Hillary Clinton: I Used to Love Her

[nitron]

To all the Left. Move further to the Left when you vote, Vote Greens or Socialists or whatever is left of the Dems if Hillary is nominated. That's all . The Repblcans are an anachronism, the Dems have replaced them, every thing has shifted to the right in your country. Therefore switch to a further left position .

[JPeterson]

To all the Left. Move further to the Left when you vote, Vote Greens or Socialists or whatever is left of the Dems if Hillary is nominated. That's all . The Repblcans are an anachronism, the Dems have replaced them, every thing has shifted to the right in your country. Therefore switch to a further left position .

Elections have consequences. People who voted Ralph Nader in 2000 are the reason for things moving further right because George W Bush appointed conservative judges that came to the conclusion corporations are people and it's a bosses business what goes on btwn a woman and her doctor. Hilary is not an ideal candidate but she is the best candidate to prevent us from having a Conservative supreme court for the next 50 years.

[Ben]

Emails expose close ties between Hillary Clinton and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger:

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/12/emai...nry_kissinger/

[Stavros]

In a week which has seen Radovan Karadzic convicted of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, this may be an opportune moment to warn anyone who is interested about a pamphlet written by Diana Johnstone called Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (linked below).

Diana Johnstone has form as a peddler of lies about Bosnia, most notoriously in her 2002 study Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press). In Fool's Crusade the Clinton's come in for a major bashing, Hillary included, as if the Reagan Presidency in the 1980s had ignored the Balkans. Whatever, there is also a link here to a sustained demolition of Johnstone's 2002 book. I expect to see some journalists and commentators in the press citing Johnstone's book on Mrs Clinton as a reason to oppose her candidacy for the Presidency, assuming she defeats Bernie Sanders and no other candidate emerges.

Johnstone has been described as a 'left revisionist' which suggests that her articles are premised on the iniquity of American imperialism so that everything that happens is seen through this prism, enabling some truly nasty people to get a free lunch on the basis that they are actively anti-American/globalization etc. It is like those people who should know better defending Vladimir Putin's military engagement in Syria as well as claims that while Saddam Hussein, Bashar as-Asad and Muammar Qadhafi were/are all dictators, the quality of life in Iraq, Libya and Syria was better than it is now, Islamic fanatics had no platform, and the countries were stable. In the case of Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's National Front, Johnstone has decided that because Le Pen is a vocal critic of the 'bankers and bureaucrats' austerity and so on that she is 'basically on the left' which is as absurd politically as it is geographically.

Readers must make up their own mind, but as has been pointed out elsewhere Diana Johnstone plays fast and loose with the truth and neglects to inform readers in her work on Yugoslavia that in the 1960s she met and befriended Mirjana Markovic who went on to marry Slobodan Milosovic, and that she often stayed with the couple when visiting Belgrade.

If she gets the nomination Hillary Clinton is going to be the target of some vicious journalism of the kind produced by Diana Johnstone.

Johnstone's book on Clinton is here:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...0chaos&f=false

A devastating critique of Johnstone's book Fool's Crusade can be found here:
http://genocideinbosnia.blogspot.co....in-bosnia.html

A Bosnian based in Canada has also written an extensive critique of Johnstone's work here:
http://www.newleftproject.org/index....iane_johnstone

[trish]

If she gets the nomination Hillary Clinton is going to be the target of some vicious journalism of the kind produced by Diana Johnstone.

Seems to be par for the course. Thanks for the post.

[broncofan]

I know this is a Hillary Clinton thread but apropos of the Democratic race I'll include this link. I must give myself credit when I said that Bernie was short on details (especially about financial matters; others have talked about his lack of foreign policy acumen) and promises more than he has plans to deliver. Is he as clueless as Trump? No. Is he a bit more genuine than Hillary? Yes. But he does speak in slogans and make unsupportable promises. Was never a Sanders supporter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ews-interview/

[broncofan]

http://fortune.com/2016/04/06/retire...iduciary-rule/

This article describes what would have to happen for the treasury to have authority under Dodd Frank to break up big banks. Bernie was also asked about the prosecution of financial criminals and what laws they broke and did not have specifics but has been talking about them for months and months in very general terms in speeches. Again, not saying some people should not have been prosecuted who were not...but you need a current violation of the law...meaning legislation that exists and which provides criminal penalties that apply to specific conduct. Just talking about an entire criminal class in the financial sector is cheap demagoguery.

[flabbybody]

It's funny that Bernie thinking we still use tokens to get on the New York subway is the gaff getting all the attention in the media.

[broncofan]

It's funny that Bernie thinking we still use tokens to get on the New York subway is the gaff getting all the attention in the media.

Yeah. After the dozens and dozens of times he's talked about breaking up banks and prosecuting crooks, one would think he'd know everything there is to know about how to achieve it. Would love to hear him talk about the advisability of breaking up banks instead of subjecting them to more exacting regulation (whatever that is, capital requirements, greater limitations on types of investments, more personal accountability for executives). Would this require the passage of more legislation or better enforcement of existing laws?

I had no idea whether he would have unilateral authority as president to break up a bank...but at least I anticipated it could require some doing to dismantle enormous financial institutions. Their liabilities are guaranteed by the federal gov. and so their existence naturally should come with more strings attached...but does that mean they can be dissolved at the whim of the president? What about their investors? What would that do to access to credit and to credit markets when you start hacking away at the banks? Again I don't know the answers...somebody more schooled maybe does but he never even asked the questions

[Stavros]

Allow me to refer you to the book Fragile by Design: the Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scare Credit, by Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber (Princeton University Press, 2014).
In particular, Chapter 3: Crippled by Populism: US Banking from Colonial Times to 1990 offers a very readable account of the early phase (and indeed the whole period under review) designed by Alexander Hamilton which nurtured the early years of your Republic through a 'coalition of elites' that 'limited the number of banks that received charters, it tended not to provide credit to small farmers and artisans' (p153). This system broke down under the demand enabled by a federal political system for credit and banking by a multitude of farmers, artisans and small businesses that dominated the US from around 1810 to 1980 when this cornucopia of small banks and loan societies collapsed. A system the authors describe as 'inherently unstable, non-competitive and inefficient in its allocation of credit' led to this: 'The banking system was composed of thousands of small banks that operated local monopolies, which meant that they were able to charge more for loans and pay less for deposits than they would have had they been obliged to compete with one another. The absence of branches meant that these banks could neither spread risk across regions nor easily move funds in order to head off other bank runs' (p154).

Something tells me from the evidence that the US has had an unhappy experience with thousands of small banks, characterised as one crisis after another. Breaking up the banks, like Trump's proposal to prevent the transfer of money through Western Union to countries outside the USA is another mad idea whose economic costs would be greater than its benefits. You can forgive Sanders as he is a business illiterate, but Trump is CEO of a large corporation and has no excuses, unless it turns out he always got someone else to do the sums and was only interested in his percentage and how much he could spend.