By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 6, 2017

Hillary Clinton’s Excuses Tour continues in the form of her new book, What Happened, set for release on September 12. Enough photos of pages with text from the book have been leaked by media outlets to get a reliable feel for what Hillary hopes to accomplish with her latest tome.

For starters, Hillary portrays herself as the mature politician who understands what can and cannot be accomplished in Washington while Senator Bernie Sanders (the wildly popular candidate who opposed her in the primary race; has survived for a quarter of a century in Congress without a scandal; and was secretly targeted for defeat by the Democratic National Committee) was irrationally promising ponies to get votes. Hillary provides a passage for how this pony-promising-strategy by Sanders derailed her message:

Bernie: I think America should get a pony.

Hillary: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony?

Bernie: Hillary thinks America doesn’t deserve a pony.

Bernie Supporters: Hillary hates ponies!

Hillary: Actually, I love ponies.

Bernie Supporters: She changed her position on ponies! #WhichHillary? #WitchHillary

Headline: “Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony”

Debate Moderator: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies?

Another technique in the book is for Hillary to wrap herself in the historical banner of the Democratic Party (sans warts) while positioning Sanders as not a Democrat at all but merely an interloper who wants to reform what the party stands for. (Given that the Democratic Party’s life force comes from fealty to Wall Street and its money, would reform really be a bad thing?)

Hillary writes:

[Bernie] “isn’t a Democrat – that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party – the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”

There is so much marketing strategy loaded into that paragraph that it has the feel of war propaganda. Maybe it is – as in setting up the battlefield for the political wars of 2020.

First, Sanders is far more aligned with the Franklin D. Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party than Hillary could ever claim to be. It was Bill Clinton’s administration that repealed one of the greatest Roosevelt era consumer protection laws ever passed by Congress: the Glass-Steagall Act that barred Wall Street’s speculating investment banks from holding deposits insured by the Federal government. The repeal of that legislation has been widely assigned the blame for the catastrophic financial collapse in the United States in 2008. Sanders wanted to restore Glass-Steagall. The Clintons, who had grown personally rich by accepting millions of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street firms, demeaned the need for restoring Glass-Steagall – the same position taken by the largest Wall Street firms.

Another strategy revealed in the above paragraph is for Hillary to attempt to perpetuate the myth that the Obama administration (ostensibly another “real” Democrat unlike Sanders) had “imposed tough new rules on Wall Street.”

Sanders had thrown a wrench into the plans of Obama to cement his legacy as a tough reformer of Wall Street’s serial crimes by repeatedly telling Sanders’ overflowing crowds that turned out for his primary stump speeches that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” Had Wall Street really been reformed when the Dodd-Frank legislation was signed into law in 2010 under Obama, the public wouldn’t have been reading about JPMorgan Chase losing $6.2 billion of depositors’ money by gambling in wild derivatives in 2012, or the Wall Street cartels’ rigging of markets in 2013 and 2015 while bragging in chat rooms of being the “The Mafia” and “The Cartel.”

Hillary damned her campaign by attempting to appease both Wall Street and Obama with the absurd public position that the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform legislation had been adequate to rein in Wall Street’s worst abuses and prevent another epic financial collapse. The public wasn’t buying it anymore than it was buying that a candidate can repeatedly take $250,000 or more to speak to a Wall Street crowd for an hour in between stints in public office and still remain loyal to the public interest.

When Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton in a CNN Town Hall during the presidential race if she had made an error in judgment in accepting $675,000 from Goldman Sachs to make three speeches, she responded: “That’s what they offered.”

Now, back on the money trail again, Clinton is absurdly asking Canadians to pay as much as $3,000 Canadian dollars ($2,454.60 U.S. dollars) to get VIP Platinum tickets to her book tour that will make stops later this year in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The VIP Platinum tickets include: “Front Row Seating, Admission for Two, Back Stage Meet and Greet with photo and signed Book.”