!”
Hillary Clinton said of Central American refugee children, “Send them back.”
When Central American children fleeing violence and starvation arrived at our border, armed members of KKK-affiliated groups and their allies surrounded the buses carrying the children, shouting “Send them back!” In a CNN interview (June 17, 2014) Hillary Clinton, when asked what we should do about these children, categorically said “Send them back … We have to send a clear message. Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.” Clinton’s position is no different than that of Mexican haters Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, not to mention the KKK-affiliated groups.
In contrast, Bernie Sanders said of the Central American refugees: “We cannot turn our backs on that essential element of who we are as a nation. We need to take steps to protect children and families seeking refuge here, not cast them out.” (“Bernie Sanders: Central American refugees should not be ‘cast out’,” Washington Post, December 24, 2015)
In light of the above, then, blacks and Latinos should flock to Hillary Clinton and vote for her?
“I like your Christ (but) your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Taking their name from the Greek term for “the good news” or the “gospel,” “evangelicals” focus on the “good news” of salvation, love, and peace enunciated by Jesus Christ, whose teaching are delineated in the New Testament Gospels. The Republican presidential candidates try to out-Christian each other as they pander to the so-called evangelicals, who hold the Republican Party hostage with a platform of hate—of gays, of women who insist on controlling their own bodies, of Mexicans and other immigrants.
Seems to me that if the right-wing zealots were serious about practicing the principles promulgated by the Jesus they purport to worship, they would promote—rather than demonize and work against—legislation and policies that feed the hungry…support workers and their families…welcome the stranger and the unwanted child…care for the ill, and other truly Christian precepts.
The evangelicals’ Jesus consorted with and advocated for the commoners, the poor, the abused and downtrodden. He didn’t traffic with the Wall Street crowd of his time. Calling them “robbers” and thieves,” Jesus threw the money changers who took advantage of the poor by charging usurious interest rates out of the temple, whereas today’s so-called evangelicals and the Republicans who pander to them cozy up to the bankers and others who make billions off the
Ted Cruz is reaching out to evangelicals.
backs of the poor and the working class.
The indisputable truth is that Jesus Christ was a liberal (or in today’s term, a progressive) who took on the conservative social establishment of his time.
Jesus is known as the “Prince of Peace.” Yet, evangelicals overwhelmingly support Ted Cruz, who advocates indiscriminate “carpet bombing” in the Middle East. As Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland noted in the New York Times, “carpet bombing” is a war crime because it indiscriminately kills civilians. (Elizabeth Williamson, “Ted Cruz Doubles Down on Carpet Bombing,” New York Times, February 6, 2016)
Mohandas Gandhi could have been talking about today’s evangelicals and their Republican friends when he said: “I like your Christ (but) your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Establishment attacks the youth…just as they attacked us…
Voters under 30 years of age favor Bernie Sanders.
Clinton’s strongest support is coming from the 65-plus group—they favored Clinton in New Hampshire by 63-36 percent. Voters under 30 favored Sanders by 79-19 percent. As evidenced by the comments made by Steinem and Albright cited above, the Establishment oldsters are demonizing the youth of today exactly as the Establishment of our day—in the 1960s-1970s—demonized us. And for the same reason: today’s youth are standing up to the Establishment just as we did.
Sadly, many of those anti-establishment idealists have been co-opted and are now themselves the Establishment. In spite of the vicious, unprincipled, and maybe even illegal, attacks the Establishment visited upon us, we won. We fundamentally changed the political landscape of the country. I have no doubt today’s youth will also survive the Establishment’s onslaught. They too will change the country’s political landscape. The question is: whose side will we be on? c/s
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