“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives” – Hillary Rodham Clinton

As we all know, sex in this culture “trumps” everything. So thanks to the firestorm over those embarrassing, sleazy, male chauvinist rants that Donald Trump made on a bus eleven years ago in 2005, the damning truth that Hillary Clinton revealed about herself in the above much-more-recent quote, made public by Wikileaks at about the same time as the Trump fiasco, has been totally obscured. And that’s a damn shame.

The gist of the Wikileaks release comes down to this: in a socio-political culture in which (to cite just one example) a peaceful black man in Minnesota was pointlessly shot to death, in his own car, by a trigger-happy cop, with the man’s fiancée and their little daughter looking on – in this America, Clinton is concerned, very concerned, that society is just not giving the wealthy a fair shake. It reminds me of that wonderful video by the comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates, “Save the Rich,” minus the irony. This should not be at all surprising. Clinton was paid the mindboggling sum of $22 million to give speeches (from which the quote above was excerpted) to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and other very, very well-heeled financial and political groups. Most organizations of power and influence don’t pay that kind of money to famous people to hear them say “you stink,” and, of course, she didn’t. And didn’t want to, either.

Clinton’s quotes come from an email written in January of this year by Clinton aide Tony Carrk to her campaign manager John Podesta, in which Carrk quotes Clinton’s speeches, to suggest the necessity of damage control, should this material ever go public. These are, of course, the very speeches from which everyone from Bernie Sanders to The New York Times has been clamoring for the release of the transcripts, something which Clinton has steadfastly refused to do. So it’s an amusing irony that her own aides have inadvertently brought about the revelation that the candidate herself tried to prevent. (Podesta, in a very cowardly fashion, refused to verify – or deny – the veracity of the email, maintaining that it was hacked by the Russians and also lamely claiming, while offering zero evidence, that the text may have been doctored… which pretty much proves to me that the document is genuine.) This release exposes what everybody already knew or at least sensed about Clinton, but now the proof is definitive. Though her mind, at least during this campaign season, is hyperfocused on liberal Democratic voters, to make sure she tells them exactly what they want to hear, her heart belongs to the plutocrats of Wall Street.

Hillary in one of her speeches characterizes the widespread condemnation that the financial sector has gotten for the economic meltdown – which Jill Stein quite rightly has said was caused by the sector’s “waste, fraud and abuse” – as an “oversimplification” that, as “we know,” is merely the “conventional wisdom.” She then says that this unfortunate misunderstanding could have been avoided (presumably by the financial sector itself, though this is unclear) by “really politicizing what happened with greater transparency.” I’m lost in admiration for that wonderful phrase: “politicizing what happened with greater transparency.” Isn’t transparency – that is, telling the truth – the opposite of politicizing – that is, creating political “spin” or propaganda? Not a bit of it, according to Clinton. What you needed to do, she’s seems to be telling the banksters, was to be “transparent,” and then put your own spin on the revelations – “politicizing” them – so the truth could become whatever you say it is. (This advice, of course, is utterly ironic in view of Clinton’s outrageous lack of transparency regarding this very speech.)

This email also reveals Hillary’s political vision for America. This can be summed up by her call for “two sensible, moderate, pragmatic parties” – or we should rather say, one “moderate,” pro-corporate party with two heads, and with no radicalism, or even true liberalism, allowed. It’s clear that if Hillary had been in charge during the late 18th Century, there would never have been an American Revolution at all. All grievances with the British Crown would have been resolved in a “sensible, moderate, pragmatic” fashion, without resort to fancy, high-flown declarations of independence or messy wars.

Speaking of the American Revolution, I must confess that, in all frankness, I never really understood what was the big deal about the colonists’ beef with the British. I mean, I get it that the colonists were taxed a bit too high and too arbitrarily, and had no representation in Parliament and all that. But the acts of tyranny committed by the British then were nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to today’s tyranny of ordinary Americans by the big corporations and the banks, the very institutions that Clinton is most chummy with.

That bit in the quote above about “successful and/or complicated lives” particularly fascinates me. Among the many things that Trump and Clinton have in common is surely that both have led very successful and very, very complicated (not to mention appalling) lives. What Clinton doesn’t really seem to get, though, is how terribly complicated are the lives of the definitely unsuccessful in this country – the grotesquely underemployed and the working homeless – when they’re juggling two or three jobs and child care and still not making ends meet. And in her crusade to Save the Rich, Clinton cannot, or will not, recognize how much these people require saving, or how deep is the shit into which America will slowly, or quickly, sink if they’re not saved.

Dr. Jill Stein knows who really needs saving in America. Here are a few of Jill’s (and the Green Party’s) economic policy proposals:

  • “Break up ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks and democratize the Federal Reserve.
  • “Support development of worker and community cooperatives and small businesses.
  • “Make Wall Street, big corporations, and the rich pay their fair share of taxes.
  • “Create democratically run public banks and utilities.
  • “Replace corporate trade agreements with fair trade agreements.”

These proposals, though, belong to the real world, not to the Golden Tower, far above America’s dark reality, in which Hillary Clinton hobnobs with her rich pals.