Apparently, the answer is the latter, if one is to judge from assertions by the most-famous \u2018progressive\u2019 economists. Even so-called \u2018progressive\u2019 economists say that corrupt \u2018Democratic\u2019 candidates who have clear records of lying should be judged on the basis of what they say<\/i> they will do, not on what their conservative record shows they\u2019ve actually done and the interests they have actually been serving and paid by.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n For example, Joseph Stiglitz is trumpeted by economists and by the newsmedia as being a \u2018progressive\u2019 economist, and he was recently asked in\u00a0a Huffington Post interview, regarding Hillary Clinton,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u201cSome people are skeptical as to whether she is really genuine, \u2026 whether or not this is a woman who is too cozy with Wall Street?\u201d and he answered, \u201cWell, she\u2019s clearly much better than the Republican candidates,\u201d and he cited as supposed evidence for that, not just what she is saying to him, but what she is saying to Democratic Party voters in a Democratic Party primary campaign to attract liberal voters and so to win the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. He compares to that, such things as the Republican candidate Marco Rubio\u2019s (who, of course, doesn\u2019t consult with such \u2018progressive\u2019 economists) campaign statements, which are aimed to appeal to conservative voters and so to win the Republican nomination \u2013 as if the task for either candidate (Clinton or Rubio) at present is actually to win, instead, the general-election campaign and so to appeal to the entire electorate, both conservative and liberal. Is Stiglitz really that stupid? Of course not. He knows the difference between a primary campaign and a general-election campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n He simply ignored Hillary Clinton\u2019s already established and lengthy record, which is that of a conservative in \u2018Democratic\u2019 rhetorical garb, just like Barack Obama (the continuer of George W. Bush\u2019s Wall Street bailouts and most of his other substantive policies), or, for that matter, her own husband, Bill Clinton, who had ended the great Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s progressive legacy of the Glass-Steagall Act, which placed a firewall between, on the one hand, government taxpayer-insured bank-deposits and checking and savings accounts, versus, on the other hand, Wall Street’s risky gambles and bets to win high profits with proportionally higher risks \u2013 and, so, FDR basically blocked any continuation of Wall Street\u2019s then-existing ability to gamble with Regular Joes\u2019 money and so to leave the gambling losses<\/i> to Regular Joes, while still reaping the outsized gambling profits<\/i>, which then go to Wall Street’s banksters, alone. The \u2018Democratic\u2019 President Bill Clinton in 1999 helped Republicans ram through Congress the\u00a0Gramm-Leach-Bliley, all-Republican<\/span><\/a>, bill (which is one of the most corrupt laws in U.S. history), to terminate the Glass-Steagall Act in order retroactively to legalize Citibank\u2019s takeover of Travelers Insurance; and his Treasury Secretary (Robert Rubin) was then hired by Citigroup to help to lead this very same Wall Street firm that had lobbied the hardest for this Republican law to legalize that merger, which violated FDR\u2019s progressivism and violated the American public. If this action by Clinton wasn\u2019t corrupt, then nothing is, except perhaps Wall Street\u2019s continuing lavish spending on the Clinton Foundation and on Hillary Clinton\u2019s political career, first as Wall Street\u2019s junior U.S. Senator, and then as an aspiring U.S. President.<\/span><\/p>\n A good summary of the reality about Hillary Clinton was Ben White and Maggie Haberman\u2019s Politico article, on 28 April 2014,\u00a0\u201cWall Street Republicans’ dark secret:\u00a0Hillary Clinton 2016,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0which noted that, “The darkest secret in the big money world of\u00a0the Republican\u00a0coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a\u00a0nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul\u00a0of Kentucky would be\u00a0Clinton.\u201d It\u2019s not that the fundamentalist Cruz or the populist Paul would fail to treat Wall Street fairly; it\u2019s instead that Hillary Clinton would be even more subservient to that big-money than either Cruz or Paul would be \u2013 that she\u2019s more corrupt. And she is.<\/span><\/p>\n Here is the list of top career donors to Hillary Clinton:<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s Wall Street and the firms which serve it. The \u2018feminist\u2019 EMILY\u2019s List is also included, of women who still vote for Hillary for the same reason that\u00a0Blacks still vote for Obama (despite their being pounded the worst by his economic policies),<\/span><\/a>\u00a0which has to do with gender or racial identifications instead of any progressive (or even practical<\/span><\/a>) ideology at all, but Hillary is almost entirely Wall Street\u2019s property \u2013 bought and paid for, and committed to delivering to them what they have paid for (advantages to big international firms at the expense of small firms and at the expense of consumers and of workers and of the environment), which is the types of services that such \u2018Democrats\u2019 as she, and her husband, and Barack Obama, have privately promised to them, and delivered to them<\/i>. (Actually,\u00a0Obama is the very worst: During his Presidency, the top 1% income share has soared, and he has been President in the years following an economic crash, which is precisely the period in the economic cycle when the norm has instead been for economic inequality to decrease<\/i>, not increase. In order for a President Hillary Clinton to outperform his lousy record on inequality, she\u2019d need to reject his policies and turn radically against Wall Street, which has financed her own rise.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0What you\u2019ve just now read is all documented right there, at that link; any intelligent voter will want to examine it.)<\/span><\/p>\n America has become a corrupt country in a corrupt world, nothing unusual in this regard.<\/a><\/span>\u00a0The first step to America\u2019s becoming less corrupt would be for its voters to recognize that they have been and are fooled by the decades-long big-money indoctrination into \u201cthe free market\u201d (actually crony capitalism), and that their top priority should thus be to vote against it \u2013 to vote against (i.e., in the exact opposite direction from) the advertisements and \u2018news\u2019 media that pump what the super-rich want to be pumped into politics and into government, and so pump the popular votes that enable it all to be legal and \u2018democratic,\u2019 no mere oligarchy that mocks America\u2019s anti<\/i>-aristocratic Founders.<\/span><\/p>\n Stiglitz wants to be part of\u00a0the game that Hillary Clinton, as Obama\u2019s Secretary of State, was playing: working for Wall Street while pretending to be their enemy.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0He wants to be on Hillary\u2019s team, perhaps even inside the White House.\u00a0(Like President Obama himself told the banksters in secret, at the start of his Presidency, on 27 March 2009: \u201cMy Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. \u2026 I\u2019m not out there to go after you. I\u2019m protecting you.\u201d And, he fulfilled on that promise.<\/span><\/a> But he doesn\u2019t fulfill on the big ones to the contrary, that he makes in public, and to the public.)<\/span><\/p>\n If President Obama were sincere about his opposition to increasing economic inequality, he wouldn\u2019t deceive people by saying that, as The New York Times<\/i> summed up his propaganda in a headline on 3 February 2014,\u00a0“In Talk of Economy, Obama Turns to\u00a0\u2018Opportunity\u2019 Over \u2018Inequality\u2019.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0He would instead acknowledge that equality of opportunity cannot increase while inequality of incomes is increasing, because opportunity depends very largely upon income: the bigger a person\u2019s income is, the more economic opportunities that person tends to have. Instead of acknowledging this basic crucial economic fact, Obama, and the Clintons, and economists, hide it.<\/span><\/p>\n The lying permeates not only all of the Republican Party, but also the very top, the national, level of the Democratic Party. Democratic voters were especially deceived by Obama, and by Hillary, and by John Edwards, in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries, to think that their plan (it was all basically the same plan) for health insurance would produce \u201cuniversal health care,\u201d but all three knew that it couldn\u2019t possibly deliver any such result.\u00a0The percentage of Americans who had insurance then was 85.4% insured; 14.6% uninsured. Currently, it\u2019s 87.1% insured, 12.9% uninsured.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Their plan thus increased the insured rate by 87.1%\/85.4%, or merely 2% above what it had been when they all started promising\u00a0\u201cuniversal coverage,\u201d something\u00a0which already exists in all other developed countries (100% of the population having health insurance)<\/span><\/a>. That\u2019s how corrupt our country is. And they all promised also a public option, something which would enable anyone to opt out of the for-profit corporate model of provisioning healthcare services. But,\u00a0Obama never really intended to deliver on that promise, either.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Leading economists are not mind-blowingly ignorant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps the main reason why the turnout of Democrats at the polls is so poor is that the Democratic Party has sold out so much to Republican Party values, so that the Democratic Party\u2019s voters are giving up hope and giving up on the Party itself as representing them and their interests. The reality now in the United States, has become that there is, now, a choice only between two conservative parties, with the only differences between them being ethnic and gender preferences in order to keep up the fraud that there exists a real political choice and not just a one-party, actually fascist, government, decorated, around the edges, with differences about how deeply into conservatism this nation ought<\/i> to go.<\/span><\/p>\n And, so: what can be expected of the Democratic Party\u2019s economists, except the hope that their next career-move will be upward, instead of downward?<\/span><\/p>\n ———-<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse Conservative economists favor Republican candidates because it\u2019s the way for them to rise in power themselves, but what about \u2018progressive\u2019 economists: are they psychopaths, too; or do they instead blindly favor \u2018Democratic\u2019 candidates because of a sincerely oblivious belief that the mere \u2018Democratic\u2019 Party-label indicates that the given politician is actually progressive? Apparently, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":146337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,32,857,96,29,845,935,535,59,5624,858,540,531,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-146336","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-conservatives","13":"tag-cover-up","14":"tag-democrats","15":"tag-economics","16":"tag-economists","17":"tag-global-news","18":"tag-military","19":"tag-money","20":"tag-progressives","21":"tag-republicans","22":"tag-wall-street","23":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-23-at-10.17.40-AM.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n