Clinton: A Better Servant Of Corporate Interests Than Trump
By Jude Fernando –March 18, 2016
Jude Fernando
During periods of acute political and economic crises, corporate elites will always prefer a Hillary-type Democrat to a Trump-like Republican. Candidates like Hillary Clinton absorb society’s discontent, drawing attention away from corporations. Instead, they divert the public’s attention by putting a human story in the forefront (“the first woman President!”), and mask neoliberalism with traditional liberal stumping. But Clinton, like her husband before her, will enact policies that discipline the entire political economy to function according to corporate interests, and will continue to ignore and punish the victims of those interests. She (and her corporate backers) are depending on the desperation of Democratic voters to avoid a Trump presidency, and campaign on the promise that there is no viable alternative: it’s either Clinton or Trump.
Admittedly, it’s a hard moment to be a liberal when the party of liberalism has moved so far to the right, but this notion of no alternative (“Hillary, or else!”) is not a cure. Even those who hope it will be a temporary salve while we work to move the Democratic party back to the middle left where it theoretically belongs, will be deeply disappointed. The labor unions who have supported Clinton (sometimes in direct opposition to the wishes of their rank-and-file members) will find Clinton is far less concerned about their interests than their votes. When the Service Workers International and American Federation of Teachers endorsed Clinton, it practically tore the unions apart, and the rank-and-file, as usual, have the right of it. Union heads may feel betrayed, but the rank-and-file know she was never with them in the first place. In fact, unions run by the rank-and-file, like the ATF, Communication Workers of America, the American Postal Workers Union, and the AFL-CIO locals, are backing Sanders.