What did Hillary do wrong and what's next for her?

Suedesi said:
At the risk of repeating myself
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/201...ions-trump-wins.403345/page-413#post-19235600

On the economy - the US Congress/administration are so incompetent that they are arbitrarily handing $Billions of US tax revenue away. Take Google, Apple or Amazon; when they earn international profits, those are returns on R&D that was almost exclusively conducted in the US. Yet the bureaucrats in charge, have allowed these US companies to relocate their intellectual property abroad to Ireland, Bermuda, Cayman, Luxembourg and other tax havens through arcane and non-transparent accounting moves. So basically Google's IP (initially funded by the National Science Foundation) is actually claimed by the company to reside in Bermuda, out of the reach of IRS.

One example - Apple profits booked in a foreign country, say Germany, are shifted back to Ireland where there's prolly a sweet deal of 0-1% tax rate. Then the Irish profits are shifted further onward to Bermuda, where tax rates are zero. $100mm in profits in Germany, are paid as a royalty to an Irish based subsidiary of Apple. Then Apple pays no taxes in Germany (since gross revenues are offset by royalty payments) and the $100mm in royalty are booked in Ireland. Then these profits are brought back to the Caribbean tax heavens - the Irish subsidiary pays a "royalty" to the Cayman sub and voila, $100 mm is back in the Caribbean tax free (minus a small haircut in Ireland).

Now if all of Apple's overseas subsidiaries were to be consolidated into one corporate account, and all the company's profits earned on US intellectual property were consolidated into one bottom line, these accounting maneuvers wouldn't matter. Apple's $100mm German sales would hit the US corporate account bottom line where it belongs. But in fact, the opposite is true - un-repatriated "foreign earnings" of US Companies are deferred under the tax code, so that's untaxed. Basically, American companies are sitting on more than $2 TRILLION of accumulated profits that they've booked abroad in this manner to avoid US corporate taxes.

Take Gilead for example, which owns Sofosbuvir, a drug to cure Hepatitis C. Gilead bought the drug from drug developer Pharmasett, which did all the R&D in the USA. Yet the intellectual property on the drug is claimed by Gilead to be Irish for tax purposes. So, when Gilead fleeces US govt by charging $1,000 for a drug that costs $1 to manufacture, and the money is paid by the US Govt to pay for the treatment of a US citizen in the US, Gilead has the balls to book the US profits in Ireland. You can't make this shit up.

Trump has been the only one of the remaining candidates that has talked about the issue. He's talked about lowering the corporate tax, or an amnesty that would allow that money to be brought onshore. He's talked about "bad trade deals", and spoken about in protectionist terms as well, and how he wouldn't eat another Oreo. Fine, that's what the masses understand, as opposed to drawing the fecking diagram containing 50 subsidiaries and special purpose vehicles!!!

I'm not sure what Clinton's policy on the matter is, but I'm assuming as Obama MK2, she doesn't have a clue. And Bernie is probably busy pontificating on just redistributing the wealth.

Also, while you mention regulations, Billary's close relations with Wall Stree helped stoke two financial bubbles (99-2000 and 2005-8) and the Great recession. In the 90's they pushed financial deregulation for their campaign backers that in turn let loose financial fraud, manipulation and toxic assets and eventually collapse. In the process, Billary won elections and got mighty rich.

On national security - Clinton is always on the side of intervention. Foreigners always believe that GOP are the neocons and the Dems act as doves to counterbalance the warmongering. This is not true - both parties are divided between neocon hawks and doves who don't want the US involved in unending wars. Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring American force and war adventures explains much of our current security danger.

Bill instituted an official US policy to support regime change in Iraq (see Iraq Liberation Act) which laid the foundations of the Iraq war in 2003. Of course by then, Hillary was a senator and a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq which caused thousands of lives, cost trillions of USD and caused more instability in the region than any other single decision in modern foreign policy.

As Secretary of State she was among the most militaristic and disastrous in modern US history. Let's talk about Libya and Syria.

On Libya, she's gotten flack over Benghazi, but her support in overthrowing Qaddafi has been far worse. She promoted regime change in Libya, which not only was in violation of international law but also counter to basic judgment. Libya descended into civil war and unsecured arms stashes quickly spread and fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, spawned war in Mali and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Of course, at the time she quipped on Qaddafi that "we came, we saw, he died".

In Syria she again promoted regime change, demanded that al-Assad be removed and thought this would be quick, costless and successful. Her declaration at the time was "Bashar must get out of the way" etc. Of course, no place on the planet is more fecked up today than Syria, and no place poses a greater threat to US security. 10 million Syrians are displaced, refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean and undermining the stability of Greece, Turkey and the EU. ISIS of course has moved in and used Syria as the base for worldwide terror attacks.

She's also supported NATO expansion (why?) at every turn, including Ukraine and Georgia, against all common sense. Of course, poking the Russian bear in the eye has led to counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine, so as Secretary of State she's presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia. Add that to her glowing CV.

Is it bad judgment? Does she blindly trust the CIA? Does she want to show that as a Democrat she will be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign backers? I don't know, and I don't care. Whatever the reasons, she's got an awful record and for that I don't want her to run the country.

If it takes a clown in her stead, so be it.
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Brilliant post.
 
How about the Dems go with someone like Leonardo Di Caprio in 2020?
 
Raoul said:
There's no such thing as uniting the nation, so I would propose option B: defeating the other guy.
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I have been thinking about what you said.
We really have so much in common as a people. The main difference is culture.
The people who are interested in making us see 'differences' are the media who are owned by corporations.

It serves the coporation agenda to build up these 'competitions'. They benefit. People lose.
 
Red Dreams said:
What do you seriously think he should have done.
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If true, this is very serious and he should have done a lot.

At the minimum, he should have talked to people and explained the situation. Then, set all voting places on high alert and double count all votes, removing all machines (since they had evidence of hacking) and hand count the votes, with federal funding covering all that. He should make certain that all votes are counted correctly, everywhere.

Then we can talk about retaliation. Any foreign country should know that messing with the elections is suicide.

Obama did absolutely nothing...
 
nick2004 said:
If true, this is very serious and he should have done a lot.

At the minimum, he should have talked to people and explained the situation. Then, set all voting places on high alert and double count all votes, removing all machines (since they had evidence of hacking) and hand count the votes, with federal funding covering all that. He should make certain that all votes are counted correctly, everywhere.

Then we can talk about retaliation. Any foreign country should know that messing with the elections is suicide.

Obama did absolutely nothing...
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Voting is controlled by individual states. Obama was constrained by the idea that making a meal of the reports could've destabilized Hillary's momentum or caused some sort of issues with actual voting.
 
Raoul said:
Voting is controlled by individual states. Obama was constrained by the idea that making a meal of the reports could've destabilized Hillary's momentum or caused some sort of issues with actual voting.
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Not when a foreign power is hacking the voting machine software. This is treason of the highest order.
 
Raoul said:
They didn't do that though did they.
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But that's what is implied, isn't it? What exactly is CIA and FBI saying? That Russia helped elect Trump over Hillary. How? They still haven't explained any details! What evidence do they have? Obama talks about retaliation. Retaliation for what exactly?

On the other hand, Obama said himself that in September he warned Putin to "cut it out"!!! WTF!!! To cut out what exactly??? Why didn't he explain to the public (in September!) what exactly was going on? If that wasn't anything really serious, why does he talk about it now??? Either way I don't understand what he is doing...
 
nick2004 said:
If true, this is very serious and he should have done a lot.

At the minimum, he should have talked to people and explained the situation. Then, set all voting places on high alert and double count all votes, removing all machines (since they had evidence of hacking) and hand count the votes, with federal funding covering all that. He should make certain that all votes are counted correctly, everywhere.

Then we can talk about retaliation. Any foreign country should know that messing with the elections is suicide.

Obama did absolutely nothing...
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This is something new. I understood the only problem was leaks by the Russians. Not flipping of votes.
 
Hacking the DNC, Podesta, a hybrid fake news campaign, etc.

They are not going to publicize the method of how the information was collected, as it would give away their advantage to the Russians, who would then just not communicate using the same channels in the future.
 
Raoul said:
Hacking the DNC, Podesta, a hybrid fake news campaign, etc.

They are not going to publicize the method of how the information was collected, as it would give away their advantage to the Russians, who would then just not communicate using the same channels in the future.
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What advantage? The election has finished. We lost!
 
The email hacking happened last year. Why do they discuss it now? How many months does NSA need to investigate such a serious matter?

And if we are just talking about the emails, then what did Obama ask Putin to cut it out in September? The fake news? Are we serious?
 
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nick2004 said:
I am not sure why anyone talks about the fake news at all. It's silly. It's like Trump blaming the Onion and SNL.
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Those two things are plain satire.

And I think people just need to put things in their own categories here. Most people aren't saying "fake news" or Russian hacking swung the win for Trump, or that if none of these things had happened, Hillary would've run a perfect campaign.

Fake news - it's concerning that Facebook has become a huge platform for news that's literally been made up on the spot and designed to appear real. This stuff is getting shared millions of times and if you care about a free press and an informed electorate, it's a worry. Separate it from the Clinton campaign when you think about it.

Russian hacking - we know the USA has interfered in other elections. We know it probably didn't in and of itself cause the result to swing. It's still concerning that the campaign Russia was actively shilling for has won, and the consequences are potentially damaging. And when your preferred candidate suffers because of gambits like this in future, not necessarily from Russia but other states you might not be so fond of, you will expect a bit more concern from everyone than "well, the US asked for it." Imagine, for instance, Bernie was the candidate of the Democrats this time round. Would you be so willing to be snarky about the entire country then?

Comey letter - this actually probably did enough of itself to swing the election to Trump. This does not mean Clinton's campaign was successful otherwise, it's just pointing out that without this brazenly political event happening little more than a week before the election, she'd probably be President-elect. It's legit for her campaign to get annoyed about it.
 
nick2004 said:
I am not sure why anyone talks about the fake news at all. It's silly. It's like Trump blaming the Onion and SNL.
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There's a difference between a satirical news websites though and something passing of Hilary Clinton being a lizard as real news.
 
Cheesy said:
There's a difference between a satirical news websites though and something passing of Hilary Clinton being a lizard as real news.
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No there isn't. If someone confuses the Onion with the NYT, it's his problem. We had fake news forever, it's nothing new. It's not illegal either.
 
nick2004 said:
No there isn't. If someone confuses the Onion with the NYT, it's his problem. We had fake news forever, it's nothing new. It's not illegal either.
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But no one who reads the Onion really does that, though: it's genuinely known to be satire.
 
nick2004 said:
So??? What about the National Enquirer, the Sun or other papers like that?

You can set up a website and print whatever you want. It's a free country.
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Well yes...there's nothing stopping someone from printing whatever they want, but purporting genuinely false information regarding serious news stories can have dangerous consequences. There's a reason that some of the more shite newspapers out there have had their arses kicked in for poor journalistic practice. Even outside of actual news websites, info spread online which has no basis in truth and is either propaganda or speculation can have pretty devastating consequences - see the case of Reddit and the Boston Bomber a couple of years back. That wasn't quite fake news, but it did involve false info spread online having negative consequences...and people deliberately spreading such info to further their own news agenda is a fairly dangerous thing if they gain traction.

The Sun may be a rag for the most part, but at least most of what it prints has a fairly decent basis in truth. And when they've posted something scandalous (Hillsborough the prime example), they've gotten a lot of negative coverage for it.
 
The truth is that a lot of people disliked Hillary. They would never vote for Hillary, no matter what. And this is true both for some Republicans and some Democrats (who may have voted for Obama in the past). I don't think that the "fake news", or even the "mail server" bullshit played an important role. It may have enforced some people's dislike for Hillary, but even without that, they would never vote for her. SNL did not play an important role for the same reason: people who watch SNL already have a negative opinion for Trump.

My problem is that Obama is again pointless and spineless. He accused the Russians and talked about retaliation, but he did not explain: what exactly did they do? It is still unclear! We have no idea what the Russians did! Is it about the emails only? Or did they hack the voting machines? I don't think that it takes months and months to find evidence, NSA has a lot of resources. When Obama talked to Putin in September, what was the problem? What was Putin supposed to "cut it out"? And what happened? Did Putin stop, or did he continue doing it? What was it exactly?
 
nick2004 said:
The truth is that a lot of people disliked Hillary. They would never vote for Hillary, no matter what. And this is true both for some Republicans and some Democrats (who may have voted for Obama in the past). I don't think that the "fake news", or even the "mail server" bullshit played an important role. It may have enforced some people's dislike for Hillary, but even without that, they would never vote for her. SNL did not play an important role for the same reason: people who watch SNL already have a negative opinion for Trump.

My problem is that Obama is again pointless and spineless. He accused the Russians and talked about retaliation, but he did not explain: what exactly did they do? It is still unclear! We have no idea what the Russians did! Is it about the emails only? Or did they hack the voting machines? I don't think that it takes months and months to find evidence, NSA has a lot of resources. When Obama talked to Putin in September, what was the problem? What was Putin supposed to "cut it out"? And what happened? Did Putin stop, or did he continue doing it? What was it exactly?
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It's not your job to know things like that. If everyone knew then intelligence would be compromised. I'm quite sure Obama, the CIA and the FBI know more than any of us including you what Russia did to influence the election for Trump. Either way, it's an blatant attack on democracy, whether it was the US or a poor third world country.
 
DFreshKing said:
Brilliant post.
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I'm no Clinton supporter but...

In what way is that an excellent post? He got Libya and Syria all wrong.

Ghadaffi aided Obama and Clinton in getting rid of the extremists in Libya. When it was time for them to them to help him during the insurrection they turned on him. It was all planned by the CIA.

Syria is a shit show:
It all started from citizens protesting about the lack of food and water caused by a drought.
It turned into an anti-Assad movement.
Assad started killing his own people.
The world wanted him gone including the US.
He killed some more.
There was talk of moving in and removing Assad but everyone knew going into Syria would mean a proxy war with Russia. (Hence the problem we have today)

To blame Clinton for Libya and Syria is not looking at the bigger picture AND not looking at the facts before and after those places turned into shit.
 
Good riddance to her, terrible candidate and partly to blame for the orange imbecile being president now.
 
She'll be fine. If there's one thing about that woman, she has thick skin.
 
adexkola said:
People need to stop saying this. I know false equivalency is the in thing now but she wasn't terrible by any measure. Mediocre? Insipid? Sure.
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Sorry I'm standing by this. To lose to Trump of all people you have to be an awful candidate, she couldn't galvanise anyone on the right nor left and even lost the woman's vote to a vehement misogynist...despite being a woman herself. She represents the establishment rot at the Democrat party and hopefully now they can drain their own swamp, starting with her and her cronies.
 
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