Sep 14, 2016 3 min read

Why vote for Hillary Clinton? For weeks, her reasons have been, “Trump is worse than me” and “I’m a woman.” Last week, she changed the message. Now, she wants you to vote for her based “on the totality of my record.”

OK, let’s look at the evidence in totality.

In the 1980s, she and a bunch of other Southern Democrats, including her husband, formed the Democratic Leadership Council. The purpose of the DLC was to steer the Democratic Party away from the interests of working people to instead serve the interests of financial corporations, hence the millions of dollars given to the Clintons by those corporations over the years. She is on record for supporting her husband’s signing the legislation that deregulated Wall Street banks in his presidency. The banks made billions in profit, while we suffered the economic crash of 2008 caused by that deregulation, and we still do.

She supported her husband’s signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which resulted in the loss of millions of jobs in the United States, as well as the illegal immigration into the United States of hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasant farmers who couldn’t compete with NAFTA-driven U.S. corn exports to Mexico.

She supported her husband’s invasion of Yugoslavia to supposedly prevent Serbia’s genocide against its Muslim population. Years later, we now know the reasons given were fabricated so we could carve out a chunk of Serbian territory called Kosovo and build our biggest overseas military base there.

She supported her husband’s sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which we now know resulted in the deaths of about 500,000 children. As senator, Clinton voted to invade Iraq. This fabricated war resulted in the death of millions, the devastation of a country, the creation of ISIS, a cost to us of trillions of taxpayer dollars and the animosity of much of the world. As Obama’s secretary of state, she made the decision to invade and destroy Libya.

Is Trump worse? I’m not so sure. I do know many of her current advisors were George W. Bush’s advisers. That’s pretty scary. I also can’t imagine why you would consider this woman to be a suitable role model for women.

To set the record straight, I’ll still vote for a woman in the presidential election, Jill Stein of the Green Party. A person who has the highest ethical and moral standards and someone whose guiding principle is to serve the interests of the people at large rather than enrich herself at their expense.

Robert Hanham

Carmichaels