Van Badham’s defence of Clinton is preposterous

Guardian columnist and former Woman for Gillard Van Badham has penned probably the most audacious column Australia will see arguing for Hillary Clinton for President.

First, I will discuss Badham’s claims about Clinton’s record. Then I will compare this to Clinton’s record on equality, and foreign policy. I will discuss how Badham characterises her critics, and then conclude with some comments on how this inhibits political discussion

Clinton’s glorious history

According to Badham, “Fighting inequality in the US — and global — context has defined Clinton’s political engagement for her entire career.” That’s right: her entire career. Apparently, “Clinton has progressed from community activist to presidential candidate with relentless dedication to equality causes.”

In over a thousand words, Badham manages to list only a handful of Clinton’s alleged progressive achievements. Given the length of Clinton’s career, it is surprising that Badham comes up with so little to demonstrate Clinton’s commitment to fighting inequality. For example, Badham writes that because of Clinton’s “redefinition of the first lady role, it’s hard to imagine now how groundbreaking it was when she told the UN ‘that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights’ in Beijing in 1995”. Badham gives other examples: Clinton “published It Takes a Village, arguing that childcare is a collective social responsibility, in 1996; or that she is credited with the creation of an office on violence against women at the Department of Justice.” And Clinton “championed access to contraception as a women’s rights issue, fought for the Paycheck Fairness Act and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter bill for fair pay, as well as campaigning for paid parental leave for US public servants.”

Much of the rest of Badham’s analysis is devoted to sneering at Bernie Bros, manarchists and so on. Badham includes among Clinton’s strengths her “nuanced understanding and dogged defence” of women’s right to choose in relation to abortion. Whilst it is true that Clinton is pro-choice, it is hard to argue that she is any more pro-choice than her Democratic primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. It is also noteworthy that Badham leaves out the less progressive record of Clinton’s VP running make, Tim Kaine.

That’s more or less Badham’s case for Clinton’s progressive record. How does it square with the facts?

Clinton’s missing fight for equality

Let’s return to Badham’s claim that “Fighting inequality in the US … context has defined Clinton’s political engagement for her entire career.” Perhaps Badham slipped in “political engagement” for a reason. From 1986 to 1992, Clinton sat on the board of Walmart. According to the NYT, Clinton wanted management to have a higher percentage of women, though this didn’t “translate into significant progress”.

What about improving the working conditions of Walmart employees? Michael Babaro reported that “ Mrs. Clinton largely sat on the sidelines when it came to Wal-Mart and unions, board members said. Since its founding in 1962, Wal-Mart has fought unionization efforts at its stores and warehouses, employing hard-nosed tactics — like allegedly firing union supporters and spying on employees — that have become the subject of legal complaints against the company.” Two board members say that Clinton never objected to Walmart’s stance on unions.

Perhaps it may be said that this was before Clinton was politically engaged. Yet two years ago, Clinton was asked to support Walmart workers fighting for increased pay. Clinton didn’t respond. Her advisers conferred in emails, leaked by Wikileaks, and concluded their call for solidarity could safely be ignored. In October 2015, Clinton was again asked for solidarity with Walmart workers. Again, she ignored them.

We also have the internal deliberations of her advisers on the campaign for the minimum wage in the US to be increased to $15 an hour. Clinton opposes this campaign. She supports a $12 federal minimum wage. I suspect there are few Australians on the left who think our minimum wage should be $12 an hour. Even the “explicitly socialist” Badham apparently feels too uncomfortable with Clinton’s position to refer to it in any direct way.

Clinton’s missing battle with US financial elites

Whilst Clinton is not exactly a friend of unions, she has made friends among the financial elite of America. She made $2.9 million from 12 speeches to big banks like Goldman Sachs (Goldman Sachs alone gave her $675 000 for her wisdom). Clinton and her husband have made over $125 million from speeches since 2001. James Kirchick reports that the Clintons have over two decades “raised more than $1 billion from American corporations for their political campaigns, paid speeches, and in donations to their charitable foundation.”

The super-rich apparently love to hear Clinton (and her husband) speak. A poll of Fortune 500 CEOs from June found that 58 percent prefer Clinton to Trump. Perhaps they, too, share Badham and Clinton’s commitment to fighting inequality.

Politico reported on Clinton’s brief stint with anti-Wall Street rhetoric. They explained that “the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry — among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America — consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.”

This is by no means a one-way love affair. Clinton began her campaign for the presidency aiming to raise between $2 and $2.5 billion. As the campaign draws to a close, she has raised over a billion dollars, twice as much as the Trump campaign. Clinton has successfully courted billionaires Haim Saban and George Soros, who are among the top contributors to her campaign. Clinton’s campaign has raised over $100 million from just 10 donors. And of the money Clinton is raising, a study in August found that most of it was raised in “just three metropolitan areas”: in New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

I could go on, but will stop here. The point is that Clinton has raised vast amounts of money from Wall Street and America’s one percent. The idea that she plans to turn around and impose serious regulations on Wall Street, seriously prosecute white collar criminals among the financial elite and so on is laughable. And, as noted above, Wall Street does laugh at that idea: “None of them think she really means her populism.” Whatever Clinton is fighting for, it is not equality. If she was, she would not be basing her campaign on donations from America’s super-rich, because they would be her adversaries.

We also know that she is cosy with Wall Street because of what she told them in private speeches. Thanks to Wikileaks, we know what she told the big banks. And we know that she told them the value of having a “public and a private position”. You know, the public position where she spouts empty rhetoric about challenging the financial elites, and then the private position where she lavishes praise on them. Her advisers even wrote a helpful breakdown of the most damaging parts of her speeches, like “CLINTON TALKS ABOUT HOLDING WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE ONLY FOR POLITICAL REASONS”. And we also know that Clinton slipped some anti-bank waffle into one of her speeches, so that she could leak it later. As her campaign speechwriter explained, “when people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power.”

In the end, they decided against this. As her adviser explained, “Downside would be that we could then be pushed to release transcripts from all her paid speeches, which would be less helpful (although probably not disastrous). In the end, I’m not sure this is worth doing, but wanted to flag it so you know it’s out there.”

Some might view Clinton as somewhat venal. After all, after Wall Street’s litany of crime and fraud causes the Global Financial crisis, Clinton went to Wall Street to tell them behind closed doors how great they were. She continued to take vast sums of money from them, whilst slipping in blatantly insincere rhetoric about the need for reform — the kind of rhetoric Wall Street knows isn’t to be taken seriously.

Yet in Badham’s rendering, Clinton’s agenda is actually “a structurally radical framework for broad-based American change.” Um… What?

Badham hails Clinton for her achievements as First Lady in the 1990s. She leaves out Clinton’s support for Bill’s welfare reform, which pushed many families into poverty. Hillary said she had been talking about welfare reform from 1973. Clinton also backed her husband’s punitive anti-crime policies, which had a particularly dire effect on black Americans. She has still not apologised for her infamous reference to black youths as “superpredators”, and the need to “bring them to heel”.

Clinton’s unprecedented centralisation of gender equality strategies to foreign policy

But let us turn to foreign policy, where Badham is at her most bold. She claims that Clinton’s “tenure as secretary of state was characterised by her unprecedented centralisation of gender equality strategies to foreign policy, creating a structure for participation of women in peace processes and recognition of rape as a weapon of war, which was subsequently adopted by the UN.”

Let me repeat that. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state “was characterised by her unprecedented centralisation of gender equality strategies to foreign policy”. Put aside Clinton’s support for the war on Iraq in 2003, before she was Secretary of State. As Secretary of State in 2009, Clinton supported the coup in Honduras. She continues to defend her support of the coup regime, claiming it wasn’t clear whether or not it was a coup. Wikileaks showed that yes, it was a coup, and she knew it at the time. The results of the coup in Honduras have been disastrous. All for the crime of a democratically elected government offending its tiny elite by instituting modest reforms.

Perhaps Clinton’s “unprecedented centralisation of gender equality strategies” was involved in her central role in pushing the US to war in Libya. The UK parliament recently published a devastating critique of the war. Among the points worth noting is her adviser noting the French motivation: gaining greater control of Libya’s oil production, increasing French influence in North Africa and so on. Presumably, Clinton wanted war because of her consistent fight for equality, and as part of her strategy to centralise gender equality.

Or perhaps Badham has in mind Clinton’s repeated promises to be super, extremely pro-Israel, and break new ground in her support for Binyamin Netanyahu.

Or maybe the strong support Clinton gave to Saudi Arabia, arguably one of the most sexist and oppressive governments on the planet. Medea Benjamin and Rebecca Green reported “On Christmas Eve in 2011, Hillary Clinton and her closest aides celebrated a $29.4 billion sale of over 80 F-15 fighter jets, manufactured by U.S.-based Boeing Corporation, to Saudi Arabia. In a chain of enthusiastic emails, an aide exclaimed that it was ‘not a bad Christmas present.’ These are the very fighter jets the Saudis have been using to bomb Yemen since March 2015.” The Saudi war is utterly destroying Yemen: about half the country is food insecure. A World Food Program official warned that “An entire generation could be crippled by hunger”. Those who survive the war will undoubtedly be pleased if Clinton is elected, as they stand to reap further benefits from her unprecedented centralisation of gender equality strategies.

It is worth dwelling on Clinton’s arms sale as Secretary of State. As if it wasn’t unsavoury enough , “In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation”. Bryan Schatz explained that an International Business Times investigation found “that between October 2010 and September 2012, State approved $165 billion in commercial arms sales to 20 nations that had donated to the foundation, plus another $151 billion worth of Pentagon-brokered arms deals to 16 of those countries — a 143 percent increase over the same time frame under the Bush Administration. The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman”. 17 out of 20 countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation “saw increases in arms exports authorized by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.” In the case of Qatar, Clinton increased arms exports to it by a whopping 1482 percent. For its part, Qatar donated a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. I assume that the more reasonable explanation for their donations is that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and so on share Clinton’s commitment to centralising gender equality strategies.

But then, what is good for American capitalism is good for Clinton, is good for equality and gender equalisation. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on Clinton’s long-standing structurally radical framework for social change and equality. James Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus report:

Among recent secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton was one of the most aggressive global cheerleaders for American companies, pushing governments to sign deals and change policies to the advantage of corporate giants such as General Electric Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Boeing Co. At the same time, those companies were among the many that gave to the Clinton family’s global foundation set up by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. At least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of public and foundation disclosures.

Then there is the fact of Clinton’s support for expanding the war in Syria, and arming the rebels. It is worth noting that whilst Clinton supported allied countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Clinton also knew that they were giving financial and logistic support to groups like ISIS and other “radical Sunni groups in the region”. Those groups presumably include Jabhat al Nusra, until recently the official affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria. Clinton was also informed in 2009 that Saudi Arabia was a “critical financial support base for Al Qaeda”. As seen, this didn’t stop her from delivering over $29 billion in arms to the Saudi government in 2011.

Clinton has continued to advocate the creation of a no-fly zone in Syria. This is a euphemism for an expanded bombing campaign, which would target Assad, and to be effective, probably Russia too. In private, she has admitted that for this to work, “you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians”. Their grieving families will undoubtedly be comforted by Clinton’s centralisation of gender equality strategies.

Van Badham describes critics of Clinton

To Badham, all critics of Clinton are basically sexist white men. There is no other category, and no critic has any valid point to make. The Bernie Bros mysteriously refuse to accept Time’s description of Clinton as a “cultural revolutionary”. “Whether ‘brogressives’, ‘brocialists’ or ‘manarchists’, they denounce Clinton’s claim on American left leadership despite her popular nomination, policy, activist record, her spoken statements or her trouncing of Donald Trump in three debates.” The brosialists in their “mannish part of the left” display “obsessional viciousness”.

The claims of critics of Clinton are characterised as “propaganda”. They spread YouTube videos and “unstructured blog posts”. They even “blame her for the US mire in the Middle East” — a position too absurd to even refute.

Apparently seeking to mimic her North Korean counterparts, Badham concludes stirringly:

Clinton is not just the most qualified candidate for election. Not only does she have a singular, expert history of activism, leadership and service that recommends her on her own terms. She’s a candidate whose policy, practice, life and very person are inextricable from the political cause of equality. In a democratic choice reduced to two options, to reject her for her opponent amounts to a rejection of equality as a political project.

To any ordinary person, this is transparent nonsense. Before the recent letter released by the head of the FBI, the Economist reported that about 55 percent of Americans have an unfavourable view of her. Are they all sexist? Are there no valid grounds for any reasonable reservations about Clinton? Is the only possible explanation white male sexism?

Or take Clinton’s alleged inextricability from the political cause of equality. How then does one explain her opposition to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? How does one explain her refusal to support unions? How does one explain her extraordinary closeness to America’s financial elite? How does one explain the enormous support they have given her candidacy? Are they all naïve fools, misinterpreting Clinton’s “policy, practice, life and very person”?

Everyone who disagrees with me is sexist

The problem isn’t just the crudeness of Badham’s agitprop, and the peremptory dismissal of any relevant failings of Clinton. Presumably, anyone who pays much attention to American politics will recognise her caricature of Clinton’s career. It is her weaponisation of feminism in service of Hillary Clinton, who is likely to soon become the most powerful woman in the world. Personally, I hope Clinton does win the election against Trump. But when she does, it is important that leftists understand what is likely to follow.

It is an understatement to say that Badham does not engage in good faith with leftists who have reservations about Clinton. As noted, she repeatedly characterises them as brocialists, the testosterone left and so on, without conceding they have a single valid concern. The mere fact of disagreement is registered as a manifestation of sexism. Expressing opposition to Clinton — let alone hatred — is simply to assign oneself to Badham’s categories of sexist male critics of Clinton.

In some ways, it is customary for people on the left to be subjected to demonisation and vilification for their views. Not so long ago, socialists weren’t called brocialists, but were characterised as part of a global Soviet conspiracy. Critics of Israel are often smeared as anti-Semitic. And, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of centre-left feminists smearing leftists as sexist for criticisms of female politicians.

Take the ouster of Julia Gillard by Kevin Rudd in June 2013. Surveys showed that by 2011, she was the most unpopular Australian Prime Minister in 40 years. According to Newspoll, her net satisfaction sunk to a low of negative 45 percent in September 2011. Her highest approval rating after that was negative 11, before finally being ousted in 2013 with a negative approval rating of negative 34. Newspoll broke down dissatisfaction with Gillard’s performance in three month increments from July 2012 to June 2013. Women were dissatisfied with Gillard at rates of 55 percent, 47 percent, 52 percent, and, from April to June 2013, at 56 percent. That is, when Gillard was ousted, most women were dissatisfied with her performance. Labor’s primary vote was at 29 percent, having earlier slumped to 26 percent. She took Labor to a two-party preferred vote of 42 percent.

The left can’t take credit for her unpopularity. Yet as noted in an Overland blog, Gillard caved into big coal on the mining tax, supported the Intervention, cut welfare to single parents, and established harsher asylum seeker policy. As Jeff Sparrow observed, “in almost every protest campaign in recent years, Gillard’s been on the wrong side.” That is, there are conceivable reasons for leftists to have had reservations about Gillard, like anyone else in Australia.

Badham couldn’t understand anyone’s reservations with Gillard. In a reaction op ed to Gillard’s ouster, Badham wrote that “To the outside world, the unpopularity of Julia Gillard must be unfathomable.” Badham explained the real issue: “The problem for Julia Gillard was not — as it had been with her predecessor Rudd — her performance. It was that, from to beginning to end, she remained female.” Presumably, this was the problem 56 percent of women had with Gillard when she was ousted. They are all sexists, who just aren’t as enlightened as Badham.

It is indisputable that Gillard was subjected to a great deal of sexist abuse whilst Prime Minister. However, claiming that all critics of a politician are ipso-facto sexist inhibits political discussion. This kind of smear is politically toxic, and has a chilling effect. Men and women who wish to discuss central political and social issues can be bullied out of airing their concerns by the kind of vilification and demonisation discussed above. This is particularly unfortunate, because it is important that the records of people like Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton are scrutinised. Their actions affect a lot of people, and I would argue, their actions have also hurt a lot of people. I also think that it is unfair for feminism as a whole to be intrinsically tied to the interests and advocacy of one particular politician. A more honest position would concede that there are feminists who do not share Badham’s enthusiasm for Gillard, or Clinton.

A final note on the misuse of sexism accusations

Ideally, this blog would not have run to such length. But I think it is good to use Badham’s article as an illustration of the issues I have discussed, because she offers such a clear illustration. Take this exchange she had with an interlocutor on twitter. A man asks Badham — why don’t you respond to women who disagree with you? She responds by asking if he is suggesting that they would rape her.

Badham deleted the exchange. But she stands by her reading of what that “abusive jerk” wrote.

Many people on the left would recognise that anti-Semitism is used as a weapon against critics of Israel. I think it’s beyond time that we equally recognise that there are people who similarly wield accusations of sexism in bad faith, to shield politicians from scrutiny. This does not entail that leftists should not take sexism seriously, anymore that we shouldn’t take anti-Semitism seriously. But it does mean that this kind of crude bullying should gain more recognition and discussion than I think it has so far received.