Amy Klobuchar: ‘I Am Troubled by Having a Socialist Lead Our Ticket’
1:55
Democrat presidential hopeful and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), during an interview with CBS News, said she is “troubled” by the thought that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) could lead the Democrat Party’s ticket in November against President Donald Trump.
Klobuchar’s remarks were made during an interview with CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe on her campaign bus after an event in Keene, New Hampshire. O’Keefe pressed Klobuchar on her decision to raise her hand on the debate stage after the candidates were questioned on whether they worry about having a democratic socialist for a presidential nominee.
“The question should be why didn’t everyone else raise their hand?” Klobuchar told O’Keefe. “But they didn’t because people are looking at each other, and it may not be popular, and you’re going to anger some people, but I believe in leading and doing what you think is right, and that’s why I raised my hand because I am troubled by having a socialist lead our ticket.”
Klobuchar also said voters “are tired of the extremes in our politics and the noise and the nonsense” and claimed they want a candidate who can “bring in ideas and actually get them done.”
The Minnesota senator went on to say that it would be a “lot tougher” for freshman Democrats to keep their seats in November should Sanders be the nominee.
“The debates have been an even playing field for me,” Klobuchar told CBS News. “People can’t buy their way into being able to respond on the debate stage. They can’t have the bigger name. So, people are able to look at the candidates and think, ‘Wait a minute, who can really stand up to Donald Trump? Who has ideas that are similar to mine?'”
According to a national average from Real Clear Politics, Klobuchar sits in sixth place with 4.3 percent support from voters.
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Amy Klobuchar, endorsed by New York Times, denounced for
railroading black teenager to prison for life
3
February 2020
Amy Klobuchar is the senior US senator from Minnesota and a
candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, having received the
endorsement in January of the New
York Times (along with Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts).
The Times praised
Klobuchar as someone “with an empathy that connects to voters’ lived
experiences, especially in the middle of the country.” The newspaper has
relentlessly promoted identity politics, an obvious factor in its endorsement
of the two female candidates.
In fact,
like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and, for that matter, Warren herself,
Klobuchar personifies the manner in which gender and racial politics provides a
phony “progressive” veneer to the malicious ambitions of middle class
reactionaries of all colors, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations.
Various
polls currently place Klobuchar fifth behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete
Buttigieg, and Warren in the Democratic primary race, but she has enjoyed a
certain “surge” recently, the product of considerable promotion by the US media.
As a result, some surveys put her in third place in Iowa on the eve of that
state’s Democratic Party caucuses on Monday.
Now, a
well-researched Associated Press (AP) story suggests that Klobuchar used the
railroading of a black teenager, Myon Burrell, to prison for life as a
springboard for her political career. Klobuchar was then the prosecutor in
Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.
Various
organizations, including the Minneapolis NAACP, the Racial Justice Network,
Black Lives Matter Twin Cities, and Communities United Against Police
Brutality, have called for Klobuchar to suspend her campaign for president.
In
themselves, the allegations concerning Klobuchar are not astonishing. The
Democratic Party teems with former prosecutors, CIA agents and military
officers, enemies of the working class and the oppressed at home and abroad.
But there is something special and appropriate about the
exposure and possible downfall of the wretched Klobuchar, recently described by
the Times, in
its inimical pompous jargon of deceit and dishonesty, as “the very definition
of Midwestern charisma, grit and sticktoitiveness.”
Klobuchar
has made the death of Tyesha Edwards, an 11-year-old girl killed by a stray
bullet in 2002, and the subsequent conviction of Burrell, central to her
campaign, proving supposedly both her toughness on crime and her sensitivity to
the African American community and the problem of gun violence.
In regard
to the Edwards-Burrell case, the AP explains that it went through more than
1,000 pages of police records, court transcripts and other documents, and
interviewed dozens of inmates, witnesses, and family members.
Summing
up, the AP notes that the case relied heavily “on a teen rival of Burrell’s who
gave conflicting accounts when identifying the shooter, who was largely
obscured behind a wall 120 feet away.” With no other eyewitnesses, the story
continues, “police turned to multiple jailhouse snitches. Some have since
recanted, saying they were coached or coerced. Others were given reduced time,
raising questions about their credibility. And the lead homicide detective
offered ‘major dollars’ for names, even if it was hearsay.”
The AP
goes on: “There was no gun, fingerprints, or DNA. Alibis were never seriously
pursued. Key evidence has gone missing or was never obtained, including a
convenience store surveillance tape that Burrell and others say would have
cleared him.” Burrell, now 33, has rejected all plea deals and insisted on his
innocence.
A
co-defendant, Ike Tyson, insists he was the triggerman: “I already shot an
innocent girl,” said Tyson, serving a 45-year sentence. “Now an innocent guy—at
the time he was a kid—is locked up for something he didn’t do. So, it’s like
I’m carrying two burdens.”
To be
blunt, the conviction and jailing of Burrell was a scandalous state frame-up,
organized by the police and the prosecutors, including, centrally, Klobuchar.
Adding insult to injury, Klobuchar has since attempted to reap
political gain out of the destruction of Burrell and his family. At the Democratic
Party candidates’ debate in Houston in September, Klobuchar bragged about
finding and putting in jail “the killer of a little girl named Tyesha Edwards
who was doing her homework at her kitchen table and was shot through the
window.” Zak Cheney-Rice in New
York magazine suggested that Klobuchar in advertising
Burrell’s case “as a special victory for black safety in Minneapolis … plumbs
new depths.”
Both
Burrell’s father, Michael Toussaint, and Tyesha Edwards’ stepfather, Leonard
Winborn, see through Myon Burrell’s railroading. Toussaint expressed sympathy
for Tyesha: “She didn't deserve to die … This is a child, studying at her
table.” But he also wanted justice for his son, “a young man, just 16 years old
... convicted of a case that he didn't do.”
Explaining
why he and others were demanding that Klobuchar suspend her presidential
effort, Toussaint argued that “Amy used my son’s case” in her campaign.
Toussaint said Klobuchar wanted a political advantage.
Winborn told the Minnesota
Spokesman-Recorder: “If that man [Burrell] hasn’t done nothing,
then he doesn’t need to be in there at all … Whatever happens, I would never
want to see somebody do some time for somebody else’s wrongdoing.”
Perceptively,
Winborn also pointed to prosecutor Klobuchar’s political ambitions at the time:
“Looking at it right now, it was an elevation thing … I know all the players. I
think my family got hoodwinked.”
One publication notes that Klobuchar “is the most unapologetic
hawk of the senators in the [Democratic Party] race.” It adds: “She has voted
for all but one, or 95 percent, of the military spending bills since 2013…
Klobuchar supported the US-NATO-led regime change war in Libya in 2011, and her
public statements suggest that her main condition for the US use of military
force anywhere is that US allies also take part, as in Libya … Klobuchar
received $17,704 in ‘defense’
industry contributions for her 2018 reelection campaign.”
The
Minnesota senator is a slavish supporter of Israeli violence against the
Palestinians and an eager participant in the McCarthyite anti-Russia campaign,
being one of six Democratic senators who introduced legislation in 2017 that
would have created an independent counsel with the ability to probe potential
Russian cyber attacks on political systems and investigate efforts by Russians
to “interfere” in American elections.
The New
York Times did not endorse her despite this
reactionary record, but because of
it. This “standard bearer for the Democratic center,” lyricized the Times, whose “vision goes
beyond the incremental,” had “the best chance to enact many progressive plans.”
Given the most recent turn of events, the Times ’ observation that
Klobuchar’s “more recent legislative accomplishments are narrower but
meaningful to those affected, especially the legislation aimed at helping crime
victims,” which “is not surprising given her background as the chief prosecutor
in Minnesota’s most populous county,” is especially cynical.
The notion that Klobuchar must represent something progressive
because of her gender should be an insult to the public intelligence by now. In
April 2019, the New
Republic, one of the unpleasant voices of self-satisfied,
upper-middle class public opinion in the US, described the then-group of
Democratic female presidential candidates, including Klobuchar—who were
“already making history” and who represented “a profound shift in the political
landscape”—as “Women of Substance.”
In fact, Klobuchar is something well known and horribly insubstantial — an unscrupulous big
business politician, who, like Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party
hierarchy, would think nothing of climbing over heaps of bodies to make
her career.
Hypocritical, conventional and cruel, Klobuchar might well step
out of the pages of Main
Street, Babbitt, It Can’t Happen Here or another of the novels
of Sinclair Lewis, the Minnesota-born American author and social critic.
But in her role as ruthless and striving prosecutor, she may
most closely resemble Orville W. Mason, the district attorney in Theodore
Dreiser’s An American
Tragedy, who anticipates a murder trial in the light of the
“prominence and publicity with which his own activities in connection with this
were very likely to be laden!”
Dreiser
continues: “At once he got up, energetically stirred. If he could only catch
such a reptilian criminal, and that in the face of all the sentiment that such
a brutal murder was likely to inspire! The August convention and nominations.
The fall election.”
This is
the Democratic Party. This is contemporary American politics, including its
utterly fraudulent “identity politics” wing, which has nothing remotely
progressive about it.
Klobuchar
Received Thousands from Corporations While Introducing Legislation That
Benefitted Them
Sen. Amy Klobuchar
(D-MN) has a troubling pattern of introducing legislation favored by major
institutions in corporate America around the same they make large contributions
to her campaign.
The revelations are detailed
in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by
America’s Progressive Elite—a new book by
Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News and president of the
Government Accountability Institute.
As a senior member of the Senate
Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Klobuchar is uniquely situated
to impact the bottomline of corporate interests. Unlike her more progressive
rivals, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Klobuchar
has not been reflexively opposed to such interests. Rather, as Schweizer
details, the Minnesota Democrat has become particularly adept at using her
legislative powers not only to benefit corporate institutions, but herself as
well.
A prime example of this occurred in
May 2011 when Klobuchar introduced legislation to deter internet piracy.
Although Klobuchar was first-term senator mainly known her being “Minnesota
nice,” the bill sparked widespread controversy
The legislation’s critics alleged it
was draconian, pointing to a provision in the bill that made it a felony to
illegally stream TV shows or films off the internet. One of the most prominent
critics, the pop star Justin Bieber, even suggested that Klobuchar was the one
who deserved to be “locked up” for proposing such a strict law.
The response from the entertainment
industry, though, was exactly the opposite. Many industry executives not only
lined up behind the bill, but it seems that many had already begun favoring
Klobuchar even before its introduction.
“In the ninety days before she introduced the bill, something
unusual started happening,” Schweizer writes. “Over a one-week period in February,
seven executives from 20th Century Fox sent her donations. Three more wrote her
checks in March.”
Other entertainment industry giants quickly followed suit.
Warner Bros., which would have reaped huge benefits from the proposed
anti-piracy law, donated $20,000 through its political action committee.
Soon afterwards, no fewer than 15 of its executives donated thousands to
Klobuchar. Individuals associated with the Motion Picture Association of
America and Comcast similarly made large-scale donations in the weeks leading
up to the bill’s introduction.
“In all, the entertainment industry sent her more than $80,000,
a flow of cash she had not experienced before; all of it was collected in the
brief period before she introduced the bill,” Schweizer notes.
That troubling pattern has been on display throughout most of
Klobuchar’s tenure in the United States Senate. In 2011 and 2017, respectively,
Klobuchar’s campaign coffers saw a flood of incoming donations from Xcel
Energy, a Minnesota-based utility holding company.
The money would not have drawn much scrutiny if not for it
arriving in what appeared to be a coordinated fashion.
“At the end of September 2011, over a six-day period, no fewer
than twenty-one executives from Xcel Energy wrote campaign checks to
Klobuchar,” Schweizer writes. “Weeks earlier, Klobuchar introduced legislation
… to give a ‘renewable electricity integration’ [tax] credit to utility
companies.
If enacted, the legislation would have allowed companies like
Excel to claim thousands if not millions of dollars in federal tax credits for
producing renewable energy.
Likewise, Klobuchar’s decision to co-sponsor the Clean Energy
for America Act in May 2017, coincided with another surge of campaign donations
from Exel’s executives.
“Beginning at the end of May 2017 over a ten-day period,
twenty-eight executives from Xcel Energy sent her contributions totaling
$12,500,” Schweizer writes.
The bill, if passed, would have extensively expanded the tax
credits available to energy companies.
Klobuchar’s intermingling of legislative prowess and campaign
finance has made her a powerhouse fundraiser among Senate Democrats. In her
most recent reelection in 2018, she raised more than $17 million—thirty-eight
times the amount brought in by her Republican opponent. The astronomical sum
was made possible by Klobuchar’s strong backing from corporate America and
their special interest representatives in Washington, D.C.
“She took in donations from the CEOs of eleven of Minnesota’s
twenty-five largest corporations,” Schweizer writes. Klobuchar “has done
particularly well with law firms and lobbyists—they have donated more than $3
million to her three Senate races.”
The revelations posed in Profiles in Corruption emerge
as Kolobuchar’s 2020 campaign picks up steam, buoyed by a high-profile endorsement by The
New York Times.
In announcing its endorsement
the Times lauded
Klobuchar for her legislative accomplishments, arguing she was “most productive
senator among the Democratic field in terms of bills passed with bipartisan
support.”
As Schweizer shows, however, those accomplishments often
resulted in mutual benefit for the senator as well as the corporations donating
to her campaign.
Schweizer:
Warren, Klobuchar Have ‘Cashed in’ from Corruption
21 Jan 202023
2:10
Author Peter Schweizer on
Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends” discussed his new book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive
Elite, which offers a look into some of
the shady dealings of the United States’ political leaders.
After detailing the corruption seen
among former Vice President Joe Biden and his family, Schweizer described how
his fellow 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren
(D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) had “cashed in” from corruption.
Schweizer said there is a
“three-layer cake of corruption” with Warren.
“[Warren] was actually a government
consultant paid by the U.S. Congress in the 1990s to rewrite our bankruptcy
laws,” Schweizer outlined. “OK, that’s all fine and good, but she did the
typical Washington crony move: She cashed in. After she rewrote those
laws, what did she do? She went to the corporations who would benefit from the
law and said, ‘Hire me, and I will help you interpret the law that I myself
wrote.’ And she made millions of dollars doing that.”
He continued, “She’s also got a
daughter who set up a business. She was setting up that business while
Elizabeth Warren was head of the TARP Oversight Committee, and what ends up
happening is the daughter gets her business financed and gets advisors from the
very investment banks that Elizabeth Warren’s TARP Committee was bailing out.”
Schweizer said Klobuchar has
“mastered the art of shaking down contributors and then pushing their
legislation.”
He stated, “[Klobuchar] was a
prosecutor before she was a U.S. Senator — very selective, did not go after
people that were donors of hers, who were clearly engaged in corruption. And as
a U.S. Senator, she has mastered the art of shaking down contributors and then
pushing their legislation. There are instances where dozens of executives from
a corporation over a three-day period will give her the donation, and then
literally a few days later, she introduces legislation on their behalf.”
Amy
Klobuchar Selectively Prosecuted White-Collar Crimes, Failed to Pursue Massive
Ponzi Scheme—Despite Evidence
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
selectively enforced the law regarding financial crimes as a local prosecutor,
often to the benefit of friends and political allies.
The bombshell revelations are
detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive
Elite—a new book by Peter Schweizer, a
senior contributor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability
Institute.
Klobuchar cut a profile as a
tough-on-crime prosecutor during her tenure as the chief legal officer of
Minnesota’s most populous county in the early 2000s. Not only did she push for
locking up more juvenile offenders, but she was also a leading exponent of the
“broken windows” theory of policing.
“What I’ve heard again and again is
that no crime is a small crime and that we must enforce the law down the line,”
she wrote in a policy paper at the
time.
Left unsaid, though, is that certain
“small” crimes were more likely to warrant prosecution than others, especially
depending on one’s personal connection to Klobuchar. As Profiles in Corruption notes,
that inequitable approach was nowhere more apparent than “white-collar” crimes.
While Klobuchar aggressively pursued
small actors, like airline pilots not paying state income taxes or a home
remodeler upcharging his clients, bigger and more nefarious financial crimes
were ignored.
“But the largest financial fraud by
far in her jurisdiction involved a massive conspiracy that she never even
appeared to investigate, despite plenty of warning signs,” Schweizer writes.
“It involved the second-largest Ponzi scheme in American history to date.”
The man at the center of the crime
was Tom Petters, a Minnesota philanthropist and longtime Democrat campaign
donor. Petters, who counted among his friends not only Klobuchar, but also
former Vice President Walter Mondale, operated a series of shady investment
funds.
Between 1998 and 2008, roughly the
years spanning Klobuchar’s tenure as prosecutor, Petters raised nearly $4
billion for his hedge funds. More of than not, individuals entrusting him with
their money would never see a penny of their investment returned.
As Schweizer elaborates, there were
plenty of warning signs that something was off. Petters was consistently facing
legal troubles, either from clients he had failed to repay or from his own
improper conduct, like writing bad checks. More troubling, however, was the
fact that his business associates kept getting convicted of wrongdoing, often
by Klobuchar herself.
“In January 1999, just weeks into
her tenure, potential evidence of the Ponzi scheme began to cross her desk,”
Schweizer writes. “Officers from her office raided the home of Richard Hettler
and Ruth Kahn. They were Petters investors.”
Documents seized during the raid
reportedly implicated Petters in a “mutually beneficial and highly illegal
financial scheme.” Despite securing convictions for both Hettler and Khan,
Klobuchar seemed to make no attempt to move against Petters or “apparently even
investigate” his part in the matter.
Klobuchar’s unwillingness to look
into Petters coincided with a time their professional relationship was
flourishing.
When Klobuchar first ran for county
attorney in 1998, Petters and his associates only donated $8,500 to her
campaign. By the time she was running for the United States Senate in 2006,
Petters had emerged as one of Klobuchar’s most prolific financial backers.
During that campaign alone, the Ponzi scheme operator donated more than $120,000, earning him the
designation of being one of Klobuchar’s single largest campaign contributors.
The donations also seemed to signal
a strong personal relationship. When the FBI finally caught up to the illegal
operation and raided Petters’ office and home in 2008, he admitted on a
wire-tap recording that Klobuchar had called him in the aftermath. Even though
the confines of that conversation were never made public, the events that
followed seemed to indicate Klobuchar was sympathetic to the plight of her
longtime donor.
“Reportedly Klobuchar’s aides
suggested a close family friend, Doug Kelley … provide legal help,” Schweizer
writes. “Kelley had been a longtime friend of Klobuchar’s father, both as a
lawyer to help him with legal issues and as a mountain-climbing partner.”
Ultimately, Kelley was unable to
make much of a difference. Petters’ fate seemed to be sealed as soon as court
proceedings began, especially when law enforcement and judicial officers
expressed disbelief that he was able to operate for so long with so many red
flags.
“But, it looks to me like [Petters]
had friends in high places,” Garrett Vail, an attorney who initially worked on
case against Kuhn in 1999, told the Daily Caller. “The
only way he ran a $3 billion Ponzi scheme was [that] he had politicians in his
pocket.”
In December 2009, Petters was
convicted on 20 different counts of mail fraud, money laundering, and wire
fraud. He was sentenced to more than 50 years in prison for defrauding
investors of more than $3.7 billion.
Klobuchar, for her part, escaped the
situation relatively unscathed. The senator was reelected overwhelmingly in
2012, despite attempts by her Republican challenger to make Petters an issue.
Reelected again in 2018, Klobuchar is now vying for the Democrat presidential
nomination on a platform that relies heavily on her accomplishments in public
office.
Those accomplishments, however, only
underscore Klobuchar’s selective approach to exercising political power,
as Profiles in Corruption exposes.
Amy Klobuchar: The
favorite Democrat of Senate Republicans
Senator Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign
exemplifies the anti-working class and right-wing politics of the Democratic
Party. Her campaign platform addresses almost none of the pressing issues
confronting millions of workers and youth in the United States. She is one of a
group of candidates offering themselves as “center-left” substitutes in case
the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden should fall apart.
Like a company offering multiple products to
saturate the market, often made using the same ingredients in minutely
different proportions, she is one of many right-wing candidates fielded by the
Democratic Party who is differentiated from the rest by a slightly varied hue
of alleged progressive politics.
Klobuchar announcing her 2020 presidential
campaign in Boom Island Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 10, 2019.
(Credit: Lorie Shaull)
In some ways, Klobuchar seems a candidate
prepared in the laboratory to meet the specific requirements of the 2020
campaign: years of experience in the US Senate, check; background as a tough
law-and-order prosecutor, check; female, check; visibly younger than Biden and
Trump, check; represents a state in the Midwest, the key battleground of 2016
and likely of 2020, check. And one might add: proven defender of corporate
America and US imperialism, check, check, check.
Corporate
lawyer and defender of police
violence
Born on May 25, 1960 in Plymouth, Minnesota,
Klobuchar attended Yale University as an undergraduate. She was a member of the
Yale College Democrats and the Feminist Caucus. While still an undergraduate,
Klobuchar interned in the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, former vice
president and former Minnesota senator, who would go on to lose to Ronald
Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
After Yale, she attended the University of
Chicago Law School, graduating in 1985 and becoming a corporate lawyer. She was
a partner at the Minnesota law firms Dorsey & Whitney and Gray Plant Mooty,
specializing in telecommunications law.
In 1994, Klobuchar first ran for Hennepin County
Attorney in Minnesota but quit the race to support incumbent Michael Freeman.
After Freeman stepped aside in 1998 to run for governor, Klobuchar ran again
and won, narrowly defeating Sheryl Ramstad Hvass, making her the chief
prosecutor in the largest county in Minnesota, including the city of
Minneapolis, with a population of more than 1.5 million.
As county attorney, Klobuchar oversaw the
systematic cover-up of police murders and
violence. During her approximate tenure as
county
attorney, the city of Minneapolis paid out
$4.8
million in legal settlement fees for 122
police
misconduct incidents. Meanwhile, during
this
same period, local police and Hennepin
County
sheriffs killed 29 people.
Klobuchar did not once file criminal charges
against police for misconduct, even when they killed people. Instead, she put such
cases for decision by a grand jury, a process which was heavily criticized for
its secrecy and for having the reputation of allowing testimonies in favor of
police.
Tahisha Williams Brewer, whose 14-year-old son
was killed by Minnesota police in 2004, wrote to Klobuchar at the time, “The
grand jury is a way of hiding that the prosecutor is not giving the full
information of guilt to the grand jury. I want this process out in the open,
where everyone can observe it and make sure that it is fair to my son.”
Minneapolis police union leaders backed her
candidacy for Hennepin County Attorney in both 1998 and 2002, when the
Republican Party tacitly supported her as well, failing to field a candidate to
challenge her reelection.
A
friend to Republicans in the US Senate
In 2006, Klobuchar won election to the United
State Senate, running as a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor
Party, Minnesota’s affiliate of the Democratic Party. As in 1998, she filled a
vacancy left when a Democratic incumbent dropped out to run for governor, in
this case, multi-millionaire Mark Dayton. She was reelected easily in both 2012
and 2018.
As a senator, Klobuchar has been identified as a
“middle of the road” Democrat, that is, one who combined right-wing Democratic
Party positions with excursions into bipartisanship, boasting of her ability to
work closely with Republicans in Washington, both in the Senate itself and when
the White House was in Republican hands.
Former President George W. Bush with Klobuchar in
2007. (Credit: White House)
This has won her a certain recognition as the
2020 Democratic presidential candidate with the most support among Republican
leaders. A report on Politico.com after she announced her candidacy in February
carried the headline, “Republicans gush over Klobuchar.”
It began: “Amy Klobuchar has an unusual constituency
behind her as she launches her run for president: Senate Republicans … numerous
Republicans are raving about Klobuchar—her personality, her respect for the
other party, even her competitiveness in a general election.” The article went
on to observe, “a dozen GOP senators were so effusive in interviews this month
that some worried they might damage her candidacy.”
Conservative columnist
George Will raved that Klobuchar was “the person perhaps best equipped to send
the current president packing.” The editorial board of the Wall Street
Journal agreed, arguing that because Klobuchar “hasn’t parroted lefty
slogans … She may be the Democrat best able to beat Mr. Trump.”
Klobuchar actively promotes the anti-Russia
hysteria which the Democratic Party has promulgated since the election of
Trump. She once told ABC News, “You cannot compare any leaders in our country
to what Vladimir Putin has done. This is a man and a regime that has taken down
a passenger plane in Ukraine, killing hundreds of people … This is a regime
that, we believe—17 intelligence agencies in our own country have said—has
tried to influence our own election. I don’t think there’s any comparison.”
She backed investigating
social media websites like Facebook on the pretense they swayed the 2016 US
presidential elections in favor of Trump via Russian interference, telling
the New York Times, “We need to know if Facebook, or any entity
affiliated with or hired by Facebook, ever used any of the vast financial and
data resources available to them to retaliate against their critics, including
elected officials who were scrutinizing them.”
In June, Klobuchar blamed Russia on Twitter for
online racist attacks against presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She
tweeted, “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are
unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against
this type of vile behavior.” Such an accusation implying Russia was responsible
was made without the slightest shred of evidence and made to intentionally
confound and whip up support to her campaign among right-wing elements.
Referencing her tweet, a CNN anchorman asked her if she believed Russia was
behind the attacks, Klobuchar responded she had “no idea.”
Klobuchar’s career as a senator has received
blessings from large corporations. According
to
opensecrets.org, from 2013 to 2017, her
campaign
and PAC committee received donations from
the
likes of Facebook, Target, Comcast, Best
Buy,
Morgan Stanley, Alphabet Inc. (the owner of
Google), Amazon.com, General Motors, Ford
and
more.
For the same period, the top contributors to her
campaign and PAC committee were: Delta Air Lines at $85,314; her former law
firm Dorsey & Whitney at $65,435; and Walt Disney Co. at $64,081.
A
banal, right-wing presidential campaign
Klobuchar announced her candidacy for president
in February 2019. In words presumably prepared in advance, she declared, “On a
cold February day in Minneapolis on the mighty Mississippi River, with
thousands of friends and supporters at my side I announced that I’m running for
President of the United States. As I said that day in our nation’s heartland,
we must heal the heart of our democracy and renew our commitment to the common
good.”
Such forgettable words express the overall banality
of her presidential campaign. A reading of her presidential campaign website
says almost nothing significant. The cut and pasted stances fail to address the
growing problems and struggles of workers in the United States.
Klobuchar with former Republican Senator John
McCain and current Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. (Credit: Ernests Dinka)
But of what little is said, along with her
history as senator, should be taken as a warning. For Klobuchar, the “common
good” amounts to her nationalistic, pro-war agenda. Just two lines are devoted
to the subject of foreign politics on her campaign website, one of which states
Klobuchar “would invest in diplomacy and rebuild the State Department and
modernize our military to stay one step ahead of China and Russia, including
with serious investments in cybersecurity.”
But this says plenty. Klobuchar’s call to
“modernize” a military whose budget
already
exceeds the next eight countries combined,
would
mean further attacks on the working class by
way
of slashing support programs to funnel
more
money into the military. To stay “one step
ahead of China and Russia,” both nuclear-armed countries, implies Klobuchar
fully supports the continued amassing and building of nuclear weapons.
Klobuchar’s voting record for military budgets is
a consistent yes. She repeatedly voted in favor of continued funding for both
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, she supported the bloody intervention in
Libya which left the country in ruins. This year, she supported the attempted coup
in Venezuela by the Trump administration.
Recently, she voted against the new federal
fiscal budget beginning October 1 that includes a record $738 billion for the
military. The hawkish Klobuchar has not been reformed. Her “no” vote was made
knowing full well the budget would pass regardless. It was a cynical attempt to
distance herself from the militaristic policies of the Trump administration.
Klobuchar espouses the nationalistic politics of
the Democratic Party and has fervently attacked China in an attempt to blame
Chinese workers for the deepening impoverishment affecting American workers. In
a 2017 letter to Trump, Klobuchar stated, “You have consistently reaffirmed
your commitment to supporting steelworker jobs, and Chinese steel dumping is a
major contributor to American manufacturing job loss.”
On domestic issues, Klobuchar has been careful to
present herself as a “moderate,” opposed to the supposed extremes represented
by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—who themselves are limited entirely to the
framework of the capitalist profit system.
As a Washington
Post report in May put it, “The senator has been willing to say no to
some of the purity tests being pushed by far-left activists. Klobuchar has
expressed skepticism of packing the Supreme Court, for example, and she has
said that some of her rivals who are promising free university tuition and
college-debt forgiveness are not being straight with voters. On health care,
Klobuchar endorses a public option but stops short of Medicare-for-all.”
On immigration, her campaign website
states,
“Amy supports a comprehensive immigration
reform bill that includes the DREAM Act,
border
security and an accountable pathway to
earned
citizenship.”
Klobuchar surrounded by the Minnesota National
Guard in Iraq. (Credit: Office of Amy Klobuchar)
With this generic right-wing profile, and her
bland campaign, it is not a surprise that Klobuchar is running ninth or tenth
in the polls and other measures of support for the Democratic presidential
nomination. She participated in the first two debates without notable impact,
and has met the slightly higher requirements to qualify for the third debate
next month in Houston.
Minnesota is the state which supplied much of the
leadership of the Democratic Party in the second half of the 20th century,
including three senators who were major presidential candidates, two of them
becoming vice president—Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale—and the third
playing a key role in ousting a sitting president—Eugene McCarthy.
Humphrey, McCarthy and Mondale all represented
the Democratic Party during the period when it was still associated with a
program of limited social reform and improved living standards for working
people, although Mondale, as vice president under Jimmy Carter, was part of a
Democratic administration that broke with that tradition, inaugurating the
steady shift to the right by the Democrats over the next four decades.
Some 35 years after Mondale went down to a
landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan, the current Minnesotan seeking
the Democratic presidential nomination, Amy Klobuchar, is closer politically to
Reagan than to the liberal politics of the Minnesota Democratic Party in its
heyday.
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