It’s not like you had to hear it from him directly, but Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday that he supported Hillary Clinton in her presidential bid. After paying Hillary $675,000 for three speeches, Mr. Blankfein’s didn’t really have to make his support for her any more obvious.
When you consider how close Hillary is to Wall Street and how eager she appears to be their champion in the White House, you wonder if she should be running as a Republican. But this year, the roles have been reversed.
The Republican nominee is the one bashing Wall Street, suggesting we should bring the troops home, and talking to our adversaries instead of going to war with them. The Democratic nominee this time is the one who appears to be Wall Street’s champion and the one threatening war against Russia, calling for no-fly zones in Syria, and flexing American military muscle around the world.
With Hillary telling us that she intends on risking war with Russia over a Syrian no-fly-zone, one would think that the progressive, anti-war wing of her party might bolt and support either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. Or, yes, even Donald Trump. Yet, we still see “liberals” like Michael Moore and Bill Maher continuing to support the pro-war candidate. How does one reconcile “progressives” supporting a Wall Street shill and a militant neocon with a long track record of foreign policy disasters on her resume?
While Trump has certainly given us enough reason to doubt how suitable he may be for the White House, he would seem to be the safer choice for those who consider themselves suspicious of Wall Street and anti-war. He seems far more less likely to get the U.S involved in a shooting war in Syria that could risk a much wider conflict with Russia. Hillary seems to be less concerned with this risk and will most likely continue her anti-Russia, Cold War era, bellicose rhetoric against them. How far she intends to go with her game of chicken with a nuclear power is something we will have to stay tuned on.
If the war and peace issue has any relevance at all among the voters in this year’s election, Trump should be able to capture a good chunk of this traditionally Democratic voting bloc. In a close election, it could swing the results just enough to keep Wall Street’s gal out of the White House.
