Great news from across the Pond. According to today’s I for Thursday, 11th April 2019, the left-wing Democrat senator, Bernie Sanders, has launched his ‘medicare for all’ scheme to replace America’s current insurance-driven healthcare system with one in which the American state would pay people’s medical fees. The I’s report, ‘Sanders launches ‘healthcare for all’ plan, on page 25 runs
The US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders revealed his “Medicare for All” plan yesterday, shaking up the 2020 election by reopening the debate over his call to eliminate private health insurance.
Four of the senators who are rivalling Mr Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination are set to sign on to the updated single-payer healthcare proposal. The bill’s reintroduction promises to shine a light on Democratic presidential candidates’ disparate visions for the long-term future of American healthcare.
Some Democratic contenders, including former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, have criticized Sanders’ measure, which they say is political infeasible.
Under Medicare for All, Americans would no longer pay premiums or face insurance deductibles as the government-run system replaced private health insurance offered through employers.
This really is what America needs. Badly. Something like 20 per cent of all Americans can’t afford medical insurance, and, according to the statistics cited by Sanders in his book, Our Revolution, every year 40,000 Americans die because they can’t afford medical treatment. In some parts of the US, people are hoarding medicine because they have difficult affording it, and even use medicines prescribed by vets for animals. They’re even heading over the border to Mexico for dental treatment because it’s much, much cheaper over there. And medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the Land of the Free. The progressive American Left have been wondering for a long time why it is that the other nations of the Developed World can afford universal healthcare, but American can’t.
Opposing him, naturally, is the American private healthcare industry, the Republicans, and the Corporate, Clintonite Democrats. I think Hillary Clinton said several times that the country couldn’t afford state medicine, parroting the ideas of the Republicans. And if she didn’t say, her daughter, Chelsea, certainly did. And over here, the Tories and Blairite Labour, as well as the ‘Centrist’ Change UK, also want to privatise the NHS. Blair’s health secretary, Alan Milburn, wanted to see the NHS reduced to a kitemark on services provided by private healthcare providers. I don’t think Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize the American healthcare system. He just wants the state to pay for its citizens’ healthcare, as Germany has done for its people since Bismarck’s ‘Socialist Law’ of 1871 or so. And one of the reasons that there has been such opposition in British politics to Jeremy Corbyn is because he has promised to renationalize the NHS. Corbyn’s policies are massively popular, which is why the Right, both within and outside the Labour Party, has been reduced to smearing him as a Communist, or a supporter of Irish Republican terrorism – as we’ve seen from the Tories, the Right considers Loyalist terrorists perfectly acceptable – and now a raging anti-Semite, despite the plentiful evidence to the contrary.
The NHS is being destroyed before us, and if this continues, we will reach a situation like America, where it’s increasingly unaffordable to all but the very affluent. We need Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10 in Britain, and Bernie Sanders over in America. A transatlantic partnership that would roll back the horrors of neoliberalism, and start giving working people in both countries the healthcare they need and deserve.
Mike put up a piece today commenting on the Torygraph’s praise of Roseanne Barr, just as she got her show cancelled for racist tweets about one of Barack Obama’s presidential staff. Barr had described Valerie Jarrett as ‘the Muslim Brotherhood + Planet of the Apes had a baby’. She later apologised for the tweet, but it was too late. The damage had been done, and her show was cancelled.
The Torygraph, however, had issued its own Tweet, stating that Roseanne’s huge ratings showed the bad need for a Tory sitcom in Britain. Mike drew the obvious comparison between the star’s own racism, and that of the Conservative party, shown in its ‘hostile environment’ policy, which has seen 60 + Windrush Brits deported unjustly, their inaction over the Grenfell Tower fire, which seems to many to have a racial aspect, and the suspension of a large number of Tory candidates for racism in the weeks leading up to the council elections.
Mike concluded his article with the words:
So the Telegraph was right to compare Roseanne with the Conservatives – just not in the way the writer had imagined. As for it being a sit-com…
Like Ms Barr’s behaviour, some of us don’t think racism is funny.
In fact, there are several more things that need to be said about this incident, and not just further discussion of Barr’s own bizarre antics and insults to other celebrities and political figures. It also shows the Tory attitude towards television, and the responsibility of the British press for starting rumours about Jarrett in the first place. The Young Turks did a piece on the scandal, and reported that Barr’s comments about Jarrett linking her to the Muslim Brotherhood come from a right-wing conspiracy theory. These emerged on right-wing blogs during Obama’s presidency, and claim that she was secretly working to promote Islam in the US, and wanted it to become ‘a more Islamic country’.
And they’re completely untrue. Jarrett isn’t even a Muslim. And the ultimate source for these stupid rumours, according to Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, was ‘a British tabloid’. Well, I wonder which one that could be. Actually, at one time I would have guessed it was the Sun, but after all the right-wing newspapers libelled Mike as an anti-Semite, it could be anyone of them, including the Heil and Express.
Uygur and Kasparian go on to discuss some of the other insulting and false tweets Barr has made in the past, as well as her rapid changes of political orientation from one extreme to the other. She also made one Tweet, directed at Chelsea Clinton, which said that George Soros had sold out his fellow Jews to the Nazis and stolen their money. This is completely untrue. In fact, it’s the very opposite of Soros’ own attitude. The billionaire financier is of Hungarian ancestry, and he hates Zionism and Israel because Kasztner, the leader of the Zionists in wartime Hungary, did allow the Nazis to deport tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps because he hoped that the Nazis would allow others to emigrate to Israel. Barr also posted another tweet saying that another woman, Susan Rice, had ‘great swinging ape balls’.
Last year, Barr’s politics were extremely left-wing. At the elections she put herself up as a Green party candidate, and appeared on The Young Turks, saying that existing American politics weren’t nearly left-wing enough, and there was a need for a new left-wing party. Now she appears to have swung completely round through 180 degrees, and is a fan of Trump. At one time, she was a supporter of the Palestinians, before turning to support Israel. She’s also made some very anti-Semitic comments herself, despite also being Jewish. And she also once dressed up a Hitler to bake cakes showing people going into gas ovens. Uygur says that he doesn’t know whether that was right-wing, left-wing or what. I honestly don’t know either, except that it’s massively tasteless and offensive.
The two suggest that Barr’s weird behaviour can be explained by her having been in a severe car accident when she was 16, which so traumatised her that she spent several months in a mental hospital. If that is the cause of her strange rants and zigzagging across the political spectrum, then she’s mentally unbalanced and needs help.
But she’s been very strange for a long time. Way back in the 1990s, one of the Ab Fab team – Joanna Lumley or Jennifer Saunders, if I remember correctly – described working with her in America. According to whichever British star it was, Barr herself never acted in rehearsals. She was pushed around everywhere in a wheelchair, and watched while another actress went through her lines, until it was time for her to act on camera.
As for the Telegraph claiming that Britain needs a Tory sitcom, this seems to be linked to the Conservative press’ attitude that television is dominated by the Left. The Daily Mail in particular has published any number of articles claiming that this is the case. It’s all part of their tactic of working up rage over a non-existent issue in order to boost the Tory party and attack the Labour party and the broader Left. And I think they’ve been fans of Roseanne and other American comedy shows for some time, because of their Conservative, anti-welfare bias. I can remember when Bread, about a family where most of the characters were on the dole, was on British TV in the 1980s. It was very popular, and the Mail and Express hated it because it was about unemployed people content to be supported by the state. They praised instead American sitcoms, which saw unemployment and surviving on state benefit as a mark of shame.
I don’t think there is an anti-Tory bias in British television comedy. It either really does try to be impartial, or there’s actually a pro-Tory bias. One of the two responsible for Dad’s Army, Perry and Croft, for example, wrote a piece in the Radio Times attacking the miners during the Miners’ Strike for their hostile treatment of strike breakers. Which shows their personal political bias, even if it doesn’t say anything about that of the shows they wrote for.
The Torygraph seemed to believe that a Conservative sitcom would be popular, but that’s simply a matter of speculation. It’s not actually clear whether such a show would work in the slightly different political culture on this side of the Atlantic. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. The Torygraph isn’t interested in quality, popular programming so much as increasing the already considerable pro-Tory bias of the British media. And they haven’t yet understood that the reason why people are turning to alternative sources, is because people are increasingly fed up with that same Tory bias.
Roseanne Barr might have had a hit show on American TV, but she was clearly a deeply troubled woman with very unpleasant, racist opinions. Which don’t make her a model for anyone’s comedy, except for racists like those in the Tories.
This came to me the other night, after I’d already posted one rant about Killary. But even if it’s a bit too much coming after the earlier posts, I still think it’s a valid point worth making.
Killary was going around the world last month trying to flog her book, What Happened?, in which she tried to blame everyone else for losing the election to the orange racist. It was all the fault of RT and Putin, WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, misogynist men and ‘treacherous’ women. And not because she herself was a greedy, corporatist warmonger, determined to keep Americans poor and deny them a proper welfare state, with free healthcare, because she’s in the pocket of Wall Street and the other big corporations. Nope. It had nothing to do with any of that.
Killary was Obama’s Secretary of State when he sent the bombers in to level Libya and aid the Islamist rebels in overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, no question – but under him the country was free from foreign domination. It was the most prosperous country in Africa, and its people had the benefit of free healthcare and free education. And while Gaddafi had no qualms against using the Islamists to assassinate his rivals in Africa and the Arab world, he kept them on a very short leash. They could not try to spread their warped vision of Islam in Libya, and attempts by them to interfere in Libyan politics were very definitely not tolerated. Gaddafi’s own ideology was a mixture of Arab socialism and Islam, but it was in many respects a modern, secular state where women enjoyed a greater degree of freedom and equality than elsewhere in the Islamic world.
All that was destroyed when the Islamists took over. There are now at least two parliaments in the country, which is split by civil war. And this week I’ve posted several stories about the revelation that the Islamists have been holding auctions of Black African migrants as slaves. When they haven’t massacred them, along with other Black Libyans. Whole Black towns have been massacred. One of these was Tawergha, which had 40,000 people.
But when Gaddafi was overthrown, Killary was giggling about it. ‘Yeah, we got him!’ she enthused. There are photos of her with the Islamists holding up a sword with one of them. That’ll come back to haunt America, just as the Islamists Reagan and Thatcher proudly promoted as our friends in the fight against the evil Soviet Empire morphed into al-Qaeda, and launched 9/11. The Islamists aren’t our friends, and are the enemies of every civilised person on this planet – non-Muslim and Muslim.
It also helps put the lie to the image Killary was trying to promote twenty or so years ago as a modern, non-racist woman fully comfortable with American multiculturalism. Back when her husband was doing his best to run the country according to the principles of Ronald Reagan, rather than FDR, she wrote her own book outlining her political philosophy.
It was called It Takes A Village, and was her attempt to present herself as a font of folksy wisdom. At the centre of the book was her daughter, Chelsea, and the book was about how she and Bill cared for her, and how they intended to give her nice, positive, left-ish values. It supposedly took its title from an African proverb: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, thus showing the Clinton’s collectivism and commitment to benefiting everyone. It was also, you may bet, given the title to show how anti-racist she was, how pro-Black and fully integrated into the global village Marshal McLuhan used to bang on about. Never mind the fact that Africans and western experts in African cultures have never heard of the proverb. You can imagine Hillary thinking how this would present her as the embodiment of Black ‘earth mother’ wisdom, like some of the images of the strong mothers in the projects, trying to raise their kids well in spite of grinding poverty, absent fathers and the looming threat of gang culture and violence. No doubt she also saw with the title an opportunity to get on one of the shows presented by Black female celebrities. You know, like Oprah Winfrey. Or perhaps an appearance with Whoopie Goldberg. I’m not sneering at either of these two celebs. They’re great presenters and performers, who’ve given a lot of people a lot of pleasure. The only person I’m sneering at here is Hillary. Because it looks opportunistic and very cynically calculated.
Private Eye more or less said so at the time when they reviewed the book. And I think they’re right. Hillary started her career as a ‘Goldwater Girl’, supporting the pro-Segregation candidate Barry Goldwater. In the 1990s she talked about the threat of ‘super-predators’ at the time when it was almost solely used to describe young Black men. She also framed the drugs legislation that resulted in a massively disproportionate number of Black men going to the slammer for drugs.
And now there’s the revelation that the Islamists she backed have been murdering and enslaving Blacks. And that CNN knew about it all three years ago, but kept silent, because they’re reporters were embedded with the same terrorist groups.
Which raises the question: did Hillary know? It’s hard to believe that, as Secretary of State, she didn’t. Or if she didn’t, she dam’ well should have known. She was in charge of giving them support. She would – or at least should – have been briefed about what these characters are like. It wouldn’t have been hard. There are a fair number of scholars of Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who could have told her exactly what they were like, as well as ulema – Muslim clergy – who could have told her how the Islamists violate the precepts of their religion.
But clearly, she didn’t want to know. All she cared about was getting Gaddafi out. This was because he’d defied the American Empire, and was going to jettison the petrodollar for the Gold Dinar. America wouldn’t be able to use the profits from the oil industry to refinance its debts, and the whole country would go bust. Plus, the Republicans’ friends in Likud wanted Libya destroyed, along with six other African and Middle Eastern nations.
And so Killary has shown herself quite willing to turn a blind eye to the horrors committed by these monsters. Well, what could the world expect from the woman, who stood on her soapbox at the presidential debates, and raved about how happy she was to know, and go on holiday with Henry Kissinger. Yeah, Kissinger. The man who’s rightly been described as the world’s biggest unindicted war criminal, responsible for the spread of Fascism, bloodshed, mass murder and torture across Latin America and South Asia.
Never mind the title of her book. Killary has harmed Black Americans, and promoted the murder and sale of Blacks in Africa.
In this short video from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Stef Zamora and Rob Placone, rip into the New York Times for publishing a bit of non-news from Chelsea Clinton. She’s the daughter of Hillary and Bill Clinton, and the NYT saw fit to publish on its pages a tweet from her, saying that the she read Fahrenheit 451 in 7th grade, and it still makes her feel uncomfortable. It’s widely considered that Chelsea Clinton is being groomed to follow her parents into politics. That’s the message that Dore, Placone and Zamora got from this tweet. They feel it’s a puff piece for her. And so did several of the NY Times’ readers. One Mr Flugennock tweeted back that the newspaper should come off it, as ‘we aren’t going to vote for her’. Accompanying this was a photo of Clinton junior with the caption, ‘Mommy, your clothes fit me now.’
Indeed they do. Both Chelsea and her vile parents seem to be highly critical of state medicine. During her election campaign last year, Killary declared that single-payer healthcare was ‘utopian’. As Dore and the other left-wing American newscaster repeatedly pointed out, it’s a utopian institution that every other country in the developed world has, except America. And Chelsea seems to think the same thing. I distinctly remember her saying something sneering and dismissive about socialised medicine or single-payer health care a few years ago.
Dore, Placone and Zamora joke about the essentially vapid content of the tweet. Zamora commented that she also read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Zeuss in the 1st Grade, and it still makes her feel uncomfortable about green eggs. Rather more seriously, Dore remarks on her comments seem to suggest that she expected to feel more comfortable with age about the book’s dark subject matter. Fahrenheit 451 is one of SF and Fantasy author Ray Bradbury’s classic novels, alongside The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. The book takes its name from the temperature at which paper burns. It’s a dystopian book, set in a future where a despotic government has banned literature and reading. In this world, firemen are people, who start firesm not put them out, consigning books and learning to the flames. Of course it’s a disturbing book. It follows the real life burning of subversive literature by oppressive regimes and movements, like Nazi Germany. It’s why Dore also makes a heavily ironic joke about not getting used to the Holocaust either.
The NY Time’s also mentions that Chelsea Clinton has also co-authored a book herself. This is Governing Global Health, an ‘unbiased’ book, which examines public-private healthcare partnerships around the world, and looks forward to them becoming increasingly important in tackling world health. Dore, Zamora and Placone miss the serious undertones for this, joking instead about its supposed connection to Clinton’s comments about Bradbury’s masterpiece. This is supposed to have disturbed her so much, she wrote a book of her own.
But Clinton fille’s authorship of this tome has serious and very ominous overtones for state healthcare elsewhere in the world, and most immediately in Britain. Public-Private Partnerships are basically the Blairite ‘Third Way’, which they in turn inherited from the Tories’ foul Peter Lilley. This capering bigot was upset that private enterprise was locked out of the NHS, and so created the Private Finance Initiative. This is where the state bales out and subsidies private firms for building and managing NHS hospitals. It’s more expensive, and so the hospitals built under it are fewer and smaller. Even worse, perfectly efficient and excellent state hospitals have had to be closed, so that Blair and the Tories could provide more lucrative work for their friends in private healthcare.
Blair took over the Clinton’s electoral strategy and their corporatist, anti-working class ideology and injected it into the Labour party. Bill Clinton’s campaign was based on rejecting the Democrats traditional base in the working class, and abandoning what little welfare provision there was, in order to win votes from Reaganite Republicans. And the policy’s continued under Obama and Shrillary. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats, famously stated last year that he wasn’t concerned if they lost blue collar voters, as for every one they lost, they’d pick up two or three suburban Republicans. This is the same attitude that infects Blairite Labour. Blair, Mandelson, Broon and Campbell targeted affluent swing voters in marginal constituencies, sacrificing the interests of the working class in order to appeal to middle class Thatcherites. The policy didn’t work, and is creating massive poverty. But the corporatist elite love it, and so the Clintonites in America and Blairites over here are still pushing it.
And just as Blair took over the Clintonite free market ideology, the same corporate interests that infest American politics also came over her to win contracts in healthcare, the prison system and other parts of the state infrastructure. Companies like the notorious health insurance fraudster, Unum. The American private healthcare companies realised that the market in America was in serious trouble, due to rising costs. There was an excellent article in Counterpunch a month or so ago, which reported that in some areas it almost broke down before being rescued by Obama’s affordable care act. With the market in America glutted and sinking, they’ve come over here to win contracts from our NHS. And our politicos have been stupid and malignant enough to give them to them.
I think Dore and co. are right. Chelsea Clinton is being groomed to succeed her parents. And as a believer in private healthcare, she does want to push the privatisation of our NHS for the profit of her country’s private healthcare firms. She has to be stopped. If she enters politics to push her vile agenda, it’ll be bad for America and terrible for Britain and our NHS. Keep her – and them – out of politics and out of Britain.
The world was shocked last week by the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States. The news showed footage of Clinton and her supporters weeping at the result. Yet as this documentary from Reichwing Watch shows, Clinton herself was no liberal. They describe her as a Republican Democrat. The description is accurate. As this documentary shows and concludes, she is like her Republican opponents a corporatist militarist, backing powerful companies, the military and the armaments industry against ordinary Americans, the environment, and the smaller nations of Latin America and Iraq, which have had the misfortune to feel the boot of American imperialism. And far from a supporter of women and ethnic minorities, the documentary also shows how she cynically sponsored the punitive legislation that has seen the mass incarceration and denial of federal welfare support to Blacks, defend truly horrific rapists and cover up Bill’s affairs and sexual assaults. All while claiming to be a feminist. The documentary also shows how Hillary was also extremely cynical about gay marriage, opposing it until the very last minute when it was politically expedient.
The documentary is divided into several chapters, dealing respectively with imperialism, Black rights, the gun lobby, the war on women, LGBT rights and corruption. It begins with a quote from Christopher Hitchens urging people not to vote for Hillary, as it is a mistake to support candidates, who are seeking election for therapeutic reasons. He then cites her husband, Bill, as an example.
Chapter 1: Building an Empire
This chapter begins with Killary’s support for the Iraq invasion, despite admissions from other members of the US Congress that the full scale industrial equipment needed to produce weapons of mass destruction was not found, and opposition to her and the invasion from Congressmen Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Gravett, and the liberal news host, Jon Stewart. It also shows clips of Obama and Christopher Hitchens stating that she had the support of the Republicans for her stance on the Iraq invasion, including Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is rightly described by one of the speakers in this documentary as ‘the greatest unindicted war criminal in the world today’. It discusses how the US supported coup in Ecuador recalls the Kissinger sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende in favour of the Fascist dictator, General Pinochet. It also mentions Killary’s sponsorship of the military coup in Honduras and the assassination of the indigenous rights leader, Berta Carceres. After the coup, Killary ensured that the regime received American aid, including military, in return for which American corporations also received lucrative contracts, especially in the construction of the dams. This section of the documentary also shows how Killary is absolutely ruthless and single-minded when it comes to pursuing her own projects, even at the possible expense of her husband’s interests. When Bill Clinton was finally considering intervening in Bosnia in the 1990s, Killary refused to support him until the very last minute as she was also afraid that this would affect her own healthcare reforms. She was also a firm supporter of No Fly Zones in Syria, despite the view of many others that these would lead directly to war with Russia.
Chapter II: Black Lives Matter
The title of this section of the documentary is highly ironic, considering that for much of her career, Shrillary hasn’t been remotely interested in Black rights, and indeed began her political involvement actively opposing them. She herself freely admits that when she was in college, she was a Goldwater Girl, supporting the segregationist Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he and Hillary continued to celebrate Confederate Flag Day along with the rest of the reactionaries. There’s also a clip of her describing the threat of urban ‘super predators’ connected to the drug gangs. This was a term that at the time was used almost exclusively to describe Black men. There’s a clip of Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, about contemporary legislation designed to marginalise and impoverish Black America, denouncing the extremely punitive legislation Killary and Bill introduced as part of the war on drugs. These deny federal welfare aid to those convicted of drug offences for going to college, access to public housing and even food stamps. This was part of the Clinton’s strategy to win back swing voters, who had voted for Reagan and the Republicans. Clinton herself continued her strategy of appealing to White voters at the expense of Blacks. In 2008 she credited White voters for supporting her against Barack Obama. She also at one point discussed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy when answering a question about how long she planned to continue her campaign against Obama. She was viciously attacked for this by Stewart, who was outraged that she should mention this at a time when Obama was receiving death threats because of he was a Black man aiming at the presidency. Hillary was also herself extremely cynical in mentioning Obama’s Muslim background and upbringing. Without ever quite saying that he was a Muslim, and therefore shouldn’t be president, she nevertheless reminded people that he had been, thus reinforcing their prejudices.
Chapter III: The Gun Lobby
This begins with Hillary denouncing the armaments industry. However, once in power, she approved $122 million in sales for the gun firms, many of which produced the weapons used by Adam Lanza to shoot his mother and the other children at Sandy Hook school. She also managed to raise American armament sales abroad by 80 per cent over her predecessor, Condoleeza Rice, approving $165 billion of armaments sales in four years. These companies then invested part of their profits in the NRA, which sent lobbyists to Washington, several of whom, including representatives of Goldman Sachs, then went and attended a fundraising dinner for the Clintons.
Chapter IV: The War on Women
This concludes with a clip of Madeleine Albright urging women to vote for Clinton as ‘there is a special place in Hell for women, who do not help other women’. Yet Clinton’s own feminism and support for women is extremely patchy. This part of the documentary begins with her making a speech about how women’s rights are human rights, and vice versa. Which is clearly true. However, it then goes on to play a recording of her talking in 1975 about how she successfully defended a monstrous rapist, who had attacked a 12 year old girl. The girl was left in a coma for several months, needed considerable therapy to help her back on her feet afterwards. She has been on drugs, never married or had children. Her life has been ruined because of this monstrous assault, by a man Clinton knew was guilty, but successfully defended. Due to plea bargaining, he only served a derisory two months in prison.
This part of the documentary also shows how Hillary covered up for Bill’s affairs, and his sexual assault of Juanita Broderick. Broderick, then married, was a nurse at a nursing home, who had done some campaigning for the Clintons. They visited the home, during which Clinton sexually assaulted her in one of the bedrooms. Afterwards Killary approached her, caught her by the hand, and said that they appreciated how much she meant to her husband. Broderick clearly, and not unreasonably, considers this to be a veiled threat, and states that Killary frightened her. The section concludes with a piece about her support for another Democrat, Cuomo, and how this candidate was really another Republican in the guise of a Democrat, who believed in trickle-down Reaganite economics.
Chapter V: LGBT Rights
This begins with a clip from an interview with a gay serviceman, stating how it was very difficult initially in the navy when his sexuality was first known about. This section of the documentary shows how she actively opposed gay marriage until she thought there was votes in supporting it. She is seen supporting her husband’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy towards gays in the military as a progressive position, despite the fact that Bill himself said it was only a compromise. It then shows her making speeches declaring that she believed marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and that New York State should not recognise gay marriage.
Chapter VI: Corruption
This part begins by discussing how the Clinton’s took money from Tyson’s, one of the major poultry producers in Arkansas, and one of the agri-businesses credited with polluting 3,700 miles of the states’ waterways. Clinton passed laws setting up a task force to looking into the problem, while ensuring that about a third of the seats on this quango went to Tyson’s. Tyson’s were an important contributor to the Clintons’ campaign funds, in return for which Bill passed laws favouring the firm, and allowing them to grow into the state’s biggest poultry firm.
And the corruption didn’t stop there. It goes on to show how Killary did absolutely nothing to challenge Walmart’s ban on trade unions when she was on their board, and the company still lags behind others in promoting women to important positions. She was also hypocritical in her ‘Buy American’ campaign to persuade Americans to buy domestically produced goods. While she was at Walmart, the company continued to sale imported goods, some of which were even misleadingly labelled as ‘made in America’. This included clothing made in factories in Bangladesh which employed 12 year old girls.
Elsewhere, Killary also campaigned against a bankruptcy bill promoted by the credit card companies in their favour, in a reversal of her previous policy. The also made $675,000 from three speeches to Goldman Sachs, speeches which she refused to release.
She has also been duplicitous in her support of the NAFTA and TPP free trade agreements. She accused Obama during his election campaign of supporting NAFTA, while secretly reassuring the Canadians that she really backed it herself. There is also a clip of Elizabeth Warren, another Democrat politician, attacking the TPP. Warren states that this free trade deal isn’t about developing commerce, but in giving more power to multinational companies at the expense of national governments and hard-working ordinary Americans. America already had free trade deals with very many of the countries included in the treaty. And about half of the TPP’s 30 chapters are devoted to giving more power to the companies.
This section of the documentary also includes a clip of Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Carter’s foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, talking about how Killary has no personal convictions of her own, and will say anything to get herself elected. This is followed by the veteran radical, Noam Chomsky, stating that Clinton’s Democrat party is really that of moderate Republicans. President Truman, who warned about the threat of the military-industrial complex, is by their standards now far to the Left. It also has a clip from an interview with one of the multibillionaire Koch brothers describing how they liked Bill Clinton over many Republicans. This one is, admittedly, rather more hesitant when it comes to whether he’d support Killary. There’s then footage from a speech by Bill Clinton promoting small government and how there isn’t a programme for every problem. This is followed by footage of Hillary herself stating that she isn’t dogmatically Republican or Democrat. The documentary ends with the description of her as the worst of the two defects of the American political system. She is both a militarist, and a promoter of corporate power.
Donald Trump is a monster, and his election has brought fear to many millions of ordinary Americans, particularly those from ethnic minorities. The Beeb yesterday reported that 300 racially motivated incidents had been recorded since he was elected last week. Non-white children have been bullied at school, racist slogans sprayed on Black and ethnic minority people’s property and vehicles, and the Nazis from Alt-Right have crawled out from their pits to spew hatred against the Jews. Trump’s even appointed Steven Bannon, a racist and anti-Semite executive from the right-wing news organisation, Breitbart, his ‘chief strategist’. America and the world are facing the prospect of a Nazi in the White House.
But Hillary herself is no angel. She’s a corporate, militarist monster, who supports the very big businesses that are bringing poverty to working people in America by lowering wages, denying union rights, polluting America’s great natural environment, and shipping jobs overseas.
And abroad, her pursuit of American imperial power, as expressed in the American military complex’s own jargon of ‘full spectrum dominance’ – in other words, absolute military power over the rest of us – has threatened to plunge the world once again into a Cold War and the prospect of nuclear annihilation. And her embrace of Henry Kissinger should be a mark of shame to any decent human being. This is the man, whose firm support of dictators in Latin America and Asia, and whose conduct of the Vietnam War, brought death and torture to tens, if not hundreds of millions of innocents.
And Killary herself has blood on her hands through her support of the Iraq invasion, and the coups in Ecuador and Honduras.
Quite frankly, considering the millions she’s threatened with torture, assassination, disappearance and the Fascist jackboot, I really honestly don’t have any sympathy with her weeping over her election defeat. She’s lucky. She didn’t get to be president, but no-one will be rounding her or her husband up to be raped or tortured by the secret police, before being murdered in a concentration camp. She doesn’t have to worry about Chelsea being murdered by a death squad. She gets to live, and enjoy her very privileged life as a major politico and businesswoman. The people she and the rest of the administrations she served and supported, who’ve had their lands invaded and governments overthrown, haven’t been so lucky.
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