Hillary the Saviour

In 2016,  Hillary Clinton happily casts herself as the saviour today, one who stands between Donald Trump and the Oval Office, which unfortunately is about the only virtue she has to offer. America is electing a President whom a clear majority of voters deeply dislike and distrust. Clinton, icy and elitist, is likely to edge the egomaniacal Trump, who couldn’t have behaved more badly if Hillary’s campaign staff programmed his every insistent mis-step.
Clinton’s sour victory doubtless will provide a bit of relief the world over but her vote margin over Trump won’t exceed single digits. Her unpopularity is poised to rise further once the even more unpopular Trump exits. Clinton reportedly wonders why she wasn’t leading the deliriously self-sabotaging Trump by 50 points all along, which puzzlement is itself the answer to her question. She simply cannot afford to ponder very much, lest unwanted answers appear.

Clinton harbours no intention and no clue about giving ordinary citizens anything they need. Not health care for all, not military budget cuts, not tax reform, not jobs programmes, not tighter regulation of mighty private institutions dedicated to ripping everyone off. So frustrated Americans are forced to grapple with the predicament of having to vote for a politician who is a devout servant of Wall Street, which engineered the 2008 crash and profited from needless austerity policies after, and a shill for the Pentagon, which absorbs the funds that can create a society where lives of all colours matter. Americans are electing a person who is clearly part of the problem inasmuch as Democratic Party apparatchiks and the corporate media strived so successfully and deviously to derail Bernie Sanders’ campaign. By all survey data, had Sanders been the Democratic nominee Trump would have eaten his dust.

In Clinton, Democrats are saddled with a candidate who wants nothing so much as to fatten insatiable bankers, corporate con artists, belligerent generals, big firm lawyers, and the ravenous packs of lobbying insiders feasting on public money. In policy terms she is in every way the ideal conservative Republican and so she pitches her soothing message to that audience. The Clinton Foundation has been a notorious pay-to-play organization that offers intimate access to the Clintons’ high-level connections through the dispensing of generous donations. The Wikileaks emails, whatever their source, really weren’t needed to confirm it.

Triangulation, practised since Bill Clinton’s presidency, ushered America to this excruciating moment of choosing between two poisons. The supposedly supremely pragmatic strategy of triangulation urged Democrats to adopt positions slightly to their Right so as to win over more big-pocketed donors and rightwing voters. In so doing, the Democratic Party left behind the organized working class, the poor and minorities who normally are their base. The Republicans, who couldn't believe their luck, steadily sashayed ever more rightward to maintain a tidy partisan distance and wound up ultimately with the looniest candidate of them all in Trump, a man who many Republicans cannot stomach. Hillary is a true believer in triangulation, which means the rightward drift in American party politics will intensify.

New York Times columnists, posing as souls of sanity, dutifully hope for a 'resounding mandate' for Clinton on November 8, but a mandate for what exactly? Hillary isn't saying because it seems enough that she is not Trump. Repudiating Trump through Hillary does not mean Americans can repudiate other bullying billionaires, crooked financiers, slimy influence peddlers, corporate greed, raving militarists, unchecked state surveillance, and deceitful public and private agencies.

Trump, seeing a loss looming, brays that the system is therefore rigged. Trump gained traction for this familiar charge because of a long Republican campaign to disenfranchise many millions of voters on the basis of claims of non-existent voter fraud, which 37 per cent firmly believe. An estimated 41per cent of Americans more accurately understand that the real game afoot is suppression of the vote so as to deter the poor and minorities from pushing politics to the left. Only the affluent in America are supposed to count. The New York Times reports that 57 per cent of Americans and two thirds of independents intelligently reckon their vote does not matter because big money predetermines the results Rs 'Exhibit A' being the candidacies of Clinton and Trump. Two-thirds of American youth likewise figure voting is futile since sociopathic corporations really run things. 

A Princeton study concluded that American politics is a plutocracy, where nothing Americans desire is granted if it conflicts with the interests of the big boys. Just scan the exquisite travesty of Obamacare which originated in a right-wing think-tank and was designed to force Americans into compulsory payments to private enterprises unencumbered by regulatory controls. Costs predictably soared and the system is a shambles in the making. Yet Hillary scolds citizens who imagine they deserve a universal health care system that dozens of industrialized countries provide for their citizens. Wall Street and the Pentagon must be nourished first and foremost.

Trump's antics may usher in a Democratic Senate and erode the Republican margin in the Congress, though it won't necessarily prevent Republicans resuming the spectacle of fighting legislation that they themselves championed earlier. Hillary will enter office already pronounced guilty of complicity with the very agents that shook the foundations of economic stability for average Americans. She will have an extremely short time to prove otherwise. The rebellious masses that propelled the Sanders campaign and, more dimwittedly, Trump's circus, are not going away.