Hillary Clinton

Hardly a day goes by without much of the mainstream media concentrating on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections. This includes any news about the various investigations into the question, much blowhard opinionating by talking heads, charges that Russia sought to collude with Donald Trump鈥檚 campaign, and more.

It is probably true that Russia would seek to influence US politics to the extent it thought it could. But to keep a sense of proportion, we should recall that the world鈥檚 foremost 鈥渕eddler鈥 in other people鈥檚 politics and elections is Washington itself.

In a New York Times op-ed in June titled 鈥淗ow Democrats Can Stop Losing鈥, Bernie Sanders slammed the Democratic Party.

鈥淚n 2016 the Democratic Party lost the presidency to possibly the least popular candidate in American history,鈥 he wrote. 鈥淚n recent years, Democrats have also lost the Senate and House to right-wing Republicans whose extremist agenda is far removed from where most Americans are politically.

When Donald Trump is sworn in as president on January 20, he will take over the running of the US intelligence agencies 鈥 the CIA, FBI, NSA etc 鈥 that have brought charges to discredit the outcome of his election.

The Electoral College has rubberstamped Trump鈥檚 election and Congress has ratified it. The storm over allegations of Russian聽interference in last year鈥檚 elections will pass as The Leader takes charge and cleans house in these agencies.

But there are some things that should be noted about this brouhaha.

The feminist movement has been sent into a spin following the election of Donald 鈥淕rab her by the pussy鈥 Trump in the US. While the consensus is that the election of Trump is a disaster for women, the debates around the would-be benefits of Hillary Clinton remain fierce.

An orange baboon obsessed with the size of his hands.

If you want a bright side to the US elections, consider Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaker who lost a huge chunk of cash after paying out early to those who put money on a Clinton win.聽

Enjoying the misfortune of a representative of the bloodsucking gambling industry may be grasping at straws, but as we await the race between a nuclear holocaust and climate change-induced eco-holocaust, we might as well take what we can get. As for Paddy Power, they can at least make their money back offering decent odds on the nuclear option.

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer-songwriter who died just two days after Donald Trump seized the White House, seemed to predict this moment.

In his dystopian song , from the 1992 album of the same name, Cohen sang: 鈥淚've seen the future, brother:听it is murder.鈥

鈥淭hings are gonna slide,鈥 the famously dark singer suggested, 鈥渟lide in all directions ... the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold.鈥

This year鈥檚 presidential election is the first in 50 years to take place without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act.

On November 5, the U.S. Supreme Court restored a Republican-supported law in Arizona banning political campaigners from collecting absentee ballots filled out by voters. In New Jersey, a federal judge decided against the Democratic National Committee in a complaint it brought against the Republican National Committee, ruling that the RNC鈥檚 poll monitoring and ballot security activities did not violate a legal settlement.

One thing is crystal clear: Hillary Clinton is a failure. And so is the neoliberal establishment.

Even if Clinton had聽narrowly managedto defeat Donald Trump, she would still have lost. Her failure is not individual, however, but a failure of Clintonism, the Democratic Party, and decades of failed economic policies.

A Trump rally.

From US SocialistWorker.org :听

Why? How? Those questions are dominating the mainstream media as they take stock of Donald Trump's victory in the presidential race.

They are dominating us at SocialistWorker.org, and no doubt our readers, too. It is hard to come to terms with the upside-down results we are seeing. But here are some thoughts.

Guardian journalist and self-proclaimed 鈥渟ocialist feminist鈥 Van Badham鈥檚 latest article is entitled .

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade - behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, "Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!"