Hillary Clinton recently awarded herself the Henry Kissinger seal of approval in an attempt to bolster her standing as a competent diplomat and a wonkish foreign policy expert. Polling shows that perceived “foreign policy competence” is Hillary’s strongest asset with Democratic voters who don’t find her trustworthy on many other issues, especially when compared to her rival for the democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders.
However, doesn’t it seem odd that Hillary Clinton, a self-described progressive, basks in the praise of Henry Kissinger, and gushingly returns praise to a man whose consistent mode of operation was violent covert regime change, with disastrous humanitarian consequences?
Indeed, Kissinger's trademark covert diplomacy has led to brutal massacres around the globe, including in Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. He is wanted for questioning by prosecutors from France, Chile, and Argentina, and has been indicted as a war criminal by a judge in Spain. And yet, Hillary’s warm embrace of Kissinger goes far beyond mere professional courtesy towards a man who shares with her the distinction of having been at the helm of the U.S. State Department…..
Clinton and Kissinger: It’s Personal:
Few people know that the gathering of the Clintons, the Kissingers, and the de la Rentas for Christmas was for years an annual event at Oscar de la Renta’s palace-like villa in the Dominican Republic. Before he passed away in 2014, Oscar de la Renta told Vogue that he built this seaside estate so he could host his close friends, specifically citing the Kissingers and Clintons. "At Christmas," he said, "we're always in the same group."
When Senator Sanders recently criticized Clinton for playing the “Kissinger card”, he probably did not know that he was hitting close to home.
A close look at Clinton’s record as Secretary of State reveals, not a progressive, but a neoconservative who shares with Kissinger, Cheney, and Rumsfeld an enthusiasm for destabilizing, and elective, wars of regime change. This is a pattern of intervention has left us with a swath of failing states from Libya to Iraq, to Syria, and to Afghanistan. Untold human suffering has ensued as the pipe-dreams of the neoconservative intervention hawks have consistently failed to materialize, although the profits of defense, security, and energy contractors have certainly soared.
The Libyan Catastrophe:
Candidate Clinton touts the intervention in Libya as a proud achievement during her reign as Secretary of State. This was an elective intervention that she championed as Secretary of State, an act of war that had nothing to do with defending our country, and that was in fact illegal without congressional authorization.
What is the result of this strange achievement? Libya now has two rival governments and a range of armed factions all battling for control. Chaos reigns, and Islamic State militants are growing in strength, taking over cities and launching attacks on oilfields and major oil export terminals. Not only has Libya failed to become a democracy, it has become a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have drastically increased. During his last years in power, Qaddafi was helping the United States to combat terrorism, now Libya serves as a safe haven for terrorist groups such as al-Sham (ISIS), al Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Iraq.
Incredibly, after Libya was plunged into horrific chaos and became a safe haven for ISIS, Clinton, in Congressional testimony, still called our intervention there “smart power at its best” and bristled at suggestions that it might be otherwise.
Libyans fleeing chaos arrive in Italy.
The pervasive violence in Libya has caused roughly 400,000 civilians have flee their homes, according to UN estimates, nearly 100,000 have left the country, making a desperate and dangerous sea voyage to Italy or Greece. This humanitarian nightmare, and not the tragic and regrettable death of 2 US diplomats and 2 CIA contractors, is the real “Benghazi scandal”.
Candidate Clinton continues to defend the optional intervention in Libya as an exercise in “smart power”, and says, without seeming irony, that “the Libyan people had a free election the first time since 1951”.
The Family Business:
The Clinton’s support for oligarchic elite interests both here and abroad is nothing less than a family business, with husband Bill playing a key role. This business continued to thrive during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State. From 2007 to 2014 Bill and Hillary Clinton reported $139 million in income, mostly speaking fees. This figure omits an unknown amount of money funneled directly into the Clinton Foundation because, contrary to Government Ethics rules, the Clintons maintain that they are not required to report such funds. However, serious questions are raised by the linkages between known foundation donors recruited by Bill Clinton, and State department activities and policies orchestrated by Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have monetized their popular political “brand” and allegiances to global elites, in away never seen before in American politics.
Hillary Clinton and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
He assumed this position when former CEO Henry Paulson became United States Secretary of the Treasury.
Hillary’s “fee for service” speechifying since 2013 has netted her a tidy $21.7 million for 92 private appearances, Bill did a little better, garnering $26.6 million for 94 income producing speeches.
The Clinton’s are estimated to have a career fundraising haul of around $3 billion, with around $2 billion of that going directly into the Clinton Foundation, a backdoor clearinghouse for giving and receiving favors and jobs to the Clinton’s political network.
Candidate Clinton defends her fundraising prowess as a strength, and shrugs off her Goldman Sachs speech income by saying “that is what they offered me”. However she laughs off calls to reveal to the American people the transcripts of these paid private speeches.
Trans-Pacific Partnership:
In what many see as putting global corporate interests over the interests of the American people, Secretary Clinton “openly pushed for the TPP trade deal at least 45 times during her tenure as secretary of state, according to CNN’s tally.” As the country’s lead diplomat, Clinton was deeply involved in the formation of TPP as well as its promotion. This treaty, should it become law, will allow US taxpayers to be forced to pay massive reparations to multinational corporations should our labor, environmental, or other policy choices be deemed to impact their “expected future profits”. These secretive proceedings would be held by unaccountable foreign tribunals of corporate lawyers outside of public view, and free from any accountability or allegiance to the basic interests of the American people. This would amount to an unprecedented surrender of US sovereignty and citizen power, and must be regarded as a kind of neoliberal corporate coup.
China, like the other Asian Tigers, have achieved rapid development by playing a smart and cagey game of economic nationalism, in particular, they have long eschewed ideological fundamentalism around the shibboleth of so-called “free trade”. Our ruling elites, on the other hand, seem to have boundless enthusiasm for pursuing profit at the cost of hollowing out our industrial and human infrastructure. They are mining the social, industrial and human capital of our country for maximum short term profit because their interests are transnational.
The arguments of the free trade fundamentalists are weak, and fall apart against empirical evidence, but they still win the day because our corrupted political system reflexively sides with the interests of organized multinational greed over the actual interests of the American people, and of ordinary people throughout the world.
Protesters in Aukland, New Zealand at the signing of the TPP.
Unrestricted offshoring of our real capacity to produce wealth is a real abdication of our long term national interests. Worse yet, it is done to placate multinational corporations with no discernible allegiance to our country whatsoever. Once facilities, knowledge, subcontractors, and supply lines have been offshored, they become integral to the offshored-to country and cannot easily be repatriated.
Candidate Clinton claims to have flipped her position on TPP, saying with lawyerly circumlocution: “As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it.”
The Hondoran Coup:
Hillary’s aggressive prioritization of elite corporate interests over the interests of common people, has taken many disturbing turns. Perhaps one of the most disturbing is her role in the 2009 military coup that brought down a democratically elected government in Honduras. The coup ousted Manuel Zelaya, a wealthy landowner who had to be “brought to heel” when his government veered left, vowed to combat poverty, and then dared to push through a modest minimum wage increase for workers earning starvation wages in the garment factories that put clothes on the backs of Americans.
In “Hard Choices,” Clinton’s autobiography, she openly admits that she used her power to bring pro-U.S. "stability" to Honduras at the expense of democracy, stating: “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya (the democratically elected president) moot”. Those “free and fair” elections entailed a media blackout, targeted assassinations of anti-coup leaders, and a generalized and grave deterioration of human rights ahead of the polls. No international institutions were allowed to monitor these elections.
This was not a popular stance among Latin American governments, and others in the international community, who had pressed the US to use its influence to restore the democratically elected government. State Department officials instead blocked the OAS from adopting a resolution that would have refused to recognize Honduran elections carried out under dictatorship, effectively giving the US seal of approval to the military coup. The result was a significant deterioration of hemispheric relations that continues to this day.
Berta Caceres, Indigenous rights activist, anti-coup leader, murdered by security forces.
The MSM has since treated the coup, and the subsequent murders of environmental, LGBT, labor, and indigenous rights activists, as a local matter unrelated to US policymakers. True to form, the MSM trots out the hollow and vapid “cycle of violence” and “ever has it been thus” clichés so often employed when murderous governments are ushered into power with help from the United States. Hillary Clinton prides herself on being a feminist, but what kind of feminist is she, exactly? Do feminists support coups?
Candidate Clinton has been silent on the coup and its violent aftermath, however she stands by her 2014 statement that Hondoran children fleeing this horrific violence should be sent back to their families to “send a message” that it is not worth trying to make the dangerous journey to the United States.
Alberta Tar Sands Mine. Turning shale into oil is an energy and carbon intensive process that burns large amounts of natural gas.
Tar Sands, Fracking, and Keystone XL:
Closer to home, Secretary Clinton made critical decisions related to the Keystone XL pipeline’s advancement towards approval. During this process, Canadian banks TD Bank and CIBC were sponsors for 8 “speeches” that put more than $1.6 million directly into Hillary’s pocket. Both banks were deeply involved in promoting the Keystone XL pipeline. TD Bank and CIBC also support the construction of 2 other pipelines, stretching to the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts, as alternative means for get Canada’s dirty, destructive, and polluting tar sands oil to international markets.
Europe is getting fracked.
Clinton’s State department also campaigned tirelessly to help US energy giants to globalize fracking, after they have faced criticism from Wall Street for missing the bus on the US fracking boom. Under her leadership, the State Department worked with US energy companies such as Haliburton, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips to spread fracking around the globe to countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, South Africa, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea. This was often done in the face of intense opposition from local citizens and legislators who object to the prospect of poisoned water supplies. American officials, demonstrating the capture of policymaking by industry and Wall Street interests, dutifully shills for US firms seeking these lucrative shale concessions, and pressures local government officials to ignore citizen opposition, in return for access to the neoliberal corporate gravy train.
Candidate Clinton now claims to be tough on climate change, and even says she now opposes the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
