IMPress Polly
10-07-2016, 10:07 AM
As a quick heads up, I've opted to make this a tPF thread. Here are da rulez: 1) No bad-faith posts. Bad-faith means irrelevant, stupid, and annoying to me. 2) No personal attacks on other members (especially me), including critiques of people's looks, career paths, etc. Thank you.
Sometimes people need reminders as events go on, so for the Hillary Clinton people, here's my issue with casting a Clinton vote:
While I would agree with you that the neoliberalism of Clinton and the alt-right fascistic politics of Trump are not equal, I disagree with any assertion that the two are opposites. The one thing led to the other. Decades of neoliberal policies of the sort that Hillary Clinton has supported, ranging from NAFTA to workfare to the repeal of Glass-Steagall to the Iraq War to the Libya War (to name a few that Hillary Clinton herself has backed), that have created an entire age of economic malaise and aggressive military policies that were not only criminally wrong in both a moral and legal sense, but which have also consistently failed to achieve their own demented objectives, have been crucial factors in the rise of the Trump phenomenon this last year. The alt-right phenomenon is, to a substantial degree, a reaction to these things. I am voting to address the disease that is capitalist imperialism, not simply to treat its worst symptom. A vote for Clinton is but a vote to revisit this same type of scenario in another four years. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote that points both the public to the solution, or at least in its direction anyway. (Besides, Clinton will win anyway.) Here's what I mean:
Stein calls for the elimination of corporate money from politics, the establishment of democratically-administered, publicly-owned banks, the replacement of our existing foreign trade agreements, an end to American imperialism (including the closing of all American military bases abroad and a cut of at least 50% to the military budget), tuition-free college education, an end to school privatization, a system of free national health insurance, publicly-owned utilities, worker-owned cooperatives, a $15 an hour minimum wage, a large-scale public works program to rebuild our infrastructure and retrofit homes, schools, community centers, and businesses with clean-energy technology, a moratorium on GMOs, the protection of public lands, water, and parks, a path to citizenship for immigrants, the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to understand and eliminate the legacy of racism in America, a restorative approach to criminal justice that favors alternatives to prison time, and more. Contrast this with Clinton's record, the people she surrounds herself with (particularly her inner circle), and campaign funding sources.
Sometimes people need reminders as events go on, so for the Hillary Clinton people, here's my issue with casting a Clinton vote:
While I would agree with you that the neoliberalism of Clinton and the alt-right fascistic politics of Trump are not equal, I disagree with any assertion that the two are opposites. The one thing led to the other. Decades of neoliberal policies of the sort that Hillary Clinton has supported, ranging from NAFTA to workfare to the repeal of Glass-Steagall to the Iraq War to the Libya War (to name a few that Hillary Clinton herself has backed), that have created an entire age of economic malaise and aggressive military policies that were not only criminally wrong in both a moral and legal sense, but which have also consistently failed to achieve their own demented objectives, have been crucial factors in the rise of the Trump phenomenon this last year. The alt-right phenomenon is, to a substantial degree, a reaction to these things. I am voting to address the disease that is capitalist imperialism, not simply to treat its worst symptom. A vote for Clinton is but a vote to revisit this same type of scenario in another four years. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote that points both the public to the solution, or at least in its direction anyway. (Besides, Clinton will win anyway.) Here's what I mean:
Stein calls for the elimination of corporate money from politics, the establishment of democratically-administered, publicly-owned banks, the replacement of our existing foreign trade agreements, an end to American imperialism (including the closing of all American military bases abroad and a cut of at least 50% to the military budget), tuition-free college education, an end to school privatization, a system of free national health insurance, publicly-owned utilities, worker-owned cooperatives, a $15 an hour minimum wage, a large-scale public works program to rebuild our infrastructure and retrofit homes, schools, community centers, and businesses with clean-energy technology, a moratorium on GMOs, the protection of public lands, water, and parks, a path to citizenship for immigrants, the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to understand and eliminate the legacy of racism in America, a restorative approach to criminal justice that favors alternatives to prison time, and more. Contrast this with Clinton's record, the people she surrounds herself with (particularly her inner circle), and campaign funding sources.