One Anti Hillary Meme At a Time:
Wallmart
The left and the right have reduced Hillary Clinton to convenient set of memes. Right now I am concerned about the left and their anti-Clinton memes. But in fact, many of the anti- Clinton memes started from the right wing. I focus on memes, because online discussions are reduced to the meme. Memes eliminate discussion, frame the opposition and shut down all nuance. In fact, nuance, context, complexity is suspect, what is honored is the reduced and simplified idea. In the Walmart :” Clinton is a corporatist”
Memes are ideas that spread within a group without any questioning. The effect of the anti- Clinton meme is to create an illusory inferiority of Hillary Clinton and add to the collective illusory superiority of Bernie Sanders as a “ better progressive”, by implication, the meme spreader frames themselves and their group into more authentic progressives.
A meme leaves no room for circumstances, situations, context or discussion. It’s an absolute oversimplification. A memer recently reduced me into a meme: “white trash feminist tea bagger” — my favorite of all the names I got called recently. Of course, others come to the discussion and there I am, this chimera of all that is hated by the meme world, branded.
I will take on the memes from time to time. Why? Well, to show how even the left is prone to oversimplification and blinded self serving ignorance with a large dose of inability to understand the complexity of history, politics and the truth. But, how can that be? Only the right does that? Well, we all do it.
Most likely I will not change any minds, but it helps me to really dig into the issues and understand this primary election and how people move in groups.
One of the often repeated memes that is used as evidence that Hillary Clinton is a corporate shill is that she served on the Board of Walmart from 1986 to 1992. All her work is reduced to serving on the Board at Walmart. But what else was Hillary Clinton doing at the time and before?
Let’s look at just one example, one that is not mentioned a lot, but in fact is a big part of her work. From 1977 till 1983 Clinton served by appointment of President Carter on the Board of the Legal Services Corporation and a number of years as chair of the board.
During Rodham’s Senate confirmation hearings, she subscribed to the philosophy that LSC should seek to reform laws and regulations that it viewed as “unresponsive to the needs of the poor.”[12] Rodham was successful in getting increases in Congressional funding for LSC, stressing its usual role in providing low-income people with attorneys to assist them in commonplace legal issues and framed its funding as being neither a liberal nor a conservative cause.[13] By her third year on the LSC board, Rodham had gotten the LSC budget tripled.[1
The Legal Services Corporation was created in 1974 to provide legal assistance to those who otherwise would not be able to afford it. Then when Bill Clinton became President the funding reached it’s peak till the Republican Congress cut the funding and restricted the scope of work of the LSC. The meme does not allow any room for pointing out that this is where she was doing work. Serving on this board, increasing funding and guiding the direction of the organization. Now, why would Carter ask her to serve on the Board if he thought she was a corporatist right winger? Why is this experience and core value work not be mentioned? Well, it does not fit the corporatist meme.
Clinton served on the Walmart Board from 1986–1992. The resulting meme
Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against the labor unions seeking to represent store workers.
According to On The Issues, maybe she was silent on Labor issues, but she was not silent on other issues:
But according to accounts from other board members, Clinton was a thorn in the side of the company’s founder, Sam Walton, on the matter of promoting women, few of whom were in the ranks of managers or executives at the time. She also strongly advocated for more environmentally sound corporate practices. She made limited progress in both areas. In 2005 she returned a $5,000 contribution from Wal-Mart, citing “serious differences” with its “current” practices.
When Bernie returned the check to the Pharma contributor, it was mark of heroism, Hillary’s check return is never mentioned in 2005 ( yes she did it first). Her break with the company and that she was not sitting silently in the board room acquiescing to the corporatists is not included in the meme. Just that one out of context picture frozen in the minds: the Walmart corproatist.
If you do a little bit of digging, you will also see that the social democracies of Europe, set quotas that require women, unions and local residents to serve on corporate boards.
Yet many American companies stop after appointing a woman or two to the board without pushing toward a particular percentage, said Ilene H. Lang, a senior adviser at Catalyst, a nonprofit research firm on women in business.
In fact, Hillary Clinton serving on the Board of a major corporation with her background was groundbreaking. But, instead it is vilified. She was not silent, she was a “ thorn on the side of the company founder”. But like a modernist chef on a cooking competition, her story is reduced to the convenient meme and deconstructed for inclusion in an oversimplified narrative of convenience.
History is messy and complicated. It’s much easier for people to re-write it, leave out large portions and then conveniently reduce it to a few words that evoke negative, or positive images: “ she served on the Walmart Board”. Now that is damning you to the infinite circles of “progressive politics hell”.
To add such history and nuance when confronted by a meme, you are accused of inventing history and being ignorant. You are an apologist and a hero worshiper.
