I am writing in the wake of the Republican “convention,” where, intermixed with the carnivalesque moments, vintage George Wallace law-and-order rhetoric, rank xenophobia and 1930s-era isolationism, came ideologically threadbare calls for the same old, same old (http://inthesetimes.com/article/19305/rnc-day-2-the-gop-circles-the-wagons-around-its-shrinking-base): “freedom” from taxes and government regulations, and, as the platform insists, the need to “rein in out-of-control spending.”
There’s just one problem with this. Deregulation, limits on state and federal governmental spending, the privatization of basic services—what academics call “neoliberalism”—has been a proven and massive failure, except for one group: the top 1%. Widespread anger at being left behind, even screwed, by these policies has fueled support for Sanders and Trump, although with very different imagined solutions. Even a research wing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a recent article titled, “Neoliberalism: Oversold? (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm),” admits that some neoliberal policies have “increased inequality.” Indeed, the top 1% of the world reportedly now has as much wealth as the rest of the planet. When the other 99% can’t buy as many goods and services as they used to, it stalls economic growth. One solution? “Redistribution” by relying on “taxes and government spending,” especially to minimize the impact of neoliberal policies on “low-income groups,” the IMF researchers write. In addition, instate “predistribution policies”—such as increased spending on education and training—“to [expand] equality of opportunity.”
In his convention speech, Paul Ryan noted that “people want a big change in direction for America.” But the “changes” Republicans propose rest on a return to discredited policies of yore: 1920s-style rabid anti-immigration (http://inthesetimes.com/article/18756/why-the-gops-fence-fantasy-is-a-farce) (although this time with the infamous border wall that could cost an estimated $25 billion), the blindered isolationism of the 1930s, the anti-black “law and order” crack-downs of the 1960s (and beyond) and the trickle-down economics of the 1980s.
We do need a change, just the opposite of what the GOP proposes. So, dear Hillary, we need you to take up the charge initiated by Bernie Sanders and drive a stake in the heart of neoliberalism. Except please don’t call it that. Aside from being jargony, it suggests that somehow liberalism is at the core of these greedy, heartless policies when it isn’t. It’s market fundamentalism.
You’ll have to repudiate various of your husband’s policies: welfare “reform” (http://inthesetimes.com/article/17428/we_forgot_to_end_poverty) (where now some people only have food stamps to live on), the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall (http://inthesetimes.com/article/18493/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-glass-steagall-wall-street)that led to the 2008 financial crisis, the now-infamous 1994 crime bill that led to skyrocketing mass incarceration (especially of people of color). And then there are your own ties to Wall Street and neoliberal economic advisors (Larry Summers) and a record of partially or wholly market-based policy proposals (healthcare). Indeed, one of the reasons many progressives don’t trust or support you is because of your and your husband’s complicity with advancing the interests of elites—and “the market”—over everyday people.
But with the 35-year run of market fundamentalism revealing its moral and economic bankruptcy, the American people need you to challenge this failed ideology. Despite neoliberalism’s conquest of much of the Democratic Party, we hoped Obama could change course given how the Great Recession exposed the ravages of unchained capitalism. He made some progress, however compromised, with the stimulus package, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. But the 2010 elections put an end to that hope and change.
Hillary: The time is now. We need you to rebrand taxes and government spending as investments in the country and our future. We need new bridges and roads, reinvigorated public schools and universities, job training and retraining programs, a much more robust safety net for the poor and vulnerable, that $15 minimum wage, student debt forgiveness and more low-interest student loans, paid parental leave, and much more. And we must, must reverse the march toward ever-greater income inequality.
With the Republican Party in shambles, it is exactly the time to expose market fundamentalism for what it is: policies by elites, for elites. They have damaged the country, our politics and too many people for too long. And wouldn’t it be great if it were a woman who had the guts to do it in?





More... (http://inthesetimes.com/article/19370/hillary-heres-a-stake-find-neoliberalisms-heart/)

We need Clinton to take up Bernie Sanders’ progressive charge and end the long reign of market fundamentalism.

What morons. Clinton is the heart of neoliberalism and "market fundamentalism". All the "leftist" bullshit Clinton is currently spouting will be forgotten by November 9th (if not earlier). Anyone who thinks Clinton will go against the core, moneyed interests of the US ruling class is dumber than a 'Bernie Bro'.
The working class has got to get into the class war, all the rest is just smoke and mirrors.

Clintonite Conspiracy Theories
Submitted by Glen Ford on Wed, 08/24/2016 - 15:11

http://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-400x300/public/Glen_ClintonBoomb.jpg?itok=WRx_k6su

2016 presidential campaign

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Hillary Clinton’s agents warn darkly of “conspiracy theories” that might trip up her presidential bid. What they really fear is the release of more damaging facts in the next round of Wikileaks documents. Therefore, the Clintonites are attempting to “poison the well of public discussion,” preemptively, “in order to immunize Clinton from future factual disclosures.” The real conspirators – to make war on the world – reside in Hillary’s “Big Tent.”

Clintonite Conspiracy Theories
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“No patriot wants to hear the truth from a Russian!”

It is surreal to hear the Clinton campaign and its vast army of surrogates, including virtually the entirety of the corporate media, howl about “conspiracy theories” timed to sabotage her triumphal procession to the White House. Shaken by this summer’s Wikileaks disclosure of the Democratic National Committee’s subversion of Bernie Sanders’ leftish insurgency, Clinton is attempting to inoculate the public against the “October Surprise” they fear is coming from Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. With Donald Trump’s electoral prospects diminishing by the day, the only thing the Clinton camp has to fear is the facts. Therefore, the campaign’s mission is to poison the well of public discussion in order to immunize Clinton from future factual disclosures. From now to Election Day, all facts are to be deemed suspect, no matter how verifiably true, since they might have bubbled to the surface through the machinations of “conspiracy theorists.”

Who is feeding such destructive facts to these conspirators? Why, the Russians, of course -- although there is no evidence that the Kremlin had anything to do with the hack-work released by Wikileaks. Nevertheless, facts remain facts, including truths that might have been passed along by Eurasian Slavs, as Donald Trump recognized before not-really-sarcastically retracting his request that Vladimir Putin do the American public additional informational services regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails. After all, no patriot wants to hear the truth from a Russian!

“From now to Election Day, all facts are to be deemed suspect, no matter how verifiably true, since they might have bubbled to the surface through the machinations of ‘conspiracy theorists.’”

Certainly, we will not hear or read the truth in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any of the major electronic media, all of which are huddled in Hillary Clinton’s “Big Tent,” conspiring on how to defeat the conspiracy theorists that threaten the “her” they are “with.” Squeezed into a campaign tent that now houses the totality of the imperial military, “national security” and “free trade” establishment, Hillary’s legions resort to the broad brush strategy of truth pacification once known as McCarthyism, connecting dots between Russian “aggressors,” far-right domestic outliers, and everyone that refuses to accept Clinton as their savior from Trump’s America First Reich.

The Breitbart News Network, the factophobic crew now taking their turn at attempting to run the show at Trump HQ, are easy pickings for the neo-con-liberal Clinton McCarthyites. Far more problematic is Judicial Watch, the right-wing legal outfit that has been in business since President Bill Clinton passed his 1994 “Crime” bill that resulted in the biggest mass Black incarceration surge in history. Judicial Watch deploys subpoenas and Freedom of Information requests and suits to dislodge actual facts that are useful in courts of law, and has been the bane of Clinton’s existence ever since she circumvented the law by setting up that Internet server in her basement. A federal judge has ruled that Clinton must answer written questions about her emails under pain of perjury -- although she will probably be able to put the moment of reckoning off until after Election Day. The Clinton campaign dismissed the ruling as the work of “a right-wing organization that has been attacking the Clintons since the 1990s” – you know: “conspiracy theorists.”

The Clinton’s first started railing against the “dark forces” arrayed against them on January 27, 1998, when Hillary appeared on the Today show to denounce the “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president." The day before, her husband had told the American people, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Seven months later, on August 27, Bill Clinton finally admitted, sort of, “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong."

“Breitbart News can’t hold a candle to the mainline corporate media when it comes to disinformation.”

The corporate media soon forgave Bill and the First Enabler, just as they forgave other imperial servants for much higher crimes: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for the lies they told to the world about the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos; Kissinger’s complicity in the assassination of Chilean president Salvador Allende; Dwight Eisenhower’s directive to kill Congolese president Patrice Lumumba; the Kennedy brothers’ countless plots against Fidel Castro’s life; Presidents Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama’s lies about the U.S. role in nurturing the global jihadist network; and the countless other lies and crimes committed in service of the One and Only Exceptional Nation in the World.

This, of course, is the real, ongoing, ingrained, institutional conspiracy at the heart of U.S. politics: the conspiracy of the ruling class and its servants, with the corporate media as principal actors. Breitbart News can’t hold a candle to the mainline corporate media when it comes to disinformation. The New York Times, et al, have acted as disinformation services on all aspects of U.S. foreign policy, hyping hysteria for the run-ups of every war and covering up U.S. crimes against humanity and violations of international law without fail, at every juncture. In this century, they have been totally complicit in U.S. lies and aggressions against Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Libya, and Syria. For the last 20 years, the corporate media have buried every scrap of information on the U.S.-backed bloodbath in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has claimed six million lives -- the worst genocide since World War II -- a crime rooted in President Eisenhower’s hit contract on Lumumba, set in ghastly motion by Bill Clinton, and compounded in savagery by George Bush and Barack Obama, with Hillary Clinton playing a role throughout. Whitewashing Israel’s seamless record of criminality is an American official and media pastime.

“Trump’s continued popularity with a white male constituency that was always assumed to be a bastion of the War Party, is seen as an existential threat to the legitimacy of the U.S. quest for global dominance.”

The imperial conspiracy has always been bipartisan, reflecting ruling class control of both major political parties and corporate ownership of the media. This election season, however, the institutional Republican Party has been broken by the billionaire brat America-Firster white nationalist from Queens, who violated the ruling class pact by, at least temporarily, challenging the doctrines of free flowing global capital, “humanitarian” military intervention (regime change, or its euphemism, “nation building”) and a permanent U.S. war footing with the Russians and Chinese. It is these heresies -- not Trump’s raging racism, which is standard issue for the White Man’s Party -- that have stampeded multinational capital, most of the denizens of the national security state, and the whole imperial foreign policy establishment into Hillary Clinton’s “Big Tent.” Trump’s continued popularity with a white male constituency that was always assumed to be a bastion of the War Party, is seen as an existential threat to the legitimacy of the U.S. quest for global dominance. When Trump says that Obama created ISIS, it does not matter much whether he understands the import of his own words. He is speaking an essential truth that goes to the heart of one of the Greatest Lies Ever Told: that the U.S. and its closest allies are sworn enemies of jihadist terror. The voluminously documented truth -- not a conspiracy theory -- is that the Americans and Saudis created the international jihadist network nearly four decades ago and have now come to rely on Islamic jihadists as foot soldiers for imperialism in the Muslim world.

No wonder the Clintonites are in a frenzy of neo-McCarthyism and “conspiracy”-mongering. Clinton is the embodiment of U.S. imperialist policy in the 21st century – a lawless and maniacal banshee with no constraints, scruples or elementary notions of decency. One would have to harken back to Germany’s Third Reich to find a major power “diplomat” capable of cackling “We came, we saw, he died” over the body of a murdered head of state.

Donald Trump has no legions of brown-shirts, but Clinton’s Big Tent contains the bulk of the fascist, racist murderers in the U.S. imperial juggernaut.

The only sane and decent vote that can be cast, is Green. Conspire to be sane and decent.

http://blackagendareport.com/clinton_conspiracy_theories

Pretty good til that last line.

As long as people don't vote for Clump, that's something. I think it best to just stay home but that ain't gonna work for a lot of folks. So go ahead, vote Green, hell, I might if there ain't no socialists, however sorry, on the SC ballot, since I'll be there anyways to vote against the sheriff. But it won't mean nothin'.

What morons. Clinton is the heart of neoliberalism and "market fundamentalism". All the "leftist" bullshit Clinton is currently spouting will be forgotten by November 9th (if not earlier). Anyone who thinks Clinton will go against the core, moneyed interests of the US ruling class is dumber than a 'Bernie Bro'.
The working class has got to get into the class war, all the rest is just smoke and mirrors.

How you doing Dhalgren. Thanks for the welcome by the way.

You remember Quint in the movie Jaws...

"I don't know Chief, he's very smart or very dumb. He's gone under the boat! He's a big smart fish, he's gone under the boat!"

I've considered that the majority lot of these liberals/progressives can't be that fucking dumb and that makes them all the more dangerous to any formation of a leftist working class political movement... and like that shark...their only mission is to gorge and devour anything and everything that represents a real challenge to the capitalist power structure and their own self-interests. These liberal/progressive sharks are dangerous adversaries and they are the enemy.

How you doing Dhalgren. Thanks for the welcome by the way.

You remember Quint in the movie Jaws...

"I don't know Chief, he's very smart or very dumb. He's gone under the boat! He's a big smart fish, he's gone under the boat!"

I've considered that the majority lot of these liberals/progressives can't be that fucking dumb and that makes them all the more dangerous to any formation of a leftist working class political movement... and like that shark...their only mission is to gorge and devour anything and everything that represents a real challenge to the capitalist power structure and their own self-interests. These liberal/progressive sharks are dangerous adversaries and they are the enemy.

Dead-on.

I was speaking with a "progressive" liberal the other day. We started with some mild Trump-bashing (always fun). And the liberal said, "I can't understand how Trump supporters can support Trump after knowing that he lied. How can they do it?" I said, gently, that Clinton supporters continued to support Clinton after knowing that she lied. He said that it wasn't the same. I said that's right, Trump just lied on the stump the way every politician has always lied in the entire history of this country; whereas Clinton lied under oath to congress. So, yeah, it is different. He refused to talk about it any more, and was bent out of shape the rest of the visit. The very idea that one can hold both candidates in equal contempt is completely foreign to these cyphers. Actually, Clinton may the more dangerous because of her higher level of competence.

But I agree with you that liberals are our primary enemies in class war.