False Choices

The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton

Liza Featherstone

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784784614
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784784638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the most powerful women in world politics, and the irrational right-wing hatred of Clinton has fed her progressive appeal, helping turn her into a feminist icon. To get a woman in the White House, it's thought, would be an achievement for all women everywhere, a kind of trickle-down feminism.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the mantle of feminist elect has descended on Hillary Clinton, as a thousand viral memes applaud her, and most mainstream feminist leaders, thinkers, and organizations endorse her. In this atmosphere, dissent seems tantamount to political betrayal.

In False Choices, an all-star lineup of feminists contests this simplistic reading of the candidate. A detailed look at Hillary Clinton's track record on welfare, Wall Street, criminal justice, education, and war reveals that she has advanced laws and policies that have done real harm to the lives of women and children across the country and the globe. This well-researched collection of essays restores to feminism its revolutionary meaning, and outlines how it could transform the United States and its relation to the world.

FAQ
This is a book critical of Hillary Clinton.

Is this book sexist?
No. The contributors are radical and feminist, and almost all are women. But sometimes even men write things about Hillary that are not sexist.

Aren't you helping the Republicans?
Only if you think that even one person will read a book by a coven of leftwing feminists, find it convincing, and conclude that she should vote for one of those misogynistic reactionaries.

Isn't this the wrong time?
No. It's never too late or too soon to criticize someone who is about to become the most powerful individual on earth. If you think there's ever a time to withhold comment on such a person, you might be an authoritarian.

Don't you care about feminism?
Yes. That's why we did this.

PART I: HILLARY AT HOME

ONE

Hillary Clinton, Economic Populist:
Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

Kathleen Geier

In 1998, then first lady Hillary Clinton requested a meeting with Elizabeth Warren. At the time a Harvard law professor, Warren had written a New York Times op-ed denouncing a bankruptcy “reform” bill that would have forced debtors to prioritize credit card payments over child support. In their meeting, Warren proved extremely persuasive, so much so that at its conclusion Clinton announced, “Professor Warren, we’ve got to stop that awful bill.”¹ Warren was elated, certain she’d made a convert. And President Bill Clinton did indeed end up vetoing the bill.

But this repulsive piece of legislation wasn’t dead yet. In 2001, the same “awful bill” was re-introduced in Congress. And this time, Hillary Clinton, now the newly elected senator from New York, voted in its favor.

It was a betrayal that Elizabeth Warren never forgot; she mentioned it as recently as her 2012 Senate campaign. In her 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap, Warren acidly noted that Bill Clinton “was a lame duck at the time he vetoed the bill; he could afford to forgo future campaign contributions. As New York’s newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position.”²

As Hillary Clinton campaigns for president, the media is talking up her so-called “populism.” But as this story so aptly illustrates, Clinton has never been a reliable champion of the economic interests of working people. On the contrary, from Arkansas and the White House through the US Senate and the State Department, one thing has been crushingly obvious: catering to the demands of Wall Street and other economic elites has always been her prime objective.

“For goodness’ sake, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks.”

—Hillary Clinton, on the campaign trail in 1992³

Ideologically, Hillary Clinton has always been a chameleon. In 1964, the teenaged Hillary was much taken with Barry Goldwater, the right-wing extremist presidential candidate, but by 1969, she had gone full hippie. In a graduation speech she delivered at Wellesley that year, she gushed: “There are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”⁴ Groovy! For a short period after, her inchoate critiques of capitalism continued. In a 1970 talk before the League of Women Voters, she railed, “How much longer can we let corporations run us?”⁵

But Hillary was young, and it was the ’60s. As soon as the political winds shifted, Hillary was quick to trim her sails. After brief stints working in government (nine months on the Watergate-era House Judiciary Committee), academia (a few semesters teaching at the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville), and the nonprofit sector (less than a year at the Children’s Defense Fund), she set her sights elsewhere. The pivotal moment came in 1977, when she joined the Rose Law Firm of Little Rock, Arkansas, a politically powerful corporate practice whose clients included such unsavory economic players as Walmart, Tyson Foods, and Monsanto. Her biographers record no evidence that Hillary’s abrupt transition from civic-minded do-goodism to corporate hackwork occasioned her a single dark night of the soul—or even much cognitive dissonance. Biographer Carl Bernstein even suggests that Hillary had the opportunity to join the state’s largest public interest law firm but chose Rose instead.

Though her campaign biography plays up the pro bono work she performed at Rose, the vast majority of her working hours were dedicated to her corporate clients. In one early case, Clinton, representing local businesses, filed suit against the community-organizing group, ACORN, which had helped pass a ballot measure that lowered electricity costs for residential users but raised commercial rates. That particular legal dispute goes unmentioned in Clinton’s memoir, Living History, but she does touch on some of her smaller corporate cases. She describes her defense of a canning company against a plaintiff who found a rat’s ass in his pork and beans and her representation of a logging company accused of negligence in an accident that maimed several workers. She frames these cases as lighthearted anecdotes, highlighting their comic grotesqueries rather than the sleazy actions of her corporate clients. This was the kind of legal work she performed dutifully for fifteen years, which would turn out to be the longest she’d work for any single employer.

During her years at the Rose Law Firm, Clinton also took home a tidy sum—over a third of her income⁶—sitting on the boards of corporations including TCBY (the frozen yogurt company), LaFarge (a cement manufacturer), and, most famously, Walmart. In the six years she served on the Walmart board, she never once spoke up in defense of labor unions for the company’s majority-female workforce. Yet during that period (1986–1992), Walmart was ruthlessly suppressing workers’ organizing efforts, and at board meetings, one of Walmart’s honchos was fond of saying charming things like “Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.”⁷ Walmart’s war on unions, like its discrimination against women, goes unmentioned in her memoir. But she does manage to coo about how Sam Walton taught her “a great deal about business integrity and success.”⁸

At the Clinton White House, Hillary was not exactly known as a tribune of the working class. She helped craft her husband’s “triangulation” strategy and supported his least populist economic policies, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which resulted in plummeting working class wages and the loss of more than 682,000 American jobs,⁹ as well the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit default swaps from regulation and helped unleash the Great Recession of 2007–2009. In 2000, when she won a US Senate seat, her liberal supporters breathed a sigh of relief. At long last, they imagined, an independent Hillary would be “liberated” to be her true, supposedly lefty self.

But that, of course, was a fantasy. Even though she was representing a relatively liberal state, her centrist orientation remained. While Hillary voted with the Democrats on most economic issues, there were notable occasions when she veered sharply to the right of party consensus.¹⁰ In addition to the bankruptcy vote that so deeply disappointed Elizabeth Warren, Clinton supported several measures that favored agribusiness and big oil, backed a law that would have slashed estate taxes, and voted for the massive 2008 bailout bill that rescued the banks but failed to hold them accountable.

At the next stop in her political career, the State Department, Clinton continued to shill tirelessly on behalf of American corporations. As the Wall Street Journal put it, Hillary “redefined the [Secretary of State] job in ways that promoted the interests of U.S. business.” Among recent secretaries of state, said the Journal, Hillary was “one of the most aggressive global cheerleaders for American companies,” lobbying foreign governments to “sign deals and change policies to the advantage of corporate giants” such as General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, and Microsoft.¹¹

Clinton’s rationale for her business-oriented diplomacy was that it was good for the American economy. Though that’s highly debatable, one thing is certain: these deals were very good indeed for Hillary Clinton. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, at least sixty companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure as secretary donated over $26 million to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation. In addition, forty-four of those firms made additional donations totaling a cool $3.2 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the foundation’s offshoots. In several instances—as when she advocated for Walmart in India, and General Electric in Algeria—the timing between Hillary’s lobbying for a particular firm and that same firm’s foundation contributions is suspiciously close.¹²

While Clinton’s tenure at State was a bonanza to many of the world’s largest multinational corporations, labor was not so lucky. Take, for example, the free trade pact with Colombia. During her 2008 presidential run, Clinton opposed the proposed agreement, citing concerns about violence against trade union workers. But two years later, after the Canadian petro giant Pacific Rubiales donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, she reversed herself. Pacific Rubiales has operations in Colombia and was aggressively backing the measure. Human rights and labor groups identified Pacific Rubiales as the chief instigator of anti-labor violence and protested the threats, attacks, and even murders of union members that had continued unabated, in clear violation of the trade pact. (The company has denied these charges.) Even so, Clinton’s State Department repeatedly declared that the country was compliant with human rights standards and never investigated the charges against Pacific Rubiales. In spite of activists’ many pleas, Clinton and company took no action to stop the anti-labor persecutions in Colombia.¹³

The Clinton Foundation, which has played a central role in consolidating and extending the Clintons’ power and influence, has been controversial for good reasons. The foundation’s defenders point to its global work fighting the spread of AIDS. But it has also been charged with providing Haiti with “shoddy and dangerous” emergency shelters.¹⁴

Notwithstanding its humanitarian projects, the foundation’s most important function appears to be as a handy vehicle for influence peddling on a massive scale. Not only does a donation enable rich and powerful firms or individuals to burnish their (often deservedly tarnished) public image, it buys them access to, and influence over, a former secretary of state and potential future president. In turn, the receipt of the donation cements the ties between the Clintons and rich and powerful corporations and individuals—the better for future fundraising efforts, especially campaign donations. Moreover, the foundation provides global political elites and economic elites with unprecedented opportunities to network, bond, and expand the scope of their power and influence. Everybody wins, right?

Everyone, that is, except the 99 percent, who aren’t in on the hustle. They might prefer that we solve problems of global poverty and inequality through bottom-up political movements and democratic governance, as opposed to top-down, unaccountable charities that depend on the whims of the rich. And they surely have reason to feel uneasy about Big Philanthropy institutions like the Clinton Foundation, which by their very structure provide endless opportunities for elite muckraking and influence peddling, thus consolidating the global domination of the 1 percent.

“One of my favorite people in the administration, [former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs co-chair] Bob [Rubin] is fabulously smart and successful, yet thoroughly self-effacing.”

—Hillary Clinton in her memoir Living History (2003)

Hillary Clinton has terrible taste in men.

I’m not so much talking about Bill (though there’s that), but the men in her professional life. Many of Hillary’s closest political aides have been men from the elite strata of finance and the corporate world, who have served neither her nor the country particularly well. At the beginning of the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton tasked his wife with reforming the American health care system; Hillary chose as her chief advisor, not a health policy expert, activist, or experienced political leader, but business consultant Ira Magaziner. Magaziner proved spectacularly ill equipped for his role. As economist Brad DeLong has argued, Magaziner’s technocratic approach and penchant for secrecy, which served him well in the corporate consulting world, turned out to be disastrous in a political context, where reaching out and building coalitions are key.¹⁵ The campaign to enact Hillarycare ended in catastrophic defeat, and it would be another two decades before anyone took a crack at seriously reforming the American health care system. In the interim, countless uninsured Americans needlessly lost their health, their savings, and their lives.

By far the most troubling of Hillary’s associations are her close, cozy, and long-standing ties to Wall Street and the banks. That’s because our bloated financial sector is at the heart of so much of the economic dysfunction and injustice in our society. Because Wall Street habitually encourages the misallocation of capital into speculative rather than productive investments, our economy has suffered from sluggish growth. Financialization has also been a major driver of inequality, as deregulation has shifted rents to financial elites, bringing on soaring executive compensation on Wall Street and elsewhere.¹⁶ Finally, financialization has spurred asset bubbles, which have in turn led to severe financial crises, such as the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession.

If you wanted to identify the single individual most responsible for the financialization of the American economy, you might pick Robert Rubin. As Clinton’s treasury secretary, he adamantly opposed the regulation of derivatives and aggressively advocated for the repeal of laws such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that had long separated investment banks from their commercial counterparts. These policy changes were among the chief causes of the worldwide financial meltdown and recession of 2007–2009. In the private sector, Rubin’s actions were equally catastrophic. At Citi, he aggressively urged the bank to take on more risk.¹⁷ That approach drove Citi into insolvency, contributed to millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes, and led to years of economic misery on a global scale. But it didn’t stop Rubin from hoovering up a cool $126 million during his decade-long tenure at Citi.¹⁸

Carl Bernstein reports that at the outset of the Clinton administration, Rubin took it upon himself to “tutor” Hillary in economic policy. Hillary’s memoir confirms that the two developed a warm relationship and were generally in ideological sympathy. As Rubin recounted in his memoir In an Uncertain World, early in Clinton’s presidency he argued that it was “inadvisable” for the administration to use “class-laden language” to sell its economic plan. He wrote, “Even talking about ‘the rich,’ it seemed to me, had an unnecessary normative connotation, suggesting that there was something wrong with having been successful financially.” Alarmed, he notified Hillary:

Hillary not only agreed, she marched me down to the Roosevelt Room, where Paul Begala was working on the speech. She stood over Paul’s shoulder as he rephrased the problematic passages.¹⁹

Another key economic debate took place right after the 1994 midterms, when, as Rubin relates, the administration argued over “whether to take a more populist or a more centrist tack.” Secretary of Labor Robert Reich championed a populist approach. Rubin fiercely opposed him, arguing that if the administration used words like “corporate welfare,” it “could adversely affect the business confidence requisite for economic growth.” Hillary took Rubin’s side in the debate. According to Rubin, she told Reich, “Bob, the polls and political intelligence we have say that the people we need to reach don’t respond well to that kind of approach.”²⁰ Rubin’s pupil had learned her lessons well.

And so have most other powerful Democrats. The outsized influence of the financial sector is not merely a personal issue, unique to Hillary Clinton, but a structural problem affecting the entire Democratic Party. So-called Rubinomics—which, in a nutshell, consists of bailouts and upward redistribution for the rich, a few crumbs for the poor (remember Clinton-era “micro-initiatives” like midnight basketball?), and practically nothing to strengthen labor or rein in capital—has been the dominant Democratic doctrine for decades now. Rubin has a reputation as a Democra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue: Clinton Contention
• Introduction
• Part I: Hillary at Home
• Part II: Hillary Abroad
• Contributors
• Notes