Robert Scheer talking:
I think Hillary Clinton was exposed last night as a serious demagogue on the banking issue. It was unbelievable to me. She knows. She raised the question—or she made the statement, “We can never let Wall Street wreck Main Street again.” Well, who did it the first time? It was her husband, in alliance with Phil Gramm of the Republicans, who reversed Glass-Steagall and opened the door to the “too big to fail.” It was her husband, by the way, who signed the bill into law, that she accuses Bernie Sanders of having somehow engineered. And that was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Bill Clinton and Lawrence Summers, his Treasury secretary, and Phil Gramm pushed through Congress. He did it as a lame-duck president. It’s that legislation, tucked into an omnibus bill, so only four people in the House voted against it. Ron Paul was one of them, on the libertarian side. Yes, Bernie Sanders went along with this threat that if you don’t vote for the omnibus bill, people don’t get paid, and so forth and so on. It was Bill Clinton’s bill.
She has done this now repeatedly, blaming Bernie Sanders for the failure to regulate credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations—all of this junk which was made legal by a bill pushed by Bill Clinton, signed into law by Bill Clinton, and, I believe, done to enhance her coming race for the Senate in New York, where she got an enormous amount of money from Wall Street. Bill Clinton’s first Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, was at that point ensconced at Citibank—Citigroup, a bank allowed to form because of the reversal of Glass-Steagall, a merger of investment and commercial banks. So, she knows what’s been going on. And to blame Bernie Sanders—I covered this for the L.A. Times. I wrote a book on it called The Great American Stickup. I know the record very well. And she’s simply lying about it.
you worked for Antonio Villaraigosa, a fellow I know well. You obviously work for Sheila Kuehl now, a supervisor. They’re nice people. The fact is, it was Mayor Villaraigosa that ordered the police to smash the Occupy movement in Los Angeles. I was there that night. I was out in the street. It was barbaric. It was brutal. And yes, progressive mayors in every city, most of whom were Democrat—I guess one in New York who claimed to be a Republican—and they smashed this movement. It’s because of that movement, which addressed a problem that has accelerated since the Clintons came to office—you could guess, Ronald Reagan was not able to put through the kind of radical deregulation he was speaking about. Bill Clinton did the triangulation. And that income gap in America, that Bernie Sanders was warning about, has mushroomed.
And let me just say something. You say you followed Hillary Clinton’s career. I interviewed Hillary Clinton. I interviewed her husband when I was working for the L.A. Times down in Arkansas. They championed the slogan—both of them—championed the slogan, “Let’s end welfare as we know it.” And what they did is they ended the main federal anti-poverty program, the aid to families with dependent children. Seventy percent of the people on that program were children. Seventy percent were children. They claimed they had a program in Arkansas called Project Success that was helping people get off of that. It was a nonsense program. It never happened. It never worked. OK? Peter Edelman—she always says, “I work with the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman.” Peter Edelman was in the Clinton administration. He broke over this question of so-called welfare reform. He’s written a devastating book. Robert Reich was the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. He is supporting Bernie Sanders. Why? Because he saw the inside of Clinton triangulation. On domestic policy, it’s been a total caving in to Wall Street. And this income disparity, which Bernie Sanders was warning about, you say, back in the ’70s, has become an uglier reality now. And you’re saying we should trust the very people who opened the door to Wall Street to now solve the problem. I think it’s utter nonsense.
And let me say something about Israel, as a Jewish person, by the way. I am so proud that the first Jewish candidate that has a chance of being president has unmasked this terrible policy of ignoring the human rights of Palestinians, their aspiration, and backing Netanyahu, a guy who just doesn’t even believe, in any serious way, in the two-state solution. And by the way, Hillary mentioned Mohamed Morsi, a graduate of the University of Southern California. He got his doctorate there. And she said, “I talked to him.” Why doesn’t she mention that he’s in jail facing death? The first elected person to run Egypt is in jail facing death, and that Hillary Clinton was part of an administration, and after this administration, she has supported an accommodation with the military rulers of Egypt that have totally reversed that Democratic experiment. So, this is utter nonsense. The woman is a Margaret Thatcher hawk on foreign policy.
She carries water for Wall Street. You talk about the shadow economy. My god, her sun was set in business with a hedge fund by Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs. You know, and, by the way, her top financial adviser, Gary Gensler, was a Goldman Sachs partner, went into the—was in the Clinton administration, was part of this whole deregulation of Wall Street. He’s calling the shots in her campaign on the economy.
Jerry Brown, when he was running against Bill Clinton, said we’re always faced with the—by these people with the—not the lesser of two evils, but the evil of two lessers. That’s a line I’m taking from my wife’s book on California that’s coming out. But it’s a good statement. They helped get us into this mess. Let’s not miss what this election is all about on the Republican and Democratic side. On the Republican side, you have a neofascist person in Trump, in the form of Trump, and something of a religious fanatic in Ted Cruz. But they are addressing real discontent across the board. The economy is not working for most Americans. OK? And so, there’s a right-wing populist appeal that is wiping away the Republican Party. On the Democratic side, much to the amazement of everyone, Bernie Sanders has been able to register a populist progressive dissent. OK? He is a uniter. He doesn’t bait immigrants. You know, he understands the need for unity in the country. But the fact of the matter is, if you go for Hillary Clinton, you go for more of the same.
— source democracynow.org