The willingness to accept a little evil over a lot of evil may, at first glance, seem the wiser move, the more pragmatic choice. But the moment we decide to accept even a little bit of evil, then we have just forfeited little bit of our soul. Voting for a candidate whom you perceive to be the "lesser of two evils" over and over again results in a downward spiral of the quality of candidates, and yet we are told by party loyalists that we MUST vote against the more evil candidates. As we can see, what we've ended up with at this point is a Wall Street backed candidate (less evil) and the insanes on the right (more evil).
But for how long can we afford to accept evil before we completely lose our collective soul? Until our lesser evil becomes a choice between Pol Pot and Kim Il Jong? When it gets that bad will people finally get hip to the fact that maybe voting for any kind of evil maybe wasn't such a good idea? When our Democratic candidates, while throwing a few social issue bones to the masses, rule to the right of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, what are the Republicans to do? Go even further to the right, of course!
So for every less evil Democrat we elect into office, so too does the Republican side of things grow more evil. If only we'd had more principled Democratic representatives, perhaps it could have gone a long way to dampen the craziness on the right. What we have now is a completely broken and corrupt political system with Dr. Evil on one side and Ms. Verbissiner on the other side. And lording over both sides are the Koch Brothers and Wall Street, pulling their strings, and laughing all the way to their off-shore tax havens in their fancy private jets.
I don't know about you, but when the Wall Street hucksters tanked our economy, got a few trillion dollars in tax-payers money, while tax payers suffered unimaginable financial woes, with job losses, home losses, retirement funds depleted. So those guys, the Blankfeins and the Diamons are still riding around in their fancy jets, throwing millions of dollars at their favorite "progressive" candidate in so many different ways … direct campaign contributions, super PAC bundling, speaking fees, foundation donations, private jet rides, etc. and that's what the party loyalists want me to vote for? The 1%? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
What ever happened to courage, and conscience? Is doing the wrong thing and winning really better than doing the right thing and losing? Some of you may argue "but the Republicans are worse!" and yes they are but they are so fucking crazy, but can they possibly be more destructive than they have been through the Obama Administration?
I've gone back and forth on this: do I vote, do I sit it out, do I write in my candidate of choice? I haven't decided yet but I can tell you this, I'm not going to take some ridiculous pledge to vote for a corporate-owned candidate if the candidate that is the best for our nation doens't win the nomination. Why would I want to surrender my leverage in such a pusillanimous way? Where is the courage of my conviction? If I choose not to vote for a candidate whom I believe with all my heart to be corrupt and embodies the antithesis of what democracy is mean that I'm not a Democrat? You gonna kick me out of your party because I refuse to take a pledge or vote for corruption? Are you going to blame me when a Republican nutjob beats Clinton in the general because I didn't feel like voting for Wall Street?
Income inequality and Wall Street perfidy aren't my only hot button issues, either. There are many other reasons why I would never pull the lever for the corporate-owned oligarch.
The betrayal that should haunt Hillary Clinton: How she sold out working women & then never apologized - As Clinton's campaign lambastes Bernie Sanders for perceived sexism, we should take a hard look at her own record
By contrast, examine Hillary Clinton’s comments defending welfare reform, assembled by Buzzfeed, in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Clinton wrote that “too many of those on welfare had known nothing but dependency all their lives.” She suggested that women recipients were “sitting around the house doing nothing.” She described the “move from welfare to work” as “the transition from dependency to dignity.” Or a “substitute dignity for dependence.” Put more simply, she stated, “these people are no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive.”
In sum, she has frequently validated a pathologization of poor black women that has often served as a pretext for Republican assaults on the social safety net. She has not repudiated these remarks.
Indeed, Clinton has long embraced welfare reform, a policy more hostile to women than almost any other enacted recent decades. Passed by a Republican Congress, the bill was signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, eager to make good on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.”
When we accept evil, regardless of its quantity, we end up with candidates that appear to have their own, and their corporate paymasters, best interests at heart and to hell with working women, families on welfare, and any kind of propriety.
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.
But even that wouldn’t make accepting the $1.5 million excusable.
If this diary causes some pearl clutching and consternation among some of you, so be it. But know that when you ask someone to set aside their principles, their ideals, and their hopes for a better world and accept a corrupt oligarch, maybe there is something wrong with your moral compass.
We have to let go of the belief that pragmatism is the safest bet because it's not in the long run, which is why our country is in such dire straits today and in fact, pragmatism has proven, once again to be quite insidious. We have got to stand up for doing no evil, doing no harm. We must come together and collectively decide to not settle for less evil or even just a wee tiny bit of evil, but we must fight evil and corruption when we see it, not throw a bunch of money at it and elect it into the highest offices of government.
Thank you for reading.