With the rigged nomination process reaching its inevitable conclusion, we are once again being manipulated with the fear tactics that make us postpone our principles for another four years and resign ourselves to “the lesser of two evils.” Yes, minor differences can make major differences in the lives of vulnerable people, say with Supreme Court nominations. But many of us have been waiting for forty five years for another progressive and idealistic youth movement to emerge, and we cannot tell them to settle and wait. Now that they have looked behind the curtain, we cannot provide cover for the power brokers anymore. Now that they have turned around and beheld the light, we cannot divert them back to the shadows cast on the cave wall by the puppet masters. We have to have long term vision, and to achieve it, to realize solutions that will finally end the cycles of fear and powerlessness and pain, we have to stop believing what the corporate media, CNN (the Clinton News Network), the sell-outs at MSNBC and the unabashed liars at Fox News, tells us. Donald Trump is scary, no question. But the deeper one looks at what they can actually get done, and what they would want to get done, the more one begins to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is in fact not “the lesser of two evils” at all, and that the Democratic Party, by nature of the plutocracy, will always be part of the problem rather than the solution. And here is why.
- Hillary Clinton is a war hawk. She supported the invasion of Iraq, and without even reading the intelligence because she wanted to appear “tough” in foreign policy to advance her own political ambitions, which is the only thing she has ever cared about. She counseled Obama to widen the war in Afghanistan, to force regime change in Libya and to be more militaristic in dealing with Iran, all allegedly against Biden’s advice, and as a result ISIS has grown and been armed, and weapons have been collaboratively smuggled from Libya to Turkey. Now she wants a no-fly zone in Syria and to be more aggressive in the Ukraine, not to mention against the Palestinians, putting us into direct conflict with Russia. Her Foundation has raked in millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, China and other “bad actors,” including anonymous ones lying in the shadows of international geopolitics. We don’t really know all of the covert alliances and abominations that go on in the world, but we can “safely” assume that she is somewhere in the middle of them. Accordingly, her tenure as Secretary of State was praised by Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney, while being criticized by Jimmy Carter for a complete absence of initiatives for peace.
- She has gotten millions of dollars herself from Wall Street and the banking, insurance, pharmaceutical, fossil fuel and educational profiteering lobbies. She claims they haven’t influenced her, but Elizabeth Warren tells us that in the nineties she had warned the then First Lady about a pending bankruptcy bill that would have been a windfall for credit card companies and a disaster for consumers. As a result, she convinced her husband to veto the bill, but then she became Senator and the money from the lobbyists started pouring in, and magically she flip-flopped, like she has on every single issue, and voted for the bill. She claims that all of the money from the fossil fuel industry has come from “the workers,” but as Secretary of State she tried to force fracking around the world, and still supports fracking, which poisons the drinking water as much as in Flint. She also refused to take a position on the Pipeline until it was politically untenable to support it. In the nineties she aided in the push to deregulation, helping her masters further, and also helping to cause the economic collapse after the Clintons left office, and then blamed it on those taking out mortgages, not the banks. She supported the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, and refuses to release the transcripts from the closed door Wall Street speeches she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for, even though no one remaining in the race has made any such speeches to release with her. And she supported every trade deal written by multinational corporations for their own profit and to the detriment of American workers. Previously, she had sat on the Board of Walmart and did nothing about the slave wages and lack of benefits of their workers, and was an attorney for Monsanto and defended their toxic agricultural and environmental practices.
- She claims to be a champion of the LGBT community, but was against same-sex marriage until the polls swung in favor. She claims to be a champion of women, but as an attorney she got the rapist of a twelve year old girl off with a slap on the wrist by putting the young girl’s sexual fantasies on trial, and then laughing about it in a subsequent interview. She savaged the courageous women who stood up to her husband’s predatory behavior. And she has always, and continues to this day, to pay women working for her less than men, and treats them like crap. She claims to be a champion of the African American community, but didn’t hesitate to play the race card not once but four times against Obama during the contentious South Carolina primary eight years ago. She built her career working for a segregationist, and praised the career of Senator Robert Byrd, much of which was spent as a Grand Dragon of the KKK. The criminal justice “reforms” she helped her husband draft have had a devastating effect on inner city minority youth, whom she once referred to as “superpredators,” and, as a footnote, she still supports capital punishment, which almost the entire civilized world has come to reject, along with private prisons and, of course, the Patriot Act. She actually traveled with her husband to witness the execution of a mentally challenged man whom he refused to pardon so that they could look “tough” on crime, again solely for the sake of personal ambition. She claims to be a champion of gun victims, but do you remember when Obama nicknamed her “Annie Oakley” for her defense of guns and coziness with the NRA? And she claims to be a champion of children, but that didn’t stop her from saying that poor children fleeing war, oppression and poverty in their native Latin American countries, largely due to American foreign policy, should be sent back to their deaths “to send a message.” She also supports the destruction of the public school system through privatization, having received lots of money from the charter school billionaires. And she helped her husband draft a welfare “reform” bill outlined by the Republicans which killed “Aid to Dependent Children” and has created abject shadow poverty, primarily for children. People support her because of her “experience.” But as Senator from New York, she authored not one piece of legislation. She doesn’t like her handiwork noticed, or her positions pinned to her.
- She is a pathological liar. Remember when she claimed she ducked sniper fire in Bosnia, claims which she embellished more and more in every speech, even when video surfaced showing her strolling the tarmac in the unbulleted sunshine greeting children? How about when she claimed at the most recent debate that she always supported the $15 minimum wage when all one had to do was replay the past debates to hear her say the opposite? How about when she claimed that Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center on 9/11, or when she claimed that all of her grandparents were immigrants, or when she claimed that much of what was on her email server was correspondence with her husband when he has made it clear that he never uses email, or when she claimed to have been a civil rights worker, or when she claimed that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary? How about when she was caught in her claim that Bernie Sanders’ Vermont was the chief supplier of guns used in crimes in New York? How about her flip-flops on everything from the environment to criminal justice, war to trade, guns to gay rights, deregulation to desegregation? Not a single genuine word comes out of her mouth, it’s all completely calculated and self-interested.
- She, her machine and the DNC have conspired to fix this nomination. There is documentation across the country of voter suppression, of covert disenfranchisements and party re-affiliations, of electoral fraud and illegal electioneering, of hidden ballots and deceitful robocalls, of closed polls and rigged machines, and of monetary and informational collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign, all to Clinton’s benefit. And then there are the superdelegates, many of whom are lobbyists for the banks, the fossil fuel industry, etc. Just read about the controversies in Nevada, Iowa and New York, among other states. And the oligarchy is taking good care of her, from the SuperPacs, including not only those that previously supported the Clinton cousins, the Bushes, and Marco Rubio, but the infamous Koch Brothers, to George Clooney’s $350,000 a plate dinner and the $100,000 a head benefit by the heir to the Rothschild fortune.
I hope you will join me in going Green and voting for Dr. Jill Stein for President. We have to build a progressive, independent and uncorrupt force to serve as an alternative to the two-party duopoly. There is no more time and there really is no other legitimate choice.