In An Alternative Universe, Where Hillary Won

Supporters of Hillary Clinton are understandably devastated by the election results. So are those of us to her left, who voted for Dr. Jill Stein or who chose to observe the voter boycott. But it’s important to consider what today would feel like if Donald Trump had lost and Hillary Clinton had won.

The mainstream media and many Americans would be patting themselves on the back. First woman president! And we held off Trump the fascist! USA! USA!

Which would not have been a good thing.

A Hillary Clinton victory would have told American politicians that it’s OK to sell influence to transnational corporations for millions of dollars, transform a nominal foundation into a money laundry that finance is your daughter’s wedding, endorse NSA spying on ordinary Americans, back “free trade” agreements that put millions of people out of work in order to line the pockets of the super wealthy, start wars for no reason whatsoever and provoke possible wars with adversaries like Russia, endorse CIA torture, all while failing to stand up for the interests of the poor and downtrodden whose party you claim to represent. She was a disgusting person and she deserved to lose.

It would have told Trump’s supporters that their interests don’t matter. Does anyone seriously doubt that Hillary Clinton would sign more free trade deals? Encourage more globalization? Knock down more borders?

There are many problems with Trump, which I have documented in my book, cartoons, and columns. And I will continue to do so, obviously. As we look with a gimlet eye into the future, however, at a time that feels like Germany in 1933, it’s important to note that the alternative wasn’t much better.

At least Donald Trump offers clarity: United States is a vicious, thuggish empire. Many of its citizens are breathtakingly ignorant and uneducated and contemptuous of those who are intelligent and make an effort to inform themselves. Many of its citizens are overtly or covertly racist.

And yes, sexism is still a huge problem. And yes, sexism is definitely part of the reason that Hillary Clinton is not president-elect today.

Any system that is impervious to internal reform is doomed to external attack and, eventually, ruin. Ross Perot, a far more reasonable man than Trump, was rejected by the system. As was Howard Dean. And Bernie Sanders. Most Trumpists would have preferred one of those.

For whatever it’s worth, Donald Trump exposes the United States for the monster that most people around the world already know it to be. Make America great again? We’ve always been assholes. Now, with an asshole in the White House, what we are is super clear. Which gives us the ability to get to work in order to clean up our rancid political culture.

EXCLUSIVE: Proof That Jill Stein Was Not a “Spoiler”

Considering that corporate right-wing Democrats still blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s 2000 “loss” to George W. Bush (scare quotes due to the fact that newspaper recounts show that Gore actually won the state of Florida), it comes as little surprise to hear than blaming Green Party candidate Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s loss yesterday to Donald Trump.

Do a little arithmetic, however, and that line of argument is quickly exposed as bullshit.

Let’s assume, although it really isn’t true, that every Jill Stein voter would have voted for Hillary Clinton had Jill Stein not been on the ballot. In other words, let’s assume a total Jill Stein as spoiler narrative. (Actually, many of her voters might not have voted at all had she not been on the ballot.)

Here I’m going to reassign all of Stein’s votes to Clinton. Let’s see what happens in the key swing states, where Trump won and Stein was on the ballot) that could have possibly changed the results of the election in Clinton’s favor:

Florida (29 electoral votes)
Trump 4,603,897 votes
Clinton 4,482,940
Stein 63,953
Clinton + Stein = 4,546,893
Result: NO CHANGE

Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes)
Trump 2,912,351 votes
Clinton 2,844,339
Stein 48,998
Clinton + Stein = 2,893,337
Result: NO CHANGE

Ohio (18 electoral votes)
Trump 2,771,984 votes
Clinton 2,317,001
Stein 44,310
Clinton + Stein = 2,361,311
Result: NO CHANGE

Iowa (6 electoral votes)
Trump 798,302 votes
Clinton 652,437
Stein 11,180
Clinton + Stein = 663,617
Result: Result: NO CHANGE

Michigan (16 electoral votes)
Trump 2,275,770 votes
Clinton 2,261,153
Stein 51,420
Clinton + Stein = 2,312,573
Result: CLINTON + 16 = 244 electoral votes (270 needed to win)

Wisconsin (10 electoral votes)
Trump 1,409,282 votes
Clinton 1,381,892
Stein 30,981
Clinton + Stein = 1,412,873
Result: CLINTON + 10 = 254 electoral votes (270 needed to win)

One important note: some ballots are still being counted so these numbers were calculated using the latest Google results at 12 noon Eastern standard time today. If these numbers hold up, however, it’s clear that any argument that accuses Jill Stein of acting as a spoiler in this election is baseless.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Here Comes the Rise of the Anti-Trump Left

http://www.marksmanstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ncsu-peace-protest.jpg            Let me get this out of the way first: I’m irritated at all the media people repeating that “nobody” saw Donald Trump’s “upset” win coming. I saw it coming a million miles away. Here, let me touch myself…am I someone? Yep, I still exist. Is it really possible that I’m the only pundit in America who grew up in the Rust Belt and goes home to visit?

Of course the corporate media morons didn’t see this coming. They didn’t see looming disaster in the invasion of Iraq. During the primaries, they ignored the polls that proved Bernie Sanders was a better candidate than Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. It certainly never occurred to the corporate media morons that reducing tens of millions of middle-class workers to poverty, in order to line the pockets of globalization-besotted elites, might turn them into tens of millions of angry voters.

The bigger the news outlet where these mainstream political hacks work, the more money they make, the more journalism prizes they win, the less these idiots see anything coming (c.f., Ross Douthat, New York Times, March 8, 2016: “Donald Trump will not be the Republican nominee”).

Well, here’s something else they don’t see coming: the rise of a new American Left energized and united by its opposition to Donald Trump and his policies, one whose size and militancy recalls the glory days of the 1960s.

There’s something happening here.

Well, there soon will be.

As I wrote in my 2010 book The Anti-American Manifesto, the United States does not have a Left — an organization or movement dedicated to the radical overthrow of the existing political and economic order. As Chris Hedges has eloquently described, this country has even lost its bourgeois 20th century liberal class.

Leftists and liberals are part of the mainstream political conversation in most developed countries. Here, however, a tacit ongoing conspiracy between media gatekeepers and corporate Democratic and Republican political leaders has marginalized the roughly 35% of Americans who oppose capitalism and militarism. Think about it: when’s the last time you saw someone completely opposed to military action speaking on cable television news? Ever heard of a communist or socialist hired to write for a newspaper or magazine?

The silencing of the American Left, brutal and relentless since the early 1970s, has impoverished our political culture and deprived the poor and oppressed of the help to which they are entitled by birthright. But that’s about to come to an end.

The devastating defeat of Hillary Clinton, the ultimate candidate of the neo-conservative Democratic center-right, has discredited her patrons, the pro-globalization elites. The election of Donald Trump sets the stage for a civil war within the party in which its liberal progressive wing is likely to emerge victorious, dominating electoral politics within the mainstream left for the foreseeable future. The Clintons, Obama, the Democratic Leadership Council types have had it their way for too long. They’ve lost. Now they need to shut up and go away.

Meanwhile, out in the streets where real political change can happen, I expect to see an anti-Trump resistance incorporating anarchists, veterans of the Occupy Wall Street movement, communists and socialists, radicalized left-wing Democrats, old hippies from the 1960s, Black Lives Matter activists, pro-immigrant people, work together and individually to oppose the radical right policies that we are going to see flying out of Washington over the next few years.

Out on the streets, Trump’s repressive tone will prompt brutal police tactics to which nonviolence will no longer be seen as the only acceptable counteraction. The “peace police” of the wimpy protests of the 1990s and 2000s will go extinct. Nonviolence will retake its rightful place as a noble and desirable tactic, but no longer the exclusive approach to taking on repressive government goons.

Donald Trump will be atrocious for the United States, especially with the Republican House and Senate. He’ll attack immigrants, Latinos, Muslims, victims of police brutality, God knows who else.

But he’ll be good for the Left. And, in the long run, the Left will be great for us.

(Ted Rall is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. Support independent political cartooning and writing — support Ted on Patreon.)

Why Didn’t Hillary Change?

6-23-16

When Hillary Clinton made literally no concessions to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, she sealed her doom. And possibly hours. I mean seriously, can she at least have said how about a $12.50/hour minimum wage?

Hillary Feels the Bern

7-15-16

Now, stupid right wing neo-conservative Democrats, can you please step aside and let someone who might actually have a chance to win in the future, someone like Bernie Sanders, have the nomination?

Some of Us Saw This Coming

7-25-16

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats didn’t lose the election yesterday. They lost it last summer, when they nominated the wrong person.

Why Blacks Didn’t Turn Out

8-31-16

Naturally, it was probably unreasonable to expect Hillary Clinton to get as many African-Americans to vote for her as did for Barack Obama, the first black president. Still, she didn’t offer anything specific to reach out to minorities including blacks, so it can’t be surprising that many of them stayed home on election day, contributing to the victory of Donald Trump.

How Trump Worked the Press

9-7-16

OK, so this is a bit of an exaggeration – it is a cartoon after all – but it tells the story of what happened in the last two or three weeks of the campaign, when Donald Trump started reading off a Teleprompter and sounding more like a conventional presidential candidate. The media stop criticizing him as much and people started projecting their kindest thoughts onto him.

Hillary Lost Cuz the Stuff in This Cartoon Happened

11-2-16

In the final analysis, I think that this is pretty much what happened. This cartoon from last week shows the unenthusiasm of Democratic voters. This was of course caused by the Hillary Clinton campaign, which made a conscious decision to move to the right after the primaries and snub the liberal base that supported Bernie Sanders.

An Alternate Universe: Hillary Clinton Wins!

Despite the polls, all my instincts told me that Donald Trump would probably win yesterday’s election. Still, sometimes the establishment is right, so I had to prepare a cartoon for the possibility that I would need to post something in recognition of Hillary Clinton’s would-have-been historic win as first woman president. Here, in precolored format because why bother to color something that no one’s going to run, is the cartoon it would have run instead of today’s.

11-9-16-d

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