Episode 141 | March 14, 2024: TikTok AtToked, Third Parties on the Rise, Crises in Gaza, Haiti and Ukraine

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

First off, the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation that would force the Chinese company that owns TikTok to divest itself of the social media company within six months. President Biden says he will pass the measure if it hits his desk but its future is uncertain in the US Senate. Scott and Ted discuss the cultural, economic, legal and political implications of targeting a company purely based on conjecture and speculation with no proof that it has any plans to act nefariously.

Secondly, third and independent party presidential runs are in the news. Robert F Kennedy Junior is about to announce his choice for his voice presidential running mate. No Labels is about to appoint a committee to determine its options for president and vice president this year. Dr. Jill Stein will almost certainly be the nominee for the Green Party. And Dr. Cornel West is running his so-called jazz campaign.

Finally, five months into Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it is very clear that Israel has overreached and is dangerously close to becoming an international pariah. Meanwhile, United States considers the possibility of military intervention in Haiti, something that has never gone well in the past. Ukraine, of course, will soon have to accept the difficult truth that it has lost its war against Russia.

 

Watch the Video Version: here.

Electoral Dysfunction

Finding it hard to get excited about your next date with democracy? You may be suffering from Electoral Dysfunction.

Democrats and Republicans “Stole” Over 35,000,000 Votes From the Greens and Libertarians in 2020

Many things that everyone knows, are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely-believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true, but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true.

Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly declares, without bothering to cite evidence because their statement’s obviousness rises to the level of self-evident, that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election (not true) and Jill Stein sucked away enough Democratic votes from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House (also not true).

Let us, for the purpose of this essay, set aside the usual counterarguments to the claim that you shouldn’t vote Green because they’re just spoilers: no presidential election is decided by a single vote so you can’t possibly individually change the outcome, people who don’t live in swing states have no reason to worry about tipping an election, parties ought to have to earn votes, voting for a lesser evil is still voting for evil, a little party will never become bigger until we stop overthinking our tactical voting and simply support that candidate and the party we like best.

But—are small parties really electoral succubi? First, a look at Republican losers who blamed third parties for their losses.

Running as a Progressive in 1912, a vengeful Teddy Roosevelt out to punish his former protege for deviating from progressive Republicanism is alleged to have sucked away votes from William Howard Taft. We did wind up with President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat—a result cited as the ultimate example of a third-party candidate splitting a party. But historians forget to mention that 1912 was a four-way race. Wilson faced his own “spoiler,” from his left: Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, who got six percent of the popular vote. Taft was such a weak candidate that neither Teddy nor Debs made a difference; Wilson would have won no matter what.

Pundits say Ross Perot created a big enough sucking sound of votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992 to hand the race to Bill Clinton. Pundits are mistaken: Perot pulled equally from the Ds and the Rs. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen is unfairly blamed for contributing to Trump’s win in 2020.

Similarly, left-leaning third-parties—since 2000, this has meant the Greens—have never poached from Democrats in big enough numbers to change the outcome. Green Party supporters tend to be leftists like me, who would otherwise not vote at all. If the only two parties on the ballot were the Democrats and Republicans, we’d sit on our hands.

Greens can’t steal my vote from the Democrats. This is because Democrats didn’t have my vote in the first place.

The Greens are not a purer, more liberal version of the Democrats. Greens’ progressivism, which criticizes the economic class divide and prioritizes programs to reduce income and wealth inequality, and opposes militarism, is a different ideology than the Democrats’ corporate identity-politics liberalism of tokenism and forever wars. Democratic voters who care more about abortion, affirmative action and transgender rights than class issues are not likely to abandon them for the Greens, who are most interested in economic problems like the minimum wage and Medicare For All.

At the same time, progressives don’t think of the Democratic Party as a watered-version of Green progressivism. Progressives hardly see any difference between Democrats and Republicans. There’s little to no daylight between the Big Two on the matters progressives worry most about: economic unfairness and militarism.

The real spoilers are the two major parties who “steal” votes—from small parties like the Greens and the Libertarians. Unlike the little organizations, who count themselves lucky if they pull in three percent of the vote in a presidential race, Democrats and Republicans steal massive numbers of votes from their rivals.

I’m talking, of course, about the phenomenon of “strategic voting.”

“I’m a Democrat who loves Joe Biden but I’m voting for Howie Hawkins (or Cornel West),” said no one ever. On the other hand, a lot of people who would otherwise go Green instead vote Democratic because they are afraid of “wasting” their vote. Many “Democrats” are actually progressive, falling significantly to the left of the Democratic Party. If they thought the Greens could win, they would vote for them.

A 2019 Hill-HarrisX survey sums up the strategic-voting mentality: 65% of Democratic voters said they would prefer to vote for a primary candidate with the best chance to beat Trump than one who agreed with them on their top issue. What if Americans voted their opinions? What if “wasting your vote” wasn’t a consideration?

A 2021 Pew Research analysis found that six percent of voters belong to the “progressive left.” They tend to be young and highly-educated; they’re the “largest Democratic group to say it backed Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primaries (though members of this group broke heavily for Biden in the general election versus Trump).” An additional 10% are what Pew calls the “outsider left”: very young and “not thrilled with the Democratic or Republican parties—or the country writ large, for that matter.”

            If the Green Party had full access to the political process, and we voted our opinions, it could expect to get all (or close to all) of the 16% of the vote who are progressives and alienated leftists. Full access to the system would include:

  • Placement on ballots without having to overcome onerous ballot-access requirements and nuisance lawsuits by the Democratic Party
  • Invitations to televised debates
  • Media coverage at the same level of exposure as either of the two major parties
  • Donations to finance advertising and data research at the same level as either of the two major parties
  • No more attack pieces in the media characterizing third-party votes as “wasting your vote” for a “spoiler” who “can’t possibly win”

(I don’t have space to address other institutional advantages enjoyed by the Democrats over the Greens, like a big rich party’s ability to attract more high-quality candidates and the fact that Americans have been propagandized by their parents and teachers since childhood to believe that the two-party system is inherent to our political system.)

The Greens are so marginalized that it’s hard to imagine this alternative reality in which they were seen as a true “third party” on par with the Ds and the Rs—not kooks or weirdos, simply a third option. Even so, it’s safe to say they’d be closer to 16.0% of the vote than the 0.2% garnered by presidential nominee Howie Hawkins in 2020.

            Pew also found that 12.0% of voters belong to what it calls the “ambivalent right”—irreligious, young, prefer smaller government and are “more moderate than other Republicans on immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization.” There’s a word for that orientation: libertarians. Yet, due to the same barriers faced by the Greens, the Libertarian Party only got 1.2% of the vote in 2020.

            By my back-of-the-envelope calculus, Democrats and Republicans are poaching over a fourth of the overall vote—over 35 million—from the Greens and Libertarians.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hillary Lost. Should We Care?

Image result for president hillary

If Jill Stein and die-hard Democrats get their way, recounts in three key states will take the presidency away from Donald Trump and hand it to Hillary Clinton. While this effort is probably doomed to failure, the attempted do-over prompts a question: what exactly are we losing with this mother of all paths not taken, a Hillary Clinton administration?

What elevates this theoretical exercise above a parlor game is the deep grief felt by tens of millions of Democrats, especially women. They believe not just that Donald Trump is a disaster, but that the United States will miss out on a great, inspiring leader in Hillary Clinton. For these bereft citizens, Hillary’s departure from the national political scene ranks alongside those of Adlai Stevenson and Al Gore — losing candidates who were clearly superior to the winners, whose loss left America much worse off.

I agree with the Clintonites’ horrorstruck reaction to Trump. But are they right about the rest? Have we really lost much with Hillary? Let’s look at what we know, or can assume with reasonable certainty, would have happened under the first few years of Madam President.

The Cabinet: Hillary’s cabinet would have been drawn from the ranks of her campaign aides, allies from her tenure in the Obama administration, and old hands from her husband’s 1990s heyday. Judging from the center-right Democrats with whom she has surrounded herself, her choice of center-right Tim Kaine as vice president (as opposed to a liberal counterbalance like Elizabeth Warren) and her campaign’s unusual snubbing of staffers who sought to migrate from Bernie Sanders’ progressive campaign, it’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton’s cabinet would have been composed of the neoliberal militarists who’ve been running things for Obama. Like Obama, she probably wouldn’t have appointed any progressives.

Supreme Court Nominees: Not wanting an early fight with Senate Republicans, she’d probably fill archconservative constructionist Antonin Scalia’s empty seat with another Republican, restoring the 2015 ideological balance of the court. She might have gotten to fill another two or three seats, and here is where she might have made a real difference for the liberal cause. The 5-4 question is, would she have gone to war with the GOP by appointing a Democrat to replace a dead or retiring right-winger? Could she win if she had? I lay 50-50 odds on both questions.

Taxes and the Economy: Clinton proposed a slightly more progressive tax structure during the campaign. She only wanted a $12/hour minimum wage — less than many states and cities. Even though NAFTA and trade were her Achilles’ heels, she didn’t propose a job retraining program or welfare plan for workers displaced by globalization. Largely, she pledged to continue the gradual Obama recovery, which has left most workers behind. In the absence of an unforeseen boom or bust, your wallet would have felt pretty much the same as it has over the last few years.

Privacy and the NSA: Even in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations (when she called the whistleblower a traitor), Clinton stridently defended the government’s illegal spying against every American. Spooks would have had a friend in Clinton, as under Trump.

Healthcare: Obamacare would have remained in place in its present form. A few vague promises to add a “public option” do not amount to a pledge to spend political capital to get it past Congressional Republicans. But premiums are skyrocketing, so Hillarian inaction might have led to wider calls for ACA repeal, a big step backward. (No one knows what Trump will do. Not even him.)

Gay and Transgender Rights: Clinton opposed marriage equality until 2013 — after most Americans told pollsters they were for it. She is weak on transgender issues. On issues of individual rights, the Clintons have always followed, not led. She would have had little effect on these struggles, on which Trump has actually been pretty good.

Women’s Rights: No doubt, the election of the first woman president would have been incredibly inspiring to women and girls. Would Clinton’ impact on the feminist movement have gone beyond the symbolism of identity politics? Probably not. The next logical legislative steps to advance women’s rights — paid family leave for a year, federal child care for freelancers and self-employed workers, a federal pay equality law, reviving the Equal Rights Amendment, a full-scale campaign against rape culture — received zero support from the defeated nominee.

Abortion: A federal law legalizing abortion would resolve the SCOTUS wars and guarantee that women in the South had the right to choose. But Clinton seems satisfied with the status quo.

Social Programs: Neither Clinton has ever proposed a major new anti-poverty program. There’s no reason to think that that would have changed. Ditto for Trump.

War and Peace: Hillary has a long history of hawkishness. She didn’t push through any peace deals as Secretary of State. During the campaign, she called for a no-fly zone over Syria, a tactic designed to provoke hostilities. And her hot rhetoric so freaked out the government of Russia that Kremlin military analysts worried about World War III if she won. Trump is a hothead. But Hillary might have been more likely to start a war.

The Middle East: Any breakthrough would have to be brokered by someone who was not as much of an unqualified supporter of Israel as she is. (So is Trump.)

Human Rights: Clinton’s record is dismal. She coddled dictators at State. Her foundation solicited money from the murderous Saudi regime. She rarely mentioned the issue during her campaign. I’d expect more of the same from her — or Trump.

Torture: Obama continued to authorize torture by the CIA, and refused to investigate torturers. Clinton would not have reversed these nauseating policies, which she has endorsed, and will continue under Trump.

Drones: Like Obama and Trump, Hillary is a big fan of using killer robot planes to slaughter thousands of innocent people abroad.

Secret Prisons/Guantánamo: It’s a safe bet that Gitmo torture gulag would have remained open under Hill, though perhaps with fewer inmates than Trump says he wants to send there.

Hillary fans can credibly argue that she would not have made things worse, or at least not as bad as they will be under Trump. By objective standards, however, it defies reason to claim that she would have presided over a halcyon era of progress. At best, President Clinton II would have held the line against Republican attacks. As we know, however, voters are not in the mood for more of the same.

And in 2020, we’d be right back where we are now. Four years into President Hillary, the anger that unleashed Trumpism would turn into boiling rage.

Odds are, Hillary would have committed many of the same outrages as Trump will. As a Democrat, however, she wouldn’t have faced the same level of protest or resistance from the Left — or a media willing to cover it.

(Ted Rall is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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: Hate Trump AND Clinton? There Are Better Alternatives

Image result for voting booth

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least popular presidential candidates of all time. So why vote for either one?

You wouldn’t know it to watch or read the news, but living in a duopoly doesn’t require you to hold your nose as you vote for someone you hate – merely because you hate the other candidate even more, or you’re deathly afraid of them. There are alternatives. And they don’t require you to compromise your ethics or vote against your own interests.

We’ve all heard it so often that we take it for granted: if you don’t vote, you’re apathetic. If you’re apathetic, you don’t have any right to complain when someone you don’t like wins and messes up the country.

That might be true when at least one of the candidates is palatable. But the argument falls apart at times like this, when most Americans agree that both are awful.

You and me, we may or may not agree on policy. But we probably agree on this: Wednesday morning, someone terrible will be president-elect. My lesser of two evils would be Hillary Clinton. But voting for her would tell the world that invading Iraq was OK. It would tell working-class people that NAFTA another free trade deals are OK. It would endorse the things that she endorses: bombing Libya and Syria, arming jihadis, Guantánamo, influence peddling, corruption on a scale that would make Nixon blush. None of that stuff is OK.

We must vote for Clinton in order to keep Trump out. That’s what they tell us. Trump, after all, is racist. But so is Clinton! What could be more racist than her obscene “war on terror”? All her victims are Muslim and brown – which is why white America doesn’t care. And don’t get me started on her and her husband’s “criminal justice reform” of the 1990s against “superpredators.”

With a “choice” like that, you have to look outside the box:

Voter Boycott

Citizens of countries with repressive and unresponsive ruling regimes often resort to the honorable strategy of the voter boycott. By denying the tyrants their votes, they rob their oppressors of legitimacy.

Never doubt that governments need their citizens to vote. For example, you might wonder why Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein bothered to hold his 2002 reelection campaign, in which he was the only candidate. The 11.4 million Iraqis who gave him his 100.00% victory (up from 99.96% in his previous “race”) allowed him, just before the U.S. invasion, to tell the world that he enjoyed his people’s popular support.

The “No Land! No House! No Vote!” movement, which began in 2004, calls for the poor and dispossessed to boycott South Africa’s electoral political system on the ground that the bourgeois political parties don’t care about their interests. In the 2011 election, 42% of registered voters respected the boycott. Concerned that the movement hurts its reputation internationally — and it has — the ruling African National Congress party has subjected the movement to torture and beatings.

It isn’t hard to imagine that a substantial decline in America’s already low voter participation rate would have some interesting effects. It would deny the United States its current holier-than-thou attitude toward other countries. And it would certainly inspire Americans outside the two-party system to consider the creation of a new political movement or third party as a more viable.

“If a huge number of people joined [in an election boycott] it would make an important statement,” Noam Chomsky has said.

Leave the Presidential Box Blank

“I will vote for Republicans up and down the ballot,” says Ari Fleischer, press secretary for George W. Bush. “But when it comes to the presidency, I’m going to leave my ballot blank.” Some Latino Republicans say they’ll do the same. So do some Bernie Sanders Democrats.

As with a voter boycott, the idea is to let the system know that you are civically engaged, not apathetic. Nevertheless, you’re displeased with the candidates on offer.

In counties and states that tally blank (also called “spoilt”) votes, this approach registers as a “none of the above” protest vote. The problem is, most municipalities do not count them — so they can’t send a message to the powers that be, the media, or to prospective third-party candidates.

Third Party

            The appeal of voting third party is obvious: it’s a protest vote and it allows you to direct your vote to someone whom you might really want to see win in an ideal world. The problem is, the fact that it isn’t an ideal world is the reason that you’re voting going outside the duopoly in the first place.

I’m voting for Jill Stein. My reason is simple: I would be happy to see her elected president. I agree with her on the vast majority of important issues. I can’t say that about anyone else on the ballot. (Not sure if that’s true for you? I strongly recommend that you take this test to determine which candidate is closest to you on policy.)

There’s only one reasonable argument against voting for a candidate who, like Stein, won’t win but with whom you agree: the lesser of two evils. In my case, by voting for Stein instead of Clinton, I’m effectively helping Trump. (Let’s forget for a moment that I live in New York, which will certainly go to Hillary.)

Theoretically, that’s a powerful argument. Trump is a fascist. I’m terrified of what he would do as president. I hate Hillary – but she’s not quite as obviously dangerous. Fortunately, this lesser-of-two-evils argument dies on the hill of mathematics.

Unless you are in Chicago, where you can make the dead vote, the only vote you control is your own: one. Statisticians have found that the odds of one vote changing the outcome of the presidential election is 1-in-10 million — and that’s only if you live in a swing state. For most people, the odds are more like 1-in-60 million. As one wag calculated, you have the same odds of changing the outcome of a major election as dying in a car accident while driving to the voting station.

The odds of your vote “going to waste” are significantly less than being struck by lightning twice during your life.

So live a little. Vote, or don’t vote, however you feel like.

(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.)

 

 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hey Lefties: Hillary Is Not Your Friend

Image result for hillary clinton warmonger           If you lean left, the only presidential candidate who shares your values is Dr. Jill Stein. But she can’t win. The two major parties have left — sorry for the pun — you and your concerns high and dry.

Certainly, Donald Trump is not your man. Though he has recently made noises to the contrary, Trump has repeatedly argued that wages are too high and that America’s pathetically low minimum wage should remain at its present poverty level. He’s a fan of torture. Trump calls the police — the police! — “the most mistreated people” in America. The governing philosophy that best approximates his ideology is authoritarianism. His opposition to “free trade” and the Iraq War aren’t nearly enough to justify casting a vote for him.

Polls show Hillary Clinton heading toward the White House. But that prospect should make liberals shudder in horror. Like Trump, Hillary is an enemy of human rights and the struggle for equality and justice. But she’s worse than him in one important respect: she’ll send the Bernie Sanders wing of the party packing.

A right-wing Trump presidency would galvanize the Left. We saw that during the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Jr. years, which generated massive street protests. But DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) like Bill Clinton and Obama have the opposite effect. Satisfied that a Democrat is president, progressives tend to stay home, their criticisms muted to the point of nonexistence. Under Democratic presidents, outrageous acts of repression — like Obama’s brutal coordinated raids on the Occupy Wall Street movement — are received by liberals with little more than a mildly annoyed tweet. Look for the Left to be defanged under First Woman President/DINO Hillary Clinton.

Don’t vote for Trump. But don’t fall for the same identity politics crap that tricked progressives and liberals in 2008.

Obama made history as the first black president, but he didn’t share the liberal politics or values of most black Americans. On the issues that matter most, he turned out to be a right-winger: expanded old wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (he voted six times to fund the Iraq bloodshed), new wars in Libya and Syria and Yemen and Somalia, drones gone wild, and talk about mass deportations — no president has ever expelled more illegal immigrants than Obama.

Corporate media political observers say that progressive stalwarts Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders will influence cabinet picks and policy in a Hillary Clinton administration. But the tea leaves as well as her track record suggest that right-wing forces – particularly Wall Street and the war industry – will exert a much stronger gravitational pull.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that top Hillary Clinton insiders consider Bernie Sanders to be a “doofus,” that she looks forward to an interventionist foreign policy, will continue to be highly secretive to the point that she would love to wage war covertly, and considers Wall Street bankers to be the most qualified people to write financial regulations.

Like her husband, she is likely to choose cabinet members who lean right. The one possible exception would echo Bill’s. Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, a liberal, is being considered for the relatively minor post of secretary of labor, where Robert Reich famously languished without portfolio or influence before leaving in disgust after a few years. All the others are conservatives.

Pro-Hillary Democrats argue that Clinton might nominate big-time liberals to the Supreme Court. But the judges she has on her shortlist for SCOTUS vacancies are closer to the centrist wing of her party. Obviously she will nominate Democrats for seats where Donald Trump would nominate Republicans. But I wouldn’t look for a seismic shift there.

What liberal Democrats should worry more about than anything else is probably her current saber-rattling with Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. First, she’s challenging the Russians’ alliance with Syria and threatening to shoot down Russian planes.

She’s blaming Russia to deflect revelations about her machinations against Bernie Sanders. “We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks [like the WikiLeaks DNC and John Podesta hacks], these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election,” Hillary Clinton says. Why does she expect us to take government agencies at their word? After all, these are the same idiotic spooks who supposedly convinced her that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass distraction. No one has presented the slightest evidence, much less proof, that Russia was involved in the hacks.

It’s irresponsible and scary to accuse a nuclear-armed nation of wrongdoing without solid proof. People in the know say that her over-the-top rhetoric has convinced Kremlin officials that she plans to start a war with Russia.

Not smart.

It’s no secret that Hillary Clinton has always been a foreign policy hawk, a corporatist on domestic economic matters, and an incrementalist in general. (Personally, I don’t see how you can call for incremental changes on problems like poverty and unemployment and keep a straight face. Here’s 10% of a job!)

Problem is, she is all but certain to enter office under conditions that will magnify her conservative instincts. House Republicans will still be in a position to block anything ambitious. And it will be all but impossible for Clinton to claim a mandate in an election where the vast majority of voters were motivated by fear and contempt for Trump rather than affirmative support for her and her proposals.

So if you are a member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, there’s only one thing to do after Election Day. Roll up your sleeves and start organizing protests — regardless of who wins.

(Ted Rall is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. Please support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: 7 Reasons I Won’t Vote for Hillary Clinton

http://constitutioncenter.org/images/uploads/callout/MainExhibit_Highlight_VotBoothAlt.png            To my many friends and readers who plan to vote for Hillary Clinton: please stop bullying me.

Also please lay off other people, progressives and liberals and traditional Democrats and socialists and communists, citizens who identify with the political left, who plan to vote for Dr. Jill Stein or stay home.

I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump. I agree with the mainstream liberal consensus that he should never hold political power, much less control over nuclear launch codes. He’s dangerous and scary. But that doesn’t mean I have to vote for Hillary Clinton.

So I won’t.

  1. The main reason that I’m not going to vote for Hillary Clinton is the same exact main reason that I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump: I don’t vote Republican. Being age 53, Nixon was the first president I remember. Hillary Clinton’s politics (and her paranoia and insularity) remind me of Richard Nixon’s. I can’t bring myself to think of a Democrat as someone who solicits millions of dollars from Wall Street or votes with crazy Republicans (like George W. Bush, whose stupid wars she aggressively supported) to invade foreign countries just for fun. She plays a Democrat on TV, but we know the truth: she’s a Republican.
  2. I’m anti-political dynasty. There should be a constitutional amendment banning anyone related by blood or marriage to a former president from running for the presidency.
  3. There’s a big difference between an impressive resume and a list of accomplishments. Hillary has the former, not the latter. I hold her resume against her: she has held tremendous power, yet has never reached out to grab the brass ring. As senator, her record was undistinguished. As Secretary of State, she barely lifted a finger on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contributed to the expansion of the Syrian civil war, and is more responsible than almost anyone else for destroying Libya. What she did well she did small; when she went big she performed badly.
  4. #MuslimLivesMatter. More than a million people died in Iraq. She voted for that. So she isn’t, as the current Clinton campaign meme goes, merely a “flawed” candidate. Voting for the violent deaths of over a million people, and the maiming of God knows how many more — when there was no reason whatsoever to think Iraq had WMDs — is not an “oops, my bad” screw-up. Those were real people, real human beings, and they’re dead because of her. You don’t get to soak your hands in that much blood and just walk away, much less into the White House.
  5. She still hasn’t made an affirmative case for herself. By clinging to President Obama, she’s running as his third term. The standard way to pull this off is to present yourself as new and improved: the old product was great, the new one will be even better. Her campaign boils down to “I’m not Donald Trump.” No matter how bad he is, and he is awful, that’s not enough. Watching her in the first presidential debate, at the beginning when Trump was besting her over trade, I kept asking myself: why doesn’t she admit that the recovery is good but has left too many Americans behind? Why hasn’t she proposed a welfare and retraining program for people who lose their jobs to globalization? A week later, the only answer I can come up with is that she has no imagination, no vision thing.
  6. She has made no significant concessions to the political left. Frankly, this makes me wonder about her intelligence. Current polling shows that the biggest threat to her candidacy is losing millennial, working class, and Bernie Sanders supporters to the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson. She would not have this problem if she’d picked Sanders as her vice presidential running mate. Even now, she could bag the millennial vote by promising the Vermont senator a cabinet post. Why doesn’t she? For the same reason that she won’t embrace the $15-an-hour minimum wage (she gets $225,000 for an hour-long speech but wants you to settle for $12) — she’s a creature of the corporations and therefore the political right. She’s not one of us. She doesn’t care about us.
  7. My vote is worth no less than the vote of someone who supports a major party nominee. So what if the polls say that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be elected president? Why, based on those polls, should I strategically vote for someone whose politics and personality I deplore? By that logic, why shouldn’t they change their votes to conform to mine? I have my vote, you have your vote, let Diebold add them up.

I don’t have a problem with you if you plan to vote for Hillary. This year is the best argument ever for lesser evilism. But the fact that we are selecting between two equally unpopular major party presidential standardbearers indicates that the two-party system is in crisis, if not broken. We need and deserve more and better options. The only way to get them is to start building viable third parties — voting for them, contributing money to them. What better time to start than now?

Anyway, there’s absolutely no way that my refusal to vote for Hillary will put Donald Trump into the White House.

How do I know? Arithmetic. The closest state margin in an American presidential election was four, in Maryland in 1832. Like you, I only get one vote. Whatever I do can’t and won’t change the result.

(Ted Rall is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form.)

If We Did Other Things The Way That We Vote

A lot of people don’t want to vote for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson because they believe their vote will be “wasted.” But they don’t apply the same logic to most other things in life, many of which involve setting yourself apart from the herd.

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