HRC actually said this: "If we break up the banks tomorrow...would that end racism & sexism?"

[brentspeak]

There's a now-old joke that certain Republicans would be willing to eat a baby on live television just to get elected -- if that's what it takes.

I'm beginning to think that Hillary might just fit that description, as well.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18962/break-up-banks-end-racism-and-sexism

Hillary Clinton Suggested Breaking Up the Big Banks Won’t End Racism and Sexism. Is She Right?

BY AMANDA MARCOTTE AND MOE TKACIK
ACT LOCALLY » MARCH 11, 2016

On February 13, ABC reporter Liz Kreutz tweeted a snippet of a Hillary Clinton speech and promptly sent the Internet into a frenzy of debate:

Clinton: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” “No!” crowd yells out

NBC later supplied a lengthier version:

“Not everything is about an economic theory, right?” Clinton said, kicking off a long, interactive riff with the crowd at a union hall this afternoon.

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow—and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will—would that end racism?”

“No!” the audience yelled back.

Clinton continued to list scenarios, asking: “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”

MOE: When I saw this quote on Twitter, I just stared for a few minutes, as if into the abyss or at a really gross zit under a magnifying glass. I didn’t want to know the “context” because the statement itself defecated all over the very idea of context.

Obviously, no one ever promised a piece of legislation would “end” hate and injustice. Anyone even notionally sincere about battling the prejudices and cognitive dissonances that oligarchs and overlords have forever promulgated to divide and conquer humanity understands that “racism” and “sexism” are not forces you can arrest with a pen.

Then there are the banks, the biggest and rottenest of which have been with us for more than two centuries. To want to see them curtailed is to have absorbed more than enough history to understand that such things don’t happen “tomorrow.”

When I finally caved and read the full speech, I found a veritable orgy of straw men, each catering to some crucial segment of the Democratic coalition. It wasn’t just racism and sexism that would persist in a landscape of smaller banks, according to Hillary Clinton. “Gerrymandering and redistricting” would also persist, as would discrimination against immigrants and gays.

Something about the line just screamed “Bill.” Not shit-eating-grin President Bill Clinton at the height of his virility/virulence, but the Clinton of today who is occasionally given to weirdly bitter rants that are simultaneously nonsensical and illuminating, like a warped decoder ring for understanding how the Democratic Party could maintain its monopoly on self-righteous rhetoric while selling short the New Deal and Great Society constituencies that got out the vote all those years: Just remind Democratic voters that Republicans want to outlaw affirmative action and abortion and quarantine everyone diagnosed with AIDS.

The thing is, we were never dumb enough to sign on to this gutted, soulless, leveraged-buyout version of the Democratic platform. Bill Clinton eked out a White House win with only 43 percent of the popular vote. His triumphant job performance as president is a fiction in which Democrats have been inculcated because his surrogates have so effectively marginalized anyone who dares acknowledge history.

But when the going gets tough, as it conspicuously has, Hillary (like Obama in 2009, alas) falls back on what worked for Bill, the old New Dem coalition strategy: getting the black community leaders and abortion lobby to get out the vote, the bank lobby to pay for the ad buys and the eternal GOP majority to prevent anything from transpiring that might alienate the bank lobbyists.

Today, as in 1992, this strategy only works by sacrificing a thing that Hillary now maligns as eggheaded “economic theory” but what Sanders supporters see as coherence.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. That's my sensible centrist!

I can't wait for four more years of this. We will have lots of sensible incremental restructuring of whatever remains of the new deal. Why heck we might even see a committee or two to examine really tough issues, like how not to raise the cap and adequately fund SS, or how to put off drug law reform for another decade, or how best to keep the current horrible health care system in place, or what can possibly be done to protect the student loan industry from reform.

Chalk me up as Another Sensible Centrist for Hillary!

[amborin]

2. developing a polio vaccine didin't stop racism, was it a bad idea?

[brentspeak]

3. Could not have put it any better. n/t

[insta8er]

4. ^^^^^^^^^^LOL^^^^^^^^^^

[840high]

16. .+1

[amborin]

5. this was a good article:

This is an excerpt from a long interview. It explains how Hillary and the DNC are cleverly using the lingo of the radical academic left (What the "left" has morphed into; although, actually, in academia, "the left" is by no means monolithic) to marginalize Bernie or to marginalize ANYONE who focuses on economic inequality.


KHALEK: There is a lot of racist ideas underpinning a lot of this thought, but it’s considered radical and it’s considered inclusive. Also, how does this relate to what we are seeing in the election right now?

You’ve got someone like Hillary Clinton, who is running for the Democratic nomination. This is someone, who’s been involved in pushing policies that have been detrimental to poor people, particularly poor people of color. And, right now, she’s really remaking herself into a social justice warrior, who’s anti-racist and always been anti-racist. She literally used the word intersectionality. She’s using the language of white privilege.

CHIBBER: She must have hired some grad students.

KHALEK: Right. But, on the other end, you’ve got someone like Bernie Sanders. Obviously, he’s not a hardcore Marxist or socialist, but he’s popularizing ideas about the economy, about redistribution, that haven’t been popularized on this massive of a platform in a really long time. And, it’s fascinating to me to watch the reaction to him and the way to push people away from him is to call him a “single-issue candidate” and to use this language coming from the radical academic left or, you know, whatever you want to call it. What are your thoughts on that?

CHIBBER: It’s deeply dishonest, of course. The entire reaction to Bernie has been bait-and-switch kind of ploy, and it’s not surprising. What is interesting is, as you say, that she is drawing on this current aspect of intellectual and political culture to justify this kind of dishonest move that she’s making. What she’s drawing on is, basically what has happened in the past twenty years is what it means to be left-wing or radical has been very successfully redefined by the academy, by professors, and by grad students.

And the way it’s been redefined is starting with a correct premise, which is that class, people’s economic condition, isn’t responsible for everything awful that’s happened in their lives. There’s also the purely racialized oppressions that they face and gendered oppressions they face, and that’s absolutely true. Starting with that correct premise, it leads to the deeply incorrect conclusion that, therefore, if you talk about people’s economic conditions, you are not addressing the core and most important aspects and liabilities of their lives.

Now, if you’re an African-American in this country, it’s absolutely true that you face all kinds of discrimination. It’s absolutely true that you have a much higher likelihood of being incarcerated than a white person in the same class as you. That’s absolutely true. But, how do you expect to address the real plight of African-Americans in this country around their everyday lives without a jobs program, without universal healthcare, without decent and universal public education? To think that these are matters that, by virtue of being economic, are not relevant for people of color is not just wrong. It is fantastically dishonest.

The reason that Hillary is able to get away with this is because the so-called left—and I don’t really call it the left anymore. I don’t know what to call it because it’s a diseased formation. The so-called left intelligentsia has succeeded in equating the word class with white guys. And we should look at this as an achievement because it’s never happened on the left before. It was always understood among the more savvy radical activists that, even though people’s economic conditions don’t explain all the liabilities they face, addressing the oppressions that men and women, who are poor are facing—Addressing those without addressing their economic conditions is an elite strategy to keep off the table the real concerns of poor, working class black men and women.

It was always understood. Now, it is taken to be the emblem of what it means to be radical, and that’s just a sign that the middle class and the upper classes have taken over the discourse of the left, whether they’re professors, whether they work in non-profits, or whether they’re these talking heads for think tanks. It’s the same thing, which is the middle class gets to define what it means to be radical.

KHALEK: That’s a really great point. There also seems to be this strain of hatred, looking down on the white working class and poor class, even blaming them for racism.

CHIBBER: A lot of this race talk serves as an acceptable way to express your disdain for poor people. You just can’t express it for poor black people because then it becomes racist and in polite circles that is unacceptable—and that’s a great thing. It shouldn’t be, of course. But it is acceptable to talk about poor white trash, or hillbillies, or rednecks. All these are expressions you can continue to use, and people use it with alacrity not because they have a hatred for white racists but there is a general disdain for poor white people. And they’re seen as being born into racism the way they were born into their skin. This is, again, an achievement of very backward and quite conservative intelligentsia now.

KHALEK: I don’t know if this is the wrong parallel to make, but Edward Said had this idea of the European mind being inherently incapable.

CHIBBER: Orientalist.

KHALEK: Exactly, so it kind of reminds me of that a little bit, where it’s projected these inherent qualities on to poor white people. But, then also this is all very helpful to elites because the idea of fixing racism ends up not fixing the material concerns of poor people, working class people, whether white or of color.

CHIBBER: Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine for a second that Hillary Clinton gets into office and she has a thorough reform of the prison system so that blacks and whites are incarcerated at the same rates. That’s a great thing. Now, it will improve the lives of a lot of young black men. What’ll it do to their job prospects? What’s it going to do for the quality of the schools? What’s it going to do to the infant mortality rate in places like Washington, D.C., which rivals that of a third world country?

So, the idea that you’re not really anti-racist until you only and exclusively talk about prisons is a ploy. It is something that the Democratic Party loves to do because it’s a way to push off the table what really threatens not just the white establishment but the black establishment as well.

KHALEK: The idea of fixing racism just becomes fixing hearts and minds and getting people to use the right language, like these really superficial things. It’s good to change people’s ideas…

CHIBBER: They’re limited, but it also keeps in place—One of the things that’s not talked about is Hillary is not doing this on her own. She has a small army of black politicos and intellectuals that are working with her. Now, why are they doing this? It’s quite simple. Over the past thirty years or so, one of the side effects of the neo-liberal turn has been the creation of a kind of intermediate class of brokers, real estate agents, sometimes small capitalists, and political officials, who are black. And, for them, the prospect of having a real, deep structural reform of the economy is quite threatening. Maybe not as threatening as to the larger elements of capital in this country, but it would mean they lose their position and all the patronage and largesse that comes their way. So, they work very, very hard....



https://shadowproof.com/2016/02/28/clinton-intersectionality-language-interview/

[LondonReign2]

6. Other things breaking up the banks won't solve

* Socks that go missing in the washer
* The heartbreak of psoriasis

Please add to this list so Hillary can add to her thoughts

[nichomachus]

7. Voting for Mrs. Clinton won't end sexism or racism either

So, there's no point in doing it.

[cui bono]

11. Bingo!

[truedelphi]

8. And this straw men verbiage of hers is not even new -

Remember when Abraham Lincoln stated: "If we fight the South to regain our Union, will it stop Indian attacks on settlers out West?"

And then decades later, FDR said, "If we should engage in military action against Hitler, as if he were the enemy, will that stop polio dead in its tracks?"

John F Kennedy went on to say, "So if we put together a space program to land a man on the moon, will that stop Starbucks Frappocinos from being high in calories?"

So we never stopped slavery, we all now speak German, and Frappocinos from Starbucks are still laden with calories!

[2cannan]

13. Too funny! nt

[rhett o rick]

9. This is typical Third Way rhetoric. Imply that sexism will be ended as long as we leave the

banksters alone.

[cui bono]

10. This goes back to the talking point that was widespread on here about social vs. economic justice.

A false choice. I actually just brought this up in a post I just made:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1280&pid=184843

It really has become the lesser of two evils and anyone who supports the less evil is still supporting evil. People are not that much better off under Dem admins than under GOP admins save for some social issues. I'm not saying they are not important but why did we ever compromise the economic issues? The DLC/Third Way sold us out. They thought we would settle for social freedom without financial freedom. Fuck that.

That's why at the beginning of Bernie's campaign they all came out with that false choice of either or when there's no reason we can't have both. Why are they making us choose which we want to not have? Because that is what they are doing when they make that false claim that it's one or the other.

Well that's not good enough. And I'm not voting for not good enough any more. Especially when Great is running in the form of Bernie Sanders.

.

[mindwalker_i]

12. Breaking up the banks won't end the CA drought

Hillary is making excuses not to hurt her friends - the ones who she's gotten ass-loads of cash from.

[pnwmom]

14. She's absolutely right. Not everything can be boiled down to economic theory.

Wealthy black people still have to worry about being stopped by the police more than white people have to.

[Bettie]

15. What I get from that statement

is that she plans to do precisely nothing about the banks, because she doesn't see a problem there.

I also get that she doesn't plan on doing anything to address income inequality either, because she doesn't see a problem there either. After all, SHE'S got plenty of money, if the peasants have no bread, why do they not eat cake?

So, if she's elected, racism, sexism, and hatred of immigrants will just vanish? Wow. If she has a magic wand, why can't she get economic justice too, while she's waving it around.

[840high]

17. Correct.

[Fumesucker]

18. The difference is the Republicans would eschew condiments

None of that safe eating for them...

[KoKo]

19. Long Time Dems were Enthralled by Bill just as we were by Carter before.....

I think after "all these years" maybe we really are looking for Authenticity and Track Record as opposed to the latest "Shiny Object."

We Dems seem to THRIVE on a VICTIM Message these days. That is neither healthy or positive moving forward. imho... after years of watching this.

[Ino]

20. Always with the weasel words...

She will break up the big banks "IF they deserve it, IF they pose a systemic risk."
But it wouldn't matter anyway -- it won't solve racism, so why bother?