American voters always traditionally hate incumbents and incumbent parties, and 2016 will be no exception. In fact, 2016 will likely be the biggest referendum on the establishment since Barack Obama’s landslide victory in 2008, when the Republican agenda was roundly rejected in favor of something ostensibly completely different. But if Democrats allow the media to turn Hillary Clinton’s campaign into a coronation and eliminate all competition early, they’ll be setting themselves up for Scott Walker to become the next president, which would be a disaster for America.
Why a Hillary Clinton Coronation is So Dangerous
Hillary Clinton has been the presumed frontrunner in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary ever since John Kerry replaced her as Secretary of State in 2013. She is largely unopposed – her only competition so far seems to be former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican who has yet to formally declare his candidacy. Despite heavily-funded efforts by groups like MoveOn.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to convince Elizabeth Warren to run in 2016, she has remained vehemently opposed to a presidential bid. Other candidates may emerge, like Vice President Joe Biden, socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, or former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley. But according to 63 different polls from 12 different pollsters, Hillary Clinton is the far-and-away favorite among likely Democratic voters.
While Clinton has been marketed as a progressive, and while her campaign announcement video has clearly tried to brand her as a woman of the people, she has a long record as a hawkish, Wall Street-friendly, fossil fuel-supporting proponent of the security state who embodies crony capitalism and an out-of-touch establishment. So far, major media outlets have ignored the left’s criticism of Clinton’s record in favor of pushing a narrative of a popular candidate catering to middle-class voters (with a decidedly milquetoast economic populist agenda).
In one of two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs that brought HRC a cool $400,000, she was introduced by one of the bankers emceeing the event as “someone who could bring us out of the wilderness.” During the speech, which has not yet been made available to the public, she is purported to have made remarks criticizing politicians who bash Wall Street as “unproductive” and “foolish.” As Zaid Jilani reported in Alternet, Clinton also gave a paid speech to the Biotechnology Industry Organization in which she simultaneously praised genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in food and advocated cutting corporate taxes, which already make up a record-low percentage of overall U.S. tax revenue. In case voters are still unclear on HRC’s position on GMOs, the Ready for Hillary PAC picked a Monsanto lobbyist as one of the leaders of her Iowa campaign team.
Hillary Clinton is also vilified among environmentalists around the country and the world for her support of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which jets of water are injected with hundreds of chemicals into the ground to break up natural gas deposits, and often lead to natural gas contaminating local water supplies. In the U.S., fracking is one of the industries chiefly responsible for California’s water crisis by burning through 70 million gallons of water last year alone. This Mother Jones report explores how, as President Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton aggressively introduced fracking to Eastern European countries. Many of these fracking projects were handled by companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, which made millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation.
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out last summer, Hillary Clinton’s defense of the Israeli attack on Gaza, which was condemned by the United Nations multiple times, is indistinguishable from Benjamin Netanyahu’s. Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” campaign of 2014 ended with approximately 2,100 Palestinians dead and thousands more injured. The UN claimed seven of 10 Palestinian lives lost were civilians, including 495 children and 253 women. Israeli fighter jets targeted multiple civilian targets for airstrikes, like the power plant that supplied Gaza City with the bulk of its electricity, and a UN school. Despite those statistics, HRC still vociferously took Israel’s side throughout the campaign, making remarks like:
““Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by Israel difficult.”
“Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets.”
“It’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.”
When it comes to unconstitutional programs like the NSA’s warrantless spying on the phone calls, texts and emails of ordinary American citizens, HRC has remained dubiously quiet. As The Atlantic reported, Clinton refused to say whether or not she would discontinue the NSA’s domestic spying programs if elected president. As a U.S. Senator, Clinton voted for the controversial Patriot Act in 2001, which radically expanded the government’s authority to spy on citizens, and voted to reauthorize it in 2006. She also famously supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which experts say was one of the major catalysts for the creation of ISIS.
Hillary Clinton is obviously not a progressive candidate, and she is the epitome of the Washington establishment that most Republicans are running against and that most Americans have grown to distrust. But regardless of who else runs in the Democratic primary, party bosses have made it clear that delegates will be expected to fall in line and support HRC’s campaign.
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