Hilary Inc. - Advisers affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media

She's not quite the rhetorical populist her husband was on the campaign trail, but she can still feel your pain. "Everything has been skewed," Clinton says, jabbing her index finger for emphasis, "to help the privileged and the powerful at the expense of everybody else!"

It's a rousing speech, though ultimately not very convincing. If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies. A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm--the Glover Park Group--that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton's campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons' closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton's economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay. "She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors," says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.

It's not exactly an advertisement for the working-class hero, or a picture her campaign freely displays. Her lengthy support for the Iraq War is Clinton's biggest liability in Democratic primary circles. But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion. She is "running to help and restore the great middle class in our country," Wolfson says. So was Bill in 1992. He was for "putting people first." Then he entered the White House and pushed for NAFTA, signed welfare reform, consolidated the airwaves through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (leading to Clear Channel's takeover) and cleared the mergers of mega-banks. Would the First Lady do any different? Ever since the defeat of healthcare reform, Hillary has been a committed incrementalist, describing herself as a creature of the "moderate, sensible center" whom business admires and rewards. During her six years in the Senate, she's rarely been out front on difficult economic issues. Given her proximity to money and power, it's not hard to figure out why she keeps controversial figures close to her--even if their work becomes a liability for her campaign.

more...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070604/berman

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1412212

"No sh*t, Sherlock" file. I never doubted it for a moment.

TC

I've repeatedly ask here and in other forums, " what is it that people that claim to be progressive see in this woman ? "
It's mind boggling...:evilfrown:

All I see is pandering and checking which way the wind is blowing before committing herself to any position.

I don't trust her.

Is that a leadership quality? Okay, not so much.

TC

But, then, the current Republican Party would probably think Gengis Khan was a "progressive", compared to them.

Mind-boggling, indeed!

TC

Bon appetite?

But I know who I am NOT for.

That would be this...woman.

Her H1-B stance has now earned her my eternal, sneering contempt. I spit on her.

How mature! :rofl:

Anyone who would advocate for more H1-Bs when we have problems with qualified AMERICANS finding and keeping jobs because of them now.

Would the phrase "hock a loogy" have impressed you more? ;-)

Launch a Lung Clam?

"Eject a respiratory oyster"? ;-)

Far more troubling is her allegiance to corporations.

And we WILL change President Hillary into who need need her to be --

BUT, PLEASE, GOD, LET THIS CUP PASS FROM BEFORE US...

SAVE US FROM THE TENDER MERCIES OF ANOTHER CLINTON.

:puke:

when he began his first run for the White House. The populist movement that grew up around Huey Long changed FDR...

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial. As depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all things, balancing the budget. Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state’s electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and said, roughly, “Listen up! They’re lying! The President’s lying! The rich fat jackals that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick’m in the ass and take your share of the wealth you created.” Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans’ benefits, regulation of the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, “rich men’s wars,” and an end to the financial royalism of the One Percent. He even had the audacity to suggest that the poor’s votes should count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem: “Everyman a King.” The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey “Kingfish” Long was elected Governor of Louisiana. At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way, but Long didn’t. To pay for the books, the Kingfish levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in the Delta.

It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure, regulate industry and share the nation’s wealth-and that meant facing down “the concentrations of monopoly power” of the corporate aristocracy-”the thieves of Wall Street,” as he called them. In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long’s ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society. America and the party prospered. What happened to the Kingfish? As with Chávez, the oil industry and local oligarchs had few options for responding to Governor Long’s populist appeal and the success of his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator, was shot dead. He was 42.



Taste of Palast’s Armed MadHouse: 1927. Again.
http://www.gregpalast.com/madhouse/index.php/46

Or even that relationships started with the intent of one to change the other, but, merely that the act imposes a severe handicap.

Choosing anyone right now is premature, but There are few in the current field I find acceptable, and those are not the front runners by any stretch of the imagination.

-Hoot

:rofl:

Sorry, I couldn't resist! I for one am scared to death! I want someone like Dennis Kucinich!

Just sayin.

-Hoot

K + R

It's always good to see what the other party is getting wound up about.

If it is not inaccurate, then it is what it is, and trying to suppress discussion of it as "R-wing talking points" seems pretty disingenuous. Or is it that we should close our eyes?

All your questions will be answered.

:eyes:

unionbusters, conservative media"?

Not only is she a sellout, she's got no judgment. If she gets stabbed in the back by her lowlife VRWC friends, she'll have only herself to blame.

And she may never know -- there are so many ways; bad advice (e.g. vote for the Iraq war?), leaking campaign info or debate tactics, etc, etc, etc.

Do we really need a president who trusts her -- and our -- natural enemies?