Elections Two Faces of Sexism

The bosses are using the election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to push sexism and divide the working class. Trump’s sexism is out in the open. Beyond his crude verbal assaults on women journalists and women in general, he created a brutally  poisoned workplace environment in his family’s real estate empire. He poisoned his office with sexist comments and sexual harassment (New York Times, 5/14). Trump has used both racism and sexism to build his racist movement. Among his favorite targets for attack are immigrant women with children born in the U.S. (CBS News, 8/19/2015).
But the most damaging sexist in this election isn’t Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton’s sexist attacks against working-class women have been less exposed by the ruling-class media, they are even more brutal.
A Sexist Since Arkansas
Contrary to the capitalists’ portrayal of Clinton as deeply caring about women and children, she has been eager to show the bosses she will do whatever it takes to keep them in power. A willingness to attack the working class is ultimately what the bosses need in their politicians. They particularly value the ones who feign compassion while they kill. Here is “democracy” under capitalism: an electoral choice between one racist, sexist mass murderer and another. This reality can’t change until the working class takes power and builds a communist society.
Clinton has been proving her worth to the bosses since her husband, Bill Clinton, was governor of Arkansas. In 1983, the Clintons blamed the problems of the state’s woefully underfunded and racist schools on a low-paid teaching force made up mostly of women. The cornerstone of their education reform was a mandated skills test for already licensed teachers, a sexist device to fail and fire large numbers of women. Many Black women teachers, in particular, were forced to leave Arkansas. The poor women left behind were essentially forced to pay for the state’s public schools. As Counterpunch (11/15/2007) noted:
The plan Mrs. Clinton came up with showcased teacher testing and funding the schools through a sales tax increase, an astoundingly regressive proposal since it imposed new costs on the poor in a very poor state while sparing any levies on big corporations. The plan went through. Arkansas’ educational ranking remained abysmal, but Hillary won national attention as a “realistic Democrat” who could make “hard” choices, like taxing welfare mothers.
Beginning in Arkansas in the 1980s, Clinton worked long and hard to gain the favor of Walmart, arguably the biggest exploiter of women in the U.S. (Today, the company’s U.S. workforce of 1.4 million includes 815,000 women, many of them paid poverty wages.) Rose Law Firm represented Walmart; Clinton spent six years on the company’s board of directors. Her tenure coincided with Walmart’s successful effort to smash a union-organizing drive, an issue where “she was largely silent” in the boardroom (New York Times, 5/20/2007).
In the 1990s, after Bill Clinton was elected president, Hillary Clinton took a lead role in promoting the administration’s sexist, racist policies. Many are familiar with Clinton’s racist fear-mongering about “super-predators” and her enthusiastic promotion of the 1994 crime bill that led directly to mass incarceration. Though the great majority of the 2 million prisoners in the U.S. are men, women have borne much of the Clintons’ attack. Nearly one of two Black women in the U.S. has a family member in prison. Between 1985 and 2007, the incarceration rate for women “increased at nearly double the rate of men”  (The Sentencing Project, 2007).
In 1996, Clinton took her role as lead sexist to a new level by helping to assure passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform. “After having supported her husband’s goal of ‘ending welfare as we know it,’ Clinton was instrumental in [building] up support….This bill…effectively ended welfare programs designed to provide real assistance to women and children in desperate need” (Global Research 8/21).
Attacking Women Across the Globe
Clinton’s sexist attacks are not limited to women workers in the U.S. As Secretary of State under Barack Obama, she was instrumental in the plan to trigger the genocidal Syrian civil war: “When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change” (Huffington Post, 2/14).
Clinton’s war in Syria has killed 500,000 people, about the same number of children starved to death in Iraq under her mentor, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Workers trying to escape the carnage of U.S. imperialism are in Clinton’s sights as well. As Obama’s Secretary of State, she engineered the 2009 coup in Honduras to install a pro-U.S. government and then insisted on the deportation of undocumented children fleeing the violence. As she callously explained in February at the Democratic Party presidential debate, “We had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children.”
Trump or Clinton, Sexism Wins in November
Voting will never end sexism. Whether Clinton or Trump wins in November, the bosses will require the new president to continue to push their sexist, racist agenda to divide the working class. It’s obvious that Trump is mobilizing a mass movement to pit white workers against Black, Latin and Muslim workers, and to demean and dismiss women along the way. Clinton has served the bosses in a less openly fascist but even more deadly fashion. While pretending to be on the workers’ side, she continues to lead the charge in the bosses’ anti-woman attacks. Many women, and younger women workers and students in particular, are rejecting her misleadership. They understand that a boss is a boss—regardless of race, religion, or gender.