from Write Brain Studio
Tag: Hillary Clinton
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Leaked Deutsche Bank Speech Shows Clinton Asking Wall Street To Police Itself, Supporting US Pivot To Asia
Originally published at Mint Press News, November 4, 2016Clinton’s October 2014 speech to Deutsche Bank was leaked as part of WikiLeaks’ archive of John Podesta’s Gmail account, revealing more of the nominee’s agenda for the financial sector and global affairs.
MINNEAPOLIS — With just days to go before the election, a two-year-old speech to a prominent global bank provides new insight into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s possible agenda if she takes control of the White House.
Clinton delivered the speech on Oct. 7, 2014 to Deutsche Bank in New York, but the content of that speech and an ensuing Q&A session wasn’t made public until WikiLeaks released it as part of the organization’s ongoing publication of emails and files taken from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.
Clinton has faced pressure to release her speeches to banking executives throughout her presidential campaign, and particularly while vying for the Democratic nomination against Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who made campaign finance reform a central plank in his presidential platform.
In her speech, Clinton acknowledged the pressures facing Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. She referenced the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt in calling for moderate economic reforms:
“Remember what Teddy Roosevelt did. Yes, he took on what he saw as the excesses in the economy, but he also stood against the excesses in politics. He didn’t want to unleash a lot of nationalist, populistic reaction. He wanted to try to figure out how to get back into that balance that has served America so well over our entire nationhood.”
Roosevelt was known as a “trust buster” who was responsible for breaking up massive corporations, and he was outspoken about his wariness of big banks and wealthy business executives.
Clinton also acknowledged “that many Americans feel frustrated, some even angry,” about the economic downturn, adding: “And a lot of that anger has been directed at the financial industry.”
While recognizing the need for reforms, Clinton also seemed to suggest that the financial sector might be allowed to police itself:
“Today, there’s more that can and should be done that really has to come from the industry itself, and how we can strengthen our economy, create more jobs at a time where that’s increasingly challenging, to get back to Teddy Roosevelt’s square deal. And I really believe that our country and all of you are up to that job.”
According to one analysis of the speech and related emails, this attempt to acknowledge critics of the banking industry could have been intended as a way to placate Clinton’s critics in the event of the eventual release of the speeches.
“In an email on November 20, 2015 Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin explicitly noted how he left an ‘easter egg’ in the DB speech precisely in case the world came knocking and asking for Hillary’s speeches,” wrote an anonymous contributor at Zero Hedge using the name “Tyler Durden,” a shared pseudonym adopted by many writers at the site, in an analysis of the speech published on Wednesday.
In the 2015 email, Schwerin wrote:
“I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats. It’s definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it now, but it’s much more than most people would assume she was saying in paid speeches. … Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written.”
Ultimately, “Tyler Durden” noted, the Clinton campaign opted not to release the speeches.
Elsewhere in the Deutsche Bank speech, Clinton acknowledged the crucial role big banks will play in Washington’s strategic pivot to Asia. She said:
“Will we have the discipline and dexterity to follow through on our pivot to Asia where so much of the history of the 21st century will be written, while managing new and old crises in the Middle East and Europe?
Can we get our relationship with China right, navigating between the twin shoals of excessive accommodation and the potential for dangerous conflict?
Will our traditional allies in Europe and East Asia step up and share the responsibilities of upholding a global order under pressure from so many fronts?”
The focus on Asia, started under the Obama administration and likely to continue under Clinton, if her speech is any indication, involves encircling China with economic and military allies as a way to undercut China’s growing global influence. However, some historic allies like the Philippines have begun to push back against U.S. influence in the region.
Many analysts see the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal, as a key element to the U.S. pivot to Asia. While initially supportive of the deal, Clinton now promises to oppose the TPP as president after facing intense pressure from Sanders and activists opposed to the deal.
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Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
An architect of regime-change, coups, no-fly zones, rule of the rich and mass incarceration is about to become Commander-in-Chief, yet the bulk of what passes for the Left is “engaged in a 1930s-style ‘united front’ against a ‘fascism’ that was never a threat in 21st century America.” Donald Trump, the orange menace, didn’t have a chance of becoming president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a 21st century fascist and threat to life on Earth.
Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Originally published at Black Agenda Report on October 26, 2016
“Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.”
Hillary Clinton’s impending — and totally predictable — landslide victory on November 8 will prove only that there never was any danger of a “fascist” white nationalist takeover of the U.S. executive branch of government in 2016. That was always a red (or “orange”) herring, a phony “barbarians at the gate” threat that — as Wikileaks documents confirmed — John Podesta and Hillary’s other handlers fervently hoped would convey “lesser evil” status to their manifestly unpopular candidate.
There was nothing particularly devious or out of the ordinary in the Hillary camp’s favoring Donald Trump or, alternatively, Ted Cruz. It is standard Democratic Party practice to position themselves just to the left of the Republicans. In a duopoly electoral system, victory lies in where the cake is cut. By hugging close to the GOP’s flanks, national Democratic candidates can lay claim to a “center-left” spectrum of political space that encompasses a clear majority of U.S. public opinion on most issues. By this calculus, Democrats are supposed to win, unless they are tripped up on the closely related issues of race (failure to “stand up” to the Blacks) and foreign policy (failure to “stand up” to whoever is the designated foreign enemy).
Race is the trickiest part of the equation, since white supremacy is embedded in the American political conversation, hiding just beneath the surface of most discourse on social and economic policy.
“His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites.”
Trump thought he could win by combining an overt white racist appeal with an anti-corporate message that laid the blame on Wall Street for (white) American job losses and falling living standards. He also calculated — correctly, it turns out — that in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, many white Americans were more upset about their own economic and social status than they were angry at Russians; that they wanted regime change at home more than abroad.
Both of Trump’s central policies backfired, dooming his campaign. His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites, who have given majorities to national Republicans since 1968 but whose self-image is that they are not, as individuals, racist. (Certainly, white women found further reason to reject his candidacy.) Much more spectacularly, Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.
At the national level, the duopoly system, as we had known it, virtually ceased to exist – a fact dramatically driven home by the near-universal corporate media rejection of Donald Trump, the candidacy they had done so much to create. The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election, a potential historic opening to a far wider space of progressive political struggle, including on the moribund electoral level. With the ruling class gathered in one Big Tent, and the overt racists occupying the imploded shell of the GOP, the system itself was in disarray. What was once two vibrant parties of the ruling class, with a virtual monopoly on the totality of the electorate, had become one ruling class party plus a hollowed-out husk, at least temporarily occupied by white nationalists under the leadership of a narcissistic and incoherent billionaire, yet without enough funds to mount a competitive general election campaign.
“The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election.”
In these pages, we had been saying since last year that Donald Trump could not win; that Bernie Sanders’ fate would be sealed in the southern primaries; and that, although ruling class money would insure Clinton an election by landslide, it could not buy her legitimacy among a significant section of the Democratic “base,” who would now be pushed to the latrine area of her Big Tent. As we wrote on May 18 of this year:
“Outsized fear of Trump is hysteria. These days, the ‘brown shirts’ wear blue. Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street, War and Austerity – not Trump, the racist America Firster. And, he can’t win, anyway – not with tens of millions of ‘moderate’ Republicans and most of the party’s funders rushing into Hillary’s welcoming embrace.”
But sadly, hysteria does reign in most of the “left” precincts of America. Those who did not hesitate to kick Hillary when she appeared to be “down” — in those heady days when they imagined it was possible she could lose to Sanders — are terrified to kick her when she is “up” and primed to take the helm of the hyper-power. They are engaged in a 1930s-style “united front” against a “fascism” that was never a threat in 21st century America, where a different kind of dictatorship of the rich (but also a fascism) has made brown-shirts (and Klansmen) utterly superfluous. These trembling leftists refuse to oppose the modern manifestation of fascism, which is now firmly entrenched in power with Hillary as its champion, in favor of a crusade against an “orange” menace that did not have a ghost of a chance of seizing national power. They have made themselves perfectly irrelevant and useless — except, of course, to the fascists-in-charge.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.