Posts Tagged ‘‘What Happened?’’

Never Mind the Titles of Her Books, the Slave Auctions Show What Hilary Really Thinks of Africans

December 1, 2017

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.

Democratic Party Leader Donna Brasile Reveals Party Controlled by Hillary Before Her Nomination

November 4, 2017

This is another piece of political dynamite. In this clip from the Jimmy Dore show, the comedian and his two co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, discuss the latest revelation about the corruption within the Democrat party.

And it’s a doozy.

Donna Brasile, who took over as head of the Democratic Party after Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught corruptly acting for Clinton, has a new book coming out about the state of the Democrat Party during the presidential elections. Well, Killary has, so she may as well put her oar in as well. A passage from the book was published in Politico magazine. It was entitled ‘Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC’. It reveals how the DNC made a secret deal with Clinton in which they signed over nearly all the fundraising money and gave her control of the political campaign, including strategy and staffing.

Brasile is also corrupt like her predecessor, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. During the Democratic presidential nominations, she was leaking debate questions to Hillary, so she would have the advantage over Bernie.

And I know this is just ad hominem, or rather, ad feminam, but to me Brasile looks like the Afro-American cousin of Mrs Slocombe from the classic BBC comedy series, Are You Being Served?

Are You Being Served’s Mrs. Slocombe

The Democrat National Convention’s Donna Brasile

Brasile starts by slagging off her predecessor, dismissing Schultz as ‘not a good manager’. She then goes on to reveal the details of the deal. Under the laws set down by the Federal Election Commission, an individual can only give a maximum of $2,700 directly to an individual in the presidential elections. The limits are, however, much higher for the parties in the individual states. The donors, who had already contributed this amount to Killary’s campaign, could contribute another $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund. This represented $10,000 to the parties of the 32 states, who were part of the agreement, which made up $320,000, and $33,400 to the DNC.

She also mentions that the party usually shrinks the number of staff in the period between presidential elections. But Wasserman Schultz had decided not to do that. She had placed a great number of consultants on the payroll, and Obama’s consultants were also being paid by the party as well. Here Dore points out that this shows the contempt the party has for anyone except their donors. The party was already in serious financial trouble, but Wasserman Schultz was serving the consultants and donors from whom the party was taking money, not its grassroots supporters.

Brasile goes on to say that about the time of the Convention, leaked emails revealed how Clinton was keeping most of the money, and very little was going to the state parties. A Politico story published on May 2 2016, quoted Hillary as saying that they would concentrate on building the party up from the bottom. That’s how they were going to win. Instead the states kept less than half of one per cent of the $82 million they had raised.

Then Brasile found the document that would prove to be the smoking gun in the shape of the Joint Fundraising Agreement itself between the Democratic National Convention, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America. The Agreement was signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, amongst others, and a copy sent to Marc Elias, Killary’s lawyer. It specified that Killary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised in return for raising money and investing in the party.

Killary’s campaign would have the right of refusal over who was the party’s communications director, and the final decision on other staff. It also bound the DNC to consult Killary over all other staffing, budget decisions, data and mailings.

This explains why Tulsi Gabbard got removed from the DNC when she suggested that there should be more debates, because Bernie did well in them.

The agreement was signed in August 2015, four months after Killary had announced her candidacy, and nearly a year before she got the nomination.

Brasile also goes on to say that she tried to find other incriminating documents or evidence of corruption within the DNC, but did not find any. Dore pours scorn on this, pointing out that Brasile herself was involved in a series of shady moves to give the nomination to Killary over Bernie Sanders. She also states that the agreement was not illegal, but it was certainly unethical. It wasn’t a criminal act, but it compromised the party’s integrity. This comment again draws very heavy sarcasm from Dore, as it’s just about the worse act of corruption that could possibly be done. It sweeps away any kind of democracy or popular accountability within the party and places it very much under the personal, dictatorial control of a single individual. She also states that she didn’t trust the polls. Touring the country slocombe – er, I mean Brasile, had found there was little enthusiasm for Hillary. And she was particularly worried about Obama supporters and millennials.

Dore, Placone and Zamorano also take the point to reproach the show’s critics for defending Hillary from these charges of corruption, and the smears and accusations they had made against Killary’s left-wing rivals. Dore reminds his audience how he and the other left-wingers were told they were ‘misogynists’, because they backed Bernie against Killary. And because a group of lads had thrown dollars bills after her in protest at her taking money from the corporations and Wall Street. This was despite the fact that Dore himself had voted for the Green New Deal, and its presidential nominee, Jill Stein. Who was very definitely a woman. And throwing money at Hillary and calling her a corporate whore is just fair comment. She is a corporate whore, just like all the corporate whores, male and female, in politics around her.

As for all the accusations she made about Donald Trump conspiring with Russia to steal the election from her, this was exactly what Killary tried to do. She had made a deal with the Russian intelligence services to get dirt on Trump. Whatever the Clinton campaign claims is happening, he says, you can bet that the opposite is true. He also responds to Killary’s comments attributing her failure to having the election stolen from her by stating that Killary had also tried to steal the election through rigged primaries and superdelegates. And then there’s the highly undemocratic electoral college. With an exasperated sigh he asks the rhetorical question of how she could lose to someone like Trump.

He names all the various politicos and celebrities, who attacked him for not backing Hillary, including the producer of the Family Guy. He makes the point that the Democratic Party was lying to its supporters. It wasn’t the Russians, it wasn’t Trump, it was the Democrats, lying to their own grassroots supporters about the corruption within it. He is also angry about how people are turning their anger over their cavalier treatment by the Democrats and Killary on the Jimmy Dore Show. These are people who are poorly raised and have no power. If they really want to show how brave they are, instead of attacking a jag-off YouTube show, as Dore describes it, they should take those who are really powerful. Like Killary and her backers in the DNC.

But the Democratic left and ordinary people are sick of it. Various groups, including progressives and the unions, and in fact 80 per cent of the party, are talking about breaking with the Democrats and forming their own. He urges Bernie Sanders to join them and form a third party, rather than urging people to join the Democrats.There’s no point in anyone joining the Democrat party, as in the view of Dore and his co-hosts, the Democratic Party is dead.

These revelations should have repercussions over here in Britain. The Blairites in the Labour party are joined at the hip to the Clinton Democrats. Blair modelled his New Labour on the Clintons’ New Democrats, copying their policy of adopting the policies of their right-wing opponents in order to win them over at the expense of ignoring their own working class grassroots.

And just as the Clintonites started screaming and libelling anyone who dared to think that Bernie and his policies of strong unions, protectionism and single-payer healthcare were better for America as ‘misogynists’, so the Blairites over here did the same to anyone and everyone who supported Jeremy Corbyn. Because obviously wishing to return to strong unions, higher wages, better workplace rights for employees, proper welfare provision and the renationalisation of the railways and electricity, and an end to the privatisation of the NHS, are real threats to women’s welfare.

Of course they aren’t. The only women they threaten are the Blairite shills in the Labour party and the media, including the Groaniad, who regard the real horny-handed sons and daughters of toil with a mixture of horror and condescension, and confidently expected that, as upper middle class gels from public schools, they were entitled to a place in government along with their brothers from the same class and educational background.

This applies to the various media hackettes, who were raving about Killary’s tour promoting her book What Happened in Britain and the rest of the world the week before last. One of them raved about how, when Killary spoke at the South Bank Centre, women brought their daughters to hear her. She was inspirational! Well, she is to women, who also have an absolute lack of any real morals and admire a corrupt, corporate shill and ravening warmonger. A woman without absolutely any qualms about backing right-wing Fascist coups in small Latin American states. And then, when she loses the election, throws a colossal tantrum and blames everyone else except her, and particularly the Russians.

A woman, who falsely claims that she’s an outsider, simply because she’s female, while being just as much an insider as the men with whom she works and against whom she competes. While also consistently voting against those measures which would improve the lot of ordinary women. Like Medicare For All, stronger welfare provision, better wages and regulation of the banks, so that ordinary folks would not have to pay higher taxes to bail out greedy financiers after they destroyed the economy. Policies that would allow poor women, and this means just about everyone in America and Britain who aren’t rich, to eat, rather than starve in order to feed their children and pay the utility bills.

And, you know, ending foreign wars so that women don’t have to watch and fear for their daughters, sons, husbands and friends coming back from the Middle East with broken or missing limbs and shattered minds, or in body bags.

You know. Those kind of misogynistic policies.

With these revelations, I think everyone in the Labour party, who were smeared as anti-female for supporting Corbyn, is owed an apology by Rachel Reed and their friends in the media.

But I ain’t holding my breath.

The Humanist Report: Killary Gets Rough Reception in Wales

October 28, 2017

Which the American presenter pronounces as ‘Welch’ and ‘Welsh’, confusing the term for its people with the name of the country itself. But you can forgive him that because (1) he’s foreign, and (2) he loves the people of Welsh for standing up to Her Highness and telling her how it really was. And he also likes Matt Free of Channel 4 News for also asking Killary tough questions, which American pundits avoid.

As I’ve discussed in previous blog posts, Killary, who seems to think going around with a mass-murdering creature like Henry Kissinger is a badge of honour, has been going up and down on the Earth promoting her book like crazy. It’s called What Happened, and is basically her attempt to blame everyone but herself for her massive failure to win the election against a colossal moron like Donald Trump. She was Down Under a few weeks ago, giving the Aussies the benefit of her wisdom. Then she was over here, at the South Bank Centre, the Cheltenham Literary Festival and then Swansea University across the border, to receive an honorary degree. The Uni decided to grant her the honour for her work promoting women’s and children’s rights around the world. As the presenter here states, presumably they didn’t get the message that she voted for the Iraq War.

But all did not go smoothly for Kissinger’s fangirl. The students at Swansea actually booed her. And one young woman, a biochemistry student, Kirsty Lloyd, called out to her ‘Bernie would’ve won. He would’ve beaten Trump.’ Which he would have. He was in the lead against her in the polls, until she, Debbie Wasserman Schulz of the Democratic National Convention, and Donna Brasile, Clinton’s main woman in her team, managed to steal the presidential nomination from her.

Lloyd said afterwards

“Hillary Clinton cheated Bernie Sanders of his nomination. And all those drone strikes, which kill women and children are illegal contradict the reason she is being given a doctorate – which is for doing things for women and children all over the world. The main thing she’s done for women and children is kill them in drone strikes.”

And things didn’t get better when she was being interviewed by Matt Free. He reminded her that her share amongst women went down 1 per cent from 44 per cent under Obama to 43. Hillary then tried to rebut this by saying that it was only White women who became disillusioned with her. Overall she won amongst women. And she lost because gender is not yet a powerful factor in American elections as race is. The commenter on the Humanist Report states that this could only be the response of an American politician, who sees everything in terms of identity politics. He also points out that it’s also terribly insulting to Barack Obama, as it implies that he only won the election because he was Black.

Free goes on to make the point that she lost partly because of her background. She’d already been in office – sort of – as the First Lady with Bill Clinton, and so her membership of a political dynasty worked against her. And people didn’t like her as they saw her as an establishment candidate, in an age of revolution.

At which point Hillary goes off and drones on about how she led in all the debates, and was seen as the more intelligent, winning candidate. When he asks her, Clinton responds that she lost partly because of Steve Dromey and Russian ‘interference’.

The Report’s presenter again points out here how Killary has contradicted herself. She says she takes full responsibility for her failure, but then immediately blames other people. He also states that it’s great to see how people in the rest of the world don’t follow American pundits in fawning over their guests, asking easy questions. He liked the way Free made her squirm. He states that you don’t see politicians like Hillary pop up elsewhere in the world, because everywhere she’s seen as another sleazy, corrupt politician like all the others. Largely because of the dodgy dealings of the Clinton Foundation. But you do find politicians like Bernie Sanders appearing in other countries, like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.

The presenter clearly makes some great points, though he and Free on Channel 4 could have challenged her about the so-called ‘interference’ from the Russians. They didn’t lose her the election. They were trying to interfere in the American election, but no more than they usually do. Crucially, they didn’t leak the incriminating emails to WikiLeaks. Those came from a Democratic insider disgruntled at her corruption.

As for her being the better candidate over Trump, he points out that Trump was trailing behind her and faced worse challenges than she did. In Utah a Mormon, Republican establishment candidate went independent to challenge Trump. And Trump faced another Republican challenger elsewhere, who took more votes away from him than Jill Stein did Hillary.

Hillary, her arrogance, corruption, and entitlement is responsible for her failings, not other people.

Except in one instance: the Electoral College. This swung overwhelmingly for Trump, despite the fact that Killary had three million votes more than he did at the popular level. And the College is an anti-democratic measure put into America’s bizarre and byzantine electoral system in the 19th century in order to give some political power to the southern, slave-holding states. If America was a genuine democracy, it would have vanished a long time ago. But it’s enshrined in America’s constitution, and so is preserved as part of the great wisdom of the patrician founders of the American political system. Who were all patricians with a real fear of power being grabbed by the White peasants and proles, let alone Blacks. They set up the Constitution to keep power in the hands of the monied, and so have built into the system the political paralysis that is stifling the forces for real change that America needs.

Hillary Clinton to Appear on Graham Norton Show Tonight – But Will He Ask Her About Corrupt Uranium Deal?

October 20, 2017

I’ve been posting various articles this week attacking Hillary Clinton and the lies she’s been spinning as she promotes her book, What Happened. This is her account of how she failed to be elected the first female president of the US in 2016, losing to the fake-tanned, bewigged maniac now determined to plunge us all into a new Cold War. Killary was in Australia one week, where one Ozzie journo caught her telling five whoppers when she was interviewed on ABC. She has since come to England, where she’s been speaking at the South Bank Centre and at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.

She’s going to appear on the Graham Norton Show tonight, Friday 20th October 2017, at 10.35 pm. The blurb for the programme on page 114 of the Radio Times states

Hillary Clinton talks to Graham about the US presidential campaign, as detailed in her book What Happened. Jeff Goldblum, Gerard Butler and Jack Whitelaw join her on the sofa.

Another piece on the previous page, 113, adds rather more information.

This time last year Hillary Clinton had her heart set on the Oval Office and probably expected to spend her evenings on a White House sofa. How on earth has she ended up on Graham Norton’s couch instead? She’ll tell him “What Happened” while discussing her new book about her annus horribilis.

Here’s hoping Clinton doesn’t try to describe 2016 after a glass or two of Norton’s house reserve, though. He’s never one to resist a red, white and blue gag.

As with so much, you are not going to hear the unvarnished truth from Clinton because, to paraphrase the old Hollywood line, ‘she can’t handle the truth.’ The simple truth is that many ordinary, working Americans were sick and tired of the poverty and massive income inequality the Reaganite neoliberalism championed by her and Bill had created. They were sick and tired about public programmes being cut, while money was poured into the banks and big businesses that were already bloated from public money anyway, and which had profited massively from the economic mess they’d created. They were sick and tired of American imperialism, of seeing their finest young men and women sent off to kill and be killed in countries which, with the exception of Afghanistan, had not attacked America on the orders of a lying president, just as Brits are sick and tired of the same neoliberal policies and the same militarism heavily promoted by the Clinton’s fan and George Dubya’s poodle over here, Tony Blair. These wars are being fought not to defend America or promote democracy, but simply to despoil and loot these other nations for the benefit of western, chiefly American, multinationals.

She lost because Americans were sick of rising medical bills, which a growing number simply can’t afford, even after Obamacare. And far from being the traditional image of the welfare recipient as an unemployed scrounger, the majority of these poor around the developed world are working people, who are now paid so poorly thanks to Thatcherite doctrines of pay restraint, that they have to work two or three jobs simply to keep their heads above water, go on welfare, or, in Britain, subsist using food banks.

And the American public, Blacks and Whites, also remembered how she exaggerated the threat of crime by young Black men, in order to push through highly punitive legislation that now sees something half of the Black American male population go to the slammer. For the profit of the privatised prison system, of course.

American women saw through her faux-feminism, in which she tried to present herself as campaigning for all women, when in fact she was a bog-standard corporate insider, despite her repeated claims that she had to be an outsider, ’cause she was female. Killary represented nobody but herself and the other, rich, entitled women like her. She was perceived as massively corrupt, massively insincere, and profoundly unsympathetic to the plight of ordinary working people.

But Killary can’t handle any of this, and so has been running round blaming everyone but herself. She’s blamed Bernie Sanders, the genuinely left-wing Democrat she and the head of the Democratic National Convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stitched up and from whom she stole the nomination. She’s also blamed the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who was a stronger feminist figure. Both she and Bernie promised Americans Medicare for all. She’s blamed it on a culture of misogyny. While this does exist, her claim that she was being bullied because of her gender by Sanders’ supporters is another lie.

And she’s also ramped up international tension by blaming the Russians. Because WikiLeaks published internal Democrat party documents showing just how corrupt she was. She’s claimed that Russian hackers were responsible for this, when in fact the former British diplomat, who took custody of them for WikiLeaks, said that they came from a Democrat Party insider.

And Killary has absolutely no business screaming at others and accusing them of corrupt dealings with Putin’s Russia, when this is exactly what she and her husband and the chief himself, Barack Obama, did. A little while ago, the New York Times broke the story that before she signed off on a deal, which saw uranium mines in Kazakhstan and a fifth of the uranium processing industry in America itself taken over by a consortium of Russian companies, the Clinton Foundation received $145 million from individuals connected with these companies. And her husband, Bill, was given $500,000 for a speech he gave to a Russian bank.

One of her aides, Brodnitz, pointed out in an internal document for her campaign that this affair would damage her electoral chances, and put people off voting for her. Now the American paper, the Hill, has also published a piece reporting that the FBI was investigating her and Bill for two years for this, but the Department of Justice only decided to release the details to the public after the deal had gone through. Thus, Obama had actively connived at preventing her and Bill’s possible prosecution for it, until after the deal had been made. And very profitable it was too for her and Bill, though possibly not for the American taxpayer.

In the video below, the American comedian Jimmy Dore and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, the Miserable Liberal, discuss this latest revelation of Killary’s corruption and double-dealing.

This is just more evidence that Bernie should have got the nomination. If he had, he would have been the far stronger opponent to Trump. And we just could now have a genuinely progressive, Democratic government. This would, in turn, have been a filip to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party over here, as well as genuine left-wingers and Socialists elsewhere in the world.

But this would have been too much for the corporate hawks running Congress to stomach, so they gave it instead to Killary. Who then lost to an even worse candidate, Trump, but one who was better at articulating popular American hopes and fears than she was.

I like Graham Norton. He’s a genial host, although I’ve long stopped watching his show. I dare say he’ll get Killary to talk at length about her book, and she’ll spin and lie about the reasons she lost, just like she’s been lying to interviewers and the paying public all over America, Australia, Britain and the rest of the civilised world. I dare say that Norton will ask her some awkward-ish questions, but they won’t be so awkward that they’ll embarrass her or stop her making similar appearances in the future.

But I doubt very much he’ll ask her about her very real corruption scandals, like the above relationship with the Russians or the handsome payments she got from Wall Street in return for protecting them from further regulation.

Killary Appearing at Cheltenham Literary Festival Today – But Will They Ask the Really Awkward Questions

October 15, 2017

Hillary Clinton was due to appear at the Cheltenham Literary Festival today, 15th October 2017, undoubtedly as part of her tour promoting her book, What Happened? In it, she tries to examine and explain how she came to lose the American presidential election to the orange maniac, whose now bringing us just that little bit closer to war with Iran, and nuclear Armageddon. Various American progressive and radical news shows, like The Young Turks, the Jimmy Dore Show and Secular Talk have extensively reviewed her book and ripped it to shreds very effectively. Some of the videos are quite long, but the problem with Hillary’s campaign can be summed up very simply: her. Clinton is a horrible person, and a horrible candidate. She is part of the corporate elite, personally corrupt in the sense that she is very much in the pocket of Wall Street and big business, and a warmonger, who was ramping up international tensions with Russia and China unnecessarily even before she lost the election. Now it’s even worse as she and the other corporatist Democrats try to cast the blame on Russian interference, rather than look much closer to home to the weakness of Clinton herself. She is massively out of touch with ordinary, working American people.

A majority of the population now want single-payer healthcare, like the rest of the Developed World. And which the Germans have had since Bismarck’s ‘Socialist Law’ of the 1870s, when the real Iron Chancellor tried to crush the rise of Germany’s Social Democrats by stealing a bit of their thunder. While Bernie Sanders has shown how America could easily afford it, and it would be cheaper both for the state and for ordinary Americans, Killary herself has declared that it’s ‘utopian’. Which is why it been working very well in Germany and the Scandinavian countries for more than a hundred years, and the French and Swiss have similar systems which mix state payment and private insurance. But this is still too far-fetched and difficult for the world’s only superpower.

Her record gets much worse when it comes to Black Americans. Bill Clinton was so popular with America’s Black population, and had the same easy charm that many of their politicians and celebrities have, that he was hailed as ‘the first Black president’. But Bill and his wife were responsible for putting in place the legislation that’s seen a massive proportion of Black men jailed for drug offences. She drew an artificial distinction between crack and ordinary cocaine, to make it appear that the one favoured by Blacks was a greater threat than the other, and so deserved greater punishment. Pushing this legislation, she talked about the threat of ‘superpredators’ at a time when this term was nearly exclusively used to describe young Black men.

On the world stage, she was responsible for arming Islamist rebels in Libya so that they overthrew Colonel Gaddafy. Gaddafy was certainly no saint. He was a dictator, who tortured and locked up his political opponents. But he kept the nation together and made sure that his country was paid a fair price for their oil after it had been run as an Italian colony from the late 19th century onwards. During the decades of his people’s struggle for independence, one third of the population was killed. It was a secular state, albeit one where the official ideology, as laid out in his Green Book, was a mixture of Islam and Arab socialism. There was free education and free healthcare. Libya was the most prosperous African country, and Gaddafy himself stood up for the continents’ rights in global affairs. And while he used the Islamists to assassinate his political rivals elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, they weren’t allowed to terrorise his people.

After Gaddafy was toppled, the country descended into civil war between rival factions, including the Islamists. It is still divided between two completing authorities. Its education and healthcare systems have been destroyed, and the Islamists have seized control of large parts of the country.

And then there’s the issue of the coup in Honduras. Up until 2012 or so, this had a liberal president, who actually wanted to raise the living standards of the peasants and urban working class, who were desperately poor, as well as protect the land and livelihood of the country’s indigenous peoples. And, as usually happens in South and Central America when the establishment is faced with the threat of a liberal regime, he was overthrown by a right-wing coup. This installed a Fascist dictator, who started rounding up, imprisoning, killing and torturing opposition leaders, activists and trade unionists. America has legislation designed to prevent it from supporting foreign coups. Killary decided to get around this by officially declaring that the coup wasn’t military, so that America could continue giving aid to the Fascist government.

And in her own party, Hillary was in cahoots with the head of the Democratic National Convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so that Democratic nominations were fiddled to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. Sanders was by far the better candidate, with far greater appeal to working Americans. But he’s a self-declared ‘Democratic Socialist’, who wants single-payer healthcare, a renewed American welfare state, stronger trade unions, and an altogether better deal for America’s poor and working people. And unlike the Clinton’s, Bernie has genuinely taken an interest in promoting the welfare of America’s ethnic minorities. He was one of the first, if not the first, mainstream American politician to go to the reservations of America’s First Peoples to seek their views on improving conditions for them.

But this was all too much for Hillary, whose entire electoral strategy consisted of turning against the party’s core constituency amongst blue-collar workers, Blacks and other minorities, to appeal to Republicans. Just like the Clinton’s mate, Tony Blair, pursued the Tory vote as the expense of the British White working class over here.

But Killary can’t accept any of that, and so blames everyone else in her book except herself, including Jill Stein, the head of the Green Party. Clinton’s tried to present herself as some kind of feminist, whose victory in the election would somehow be a step forward for America’s women, despite the fact that she would do nothing for them. Bernie was much more popular amongst the female population, because he promised women – and men – work and proper healthcare. As did Jill Stein. Stein was a doctor. I put up one of her election broadcasts I found on YouTube, in which Stein talked to a group of women about the necessity for a single-payer healthcare system. She stated unequivocally that it was especially needed for America’s women. And I don’t doubt for a moment that Stein’s absolutely right. From what I’ve seen, the cost of giving birth alone under the American private medical system is tens of thousands of dollars, so much so that American couples have to spend years saving up and then worrying if it’ll bankrupt them before starting a family. It’s a situation that also shows how hollow the Republicans’ concerns about the falling American birthrate is. Their solution is to try to ban abortion. I think Mussolini in Fascist Italy also did that. But he also passed legislation to give Italian women state aid in raising a family. It was part of the Fascists’ reactionary campaign to take women out of the workplace and back in the home and the kitchen, but even then it was far less reactionary in its methods than that of contemporary Conservativism.

The electorate knew that Hillary wasn’t going to do anything for ordinary women, and so voted for the other candidates. And so Killary responded by trying to smear Sanders as a misogynist, just as the Blairites in the Labour party tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn over hear. It hasn’t worked.

And Killary’s still trying to present herself as some kind of feminist ‘everywoman’. When she appeared on America’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon a few days ago, the show’s female writers and a tearful Miley Cyrus also appeared to write ‘thank you’ notes to her praising her for being such an inspiration to them. The Humanist Report produced the video below rightly critiquing not just Hillary, but also the other mainstream comedians, who have politicos on their show, whether the comedians are Fallon, Bill Maher or whoever. He attacks them because they are using their comedy to promote a corporatist agenda regardless of whether the politicians are from the Democrats or Republicans. The Report’s presenter urges his audience to watch intelligently and critically. They can’t and shouldn’t censor, but they should hold presenters and broadcasters, even himself, up to a higher standard.

I am very definitely not a Humanist, but it’s an excellent point that can’t be repeated too much. Here’s the video.

I wonder just how many of the really tough questions have been or will be put to Hillary at the Cheltenham Literary Festival today. My guess is that they’ll ask some awkward questions, but nothing too hard or likely to make her feel uncomfortable.

As for Hillary’s appearance in Britain, I was talking about it to a friend of mine in Cheltenham the last time I was up there a week or so ago. He told me that one of his American friends had wondered what she was doing over here. The obvious answer is that Britain has a special relationship with America, and American politics directly affects this country, and indeed the rest of the world. But his reply was different. He said: ‘Because you owe us an apology’.

When George ‘Dubya’ won the election in 2000, Americans went on social media to apologise to the rest of the world. I think something similar is needed now. But instead of ordinary Americans apologising, it should be Hillary apologising to the ordinary Joes and Josies across the US for being such a transparent corporate shill that she lost to someone as bigoted, stupid and murderous as Trump.