Eric Zuesse

In order to attract some of the liberal support that would otherwise go to Bernie Sanders, who is her new challenger for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton is announcing that too many people are in U.S. prisons, and that this nation should let lots of them out.

Amanda Terkel at Huffington Post headlines about it, "Hillary Clinton To Call For 'End To The Era Of Mass Incarceration' In Major Speech.” As reported there, this speech will call for "an end to a system that disproportionately targets black men.”

Hillary Clinton needs the votes of America’s Blacks, and is therefore going to campaign against the institutionalized racism of American society, so that she can get into the White House and serve the Wall Street, GMO, Big Oil, and other financial backers of her political career, especially Wall Street, such as is shown here:

https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&cid=n00000019

Screen Shot 2015-04-23 at 10.17.40 AM

She needs their continuing financial support.

Thus, ABC television in Baltimore reported, on Tuesday night:

8 p.m. At a New York fundraiser for her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton told about 150 donors: "Baltimore is burning."

"It is heartbreaking," Clinton said. "The tragic death of another young African-American man. The injuries to police officers. The burning of peoples' homes and small businesses. We have to restore order and security. But then we have to take a hard look as to what we need to do to reform our system."

Clinton said she planned to address the unrest in Baltimore in more detail on Wednesday during a speech at Columbia University.

Ms. Clinton, in other words, needs to convince her past (and future) donors that she’s the person who will win the votes of the most Blacks and low-income people, the people who fill prisons in which no billionaires are incarcerated (instead, the corporation’s stockholders pay token fines for these controlling executives’ ‘infractions’, just like those stockholders pay via the corporation’s treasury into political campaign chests to get those controlling executives’ policy-preferences made into national laws).

Whereas those billionaires have the money, it’s the poor and suffering masses who have the actual votes, in such a corporate type of ‘democracy.’ Those white billionaires want to invest only in winners. Ms. Clinton needs to convince them that she can convince the poor and suffering masses that she favors their interests, and not only the interests of these super-rich. That’s how her campaign will get the money from the super-rich and the corporations they control, to blanket TV etc., with her campaign messages, so that she’ll be able to convince the general public to vote for her.

Ms. Clinton is campaigning now against a candidate, Sanders, who would pose a real threat to the advantages that the super-rich have against everyone else. Consequently, the incentive for the super-rich to donate to her campaign — so as to have two proven conservatives, one called Republican, and the other called Democrat, running for the Presidency in 2016 — will be even stronger than it was before. They are hoping that America will continue being a one-party nation with two opposing competing political organizations, one of which (the Republicans) is proud of and publicly announces its conservatism, and the other of which (the Democrats) tries to hide its conservatism and so to win more by ideological deceit than by lying about the issues (which Republican politicians generally prefer to do, instead of lying about their idealogical motivations).

The Sanders threat is that he would restore the Democratic Party to what it had been under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: an authentically progressive party, a party that really does care about the welfare of the general public, not only of the aristocracy. America’s aristocracy want to continue running the government for their own interests. (Clinton’s record shows that she represents that above all.) If Sanders wins the Democratic Presidential nomination, there might be real political competition in the U.S., for the first time in decades, and the billionaires have the money and the will to block that.

Consequently, there is the very real possibility that Ms. Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign will set new records as the most expensive political campaign in history. She will thus be able to hire the most expensive campaign talent that exists. And her political campaign will furthermore bring advertising income into all the news-media, which will consequently be appreciative of her candidacy and thus greatly inclined to favor it over that of Senator Sanders.

And, so, Ms. Clinton now is speaking about the problems that are faced by America’s poorest and least-advantaged, while she is raising money from America’s richest and most-advantaged. The acceptability of this is based on the idea that to take political money from the richest 0.1% isn’t generally part of a transaction in which the government is being purchased by the richest 0.1%. That’s the Supreme Court’s view of things, and they call such transfers of political money “First-Amendment-protected free speech,” instead of “fascism,” or “corruption.” To our Supreme Court, this is ‘democracy.’ That's why those people were appointed and approved to be on that Court, and why they get along so well together, even though they sometimes disagree, especially about the way things are worded.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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