False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clintonby Liza Featherstone
Thirteen succinct and well presented (some even quite humorous) essays by different feminist writers all have the ring of a collection of speeches by Cato the Elder, a Roman senator who ended any speech on any topic with the refrain
“Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.” In this case, the brief version would be to say that no matter which way you look at Hillary Clinton’s exceptionally prolonged record as a senior figure in American politics, she is no feminist.
In the forthcoming presidential election, successive writers acknowledge that responsible, feminist voters will prefer to select Clinton to her Republican rival, and that is the nature of political choice in America as in so many countries. As they say on the back cover of their book
“Aren’t You Helping the Republicans? Only if you think that even one person will read a book by a coven of leftwing feminists, find it convincing and conclude that she should vote for one of those misogynist reactionaries.” They also deny that this book is sexist when it attacks Clinton’s claim to the feminist vote.
“We can start, not by insulting Hillary Clinton, but by creating resistance and revolutionary alliances of refusal—refusal to go along with the cruel forms of neoliberalism she has worked so hard to enact.” [p155]
The case against Clinton is not presented as a rant, but patiently spelled out by means of detailed attention to the facts of Clinton’s record. This opens by refuting the suggestion that Hillary Clinton is in any way an economic populist. Her record shows that she will make populist claims and even commitments when seeking election (I assume with the implications that she will do this again, perhaps assisted by more credible Democrats like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders) but she is in reality exclusively tied to the interests of the most wealthy. The account of her links with wealthy supporters is breathtaking.
“If nominated, Hillary will become one of the wealthiest Democratic standard bearers in history; if elected, she will become one of the richest presidents of all time.” [p42]
Hillary’s attitude to poverty is clarified by examining the legacy of Bill Clinton’s presidency. With Hillary’s active support, President Clinton accepted Republican legislation that removed the universal right of Americans to state assistance when they were in poverty.
In August 1996, as President Clinton’s reelection campaign loomed, he took Hillary’s advice and signed the third bill. This version was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and it created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to replace AFDC. Republicans and many Democrats argued for the new program by claiming that government checks to the poor created a condition called “dependency” that sapped recipients of the drive and self-reliance required for economic success. Hardly anyone probed deeply enough to recognize that dependency is part of the human condition. But the plan was that newly trained welfare workers would combat dependency by tough love; they would persuade and, when necessary, coerce, welfare recipients to go out and take jobs. And with states setting strict time limits on a family’s welfare eligibility, those who resisted would ultimately be cut off the rolls p45
While the Clinton effort “to make work pay” had a short shelf life, the TANF legislation endured and it has worked just as its Republican architects intended. Welfare caseloads have plummeted, from about 14 million people in 1995 to 4.2 million today. Before welfare reform, 68 percent of families with children in poverty received cash assistance. By 2013 it had fallen to 36 percent, and the assistance these families received was only a fraction of the poverty line. States receive a TANF block grant from the federal government, but they are allowed to use that money for other purposes, so they have a strong incentive to deny aid to eligible families by requiring recipients to look for work first or by simply cutting them from the rolls for rule infractions. And without recourse to the courts, there is nothing that the poor or their advocates can do. It is no surprise then that with millions of people forced into the labor market, wages and working conditions at the bottom have deteriorated. The obstacles to aid are so extreme that during the great recession of 2007 when unemployment exceeded 10 percent—the worst downturn since the 1930s—sixteen states saw continued declines in their TANF rolls between 2007 and 2011 even though the number of unemployed had risen nationally by 71 percent. Since as few as 40 percent of the unemployed are eligible for unemployment insurance in any given month, this meant millions of families were eligible only for food stamps in the midst of a global economic crisis that resulted from the speculative excesses of Wall Street. Because of TANF, the US had effectively regressed to the early 1930s, when many of the unemployed had no recourse other than private charity. In a word, the Clintons gambled in 1996 that eliminating a legally protected right to assistance for the poor would not, in total, matter because of their policies to improve the compensation of low wage work. P47
Incidentally, an interesting and quite extended passage follows that discusses the limitations of any policy based on full employment and makes a strong case for the principle of a Universal Basic Income. Based on experiments in a number of Latin American countries, there is evidence that this is a viable and realistic policy option.
"..the point is that social problems can be solved by throwing money at them, contrary to the trhetoric of dependency." p56 Of course, this would have to assume that our elite actually wished to solve them.
For every hundred families with children that are living in poverty, sixty-eight were able to access cash assistance before Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. By 2013, that number had fallen to twenty-six. p106
The Clinton legacy in education it is no less perverse and this was very much Hillary’s contribution. Infuriatingly, she took responsibility for introducing educational strategies without any reference to educational research or evidence whatever, entirely for political motives, and these have spread from Arkansas through the American system to other countries, not least England and Wales, where their influence is no less baleful. Central to these were standardized pupil tests and attacks on the competence of teachers and their strategic goals were also completely ill considered.
It is impossible to talk about the political strategy—or, to use today’s individualist parlance, the “vision” and “achievements”—of one Clinton without talking about the other. This is particularly true when it comes to matters they care deeply about—and education is unlucky enough to be one of those. P62
Reformers who emphasize standardized testing and teacher accountability over inputs/money often claim to do so because of concerns over young people’s presumed lack of preparation for high tech jobs.... But the truth is, these jobs don’t exist—the greatest area of growth in the job market for years to come was then, and still is projected to be, in the often low-paying service sector. The “skills gap” is a myth. P68
On racism, the book is scathing. The Clintons pull off the political stunt of attracting African American votes and support without addressing any of the structural foundations of racism; indeed, their policies are racist in their impact.
In his critique of the inadequacy of anti-racism, Adolph Reed writes: as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance”. P74
While “meritocracy” was a satirical term used by British socialist Michael Young to describe postwar oligarchies, overseers of the neoliberal order like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair celebrated it. Like Obama, Hillary Clinton is one of the meritocracy’s golden children. 8 Under meritocratic rule, American exceptionalism tells us that we do not need systems of social welfare because we are a nation uniquely capable of leveling all playing fields and creating equality of opportunity for an astounding array of people of all races, sexualities, and, more recently, all gender identifications. American institutions are meant to reward intelligence and hard work and punish stupidity and idleness. That the Clintons are building dynastic forms of power and wealth linking private foundations, shadowy nonprofits, billionaires’ fortunes, and young bright ambitious people willing to take on the unvetted agendas of Eli Broad or Bill Gates does not, it would seem, discredit the myth of the meritocracy. P75
The couple’s close relationships with Vernon Jordan and other black insiders offered an illusion of access that superseded any real concern for how hard-line anti-crime, drug war, and welfare policies affected poor and working class African Americans. As the movement against state-sanctioned violence and for black lives grows, it is important to remember that proximity to power rarely equals real power. P96
The Clinton record on crime and punishment, and in particular the War on Drugs, is so disastrously bad that even Hillary has been cautious about defending its egregious errors.
It is only because the experiences of the incarcerated and the poor have been so profoundly erased that the Clintons can be thought of as liberals (racial or otherwise) in any respect. P97
The overall effect is a landscape of feminist carcerality which draws upon the force of the state acting in collusion with social service agencies, emboldened by an angry clamoring for “justice” in mostly privileged sites like college campuses. The end result is that some women, mostly middle to upper class, and mostly white, are able to demand punitive measures for their accused attackers, but vast numbers of other women, mostly poor, often women of color, are left to struggle under a combination of poverty and vulnerability created by the very system that claims to protect them. 3 At the same time that some women are granted the right to invoke state involvement and send more people to prison, millions of others—mostly poor white and black women—increasingly feel the brunt of a carceral regime. According to the Sentencing Project, from 1980 to 2010 the number of women in prison has increased at nearly 1.5 times the rate for men, a 646 percent rise which means that now nearly 205,000 women are incarcerated. Nearly 75 percent of women in prison have mental health problems, in contrast to 55 percent of men—and the significantly large numbers across the board say a lot about how the prison industrial complex is also now the dumping ground for a broken health care system. In all but thirteen states, incarcerated women delivering babies are shackled during the process of birth. P101
The US is home to only 5 percent of the world’s population but holds 25 percent of the world’s prison population. There are 2.4 million behind bars, but, overall, more than 7 million people are tethered to the penal system in some way (parole, house arrest, etc.). P102
Hillary Clinton remains wedded to free trade as an economic strategy. A major policy initiative of the Clinton Presidency was NAFTA and its impacts remain hugely damaging, not only in the US but also in Mexico and beyond.
In 1994, the Clintons oversaw the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As a result of US goods flooding local markets, Mexican merchants and farmers, whether selling textiles or corn, have been forced to shut down. Approximately 2 million farmers had to abandon their occupations, and today 25 million Mexicans live in “food poverty.” As Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy points out, “Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact.” Restrictive trade policies, disguised as “free trade,” mean the displacement of millions of people who had up to that point been able to survive and thrive in their native economies. NAFTA eventually caused massive waves of immigration as desperate Mexicans streamed across the border. P104
The Clintons were fully aware of the waves of economic migrants provoked by NAFTA and the book describes their repressive policy responses, dehumanising and criminalising the migrants whose plight was a direct and predictable outcome of Clinton’s policies.
On women’s issues. Hillary is utterly non feminist, yet works to secure feminist votes with her usual strategy of distraction.
The abortion lobby is arguably the only Democratic Party interest group the Clintons never fucked over, and the Democratic Party’s support for abortion rights in the face of the so-called Republican “War on Women” has become increasingly central to the party’s messaging. P111
...on other issues that disproportionately affect women, like health care, welfare, and wages, there is little policy consensus among Democrats. As a brand, abortion is pretty much all they’ve got. P111
It’s fair to say the makers and distributors of Mexican misoprostol pills have done infinitely more than Hillary Clinton’s political clique to ensure reality-based abortion rights... P112
It seems ill-conceived to have tethered feminism to such a narrow issue as abortion. Yet it makes sense from an insular Beltway fund-raising perspective to focus on an issue that makes no demands—the opposite, really—of the oligarch class; 120
abortion is a consummately foolish thing to attempt to build a political movement around. It happens once or twice in a woman’s lifetime. Kids, on the other hand, are with you forever. A more promising movement—one that goes against everything Hillary Clinton stands for—might take that to heart. P121
“The US is funding trafficking NGOs at 686 million a year and most of the money goes to ‘creating awareness on sex trafficking,’ and the rest [of the money funneled into those organizations] goes to pay their board members, many who make six-figure salaries,” says Robinson. 9 “When I called Polaris they said they don’t investigate anything, all they do is relay the tips to local police. I said, ‘Can’t people just dial 911 and we can save the 3 to 7 million a year you get in federal funding?’ They admitted they do not have any direct services, so all they do is refer victims to public shelters. A person can dial 211 and get a list of the same fake services.” 129
Tara Burns writes: Like we saw recently in the Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage, the courts are where minority peoples most often see our rights affirmed. The Supreme Court’s job is not to act as a moral arbitrator or to interpret the will of the people. It’s to interpret the law, beginning with the constitution. LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] people were being denied their constitutional right to equal protection under the law. p129
Hillary’s record as secretary of State under Obama has been hawkish and unproductive. Her contribution to the undemocratic coup that removed a progressive, elected President in Honduras in June 2009 is as shameful as any of the earlier imperialist ventures of the US. She simply is a neocon in foreign affairs and while I have no respect at all for Obama’s conduct of foreign policy, his record has certainly been utterly perverted by Clinton’s reckless behaviour.
“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, told the New York Times . “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he said, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.” p149
President Obama’s two signature foreign policy achievements—the Iran deal and the groundbreaking opening with Cuba—came after Clinton left. These historic wins serve to highlight Clinton’s miserable track record in the position. p148
The writers have no respect whatever for Hillary Clinton’s use of feminist sounding slogans in support of an imperialist and militarist foreign policy.
e
mphasis on women entering the labor force is an old strategy that intensifies the triple day of labor for women, but is not tied to their freedom, equality, or liberation… Clinton uses her “No Ceilings” initiative to advance women and girls around the world. She says that “giving women the tools to fully participate in their economies, societies and governments” is the unfinished business of the twenty-first century. I am more interested in a “No Basements” initiative: feminists need to work to empower from the bottom up where most women are found—hauling water, collecting wood, standing on assembly lines or at factory sewing machines, providing food, doing low-paid service jobs. p152
Clinton assumes the “exceptional” status of the US because of its supposed just and democratic practices, especially toward women. She long ago set her sights outside the US as in China in 1995 at the Beijing Women’s Conference, where she famously declared “women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” Interestingly, despite some campaign efforts to talk about paid family leave in the United States, she has usually located the problem of women’s oppression elsewhere, and not here. But what about safeguarding access to medical care, demanding a living wage and alleviations to poverty, improving day care, lessening incarceration rates, and increasing contraceptive coverage for women of color, right here in the US? P153
The cumulative effect of this book is a demolition of any claim that Hillary Clinton can be considered feminist, or for that matter even that she is progressive. Her candidacy and perhaps election as President of the USA will not represent any advance whatever for the issues to which feminism is committed.
