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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with a report that Clinton will call out Trump’s connection to the “alt right,” which is essentially the regular right with its mask dropped.
Washington Post reports:
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Thursday plans to deliver a speech on the connection between Republican Donald Trump’s campaign and the “disturbing ‘alt-right’ political philosophy,” a Clinton aide said.
The alt-right is named for the Alternative Right website that the “identitarian” nationalist Richard Spencer set up in 2010. It was adopted by those opposed to multiculturalism and mass immigration.
The Clinton aide said the “‘alt-right brand is embracing extremism and presenting a divisive and dystopian view of American which should concern all Americans, regardless of party.” Clinton will offer a very different vision, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview a speech that has not been formally announced.
Clinton is renewing her focus on small businesses, with an emphasis on those run by Latinos.
Here’s the press release:
As Hillary Clinton releases a plan to make life easier for small businesses at every step of the way, Hillary for America is launching a national voter registration effort, “Nuestros Negocios, Nuestra América” (Our businesses, Our America), led by Latino small business owners across the country. “Hillary recognizes that Latino small business owners are the bedrock of our neighborhoods and that’s why she tasked us to build a program that would empower them to mobilize Latinos to the polls. And Latino small business owners know that Hillary Clinton will have their backs as president,” stated Lorella Praeli, National Director of Latino Vote.
As part of ”Nuestros Negocios, Nuestra América,” the campaign is calling on Latino small business owners to help register voters in their communities and educate, engage, and activate Latino voters. Small business owners will volunteer their spaces to host canvass kick-offs, debate watch-parties, round-table discussions or stage Get Out the Vote efforts. Throughout the week ”Nuestros Negocios, Nuestra América” will hold events across the country.
”Nuestros Negocios, Nuestra América” is an element of her larger plan to help small businesses nationwide:
Small businesses are the engine of the American economy. They create nearly two-thirds of new American jobs, fuel innovation, and offer crucial ladders to prosperity. But small businesses were hit hard by the Great Recession, and there are still too many obstacles to success. New business formation has fallen 15% since 2007, and the gains we’ve seen have been isolated: between 2010 and 2014, just 20 counties represented half of the growth in new businesses for the entire country.
Small business is personal for Hillary: Her dad ran a small business that provided her with a middle class life. And during this campaign, she’s visited with small business owners across the country to better understand the barriers that are holding them back—and what smart public policy can do to break those barriers down. Today, Hillary is releasing a plan to make life easier for small business at every step of the way. She will:
- Make it easier to start a business and become profitable
- Make it easier to get financing and find investors
- Make it cheaper and faster to file taxes and provide tax relief
- Make it easier to offer health care and other benefits to employees
- Make it easier to work with the federal government
- Make it easier to fight back when you’re getting stiffed
For Hillary, this is just the beginning of the conversation. Small businesses and entrepreneurs will have a seat at the table in her Administration. She will listen to their concerns and work to address them. As she’s said for more than a year, she wants to be the Small Business President. While Donald Trump has made a career of stiffing small businesses—not because he couldn’t pay them, but because he wouldn’t pay them—Hillary will fight to support small business at every stage of their lifecycle.
Here’s how Hillary plans to make life easier for small business:
- Make it easier to start a business and become profitable. Hillary will break down barriers so that starting a business can be as easy as setting up a lemonade stand in the front yard. She will:
- Push states to make it faster and cheaper to start a business. It takes longer to start a business in the U.S. than it does in other countries like Canada or Denmark. Aspiring entrepreneurs work for days, weeks, or even years to secure business and occupational licenses and sort through stacks of forms at different government agencies. Across the country, more than a quarter of working Americans now need a license just to do their jobs—up from 5 percent in 1950. The average occupational license requires $209 in fees, according to one study, and the aggregate burden of occupational and business licensing fees totals billions per year.
State and local licensing plays a critical role in safeguarding public health and safety. But unnecessary requirements also increase costs for everyone and stand in the way of those who are eager to start new careers or open a business. That’s why Hillary will launch a national initiative to break down unnecessary barriers to starting a company by:
- Pushing state and local governments to make starting a business easier: Any state and locality willing to make starting a business cheaper and easier and meaningfully streamline unnecessary licensing programs will receive federal funding to support innovative programs and offset forgone licensing revenue. These funds will only be available for proposals that also safeguard public health and safety.
- Working with states to standardize licensing requirements and reduce barriers for Americans seeking to work across state borders—particularly for military families and spouses who are mobile and often employed in licensed occupations.
- Making technical assistance and resources available to states to help determine which licensing requirements serve the public good and which impose undue burdens on aspiring workers and entrepreneurs.
- Provide incubators, mentoring, and training to 50,000 entrepreneurs and small business owners in underserved communities. Hillary will make it easier to start and grow your business by offering training and mentoring programs that help guide you through the challenges entrepreneurs face. She will form partnerships with local business leaders, community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions. Through both public and private investments, she will give entrepreneurs in underserved communities access to the training and support networks they need to grow their businesses.
- Make it easier to get financing and find investors. Small businesses owners cite insufficient access to capital as a primary inhibitor to starting, growing, and sustaining a small business. In fact, small business loans comprised just 29 percent of total bank loans in 2012, as compared with 51 percent in 1995. Clinton will fight to expand small businesses’ access to capital. She will:
- Streamline regulation and cut red tape for community banks and credit unions, which are the backbone of small business lending in America, while defending the new rules on Wall Street.
- Harness the potential of online lending platforms and work to safeguard against unfair and deceptive lending practices.
- Reduce the burden of student debt by allowing entrepreneurs to defer student loan payments with no interest while they get their ventures off the ground.
- Promote the 100% tax exclusion on capital gains for long-term small business investments, which Hillary called for it in July.
- Expand and streamline the SBA’s Small Business Investment Company program, which provides community venture capitalists and lenders with access to low-cost capital to invest in small businesses in their neighborhoods.
- Support new innovative ways to assess creditworthiness for small business owners, while working to ensure that alternative credit profiles are not being used unfairly.
- Expand access to credit in underserved communities, including by expanding and making permanent the New Market Tax Credit, and doubling support for community development financial institutions and the State Small Business Credit Initiative.
- Give the SBA administrator the authority to continue providing 7(a) loan guarantees to small businesses if demand is higher than the yearly cap, helping even more small businesses get affordable bank loans.
- Expand access to working capital by expanding the SBA’s working capital guarantee programs and lowering working capital fees for businesses in underserved communities.
- Make it cheaper and faster to file taxes and pay for tax relief. The smallest businesses spend an average of 150 hours and $1,100 per employee to comply with federal taxes—20 times higher than for larger businesses. Hillary will:
- Work to create a new standard deduction for small businesses—like the one available to individual filers. This proposal will vastly simplify filing for small businesses and entrepreneurs—whether they’re running a business out of their own home, managing a shop on Main Street, or selling online through platforms like Etsy and eBay. Rather than having to track and file forms documenting their overhead costs—potentially including transportation, computer and phone use, maintaining an office, and more—a small business would be offered the option of taking a single, simple deduction. Hillary will ask her Treasury Department to bring together small business owners and leading experts to design this new standard deduction, including its limits and parameters, which existing expenses could voluntarily be replaced, and measures to prevent gaming and abuse—all to advance the goal of making it far easier for small businesses to file their taxes. This proposal would be focused on true small businesses, with restrictions preventing larger businesses or high-income taxpayers from claiming it. Small businesses could still opt to track and deduct their expenses individually, just like individual filers.
- Allow 4 million small businesses with gross receipts under $1 million to take advantage of “checkbook accounting.” Hillary wants to make filing taxes for these small businesses as simple as maintaining a checkbook or printing a bank statement, eliminating all the paperwork involved in today’s more complex filing and recordkeeping requirements. She will also simplify accounting and tax filing and offer tax relief for small businesses with $25 million or less in gross receipts, by replacing complicated rules and letting businesses under this threshold choose the simpler “cash accounting” method. Together, these proposals will offer simplified tax filing and accounting and provide tens of billions of dollars of tax relief to 99% of businesses in America.
- Allow small businesses to immediately expense up to $1 million in new investments, rewarding small businesses expanding factories or buying new equipment to boost growth and hiring.
- Quadruple the start-up tax deduction to significantly lower the cost of starting a business.
This relief will be paid for as part of broader business tax reform that rewards investment in America, while closing loopholes that shift jobs and profits overseas.
- Make it easier to offer health care and other benefits to employees. Many small businesses want to take care of their employees and provide robust health insurance and retirement accounts, but the costs can be significant, and qualifying for available relief can be complicated and difficult. That’s why Hillary will:
- Simplify and expand the healthcare tax credit for small employers in the Affordable Care Act, so that even more employers can provide quality, affordable healthcare to their workers. She will make sure that small businesses with up to 50 employees can be eligible for the credit, and she will simplify complex phase-out and eligibility rules so that it’s easier for many more small businesses to get the credit and cover their workers.
- Allow more small businesses pool together to offer retirement plans, making it easier for small businesses to offer retirement accounts to their employees.
- Make it easier to work with the federal government. From regulatory compliance to accessing loan support and contracting opportunities, the experience small businesses have with the federal government remains too complicated and burdensome. Hillary will push the federal agencies to do the hard work of making government simple and user-friendly. She believes that government should organize itself to meet needs of small business—rather than forcing small businesses to navigate the maze of government. In other words, Hillary wants to treat small business like the customer:
- Work to completely revamp the digital experience for small businesses. This requires a smarter investment in technology to make it much easier for small businesses owners to interact with the government. She will direct the U.S. Digital Service, SBA, and other relevant agencies to work together and build a digital team to overhaul the entire small business web experience, making it more user-friendly, helpful, and convenient.
- Use the leverage of more than $400 billion in federal government contracting to encourage businesses to pay their suppliers in full and on time.
- Guarantee a 24-hour response time to small businesses with questions about federal regulations and access to capital programs.
- Ensure that Small Business Development Centers are placed in the highest-need communities with staff that speaks the language of local residents.
- Work to ensure that federal regulations aren’t unnecessarily holding small businesses and our economy back.
- Increase federal contracting opportunities for women-owned, minority-owned, and veteran-owned small businesses.
- Defend and strengthen the Export-Import Bank, which is a crucial partner to small businesses across the country when they seek to export their goods and services.
Encourage small business exports by expanding SBA funding for export development, establishing a single global export strategy across agencies, and creating a user-friendly export planning portal for small businesses.
- Make it easier to fight back when you’re getting stiffed. Hillary Clinton believes it is outrageous when big businesses like Trump’s repeatedly stiff the small businesses that do work for them. She knows that getting paid, and getting paid on time, is essential to making payroll and keeping a business running. That’s why she will ensure federal regulatory oversight of proven bad actors and stop large companies from using expensive litigation hurdles to deny small businesses their right to a remedy—and give small businesses recourse to take on predatory behavior.
The latest Survey Monkey/NBC News poll is another showing Clinton reaching the critical 50% threshold.
NBC News reports:
Hillary Clinton continues to hold a large national lead over Donald Trump, 50 percent to 42 percent, weeks after the Democratic National Convention.
Clinton's 8-point advantage is virtually unchanged from her 9-point lead last week, and she has seen similar margins since the end of July. These results are according to the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll among registered voters.
Trump faces a steep climb if he is to win non-white voters. Results from the latest tracking poll show that only 8 percent of black voters support him, compared to 87 percent who support Clinton. Trump is also behind among Hispanic voters with 22 percent compared to 73 percent who support Clinton. Asian Americans also overwhelmingly support Clinton, 66 percent to 23 percent who support Trump.
The latest evidence of Clinton’s 50 State Strategy is her opening of an office in Utah, where Democrats are targeting a vulnerable GOP House seat.
Join Hillary for America's Senior Policy Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Hillary supporters from throughout the Beehive State, as we open our first official office in Utah!
Politico reports:
Hillary Clinton is setting up shop in once-hostile territory, threatening to mount a renewed push for deep-red Utah, a state no Democrat has won in the past half-century.
The Clinton campaign announced Monday the opening of their first general election office in Salt Lake City, bolstering a recent effort by the Democratic nominee to build support among Utah’s religious community.
The aggressive measure in usually safe grounds for Republican candidates is emblematic of the campaign’s recent approach, which has been increasingly targeting traditionally conservative states such as Arizona and Georgia. Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine had aided by holding rallies in various GOP stronghold states.
Meanwhile, Georgia is now a battleground state.
New York Times looks at Clinton’s potential Southern Strategy:
Recent polls show something that has caught even the most optimistic liberals by surprise: Hillary Clinton is tied with Donald J. Trump in Georgia, catching up with him in South Carolina and generally showing strength in traditionally Republican parts of the South.
Mr. Trump’s extreme language and divisive policies are alienating moderate Republicans in places like the Atlanta exurbs — where Mrs. Clinton is running nearly even with Mr. Trump. And across the state, polls show a significantly low number of Republicans saying they’ll support their party’s candidate.
Mr. Trump’s campaign most closely resembles the presidential campaigns of George C. Wallace, the arch-segregationist Alabama governor. Indeed, Wallace’s legacy is telling. An economic progressive, he remained a Democrat his entire life. True, he galvanized white working-class disenchantment and pioneered a populist, anti-liberal rhetoric that Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republicans would use to devastating effect. Yet he never had much appeal among the new class of suburban whites; the two were like oil and water. So, too, it would seem, are Donald Trump and moderate Southern Republicans today.
What might be happening instead is something new in the South: true two-party politics, in which an urban liberal-moderate Democratic Party fights for votes in the increasingly multiethnic metropolitan South against an increasingly rural, nationalistic Republican Party. If that happens, it will transform not only the politics of the American South, but those of America itself.
Clinton has addressed the attacks on her health, which have been shamelessly mainstreamed by the media.
CNN reports:
"Back in October, the National Enquirer said I would be dead in six months. So with every breath I take I feel like I have a new lease on life," Clinton joked. "I don't know why they are saying this. I think on the one hand, it is part of the wacky strategy, just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you."
Clinton continued, "On the other hand, it just absolutely makes no sense. I don't go around questioning Donald Trump's health. As far as I can tell, he is a healthy as a horse."
Clinton went on to dismiss the false claims by saying that Republicans are taking the campaign "into an alternative universe."
"I am out here talking about [issues] and then I have to step into the alternative reality and answer questions about am I alive, how much longer I will be alive and the like," Clinton said to laughs.
Clinton also commented on an issue that her campaign is currently grappling with: How to prepare for debates against Trump.
Clinton, who said she was taking the preparation seriously, added that she knows she needs to be "prepared for, like, wacky stuff."
"I'm planning," Clinton said, "on drawing off my experiences from elementary school."
A good article on Vox explores different levels of enthusiasm for Clinton among feminists, quoting two of my favorite writers — Sady Doyle and Imani Gandy:
"I'm moved that we actually got here in my lifetime, and I'm glad that it's her," said Sady Doyle, author of the upcoming book Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ... and Why. "This woman, of all women, has had to fight to earn her place at the table. She deserves this."
But for many other feminists — especially younger women and women of color — the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency is more complicated, and less obviously worth celebrating. It’s not that these feminists would actually vote for the infamously misogynistic Donald Trump over Clinton. Very few of them would say it means nothing to elect the first woman president. But nor does it mean everything; not even close.
"I recognize the momentousness of the moment, and yet I don't feel a whole lot," said Imani Gandy, senior legal analyst at Rewire and co-host of the This Week in Blackness Prime podcast. "The election of a white woman to the highest office doesn't say a whole lot about my feminism. I’m far more moved about what Michelle Obama's tenure as first lady says about feminism — about black feminism — her raising black daughters, as she so poignantly pointed out during her convention speech, in a house that was built by slaves."
"It’s a sticky wicket when you're a black woman," Gandy said. "I almost feel better represented by Obama than by Hillary, even though when it comes to my main issue — reproductive rights and justice — Hillary is already campaigning to the left of where Obama campaigned in 2008. I just don't feel the connection to Hillary that I feel to the Obamas, although I know there are some black women who do."
Either way, America seems to have evolved on feminism to a certain extent along with Clinton.
"A lot of people assumed that the first female president would have to be conservative and anti-woman in order to offset her gender and win an election — the Margaret Thatcher model, or, if you prefer, the Palin option," Doyle said. "It's a very real sign of progress that we got a liberal Democrat, with a stated record of supporting feminism specifically, into such a powerful position."
That may not seem remarkable to us now, Doyle said, but "the thing about huge social sea changes is that by the time they actually pay off, the world has changed to accommodate them."
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.
