Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Hillary Clinton

Cries for Sanders to Be Conciliatory Miss the Point

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On April 28, 2016

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So, Sanders has most likely lost. Last minute upsets are possible, but highly unlikely.

And now come the calls for Bernie to be conciliatory.

This misses the point.

Sanders doesn’t need anything Clinton can give.

Any promises she makes with respect to his priorities are not credible. He’s old and his career is all but over anyway, so there is little she can offer in terms of career “advancement.”

Why does he need to be conciliatory? Only “for the good of the party.”  But the party has not been good to Sanders–in fact, it has repeatedly put its hand on the scales to help Hillary.

Clinton’s policies are far enough from Sanders that the only argument for him to be “conciliatory” are based on Trump being even further from him. But on things like not attacking foreign countries, Trump is actually closer to Sanders.

From my POV, the onus is on Clinton to be credibly conciliatory to Bernie, and more importantly his supporters. If her entire argument is “I’m the lesser evil,” then she should expect little beyond the occasional symbolic olive branch from Sanders or his followers.

Of course, it’s hard to be conciliatory for Clinton. Her entire campaign has been based on “I deserve this,” which doesn’t leave a lot of room for saying to other people, “I see your side.” She’s already saying things like TPP only needs a few tweaks, etc.

She’s simply, and to the core, a right wing hawk who is fundamentally opposed to most left-wing policies and who only changes her mind once those policies are inevitable (as with gay marriage, which she supported very late in the game).

In emotive language, she’s evil. Bernie’s no wonder on a lot of issues, but he did actually oppose all the key wars, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and so on. Clinton? On the wrong side of almost every issue which has mattered for her entire career and she’s not even believable where she’s better than Bernie, for instance on gun-control, about which she has attacked Obama as anti-guns, but then pandered in PA on gun-control.

So Clinton has to rely on Bernie being loyal to a party which has screwed him repeatedly in order to help her win the nomination, and she can’t credibly give him anything that matters because she’s not trustworthy on any issue that matters to Sanders or his followers.

Conciliatory? Ridiculous. She’s not credible, and he doesn’t need her. If she wants to be conciliated, she had best go first and find out how to make it credible.

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Hillary Clinton Is a Monstrous Politician

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On March 23, 2016

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Ok.  I’ve had enough. Let’s speak truthfully about Hillary Clinton:

She voted for the Iraq war and defended that vote for years.

She was a primary driver behind the Libyan war.

She was involved in the cluster-fuck that is Syria.

She was for the “welfare reform” and three strikes laws during her husband’s administration. She actively spoke for them, thus, she is culpable.

She opposes the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.

She has blamed homeowners for the financial crisis.

Henry Kissinger, a man who has a great deal of responsibility for two genocides was her adviser while she was Secretary of State, and he is her personal friend.

Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq sanctions which killed half a million Iraqi children or so.

She has compared Putin to Hitler.

It is a fact that Clinton is a bad person, who has championed policies which have killed a lot of people, and which have impoverished many others.

No Realpolitik case can be made for these policies: They have clearly made the world a more dangerous place, vastly increasing failed states and terrorism. These policies were unethical both in and of themselves, and massive suffering have been direct results.

I have been told by people who know her that she is a wonderful, concerned friend, and very warm in small groups.

I care about that as much as I do about the fact that Americans thought that George W. Bush was “someone who they wanted to have a beer with.”

Clinton, as a politician, has supported terrible policies. Moreover, she has not learned from these policy failures. For example, after Iraq, she supported Libya.

I am tired of the “lesser evil” argument; but it is not clear to me that Clinton is the lesser evil.

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Pure Utilitarianism and Capitalism

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On March 5, 2016

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Hilary Clinton recently tweeted the following.

On the face this is unexceptional. A business exists to do certain things, and employees are hired to contribute towards those actions. We hire an employee because we think they will do a good job.

Except that in our current system, we distribute goods through money, and most of how we distribute money is through corporations. You have a good life if you have a good job, pretty much. There are exceptions and they are exceptions.

Hilary has also said that she doesn’t favor a $15/hour minimum wage.

This is what happens when you think of people as assets. Some people don’t deserve $15/hour because they don’t “add enough value.”

But they are still people, and they still need to eat, sleep in a warm place, and have the occasional bit of entertainment.

They have value that cannot be reduced to their economic utility.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

If we had a society where everyone lived well whether they had a job or not, then we could make pure utilitarian arguments about employment. But when employment is required for people to be able to live decently, or even live at all, such arguments lead to treating huge masses of people as disposable, and consigning them to awful lives.

Again, this might be ok if we lived in a scarcity society, but we don’t. We produce enough food to feed everyone, we have the ability to house everyone, and so on. This would be especially true if we would dump the doctrine of planned obsolescence and produce goods meant to last pretty close to forever.

There are other arguments, of course, like “What is utility?”, bolstered by findings that blacks, say, get half the interviews as whites with identical resumes. Those are important arguments, but they pale next to, “Everyone should have a decent life, and that shouldn’t be contingent on whether they can make money for a billionaire.”

The economy and corporations exist to serve people, not the other way around. When they do not do so, the problem lies with them. This is not a subsistence farming community, it is not, “You work, you eat.” We’d be better off, in fact, if a lot of the work we are doing wasn’t done, because so much of it does more damage than good, even if it does generate a “profit.”

The core of any decent system of ethics, and thus of any political and economic order, is Kant’s maxim that people are ends, not means. When you forget that, you inevitably descend into monstrosity.

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