Clinton doesn’t have my vote yet, but I want to support her. Here’s how she can close the deal.
You probably have already decided whom you will support in the presidential primary, and that's fine. If voting is the expression of your beliefs and aspirations, a statement of your desires and fears for our society, reflecting a balance between resolve and compromise, then the sum of all those passions is a nuanced thing personal to you. I respect that. I'm not trying to change your vote.
Instead, this post is about how you can change my vote.
I should preface by saying I'm not young enough to be a bro, but I have revolved around the sun enough times to be revolutionary. I'm a radical in the sense that I like to go ad radices – to the root of things. In my heart, I'm a purist. I have a list of more than a hundred policy topics on which I want my president to take firm positions for the side that is unambiguously good. However, I know that other people have different ideas about what is good, and there is almost always ambiguity.
Since the government is not answerable to my whims and wishes, I have drawn lines through most of the items on my purity list. Those items included enacting single-payer, subsidizing university education, prosecuting war criminals, overhauling police and corrections departments, abolishing the death penalty, legislating gender and transgender equality, ending drug prohibition, restructuring our institutions to promote true diversity and to discourage privilege, etc. etc. I think we can and should do those things, but I also recognize that there will have to be a lot of negotiation. This post is not about purity.
The items I kept on my list are those of necessity. They are the things I believe we must do now because there is no other choice and there is no more time for delay. There are three:
1) Stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere.
2) Change the predatory, speculative nature of our financial system.
3) From giant corporations and billionaires, take back our ability to choose our nation's future and our planet's future.
The candidate I support in the primary and in the general election will be one who understands the necessity and urgency of those things and who demonstrates the leadership that will guide us in accomplishing those things. Bernie Sanders has already convinced me that he shares those priorities and that he can be a populist leader, but he is not currently the front runner for the nomination.
If Hillary Clinton is the eventual Democratic nominee, my vote will be there for her, along with my support, my ability to canvass and mobilize voters, and my willingness to help her campaign in any way possible, if...
...if she convinces me that those three necessary items will be her top priorities as president and that she will wrestle Congress to the mat to accomplish them;
...if she transforms into the leader who can mobilize the rest of us (i.e., the America people) in pushing for structural solutions to the crises we face.
I'm not going to vote for Clinton simply because she offers something that's "better than nothing" or "better than the Republican." I need to see that she is serious about addressing those three problems. I need to see her lead. I need to know that she can herd beltway insiders and corporate chieftains toward solutions, confronting them when necessary, and that she can lead the public in an all-out push to make Congress cooperate.
But Clinton's platform already includes plans. Aren't they enough?
No, on the three essential topics I mentioned, Clinton's plans are not even close to being enough. It's not just that they don't go as far as I would like. It's that they don't go nearly far enough to solve the problems.
Incrementalism is a fine approach to governance during normal times, in response to normal problems. We don't live in normal times, and the crises we face are extraordinary. If we can't address the "big three" problems through leadership and good governance during the next few years, I am convinced that the only alternative will be to address them through protest, disobedience, and disruptive means. I very much do not want society to go in that direction. I'm conservative that way.
Climate change – how urgent is it?
Our planet's intricate climate systems may be on the verge of crossing beyond crucial tipping points that would accelerate global warming. If/when that happens, you will see failures of agriculture across entire regions, mass migrations away from coastal areas, increases in vector-borne diseases, and eventually increases in warfare and the collapse of national governments as different groups compete for basic resources, food, and water. Every one of those events carries a death toll. That means we are living in an era when we can look at actions such as buying a new SUV, or flying to London, and measure their effects in terms of the ecological damage that will be done and the number of lives that will be lost 40 or 80 years hence.
Meanwhile, the only thing we have done in recent years that actually succeeded in reducing our civilization's carbon emissions temporarily was to crash the global economy in 2009. Overall, the factors that are causing climate change are increasing, not decreasing, and the United States is large contributor to the problem because it burns a lot of fossil fuel and extracts a lot of it from the ground. The stuff needs to stay in the ground.
What's our time horizon for finding a solution, if carbon emissions continue following the worst-case projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as they have been doing? How many years can we continue burning fossil fuels to power a civilization that has grown beyond ecological boundaries, before we finally ensure our own extinction. I don't know. You don't know. Climate scientists don't know, but some of them are terrified that we might already have passed the point of no return.
In other words, the situation is dire, and we don't even have the ability to understand how dire it is.
What's in Clinton's plan? It's puppies and rainbows -- not because it promises too much, but because it pretends to solve the problem while proposing far too little.
- The Clinton plan (pdf) calls for installing half a billion new solar panels... which sounds impressive until you realize it amounts to fewer than two new solar panels for each American during the next eight years. We must do better than that.
- The Clinton plan calls for ensuring that fossil fuel production is made "safe and responsible." If your home is near a railroad or a pipeline, you will be able to sleep well knowing that you are less likely to be blown up in a tanker car explosion, and that your children might grow up to see the consequences of that train full of carbon being burned in the proper way.
- The Clinton plan calls for grants and incentives that would encourage states to move ahead faster with renewable energy plans. It says we will address the problem through innovation and that we will create jobs, but those statements reflect a framework that badly understates the magnitude of the problem and the required response. If George W. Bush had called for market-based incentives for states and industry to develop tailored plans for preventing terrorism after 2001, he would have been ridiculed and replaced. The climate change problem is thousands of times more dangerous than terrorism (that's an understatement), but the Clinton plan suggests that we will solve it by coaxing the free market toward innovations and investments. That is fantasy, like saying we can change the course of a supertanker by nudging it with a rowboat.
At this point, I don't believe that having a plan to address climate change is nearly as important as having the courage and resolve to address it. If we start by laying out a plan, then we also start with assumptions about the limits of what we can achieve with an obstructionist Congress and an uninvolved public. This is wholly evident in Clinton's climate change document, which offers to shift and adjust things to the extent that its authors believe is possible within political constraints.
Instead of starting with the plan, we need to start by fixing our eyes on the goal. In the face of an existential threat, Winston Churchill did not propose to respond to aggression through innovations and public-private partnerships. He said this:
"We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."
It's no exaggeration that our goal now is survival, and that there is a plausible chance we will fail within the next 100 years. From the perspective of systems and physics, we may already have failed, but we don't know that. We must stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. We need to accomplish that quickly, and I would suggest that we need to accomplish it within the next ten years. That is an almost impossible task, but it is a necessary one.
A solution to climate change will almost certainly have to include:
- shutting down the oil, coal and natural gas industry (not expanding it, as has happened during Clinton's and Obama's leadership)
- redesigning our urban environments, our work culture, and our retail systems to require less travel and transport
- changing our society's lifestyle expectations, shrinking the number of personal vehicles to "few," reducing the number of airplane flights to "almost none," turning our furnaces down to "#$*@% cold" and our air conditioners to "off."
- building renewable power infrastructure in our own country and in all the developing countries for free, out of enlightened self-interest.
I will support Clinton's campaign to be president if she convinces me she is the leader who can guide us through the enormous social and economic transformations we are going to have to undertake. So far, she has not even acknowledged the magnitude of the problem, much less shown she can lead our nation toward solving it. Nevertheless, my support is waiting there for her to claim, if she will lead on this.
If you are one of Clinton's supporters, I am pleading with you to convince her that she needs to lead on this. Get her to become the candidate I can vote for.
The financial system – what's really the problem?
Yes, shadow banking -- unregulated institutions and services for transferring and assigning wealth -- is part of the problem, but it's not the root. I would suggest that the deeper problem is in the way our financial system has been streamlined to encourage speculation and rent-taking over investment.
Speculation is what traders do. It involves buying the temporary ownership of something based purely on the expectation that someone else will soon believe the thing has a greater value than what you paid for it. Then you sell it to them.
You don't do anything to improve the thing you're selling. You don't make it more functional or better suited to customer demand. You just take ownership of the thing and then turn it over again, after having "tricked" the market into undervaluing it when you bought it and/or overvaluing it when you sold it.
In another way, speculation is what corporate managers do when they sacrifice the assets and growth potential of their company in order to meet quarterly profit expectations. Speculation is almost the opposite of investment.
Rent-taking is what many banks do when they treat customers as assets from which they can extract money rather than as people and businesses whose wealth they can help grow.
The problem with speculation, as I understand it, is that it often leads to market bubbles, such as the one that currently encompasses the stock market. It can also lead to bubbles and artificial scarcity in real estate, raw materials, food, and even water. It can lead to artificial and unnecessary poverty. Solving the problem is urgent, because in the coming time of greater resource scarcity (see climate change), speculation and misallocation of resources threaten to cause even greater human misery and environmental destruction.
Right now, our financial system is streamlined to encourage liquidity of wealth. Money can flow into and out of stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities almost without hindrance, and wealth that has no ties also has no loyalty. I am suggesting that too much liquidity discourages real investment and makes people less interested in directing their wealth toward addressing real, local needs.
I'm sure there are others here at Daily Kos who can offer a deeper and more correct description of the structural problems of our financial system. I'm barely an economist. Mainly I'm just a trader and an analyst of markets. As a trader, I stand to lose some if Bernie Sanders is successful in instituting a transaction tax on speculative trading. Even so, I think it is a good idea. Speculation needs to take a back seat to investment.
Sanders has been clear about the need to make financial institutions answerable to larger social priorities. If Clinton is the nominee, what will she do to lead us toward that goal? I want to know, so that I can vote for her. So far, I do not believe she has proposed any reforms that go to the real problem.
Taking control back from corporations and billionaires
Clinton has called for overturning the Citizens United decision. I applaud that! Most of us understand that we need to get the corrupting influence of money out of government, and her leadership on that topic is important.
Beyond political spending and lobbying, there are other ways that wealthy and corporate powers threaten to control our governance. I want to know that she is unafraid to confront those things too.
For example, the current incarnation of the TPP may (probably does) force signatory governments to cede control of many aspects of environmental protection, workplace regulation, and consumer safety to corporate-dominated arbitration panels. It might (probably would) further encourage the export of jobs because someone else, somewhere else will always be available to do the work for less pay.
I understand why business leaders want to institutionalize free trade. It makes it easier for them to unchain their assets from any particular nation, and it makes their labor pool and their consumer base in a sense more liquid. I also understand why people like Clinton, who think of themselves as geostrategic planners, view additional trade institutions as a way to squeeze other potential superpowers and empire-builders out of certain regions of the world.
To those in our society who want to maintain empires corporate or hegemonic, I believe we should say no. Going forward, sustainable economies will probably be local economies, and local economies are what we should encourage through policy.
Solving the problem is urgent, because if we give away our governance to institutions dominated by private wealth now, we will have a hellishly difficult time getting our government back.
Clinton needs to acknowledge this. She needs to be a solid advocate for local over trans-national. Her record does not suggest that she will do that, but I hope she will. I would like to see her repudiate the TPP as something that was built on a bad foundation and call for it to be scrapped. I would like her to propose we start over in developing trade agreements, with sustainability and justice as our guides. I could vote for someone who did that.
Questions, comments, and rotten tomatoes
This post probably will draw a range of comments about whether the things I identified as critical problems are really as bad as I say they are. Those comments might be helpful in terms of understanding our situation, but they also would distract from the main point of the whole post. The main point is that Clinton's goals, positions and leadership approach need to change substantially.
This post probably also will draw some responses encouraging me to vote for a candidate (Clinton) who offers solutions that are better than nothing. However, I do not believe that halfway (quarter-way, eighth-way, thousandth-way) solutions to the problems mentioned here are better than nothing. Tepid approaches that pretend to be solutions will encourage complacency, causing people to feel that "something is being done" when really very little is being done. As I wrote earlier, if we do not solve these problems soon through regular methods of governance, then numbers will grow among those who see no alternative but to address the problems through disruptive means, and I don't like that idea at all.
I am not refusing to vote for Clinton in the general election, but I also am not willing to "hold my nose" to vote for her if she does not step up to become a real, populist leader in the areas I described. As a progressive who cares about the Democratic party, democracy, our nation, our species and our planet, I very much want Clinton to come over to the side of necessity on these issues and earn my vote. If she does that, I will devote every ounce of my energy toward getting her elected.
(I'm not planning on sitting out the election. I will canvass and vote for local and down-ticket Democrats, as long as they aren't trying to push legislation for the fossil fuel industry.)
If you are a Clinton supporter, I hope you will encourage her to become the populist leader who will push for real solutions. Clinton's transformation would make the party stronger, and it would give our democracy and our civilization a better chance at survival. On the other hand, if she will not get serious about solving the big three problems, and if she cannot transform her leadership style, then she is not the leader we need for the challenges ahead.
One last note... if you choose to enter comments below, please be polite to your fellow kossacks. Don't insult the candidates or each other. If you are not polite, I will single you out in comments and ask you to be polite.