Clinton Wants to Keep the Republican Majority in Congress

[StatUS]

Clinton Wants to Keep the Republican Majority in Congress
Hillary is going to need help passing her neo-liberal agenda
By Michael Sainato • 08/29/16 8:30am

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Hillary Clinton’s speech last week about the alt right was the latest attempt by her campaign to win the right-wing establishment over—and away from her competitor Donald Trump. By distancing Trump from the Republican leadership, she can preserve the GOP majority in Congress and use them during her presidency to pass neo-liberal legislation. Having already solidified support from the Democratic Establishment, Clinton is using that “D” next to her name as a Trojan horse to push forth the elitist and corporate interests held by her vast network of wealthy donors from both parties.

In her speech, Clinton referred to former Sen. Bob Dole, former president George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, noting, “We need that kind of leadership again.” She added that she was honored to receive support from Republicans. While Clinton is aligning herself with the right, Clinton supporters in the media are also highlighting these ties in their defenses of her.

“Most Americans not named Bush or Clinton don’t spend much time thinking about the plight of impoverished people with AIDS in developing countries whose lives depend on access to wildly expensive drugs,” wrote Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. The piece was a lousy attempt to ignore the profound ethics violations and corruption allegations over how the Clinton Foundation raises money.

On August 24, Politico published an article claiming Clinton is teaming up with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to combat poverty. This is an attempt to suggest Ryan prefers Clinton over Trump, reflecting a campaign strategy even corrupt Democratic National Committee (DNC) staff warned Clinton against in an email released by WikiLeaks. The email reveals that the Clinton campaign intended to portray Ryan as at odds with Trump in May, but DNC staff resisted, believing it would hurt the Democratic Party’s other candidates running for Congress around the country.

“Asking state Parties to praise House Republicans like Ryan would be damaging for the Party down ballot,” former DNC communications director Luis Miranda wrote to former DNC CEO Amy Dacey on May  16, at which point Ryan had yet to endorse Trump. “We would basically have to throw out our entire frame that the GOP made Trump through years of divisive and ugly politics. We would have to say that Republicans are reasonable and that the good ones will shun Trump. It just doesn’t work from the Party side.”

Now with a comfortable lead over Trump, Clinton’s campaign is employing this tactic to welcome defectors from the Republican Party, despite the repercussions it could have for the rest of the Democrats. The DNC’s recent fundraising efforts attest to this shift to focus the resources of the Democratic Party entirely onClinton.

Thanks to a campaign finance loophole, wealthy donors who maxed out their contributions to the Clinton campaign and DNC directly are funneling money to the DNC and Clinton campaign through state parties. A recent Bloomberg article noted, “on average, 83 percent of the money that was sent from the state committees to the DNC in July originated with a donor who had already given the maximum $33,400 to the national party.”

Under the pretenses of courting Republicans for the sole purpose of soliciting their wealthy donors to stop Trump, Clinton’s campaign has pushed for money from former Bush and Romney donors, despite the clash between these donors, their interests, and the platform of the Democratic Party.

In early August, the Clinton campaign even launched the Republicans for Hillary effort. Instead of using Trump’s unfavorable ratings against the Republican Party,Clinton is embracing its establishment who don’t like their party’s candidate. This shift should be concerning to Democrats, as it is indicative of the fact that Clintonplans to relive the neo-liberal disasters of the first Clinton Administration.

Bill Clinton pushed through destructive welfare reform, catalyzed mass incarceration, deregulated the financial industry, and passed NAFTA under the banner of the Democratic Party. A Republican majority in Congress not only will provide President Hillary Clinton with a scapegoat for any flip-flopping or broken campaign promises in office, but will provide her with the support of the establishment in both parties to continue promoting the interests of corporate giants over the public interest—just as she did at the State Department.

Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.


COMMENT
FILED UNDER: 2016 ELECTIONS, CONGRESS, DNC, DONALD TRUMP, GOP, HILLARY CLINTON,PAUL RYAN, REPUBLICANS, WIKILEAKS

Celebrate Dubbya leadership
#GOPforHillary
#4DChess
#Somethingsomethingpragmetism
#Bububutliberaljustices

 

[ineedsleep212]

Anybody that doesn't see this is blind. She wants to keep the argument that this is all she can do and validate the GOATness of incremental change.

 

[StatUS]

Anybody that doesn't see this is blind. She wants to keep the argument that this is all she can do and validate the GOATness of incremental change.

Let's be honest too. The only reason the dems would want serious change is to change gun laws because the NRA's not on their payroll and for social issues that any sane person would be in favor of.

But criminal justice? BLM is radical to them. Climate change? They still take money from oil companies and play to their every whim. Economic reform? They've doubled down on alot of things Bush put into place and gave Wall Street a little slap on the wrist for fukking up. A more liberal supreme court? We'll see because that's definently not guaranteed.

I think at this point it's obvious Hill is the next president I just don't want these fakes masquerading as progressives anymore when it's obvious they play to the both sides. Which is fine but don't try to act like you're down with the real left when you much prefer the rights way of doing things.

 

[the cac mamba]

whillary

 

[The War Report]

You're citing a web site that's clearly right leaning. Look at the bull shyt ass headlines.



Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law owns the paper.

 

[StatUS]

You're citing a web site that's clearly right leaning. Look at the bull shyt ass headlines.



Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law owns the paper.

The guy writing the article is a progressive who's pretty anti-DNC so he gets play on that site. He also writes for The Guardian. Don't derail.

 

[88m3]

The guy writing the article is a progressive who's pretty anti-DNC so he gets play on that site. He also writes for The Guardian. Don't derail.

 

[StatUS]

Your articles come from every Hillary favored rag on the planet though

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

When her and the republicans roll back parts of dodd-frank.

 

[88m3]

Your articles come from every Hillary favored rag on the planet though

An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees

 

[StatUS]

An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees

Do you have any opinions on the article this guy who's not that person in that article wrote or are you here to deflect because it's posted on that site

 

[88m3]

Do you have any opinions on the article this guy who's not that person in that article wrote or are you here to deflect because it's posted on that site

Are you going to play dense to what is being pointed out to you or are just an ignorant person?

 

[the cac mamba]

An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees

why are you writing letters to jared kushner

 

[StatUS]

Are you going to play dense to what is being pointed out to you or are just an ignorant person?

So you're not gonna refute anything in the OP opinion piece but instead continue to post deflections, ok that's fine.

 

[StatUS]

Also as an aside, here's Krugman warning about the same things weeks ago

nytimes.com
No Right Turn

• by Paul Krugman
• Aug. 5, 2016
• 3 min read
• original

All the experts tell us not to pay too much attention to polls for another week or two. Still, it does look as if Hillary Clinton got abig bounce from her convention, swamping her opponent’s bounce a week earlier. Better still, from the Democrats’ point of view, the swing in the polls appears to be doing what some of us thought it might: sending Donald Trump into a derp spiral, in which his ugly nonsense gets even uglier and more nonsensical as his electoral prospects sink.

As a result, we’re finally seeing some prominent Republicans not just refusing to endorse Mr. Trump, but actually declaring their support for Mrs. Clinton. So how should she respond?

The obvious answer, you might think, is that she should keep doing what she is doing — emphasizing how unfit her rival is for office, letting her allies point out her own qualifications and continuing to advocate a moderately center-left policy agenda that is largely a continuation of President Obama’s.

But at least some commentators are calling on her to do something very different — to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.

I don’t think there’s much prospect that Mrs. Clinton will actually do that. But if by any chance she and those around her are tempted to take this recommendation seriously: Don’t.

First of all, let’s be clear about what she’s running on. It’s an unabashedly progressive program, but hardly extreme. We’re talking about higher taxes on high incomes, but nowhere near as high as those taxes were for a generation after World War II; expanded social programs, but nothing close to those of European welfare states; stronger financial regulation and more action on climate change, but aren’t the cases for both overwhelming?


And no, the program doesn’t need to be more “pro-growth.”

There’s absolutely no evidence that tax cuts for the rich and radical deregulation, which is what right-wingers mean when they talk about pro-growth policies, actually work, or that strengthening the social safety net does any harm. Bill Clinton presided over a bigger boom than Ronald Reagan; the Obama years have seen much more private job creation than the Bush era, even before the crash, with job growth actually accelerating after taxes went up and Obamacare went into effect.

It’s true that there are things we could do to boost the U.S. economy. The most important of these things, however, would be to take advantage of very low government borrowing costs to greatly expand public investment — which is something progressives support but conservatives oppose. So enough already with the notion that being on the center-left somehow means being anti-growth.

Now let’s talk about the politics.

The Trumpification of the G.O.P. didn’t come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it was the natural outcome of a cynical strategy: long ago, conservatives decided to harness racial resentment to sell right-wing economic policies to working-class whites, especially in the South.

This strategy brought many electoral victories, but always at the risk that the racial resentment would run out of control, leaving the economic conservatives — whose ideas never had much popular support — stranded. And that is what has just happened.

So now the strategy that rightists had used to sell policies that were neither popular nor successful has blown up in their faces. And the Democratic response should be to adopt some of those policies? Say what?

Also, I can’t help but notice a curious pattern in the recommendations of some self-proclaimed centrists. When Republicans were in the ascendant, centrists urged Democrats to adapt by moving right. Now that Republicans are in trouble, with some feeling that they have no choice except to vote Democratic, these same centrists are urging Democrats to … adapt by moving right. Funny how that works.

Back to the main theme: Grand coalitions do sometimes have a place in politics, as a response to crises that are neither party’s fault — external threats to national security, economic disaster. But that’s not what is happening here. Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding.

If some conservatives find this too much and bolt the party, good for them, and they should be welcomed into the coalition of the sane. But they can’t expect policy concessions in return. When Dr. Frankenstein finally realizes that he has created a monster, he doesn’t get a reward. Mrs. Clinton and her party should stay the course.