To my friends who have asked, “Why Not Hillary?”
Why not, at last, be led by a true champion of women, revered by female activists around the world, super smart and savvy, with in-depth knowledge and the gumption to stand up to adversaries? And why, then, support an old white guy from a tiny state?
There are quite a lot of reasons- too many to discuss each in detail, but I will start with the most basic. If she is the nominee, I will vote for her, but with little hope that her election will make it possible to reverse the immense damage being done to the poor, the middle class, the environment, and to the vestiges of our proud experiment with democracy. To paraphrase Robert Reich, Hillary is the best candidate for the system as it is, but Bernie is the only candidate for the serious change that is needed to keep us from going over the cliff.
Economists and historians have been sounding the alarm for a number of years about a new “Gilded Age”. The levels of income inequality that, in their view, precipitated the Great Depression are even worse now. It's not that it is “unfair” for some to have immense wealth, it's that the flow of money to pay for work, the kind of everyday work that actually builds and maintains the institutions of society and civilisation, is blocked. We need our money to function as a medium of exchange, flowing to work that benefits society, and not just as a “trophy” to validate the status of a few. The only person saying anything close to this is Bernie Sanders. It makes me think of the classic tale “The Emperer’s New Clothes”.
Hillary began her campaign saying she wanted to be the champion of the middle class, but her actions as a senator have put the lie to that statement. After recognizing, while First Lady, the disastrous effects of a law to repeal protection of consumers from predatory lenders, she supported and voted for that same law when, as Senator from New York, she chose to represent the interests of Wall Street, a part of her constituency, over those of the middle class. http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/05/clips-elizabeth-warren-takes-on-hillary-clinton-and-alan-greenspan/
This is why the “fuss” over her speeches to Goldman Sachs matters. Whether she releases any transcripts or not, we know from an insider's report that the speeches contained nothing substantive, just a $675,000 pat on the head of the brokerage firm- at a time when the unbridled greed of many on Wall Street has led them to make riskier and riskier “bets” on, and against, the wealth of the ordinary investor. Check out Micheal Lewis' “The Big Short” and “Liar's Poker”, if you don't think that much of Wall Street is a giant casino where the players equate the state of their masculinity with their ability to make huge commissions for their firms (the term at Salomon Bros., where he worked for a few years, was “Big Swinging Dick”). So for Hillary to drop in and basically say, “I've got your back,” is frankly, unacceptable. As is “Cut it out” as a response to risky behavior.
I could go on- her ties to the shameful private prison system, her response to the young BLM activist who paid $500 entry to ask her for a real answer about having called young blacks “super predators” (at the time of her husband's sponsorship of laws that put so many young black men in prison for offenses that whites could skate by with), her lack of recognition of the damage caused by Bill Clinton's “triangulation” policy, that gave him some political victories while allowing the rightwing powermongers to solidify their grip on our poitical system... Not to mention the DNCC bias question and the patent “dirty tricks” played by her campaign workers in Nevada- for example: http://www.examiner.com/article/ethical-complaint-filed-against-hillary-clinton-s-campaign-lawyer in South Carolina: http://m.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/26/1491618/-Twitter-Exec-Censors-WhichHillary-in-advance-of-Sunday-Fundraiser-Key-Primaries and here in Michigan. I volunteer at a campaign office here, and yesterday a gentleman came by to contribute $60 because he had received a “push poll” from her campaign. I share his indignation.
The last point is that obviously a Donald Trump presidency would be a complete disaster, and as many polls are showing, the lack of trust in Hillary generated by all of the above has convinced me that she will not have strong enough support among voters to ensure a democratic presidency. Bernie Sanders, for now, does, despite his loss in South Carolina. When people learn who Bernie is, even more than what he stands for, they support him. He incites trust, while Hillary, sadly, incites distrust. The sooner the Democratic Establishment wakes up to the near-impossibility of Hillary's winning, the better for all of us.
Nobody expects Bernie to be able to enact all of his platform upon taking office. It will take at least the first two years to change the balance of Congress, but if (and only if) WE THE PEOPLE support him to get big money out of politics and break up the giant banks http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-kashkari-banks-federal-reserve-20160216-story.html we will begin to rebuild an America that works for everybody.