Ever wonder how so many Africans could be crowded aboard European slave ships without a revolt in the 1800s?
Or how so many Jews could be herded to their own deaths during the Holocaust without turning on their Nazi oppressors?
Well, wonder no more. Cause you’re living that kind of history right here and now as the faltering middle class is being forced to choose between dueling Wall Street sellouts in the biggest mockery of a presidential election in United States history.
It’s a political version of Japan’s vaunted kabuki theater. One which signals no more and no less than the end of representative democracy and the American Way of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This surreal moment is eerily reminiscent of the climactic scene in the original Ghostbusters film, when Gozer the Gozerian invited the human race to choose the form of its own destruction.
With that thought in mind, The Cynical Times hereby endorses Hillary Clinton for president, as the lesser of the two elitist turds vying to betray the faltering middle class in November. We endorsed Bernie Sanders before the conventions, but Clinton succeeded in cheating the working class hero out of the Democratic nomination.
“In a normal general election we’d have at least one candidate representing the interests of decent, hardworking Americans,” said Cynical Times Editor VJ Epstein. “This year both candidates are greedy sonsabitches from the country club set who can’t wait to sell out the rest of us to Wall Street. To her credit, Hillary isn’t quite as big a turd as Donald Trump.”
“Watching them take a run at one another is like watching a football game between the hapless New York Jets and even more hapless Detroit Lions,” he said. “You know they both deserve to lose, but you also know one of them has to win at some point. Them’s the rules.”
Our decision to endorse a candidate was inspired by a recent column in the Contrarian Blog called “The Moron’s Case for Hillary Clinton.” It argued that the middle class should not only go willingly to its own demise by supporting the fatally flawed Clinton, but do so with enthusiasm in our hearts and praise for our affluent oppressor on our lips. Cause she’s that wonderful.
That kind of moron
ic screed is typical of the misleading garbage which passes for journalism these days. Such one-sided articles are meant to manipulate voters instead of arming them with the information to reach their own conclusions.
The Moron article channels the same kind of partisan idiocy which prompted affluent Democratic icons like Gloria Steinem to mansplain how middle class suffering should be presented during the Democratic primary. They directed Americans who have lost jobs to offshoring and homes to predatory bank practices to preserve their tales of class warfare for those moments when they hurt Republicans more than Democrats. As if there’s still a difference.
The Moron author insists voters embrace a similar kind of blind obedience to Hillary. He maintains that it’s not enough for us to vote for this crooked piece of shit to block the evil racist cock that is developer Donald Trump. We must also turn a blind eye to her particular brand of Pay-to-Play political corruption.
Clinton an
d Trump are not just political hookers for multinational corporations, with no loyalty whatsoever to hard-working Americans. They are the two most unappetizing presidential candidates to make it to a general election in U.S. history.
More than 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump – the worst showing in Gallup history – according to a poll released this week by The Gallup Organization. Fifty-four percent feel the same way about Hillary, making her the second most unpopular presidential candidate in history.
All of which means that a large number of independents and Democrats – not just Republican loyalists – have had their fill of the Clintons’ increasingly royalist view of themselves.
The painful truth is that Bill and Hillary have elevated political corruption to rarefied levels via venal practices which exchange access for money. These practices – which investigative journos refer to as “Pay-to-Play” – generated more than $153 million in legalized bribes for them from 2003 to 2015.
Such blatant payoffs are supposed to be illegal. However, the Clintons have carved an innovative loophole for themselves in our nation’s anti-corruption laws by categorizing them as “speaking fees” and “charitable donations” to their family foundation.
Wall Street’s political champions have made a mockery of the laws meant to keep monied interests from buying their way into the halls of power in recent years as Wall Street’s addiction to endless revenue growth has metastasized into a cancer in the American soul.
One result has been the erection of a kind of financial means test for high office, requiring millions and even billions of big money donations. A test which rivals the literacy tests of old in curtailing the will of the electorate.
The tsunami of laundered money has transformed the U.S. Congress – once the symbol of our representative democracy – into a kind of House of Lords in recent years.
The average household wealth for members of Congress is now roughly $1 million. That compares with about $54,000 for the rest of us.
Representative democracy?
Only for the silver spoon mofos who live in rich enclaves like Mecca, Monaco, Palm Island, The Hamptons, Manhattan, Palm Springs, and Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood.
The rest of us are unrepresented. Just like the patriots who revolted against England in the 1700s behind the banner of “no taxation without representation.”
The speaking fees the Clintons have pioneered are rivaled only by the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Citizens United ruling when it comes to undermining democracy. Both have removed limits which previously hindered annual bribery revenue growth for our nation’s political hookers.
These bribes are exactly what they appear to be – payoffs from predatory big banks and the like for political protection. As such, they represent a straight-forward betrayal of democracy and the average hardworking American.
The 
speaking fees scandal is very different than the frivolous charges the Right Wing Noise Machine has rolled out against the Clintons and President Barack Obama in recent years. And it’s precisely that flood of frivolous charges which has diluted the public backlash against them.
Hillary often alludes to this gratuitous criticism when she describes the
attacks upon her as “smoke without fire.”
Why?
Because “smoke gets in your eyes” to borrow a line from the song of the same name. It can even make a lifelong political hooker like Hillary – a former Young Republican who backed conservative Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 – look like leadership material.
The painful truth is that the speaking fees scandal represents overt corruption on a grand scale. It is a raging fire, which has been obscured by trumped up scandals like Travelgate, the Norman Hsu Scandal, Whitewater, Benghazi, the suicide of Vince Foster, and Hillary’s discredited claim about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996.
Why and how?
Lots of reasons. First and foremost is simple supply and demand on the political speakers circuit. If Hillary or Bill Clinton had refused to address the nation’s Too Big to Fail Banks they might have commanded one payment of $200,000 when they broke their silence. Not 729 payments of the same magnitude.
That’s the number of overpaid speeches the two lawyers have allegedly made. The list includes repeat appearances before the same fat-cat corporate benefactors – often on an annual basis.
A speaking fee consistent with that market actually would be more along the lines of zero for a presidential hopeful like Hillary, strictly because of the need to keep herself in the public spotlight.
Former President Jimmy Carter gets about $50,000 to $100,000 per speech, according to The Annenberg Media Center. George W. Bush gets about $110,00.
Now, contrast those amounts with the 12 speeches the Clintons have given to Goldman Sachs since 2004 for a combined $2.25 million. And the nine speeches they gave to UBS for $1.9 million.
Smoke, no fire?
Hardly.
UBS is the Swiss-based bank which has helped members of the 1 Percent escape trillions in taxes by improperly hiding their money in offshore tax shelters. It agreed to pay a fine of $780 million to the U.S. government in 2009 as part of a deferred prosecution agreement.
Goldman Sachs is the bank that agreed to a $5.1 billion settlement with federal investigat
ors in April to order to avoid admitting wrongdoing for exacerbating the mortgage bubble which triggered The Great Recession. It destroyed a staggering 9 million American jobs.
Again, these speaking fees are not smoke. They are fire.
Fire on a grand scale.
Eff Benghazi and the right’s other marginal allegations, which try to make decisions that don’t turn out well look like malice of forethought. We’re not talking about bad judgment here, we’re talking about a premeditated and intentional campaign of political corruption covering more than decade.
That’s a dealbreaker. Not a hiccup.
I don’t n
eed my president to have perfect judgment – mostly because perfection is always a lie in my experience. In the real world every president is going to want and need some Mulligans.
That said, we do need our nation’s highest leader to be honest, principled, and committed to the greater good. Neither Hillary nor Trump qualify by that measure,
No one with Hillary’s obvious record of bribery should be allowed to run for dog catcher. Much less commander-in-chief. Same goes double for the supremacist Sir Trumpalot.
The payments the Clinton Foundation has solicited from monied interests in exchange for private meetings with Hillary during her time as Secretary of State are simply indefensible. As are the bribes MSNBC has handed out to the Clinton, Bush and McCain families in recent years by employing their sheltered daughters as national correspondents. Chelsea Clinton received a staggering $600,000 a year to be arguably the worst national correspondent in the history of U.S. journalism.
These are classic examples of political corruption, which defy party labels. They epitomize the kind of Pay-to-Play corruption which inspired the book “City for Sale” about the administration of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s.
The biggest sin of “A Moron’s Guide to Voting for Hillary Clinton” is that it attempts to excuse such epic corruption by leveling it with the red herrings routinely generated by the far right. The resulting implication of the Moron column is that Dems should be held to a different and lesser standard of corruption than their political opponents, and that Republican misconduct somehow justifies Dem misconduct.
No.
Such manipulative writing invites more corruption, which is exactly where we are in this nation. We are in the midst of an age of unparalleled political corruption. One in which the 99 Percent is becoming more helpless, voiceless, invisible and irrelevant in their own land with each passing year.
Like many Americans, we here at Cynical are going to hold our noses and vote for Hillary come November. Not because we think she’ll make a good president or because we think the quality of the first person with internal genitalia to occupy the Oval Office is irrelevant.
We will support Hillary simply because we have black, Muslim and Hispanic friends we love who are terrified by the prospect of a racist Trump presidency.
We will vote for this piece of shit simply because we can’t do any better. Just don’t try to tell us to like it and don’t call it an election. Cause that implies voters actually have a real choice.
We don’t. Not this time.
What we do have is a rigged election in which Wall Street has presented us with the ridiculous choice between a racist crook and a non-racist crook. The same kind of strategy that was used unsuccessfully to pressure British voters to oppose the Brexit.
We’re going to support the lesser crook in November by voting for Hillary. Even though this predictable outcome feels very orchestrated and very rigged,
Seems like U.S. voters haven’t had a chance to vote against Wall Street’s increasingly indefensible greed since Ralph Nader ran as an independent candidate in 2000.
Look for Hillary to approve both The Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, which will further level American workers with their counterparts in China and India, and The Keystone Pipeline in her first year.
W
hy?
Two reasons. First, because the average American is invisible to her between elections. And second, because her masters on Wall Street have already paid for it.
The treasonous Clinton and Trump families are the big winners here. Along with their equally treasonous friends on Wall Street. This election will cement their status as economic royals.
The rest of us are losers, on our way to debt slavery in a plantation nation run for and by the Predatory 1 Percent.
Only an ingénue like the author of the Contrarian Blog would mistake such a disaster for the faltering middle class as a victory of some kind. Or mistake a charlatan like Hillary for a champion of decent working people.
