Like her career, Clinton’s neoliberal ideology peaked at a moment when its foundations have all but rotted away. There is no great principle at work here that moves and inspires the crowd. To prevail, today’s very old “New Democrats” must incessantly appeal to the bourgeois pleasure of staving off panic without banishing it completely. To make her case for uniting the scepters of the neoliberal West and the U.S. presidency, Clinton must hit a psychological sweet spot: one part sheer terror at the prospect of a fascistic or socialistic takeover, and one part smug satisfaction at not only being humanity’s only hope, but having earned it.
…
For the Clinton campaign, and the ideology she incarnates, the secret motto is simple: The fix is in, and you will like it. Because it really doesn’t get better, except insofar as Clintonism rules longer. Clinton is the Pollyanna of power politics, for whom there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what’s right with her and her squad. Clinton has twisted her husband’s homey maxim about America’s inner goodness into a tribute to her own — an unseemly funhouse reflection of Trump’s own preposterous claim that “I alone can fix it.”
Utterly lost on the Times is the irony that nuclear power was originally touted as a key part of a future where electricity was “too cheap to meter.” Now it’s just another inflexible but powerful dinosaur industry being crushed in the marketplace by a superior product — kind of like mainframe computers or the horse and buggy or … print newspapers.
I love the ideals of my country. But I hate that we’ve been so denied any real knowledge of the world and don’t have the education to think clearly, so we vote against our economic interest and believe in our most shallow first thoughts of fear and hatred.
African American religious leaders have added their weight to calls for action on climate change, with one of the largest and oldest black churches in the US warning that black people are disproportionally harmed by global warming and fossil fuel pollution.
The African Methodist Episcopal church has passed its first resolution in its 200-year history devoted to climate change, calling for a swift transition to renewable energy.
“We can move away from the dirty fuels that make us sick and shift toward safe, clean energy like wind and solar that help make every breath our neighbors and families take a healthy one,” states the resolution, which also points to research showing that black children are four times as likely as white children to die from asthma.
Beyond the racial resentment, xenophobia and Islamaphobia that is very plainly coursing through the veins of Trump’s candidacy and his supporters’ fervor, this election is also marked by a genuine craving for radical change, new ideas and new leadership — a craving that cuts across partisan divides.
To see this movie, you have to survive the election – hang tough.
“When he wasn’t aboard his yacht, Farid Bedjaoui held court in the Bulgari Hotel in Milan, a renovated 18th-century palace nestled between the botanical gardens and the La Scala theater. Over five years, Bedjaoui’s hotel tab there exceeded $100,000.
In the plush rooms and the granite-lined lobby, Bedjaoui met with Algerian government officials and executives from Saipem, the Italian energy giant. Their agenda, according to witnesses later interviewed by Italian prosecutors: arranging some $275 million in bribes to help the energy company win more than $10 billion in contracts to build oil and gas pipelines from the North African desert to the shores of the Mediterranean.
To shift the bribe money between countries, Bedjaoui used a cluster of offshore companies that helped him shield the transactions from scrutiny, Italian prosecutors claim. Twelve of the 17 shell companies linked to Bedjaoui were created by Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law firm that is at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, a review of the law firm’s internal records by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media partners has found.”
Gardner, who raised two children as a single mother, says she felt vaguely positive about Bill Clinton when he was elected in 1992. In 2008, she supported John McCain, and in this election she’s become a passionate Sanders backer. She sees Hillary Clinton as integral to the economic system that has left her struggling. “I’ve been working since I was 12. It seems like when I was working as a kid, my money went further than it does now as an adult, just trying to feed the kids. I could work 40 hours a week and go live in the Y because that’s all you can afford,” she says.
The Clintons, says Gardner, “removed a lot of sanctions against companies and changed a lot of laws so companies could pay their workers less, fight unions, fight health care.” Employment used to come with security and benefits, she says. “That was just common knowledge, all those things you got when you worked your butt off for a company.” Clinton, she believes, had a hand in taking all that away. “Bill and Hillary’s friends were all rich, they were the ones who owned all these companies, why not use your power to let everyone in your circle get as rich as humanly possible?”
According to a new New York Times investigation, the other leaders of Fox News may have been emboldened by Ailes’ alleged sexism. More than 10 women told the Times they’d endured sexual harassment as employees of Fox News or Fox Business Network, and several others said they saw fellow employees become victims of harassment. Just two of these cases involved Ailes; the rest of the acts were perpetrated by other supervisors at the networks. They are uniformly horrifying.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.