Thinking about voting for Jill Stein (or any candidate not named “Hillary Rodham Clinton”) in November 2016? You probably already know that by next fall, a lot of your liberal friends and family members will be about as open to that discussion as loyal Ingsok members in 1984 were to Emmanuel Goldstein’s criticisms of Big Brother. Hell, a lot of those minds will have been thoroughly closed by the time people start voting in the primaries, and the Hillary machine has really geared up with its demonization of Bernie Sanders as a Crazy Unelectable Commie. Right now—the summer before her inevitable coronation—might be the last time you can talk to some of those people about the case against Clinton without being accused of being a stooge of Jeb Bush (or Scott Walker, or whoever). With that in mind, here’s a handy list of five facts to bring up in those conversations.
1. Many people know that Hillary Clinton is a life-long warmonger, from her humble beginnings as a Goldwater Girl to her Senate vote for the invasion of Iraq. What’s less widely appreciated is that she’s at least arguably a war criminal. She was one of the strongest voices in the Obama administration pushing for a war in Libya that even Attorney General Eric Holder and the President’s own Office of White House Counsel found to be in violation of the War Powers Act. There were several attempts on both sides to negotiate a cease-fire, and Secretary Clinton shut down the negotiations every time.
2. Hilary Clinton was one of the leading spokespeople for the administration that repealed Glass-Steagall. When an audience member at a recent Clinton speech asked if she’d restore it, she had him escorted out by security. Needless to say, she has yet to answer the question.
3. Think she’s going to start prosecuting Wall Street crooks (as she’s hinted she might, in the course of campaign-stop pandering)? Or that she’ll act meaningfully to protect the environment? Well, it’s safe to say that the hedge fund managers and fossil fuel lobbyists who are funding her campaign don’t share those worries.
4. With the odious Scott Walker in the mix, many people will bring up Hillary’s alleged support for organized labor. Don’t buy it. She sat on Walmart’s Board of Directors for six years while the company waged a relentless war against union organizers, without ever once even hinting at disagreement with the companies labor policies. She also served as an attorney for Walmart. In her memoir Living History, she only mentions these ties once, and expresses no regret about any of it. She had to leave Walmart’s Board when her husband became President, but this isn’t ancient history. Walmart executives and lobbyists donated an estimated $20,000 to her Senate campaign, and the Clinton Foundation has received millions of dollars of Walmart cash.
5. She’s scored points on the campaign trail by saying that ‘black lives matter.’ When considering this, it’s worth looking at the actions of the rebels she supported in Libya.
“Racist pogroms…were characteristic of the Libyan rebellion from its very inception, when 50 sub-Saharan African migrants were burnt alive in Al-Bayda on the second day of the insurgency. An Amnesty International report from September 2011 made it clear that this was no isolated incident: “When al-Bayda, Beghazi, Derna, Misrata and other cities first fell under the control of the NTC in February, anti-Gaddafi forces carried out house raids, killing and other violent attacks” against sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans, and ‘what we are seeing in western Libya is a very similar pattern to what we have seen in Benghazi and Misrata after those cities fell to the rebels’ – arbitrary detention, torture and execution of black people.”
To be fair, most Hillary supporters don’t know about any of this—but how much can African lives possibly matter to people who do know, and who support her anyway?
