Third and final part. Wow. What a bitch.
November 16, 2007
Secrecy, Intransigence and War
The Vices of Hillary Clinton
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Hillary Clinton's propensity for overkill earned her and Bill the enmity of people capable of inflicting serious damage, as the Whitewater and Cattle Futures scandals duly attested. And soon, as they embarked on the 1992 presidential campaign, the same overkill reflex produced a perfect storm of bad publicity that came within an ace of finishing Clinton off altogether.
In January 1992, America was introduced to the Gennifer Flowers scandal, courtesy of the National Enquirer. Flowers was a former Little Rock newscaster with whom Governor Clinton had an extended love affair for five years in the 1980s, as pleasingly chronicled in Flowers' entirely credible memoir, Gennifer Flowers: Passion and Betrayal.
After the Enquirer broke the Flowers story while Clinton was campaigning in New Hampshire, his campaign advisors went into crisis mode, trying to figure out the best defense. Seasoned tacticians like Betsey Wright and David Ifshin suggested that the best course would be to shrug the story off as unsubstantiated gossip mongering by a supermarket tabloid. The national press corps was already taking this tack, since the reporters on the campaign bus were loath to admit they had been scooped by the Enquirer--whose story was in fact a piece of well-researched investigative reporting, backed up by taped phone calls and messages to Gennifer from Bill.
It was Hillary who instructed the campaign to put the ruthless private investigator Jack Palladino on the case. In her memo to Palladino, she ordered him to "impeach Flowers' character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition." Thus primed, Palladino went into action, seeking to portray Flowers as a prostitute, a shakedown artist and career scamster.
While Palladino was trying to finish off Flowers, Hillary urged Bill to follow the high-risk strategy of both of them going on CBS's 60 Minutes for an interview conducted by Steve Kroft. In front of a vast national audience Bill, visibly ill at ease, admitted to causing pain to his family while denying that their marriage was merely an arrangement. "This is a marriage" he asserted. Hillary broke in. Years of effort in burnishing Bill's image as a Son of the South went up in smoke as she declared, "You know, I'm not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
The polls promptly showed Bill's numbers plummeting south of the Mason-Dixon line. An affair with Flowers was one thing, but insulting Tammy Wynette? The nation's number one country star had been watching the program and was furious. She immediately called her publicist to vent her outrage, and the publicist relayed this to the press. For three days the Clinton campaign tried to talk to Wynette. She declined all calls until finally they got Burt Reynolds to call her, and she relented, releasing the news she would accept Hillary's apologies.
The next storm the Clintons had to face was the matter of his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War. James Carville, the campaign manager, advocated forthright admission that this is what he had done. Clinton agreed with Carville's plan to go on ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel, bringing with him his famous letter to Colonel Eugene Holmes frankly discussing the conflict between his desire to go and fight in Vietnam and his concomitant eagerness to "maintain my political viability". But Hillary was adamant. He should not admit that he wanted to avoid the draft. On the other hand, he should not be forced to apologize for being against the war. The entire file of documents and letters should be concealed. Her view prevailed, and the inevitable consequence was the draft-dodging issue stayed alive as a steady stream of compromising documents was leaked to the press over the next five months.
The desire for secrecy is one of Mrs. Clinton's enduring and damaging traits, which is why these campaign imbroglios are of consequence. Clinton dug himself into many a pit, but his greatest skill was in talking his way out of them in a manner Americans found forgivable. Befitting a Midwestern Methodist with a bullying father, repression has always been one of Mrs. Clinton's most prominent characteristics. Hers has been the instinct to conceal, to deny, to refuse to admit any mistake. Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles lawyer who worked on the 1992 campaign, said that Hillary adamantly refused to admit to any mistakes.
It's clear from Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s very revealing Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton that Mrs. Clinton played a major role in driving White House lawyer Vince Foster to suicide. After the Clintons arrived in the White House, it became Foster's role to guard their secrets. It was one thing to lock documents into a secret room during the campaign. It was quite another to play hide-and-seek with files in the White House, as Mrs. Clinton required Foster to do. Now there weren't nosy reporters but special prosecutors with subpoenas, looking for documents relevant to Whitewater, to Mrs. Clinton's billing records at Rose Law, her tax records relevant to the commodity trades. Foster was tasked with hiding all these documents: some in his house, some in his office and some--the most damaging files--back in his Little Rock house.
There were additional burdens for Foster. He was trying to douse another fire started by Mrs. Clinton. This was her instruction to fire the White House travel staff, on a trumped-up rationale. There were six separate investigations into these firings, all of which Foster had to deal with. Finally, the wretched man had to listen to Mrs. Clinton publicly blame the whole "Travelgate" mess on him, even as he was concealing documents making it clear she had been the person initiating the mess. On top of that, Mrs. Clinton demanded Foster be the principal liaison with Congress on her health reform plan. For the last month of his life, she refused to communicate with him, even though their offices were thirty feet apart.
Health reform was Mrs. Clinton's assignment in her husband's first term. The debacle is well known. In early 1993, 64 per cent of all Americans favored a system of national health care. By the time Mrs. Clinton's 1342-page bill, generated in secret, landed in Congress, she had managed to offend the very Democratic leadership essential to making health reform a reality. The proposal itself, under the mystic mantra "Managed Competition", embodied all the distinctive tropisms of neoliberalism: a naïve complicity with the darker corporate forces, accompanied by adamant refusal to even consider building the popular political coalition that alone could have faced and routed the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies--two of the most powerful forces on the American political scene. Mrs. Clinton's rout on health reform remains one of the great avoidable disasters of the last century in American politics, and one with appalling human and social consequences
This disaster was compounded by the fact that after the collapse of health reform, on the advice of Dickie Morris (summoned by Mrs. Clinton), the Clintons swerved right, toward all the ensuing ghastly legislative ventures of their regime--the onslaughts on welfare, the crime bill, NAFTA. With Morris came the birth of "triangulation"--the tactic of the Clinton White House working with Republicans and conservative Democrats and actively undermining liberal and progressive initiatives in Congress. Money that could have given the House back to the Democrats in 1996 was snatched by the White House purely for the self-preservation of the Clintons.
After health care went down the tubes, Hillary adopted a very low-key political profile, in part because Leon Panetta, the new White House chief of staff, banned her from political meetings. She outflanked him in two ways: by secret strategizing with Morris every two weeks and by nightly strategy sessions with Clinton and Al Gore. She swung back into a crucial public role with the Lewinsky affair, ironically enough, standing by her man. Gerth and Van Natta establish that she knew the full extent of her husband's relations with the woman she called "Elvira" (the mid-'90s horror queen) on January 21, 1998, eight months before the official narrative claims that Bill informed her of his treachery the night before he gave his deposition. She ordered a full-bore attack on Lewinsky as "a stalker with a weight problem" and shoved Bill toward the doomed posture of total denial. He himself had initially been trending toward a stuttering half-admission that hanky-panky might have taken place. But after he returned from the Lehrer show where he had taken this non-combative route, Hillary lashed him into the categorical denial--"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky"--that exploded so disastrously in the months and years ahead. (Only months earlier, Hillary had been the one who insisted that no deal be made with Paula Jones, who could have been bought off with the modest settlement her lawyer was requesting. Hillary said she didn't want Jones to get "a single dollar".)
Bill had his Tammy, and he knew the price. "Whatever Hil wants, Hil gets," he told his staff in 1998, and he began to read books about the campaigns of successful female politicians--Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Golda Meir. As Clinton headed toward impeachment, Hillary set her course for the New York Senate seat.
Since Vietnam, there's never been a war that Mrs. Clinton didn't like. She argued passionately in the White House for the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Five days after September 11, 2001, she was calling for a broad war on terror. Any country presumed to be lending "aid and comfort" to al-Qaeda "will now face the wrath of our country." Bush echoed these words eight days later in his nationally televised speech on September 21. "I'll stand behind Bush for a long time to come", Senator Clinton promised, and she was as good as her word, voting for the Patriot Act and the wide-ranging authorization to use military force against Afghanistan.
Of course she supported without reservation the attack on Afghanistan and, as the propaganda buildup toward the onslaught on Iraq got underway, she didn't even bother to walk down the hall to read the national intelligence estimate on Iraq before the war. (She wasn't alone in that. Only six senators read that NIE.) When she was questioned about this, she claimed she was briefed on its contents, but in fact no one on her staff had the security clearance to read the report. And her ignorance showed when it came time to deliver her speech in support of the war, as she reiterated some of the most outlandish claims made by Dick Cheney. In this speech, she said Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his chemical and biological weapons program; that he had improved his long-range missile capability; that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program; and that he was giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda. The only other Democratic senator to make all four of these claims in his floor speech was Joe Lieberman. But even he didn't go as far as Senator Hillary. In Lieberman's speech, there was conditionality about some of the claims. In Senator Clinton's, there was no such conditionality, even though a vehement war hawk, Ken Pollack, advising Senator Clinton prior to her vote, had told her that the allegation about the al-Qaeda connection was "bullshit".
Later, as the winds of opinion changed, Senator Clinton claimed--and continues to do so to this day--that hers was a vote not for war but for negotiation. In fact, the record shows that only hours after the war authorization vote she voted against the Democratic resolution that would have required Bush to seek a diplomatic solution before launching the war.
Today, Hillary Clinton says she supports the "surge" in Iraq and claims it's working. From candidate, maybe president Hillary Clinton, Iran can expect no mercy.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11162007.html
Hillary: I'm in
This is just too juicy...Part II.
November 15, 2007
The Seeds of Corruption
Hillary Clinton in Arkansas
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In 1990, the National Law Journal ran profiles of "the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States". Hillary Clinton was on the list, and for years she would publicly boast that the Journal had named her one of "the nation's 100 top lawyers". Finally, the editor of the National Law Journal, Patrick Oster, wrote to Arkansas' first lady--as she still was in 1991--testily pointing out that the word "influential" is not synonymous with "top" or "best"--the latter two words used by Mrs. Clinton interchangeably.
By "influential" the Journal's profile writer, Peggy Fisk, had meant a lawyer plentifully endowed with corporate and political connections, which Mrs. Clinton certainly enjoyed in Arkansas where she had become a partner of the Rose Law Firm in 1977, amid the dawn of her husband's political career as he began his terms as governor of the state. By the late 1980s, Hillary Clinton was sitting on the board of Wal-Mart, with the rest of Arkansas' business elite crowding her Rolodex. Hillary ignored Oster's letter of correction, instructing her staff to continue to use the word "best" in invoking the Journal's profile. She continued to do so for years. Oster was still writing her a decade later about her misuse--including an editorial column in the Journal in 2000, when she was running for the U.S. Senate.
In fact, Mrs. Clinton was not a particularly good lawyer and would have had trouble making any honest list of the 100 best lawyers in Little Rock. In their political biography, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. tell the story about the National Law Journal and also probe her lawyerly skills when she was at Rose Law. She only tried five cases and confided to Vince Foster--another Rose Law partner--that she was terrified of juries. So Foster had to accompany her to court. Because of her lack of prowess in the courtroom, she had to make her way at Rose Law by working her connections as the State's first lady to bring in clients, and even then her annual partner's share was mostly below $100,000--the lowest in the firm and very small potatoes for one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.
The Clintons' joint income--at least the visible portion--was not substantial: the state paid Bill $20,000 a year, no doubt under the assumption he'd even up the score with kickbacks. So money was on Mrs. Clinton's mind. Her search for extra income led her into associations that were later to cause endless trouble.
First came the ties with Jim McDougall that were to flower into the Whitewater property speculation and later a huge federal investigation into that deal, unprofitable to the Clintons who had hoped--like many Americans--to make a big score in real estate and solve their money problems at a single stroke.
When things were looking bleak for the Clintons after the Arkansas voters threw Bill out in 1980 after his first term as governor (Arkansas had two-year gubernatorial terms until 1986), she fanned her friendship with James Blair, general counsel of Tyson Foods. Bill Clinton's Little Rock chief of staff, Betsey Wright, recalled that Hillary "loved Jim Blair. Blair was her money man". It was Blair who set up an account for Hillary Clinton with Refco, a small brokerage firm run by Robert "Red" Bone, Don Tyson's former bodyguard and a professional poker player. "Red" Bone got her into cattle future trades. She put up $1,000 and left the trading to Mr. Bone who's often assumed to have arranged the trades with Blair, to Mrs. Clinton's advantage. Nine months later, the $1,000 had swollen with miraculous speed into a profit for Mrs. Clinton of $99,000.
When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency in 1992, reporters noted a mysterious spike in the couple's net worth in the early 1980s and quizzed Mrs. Clinton about it. Her first untruthful explanation was that there had been a windfall in the form of an unexpected gift of cash from her parents. But, aware that the questions wouldn't stop, she issued ferocious order to her staff about any leakage of her tax records. She told them that if they released the tax records showing the commodity trades, they'd "never work in Democratic politics again".
The records were stored in the Clinton Campaign headquarters in Little Rock, in a locked room for which only Hillary, Bill and Betsey Wright had keys. Also in "the Box Room" under lock and key were details of Bill's sexual capers and Hillary's dealings at Rose Law. An internal '92 campaign memo, quoted by Gerth and Van Natta, cited 75 "problem files" in the materials in the Box Room, two-thirds of which related to them as a couple or to Hillary alone. When David Ifshin, the campaign's legal counsel, asked for the key to the room to assess the likely problems, Bill Clinton told him: "We can't open our closet, we'll get crushed by the skeletons".
But two reporters in particular kept pressing: Gerth of the New York Times and James Stewart of the Wall Street Journal. Gerth finally got evidence of the $99,000 profit on a $1,000 trade and confronted Mrs. Clinton. Shorn of the family gift story, Mrs. Clinton avowed that she'd spent her days poring over cattle prices in the Wall Street Journal, that the $99,000 was the fruit of these studies and that she'd quit commodity trading in 1980, after she'd got pregnant with Chelsea, because the trading "was too nerve-wracking". Unfortunately for this story, details later surfaced amid prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigation during the Clinton presidency, showing that in 1981 Hillary had made a trade netting her $6,500 and she hadn't reported the profit to the IRS.
Amid the Starr probe, the Clintons encouraged the Wall Street Journal's Stewart to do a book on what they saw as their unfair persecution on the Whitewater deal. As he researched this work, published as Blood Sport, Stewart took a hard look at the commodity trades and pressed Mrs. Clinton for an explanation for all the contradictory stories. Hillary blamed everything on her staff and told Stewart that her own statements should simply be "accepted at face value".
In the mid-1990s, federal special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigative team in Little Rock was headed by a veteran of the courtroom, Hickman Ewing Jr. Grilled by Ewing before a grand jury on July 22, l995, Mrs. Clinton used the words "I can't recall" in answer to 50 questions. Later, Ewing told Starr that he rated Mrs. Clinton's testimony as deserving an F Minus, and he wanted to indict the nation's first lady. He was contemplating a number of counts, headed by two major lines of enquiry. First came her handling of the commodity trades and her failure to report her profits to the IRS. Second came her conduct amid the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim McDougal. Relevant to this affair were Hillary Clinton's billings as a legal counsel to Madison Guaranty. These were germane to the question of whether Hillary was being truthful in denying she'd done any legal work for the bank. After many adventures, the records finally came into the hands of Starr's team and showed that Hillary Clinton had billed Madison Guaranty at the rate of $150 an hour, with a total of 60 hours of supposed work on the Castle Grande deal. The prosecutors had the billings but were never able to look at Hillary's time sheets. Her secretary removed them from the Rose Law Firm in 1992, and it's generally assumed the first lady destroyed them.
Webb Hubbell, a partner at Rose Law and one of Hillary's closest friends, fell from his eminence as deputy attorney general in Clinton's first term and was convicted and imprisoned on charges of padding by $394,000 his legal billings at Rose Law. Ewing was convinced that Hillary had been doing the same thing. He prepared an indictment. It was the most serious brush with disaster that Hillary ever faced. Paradoxically, she was saved by the indiscretions of her faithless mate. Even as Ewing was urging Hillary's indictment, Starr was delightedly fingering what he conceived to be the object that would doom Bill Clinton, the semen-stained dress retrieved from Monica Lewinsky's closet by Starr's team. The only thing the prurient Starr cared about was nailing Clinton for sexual misconduct, and so he told the disappointed Ewing that there would be no indictment of Hillary.
Even as Hillary Clinton was making trouble for herself and Bill in her legal and business dealings, she was reinventing Bill as a politician. Defeat in 1980 after his first two-year gubernatorial term was a cataclysmic event. Bill called it a "near death experience". According to Gerth and Van Natta, it was "the only time anyone has seen Hillary Clinton cry in public". Bill was inclined to throw in the political towel and go back to being a law professor in Fayetteville, where he would doubtless be roosting in tenured bliss to this day, plump and pony-tailed, fragrant with marijuana and still working his way through an endless roster of coeds. But in 1980, over a funereal breakfast of instant grits, Vernon Jordan brokered a deal: Bill Clinton would give up being a southern populist in the mold of Orval Faubus, six-term governor of Arkansas. Southern populism involved offending powerful corporations. Bill lost in 1980 because not only had he taken the un-populist course of hiking the rate on car registration, he'd angered Weyerhaeuser and Tyson Foods. So, for his comeback he would remake himself as a neoliberal. Hillary Rodham would give up insisting on keeping her maiden name and become Hillary Clinton. The man charged with supervising the Clintons' makeover was selected by Hillary: Dick Morris, a political consultant known for his work for Southern racists like Jesse Helms. Morris ultimately guided President Bill Clinton into the politics of triangulation, outflanking the Republicans from the right on race, crime, morals posturing and deference to corporations. As Hillary said in 1980, "If you want to be in this business, this is the type of person you have to deal with".
Bill Clinton duly pushed aside the Playboy centerfolds and pored over Dick Morris' polling data, trimming his positions to suit. He recaptured the governorship in 1982 and as a reward appointed his wife to head a special task force charged with reforming Arkansas' education system, at that time widely regarded as the worst in the country. The plan Mrs. Clinton came up with showcased teacher testing and funding the schools through a sales tax increase, an astoundingly regressive proposal since it imposed new costs on the poor in a very poor state while sparing any levies on big corporations. The plan went through. Arkansas' educational ranking remained abysmal, but Hillary won national attention as a "realistic Democrat" who could make "hard" choices, like taxing welfare mothers.
While enjoying this limelight, Mrs. Clinton was invited onto the board of Wal-Mart as the first woman director, the only Rose Law partner at that time to have accepted an outside position. She was also asked by Robert Mac Crate, the president of the American Bar Association, to head up a commission on how to implement a resolution by the ABA to increase the profile of women and minorities in the legal profession. Mac Crate told Gerth and Van Natta that Mrs. Clinton declined, saying that she didn't want gender equity to be linked with race. She prevailed. Two years later, she agreed to head an ABA commission examining the status in the legal profession. Issues of race were not to be scrutinized.
By 1987, Hillary was wearying of life as first lady of Arkansas and began to press her husband on the 20-year plan they had made long before, whose consummation would be a successful run by Bill for the U.S. presidency. Dick Morris was assigned the task of running polls on Bill's chances. Betsey Wright was charged with sizing up the "problems". Morris' news was grim. The Democratic Party was not sold on the prospect of the governor of Arkansas as their nominee in l988. Betsey Wright sat down with Bill and Hillary and read out to both of them a list of dozens of women Wright believed Bill had had some kind of fling with during his gubernatorial years. Bill's head sank into his hands, and he mumbled, "I'm not going to run for president and I don't want to run for re-election as governor either". As Wright recalled later, Hillary stood up and cried, "If you're not gonna run for re-election, I'm gonna run". "Okay", said Bill, he'd run again. It was Hillary's call.
The next four years were spent gearing up for the White House run and trying to bury Bill's past. Amid these efforts Hillary made two huge mistakes, which haunted the Clintons throughout the 1992 campaign and their White House years. Clinton's opponent in the 1990 governor's race was Sheffield Nelson, a Little Rock lawyer. Nelson had accumulated a dirt file on Bill, detailing his sexual escapades and the couple's Whitewater real estate transactions. But he never used this material in the campaign. Nonetheless, in 1990 Hillary Clinton publicly excoriated Nelson, calling him "a vindictive and very bitter man". The reason for Hillary's assault was that Nelson, in the climactic weeks of the race, had saturated the airwaves with a series of campaign ads charging Clinton with being a tax-and-spend Democrat. The ads had some effect, and the Clintons had to borrow $100,000 from the Jackson Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank to mount a counteroffensive ad campaign of their own. Nelson, seething at Hillary's onslaught, duly became bitter and vindictive and, as Clinton's presidential campaign got under way, he began to leak ripe details from the file he had kept closed in l990.
Her second mistake also came in 1990, when Jim McDougal was facing trial over the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In his hour of need, he asked Bill to testify as a character witness in his trial. Though Bill was willing to do so, Hillary was adamant that he should avoid any association with McDougal. She successfully persuaded Bill to decline. McDougal was acquitted, but he never forgave the Clintons for their disloyalty. He too began to leak damaging stories about Whitewater to Gerth and other reporters from his rusting trailer in Arkadelphia. Thus, even as she kindled her husband's presidential bid, Hillary helped spark the fires of financial and sexual scandal that almost destroyed his presidency.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11152007.html
November 15, 2007
The Seeds of Corruption
Hillary Clinton in Arkansas
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In 1990, the National Law Journal ran profiles of "the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States". Hillary Clinton was on the list, and for years she would publicly boast that the Journal had named her one of "the nation's 100 top lawyers". Finally, the editor of the National Law Journal, Patrick Oster, wrote to Arkansas' first lady--as she still was in 1991--testily pointing out that the word "influential" is not synonymous with "top" or "best"--the latter two words used by Mrs. Clinton interchangeably.
By "influential" the Journal's profile writer, Peggy Fisk, had meant a lawyer plentifully endowed with corporate and political connections, which Mrs. Clinton certainly enjoyed in Arkansas where she had become a partner of the Rose Law Firm in 1977, amid the dawn of her husband's political career as he began his terms as governor of the state. By the late 1980s, Hillary Clinton was sitting on the board of Wal-Mart, with the rest of Arkansas' business elite crowding her Rolodex. Hillary ignored Oster's letter of correction, instructing her staff to continue to use the word "best" in invoking the Journal's profile. She continued to do so for years. Oster was still writing her a decade later about her misuse--including an editorial column in the Journal in 2000, when she was running for the U.S. Senate.
In fact, Mrs. Clinton was not a particularly good lawyer and would have had trouble making any honest list of the 100 best lawyers in Little Rock. In their political biography, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. tell the story about the National Law Journal and also probe her lawyerly skills when she was at Rose Law. She only tried five cases and confided to Vince Foster--another Rose Law partner--that she was terrified of juries. So Foster had to accompany her to court. Because of her lack of prowess in the courtroom, she had to make her way at Rose Law by working her connections as the State's first lady to bring in clients, and even then her annual partner's share was mostly below $100,000--the lowest in the firm and very small potatoes for one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.
The Clintons' joint income--at least the visible portion--was not substantial: the state paid Bill $20,000 a year, no doubt under the assumption he'd even up the score with kickbacks. So money was on Mrs. Clinton's mind. Her search for extra income led her into associations that were later to cause endless trouble.
First came the ties with Jim McDougall that were to flower into the Whitewater property speculation and later a huge federal investigation into that deal, unprofitable to the Clintons who had hoped--like many Americans--to make a big score in real estate and solve their money problems at a single stroke.
When things were looking bleak for the Clintons after the Arkansas voters threw Bill out in 1980 after his first term as governor (Arkansas had two-year gubernatorial terms until 1986), she fanned her friendship with James Blair, general counsel of Tyson Foods. Bill Clinton's Little Rock chief of staff, Betsey Wright, recalled that Hillary "loved Jim Blair. Blair was her money man". It was Blair who set up an account for Hillary Clinton with Refco, a small brokerage firm run by Robert "Red" Bone, Don Tyson's former bodyguard and a professional poker player. "Red" Bone got her into cattle future trades. She put up $1,000 and left the trading to Mr. Bone who's often assumed to have arranged the trades with Blair, to Mrs. Clinton's advantage. Nine months later, the $1,000 had swollen with miraculous speed into a profit for Mrs. Clinton of $99,000.
When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency in 1992, reporters noted a mysterious spike in the couple's net worth in the early 1980s and quizzed Mrs. Clinton about it. Her first untruthful explanation was that there had been a windfall in the form of an unexpected gift of cash from her parents. But, aware that the questions wouldn't stop, she issued ferocious order to her staff about any leakage of her tax records. She told them that if they released the tax records showing the commodity trades, they'd "never work in Democratic politics again".
The records were stored in the Clinton Campaign headquarters in Little Rock, in a locked room for which only Hillary, Bill and Betsey Wright had keys. Also in "the Box Room" under lock and key were details of Bill's sexual capers and Hillary's dealings at Rose Law. An internal '92 campaign memo, quoted by Gerth and Van Natta, cited 75 "problem files" in the materials in the Box Room, two-thirds of which related to them as a couple or to Hillary alone. When David Ifshin, the campaign's legal counsel, asked for the key to the room to assess the likely problems, Bill Clinton told him: "We can't open our closet, we'll get crushed by the skeletons".
But two reporters in particular kept pressing: Gerth of the New York Times and James Stewart of the Wall Street Journal. Gerth finally got evidence of the $99,000 profit on a $1,000 trade and confronted Mrs. Clinton. Shorn of the family gift story, Mrs. Clinton avowed that she'd spent her days poring over cattle prices in the Wall Street Journal, that the $99,000 was the fruit of these studies and that she'd quit commodity trading in 1980, after she'd got pregnant with Chelsea, because the trading "was too nerve-wracking". Unfortunately for this story, details later surfaced amid prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigation during the Clinton presidency, showing that in 1981 Hillary had made a trade netting her $6,500 and she hadn't reported the profit to the IRS.
Amid the Starr probe, the Clintons encouraged the Wall Street Journal's Stewart to do a book on what they saw as their unfair persecution on the Whitewater deal. As he researched this work, published as Blood Sport, Stewart took a hard look at the commodity trades and pressed Mrs. Clinton for an explanation for all the contradictory stories. Hillary blamed everything on her staff and told Stewart that her own statements should simply be "accepted at face value".
In the mid-1990s, federal special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigative team in Little Rock was headed by a veteran of the courtroom, Hickman Ewing Jr. Grilled by Ewing before a grand jury on July 22, l995, Mrs. Clinton used the words "I can't recall" in answer to 50 questions. Later, Ewing told Starr that he rated Mrs. Clinton's testimony as deserving an F Minus, and he wanted to indict the nation's first lady. He was contemplating a number of counts, headed by two major lines of enquiry. First came her handling of the commodity trades and her failure to report her profits to the IRS. Second came her conduct amid the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim McDougal. Relevant to this affair were Hillary Clinton's billings as a legal counsel to Madison Guaranty. These were germane to the question of whether Hillary was being truthful in denying she'd done any legal work for the bank. After many adventures, the records finally came into the hands of Starr's team and showed that Hillary Clinton had billed Madison Guaranty at the rate of $150 an hour, with a total of 60 hours of supposed work on the Castle Grande deal. The prosecutors had the billings but were never able to look at Hillary's time sheets. Her secretary removed them from the Rose Law Firm in 1992, and it's generally assumed the first lady destroyed them.
Webb Hubbell, a partner at Rose Law and one of Hillary's closest friends, fell from his eminence as deputy attorney general in Clinton's first term and was convicted and imprisoned on charges of padding by $394,000 his legal billings at Rose Law. Ewing was convinced that Hillary had been doing the same thing. He prepared an indictment. It was the most serious brush with disaster that Hillary ever faced. Paradoxically, she was saved by the indiscretions of her faithless mate. Even as Ewing was urging Hillary's indictment, Starr was delightedly fingering what he conceived to be the object that would doom Bill Clinton, the semen-stained dress retrieved from Monica Lewinsky's closet by Starr's team. The only thing the prurient Starr cared about was nailing Clinton for sexual misconduct, and so he told the disappointed Ewing that there would be no indictment of Hillary.
Even as Hillary Clinton was making trouble for herself and Bill in her legal and business dealings, she was reinventing Bill as a politician. Defeat in 1980 after his first two-year gubernatorial term was a cataclysmic event. Bill called it a "near death experience". According to Gerth and Van Natta, it was "the only time anyone has seen Hillary Clinton cry in public". Bill was inclined to throw in the political towel and go back to being a law professor in Fayetteville, where he would doubtless be roosting in tenured bliss to this day, plump and pony-tailed, fragrant with marijuana and still working his way through an endless roster of coeds. But in 1980, over a funereal breakfast of instant grits, Vernon Jordan brokered a deal: Bill Clinton would give up being a southern populist in the mold of Orval Faubus, six-term governor of Arkansas. Southern populism involved offending powerful corporations. Bill lost in 1980 because not only had he taken the un-populist course of hiking the rate on car registration, he'd angered Weyerhaeuser and Tyson Foods. So, for his comeback he would remake himself as a neoliberal. Hillary Rodham would give up insisting on keeping her maiden name and become Hillary Clinton. The man charged with supervising the Clintons' makeover was selected by Hillary: Dick Morris, a political consultant known for his work for Southern racists like Jesse Helms. Morris ultimately guided President Bill Clinton into the politics of triangulation, outflanking the Republicans from the right on race, crime, morals posturing and deference to corporations. As Hillary said in 1980, "If you want to be in this business, this is the type of person you have to deal with".
Bill Clinton duly pushed aside the Playboy centerfolds and pored over Dick Morris' polling data, trimming his positions to suit. He recaptured the governorship in 1982 and as a reward appointed his wife to head a special task force charged with reforming Arkansas' education system, at that time widely regarded as the worst in the country. The plan Mrs. Clinton came up with showcased teacher testing and funding the schools through a sales tax increase, an astoundingly regressive proposal since it imposed new costs on the poor in a very poor state while sparing any levies on big corporations. The plan went through. Arkansas' educational ranking remained abysmal, but Hillary won national attention as a "realistic Democrat" who could make "hard" choices, like taxing welfare mothers.
While enjoying this limelight, Mrs. Clinton was invited onto the board of Wal-Mart as the first woman director, the only Rose Law partner at that time to have accepted an outside position. She was also asked by Robert Mac Crate, the president of the American Bar Association, to head up a commission on how to implement a resolution by the ABA to increase the profile of women and minorities in the legal profession. Mac Crate told Gerth and Van Natta that Mrs. Clinton declined, saying that she didn't want gender equity to be linked with race. She prevailed. Two years later, she agreed to head an ABA commission examining the status in the legal profession. Issues of race were not to be scrutinized.
By 1987, Hillary was wearying of life as first lady of Arkansas and began to press her husband on the 20-year plan they had made long before, whose consummation would be a successful run by Bill for the U.S. presidency. Dick Morris was assigned the task of running polls on Bill's chances. Betsey Wright was charged with sizing up the "problems". Morris' news was grim. The Democratic Party was not sold on the prospect of the governor of Arkansas as their nominee in l988. Betsey Wright sat down with Bill and Hillary and read out to both of them a list of dozens of women Wright believed Bill had had some kind of fling with during his gubernatorial years. Bill's head sank into his hands, and he mumbled, "I'm not going to run for president and I don't want to run for re-election as governor either". As Wright recalled later, Hillary stood up and cried, "If you're not gonna run for re-election, I'm gonna run". "Okay", said Bill, he'd run again. It was Hillary's call.
The next four years were spent gearing up for the White House run and trying to bury Bill's past. Amid these efforts Hillary made two huge mistakes, which haunted the Clintons throughout the 1992 campaign and their White House years. Clinton's opponent in the 1990 governor's race was Sheffield Nelson, a Little Rock lawyer. Nelson had accumulated a dirt file on Bill, detailing his sexual escapades and the couple's Whitewater real estate transactions. But he never used this material in the campaign. Nonetheless, in 1990 Hillary Clinton publicly excoriated Nelson, calling him "a vindictive and very bitter man". The reason for Hillary's assault was that Nelson, in the climactic weeks of the race, had saturated the airwaves with a series of campaign ads charging Clinton with being a tax-and-spend Democrat. The ads had some effect, and the Clintons had to borrow $100,000 from the Jackson Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank to mount a counteroffensive ad campaign of their own. Nelson, seething at Hillary's onslaught, duly became bitter and vindictive and, as Clinton's presidential campaign got under way, he began to leak ripe details from the file he had kept closed in l990.
Her second mistake also came in 1990, when Jim McDougal was facing trial over the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In his hour of need, he asked Bill to testify as a character witness in his trial. Though Bill was willing to do so, Hillary was adamant that he should avoid any association with McDougal. She successfully persuaded Bill to decline. McDougal was acquitted, but he never forgave the Clintons for their disloyalty. He too began to leak damaging stories about Whitewater to Gerth and other reporters from his rusting trailer in Arkadelphia. Thus, even as she kindled her husband's presidential bid, Hillary helped spark the fires of financial and sexual scandal that almost destroyed his presidency.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11152007.html
How juicy! This is the kind of thing Maureen Dowd should be writing about instead of obsessing over Hillary's marriage or whatever sexist crap Dowd can't seem to extricate herself from.
I can't wait to read the other two installments about your girl, Sonic. :p
Counterpunch
November 14, 2007
From Nixon Girl to Watergate
The Making of Hillary Clinton
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
First in a three-part series.
Hillary Clinton has always been an old-style Midwestern Republican in the Illinois style; one severely infected with Methodism, unlike the more populist variants from Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Her first known political enterprise was in the 1960 presidential election, the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana and Judith Exner. Hillary was a Nixon supporter. She took it on herself to probe allegations of vote fraud. From the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chicago's west side, she journeyed to the tenements of the south side, a voter list in her hand. She went to an address recorded as the domicile of hundreds of Democratic voters and duly found an empty lot. She rushed back to campaign headquarters, agog with her discovery, only to be told that Nixon was throwing in the towel.
The way Hillary Clinton tells it in her Living History (an autobiography convincingly demolished by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta in their Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, an interesting and well researched account ) she went straight from the Nixon camp to the cause of Martin Luther King Jr., and never swerved from that commitment. Not so. Like many Illinois Republicans, she did have a fascination for the Civil Rights movement and spent some time on the south side, mainly in African Methodist churches under the guidance of Don Jones, a teacher at her high school. It was Jones who took her to hear King speak at Chicago's Orchestra Hall and later introduced her to the Civil Rights leader.
Gerth and Van Natta eschew psychological theorizing, but it seems clear that the dominant influence in Hillary life was her father, a fairly successful, albeit tightwad Welsh draper, supplying Hilton hotels and other chains. From this irritable patriarch Hillary kept secret--a marked penchant throughout her life--her outings with Jones and her encounter with King. Her public persona was that of a Goldwater Girl. She battled for Goldwater through the 1964 debacle and arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1965 with enough Goldwaterite ambition to become president of the Young Republicans as a freshman.
The setting of Hillary's political compass came in the late Sixties. The fraught year of 1968 saw the Goldwater girl getting a high-level internship in the House Republican Conference with Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird, without an ounce of the Goldwater libertarian pizzazz. Hillary says the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, plus the war in Vietnam, hit her hard. The impact was not of the intensity that prompted many of her generation to become radicals. She left the suburb of Park Forest and rushed to Miami to the Republican Convention where she fulfilled a lifelong dream of meeting Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and devoted her energies to saving the Party from her former icon, Nixon, by working for Nelson Rockefeller.
Nixon triumphed, and Hillary returned to Chicago in time for the Democratic Convention where she paid an afternoon's visit to Grant Park. By now a proclaimed supporter of Gene McCarthy, she was appalled, not by the spectacle of McCarthy's young supporters being beaten senseless by Daley's cops, but by the protesters' tactics, which she concluded were not viable. Like her future husband, Hillary was always concerned with maintaining viability within the system.
After the convention Hillary embarked on her yearlong senior thesis, on the topic of the Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. She has successfully persuaded Wellesley to keep this under lock and key, but Gerth and Van Natta got hold of a copy. So far from being an exaltation of radical organizing, Hillary's assessment of Alinsky was hostile, charging him with excessive radicalism. Her preferential option was to seek minor advances within the terms of the system. She did not share these conclusions with Alinsky who had given her generous access during the preparation of her thesis and a job offer thereafter, which she declined.
What first set Hillary in the national spotlight was her commencement address at Wellesley, the first time any student had been given this opportunity. Dean Acheson's granddaughter insisted to the president of Wellesley that youth be given its say, and the president picked Hillary as youth's tribune. Her somewhat incoherent speech included some flicks at the official commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, for failing to mention the Civil Rights movement or the war. Wellesley's president, still fuming at this discourtesy, saw Hillary skinny-dipping in Lake Waban that evening and told a security guard to steal her clothes.
The militant summer of 1969 saw Hillary cleaning fish in Valdez, Alaska, and in the fall she was at Yale being stalked by Bill Clinton in the library. The first real anti-war protests at Yale came with the shooting of the students at Kent State. Hillary saw the ensuing national student upheaval as, once again, a culpable failure to work within the system. "I advocated engagement, not disruption."
She finally consented to go on a date with Bill Clinton, and they agreed to visit a Rothko exhibit at the Yale art gallery. At the time of their scheduled rendez-vous with art, the gallery was closed because the museum's workers were on strike. The two had no inhibitions about crossing a picket line. Bill worked as a scab in the museum, doing janitorial work for the morning, getting as reward a free tour with Hillary in the afternoon.
In the meantime, Hillary was forging long-term alliances with such future stars of the Clinton age as Marian Wright Edelman and her husband Peter, and also with one of the prime political fixers of the Nineties, Vernon Jordan. It was Hillary who introduced Bill to these people, as well as to Senator Fritz Mondale and his staffers.
If any one person gave Hillary her start in liberal Democratic politics, it was Marian Wright Edelman who took Hillary with her when she started the Children's Defense Fund. The two were inseparable for the next twenty-five years. In her autobiography, published in 2003, Hillary lists the 400 people who have most influenced her. Marion Wright Edelman doesn't make the cut. Neither to forget nor to forgive. Peter Edelman was one of three Clinton appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services who quit when Clinton signed the Welfare reform bill, which was about as far from any "defense" of children as one could possibly imagine.
Hillary was on Mondale's staff for the summer of '71, investigating worker abuses in the sugarcane plantations of southern Florida, as close to slavery as anywhere in the U.S.A. Life's ironies: Hillary raised not a cheep of protest when one of the prime plantation families, the Fanjuls, called in their chips (laid down in the form of big campaign contributions to Clinton) and insisted that Clinton tell Vice President Gore to abandon his calls for the Everglades to be restored, thus taking water Fanjul was appropriating for his operation.
From 1971 on, Bill and Hillary were a political couple. In 1972, they went down to Texas and spent some months working for the McGovern campaign, swiftly becoming disillusioned with what they regarded as an exercise in futile ultraliberalism. They planned to rescue the Democratic Party from this fate by the strategy they have followed ever since: the pro-corporate, hawkish neoliberal recipes that have become institutionalized in the Democratic Leadership Council, of which Bill Clinton and Al Gore were founding members.
In 1973, Bill and Hillary went off on a European vacation, during which they laid out their 20-year project designed to culminate with Bill's election as president. Inflamed with this vision, Bill proposed marriage in front of Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District. Hillary declined, the first of twelve similar refusals over the next year. Bill went off to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to seek political office. Hillary, for whom Arkansas remained an unappetizing prospect, eagerly accepted, in December '73, majority counsel John Doar's invitation to work for the House committee preparing the impeachment of Richard Nixon. She spent the next months listening to Nixon's tapes. Her main assignment was to prepare an organizational chart of the Nixon White House. It bore an eerie resemblance to the twilit labyrinth of the Clinton White House 18 years later.
Hillary had an offer to become the in-house counsel of the Children's Defense Fund and seemed set to become a high-flying public interest Washington lawyer. There was one impediment. She failed the D.C. bar exam. She passed the Arkansas bar exam. In August of 1974, she finally moved to Little Rock and married Bill in 1975 at a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Vic Nixon. They honeymooned in Acapulco with her entire family, including her two brothers' girlfriends, all staying in the same suite.
After Bill was elected governor of Arkansas in 1976, Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm, the first woman partner in an outfit almost as old as the Republic. It was all corporate business, and the firm's prime clients were the state's business heavyweights--Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart, Jackson Stevens Investments, Worthen Bank and the timber company Weyerhaeuser, the state's largest landowner.
Two early cases (of a total of five that Hillary actually tried) charted her course. The first concerned the successful effort of Acorn--a public interest group doing community organizing--to force the utilities to lower electric rates on residential consumers and raise on industrial users. Hillary represented the utilities in a challenge to this progressive law, the classic right-wing claim, arguing that the measure represented an unconstitutional "taking" of property rights. She carried the day for the utilities.
The second case found Hillary representing the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Arkansas in a lawsuit filed by a disabled former employee who had been denied full retirement benefits by the company. In earlier years, Hillary had worked at the Children's Defense Fund on behalf of abused employees and disabled children. Only months earlier, while still a member of the Washington, D.C., public interest community, she had publicly ripped Joseph Califano for becoming the Coca Cola company's public counsel. "You sold us out, you, you sold us out!" she screamed publicly at Califano. Working now for Coca Cola, Hillary prevailed
Tomorrow: HRC and the Arkansas Elite.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11142007.html
Edited By Akash on 1195088533
I can't wait to read the other two installments about your girl, Sonic. :p
Counterpunch
November 14, 2007
From Nixon Girl to Watergate
The Making of Hillary Clinton
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
First in a three-part series.
Hillary Clinton has always been an old-style Midwestern Republican in the Illinois style; one severely infected with Methodism, unlike the more populist variants from Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Her first known political enterprise was in the 1960 presidential election, the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana and Judith Exner. Hillary was a Nixon supporter. She took it on herself to probe allegations of vote fraud. From the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chicago's west side, she journeyed to the tenements of the south side, a voter list in her hand. She went to an address recorded as the domicile of hundreds of Democratic voters and duly found an empty lot. She rushed back to campaign headquarters, agog with her discovery, only to be told that Nixon was throwing in the towel.
The way Hillary Clinton tells it in her Living History (an autobiography convincingly demolished by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta in their Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, an interesting and well researched account ) she went straight from the Nixon camp to the cause of Martin Luther King Jr., and never swerved from that commitment. Not so. Like many Illinois Republicans, she did have a fascination for the Civil Rights movement and spent some time on the south side, mainly in African Methodist churches under the guidance of Don Jones, a teacher at her high school. It was Jones who took her to hear King speak at Chicago's Orchestra Hall and later introduced her to the Civil Rights leader.
Gerth and Van Natta eschew psychological theorizing, but it seems clear that the dominant influence in Hillary life was her father, a fairly successful, albeit tightwad Welsh draper, supplying Hilton hotels and other chains. From this irritable patriarch Hillary kept secret--a marked penchant throughout her life--her outings with Jones and her encounter with King. Her public persona was that of a Goldwater Girl. She battled for Goldwater through the 1964 debacle and arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1965 with enough Goldwaterite ambition to become president of the Young Republicans as a freshman.
The setting of Hillary's political compass came in the late Sixties. The fraught year of 1968 saw the Goldwater girl getting a high-level internship in the House Republican Conference with Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird, without an ounce of the Goldwater libertarian pizzazz. Hillary says the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, plus the war in Vietnam, hit her hard. The impact was not of the intensity that prompted many of her generation to become radicals. She left the suburb of Park Forest and rushed to Miami to the Republican Convention where she fulfilled a lifelong dream of meeting Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and devoted her energies to saving the Party from her former icon, Nixon, by working for Nelson Rockefeller.
Nixon triumphed, and Hillary returned to Chicago in time for the Democratic Convention where she paid an afternoon's visit to Grant Park. By now a proclaimed supporter of Gene McCarthy, she was appalled, not by the spectacle of McCarthy's young supporters being beaten senseless by Daley's cops, but by the protesters' tactics, which she concluded were not viable. Like her future husband, Hillary was always concerned with maintaining viability within the system.
After the convention Hillary embarked on her yearlong senior thesis, on the topic of the Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. She has successfully persuaded Wellesley to keep this under lock and key, but Gerth and Van Natta got hold of a copy. So far from being an exaltation of radical organizing, Hillary's assessment of Alinsky was hostile, charging him with excessive radicalism. Her preferential option was to seek minor advances within the terms of the system. She did not share these conclusions with Alinsky who had given her generous access during the preparation of her thesis and a job offer thereafter, which she declined.
What first set Hillary in the national spotlight was her commencement address at Wellesley, the first time any student had been given this opportunity. Dean Acheson's granddaughter insisted to the president of Wellesley that youth be given its say, and the president picked Hillary as youth's tribune. Her somewhat incoherent speech included some flicks at the official commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, for failing to mention the Civil Rights movement or the war. Wellesley's president, still fuming at this discourtesy, saw Hillary skinny-dipping in Lake Waban that evening and told a security guard to steal her clothes.
The militant summer of 1969 saw Hillary cleaning fish in Valdez, Alaska, and in the fall she was at Yale being stalked by Bill Clinton in the library. The first real anti-war protests at Yale came with the shooting of the students at Kent State. Hillary saw the ensuing national student upheaval as, once again, a culpable failure to work within the system. "I advocated engagement, not disruption."
She finally consented to go on a date with Bill Clinton, and they agreed to visit a Rothko exhibit at the Yale art gallery. At the time of their scheduled rendez-vous with art, the gallery was closed because the museum's workers were on strike. The two had no inhibitions about crossing a picket line. Bill worked as a scab in the museum, doing janitorial work for the morning, getting as reward a free tour with Hillary in the afternoon.
In the meantime, Hillary was forging long-term alliances with such future stars of the Clinton age as Marian Wright Edelman and her husband Peter, and also with one of the prime political fixers of the Nineties, Vernon Jordan. It was Hillary who introduced Bill to these people, as well as to Senator Fritz Mondale and his staffers.
If any one person gave Hillary her start in liberal Democratic politics, it was Marian Wright Edelman who took Hillary with her when she started the Children's Defense Fund. The two were inseparable for the next twenty-five years. In her autobiography, published in 2003, Hillary lists the 400 people who have most influenced her. Marion Wright Edelman doesn't make the cut. Neither to forget nor to forgive. Peter Edelman was one of three Clinton appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services who quit when Clinton signed the Welfare reform bill, which was about as far from any "defense" of children as one could possibly imagine.
Hillary was on Mondale's staff for the summer of '71, investigating worker abuses in the sugarcane plantations of southern Florida, as close to slavery as anywhere in the U.S.A. Life's ironies: Hillary raised not a cheep of protest when one of the prime plantation families, the Fanjuls, called in their chips (laid down in the form of big campaign contributions to Clinton) and insisted that Clinton tell Vice President Gore to abandon his calls for the Everglades to be restored, thus taking water Fanjul was appropriating for his operation.
From 1971 on, Bill and Hillary were a political couple. In 1972, they went down to Texas and spent some months working for the McGovern campaign, swiftly becoming disillusioned with what they regarded as an exercise in futile ultraliberalism. They planned to rescue the Democratic Party from this fate by the strategy they have followed ever since: the pro-corporate, hawkish neoliberal recipes that have become institutionalized in the Democratic Leadership Council, of which Bill Clinton and Al Gore were founding members.
In 1973, Bill and Hillary went off on a European vacation, during which they laid out their 20-year project designed to culminate with Bill's election as president. Inflamed with this vision, Bill proposed marriage in front of Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District. Hillary declined, the first of twelve similar refusals over the next year. Bill went off to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to seek political office. Hillary, for whom Arkansas remained an unappetizing prospect, eagerly accepted, in December '73, majority counsel John Doar's invitation to work for the House committee preparing the impeachment of Richard Nixon. She spent the next months listening to Nixon's tapes. Her main assignment was to prepare an organizational chart of the Nixon White House. It bore an eerie resemblance to the twilit labyrinth of the Clinton White House 18 years later.
Hillary had an offer to become the in-house counsel of the Children's Defense Fund and seemed set to become a high-flying public interest Washington lawyer. There was one impediment. She failed the D.C. bar exam. She passed the Arkansas bar exam. In August of 1974, she finally moved to Little Rock and married Bill in 1975 at a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Vic Nixon. They honeymooned in Acapulco with her entire family, including her two brothers' girlfriends, all staying in the same suite.
After Bill was elected governor of Arkansas in 1976, Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm, the first woman partner in an outfit almost as old as the Republic. It was all corporate business, and the firm's prime clients were the state's business heavyweights--Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart, Jackson Stevens Investments, Worthen Bank and the timber company Weyerhaeuser, the state's largest landowner.
Two early cases (of a total of five that Hillary actually tried) charted her course. The first concerned the successful effort of Acorn--a public interest group doing community organizing--to force the utilities to lower electric rates on residential consumers and raise on industrial users. Hillary represented the utilities in a challenge to this progressive law, the classic right-wing claim, arguing that the measure represented an unconstitutional "taking" of property rights. She carried the day for the utilities.
The second case found Hillary representing the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Arkansas in a lawsuit filed by a disabled former employee who had been denied full retirement benefits by the company. In earlier years, Hillary had worked at the Children's Defense Fund on behalf of abused employees and disabled children. Only months earlier, while still a member of the Washington, D.C., public interest community, she had publicly ripped Joseph Califano for becoming the Coca Cola company's public counsel. "You sold us out, you, you sold us out!" she screamed publicly at Califano. Working now for Coca Cola, Hillary prevailed
Tomorrow: HRC and the Arkansas Elite.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11142007.html
Edited By Akash on 1195088533
This one is only kinda sorta 'bout Hillary. But I just have to ask: are straight American men really this insecure? I have absolutely no problem being with a woman who makes more money than I do and buying me things.
New York Times
November 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?
By MAUREEN DOWD
In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy.
“Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”
Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed.
But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”
Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on dating. With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus.
The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.
“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”
As he recapped the experiment in Slate last week:
“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.”
He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.
“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”
Hillary Clinton, who is trying to crash through the Oval glass ceiling, may hope that we’re evolving into a kingdom of queen bees and their male slaves. But stories have been popping up that suggest that evolution is moving forward in a circuitous route, with lots of speed bumps.
Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they’re built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.
Yet Alex Williams recently reported in The Times that the new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter “forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet,” leaving them “trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.”
Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.
Even though men and women in surveys often say that a salary gender gap doesn’t matter, in the real world it can play out differently — either because the man has subterranean resentment he can’t shed, or the woman equates it with a lack of male drive.
Evolution is lurching ahead unevenly at the office, as well. The Times’s Lisa Belkin wrote this month about the confusing array of signals for executive women that can leave them hamstrung.
Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”
Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.
Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.
Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.
That may be why Obama is trying to get “fired up,” in the words of his fall slogan, while Hillary calmly observes that she can take the heat and stereotypically adds that she likes the kitchen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14dowd.html?hp
Edited By Akash on 1195081923
New York Times
November 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?
By MAUREEN DOWD
In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy.
“Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”
Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed.
But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”
Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on dating. With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus.
The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.
“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”
As he recapped the experiment in Slate last week:
“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.”
He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.
“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”
Hillary Clinton, who is trying to crash through the Oval glass ceiling, may hope that we’re evolving into a kingdom of queen bees and their male slaves. But stories have been popping up that suggest that evolution is moving forward in a circuitous route, with lots of speed bumps.
Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they’re built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.
Yet Alex Williams recently reported in The Times that the new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter “forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet,” leaving them “trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.”
Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.
Even though men and women in surveys often say that a salary gender gap doesn’t matter, in the real world it can play out differently — either because the man has subterranean resentment he can’t shed, or the woman equates it with a lack of male drive.
Evolution is lurching ahead unevenly at the office, as well. The Times’s Lisa Belkin wrote this month about the confusing array of signals for executive women that can leave them hamstrung.
Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”
Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.
Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.
Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.
That may be why Obama is trying to get “fired up,” in the words of his fall slogan, while Hillary calmly observes that she can take the heat and stereotypically adds that she likes the kitchen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14dowd.html?hp
Edited By Akash on 1195081923
Oh Barney Frank! What a sell out you've become!
Um yeah right, Barney. Doesn't Hillary's position on gay marriage effectively refute his claim in the first quote?? But then I guess this shouldn't shock me coming from a man who believed an anti-discrimination law should effectively discriminate by excluding transgendered people.
Edited By Akash on 1195024210
The Massachusetts Democrat said that he is "convinced that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to pass laws that will treat all Americans with dignity, fairness and equality no matter who they are or who they love."
Baldwin acknowledged at the time, however, that she and Clinton do not see eye to eye on the issue of same-sex marriage. The New York senator supports domestic partnership initiatives and civil unions, but has opposed moves that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.
Um yeah right, Barney. Doesn't Hillary's position on gay marriage effectively refute his claim in the first quote?? But then I guess this shouldn't shock me coming from a man who believed an anti-discrimination law should effectively discriminate by excluding transgendered people.
Edited By Akash on 1195024210
-
Aceisgreat
- Temp
- Posts: 459
- Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 7:56 am
Barney Frank: Clinton "Best Equipped" to Advance Gay Rights
The Nation -- Both openly-gay members of Congress have now endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The New York senator secured the support of Tammy Baldwin, the Wisconsin congresswoman who is the only out lesbian in the House, months ago. And this week Clinton gained the enthusiastic endorsement of House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the only out gay man currently serving in the chamber.
Frank specifically hailed Clinton's support for gay and lesbian rights in announcing his decision to back the woman who current leads in national polling on the Democratic race and who is the front-runner in most early caucus and primary states.
The Massachusetts Democrat said that he is "convinced that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to pass laws that will treat all Americans with dignity, fairness and equality no matter who they are or who they love."
That comment came as part of a particularly warm embrace of Clinton by Frank, who has traditionally been one of the party's most determined and effective campaigners among liberals in Massachusetts and other states.
"I have from the beginning of this campaign believed that Hillary Clinton was the candidate best qualified to serve as president," the congressman explained. "I am convinced that once elected, the qualities she will bring to the job -- commitment, intellect and political skills -- will make her an extremely effective leader in our effort to reverse the badly flawed course on which George Bush and past Republican Congresses have set this country."
Frank's sister, veteran Democratic party leader Ann Lewis, is a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign. He has been a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
When Baldwin endorsed Clinton last summer, she cited her longstanding friendship with the senator as well as a shared commitment to health care reform. In addition, the Wisconsinite described Clinton as "strong and vocal" in her support of ending employment discrimination against gays and lesbians.
Baldwin acknowledged at the time, however, that she and Clinton do not see eye to eye on the issue of same-sex marriage. The New York senator supports domestic partnership initiatives and civil unions, but has opposed moves that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.
"It's not my position," Baldwin said of Clinton's stance. "I support full marriage equality. We will voice encouragement for (Clinton) to be open to changing her opinion."
Clinton's chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, Illinois Senator Barack Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, share the front-runners opposition to same-sex marriage.
In contrast, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a longtime colleague of Frank and Baldwin in the House who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nod, has been an outspoken backer of marriage equality for many years. Says Kucinich, "This is really a question of whether you really believe in equality. When you understand what real equality is, you understand that people who love each other must have the opportunity to be able to express that in a way that's meaningful."
The Nation -- Both openly-gay members of Congress have now endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The New York senator secured the support of Tammy Baldwin, the Wisconsin congresswoman who is the only out lesbian in the House, months ago. And this week Clinton gained the enthusiastic endorsement of House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the only out gay man currently serving in the chamber.
Frank specifically hailed Clinton's support for gay and lesbian rights in announcing his decision to back the woman who current leads in national polling on the Democratic race and who is the front-runner in most early caucus and primary states.
The Massachusetts Democrat said that he is "convinced that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to pass laws that will treat all Americans with dignity, fairness and equality no matter who they are or who they love."
That comment came as part of a particularly warm embrace of Clinton by Frank, who has traditionally been one of the party's most determined and effective campaigners among liberals in Massachusetts and other states.
"I have from the beginning of this campaign believed that Hillary Clinton was the candidate best qualified to serve as president," the congressman explained. "I am convinced that once elected, the qualities she will bring to the job -- commitment, intellect and political skills -- will make her an extremely effective leader in our effort to reverse the badly flawed course on which George Bush and past Republican Congresses have set this country."
Frank's sister, veteran Democratic party leader Ann Lewis, is a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign. He has been a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
When Baldwin endorsed Clinton last summer, she cited her longstanding friendship with the senator as well as a shared commitment to health care reform. In addition, the Wisconsinite described Clinton as "strong and vocal" in her support of ending employment discrimination against gays and lesbians.
Baldwin acknowledged at the time, however, that she and Clinton do not see eye to eye on the issue of same-sex marriage. The New York senator supports domestic partnership initiatives and civil unions, but has opposed moves that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.
"It's not my position," Baldwin said of Clinton's stance. "I support full marriage equality. We will voice encouragement for (Clinton) to be open to changing her opinion."
Clinton's chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, Illinois Senator Barack Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, share the front-runners opposition to same-sex marriage.
In contrast, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a longtime colleague of Frank and Baldwin in the House who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nod, has been an outspoken backer of marriage equality for many years. Says Kucinich, "This is really a question of whether you really believe in equality. When you understand what real equality is, you understand that people who love each other must have the opportunity to be able to express that in a way that's meaningful."
"I can't stand a naked light bulb any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action." -- Blanche DuBois
I'm not usually after men in their late 60's, but I'd have Alexander Cockburn's babies if I could. Er, sort of...I mean, I'd abort his babies -- or whatever is the liberal/feminist equivalent.
CounterPunch Diary
Hillary's Big Problem and How Bill Can Fix It
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Hillary's problem is that she's not too quick on her feet, unlike her husband Bill, a Baryshnikov of equivocation, who in his heyday could pirouette effortlessly across the political spectrum in a single phrase. In that Fatal Debate, out there under the spotlights, with Tim Russert as moderator and Obama and John Edwards gunning for her, Mrs Clinton blew it, just exactly at the moment when every laptop pundit in the blathersphere was getting bored with the apparent certainty that H. Clinton would be the party's nominee.
So they've been piling on ever since. Campaign Clinton protests they're picking on a woman, and the crowd roars that Hillary's playing the poor-little-me card. Campaign Clinton says she's one tough woman and the crowd howls back that she can't have it both ways.
Right now, her campaign is dazed and bleeding. This time Hillary's "vast conspiracy" is not the grantees' list of Richard Mellon Scaife, but Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and a hefty slice of the press which wants to see HRC trip up and hence gives Senator Obama a fairly free ride in this phase.
Will she implode, just like that front-runner of November, 2004, Howard Dean? I still doubt it, just like I doubt that the US will attack Iran. But, as the President of the Free World once said, "Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." Hillary Clinton has a ton of money and the solid support of the Democratic Party's bosses, which is not surprising since the Clintons picked these bosses in the first place. A great many women in America want her to be president. Recovery is a process the Clintons have been refining every since Hillary got herself into trouble with the voters of Arkansas back in 1978 for insisting on the first lady of that state be called Hillary Rodham, a stand on feminist principle she abandoned in time for the 1980 governor's race.
Schizophrenia is a mandatory condition for all Democratic presidential candidates, never more so than at this stage in America's election cycle. They have to rush from Davenport, Iowa, to Manchester, New Hampshire projecting constructive uplift to the party liberals who can make and break them in these early days. But simultaneously they have to make sure not to offend the flag-wagging, book-burning, Fortress America legions who will elect America's next president in November, 2008.
So when Hillary Clinton says she's in favor of giving illegal immigrants driving licenses, albeit hostile to this becoming a practical option; or in favor of an end to the war in Iraq, while vehement in the war on terror; or supportive of regulatory curbs on law-breaking corporations, while cautious about messing with free enterprise; or committed to hate-crime legislation to protect gays, while committed to equal rights for all Americans, she's just talking the talk and walking the walk. If a Democrat mentions love in the first part of any sentence, there had better be an endorsement of war before the full stop. Two endorsements, if the Democrat is a woman.
So of course Hillary bobs and weaves. She's not alone. On a clear day from the summit of Mount Obama one can see as many as three contradictory political intentions in a single paragraph. Only the rank outsiders and third-ranked contenders like Edwards stick to principled positions, because they've got only truly committed enthusiasts to lose.
So Hillary will probably survive this typhoon. But the bigger problem is not going away. There's a solid slice of the flag-wagging, book-burning, Fortress America legions which will never, under any conditions, vote for Hillary Clinton a year from now. Every equivocation on immigrants, on the war, will be replayed next fall as mercilessly as John Kerry's fence straddles in 2004 on his record on the war in Iraq. Hillary's only chance is to have the Republican vote split by the Evangelical Christians, unable to stomach a pro-abortion wife-hopper like Giuliani, running a candidate of their own. Some born again type from the South.
Now if Bill really wants to make it up to Hillary ...
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11132007.html
Edited By Akash on 1194990318
CounterPunch Diary
Hillary's Big Problem and How Bill Can Fix It
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Hillary's problem is that she's not too quick on her feet, unlike her husband Bill, a Baryshnikov of equivocation, who in his heyday could pirouette effortlessly across the political spectrum in a single phrase. In that Fatal Debate, out there under the spotlights, with Tim Russert as moderator and Obama and John Edwards gunning for her, Mrs Clinton blew it, just exactly at the moment when every laptop pundit in the blathersphere was getting bored with the apparent certainty that H. Clinton would be the party's nominee.
So they've been piling on ever since. Campaign Clinton protests they're picking on a woman, and the crowd roars that Hillary's playing the poor-little-me card. Campaign Clinton says she's one tough woman and the crowd howls back that she can't have it both ways.
Right now, her campaign is dazed and bleeding. This time Hillary's "vast conspiracy" is not the grantees' list of Richard Mellon Scaife, but Tim Russert, Chris Matthews and a hefty slice of the press which wants to see HRC trip up and hence gives Senator Obama a fairly free ride in this phase.
Will she implode, just like that front-runner of November, 2004, Howard Dean? I still doubt it, just like I doubt that the US will attack Iran. But, as the President of the Free World once said, "Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." Hillary Clinton has a ton of money and the solid support of the Democratic Party's bosses, which is not surprising since the Clintons picked these bosses in the first place. A great many women in America want her to be president. Recovery is a process the Clintons have been refining every since Hillary got herself into trouble with the voters of Arkansas back in 1978 for insisting on the first lady of that state be called Hillary Rodham, a stand on feminist principle she abandoned in time for the 1980 governor's race.
Schizophrenia is a mandatory condition for all Democratic presidential candidates, never more so than at this stage in America's election cycle. They have to rush from Davenport, Iowa, to Manchester, New Hampshire projecting constructive uplift to the party liberals who can make and break them in these early days. But simultaneously they have to make sure not to offend the flag-wagging, book-burning, Fortress America legions who will elect America's next president in November, 2008.
So when Hillary Clinton says she's in favor of giving illegal immigrants driving licenses, albeit hostile to this becoming a practical option; or in favor of an end to the war in Iraq, while vehement in the war on terror; or supportive of regulatory curbs on law-breaking corporations, while cautious about messing with free enterprise; or committed to hate-crime legislation to protect gays, while committed to equal rights for all Americans, she's just talking the talk and walking the walk. If a Democrat mentions love in the first part of any sentence, there had better be an endorsement of war before the full stop. Two endorsements, if the Democrat is a woman.
So of course Hillary bobs and weaves. She's not alone. On a clear day from the summit of Mount Obama one can see as many as three contradictory political intentions in a single paragraph. Only the rank outsiders and third-ranked contenders like Edwards stick to principled positions, because they've got only truly committed enthusiasts to lose.
So Hillary will probably survive this typhoon. But the bigger problem is not going away. There's a solid slice of the flag-wagging, book-burning, Fortress America legions which will never, under any conditions, vote for Hillary Clinton a year from now. Every equivocation on immigrants, on the war, will be replayed next fall as mercilessly as John Kerry's fence straddles in 2004 on his record on the war in Iraq. Hillary's only chance is to have the Republican vote split by the Evangelical Christians, unable to stomach a pro-abortion wife-hopper like Giuliani, running a candidate of their own. Some born again type from the South.
Now if Bill really wants to make it up to Hillary ...
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11132007.html
Edited By Akash on 1194990318
-
Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
Another slap. Bitch.
Counterpunch. November 9th, 2007
The Clinton Policy is the Bush Policy
Hillary Clinton's Lack of Respect for Latin America
By TOM BARRY
"A great nation must command the respect of others," writes Hillary Clinton in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. But what about showing a little respect? In her infatuation with U.S. power and the transcendent "American idea," she forgets that international cooperation is not just about winning respect, it's also about respecting other nations.
In her outline of her foreign policy agenda, titled "Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century," Clinton laments that the Bush administration "has squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends." As president, Clinton promises to introduce America to the world, and to demonstrate that the "United States is committed to building a world we want, rather than simply defending against a world we fear." That world, says Clinton, will be "a world of security and opportunity."
But Clinton's cursory review of Latin America policy won't win much respect in Latin America. In the one paragraph devoted to Latin America in her 18-page essay, Clinton focused more on U.S. fear of new political developments in the region than on ways to increase human security and opportunity.
According to Clinton, the Bush administration neglected "at our peril" the new political developments in Latin America. Without naming names, Clinton asserts, "We have witnessed the rollback of democratic development and economic openness in parts of Latin America."
Rather than applauding the new willingness of an increasing number of elected governments to tackle the structural obstacles that have marginalized the poor and indigenous populations, Clinton evokes a picture of a region threatened by retrograde forces. Blaming the Bush administration for its negligence, Clinton implies that a more engaged U.S. policy could have obstructed the rise of democratically elected left-center governments, such as those in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
"We must return to a policy of vigorous engagement: this is too critical a region for the United States to stand idly by," asserts Clinton.
But what kind of "vigorous engagement" is she talking about? Past forms have included intervention in national elections, financial and military support for illegal opposition movements, propaganda campaigns to carry the message of pro-U.S. forces and vilify others. Any "return" to policies like these is not likely to be regarded kindly in Latin America. With few positive examples to cite recently, U.S. engagement to protect "critical" U.S. geopolitical and economic interests has too often been synonymous with intervention.
Priorities in the region, according to Clinton, include supporting the "largest developing democracies in the region, Brazil and Mexico"; deepening "economic and strategic cooperation with Argentina and Chile"; and combating "the interconnected threats of drug trafficking, crime, and insurgency" in Colombia, Central America, and the Caribbean.
After establishing this aggressive agenda for U.S. involvement in security issues she concludes, "We must work with our allies to provide sustainable-development programs that promote economic opportunity and reduce inequality for the citizens of Latin America."
In short as president, Hillary Clinton's Latin American policy would likely be very similar to that of the Bush I, Clinton I, and Bush II administrations before her-with the only notable difference being that her administration may take stronger measures to counter governments that dare to determine their own trade, development, and foreign policies.
In laying out her policy, she fails to mention the need to overhaul the monumentally flawed Cuba policy, and in fact has said elsewhere that she wouldn't lift the trade embargo until there is a "democratic transition." Apparently she has no intention of modifying the strategy of the failed drug wars either, even though U.S. policies of drug interdiction, drug eradication, and counterinsurgency have not slowed the flow of illegal drugs and have caused enormous problems of displacement and environmental destruction.
Candidate Clinton offers a U.S. policy that promotes economic opportunity to reduce inequality. But her solutions-economic "openness" and foreign aid-are the standard formulas that have increased inequality and prompted the search for alternatives among the nations she criticizes for "rolling back economic openness" in an effort to provide basic needs to their citizens.
While the Washington political establishment is stuck within a narrow band of policy options, Latin American nations, particularly in South America, are experimenting with new policies aimed at setting their nations on sustainable development paths. Establishing national control over energy resources, sponsoring agrarian reforms, and breaking free of the economic reforms imposed by the international financial institutions are among the policies that have antagonized the Bush administration.
To win the respect of Latin Americans, Clinton doesn't need to endorse these policy alternatives. But she does need to respect the right of Latin Americans to set their own directions.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt set out to build cooperative relations in Latin America after three decades of imperial interventions and occupations, he promised that his "policy of the good neighbor" would be founded on "mutual respect" and self-determination. While the FDR administration did not always follow its own good neighbor principles, it did go a long way to building respect for the United States and a culture of cooperation in the Americas.
Clinton asserts that respect can be won by a leadership that "draws on all the dimensions of American power" and reestablishes the authority of the "American idea." But to regain respect for U.S. leadership, whether in Latin America or elsewhere, the United States will need to return to basic good neighbor principles. Rather than relying on its power and ideas that have largely lost credibility in the hemisphere, she needs to let Latin Americans set their own policy agendas. Some new thinking is long overdue, but Hillary Clinton isn't offering it.
Clinton fails to recognize that the United States must acknowledge that U.S.-Latin America relations are imperiled much more by U.S. arrogance and its misdirected "engagement" than by negligence or inaction in the face of imagined threats to U.S. interests. Moving forward, the foundation of improved relations and sustainable development in the Americas must be "mutual respect."
If Clinton wants respect for U.S. foreign policy, then she will need to show more respect for our southern neighbors. As a start, Clinton should tell Latin Americans that she respects their right to decide for themselves what is needed to ensure "security and opportunity."
Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy.
http://www.counterpunch.org/barry11092007.html
Counterpunch. November 9th, 2007
The Clinton Policy is the Bush Policy
Hillary Clinton's Lack of Respect for Latin America
By TOM BARRY
"A great nation must command the respect of others," writes Hillary Clinton in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. But what about showing a little respect? In her infatuation with U.S. power and the transcendent "American idea," she forgets that international cooperation is not just about winning respect, it's also about respecting other nations.
In her outline of her foreign policy agenda, titled "Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century," Clinton laments that the Bush administration "has squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends." As president, Clinton promises to introduce America to the world, and to demonstrate that the "United States is committed to building a world we want, rather than simply defending against a world we fear." That world, says Clinton, will be "a world of security and opportunity."
But Clinton's cursory review of Latin America policy won't win much respect in Latin America. In the one paragraph devoted to Latin America in her 18-page essay, Clinton focused more on U.S. fear of new political developments in the region than on ways to increase human security and opportunity.
According to Clinton, the Bush administration neglected "at our peril" the new political developments in Latin America. Without naming names, Clinton asserts, "We have witnessed the rollback of democratic development and economic openness in parts of Latin America."
Rather than applauding the new willingness of an increasing number of elected governments to tackle the structural obstacles that have marginalized the poor and indigenous populations, Clinton evokes a picture of a region threatened by retrograde forces. Blaming the Bush administration for its negligence, Clinton implies that a more engaged U.S. policy could have obstructed the rise of democratically elected left-center governments, such as those in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
"We must return to a policy of vigorous engagement: this is too critical a region for the United States to stand idly by," asserts Clinton.
But what kind of "vigorous engagement" is she talking about? Past forms have included intervention in national elections, financial and military support for illegal opposition movements, propaganda campaigns to carry the message of pro-U.S. forces and vilify others. Any "return" to policies like these is not likely to be regarded kindly in Latin America. With few positive examples to cite recently, U.S. engagement to protect "critical" U.S. geopolitical and economic interests has too often been synonymous with intervention.
Priorities in the region, according to Clinton, include supporting the "largest developing democracies in the region, Brazil and Mexico"; deepening "economic and strategic cooperation with Argentina and Chile"; and combating "the interconnected threats of drug trafficking, crime, and insurgency" in Colombia, Central America, and the Caribbean.
After establishing this aggressive agenda for U.S. involvement in security issues she concludes, "We must work with our allies to provide sustainable-development programs that promote economic opportunity and reduce inequality for the citizens of Latin America."
In short as president, Hillary Clinton's Latin American policy would likely be very similar to that of the Bush I, Clinton I, and Bush II administrations before her-with the only notable difference being that her administration may take stronger measures to counter governments that dare to determine their own trade, development, and foreign policies.
In laying out her policy, she fails to mention the need to overhaul the monumentally flawed Cuba policy, and in fact has said elsewhere that she wouldn't lift the trade embargo until there is a "democratic transition." Apparently she has no intention of modifying the strategy of the failed drug wars either, even though U.S. policies of drug interdiction, drug eradication, and counterinsurgency have not slowed the flow of illegal drugs and have caused enormous problems of displacement and environmental destruction.
Candidate Clinton offers a U.S. policy that promotes economic opportunity to reduce inequality. But her solutions-economic "openness" and foreign aid-are the standard formulas that have increased inequality and prompted the search for alternatives among the nations she criticizes for "rolling back economic openness" in an effort to provide basic needs to their citizens.
While the Washington political establishment is stuck within a narrow band of policy options, Latin American nations, particularly in South America, are experimenting with new policies aimed at setting their nations on sustainable development paths. Establishing national control over energy resources, sponsoring agrarian reforms, and breaking free of the economic reforms imposed by the international financial institutions are among the policies that have antagonized the Bush administration.
To win the respect of Latin Americans, Clinton doesn't need to endorse these policy alternatives. But she does need to respect the right of Latin Americans to set their own directions.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt set out to build cooperative relations in Latin America after three decades of imperial interventions and occupations, he promised that his "policy of the good neighbor" would be founded on "mutual respect" and self-determination. While the FDR administration did not always follow its own good neighbor principles, it did go a long way to building respect for the United States and a culture of cooperation in the Americas.
Clinton asserts that respect can be won by a leadership that "draws on all the dimensions of American power" and reestablishes the authority of the "American idea." But to regain respect for U.S. leadership, whether in Latin America or elsewhere, the United States will need to return to basic good neighbor principles. Rather than relying on its power and ideas that have largely lost credibility in the hemisphere, she needs to let Latin Americans set their own policy agendas. Some new thinking is long overdue, but Hillary Clinton isn't offering it.
Clinton fails to recognize that the United States must acknowledge that U.S.-Latin America relations are imperiled much more by U.S. arrogance and its misdirected "engagement" than by negligence or inaction in the face of imagined threats to U.S. interests. Moving forward, the foundation of improved relations and sustainable development in the Americas must be "mutual respect."
If Clinton wants respect for U.S. foreign policy, then she will need to show more respect for our southern neighbors. As a start, Clinton should tell Latin Americans that she respects their right to decide for themselves what is needed to ensure "security and opportunity."
Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy.
http://www.counterpunch.org/barry11092007.html
I know she's just a girl and we should leave her alone, but I think she can handle this criticism.
And I have no problem bitch-slapping a girl.
The Nation
CLINTON ON TRADE: I'M AS AWFUL AS OBAMA...
Hillary Clinton had a chance to do one of two things on the Peru Free Trade Agreement.
She could announce her opposition to the proposal and score the remarkable political coup of trumping both Barack Obama and John Edwards of an important issue for grassroots Democrats -- thus all but assuring her front-runner status as the race toward the first presidential caucuses and primaries accelerates.
Or she could do what Wall Street demanded.
Clinton went with Wall Street. On the same day that a majority of House Democrats voted against the Peru FTA, the senator from New York endorsed the current economic-policy priority of the Bush administration.
In so doing, Clinton confirmed that the only thing more important to her than securing her lead in the race for the Democratic nod is keeping the likely financiers of her fall campaign happy.
In so doing, Clinton joined Illinois Senator Obama in supporting the trade deal.
That means that, among the top contenders in the Democratic contest, only former North Carolina John Edwards is standing with the majority of congressional Democrats in opposition to the Bush administration's free-trade agenda.
Had Clinton joined Edwards in opposing the Peru FTA, she would have stolen the spotlight from the candidate with whom she is competing for labor support while at the same time identifying herself as more attuned to the concerns of working Americans than Obama.
It would have been a political masterstroke.
But Clinton's far enough ahead in the polls so that she feels she can dismiss Democratic voters. And, of course, she's betting that she'll collect enough campaign money from investment bankers and multinational corporation CEOs to buy the advertising that will allow her to buy down the concerns of soon-to-be-unemployed factory workers and soon-to-be-landless farmers.
Posted by John Nichols at 11/08/2007 @ 9:01pm
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=250121
And I have no problem bitch-slapping a girl.
The Nation
CLINTON ON TRADE: I'M AS AWFUL AS OBAMA...
Hillary Clinton had a chance to do one of two things on the Peru Free Trade Agreement.
She could announce her opposition to the proposal and score the remarkable political coup of trumping both Barack Obama and John Edwards of an important issue for grassroots Democrats -- thus all but assuring her front-runner status as the race toward the first presidential caucuses and primaries accelerates.
Or she could do what Wall Street demanded.
Clinton went with Wall Street. On the same day that a majority of House Democrats voted against the Peru FTA, the senator from New York endorsed the current economic-policy priority of the Bush administration.
In so doing, Clinton confirmed that the only thing more important to her than securing her lead in the race for the Democratic nod is keeping the likely financiers of her fall campaign happy.
In so doing, Clinton joined Illinois Senator Obama in supporting the trade deal.
That means that, among the top contenders in the Democratic contest, only former North Carolina John Edwards is standing with the majority of congressional Democrats in opposition to the Bush administration's free-trade agenda.
Had Clinton joined Edwards in opposing the Peru FTA, she would have stolen the spotlight from the candidate with whom she is competing for labor support while at the same time identifying herself as more attuned to the concerns of working Americans than Obama.
It would have been a political masterstroke.
But Clinton's far enough ahead in the polls so that she feels she can dismiss Democratic voters. And, of course, she's betting that she'll collect enough campaign money from investment bankers and multinational corporation CEOs to buy the advertising that will allow her to buy down the concerns of soon-to-be-unemployed factory workers and soon-to-be-landless farmers.
Posted by John Nichols at 11/08/2007 @ 9:01pm
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=250121
-
Mister Tee
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8648
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 2:57 pm
- Location: NYC
- Contact:
Mauren Dowd is a useless piece of shit, and has been since she joined the New York Times. I've heard liberal friends tout her on occasion because she went after Bush and Cheney, but, as Bartcop says, that's only because she hates/feels superior to everybody. She's a Heather through and through; you can count on her to spread the dumbest DC conventional wisdom ("Edwards is the Breck girl!" "Obama is Obambi!"). She couldn't write about a serious issue if a gun were to her temple.
HA! Take THAT Dowd.
I have to say I agree. Except for a few good points (like calling out Hillary on her Iran position), Dowd has been downright petty where Hillary is concerned.
The Nation
And Another Thing - Katha Pollitt
BLOG | Posted 11/07/2007 @ 01:19am
Dowd v Clinton, Chapter 3465
Is Maureen Dowd obsessed with Hillary Clinton or what? Last week, she complained that Hillary spoke "girlfriend to girlfriend" to women voters while refusing to share the pain of being married to a sexually exploitative monster who had made her violate all her beliefs and principles, as Caitlin Flanagan opined in the Atlantic. This week, Dowd accused Hillary of "playing the woman-as-victim card" because her campaign put out a humorous video portraying the last debate as a masculine pile-on (never mind that Hillary herself said she was the focus of tough questioning because she was the front-runner): "If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn't it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now."
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who quotes Caitlin Flanagan approvingly has lost their bona fides on gender issues. Flanagan, after all, is the woman who calls herself a homemaker while acknowledging that she's never changed her own sheets, who insists that children don't love working mothers as much as they do stayhomes, and who says women have a duty to have sex with their husbands at least twice a week. As for playing the woman-as-victim card, can this be the same Maureen Dowd who wrote in her last book, Are Men Necessary?, that men don't ask her out because she's too smart and successful and will never see 35 again? How's that for painting yourself as a victim of sexism-- which, I hasten to add, Dowd probably is!
You don't need to be Simone de Beauvoir to recognize that lots of middle-aged men would find Dowd too challenging and too old -- i.e., their own age. For applying this rather obvious sociological observation to herself--for permitting herself one unguarded moment and writing what women say to each other all the time--she was publicly taken to task all over the media. Unlike Hillary, Dowd backed down. I turned on the TV late one night and there was Dowd, all sultry red hair and fishnet stockings, gaily insisting to some male interviewer that her social life was terrific, no problems in that department at all.
The more people insist that sexism plays no part in the primary campaign or its media coverage, the more likely I am to vote for her and I'll bet I'm not the only one. Hillary's poll numbers with women are rising, after all. I think a lot of women are just fed up to here with the sexism they see around them every day at their own workplaces and that their male colleagues just don't notice as they ride the testosterone escalator upwards. Six male politicians salivating to score points, two super-self-satisfied male journalists asking the questions (and what questions!), one woman who has got to know the world is just waiting for her to set a foot wrong--it makes a picture. If you've ever been the only woman at the meeting, on the panel, with your job, at your level, you see that picture all the time, and it's a self-portrait.
While on the subject of Dowd, let me add that I am sick of Hillary being tagged with the adventures of Bill's genitals. What's it to Dowd or Flanagan that Hillary ran for the Senate instead of filing for divorce? At least Hillary isn't a sad doormat like Wendy Vitter and countless other political wives. As long as we are looking at candidates' spouses, what about Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards, smart lawyers who quit work to promote their husbands' ambitions? Nobody criticizes those choices, or says nasty things about those relationships. In fact, we are constantly being told how warm and wonderful these marriages are. Fact is, none of us knows a thing about what really goes on with the Obamas, the Edwardses, or any of the other candidates and their wives. And if it weren't for Kenneth Starr, we wouldn't know about the Clintons, either.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing?pid=249451
I have to say I agree. Except for a few good points (like calling out Hillary on her Iran position), Dowd has been downright petty where Hillary is concerned.
The Nation
And Another Thing - Katha Pollitt
BLOG | Posted 11/07/2007 @ 01:19am
Dowd v Clinton, Chapter 3465
Is Maureen Dowd obsessed with Hillary Clinton or what? Last week, she complained that Hillary spoke "girlfriend to girlfriend" to women voters while refusing to share the pain of being married to a sexually exploitative monster who had made her violate all her beliefs and principles, as Caitlin Flanagan opined in the Atlantic. This week, Dowd accused Hillary of "playing the woman-as-victim card" because her campaign put out a humorous video portraying the last debate as a masculine pile-on (never mind that Hillary herself said she was the focus of tough questioning because she was the front-runner): "If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn't it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now."
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who quotes Caitlin Flanagan approvingly has lost their bona fides on gender issues. Flanagan, after all, is the woman who calls herself a homemaker while acknowledging that she's never changed her own sheets, who insists that children don't love working mothers as much as they do stayhomes, and who says women have a duty to have sex with their husbands at least twice a week. As for playing the woman-as-victim card, can this be the same Maureen Dowd who wrote in her last book, Are Men Necessary?, that men don't ask her out because she's too smart and successful and will never see 35 again? How's that for painting yourself as a victim of sexism-- which, I hasten to add, Dowd probably is!
You don't need to be Simone de Beauvoir to recognize that lots of middle-aged men would find Dowd too challenging and too old -- i.e., their own age. For applying this rather obvious sociological observation to herself--for permitting herself one unguarded moment and writing what women say to each other all the time--she was publicly taken to task all over the media. Unlike Hillary, Dowd backed down. I turned on the TV late one night and there was Dowd, all sultry red hair and fishnet stockings, gaily insisting to some male interviewer that her social life was terrific, no problems in that department at all.
The more people insist that sexism plays no part in the primary campaign or its media coverage, the more likely I am to vote for her and I'll bet I'm not the only one. Hillary's poll numbers with women are rising, after all. I think a lot of women are just fed up to here with the sexism they see around them every day at their own workplaces and that their male colleagues just don't notice as they ride the testosterone escalator upwards. Six male politicians salivating to score points, two super-self-satisfied male journalists asking the questions (and what questions!), one woman who has got to know the world is just waiting for her to set a foot wrong--it makes a picture. If you've ever been the only woman at the meeting, on the panel, with your job, at your level, you see that picture all the time, and it's a self-portrait.
While on the subject of Dowd, let me add that I am sick of Hillary being tagged with the adventures of Bill's genitals. What's it to Dowd or Flanagan that Hillary ran for the Senate instead of filing for divorce? At least Hillary isn't a sad doormat like Wendy Vitter and countless other political wives. As long as we are looking at candidates' spouses, what about Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards, smart lawyers who quit work to promote their husbands' ambitions? Nobody criticizes those choices, or says nasty things about those relationships. In fact, we are constantly being told how warm and wonderful these marriages are. Fact is, none of us knows a thing about what really goes on with the Obamas, the Edwardses, or any of the other candidates and their wives. And if it weren't for Kenneth Starr, we wouldn't know about the Clintons, either.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/anotherthing?pid=249451
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Sonic Youth
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Not anymore, it isn't.Akash wrote:Thank you Damien. That was my point exactly.
Of course OscarGuy, competence is always preferable to gross abuse of power and staggering ineptitude -- and I'm sure Hillary Clinton's Administration would be far more competent than Bush's -- but that doesn't translate to anything more than a relative comparison and an extremely low bar.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler