Bernie Sanders is remarkably right again about the toxicity of Hillary Rodham Clinton positions.
This is not about Hillary’s unfavorability ratings as bad as or worse than Donald Trump’s nor her failure to outpoll Donald by anything but small single digits nor her stonewalling on producing her Goldman Sachs speeches. Nor is this about her waffling on key issues like climate change [she wants to take a second good look at Carbon Sequestration technology advocated by Coal Industry donors] or TPP trade policy [for it, then against, now reconsidering it again].
No this is about two key issues one of which Bernie Sanders heretofore has given Hillary a pass on and one issue that he has steadily castigated Hillary for. Lets look at the latter first. Bernie Sander is fundamentally right about Hillary’s badly compromised position regarding campaign donations and lobbying as she take huge contributions from Wall Street and other corporate executive suites. Like all Members of Congress with the exception of Bernie, gosh Hillary avows that she is not influenced in anyway by the Wall Street and large corporate donations with millions of dollars in campaign contributions. Even Barack Obama who took millions in Wall Street dollars in his 2008 campaign and who Hillary espouses as her mentor on this issue, would argue he has not been influenced by the Wall Street money. The President would cite the many $billion++ fines and Dodd Frank legislation as proof that he has been tough on Wall Street. Too bad that unlike Ronald Reagan before him in the Savings and Loan Crisis, President Obama failed to prosecute and put into jail or even just bar complicit individuals from practicing in any financial capacity. Reagan sent dozens of S&L executives to jail; Barack has sent no Wall Street Executive involved in the scandals to jail..
So Rule of Law no longer applies to white collar criminals located in Wall Street executive suites nor to their “trusted surrogates” And this Executive Super Power of Invulnerablity to Rule of Law is spreading like a cancer to other Corporate Boards such as Exxon, Volkswagen, Pfizer, etc. So with Citizens United help, they are cashing in on acquiring “Do Not GoTo Jail Cards” with added perks like “help write the final legislation” or Emergency Hotline Access to key legislators and cabinet officials. So how can a badly broken Rule of Law be enforced from a Congress and a Presidency so indebted to its billionaire donors?
The second issue is one that Bernie heretofore has given Hillary a pass on that speaks to his own misjudgment – this is the Hillary emails issue. For reasons unclear, Bernie has let this issue slide despite the facts and Hillary’s continuing stream of “misstatements”::
1)it was not done with the approval of the State Department concerned in an age of increased cyberattacks against governments and business;
2)specifically during the time Hillary had her own server the Pentagon, CIA, NSA and FED were hacked, multiple times in some cases;
3)the server that Hillary was using did not have hardening against cyberattacks;
3)this may have exposed key negotiating positions and dozens of Top Secret communications to hostile government and 3rd parties;
4)Hillary was involved in securing arms sales to many Arab and other states for which the Clinton Foundation may have received payments;
5)because the server was not state.gov it was exempt from Freedom of Information Access by journalists, reporters and the public;
6)on leaving office in 2012, Hillary did not immediately turnover her emails to government archives as required by law but waited 21 months;
7)Hillary’s staff deleted 32,000 “private” emails not subject to supervised 3rd party review;
8)the server itself was not surrendered to 3rd party review until after unsupervised purge operations.
In sum, Hillary’s use of a private server suggests the same flaunting of the Rule of Law which the Executive Suite and Establishment use to control broad political and economic directions in the country. So if Hillary relies on flaunting the Rule of Law how can she be expected to curb or control its abuses?
The bottom line is that Hillary, like Lucie , has a lot of splainin to do. But She is an expert on dissimulation, distraction and Fox-News-like late reversal of statements”. “I did it strictly for the convenience of not having two servers”; ” I will go anywhere at anytime to testify on this issue”; “There were no classified emails sent by me” – and other such dissembling hated-Clintonian truthiness. Thus, Hillary’s emails are a ticking time bomb depending on whether a)the 31000 missing emails can be recovered and b)whether her email server was hacked by hostile foreign governments.If the former is true, her election chances or Presidency may be damaged. If foreign governments have her emails, the opportunity for a 3:00AM call to President Clinton with Vladmir Putin saying he has reclaimed Eastern Ukraine and parts of Russian Latvia and you President Clinton can protest but not take any action because we will expose information from your email server to completely discredit you. – this scenario is more much likely given the recent DNC Wikileaks just before the Democratic convention.
Summary
Hillary Clinton is toxic because she represents the Bisexual Establishment. The Establishment will do business with either or both parties just so long as the party leaders get permission for any major political change. And the one thing the Establishment will not tolerate is any loss of their hard won control of political policy-making and electoral incumbency through their recently attained power – unfettered campaign financing and ever expanding lobbying access to the corridors of power. No wonder Hillary has been blamed for having no campaign statement of major popular policy positions [in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders and even Donald Trump]. She is waiting to get those approved by her Handlers.