Read the full article here.
Read the interview (with subscription) here.
Read the article here.
Read the full article here.
US government is about whatever makes the global corporate oligarchs operating from or through the US richer. Mere crumbs of appeasement (as when Democrats hold office) to identity and civil rights groups.
US political parties, behind window dressing to appease the various voter blocks, equal neocolonialism’s virtual enslavement of minds if not bodies all the way. Every day.
We US voters are merely useful idiots providing the imprimatur of legitimacy to a political charade of power wielded against the masses of people and other species in North America and around the world.
The Democratic party elite may have been fighting behind the scenes this year for who among the Democrats with or without “RINOs” is going to assume future power, and none of us reading the “news” knows the truth about email hacking. At this point, who cares.
Read the full piece here.
The question remains whether Hillary Clinton is the progressive, feminist candidate the left wants her to be—or simply a hawkish corporatist.
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On Monday night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, First Lady Michelle Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders both took the stage to voice their support of Hillary Clinton. Both the First Lady and Senator Sanders, perhaps to the disappointment of the latter’s fervent supporters, spoke strongly about why they believe Hillary deserves votes.
The First Lady was adamant that Hillary was the only candidate for the job, saying, “And I am here tonight because in this election, there is only one person who I trust with that responsibility—only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be President of the United States. And that is our friend, Hillary Clinton.”
Senator Sanders, on the other hand, struck a different note. “[T]he case he made for Clinton was less about a visceral appeal to liberal values than a dry, logical chain of argument that led (somewhat joylessly and amid boos) to the conclusion that Clinton deserved to be the nominee,” wrote Glenn Thrush of CNN. That was before Sanders tweeted on Monday:
We have got to defeat Donald Trump and do everything we can to elect Hillary Clinton to the White house. #DemsInPhilly
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 25, 2016
Some suggested the tweet belies the fact that Sanders is more interested in keeping Trump out of the White House than putting Hillary in it.
The incongruous messages from the First Lady and Senator Sanders—one of full-fledged support and character endorsement, the other of resignation and necessity—reflect the anxieties of many voters on the left for whom Hillary Clinton is seen as the last remaining option, an alternative to Donald Trump who is not as progressive as they might like; that, as Doug Henwood points out in My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency, “The case for Hillary boils down to little more than her alleged inevitability.”
Which begs the question, is Hillary the progressive, feminist candidate the left wants her to be? Or another hawkish, corporatist politician?
In My Turn, a critique from the left that catalogs the rumors, policy complaints, and ideological alignments that have dogged the candidate throughout her career, Henwood allows Hillary’s words to speak for themselves:
“As a shareholder and director of our company, I’m always proud of Wal-Mart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else.”
—June 1990, at the annual stockholders’ meeting
“For goodness’ sake, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks.”
—March 1992. In her youth, Hillary interned at a radical law firm in Oakland, which, in Carl Bernstein’s words, was “celebrated for its defense of constitutional rights, civil liberates, and leftist cases.”
“Now that we’ve said these people are no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive—how do we keep them there?”
—April 2002. The “deadbeats” she’s referring to are former welfare recipients who’d (briefly, in many cases) found low-wage work.
“It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”
—June 2011, to an audience of senior executives from U.S. companies and officials from the U.S. and Iraqi governments.
“I love this quote. It’s from Mahatma Gandhi. He ran a gas station in Saint Louis for a few years.”
—January 2004. She later apologized, explaining it as a “lame attempt at humor.”
“The office of the president is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than expected from the average citizen of the United States.”
—Written in 1974, as a staff lawyer drawing up the rules for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
MY TURN
Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency
Hillary Clinton is running for the presidency with a message of hope and change. But, as Doug Henwood makes clear in this concise, devastating indictment, little trust can be placed in her campaign promises. More |
Going Rouge
Sarah Palin has many faces: hockey mom, fundamentalist Christian, sex symbol… More |
AT THE TEA PARTY
The Wing Nuts, Whack Jobs and Whitey-Whiteness of the New Republican Right… And Why We Should Take It Seriously.
“A lively and informed expose… At the Tea Party stands out as a must-read for anyone interested in the turbulent future of American politics.” —The Nation More |
“Progressives will find many new reasons to dislike Clinton after reading this sordid expose.”
To hear more, visit The Indypendent
[On Hillary Clinton]: “She is very bellicose, aggressive, very pro-military. When she was Secretary of State she was by far the most aggressive member of the Cabinet.”
To read more, visit Tablet Mag.
To read the rest of the review, visit The New York Review of Books.
To read the full excerpt, visit Alternet.
Henwood’s brief is directed squarely at Hillary Clinton’s political opportunism, her reflexive secrecy, her frequent patronage of friends and cronies, her belligerent approach to foreign policy, her scant legislative record in the Senate, and her unimpressive tenure as secretary of state.
To the extent that Clinton’s identity serves as a basis for Henwood’s critique, it is not her gender, but her identification with, and championing of the interests of, the powerful and wealthy American elite that makes her an unworthy candidate.
To read the full review, visit Jacobin.
As I told my Democrat friends back in 2014, if they’re so worried about the reactionary horror threat, they should look more skeptically at their candidate. Her political history was generally more conservative than theirs, but, more important from a party politics view, were her vulnerabilities as a candidate. Her stash of scandals, past and present, that could blow up at any time, and her campaigning personality, which could be stiff, error-prone, and inspire distrust. The more people see her, the less they like her. That political history should give anyone not a Goldman Sachs managing director pause.
To listen to the full interview, visit BBC. Henwood’s interview begins around the 20:40 mark.
[My Turn] it makes a simple, important point very effectively: that there is, and always has been, a distinctive whiff of cronyism and dishonesty about the way Hillary Clinton does politics.
To read the rest of the review, visit OpenDemocracy.
Would Clinton actually be a good president? No, argues Doug Henwood in his book My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency. As Daniel Davies observes, it provides a brief, reasonable survey of the case against returning Clinton to the presidency, free of the right-wing dreck clogging up the internet. The whole book is worth reading, but the main argument can be grouped under three headings.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Week.
To listen to the interview, visit Writer’s Voice.
My Turn, an expanded and heavily annotated version of his Harper’s cover story of November 2014, is a brisk tour of everything putatively dishonest, corrupt, venal, nasty, and equivocating about Hillary, from high school to the present moment.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Nation.
So for all of the “pragmatic” New Democrats on your list, those folks who never tire of lecturing you on electability and not letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good”—get them this book and make them read it before their next recitation of that chapter and verse.
Maybe then we’ll have a real primary debate.
To read the rest of the review, visit San Diego Free Press.
To listen to the interview, visit This Is Hell!.
Title is called ‘My Turn’. Not called ‘Her Turn’, which would be a very gendered title… My Turn is a full recognition of [Hillary Clinton’s] full-fledged ego… Doug Henwood is in many respects ahead of his time and ahead of many women who feel that they have to support Hillary Clinton because she is a woman… Hillary is a person who weirds us out. And so should she be. She wants to be the president of the US.
To listen to the rest of the review, visit Morning Brew.
The danger here is that in erasing left feminism, consciously or not, progressive media is pitting class against gender—making socialism (or Cold War social democrats, whatever) look sexist to feminists, and making feminism look fucking bourgeois to working people.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Baffler.
My main impression on reading the book is that this is something that all Hillary supporters ought to be buying – it sets out all of the credible criticisms, without mixing them with a load of right wing dreck.
To read the rest of the review, visit Crooked Timber.
Bubbling intra-left conflict over Hillary Clinton has washed over the internet, with the most recent fracas concerning the cover art for a new anti-Hillary book by left-wing writer Doug Henwood. The book, which will be published in January, is an expansion of Henwood’s anti-Hillary broadside for Harper’s in 2014. Its cover is a noirish painting of Hillary, arm raised, gun pointed at readers, under the title My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency.
To read the rest of the review, visit New York Magazine.
The Washington Post and Cosmopolitan are the latest to report on the controversy stirred up by the cover of Doug Henwood’s forthcoming book, My Turn.
The painting, if we may say, is kind of amazing.
To read the rest of the article, visit Refinery 29.
Sole has spent a lot of time ruminating on [Hillary Clinton’s] form. She left her first career as a mathematician to pursue her love of visual art in the mid-2000s. She was getting an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York when Clinton first ran for president eight years ago. “In May of 2007, I became kind of obsessed with her,” she says. “Those were my first paintings. I was learning how to paint—poor thing,” she laughs. Since then, Clinton has remained Sole’s primary subject, and has figured in dozens of her works. Sometimes, Sole herself is in there, too—locking lips with Clinton, or getting married to her, or performing Hamlet with her.
To read the rest of the interview, visit Slate.
MSNBC reports that the cover of Doug Henwood’s recently announced book, My Turn, has drawn a strong response.
The International Business Times spoke with Sarah Sole, the cover’s artist, about her inspiration for the book cover.
On CounterPunch, John Halle praised the provocative cover for forcing Clinton’s liberal supporters to face her hawkish record.
News of the book cover also made the front page of the Drudge Report.