Why I no longer like Hillary Clinton
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Hillary Clinton’s status as a liberal icon has always been based on leaps of logic, as opposed to her record.
As the first lady, she actively supported Bill Clinton’s anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-human rights trade policies, from the North American Free Trade Agreement to permanent most favored nation trading status for China.
from ” Hillary Clinton Hardly a Liberal Icon” by John Nichols
One of the reasons I don’t like Hillary Clinton is that she’s married to Bill Clinton, who is a war criminal and economic disaster maker. I figure she’s kinda like an Imelda Marcos or the wife of Hitler.
During Clinton’s presidency, I blindly followed him. I voted for him and I was in anguish over his impeachment, which was done for an entirely wrong reason. But I’ve done some reading since then and I cannot in good conscience say he is a good man or even a decent man or even a man I’d want over for dinner.
With his inhuman sanctions, Bill Clinton is responsible for almost a million dead Iraqis, half a million of them children. (Yeah, sure, the Iraqi population could “rise up” and overthrow Hussein. Right. Just like we’re rising up and overthrowing our illegitimate president, right?)
The most monumental of Clinton’s war crimes, however, has been his policy of sanctions on Iraq, supplemented by the maintenance of intense satellite surveillance and regular bombing attacks that have often resulted in civilian casualties. UNICEF reports that in 1999 more than 1 million Iraqi children under 5 were suffering from chronic malnutrition, and some 4,000-5,000 children are dying per month beyond normal death rates from the combination of malnutrition and disease. Death from disease was greatly increased by the shortage of potable water and medicines, that has led to a 20-fold increase in malaria (among other ailments). This vicious sanctions system, causing a creeping extermination of a people, has already caused more than a million excess deaths, and it is claimed by John and Karl Mueller that Clinton’s “sanctions of mass destruction” have caused “the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction [nuclear and chemical] throughout all history” (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999). U.S. mainstream reporters, who have so eagerly followed the distress of the Kosovo Albanians, somehow never get to Iraq for pictures of the thousands of malnourished children.
Bill Clinton is partly responsible for the devaluation of the peso and subsequent raiding and impoverishment of Mexico with NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank. (By the way, read _Letters From Mexico_ by Stan Gotlieb. What happened in Mexico in the 90s sounds a lot like what’s happening right now in the US with currency devaluation and foreclosures.)
It’s just like one of the scripts we follow in the other countries we’ve impoverished. Read _Shock Doctrine_ by Naomi Klein. It’s essential. Bill Clinton was following the script.
From Gotlieb’s book:
In December 1994, as you may recall, the Zedillo government, at the urging of the IMF, the World Bank [which the US controls] and others, allowed the Peso to “float” against the Dollar. In the debacle that followed, the Peso sank like a stone. By March 1995, the Peso settled at just about half its previous value.
When Mexico’s money was devalued by half, Mexico became half as rich. Because its debts to foreign banks and countries are in Dollars, it became twice as much in debt. Practically overnight, Mexico lost over half of its billionaires when Peso holdings are measured in Dollar terms.
Mexican banks, desperate to rebuild their hard currency reserves, raised the interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and business loans. At one point in the spring of 1995, it had gotten so bad that one bank took out big ads in the national newspapers to advertise a “new low rate for credit cards” of “only” 67% per year (some cards were costing 97%).
So this was because of the IMF and pals, who are led by the US, who were under Clinton during this time.
And not only this, there is NAFTA. NAFTA was pushed through by Clinton. And the Mexicans are really angry at us for this.
Entire towns in the Mexican countryside are missing their young men because of NAFTA. Millions of Mexicans used to make a living as farmers, but they can’t compete with the US’s subsidized crops. The men can no longer make a living doing farming here, so they have to migrate north to find work.
Mexico is a country of about 105 million. Estimates of undocumented Mexican nationals currently in the U.S. range from 11 million to 30 million. The figure is scandalous for two reasons: 1. Our best guesses of the undocumented (illegal) population in the U.S., during “wartime,” are equal to a hole big enough for 19 million people and; 2. The conditions in Mexico are such that 10 percent to 30 percent of her total population has already left.
My Spanish teacher told me about what it’s like to live up north as an illegal immigrant. You are paid very little money, not enough to live on, so you have to live in an apartment with 24 other people, essentially in a flop house.
The latest phase of NAFTA passed a couple days ago. It eliminates the tariffs on beans and corn from the US. This will hurt many more Mexican farmers and increase immigration to the US.
Subsidized crops are not free trade. This is pure evil.
1995 article on impact of devaluation of peso on immigration and Clinton upping border control
I don’t like Hillary Clinton specifically because of three things:
She voted for the Iraq war and in 2004 said she has no regrets about it.
She uses incendiary rhetoric like “no option can be off the table” and plays games that might lead us into war with Iran.
By the way, read this article about how Iran’s president’s supposed remark, “Israel Must Be Wiped Off The Map” was MISTRANSLATED. He didn’t actually say that. He was actually calling for regime change in Israel, which I’m all for. Heck, I’m for regime change here.
Third, Clinton’s health care plan is not a good solution to the health care crisis. She would make it mandatory that everyone have it. If you aren’t covered by your employer, you have to buy it. And she would do nothing to make it single payer; private insurers would actually get a big payoff from this because now everyone would HAVE to buy their product. The only plus I see to Clinton’s plan is that supposedly insurers could no longer refuse to cover people and that it is supposed to be made “affordable”, whatever that means. I suspect Clinton’s opinion of “affordability” is vastly different from mine.
I don’t buy the defense that her plan is “practical”, not when I’ve experienced the wonderful cheap and decent health care in Croatia, not when Mexican national health care costs only $500 a year per family and US citizens flood in to buy Mexico’s pharmaceuticals and dental care, not when all other European nations have single payer. We can do better than Clinton’s proposed plan. We could at least meet Mexico’s level of benefits, no?
We have the RIGHT to single payer. We have the RIGHT to have a government which actually represents its citizens. We’ve gotta stop letting these politicians and corporations from feeling they are “endowing” us with whatever dribbles we get. We’ve gotta stop giving welfare to corporations. We’ve gotta stop skimming taxes from citizens to pay this corporate welfare. And we’ve gotta start being good world citizens lest we experience more blowback.
“Clinton, Health Care Industry Get Cozy” by Dave Zweifel, Madison Capital Times
