Home Americanism Jeff Cohen’s Right – Hill-Billy Clinton Turns Stand-Up Comic

Jeff Cohen’s Right – Hill-Billy Clinton Turns Stand-Up Comic

Jeff Cohen is cofounder of RootsAction.org, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College got Hill-Billy’s number: she a comedian with Bill & Chelsea laughing at us.

But do we have to be laughed at?

Hillary Clinton Turns Stand-Up Comic: “I’m a Progressive Who Gets Things Done.”

A quick review of Hillary Clinton’s record shows that much of what she gets done is anti-progressive (not unlike President Clinton in the 1990s). Some examples:

PROMOTING FRACKING WORLDWIDE IS NOT PROGRESSIVE:  On behalf of Chevron and other US oil companies, Secretary Clinton and the State Department pushed fracking globally, as Mother Jones has documented: “How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World.”

BOOSTING CORPORATIST TRADE DEALS IS NOT PROGRESSIVE:  Secretary Clinton repeatedly praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – as it was being negotiated by the US Trade Representative and her State Department – and she recruited countries into the deal. In October, with Bernie Sanders climbing in the polls, Clinton said she no longer supported the pact, and prevaricated about her earlier boosterism.

ENABLING MILITARY COUPS IS NOT PROGRESSIVE:  When she headed the State Department, it enabled a military coup in Honduras that overthrew democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, a progressive. Clinton was briefed on the dishonesty that allowed aid to illegally reach the coup government.

POCKETING MILLIONS FROM CORPORATE LECTURE FEES IS NOT PROGRESSIVE:  When Wall Street, Big Pharma and other corporate interests paid a soon-to-be presidential candidate an average of $230,000 for a speech, did Hillary Clinton think it was for her brilliant stand-up comedy? Or was it more akin to political bribery? Clinton now says these firms just wanted to hear the views of a former Secretary of State on our “complicated world” – or about the Bin Laden raid. But Politico reported in 2013 soon after one of her three speeches to Goldman Sachs: “Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish.” (Releasing the speech transcripts would help settle the matter.)

ESCALATING THE AFGHAN WAR IS NOT PROGRESSIVE:  As insider books on the Obama administration have revealed, Secretary Clinton was among the most hawkish of Obama’s advisors in country after country – for example, vociferously urging the failed and pointless 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan.

CHAOTIC MILITARY INTERVENTION IN THE MIDEAST AND NORTH AFRICA IS NOT PROGRESSIVE:  If not for Hillary Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote in support of Bush’s Iraq invasion, Obama would not have defeated her in 2008. As if having learned nothing from the post-invasion chaos in Iraq, Secretary Clinton was one of the strongest voices in 2011 urging Obama to militarily depose Qaddafi in Libya, a country now in total, deadly chaos.

On the campaign trail lately, Hillary Clinton is doing her best to sound much more progressive than her record in office, but she’s a rank amateur compared to her husband’s slickness on this score in the 1990s. President Bill Clinton did “get things done” – but some of his biggest initiatives were the opposite of progressive.

1993:  Passage of the corporate-friendly trade deal NAFTA, which passed mostly with Republican support against the votes of most Democrats in Congress.

1996:  Passage of the Telecommunications Act, the biggest change in media law since the 1930s, which helped big media companies grow even bigger. Bill Clinton got this done by working closely with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as both major parties received large donations from media and telecommunications corporations.

1996:  Repeal of federally-guaranteed welfare in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program enacted in 1935 during Franklyn Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Children’s Defense Fund – a group Hillary Clinton worked with and repeatedly invokes to shore up her “progressive” credentials – vehemently denounced repeal.

1999-2000:  Deregulation of Wall Street, working closely with right-wing Senator Phil Gramm. Among other things, President Clinton ended the 1933 Glass-Steagall legislation which had separated Main Street banks from the more speculative Wall Street banks (a measure Hillary Clinton says she is opposed to reinstituting). Dereg led directly to the 2007/2008 economic meltdown.

Now, if you can still allow Hill-Billy laugh at you, then you may be a Human Rights Gay activist, who chose to endorse Hillary over Bernie,

 despite the fact that it took Hill-Billyuntil 2013 to support gay marriage, while Bernie had joined a minority of Congress members who voted against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act signed by President Clinton in 1996.

So, gay or straight, make up your mind, is it your turn to laugh at corporate America, or is it, yet, another turn to be laughed at. If I am to be laughed at, at least I choose to be laughed at by a Republican. What about you?

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ronald-mcdonald11

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