I am currently supporting Senator Sanders, although I disagree with him strongly on immigration and the admission of refugees. If Mrs. Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, I will not vote for her, for the following reasons, among others:
Mrs. Clinton should be held accountable for the disastrous legacy of the Clinton administration. Remember, we were all informed during their campaigns that we would be getting “two for the price of one”, with Mrs. Clinton being touted as in effect a co-president. It appears that Mrs. Clinton had her hand in all of the outrages discussed below as partner or enabler, in spite of her efforts now to distance herself from the role she gloried in at the time. She should now shoulder co-responsibility. Clinton is the person who stood on the platform at the 1992 Democratic Party convention and declaimed, “I won’t let them send your jobs overseas.” He didn’t mention that he was supporting NAFTA and would send their jobs across the border, and then sell them out to China.
He appears to have sold out American workers to China for campaign contributions, (later admitting that he had not realized that China would suck so much out of the U.S. economy). He supported all of the “downsizing” during the Nineties, and had Robert Reich tell us to retrain for “high tech”, and that the new normal would be retraining five or six times during a working lifetime.
Besides NAFTA and most-favored-nation status for China, and China’s membership in the World Trade Organization, he pushed through cutting welfare for the poor without concern for the fact that the other side of the welfare coin is the availability of jobs that pay enough to support the worker and his/her family.
He advocated for and signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to repeal Glass-Steagall, as well as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed the commercial banks to speculate for their own account, which they did in spades in the derivatives over-the-counter market. The commodities trading act removed the rules established in the early New Deal to prevent speculators from gaming the commodities market. This allowed speculators, especially index traders who had no use for and would never take delivery of the commodities in which they speculated, to run up prices in oil, wheat, aluminum, etc.
The commodities act also slipped in a prohibition against regulating derivatives, which regulation Brooksley Borne had advocated, thereby getting herself removed as head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and paving the way for the derivatives bubble as to residential mortgages and the ensuing financial sector meltdown and “Great Recession”.
In living through this period, one was driven to conclude that Clinton based his survival in office on keeping the stock market up, at the expense of workers. Wall Street pundits were praising his “low wage, pure profit economy”. The income of the average family fell 9% during this Wall Street “Camelot”, while two wage earner families increased 27%.
The Chinese stole the technology for small, multi-targetable nuclear warheads from Los Alamos on Clinton’s watch, and then he approved Loral’s sale of missile guidance technology to China, ostensibly because they were unable to put satellites into orbit, not for military use. The CEO of Loral was a large Clinton campaign contributor. Clinton’s administration was the 4th and 5th terms of Reaganomics. Hardly “Camelot.”
The judgment of someone who allows the Chinese to steal the technology for multi-targeted nuclear warheads, and then gives them the technology for delivering them against us, leaves something to be desired.
Clinton showed his ruthless disregard for the truth, and willingness to destroy other human beings, when he sent Sidney Morgenthau out on the 24/7 news circuit to assert that Monica Lewinsky was a troubled young woman obsessed with Clinton, who was just trying to help her. What do you think would have been Ms. Lewinsky’s fate if Linda Tripp had not advised her to save the semen-stained dress?
His exit from office was shameful, with his pardons of despicable people to repay past political favors, and the trashing of the White House, which needed fumigating as well as a counting of the silver when the Clintons’ ragtag lot of Sixties' misfits, dropouts and circus runaways finally skulked away. (Who knew we would get even worse with Bush?)
After all of this, I have no desire to see Mrs. Clinton become president. One helping of the Clintons was enough.
Additionally, Mrs. Clinton has her full share of faults and scandals, which help explain why the public believes her to be dishonest and untrustworthy.
For example, the Uranium One deal, in which a Canadian mining company obtained a claim to mine uranium in the U.S., and did so. While Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State, the Canadian company entered into a deal to sell this interest to a Russian company. The head of the Canadian company made generous donations to the Clinton Foundation, and the State Department signed off on allowing Russia to take over control of about twenty percent of the mineable uranium in the U.S. This should be an on-going scandal.
Anyone considering voting for Mrs. Clinton should reflect on the revelation that came from some of her emails released in February. When the Korea, Colombia, and Panama trade agreements, the most recent of our trade fiascos, were being pushed through, Mrs. Clinton publicly stated that she opposed the deals, then secretly lobbying Congress to pass them. That alone should take her out of the running. It shows that none of her campaign statements, especially her new-found concern for the poor and vanishing middle class, and “fighting the banks”, can be taken seriously.
In this connection, think about what her campaign would be like, and what she would be saying, if Bernie Sanders had not started drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds, and started rapidly closing the gap with her in the polls? Compare her early campaign appearances to her present outpourings since Iowa and New Hampshire. Mrs. Clinton suddenly became a woman of the people, and along the way even disavowed the TPP and the Keystone Pipeline. Don’t expect any of these positions to hold if she should be elected.
It is interesting that Mrs. Clinton has now attached her campaign to a defense of the Obama administration. This is an obvious ploy to try to save the African-American vote by labeling Senator Sanders’ analyses of the problems causing the decline in the standard of living of most Americans, as being attacks on Obama.
She has also defended her own sloshing in the hog wallow of Wall Street campaign “donations” by pointing out that Obama has received more Wall Street money than any other politician up to this time, inferring that therefore both she and Obama are free from taint for taking all of that money.
Rather than exonerating them both, her admission explains why Obama (i) surrounded himself with Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Gary Gensler, and other Wall Streeters, (ii) let the bank CEO’s and senior officers off the hook in 2009 when real financial reform would have been possible, (iii) allowed the banks and AIG to return immediately to the payment of startlingly high bonuses for the officers and traders who caused the financial meltdown, (iv) adopted a policy for the Department of Justice under Eric Holder, and now Loretta Lynch, of not bringing criminal prosecutions against the banks or their guilty officers even when the crimes were admitted, (v) applied his policy of “let’s look forward, not back”, to the rating agencies, whose malfeasance in giving AAA ratings to junk CDO’s was inexcusable, (vi) took single payor off the table when the Affordable Care Act was being threshed out, vii) took reinstatement of Glass-Steagall off the table when financial reform was finally addressed by Congress, and (viii) pushed through the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade agreements with false promises of job growth and prosperity for American workers, and is similarly advocating for passage of approval of the TPP by Congress.
Unfortunately, Senator Sanders is in a position where it will be difficult for him to make a forthright response to Mrs. Clinton’s attacks in this area.
If Mrs. Clinton succeeds in becoming the Democratic nominee, there will be a number of Bernie Sanders supporters who will not vote for her under any circumstances. In this connection it is interesting to note how neocons such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan have come out for Mrs. Clinton over Trump. They see her as one of them, whereas Trump definitely is not.