Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (photo: ABC News)
04 June 16
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the evidence there is now too great a risk that Donald Trump would
defeat Hillary Clinton and become President with his thumb poised at the
button to detonate some of our almost 5,000 deployed nuclear weapons,
killing millions in strikes and retaliations and perhaps ending life on
earth. In my considered judgement the two now corrupt major political
parties must face the hard facts why, if possible, the Democratic
National Convention in July, in conscience and patriotism, should swing
from Clinton to Bernie Sanders, even possibly to Elizabeth Warren or
Vice President Joe Biden, as their nominee.
All of us who are even dimly watching know the
Republicans have nominated and the Democrats seem about to nominate
politicians for President each of whom are the most disrespected and
distrusted-as-dishonest such candidates in the long history of our
country. Clinton is basically tied with Trump in the polls as if they
are presently running against each other in November. The American
people now seem fenced in toward electing a President Trump, an
astounding collapse and quite possibly a death trap for the United
States and the human race.
It’s clear and obvious that Sanders as of now has a
two, even three times better chance of beating Trump than Clinton has.
It’s as plain on the noses of the faces of the Democrats’ unelected
“superdelegates.” Those misnamed convention-rigging superdelegates are
providing Clinton a net of about 500 of her unelected delegate vote
advantage beyond those delegates chosen by the voters.
As Sanders has said accurately, “If you look at all
the national polls out there, virtually all of them, if you look at all
of the state polls, we do much better against Trump than does Hillary
Clinton.” A national poll a week ago showed Clinton 3% ahead of Trump
compared to Sanders’ 15-point lead if running against him. An adviser
and pollster for President Clinton from 1994 to 2000, Douglas E. Schoen,
wrote as of June 1, “Bernie Sanders consistently runs stronger than
[Clinton] does against Mr. Trump nationally, beating him by about 10
points in a number of recent surveys.” Schoen forecasts that Clinton may
not be the Democratic nominee.
People for Clinton and/or against Trump often fall
silent knowing they weaken Clinton perhaps long-run by seeing or arguing
that she should not be the candidate because of her mounting
weaknesses. That is the kind of risk that is now upon the citizenry.
Nevertheless, navigating through this national political crisis, the
truth about them must be said and weighed. In brief here are, I believe,
seven of the unnerving weaknesses of candidate Clinton.
First, there are huge contributions to Clinton through
superPACs from undisclosed donors, and also the payoff-like “fees” big
banks and corporations free-handed Clinton, and she accepted, for giving
them speeches. That latter was money for her personally, for her own
self. For example, within a year she received $225,000 from Goldman
Sachs for each one of three speeches. Despite repeated demands from
Sanders, as well as in a New York Times editorial, she has so far flatly
refused to make the transcripts of those speeches public, keeping
secret what she said to the super-bank (at “$200,000 an hour,” Sanders
estimated).
In a January 16th debate Sanders said, “I don’t take
money from the big banks. I don’t take personal speaking fees for
Goldman Sachs.” In Austin he said to 10,000 people that Clinton has a
superPAC, as he does not, that is giving her millions of dollars from
drug companies, fossil fuel industries, and the like, with the donors
kept secret.
Every candidate says “But they won’t influence me,” Sanders
said, adding: “Very simple. Why are they giving me several million
dollars?” In a February 11th debate, Clinton accused him of smearing her
on the topic. “A low blow,” he replied. “People aren’t dumb. Why in
God’s name does Wall Street make large campaign contributions? I guess
for the fun of it. They just want to throw money around.” In a debate
April 14th he said while alongside her, “I don’t think you’re going to
stand up to the big money interests when you take their money.”
Second is the fact that in 1993 President Clinton, and
Ms. Clinton as his official and leading representative, killed national
health insurance in favor of a plan preserving private medicine that
was DOA in Congress. In this election contest, she actively and vividly
opposes single-payer national health insurance, which Sanders advocates,
despite maintaining in her mailings, for example, that she champions
“universal health care for every man, woman, and child.”
Third, in 1996 President Clinton, with his wife’s
approval, signed into law the “end-welfare-as-we-know-it” law which,
after 60 years, abolished the New Deal’s fundamental “Aid to Families
with Dependent Children” (AFDC) welfare program, turned the welfare
program for the poor over to the states, and set new time limits on such
aid. In consequence, millions of the poorest Americans have become
substantially poorer.
Clinton, fourth, has said she will, if elected, put
her husband in charge of the economy, although it was he who in 1999 and
2000 signed laws, including one repealing the New Deal law prohibiting
banks from speculating with depositors’ money and others which legalized
related banking excesses, that are generally conceded to have been
substantial causes of the Great Recession which cost millions of
Americans their jobs and homes.
Clinton, fifth, now bears with her the devastating
report of the Department of State Inspector General saying she did not
ask that agency’s OK, and if she had would have been told no, when she
arrogated federal security rules to herself and, from 2009 to 2013 as
Secretary of State, used her personal email server in her home for her
official and personal business; had refused, along with some of her
uppermost staffers, to be interviewed on this by the Inspector General;
did not comply with the Department’s policies as she said she had; and
did not for two years after leaving State turn her State records over to
the Department until she was asked for them and destroyed 30,000 of
those emails beforehand which, she said, her lawyers chose as being not
official, but personal emails. She and top staffers appear to have
interviews ahead of them by the FBI, in a criminal investigation, and by
an NGO that in its publications is verbally violent toward her,
Judicial Watch. “What If Clinton Gets Indicted?” asks the headline over
one of Karl Rove’s columns in the Wall Street Journal.
Sixth, Bill Clinton was receiving huge speaking fees
and the Clinton family foundation was receiving many large contributions
while Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State. One related complex set of
events entailing Kremlin-allied groups was followed by one of those
Kremlin-related actors obtaining title to substantial U.S. uranium ores.
Presumably Trump, already repeatedly calling Clinton “Crooked Hillary,”
has loaded up with “oppo research” in this area.
Seventh, Trump’s speeches are characterized by strong
populist themes, for instance, against trade agreements that hurt U.S.
workers, against President George W. Bush’s Iraq war, and for his
promises to provide more jobs and pay raises for workers. As John
Nichols writes in The Nation, Trump could take Democratic votes from
Clinton, as happened with Reagan. About half of AFL-CIO members are
Democrats, a third Republicans, and the rest are independent.
Sanders’ historical standing as a cultural and
political groundbreaker is self-evident. As Clinton has pointed out, he
has been the target of almost no negative ads to date. He too, as the
nominee, would face all-out oppo research, and perhaps an attempted
revival of McCarthyism against him as a Scandinavian-type democratic
socialist. Present polling patterns do not and cannot foresee our future
that now quails in our imaginations.
Here we all are at this point in the “extremely
extraordinary” presidential election of 2016, and down the American road
five months from now we all will account to ourselves and others for
the thinking we did, the decisions we reached, and the actions we took
now, when we could.
Ronnie Dugger, winner of the George Polk career
award in journalism in 2012, founded the Texas Observer and has written
biographies of Presidents Johnson and Reagan, books on Hiroshima and
universities, and many articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Atlantic,
Harper’s, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post,
and other periodicals. He has been a Sanders supporter since this
presidential campaign began.
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