Campaign 2016: Hillary Clinton’s Fake Populism Is a Hit, by Matt Taibbi

How dare anyone claim that Hillary Clinton is not a woman of the people! She is a woman of the hedge fund people, the investment banking people, the Fortune 500 people, the Forbes 400 people, the Davos people, the Hollywood people, and the government kleptocracy people. And now she’s reaching out to the little people! From Matt Taibbi at rolling stone.com:

Hillary Clinton ran onto the playing field this week, Rock and Roll Part 2 blaring in the background, and started lying within minutes of announcing her entry into the presidential election campaign.

“There’s something wrong,” she told a crowd of Iowans, “when hedge fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 when I was driving here over the last two days.”

Oh, right, that. The infamous carried interest tax break, the one that allows private equity vampires like Mitt Romney and Stephen Schwartzman to pay a top tax rate of 15 percent while all of the rest of us (including the truckers Hillary “saw” – note she didn’t say “hung out with Bill and me over chilled shrimp at the Water Club”) pay income taxes.

The carried interest loophole is an absurd, completely unjustifiable handout to the not merely well-off but filthy rich, and it’s been law in this country for about three decades.

Raise your hand if you really think that Hillary Clinton is going to repeal the carried interest tax break.

We’ll come back to that in a minute. In the meantime, the reaction to Hillary’s campaign announcement went exactly according to script. Newspapers and news sites ever-so-slightly raised figurative eyebrows at the tone of Hillary’s announcement, remarking upon its “populist” flair.

This is no plutocrat who plans to ride to the White House upon a historically massive assload of corporate money, the papers declared, this is a candidate of the people!

“Hillary’s Return: Her Folksy, Populist Re-Entry,” proclaimed Politico. “Populist Theme, Convivial In Tone!” headlined the Los Angeles Times. “Hillary Lifts Populist Spirits,” commented The Hill, hook visibly protruding from its reportorial fish-mouth.

Having watched this campaign-reporting process from both the inside and the outside for a long time now, I knew what was coming after the initial wave of “Hillary the Populist!” stories.

In presidential politics, every time a candidate on either the left or the right veers in a populist direction – usually with immediate success, since the American populace is ready to run through a wall for anyone who makes the obvious observation that they’re being screwed by someone up above – it takes about two or three days before the “Let’s let cooler heads prevail!” editorials start trickling in.

These chin-scratching op-eds arrive on time every time, like clockwork. They declare that populism is all well and good, and of course a necessary strategy for getting elected, but the “reality” is that once in office, one has to govern.

And since the people are a stupid, angry mob, these op-eds say, and don’t know how to govern themselves, the politician will have to abandon the populism sooner or later.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/campaign-2016-hillary-clintons-fake-populism-is-a-hit-20150416#ixzz3XoTc6Ek1 

To continue reading: Hillary Clinton’s Fake Populism Is a Hit