[NOTE: I was originally intending to publish this just after the November elections of 2016, assuming that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in. Since Trump won instead, I’ve had to make considerable revisions of this post, not only to accommodate the surprise outcome, but also to take into account what a ‘Trump presidency’ would be like. In terms of all the horrible things we were expecting him to do, he certainly ‘didn’t disappoint’. Nonetheless, as unhappy as I am that he is president, I’m also glad she isn’t. This post, though critical of both of them, will focus on why she should never be president, and so much of it focuses on issues from 2016 rather than those of the Trump administration, which is touched on only a bit.]

I expected, a year or so ago, that Hillary Clinton would win not only the Democratic primaries, but in November 2016, too: I was wrong about the second prediction. According to polling data over the months, from various media sources, she was consistently winning against Donald Trump the great majority of the time, but he got it in the end.

Hillary seemed to have this election in the bag right from the beginning; you need only have knowledge of her record as a politician over the decades, allied with who her husband is, to know that she is working for The Big Club, as George Carlin called it in a famous rant. Yet, she still managed to lose. Well, she never had her husband’s charm…

All of the candidates, of course, were and are working for The Big Club, in varying extents and with only mildly varying political agendas, in both mainstream American political parties (what makes Trump ideologically similar to the others is far more important than what makes him different). Not even Bernie Sanders is as committed to ending the rule of the Big Club as he would seem to be, as proven by how he sold his soul to the Democratic devil. The Big Club, needless to say, is the capitalist class…but of all the candidates, Hillary was the most qualified, and the ruling class wanted to ensure that she got the job, just as any boss hires the best one for the job. They never wanted Trump to represent their interests, but this dissident member of the ruling class won, anyway, as surreal as that is.

The new president may have been elected, but she was selected, for it had all been rigged for her up until the end…but even that rigging wasn’t good enough. All the bias in Hillary’s favour among those in the DNC had already been known for months by Sanders and Jill Stein supporters before Wikileaks publicized the DNC e-mails in July 2016. People with eyes to see and ears to hear saw the proof all over the place in the mainstream media, in what was not reported every bit as much as what was reported: glowing op-eds about Hillary’s experience and competence, as against a dearth of coverage about Sanders or Stein, except to say they were both a lost cause from the beginning; about how pro-Hillary Google ensured that pro-Hillary searches were accessible, while searches critical of her were not.

Other evidence of pro-Hillary bias can be seen in how ‘Correct’ the Record (begun in late 2013 by ex-conservative [!] David Brock) paid trolls to harass and annoy online critics of her; a former Facebook friend of mine, who was doing exactly this kind of intensive, constant trolling of many anti-Hillary posts I’d put up, got so cocky when I posted an article on the paid trolling issue as to ask where he could sign up, for allegedly Bernie’s supporters had been doing it first. I should have responded by saying I thought he already was signed up, and knowing how much more money was in the Clinton campaign than in that of Sanders and Stein put together (as to make the claim, ‘Sanders’s trolls started it,’ sound ludicrous), I figured that if my former friend was a paid troll (as opposed to being merely one of Hillary’s useful idiots), he was probably getting so much money by being an asshole that he didn’t need to have a real job. In today’s sluggish economy, caused by the neoliberal agenda that the Clinton family helped establish, combined with neoliberal-caused wealth inequality, it is quite plausible that trolling at least contributes to a comfortable income for those without other options.

The Wikileaks e-mail exposures (claimed, without proof, by a desperate and embarrassed Democratic Party, to have been fabricated) may not have explicitly shown a plan to rig the DNC primary elections, but they did show a sufficient bias in favour of Hillary over Sanders. A suggestion to propagate evidence of possible atheism in Sanders may not have been used, but the bias against him in those e-mails disproves the impartiality that is supposed to exist in the party towards potential candidates. Sanders could have won if there hadn’t been the bias and election fraud during the Democratic primaries, and he certainly could have beaten Trump, unlike Hillary.

The reasons for the DNC’s preference of Hillary are obvious: she has the big money behind her. (Consider her connections with billionaires like George Soros. She also accepted a huge amount of money from UBS.) Sanders, though much more popular at the time, never had the needed huge number of Super PACs, because he wants to help the poor. No wealthy donor is going to support such a politician.

One rationalization Hillary supporters have given for the bias against Sanders is that he’s been an independent politician for most of his career, had only recently joined the Dems, then proceeded to hit Hillary and the DNC with criticisms of party corruption. Why would the butt-hurt DNC want to support this upstart outsider who had just joined their club, only to bash their favoured candidate? Who was he to judge her?

Well, maybe that was the whole point, Dear Dems. Your party is corrupt, right to the core. You’re supposed to be the left-leaning party, as contrasted with the right-wing Republicans. (Or, at least, the Democrats had been the left-leaning party, starting from their 1930s move to the left, until they were moved back to the right by…who were they…the Clintons?) The corruption of the Dems required an outsider to come in and expose what has been going on since the 1990s. It’s exactly the establishment within the Democratic Party that must be exposed for the pro-capitalist frauds that they are, so naturally, those servants of The Big Club are going to be biased against Sanders; but that doesn’t justify the bias.

In popular imagination, Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III) is a hero among ‘left-leaning’ liberals. Actually, he and his wife are more conservative than Reagan was (not to say that Ronny didn’t want to be more right-wing, of course). Bill signed and ratified NAFTA (after George HW Bush tried to), which helped take jobs away from unionized workers in the U.S. and kept Mexican poverty about the same over the years, with hardly any economic growth, and with Mexico’s increased dependence on the U.S., Mexico was hit especially hard by the 2008 economic crisis. With this, and all the other crimes and interventions of U.S. imperialism in Central America over the past hundred years, it’s no wonder so many Latin Americans keep trying to get into the U.S. Poverty has forced them to search for decent-paying work in America.

When I touched on Bill Clinton’s contributions to the nefarious growth of neoliberalism in this essay, I was barely scratching the surface. His and Hillary’s betrayal of the left began long before they got into the White House; but when he got in, he did a number of other shameful things, supported by Hillary, during his two terms, including the Crime Bill of 1994, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The first of these heinous forms of legislation resulted in the lopsided levels of incarceration for blacks and other minorities, whom Hillary callously called “superpredators.” The welfare reform destroyed the social safety net. The telecommunications act helped with the merging and acquisitions of so many media sources that now almost all of the US media are controlled by only six corporations (who, of course, decide what political agenda to promote); small wonder so many of us, finding the mainstream media utterly untrustworthy, now flock to alternative sources, including even Russian media, so derided by the establishment Western media, for obvious reasons.

Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which many commentators believe was a major factor leading to the financial crisis of 2008, since it allowed financialization of the economy to go on without let or hindrance.

During his two terms, Bill Clinton also helped US imperialism ruin Russia with Boris Yeltsin by destroying the country’s social safety net. This led to what some have called the economic genocide of Russia. And the demise of the USSR made it easy for the US to extend its global hegemony.

With this background in mind, we must now see why having the Clintons back in the White House, continuing their machinations, was such a dangerous, frightening prospect, and why, in spite of how obviously awful Trump is, we should be glad they didn’t get back in. The military-industrial complex’s habit of removing regimes that go against the interests of the capitalist class has been going on for a much longer time than when the Clintons came onto the scene (consider the CIA’s helping MI6 to oust Mohammad Mosaddegh and bring back the Shah of Iran from exile in 1953, or the CIA’s helping to replace the democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende, with the capitalist dictator Augusto Pinochet); but the notion of waging “humanitarian wars” against “brutal dictators” really came into its own with the false charge of genocide against socialist Slobodan Milošević, against whom it was recently judged that there was no evidence linking him with the deaths in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This ousting of “brutal dictators” didn’t start with George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003; it was continued by him, but popularized by that ‘sensitive liberal,’ Bill Clinton, in the late 1990s.

Now we can put Hillary’s hawkishness in its proper context. Her support of the Iraq War wasn’t just a fearful reaction to the September 11th attacks; her later recanting of that support was a reaction to that war’s unpopularity, in anticipation of her hopes of becoming president in 2008. Given her continuing hawkishness since then, I find it easy to believe that her ‘regret’ over voting for the Iraq War was anything but genuine.

As Secretary of State under Barack Obama, who is as undeserving of a Nobel Peace Prize as anyone can be, Hillary talked him into bombing the Hell out of Libya, resulting in the brutal sodomizing and murder of Muammar Gaddafi, benevolent as far as dictators go, whose government had been providing a host of social programs, including free education, free health care, free electricity, and even interest-free loans. Libya, thanks to the NATO intervention, became a failed state and a haven for terrorists. Hillary boasts of this achievement, instead of being contrite. She’s friends with Henry Kissinger, remember.

She has always supported an aggressive foreign policy against the already besieged and aggrieved Syria, arming “moderate” rebels as well as ISIS, all for the purpose of removing another “brutal dictator,” Bashar al-Assad. How many more Syrian children must be traumatized or killed, just so the U.S. can install a gas pipeline in Syria?

Of course, Russia has been doing airstrikes on Syria, but with the intention of helping the Syrian government stop ISIS (which US imperialism in the region has helped to create, and with Hillary Clinton’s help, allowed its Arab allies to fund), not helping the terrorists. And because of this thwarting of the US’s plans to extend its global hegemony (among other reasons), Vladimir Putin has become the latest “brutal dictator” whom the US and NATO must stop.

It has come to this: the deep state in the U.S. is actually, seriously planning to go to war with Russia, a country as armed to the teeth with nukes as the U.S. is. Does the hubris of U.S. imperialism have no limits? Haven’t the misadventures of the American army (and NATO) in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria proven the limits of their strength? And now they have NATO troops lined up along the Eastern borders of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, doing war-games and preparing for a confrontation with Russia.

The U.S. Navy has also had navy vessels and aircraft in the South China Sea, ready to face China, another growing challenger to U.S. hegemony (Steve Bannon, of course, has predicted war with China). This anti-China and anti-Russian attitude is nothing new from Hillary, of course, but it should be equally obvious that not all of this is solely the Clintons’ fault, either: Obama had been pursuing much of this, because The Big Club want it; hence all the anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda in the U.S. corporate media, including the speculative fantasy that the Russians were behind the Wikileaks hack of the DNC e-mails (US intelligence insiders seem a likelier source of the leaks), as well as the claims that Trump, Sanders, and Stein are, or have been, all puppets of Vladimir Putin. Then, of course, there’s the ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim that Russia manipulated the election to put Trump in the White House.

My criticism of Hillary will lead many to assume that I’m a supporter of Sanders, or Stein, or that right-libertarian Gary Johnson, or–worst of all–Donald Trump. I don’t like any of them. Sanders is at best a mere social democrat, who would help Americans get lots of free stuff while allowing a certain measure of U.S. imperialism to continue unchecked; at worst, he’s a pawn of the system, bullied or bribed into supporting Hillary instead of fighting for his “revolution” to the bitter end. Stein is a nice lady whose heart is, or seems to be, in the right place, but how she plans to implement her radical changes, especially when opposed by the Big Club, remains a mystery. I don’t support Johnson because I’m a left-libertarian, and we shouldn’t need him to legalize weed.

As for Trump, opposing him is all too easy. His charmless, tactless campaign showed what he really is: a lecherous buffoon, a cartoon character. He has a cult of dedicated bigots and simpletons following him, and we’ve always known that lots of Americans are like that (although, to be fair, others among his supporters are better than that; but despite their legitimate feelings of disenfranchisement, they still have the misguided notion that he, a billionaire narcissist, actually cares about them); still, more than enough Americans, including the super-rich, won’t want to let him stay in the Oval Office too long. Most importantly, I’m convinced of the idea, often dismissed as a conspiracy theory of disgruntled Republicans, that Trump was originally a Clinton plant; but later, when he saw how popular he’d become, his narcissism took over, and he didn’t want to be her plant anymore (or, maybe, he secretly still wanted to?).

You don’t have to be a partisan of the GOP to believe that Trump could have originally intended to run a phoney campaign to help his friends, the Clintons, make all Republicans seem extreme, and ensure that the Clintons easily return to the White House (though the plan ultimately failed). You just need to understand the nature of The Big Club, who are now using the mainstream media to get rid of him by demonizing him.

In any case, the political goalposts keep getting moved further and further to the right, with the GOP goalpost coming closer and closer to Attila-the-Hun right-wing, and the DNC goalpost being more and more neoliberal right-wing…with the illusion of the Dems still being ‘progressive’ relative to the GOP. The extreme goalpost isn’t so much what we need to worry about, since Trump will probably be removed from the White House by the Big Club sooner or later, either through their attempts to impeach him (and replace him with the much more establishment-oriented Pence) by accusing him of being a ‘Putin stooge’, or by defeating him in 2020, or they’ll ‘remove’ his agenda by bullying him into following theirs, or he’ll simply quit the job out of frustration at his unpopularity and the stress of the job; it’s the neoliberal goalpost that is the problem, and Trump is helping that one stay in place forever, in his own, twisted way.

Trump and the Clintons have been friends for years. The Clintons attended Trump’s wedding with Melania in 2005. Bill and Trump play golf together. Bill has played golf at Trump’s golf course for years; Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and Marc Mezvinsky all played there together once. Chelsea is friends with Ivanka; their husbands introduced the young women to each other, because the young men were already friends! It’s a big club, and we’re not in it! Then, there was that mysterious phone call Bill gave the Donald, just before he announced his bid for the Republican nomination.

Let’s compare Hillary’s history with Trump’s political positions. She, too, has spoken of building a barrier to keep Mexicans out of America. Trump put a ‘temporary’ ban on Muslims? His executive order merely continued and developed something Obama had started in late 2015; furthermore, Obama and Hillary have bombed Muslims (as Trump is doing now in Syria)! Obama was the deporter-in-chief, as well as a bomber of Muslims, so how much worse can Trump be? Trump wants to outlaw burning the US flag; Hillary Clinton backed proposed legislation to do the same thing in 2005. He may have spoken of wanting to ‘drain the swamp’ of Clinton-oriented corruption, but now that he’s president, he’s appointing the same kind of neo-con, neoliberal, pro-banker people who supported the Democrats.

People were afraid when Trump asked why we can’t use nuclear weapons, while Hillary and Obama were and are content to expand NATO along Russia’s border, with troops there, ready to do war with a nuclear-armed superpower. Hillary hasn’t been any less averse to using nukes, either. Trump is actually less hawkish towards Russia, yet we’re all afraid of his itchy finger on the button, instead of hers. He is an awful president, but that’s because there’s never really been a good president. His election isn’t Russia’s fault: it’s the US’s.

Now, Trump was accused of not paying his taxes (which, it turns out, he has payed them); now, avoiding paying one’s fair share is typical of any capitalist billionaire. The Clintons haven’t been much better with that kind of thing, though, with their not-so-charitable foundation. And if Trump is no friend to women, neither is Hillary. To all of those who were so ecstatically hoping to shout, “First woman president! First woman president!” in November 2016: it isn’t the women at the top who matter (there already are lots of women at the top…not so much female politicians, of course, but I mean those women in the families of the ruling class); it’s the women at the bottom who do…working women in the US who would have got no help from Hillary had she become president, women in the Middle East who have had her bombs raining over them, women apparel workers in Haiti whose wages were kept down by her and the then-State Department, etc.

None of this is meant to be a defence of Trump, who as I’ve said above, has been as awful a president as we had all predicted he would be. His bigotry, rudeness, needless increase of spending on the military–side by side with cuts in such areas as the arts, education, the HHS, and the EPA–are all inexcusable. Then there’s his continuation of the ‘War on Terror’. These are also typical moves to expect from The Big Club. Trump’s privatizing of education has parallels in the Obama administration, too.

But as bad as Trump is, none of this means that Hillary would have been any better. The 2016 voting in California and New York State showed election fraud (note how easily hacked electronic voting booths are, how computers can be used to rig elections); the mainstream media favoured Hillary; the FBI director, who was on her payroll, twice wouldn’t indict her for the e-mail scandals; she paid trolls to intimidate her critics; and she got a personal friend to make an ass of himself, and was promoting him to the hilt through the corporate media so she, because of the fear of him being elected, would be ensured a victory, though her plan failed. But because she’s a “liberal progressive” Democrat, she couldn’t have been an authoritarian dictator, or someone working for the plutocrats? And just as everyone is rightly worried that President Trump is showing fascist tendencies, the mainstream media is trying to silence alternative media as ‘fake news’ or ‘Russian propaganda’. This is the new version of book-burning, and both the mainstream GOP and the Dems are supporting the idea.

Hillary and Kaine aren’t progressive in the slightest, if the word ‘progressive’ actually means anything. The notion of the Democratic Party as ‘left-leaning’ is a lie. The Republican Party isn’t the only repugnant party. Don’t ‘correct’ the record on Hillary, consider her record. Here’s a hint: a number of neocons and Republicans were either supporting her, or had at least considered supporting her. Being a ‘liberal’ Democrat is nowhere near left enough. The ‘Third Way’ is what brought the Democrats and the Labour Party to the right. Imperialism with the Dems is the same as it ever has been with the GOP. Democrats have been no less war-mongering than Republicans, for both parties serve the same capitalist masters. The US really has two Republican parties: the neoliberal Republicans (Hillary ‘Democrats’), and the Attila-the-Hun Republicans (President Trump).

So, what can we do? Anyone with a modicum of common sense will know that The Big Club won’t allow anyone to legislate them out of their wealth. Such is the nature of so-called liberal democracy, which is really the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And a soft Left won’t suffice in fixing this problem; ‘libertarian socialist’ Noam Chomsky has seriously disappointed me in supporting a Hillary vote to prevent Trump from winning in swing states.

What we need is a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. And what is the dictatorship of the proletariat? It means various things to different leftists, of course. For Marx, it was exemplified in the short-lived but exhilarating Paris Commune. For others, it was the USSR, it’s Castro’s Cuba, or North Korea, and socialist Eastern Europe during the Cold War. That’s not how I, leaning towards a more libertarian left, would prefer it. But in any case, it’s about having a worker-ruled society that is protected from a resurgence of capitalism through an arming of the workers. This is real democracy, a worker-ruled society, democracy from the bottom-up, for a change. This is to be achieved by any means necessary, and necessarily involving force.

I personally don’t like violence; my advocacy of violence comes not out of personal preference, but out of a lack of viable alternatives. The only thing that will fix America, and by extension, the world, is a bloody, violent revolution. Lots of Americans own guns, thereby making them physically equipped (to an extent, at least) to carry out this uprising. Sadly, too many of these people fetishize capitalism, and therefore won’t want to make the necessary political changes. They’ll simply replace Trump’s right-wing government with a neoliberal one in ‘left-wing’ garb (think of those Hillary supporters who don’t accept the Trump victory), or with a right-libertarian one.

Leftists will have to arm themselves; they’ll also have to get over their differences. A divided Left is an impotent Left. Now is not the time to debate on Facebook whether Bakunin or Marx, Kropotkin or Lenin, Makhno or Mao, or Trotsky or Stalin had the right ideas. Nor is it the time to debate how many died under communism in order to invalidate those forms of leftism we don’t particularly like. Now is the time to organize and plan a revolution. Online communication will have to be kept to a minimum, for fear of all that internet spying. In-person meetings will have to be made at the local level, off the radar.

Sadly, we in the First World have next to no revolutionary potential: we stare at our phones like zombies, eat unhealthy food, and get far too little exercise. We need to be in a state of desperation to be in a revolutionary situation. I try not to be as pessimistic as Jason Unruhe about First World revolutionary potential; it’s not that I think he’s wrong, but if he’s right, why are any of us leftists still spreading the message? Are we just ego-tripping? The Third World may be desperate enough to be in a revolutionary situation, but they lack the wherewithal to prepare an uprising; they can barely feed their families.

Our situation is urgent: the Big Club, with or without Trump, is sure not only to continue to exacerbate the problems of income inequality, environmental dangers (i.e., fracking), and imperialist wars, including a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia or war with China; they will use a mass media the DNC largely controls to divert the masses’ attention from the real issues.

The Big Club must be torn down, not just because of our yearning for justice, but for the sake of our very survival. It’s either socialism, or barbarism. Since the people make up a much bigger club than the capitalist club, we all need to come together. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

The choice is ours…for we have no other choice.