I
will not support Hillary Clinton in 2016, because she is an
empire-building corporatist. Here's my mental math, which I challenge
anyone out there to refute:
First off, America has firmly
established itself as the world's only military giant and the global hub
of corporate oligarchy, so whatever the next U.S. President decides
will have a huge impact on the rest of the world. The United States
is currently an electoral democracy, but when you examine our campaign
finance structure, it turns out that we are really an ad-hoc
Corporatocracy. History shows that flagrant Corporatism, in which
for-profit entities effectively write the laws, has often been a
precursor to brutal fascism (which would take a lot longer to explain,
but that's why we have Wikipedia). This makes a lot of sense:
corporations, especially those that are publicly traded, are designed to
NOT have a moral compass, putting them at odds with any government
which tries to protect its citizens from things like slave wages, unsafe
food and medications, chemical dumping and air pollution. Fascist
political leaders conflate moral compunctions with weakness, and
external power with strength, and don't fret much over who gets hurt as
long as their own control is assured. When you put them together, you
get a recklessly amoral government "of, by, and for" the power-hungry
and the super-rich. It's a marriage made in... well, you get the idea.
Another essential component of fascism is the militaristic presumption
of a right to invade any nation, regardless of imminent threat, which
perfectly describes Hillary Clinton's rhetoric and voting record over
the past decade. As head of the U.S. State Department, Clinton oversaw
the bombing of various sovereign nations via drones despite their
leaders' protests, which is just as much an act of war as launching a
missile (drone strike fans can't seem to grasp the idea that when your
country uses a new type of remote-controlled killing machine to end
human lives en masse on foreign soil, it's still technically "war").
The United States is currently fighting numerous wars of choice, with no
foreseeable end. This is a direct violation of the UN Security Council
Charter, which is why many countries consider the drone strikes to be
illegal. To wit, Hillary Clinton's foreign policy positions are
directly at odds with the core notion upon which all modern diplomacy is
predicated: "You can't just attack whomever you please." This does not
recommend her for the job of Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed
Forces.
Those who defend Hillary Clinton's record as Secretary
of State like to point out that during her tenure, the United States
didn't launch new ground offensives, so she is clearly better than
George W. Bush. First off—for fuck's sake, is THAT where we set the bar
these days?!! But I digress... these apologists know very well that
their defense of Clinton's record doesn't hold up in light of the steady
increase in U.S. drone strikes in countries like Yemen and Pakistan.
Drone strikes are predicated on a chillingly relativistic argument:
"Fewer American troops are dying in America's endless War on Terror, so
it's OK to murder hundreds or thousands of brown-skinned foreigners,
many of whom happen to be innocent." This is dehumanizing propaganda
worthy of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's novel 1984.
Moreover, drone strikes during President Obama's first term were so
indiscriminate in their killing of innocents that they actually fomented
terrorism under a pretext of fighting it, so there goes the hackneyed
"But now we're all safer" justification. As far as I can tell, Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton both represent a Washington culture of lawless
empire-building, and I have yet to hear a persuasive argument to the
contrary.
Another point against Clinton: she tacitly supports
an environmental Apocalypse. Now, lest you start thinking I'm an
alarmist, consider the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and
the Fukushima disaster. Crude oil and chemical dispersants have
devastated the Gulf of Mexico, whereas the whole Pacific Ocean is now
radioactive (people realize this everywhere but the United States, where
the "free press" has dutifully covered up the shocking scope of this
global catastrophe). In light of all this, it seems fair to say that
corporate cronyism has already brought about the end of the world as we
know it, and the best we can do now is run damage control. Seriously,
these are two enormous bodies of water, which are essential components
in the global food chain, and that's not even taking climate change into
account. The corporatists won't stop until Mother Earth has been
rendered a toxic cesspit full of genetically modified organisms. For
whatever twisted reasons, they seem to actively hate any policy, plan,
or technology which promises to preserve a shred of Earth's natural
state... but they're all for splicing snail DNA into corn, removing
mountaintops, burning stuff, and producing even more nuclear waste.
I would rather not see this beautiful planet transform into a
radioactive ball of sludge where most living things are cancer-riddled
and/or mutated (yeah, call me a starry-eyed dreamer), but this already
seems likely to happen within my lifetime. Putting another corporate
shill in office is not going to help the situation. Hillary Clinton
will loyally represent Monsanto, Big Oil, Big Coal, and the rest of the
Terracidal God Complex Machine bankrolling her 2016 campaign, even to
the detriment of most Americans and Mother Earth itself, because she
believes that this is how she will WIN. That's just how Corporate
Democrats roll... because deep down, they're just Social Darwinists
wearing a different costume. Social Darwinists transcend labels; they
may disguise their nihilistic lust for power behind words like Democrat,
Republican, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, but when all's said and done,
you shall know them by their deeds.
This is the point at which
Liberals out there shout that Hillary Clinton will support gay marriage
(after voting against it in the DOMA decision) and any number of other
goody-good social causes. Sorry to break it to you, but the "Good Guys
versus Bad Guys" paradigm which lionizes these Corporate Democrats is a
dog and pony show. Issues like gay marriage, women's reproductive
rights, and social services are very important to many people's quality
of life in the United States, but the Culture Wars have become one of
the corporate imperialists' most effective weapons in the propaganda
campaign which tells us that we have "choice." Social issues are a red
herring which effectively pacifies the Good Liberals, rendering them not
only blind but mute in the midst of a global fascist overthrow that is
quite apparent to true Progressives.
The fatalistic mindset
that we must settle for yet another corporatist in the White House seems
perfectly normal for Democratic party loyalists, because theirs is a
faith-based approach to politics best summed up in the mantra,
"Everything will be fine once my team wins." As for myself, I have
concluded that these times are far too desperate to support Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton's style of offering piecemeal incrementalism yet
never tackling the pressing need for wide-scale systemic reform... dare I
say, revolution. Obama was no FDR, and Clinton won't be either.
To be fair, there are a couple of scenarios in which I would vote for
Hillary Clinton—lest I appear sexist for not bringing up how great it
would be to have a woman president regardless of her politics.
Specifically: if Hillary Clinton ever comes out in favor of prosecuting
jailable offenses on Wall Street, restoring Americans' civil liberties
to a pre-Patriot-Act Constitutional standard, phasing out the fossil
fuel and nuclear industries, or ending the drone strikes, I'll
reconsider my decision to oppose her candidacy; any of those positions
would do, but preferably all of them. In the meantime, I'll support
whoever challenges the imperialistic, Terracidal, corporate machine that
is subjugating humankind and destroying the natural world.
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