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La notte, Michelangelo Antonioni. (1960)
Hillary Clinton has officially announced sheâs running in 2016!
Oh boy. I highly recommend everyone does their research on Hillary Clinton. Donât give her your vote just because she is a woman. Consider what she has done and what she will do for the United States. She shouldnât be voted president just because we finally want a woman in the white house. Make sure you are aware of what she stands for and what she has been willing to do in the past. We have placed her on a pedestal as pro-feminism, pro-lgbt, pro-progress, but people need to understand that this is how politics work. As millennials, we are changing and becoming more open minded. We are the target group that need to be encouraged to vote for her. Now I am not saying to not vote for her, and instead vote for a republican who will destroy any progress made. But be wary of who you are choosing to vote for.Â
Some information you all might be interested in:Â
hillary clinton won a plea bargain while defending a child rapist who she knew to be guilty. part of her defense was that the 12 year old girl âsought older menâ and was âemotionally unstableâ. she was recorded laughing & making jokes about it, and when the tapes surfaced to the media years later, she said she was just doing what she had to do to the best of her ability.
âMaking Profit and War
All issues of wealth, power, and violence are also womenâs and LGBT rights issues. For instance, neoliberal economic policies of austerity and privatization disproportionately hurt women and LGBT individuals, who are often the lowest paid and the first workers to be fired, the most likely to bear the burdens of family maintenance, and the most affected by the involuntary migration, domestic violence, homelessness, and mental illness that are intensified by poverty.
Clintonâs record on such issues is hardly encouraging. Her decades of service on corporate boards and in major policy roles as first lady, senator, and secretary of state give a clear indication of where she stands.
One of Clintonâs first high-profile public positions was at Walmart, where she served on the board from 1986 to 1992. She âremained silentâ in board meetings as her company âwaged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers,â as an ABC review of video recordings later noted.
Clinton recounts in her 2003 book Living History that Walmart CEO Sam Walton âtaught me a great deal about corporate integrity and success.â Though she later began trying to shed her public identification with the company in order to attract labor support for her Senate and presidential candidacies, Walmart executives have continued to look favorably on her, with Alice Walton donating the maximum amount to the âReady for Hillaryâ Super PAC in 2013. Waltonâs $25,000 donation was considerably higher than the averageannual salary for Walmartâs hourly employees, two-thirds of whom are women.
After leaving Walmart, Clinton became perhaps the most active first lady in history. While it would be unfair to hold her responsible for all of her husbandâs policies, she did play a significant role in shaping and justifying many of them. In Living History she boasts of her role in gutting US welfare: âBy the time Bill and I left the White House, welfare rolls had dropped 60 percentâ â and not because poverty had dropped.
Women and children, the main recipients of welfare, have been the primary victims. Jeffrey St Clair at Counterpunch notes that prior to welfare reform, âmore than 70 percent of poor families with children received some kind of cash assistance. By 2010, less than 30 percent got any kind of cash aid and the amount of the benefit had declined by more than 50 percent from pre-reform levels.â
Clinton also lobbied Congress to pass her husbandâs deeply racist crime bill, which, Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, âescalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible,â expanding mass incarceration and the death penalty.
Arguably the two most defining features of Clintonâs tenures as senator (2001â2009) and secretary of state (2009â2013) were her promotion of US corporate profit-making and her aggressive assertion of the US governmentâs right to intervene in foreign countries.
Reflecting on this performance as Clinton left her secretary post in January 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek commented that âClinton turned the State Department into a machine for promoting U.S. business.â She sought âto install herself as the governmentâs highest-ranking business lobbyist,â directly negotiating lucrative overseas contracts for US corporations like Boeing, Lockheed, and General Electric. Not surprisingly, âClintonâs corporate cheerleading has won praise from business groups.â
Clinton herself has been very honest about this aim, albeit not when speaking in front of progressives. Her 2011 Foreign Policy essay on âAmericaâs Pacific Centuryâ speaks at length about the objective of âopening new markets for American businesses,â containing no fewer than ten uses of the phrases âopen markets,â âopen trade,â and permutations thereof.
A major focus of this effort is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involves twelve Pacific countries and is being secretly negotiated by the Obama administration with the assistance of over six hundred corporate advisers.
Like Bill Clintonâs North American Free Trade Agreement, the deal is intended to further empower multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment in all countries involved. Lower wages and increased rates of displacement, detention, and physical violence for female and LGBT populations are among the likely consequences, given the results of existing âfree tradeâ agreements.
Clintonâs Foreign Policy article also elaborates on the role of US military power in advancing these economic goals. The past âgrowthâ of eastern Asia has depended on âthe security and stability that has long been guaranteed by the U.S. military,â and âa more broadly distributed military presence across the region will provide vital advantagesâ in the future.
Clinton thus reaffirms the bipartisan consensus regarding the USâs right to use military force abroad in pursuit of economic interest â echoing, for instance, her husbandâs secretary of defense, William Cohen, who in 1999 reserved the right to âthe unilateral use of military powerâ in the name of âensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.â
In the Middle East and Central Asia, Clinton has likewise defended the USâs right to violate international law and human rights. As senator she not only voted in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq â a monstrous crime that has killed hundreds of thousands of peoplewhile sowing terror and sectarianism across the region â she was an outspoken advocate of the invasion and a fierce critic of resistance within the United Nations (UN).
Since then she has only partially disavowed that position (out ofpolitical expediency) while speaking in paternalistic and racist termsabout Iraqis. Senator Clinton was also an especially staunch supporter â even by the standards of the US Congress â of Israelâs illegal military actions and settlement activity in the occupied territories.
As Barack Obamaâs secretary of state, she presided over the expansion of illegal drone attacks that by conservative estimates have killed many hundreds of civilians, while reaffirming US alliances with vicious dictatorships. As she recounts in her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, âIn addition to our work with the Israelis, the Obama Administration also increased Americaâs own sea and air presence in the Persian Gulf and deepened our ties to the Gulf monarchies.â
Clinton herself is widely recognized to have been one of the administrationâs most forceful advocates of attacking or expandingmilitary operations in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria and of strengthening US ties to dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, and elsewhere. Maybe the women and girls of these countries, including those whose lives have been destroyed by US bombs, can take comfort in knowing that a âfeministâ helped craft US policy.
Secretary Clinton and her team worked to ensure that any challenges to USâIsraeli domination of the Middle East were met with brute force and various forms of collective punishment. On Iran, she often echoes the bipartisan line that âall options must remain on the tableâ â a flagrant violation of the UN Charterâs prohibition of âthe threat or use of forceâ in international relations â and brags in Hard Choices that her team âsuccessfully campaigned around the world to impose crippling sanctionsâ on the country.
She ensured that Palestineâs UN statehood bid âwent nowhere in the Security Council.â Though out of office by the time Israel launched its savage 2014 assault on Gaza, she ardently defended it in interviews. This context helps explain her recent praise for Henry Kissinger, renowned for bombing civilians and supporting governments that killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of suspected dissidents. She writes in the Washington Post that she ârelied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.â
Militarization and Its Benefits
In another domain of traditional US ownership, Latin America, Clinton also seems to have followed Kissingerâs example. As confirmed in her 2014 book, she effectively supported the 2009 military overthrow of left-of-center Honduran President Manuel Zelaya â a âcaricature of a Central American strongmanâ â by pushing for a âcompromiseâ solution that endorsed his illegal ouster.
She has advocated the application of the Colombia model â highly militarized âanti-drugâ initiatives coupled with neoliberal economic policies â to other countries in the region, and is full of praise for the devastating militarization of Mexico over the past decade. That militarization has resulted in eighty thousand or more deaths since 2006, including the forty-three Mexican student activistsdisappeared (and presumably massacred) in September 2014.
In the Caribbean, the US model of choice is Haiti, where Clinton and her husband have relentlessly promoted the sweatshop model of production since the 1990s. WikiLeaks documents show that in 2009 her State Department collaborated with subcontractors for Hanes, Leviâs, and Fruit of the Loom to oppose a minimum-wage increase for Haitian workers. After the January 2010 earthquake she helped spearhead the highly militarized US response.
Militarization has plentiful benefits, as Clinton understands. It can facilitate corporate investment, such as the âgold rushâ that the US ambassador described following the Haiti earthquake. It can keep in check nonviolent dissidents, such as hungry Haitian workers or leftist students in Mexico. And it can help combat the influence of countries like Venezuela that have challenged neoliberalism and US geopolitical control.
These goals have long motivated US hostility toward Cuba, and thus Clintonâs recent call for ending the US embargo against Cuba was pragmatic, not principled: âIt wasnât achieving its goalsâ of overthrowing the government, as she says in her recent book. The goal there, as in Venezuela, is to compel the country to ârestore private property and return to a free market economy,â as shedemanded of Venezuela in 2010.
A reasonable synopsis of Clintonâs record around the world comes from neoconservative policy adviser Robert Kagan, who, like Clinton, played an important role in advocating the 2003 Iraq invasion. âI feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,â Kagan told the New York Times last June. Asked what to expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency, Kagan predicted that âif she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, itâs something that might have been called neocon.â But, he added, âclearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.â
Narrowly Defined Rights
What about Clintonâs record on that narrower set of issues more commonly associated with womenâs and LGBT rights â control over oneâs reproductive system and freedom from discrimination and sexual violence?
Perhaps the best that can be said is that Clinton does not espouse the medieval view of female bodily autonomy shared by most Republicans, and does not actively encourage homophobia and transphobia. She has consistently said that abortion should remain legal (but ârareâ) and that birth control should be widely available, and when in office generally acted in accord with those statements. She has recently voiced support for gay marriage rights. These positions are worth something, even if they are mainly a reflection of pressure from below.
But nor does her record on these rights merit glowing praise. In addition to partly capitulating to the far-right anti-choice agenda in Congress, with disproportionate harm to low-income parents, Clinton and other Democrats have also actively undermined these rights. Some observers have argued that Clintonâs repetition of the Democratic slogan that abortion should be âsafe, legal, andrareâreinforces the stigmatization of those who choose that option.
Her narrow definition of reproductive rights â as abortion and contraception only â does not allow much in the way of material support for parents or young children. She insists that abortion must remain ârare,â but has also helped deprive poor expecting parents of the financial support they would need to raise a child (for instance, through the 1996 welfare reform and the fiscal austerity for social programs that has become the bipartisan consensus in Washington).
She has supported the further militarization of the Mexico border and the arrest of undocumented immigrants, undermining the reproductive rights of women who give birth in chains in detention centers before being deported back to lives of poverty and violence.
Regarding non-discrimination, Clintonâs record is also worse than her reputation suggests. Her old company Walmart, widely accused ofdiscriminating against women employees, was recently praised by the Clinton Foundation for its âefforts to empower girls and women.â
Clinton has given little serious indication that she opposes discrimination against LGBT individuals in the workplace (which is still legal in the majority of US states). Her very recent reversal of her opposition to gay marriage came only after support for the idea has become politically beneficial and perhaps necessary for Democrats. At best, Clinton in these respects has been a cautious responder to progressive political winds rather than a trailblazing leader.
Clintonâs foreign policy record is even more at odds with her reputation as a champion of womenâs and LGBT rights. Her policy of support for the 2009 coup in Honduras has been disastrous for both groups. Violent hate crimes against LGBT Hondurans have skyrocketed. In mid-2014, leading LGBT activist Nelson ArambĂș reported 176 murders against LGBT individuals since 2009, an average of about 35 per year, compared to just over 1 per year from 1994â2009.
ArambĂș located this violence within the broader human rights nightmare of post-coup Honduras, noting the contributions of US-funded militarization and the post-coup governmentsâ pattern of âshutting down government institutions charged with promoting and protecting the human rights of vulnerable sectors of the population â such as women, children, indigenous communities, and Afro-Hondurans.â Clinton has been worse than silent on the situation, actively supporting and praising the post-coup governments.
In a review of her work as secretary of state, Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes concludes that while âHillary Clinton has been more outspoken than any previous Secretary of State regarding the rights of women and sexual minorities,â this position is âmore rhetoric than reality.â
As one example he points to the US-backed monarchy in Morocco, which has long occupied Western Sahara with US support. Two weeks after Secretary Clinton publicly praised the dictatorship for having âprotected and expandedâ womenâs rights, a teenage girl named Amina Filali committed suicide by taking rat poison. Filali had been raped at age fifteen and then âforced to marry her rapist, who subsequently battered and abused her.â
Although Clintonâs liberal supporters are likely to lament such details as exceptions within an impressive overall record (âSheâs still much better than a Republican!â), it is quite possible that her actions haveharmed feminist movements worldwide. As Zunes argues:
Given Clintonâs backing of neo-liberal economic policies and war-making by the United States and its allies, her advocacy of womenâs rights overseas ⊠may have actually set back indigenous feminist movements in the same way that the Bush administrationâs âdemocracy-promotionâ agenda was a serious setback to popular struggles for freedom and democracy⊠.
Hillary Clintonâs call for greater respect for womenâs rights in Muslim countries never had much credibility while US-manufactured ordinance is blowing up women in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Base Building
This summary of Clintonâs âenormous contributionsâ (as Feminists for Clinton puts it) is just a partial sampling. On almost all other major issues, from climate change to immigration to education to financial regulation, President Hillary Clinton would likely be no better than President Obama, if not worse.
As in the case of Obama, it is of course necessary for Clinton to âcall it something else,â in Robert Kaganâs words. The stark disjunction between rhetoric and policies reflects a well understood logic. Mainstream US political candidates, particularly Democrats, must find ways to attract popular support while simultaneously reassuring corporate and financial elites.
The latter, for their part, usually understand the need for a good dose of âpopulismâ during a campaign, and accept it as long as it stays within certain bounds and is not reflected in policy itself. One former aide to Bill Clinton, speaking to The Hill last July, compared this rhetorical strategy to threading a needle, saying that âgood politicians â and I think Hillary is a good politician â are good at threading needles, and I think thereâs probably a way to do it.â
Hillary Clinton faces the challenge of convincing voters that she is a champion of âpeople historically excluded,â as she claims in her 2014 memoir. Last year, The Hill reported that âClinton is now test-driving various campaign themes,â including the familiar progressive promises to âincrease upward mobilityâ and âdecrease inequality.â Her memoirs, for those who dare to suffer through them, include invocations of dead leftists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman (âone of my heroinesâ), and Martin Luther King Jr (referenced nine times in Clintonâs 2003 book).
This public relations work requires that her past record be hidden from view, lest it create a credibility problem. Here Clinton has enjoyed the assistance of many liberal feminists. One former Obama staffer, speaking to The Hill, notes Clintonâs successful efforts âto co-opt the base groups in the past eight years.â
Rhetoric is not totally meaningless. The extent to which politicians like Clinton have been compelled to portray themselves â however cynically â as champions of the rights of workers, women, LGBT people, and other âhistorically excludedâ groups is an indication that popular pressures for those rights have achieved substantial force.
In the case of LGBT rights this rhetorical shift is very recent, and reflects a growth in the movementâs power that is to be celebrated. But taking politiciansâ rhetoric at face value is one of the gravest errors that a progressive can make.
The Feminists Not Invited
Liberal feministsâ support of Clinton is not just due to credulousness, though. It also reflects a narrowness of analysis, vision, and values. In the US feminism is often understood as the right of women â and wealthy white women most of all â to share in the spoils of capitalism and US imperial power. By not confronting the exclusion of non-whites, foreigners, working-class people, and other groups from this vision, liberal feminists are missing a crucial opportunity to create a more inclusive, more powerful movement.
Alternative currents within the feminist movement, both in the US and globally, have long rejected this impoverished understanding of feminism. For them, feminism means confronting patriarchy but also capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression that interlock with and reinforce patriarchy.
It means fighting to replace a system in which the rights of people and other living things are systematically subordinated to the quest for profits. It means fighting so that all people â everywhere on the gender, sexual and body spectrum â can enjoy basic rights like food, health care, housing, a safe and clean environment, and control over their bodies, labor, and identities.
This more holistic feminist vision is apparent all around the world, including among the women of places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, whose oppression is constantly evoked by Western leaders to justify war and occupation.
The courageous Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her feminist advocacy, has also criticized US drone attacks for killing civilians and aiding the Taliban. Yousafzaiâs opposition to the Taliban won her adoring Western media coverage and an invitation to the Obama White House, but her criticism of drones has gone virtually unmentioned in the corporate media. Also unmentioned are her comments about socialism, which she says âis the only answerâ to âfree us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation.â
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has equally opposed the Taliban, US-backed fundamentalist forces, and the US occupation. While liberal groups like Feminist Majority have depicted the US war as a noble crusade to protect Afghan women, RAWA says that the United States âhas empowered and equipped the most traitorous, anti-democratic, misogynist and corrupt fundamentalist gangs in Afghanistan,â merely âreplacing one fundamentalist regime with another.â
The logic is simple: US elites prefer the âbloody and suffocating rule of Afghanistanâ by fundamentalist warlords âto an independent, pro-democracy, and pro-womenâs rights governmentâ that might jeopardize âits interests in the region.â Womenâs liberation, RAWA emphasizes, âcan be achieved only by the people of Afghanistan and by democracy-loving forces through a hard, decisive and long struggle.â Needless to say, Clinton and Obama have not invited the RAWA women to Washington.
A group of Iranian and Iranian-American feminists, the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, takes a similar position in relation to their own country. In 2011 they bitterly condemned the Ahmadinejad governmentâs systematic violations of womenâs rights (and those of other groups), but just as forcefully condemned âall forms of US intervention,â including the âcrippling sanctionsâ that Clinton is so proud of her role in implementing.
The group said that sanctions âfurther immiserate the very people they claim to be helping,â and noted that few if any genuine grassroots voices in Iran had âcalled for or supported the US/UN/EU sanctions.â
In Latin America, too, many working-class feminists argue that the fight for gender and sexual liberation is inseparable from the struggles for self-determination and a just economic system. Speaking toNACLA Report on the Americas, Venezuelan organizer Yanahir Reyes recently lauded âall of the social policyâ that has âfocused on liberating womenâ under Hugo ChĂĄvez and NicolĂĄs Maduro, those evil autocrats so despised by Clinton.
This tradition of more holistic feminisms is not absent from the United States. In the nineteenth century, black women like Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth linked the struggles for abolition and suffrage and denounced the lynching campaigns that murdered black men and women in the name of âsavingâ white women. In contrast, leaders of the white suffrage movement like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to include people of color in the struggle for citizenship rights.
Unfortunately this history continues to be distorted. In 2008 Gloria Steinem, the standard-bearer of liberal feminism, said that shesupported Clintonâs campaign over Obamaâs in part because âblack men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.â
The assumption that all women are equally oppressed by patriarchy (and that all men are equal oppressors) was fiercely challenged by US women of color, working-class women, and lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists of color analyzed their gender and sexual oppression within the larger history of US slavery, capitalism, and empire.
In New York, the women of the Young Lords Party pushed their organization to denounce forced sterilizations of women of color, to demand safe and accessible abortion and contraception, and to call for community-controlled clinics. They redefined reproductive rights as the right to abortion and contraception and the right to have children without living in poverty.
In recent years, the radical LGBT movement has condemned the state, from prisons to the military, as the biggest perpetrator of violence against gender and sexual non-conforming peoples, particularly trans women of color and undocumented queers.
These queer radicals reject the logic that casts the United States and Israel as tolerant while characterizing occupied territories, from US to Palestinian ghettoes, as inherently homophobic and in need ofmilitary and other outside intervention. They condemn US wars and the Obama administrationâs persecution of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning (who helped expose, among other US crimes, military orders to ignore the sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees and the trafficking of Afghan children).
A more robust vision of feminism doesnât mean that we shouldnât defend women like Hillary Clinton against sexist attacks: we should, just as we defend Barack Obama against racist ones. But it does mean that we must listen to the voices of the most marginalized women and gender and sexual minorities â many of whom are extremely critical of Clintonite feminism â and act in solidarity with movements that seek equity in all realms of life and for all people.
These are the feminists not invited to the Hillary Clinton party, except perhaps to serve and clean up.â (x)
Holy shit
premiere: The Interest Group - Soul Kiss (For Allies to Be)
These Philadelphians have been close to my heart for many personal reasons, but its songs like this that keep me locked into their sound. The effortlessness that conjure mixed influences yet continue to feel as fresh of their own is what fuels it ever forward.Â
Connect with their other work on Bndcmp.Â
Previously:Â âThe Boys and The Girlsâ
Possession
WHOA THIS GUY MEANS BUSINESS
me when i conclude an essay with an obvious empical fact bc my argument has nothing to stand on and itâs 1am
Monica Vitti on the original US press kit for RED DESERT (1964).
Itâs a world of color for Antonioni, Tati, Kurosawa and more in our festival of free films on @hulu this week.
(via Dan Svizeny - Still Time To Change The Road Youâre On)
new record out today. new single.Â
Stereolab, 1994, London, photographer unknown
SIRIUS B JOHN SAYSÂ