Queen of Chaos: Her record, and her own words, show us exactly what we can expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency, write Jeremy Kuzmarov and Steve Brown.
Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Phoenix, March 2016. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Jeremy Kuzmarov and Steve Brown
Special to Consortium News
Her “No” seems nothing more than the classic — and expected — response that politicians always make to the media when they are testing the waters.
Certainly it was not the kind of definitive cement wall “No” delivered by Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman during the election campaign of 1884. When his name was floated as a possible candidate, he famously told the press, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”
Hillary’s “No” was nowhere near that emphatic, and became less and less so each time she repeated it to the media. For example, on June 19, Hillary told Business Insider (and Financial Times, Parade and others) that a 2024 presidential campaign was “out of the question…[because it] would be ‘very disruptive’ to challenge [Biden].”
And there it was — her escape hatch.
The reason she was not going to run was—she wouldn’t run against Biden. Which was the same reason given by all the likely Democratic candidates for not running in 2024. As People Magazine sarcastically noted,
“Many Democratic hopefuls…such as Vice President Harris, Sec. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — have used Biden’s plans to run again as a reason for staying out of the 2024 election, creating leeway for them to change their mind if Biden decides to sit the next cycle out.”
And Biden may indeed sit the next cycle out.
Given his plummeting poll numbers, it is very possible that, sometime in 2023, Biden may suddenly discover that “I need to spend more time with my family.” Or he may resign “due to continuing health complications from Covid-19,” which he recently contracted not once but three times in a row.
Then, too, there is the negative pressure within his own party. Politico reports that progressives are already pressing Biden not to run in 2024. And according to CNBC, “Most Democrats want someone other than Biden to run for president in 2024.” And New York Magazine says, “A new poll shows two-thirds of Democrats want someone other than Joe Biden to be their 2024 presidential nominee.”
So if Biden does step aside — who better to run against Trump in 2024 (if he wins the nomination) than the candidate who beat him by 3 million votes in 2016?
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during presidential campaign of 2016. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
Which is exactly why the Hillary propaganda campaign has started planting stories suggesting that a popular groundswell for Hillary was starting to build. A June 28 story from CNN reported that “The whispers of Hillary Clinton 2024 have started.”
Are the “whispers” real? It doesn’t matter. Saying they are is good enough. It doesn’t matter that the whispers may be only craftily constructed floaters leaked to compliant corporate media by well-placed political operatives and PR consultants. Their purpose is to take the public temperature and position the candidate for the next step, which is to escalate the mythical “groundswell of support.”
Accordingly, in July, stories began abandoning the coy suggestion that there were only “whispers” of interest in a Hillary candidacy. Instead, they trumpeted confident predictions that Hillary could definitely win in 2024.
For example, Newsweek upped the ante on July 6, with an article titled “Hillary Clinton Is Best Bet for Democrats in 2024.” The Hill topped that with a piece titled, “Now more than ever, Democrats need Hillary Clinton.”
We might dismiss the above attempts to promote a Hillary candidacy in 2024 as a delusion taken seriously only by segments of the Democratic Party elite (and their captive media echo chambers) who listen only to themselves and are disconnected from reality.
But what if they are right?
What if Hillary does win the Democratic Party nomination in 2024, and then goes on to become president of the United States? Aside from the not inconsiderable blessing of being spared the buffoonery, egotism, arrogance, racism and overweening ignorance of former President Donald Trump, would the country be any better off with Hillary?
We don’t have to guess. Her record, and her own words, show us exactly what we can expect from a Hillary presidency.
Bill’s Behind-the-Scenes Partner
President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1997. (White House)
As a powerful behind-the-scenes partner in Bill Clinton’s presidency, she bears significant responsibility for his policy of triangulation, which critically severed the Democratic Party from its long relationship with working-class Americans, pushing it further to the right and permanently cementing Wall Street’s dominance over both major political parties.
In his 2004 memoir, Bill Clinton bragged about cutting more than 100,000 public-sector jobs in his first term and scrapping 16,000 pages of federal regulations. At an economic policy meeting, Clinton stated:
“I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans. We’re Eisenhower Republicans and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great.”
Clinton actually passed laws that former President Dwight Eisenhower himself could never have had passed, most notably sweeping cuts to the welfare system and banking deregulation, which undermined core tenets of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Clinton’s other signature legislation was a sweeping crime bill — the domestic equivalent of the Iraq War for Democrats — which bolstered funding for the police and prison construction and advanced tougher sentencing guidelines for drug offenders.
The White House became under Clinton “like a subway: you have to put in coins to open the gate,” to quote Taiwanese-born lobbyist Johnny Chung, who was convicted of funneling money to Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign in violation of campaign finance laws.
After the Republican Party gained control of the House of Representatives in January 1995, in an effort to appease opposition on his political right, Clinton increased military spending more than the Pentagon had requested, and in the fiscal year 2000, he sought an increase of $4 billion and $100 billion over the next six years. By the end of Clinton’s first term, he had already ordered U.S. troops into 25 separate military operations, compared to 17 in Reagan’s two terms.
Appointing a future C.I.A. director, Leon Panetta, as his chief of staff, Clinton at the same time expanded America’s covert empire of overseas surveillance outposts and spying and increased the budget for secret intelligence spending and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a C.I.A. offshoot which promoted regime change in foreign nations.
The U.S. zone of military hegemony was expanded into Eastern Europe through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and into the formerly neutral Yugoslavia with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and U.S. bombing in support of secessionist movements there.
Clinton further deepened U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Africa, where his administration a) bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan under false pretexts, depriving people of vital medicines; and b) covertly armed Rwanda and Uganda as they invaded and plundered the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), causing millions of deaths.
Peter Krogh, the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, said in 1999 that the Clinton administration promoted a “foreign policy of sermons and sanctimony accompanied by the brandishing of tomahawks.”(8)
Madame Secretary –a Chip off the Old Block
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, April 18, 2012. (DOD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo )
This above assessment is equally appropriate for Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
Hillary burnished her public image by championing women’s issues and helping to provide microfinance loans in Third World countries while purporting to stand for human rights — mainly in countries the U.S. targeted for regime change.
According to a 2016 profile by Mark Landler in The New York Times Magazine, aptly entitled “How Hillary Became a Hawk,” Hillary as secretary of state tried to pressure President Barack Obama to a) increase the U.S. troops presence in Afghanistan even more than under his “surge policy”; b) sustain a U.S. troop presence in Iraq; c) funnel more arms to anti-government rebels in Syria; d) dispatch a U.S. aircraft carrier in waters between North Korea and China as a show of U.S. force; and e) reject any symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of goodwill in resetting the relationship, the latter position earning her the respect of Cold War hardliner Robert Gates (defense secretary 2006-2011).
After Libya’s long-time leader, Muammar Qaddafi, was lynched following a U.S.-NATO bombing campaign — which she oversaw — Hillary jubilantly told a reporter, “We came, we saw, he died,” a twisted play on the words of Julius Caesar following his victory over the King of Bosporus at the Battle of Zela around 47 B.C.
Hillary had been very influential in the build-up to the war in Libya, not only promoting disinformation about Qaddafi to support the U.S. military intervention, but also even meeting with opposition forces before the war to help plan for the post-Qaddafi order.
Gates told The New York Times that Hillary Clinton’s backing of military intervention in Libya was decisive. Obama had told him privately in the Oval Office that the Libya decision was “51-49,” and Gates said: “I’ve always thought that Hillary’s support for the broader mission in Libya put the president on the 51 side of the line for a more aggressive approach.”
Now ask Libyans how that turned out.
Hillary as a Liberal Richard Nixon
Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Tempe, Arizona, November 2016. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Described by one of her detractors as a “cool and hardened political operative,” Hillary honed her political skills in the early 1970s, when she served as an investigator on the House Judiciary Committee set up to decide whether Richard Nixon should be impeached for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. She learned a lot from studying Nixon’s political tactics, and later deployed those skills to advantage in a truly Nixonian manner by manufacturing the bogus Russiagate scandal to malign her political rival Donald Trump and explain her humiliating loss to him in 2016.
According to Barbara Olson, chief counsel for the House Oversight Committee that investigated an assortment of Clinton scandals,
“Few Americans realize the extent to which Hillary burnished her political skills [by] practicing the bare-knuckle tactics of the highly politicized House Judiciary Committee on the Watergate Impeachment investigation.”
Hillary skillfully used an arsenal of “opposition researchers and private detectives,” that her mentor Dick Morris identified as “secret police,” in a systematic campaign to “intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth.”
Another example of what Hillary learned from Nixon is how useful it can be to portray oneself as a victim of powerful anti-democratic forces. Nixon had complained of a “vast left-wing conspiracy” arrayed against him; Hillary turned that on its head, claiming that she and her husband were victims of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” As a master manipulator, she made that charge stick by cultivating influential journalists and turning them into “surrogates” or “fans” who duped the public on her behalf.
Corporate Liberal
A liberal on social issues, Hillary remains, at her core, what the old Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) used to call a “corporate liberal,” identified by a close and symbiotic relationship with Corporate America and Wall Street.
From 1986 to 1992, as first lady of Arkansas, Hillary sat on the board of Wal-Mart. In that position, she promoted female advancement and more eco-friendly stores, though stood silent about Wal-Mart’s low-wage and anti-union policies, which benefited from Arkansas’ status as a “right-to-work” state — something Bill had supported from the beginning of his political career in 1976.
Large Appetite for Military Engagement
If elected president in 2024, Hillary would no doubt continue to champion women’s rights and to some extent environmentalism, but would not rock the boat too far in advancing any domestic reforms, and would perpetuate the Biden administration’s foreign policies, including its confrontational approach toward China and Russia, upon which she has “advocated doubling down.”
According to an aide, Hillary’s foreign-policy instincts were grounded in cold realism about human nature and “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”
Mark Landler wrote in his New York Times Magazine profile that, “For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that [Hillary] Clinton has.”
Hillary’s hawkish instincts may derive in part from the influence of her father, Hugh S. Rodham, a staunch anti-communist and Republican who was a naval officer in World War II.
In 1975 (the year she married Bill Clinton), despite her professed opposition to the Vietnam War, Hillary claimed to have stopped in at a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the active forces or reserves. She was allegedly turned away because of her age (she was almost 27), gender and poor eyesight (she wore coke-bottled eyeglasses).
Two decades later, when Hillary as first lady visited American troops stationed in Bosnia, she claimed, during the 2008 campaign, to have dodged sniper fire after her C-17 military plane landed at an American base in Tuzla. However, Chris Hill, a diplomat who was on board that day, did not remember any sniping but rather that children had handed her bouquets of flowers.
When Hillary was elected to the Senate from New York, she was determined to protect the state’s remaining military bases from being closed down. Just after 9/11, she traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, who was subsequently deployed to Afghanistan and tried to warn her about the risk of invading Iraq — which he said would be “like kicking over a bee’s nest.”
But Hillary ignored his advice and subsequently voted to authorize U.S. military action in Iraq. Subsequently, she took a seat on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee alongside fellow hawks like John McCain (R-AZ), and grew close with General Jack Keane, a board member of General Dynamics who was a key architect of George W. Bush’s troop-surge strategy in Iraq in 2007.
(Bad) Lessons from Arkansas
2006 presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton stopped by Little Rock to get the endorsement of Gov. Mike Beebe. (David Quinn, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The Clinton political brand was christened in Arkansas in the 1980s during Bill’s governorships (1979-1981; 1983-1992). As Arkansas’ first lady, Hillary managed her husband’s public relations image and, according to insiders, was the power behind the throne.
Most significant was how, according to The Washington Post, Hillary used her position as partner at the prestigious Rose Law Firm to cultivate support for Bill among Arkansas’ economic elite.
Rose’s clients included: Wal-Mart; Stephens, Inc., the largest investment house in the U.S. outside of Wall Street; Dan Lasater, a bond trader convicted for cocaine trafficking who was Bill’s largest campaign donor; and Tyson Foods, which allegedly provided Bill with envelopes filled with cash in support of his political campaigns.
As part of the quid pro quo, Hillary recommended many of the regulators and judges who wound up favoring the clients of her employer and who donated money to her husband’s campaign.
By the mid-1980s, with Hillary’s help, Bill had compiled the most impressive list of corporate donors in Arkansas’ political history. When Bill set up the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA) as Arkansas’ lead economic development agency, many of its contracts went to these corporate donors in deals worked through the Rose Law Firm, which made at least $175,000 from the arrangement.
Hillary billed 60 hours of work to Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan association enmeshed in legal problems that was set up by Bill’s business partner, Jim McDougal, to finance the Clinton’s Whitewater land investment and which provided a “slush fund” for their political campaigns.
Government regulators noticed that Whitewater was making loan payments to Clinton when its accounts at Madison were overdrawn and the overdrafts were covered by a Madison subsidiary; a classic sign of S&L fraud, which Hillary may have helped to cover up.
Hillary appears to have been involved in potentially jail-worthy activity involving cattle futures trading that enabled the Tyson chicken dynasty to give the Clintons in excess of $100,000 in campaign donations.
The scheme was orchestrated by Tyson’s principal outside counsel, James Blair, a friend of the Clintons, who set up Hillary with a $1,000 investment that yielded a dividend of more than $100,000.
The original investment was recorded as $12,000 from the records of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but Clinton only had $1,000 in her account at the time. Despite her claims of actively managing her own account, on the three days when the trading was most active, she was involved in an all-day meeting out of town.
Blair’s partner in the operation, Robert L. “Red” Bone, was at the time under investigation for fraud in manipulation of the cattle trading market.
Author Roger Morris, in Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, noted that Hillary’s “spectacular” 10,000 percent return on her investment had all the trappings of being part of “prearranged trades.” Dow Jones analysts Caroline Baum and commodities trader Victor Niederhof determined that “if legitimate, the odds against such prescience and mastery [by Clinton] would have been ‘about the same as those of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls on the steps of the State House in Little Rock.’”
Hillary’s $100,000 hit was “a money transfer disguised as commodity profits.” If “she had allowed Blair and Red Bone to allocate other customers’ winnings to her accounts and to park her losses in those others, then she had committed the ultimate fraud.”
‘Like a Tornado’
The Clintons’ corrupt ways and backstabbing made them many enemies in Arkansas who saw through their phony veneer.
In his memoir, Jim McDougal, who took the fall for the Whitewater scandal and died of a heart attack in prison, wrote that the Clintons were “like a tornado who came into people’s lives” and “destroyed them;” they “took without giving back in return.”
These comments should be borne in mind by voters if Hillary vies one last time to achieve her dream of the presidency.
Like a tornado, she will come into people’s lives, conning them into a vote, and then betray and destroy them, as she and her husband have always done.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is managing editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018).
Steve Brown is a member of the editorial board of CovertAction Magazine and a former director of Pacifica Radio and WBAI-FM in New York. He is a co-founder of the Progressive Radio Network (PRN), president of the Alliance for Community Elections (ACE) and has run political campaigns for the U.S. Senate, governor of New York and mayor of New York City.
The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.