Everyone with a job, and everyone who wants one, should vote for Hillary Clinton.
There are a lot of people who are pretty pissed off at the way the economy has been going for a while. And a lot of those people don’t like Hillary Clinton.
On the left, there are Bernie Sanders supporters, often long-time Democratic Party voters, who see Hillary Clinton as a big step backward into the clutches of banks, corporate influence-peddlers, and the like. A lot of folks remember some bad legislation Bill Clinton passed — welfare “reform,” criminal “justice” legislation that worsened mass incarceration — and have a bad taste in their mouths from it. And a lot of those folks are considering voting for Jill Stein, or even for Trump, with the idea that, if nothing else, he’ll disrupt the oligarchic and corrupt political system.
And on the right, there are folks who feel neglected by both major parties — but who care about America and care about American workers and are seriously considering voting for Donald Trump. They think that recent American trade policy has sent too many jobs overseas and recent American immigration policy has let too many foreign workers come and take jobs from Americans. And they think those policies were passed by crony capitalists who are friends with Hillary Clinton and who have funded her. Trump, by contrast, is supposedly not beholden to the corporate elites, and promises to change those policies.
I get it. Clinton’s not perfect. Her high-dollar speeches to Goldman Sachs, for example, are pretty outrageous. It’s reasonable to ask: “is she bought and paid for?”
But I don’t think she is bought. And I do think she’s the best candidate for the issues that I, and the folks I just described above, care about. Lemee tell you why. (By the way, I don’t have any affiliation with the Clinton campaign, although I’ve donated some money to it.)
Deeds, not Words
Yes, Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of corporate money. But she’s also been fighting for working class people her entire life. Let’s look at her record.
What we’ll see is a consistent history of fighting to help ordinary working folks, especially families with children, get by in the world.
She began her career working for the Children’s Defense Fund, where she successfully fought to ensure access to education for disabled children.
This is great for working families: she helped pass legislation that would require public schools to provide education for disabled kids, rather than impose that cost on parents or, all too often, leave them without an effective education at all.
After leaving the CDF, she first worked on the Congressional investigation of Richard Nixon, but then went right back to helping people who needed it. She ran a legal clinic for low-income folks at the University of Arkansas, and eventually became head of the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a federally funded agency that provides free legal help to people who can’t afford it.
Again, this is great, dedicated work for ordinary working folks. Legal aid lawyers fight to keep tenants in their homes against unjust evictions and foreclosures. They fight against wage theft, suing employers who stiff their workers. They work to help protect vulnerable people from domestic abuse. I know, I did that work for two years myself in rural Oregon.
And you know what else? She was effective. She was effective as fuck. She managed to get Congress to triple — TRIPLE — the LSC budget during her tenure, delivering that much more legal help to those who needed it the most.
Around the same time, she also founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the basics every child needs to thrive — education, health care, the important stuff.
When Bill was governor of Arkansas, she was in private law practice, but she was also, yet again, advocating for children and families. This New York Times article from 1993 summarizes her extensive work in Arkansas, which includes massive expansions in preschool funding, head start, fundraising for a children’s hospital, and working to increase teacher training and qualification standards throughout the state.
When Bill was president, yes, Bill did a lot of bad stuff. But Hillary is not Bill. They’re not the same person. And the stuff that she did was, yet again, real efforts to make life better for working families.
Let’s start with the big one. Bill put her in charge of the efforts to achieve health care reform.
This is a big deal for working folks. A really big deal. One study found that medical problems contributed to almost half of all bankruptcies in 2001. Why? Partly because health care in this country is incredibly, ridiculously, insanely expensive, even if you have insurance, and worse if you don’t. 20 years before Obamacare, Hillary Clinton led an effort that developed a proposal to comprehensively reform the health care system in this country.
Besides universal coverage and a basic benefit package, provisions included health insurance reform, regional alliances for structuring competition among health insurance plans, consumer choice of health plans, and provisions for Medicaid beneficiaries. Proposed mental health and substance abuse provisions included coverage of intensive nonresidential services, medical management, evaluation and assessment services, and case management.
As we know, this failed in Congress. But Hillary Clinton didn’t quit. Instead, she went to work on getting the most important stuff through in pieces. The biggest deal was the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a bipartisan effort that Clinton was instrumental in passing, and that got health care to millions of children.
And she kept fighting for health care! For example, when she was in the Senate, years later, she reached across the aisle with Republican Lindsey Graham to expand health benefits provided to members of the National Guard and Reserve.
This is her record. Yes, it has bad stuff. It has some blame for supporting some of the bad stuff Bill Clinton did, and it also has the serious mistake of voting for the Iraq war as a Senator in the Bush administration. But it also shows a consistent and dedicated committment to fighting for the things that make a real difference in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people just trying to get by.
What is She Proposing Now?
Unsurprisingly, given her decades and decades of commitment to working families, the centerpiece of her domestic proposals is a plan to radically expand access to child care. It turns out that child care is insanely expensive, and takes a huge proportion of the incomes of many working families, as well as forcing multiple-earner families to become single-earner families because they just don’t have access to child care.
Hillary Clinton wants to change all that. She has a proposal to make big investments in child care, to allow working families to get back to work and to actually keep what they earn.
Trump Loses Jobs, Clinton Gains Them.
Let’s compare economic plans. Donald Trump thinks (or claims to think) that you can bring more jobs back to America by closing the borders, by making it harder for people from other countries to work here, and by making it harder for companies to do business abroad.
But that’s actually not right. Economists have long recognized that trade is good for everyone, when managed correctly. To be sure, our elites have done a very bad job at managing it correctly — they have done little or nothing to ensure that everyone shares equally in the benefits of trade, and they’ve let multinational corporations plunder most of the gains.
But the solution is not to seal the economic and social borders and try to make everything outselves.
That’s why a Moody’s analysis suggests that Donald Trump’s economic plan would actually *cost* three and a half million jobs.
1. Trade: Trump’s idea to put big taxes on imports from China and Mexico would hurt growth, Moody’s finds. Americans would face higher prices at the store on many goods, inflation would rise overall, and the U.S. would get less foreign investment.
2. Immigration: The plan to limit immigration and deport up to 11 million illegal immigrants would be costly — for the government and businesses.
3. Taxes: Trump proposes large tax cuts for individuals and businesses. At the same time, Trump wouldn’t touch the big drivers of government spending — Social Security and Medicare. As a result, the tax cuts are costly. The Tax Policy Center estimates Trump’s plan would add nearly $10 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
”More than one-third of the proposed tax cuts on personal income will go to the top 1% of income earners, with the average taxpayer in this group receiving a reduction in their tax bill of $275,000. Taxpayers in the bottom 99% of income earners will receive a tax cut of less than $2,500,” Moody’s writes.
Well, what about Clinton? She proposes to make use of America’s advantages, and help create innovations to grow the global economy and share the benefits to all. In her words:
In her first 100 days as president, Hillary will work with both parties on a plan to create the next generation of good-paying American jobs. That plan will include the biggest investment in American infrastructure in decades — including connecting every household to broadband by 2020; building a cleaner, more resilient energy grid; recommitting to scientific research that can create new industries; and cutting red tape so that small businesses can get off the ground.
This is positive, pro-growth jobs creation that doesn’t try to preserve disappearing jobs for Americans by shutting the doors to the outside world, but tries to increase jobs for Americans by taking American advantages in science, in technology, and in entrepreneurship and investing in the infrastucture to actually bring them to market and promote economic wellbeing for all.
And it’s work she’s been doing ever since she was in the Senate, when she worked on unsexy but important issues like helping rural farmers get their goods to market and expanding broadband internet access.
She’s also a liberal. You know this. Unsurprisingly, her plan also includes a proposal to increase taxes on the very rich, and to close corporate tax loopholes. She also supports increasing the minimum wage, and supports making college education more affordable.
What about the economic analysis? Well, according to Moody’s, her plan would add 3.2 million more jobs than under current policy.
Hillary Clinton wants to invest in clean energy. Donald Trump says climate change is a myth, and would rather invest in toxic and unsustainable coal mining. (That won’t work.) Yet Hillary Clinton’s growth-first and innovation-first economic plan nets seven million more jobs than Trump’s wall-building.
What about Character?
But a lot of people think that Hillary Clinton is dishonest. “How can we trust these plans,” they ask, “when Clinton is in the pay of the bankers and is a notorious liar?”
Here’s the thing though. That’s not true. Hillary Clinton is not a liar. Politifact, the nonpartisan fact-checking site, rates many more of her claims as true, and rates many more of Trump’s claims as false. Check out this graphic for a vivid illustration of the honesty gap between the two.
So where does this Hillary-as-Liar reputation come from? It comes from the 1990’s. For those of us who are ancient enough to remember, much of the 90’s was an extended war between Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress —they investigated him for some real estate dealings (and never found anything), and of course for lying about getting oral sex.
In the course of this process, a lot—a lot—of ridiculous allegations were flung against Hillary. For example, some nutty conspiracy theorists actually accused her of having White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster, who committed suicide in 1993, murdered. There was never any evidence for anything remotely like that, but people flung the accusation anyway, because they were looking for anything to use to take down her husband.
It turns out that when you make wild accusations against someone for a quarter-century, some of them tend to stick, regardless of their merits. The perception that Hillary Clinton is somehow more dishonest than any other politicians (all politicians, from Abe Lincoln on down, have a basic reserve of dishonesty) is nothing more than the lingering effect of 25 years of political warfare directed against her. Pure and simple.
Now look at Trump.
Trump, by contrast, is a massive liar about everything. Everything. This isn’t an article about why Trump is bad, it’s about why Clinton is good, so I won’t spend too much time on this (I’m not even going to talk about the racism, or the cozying up to evil dictators like Vladimir Putin, or the possible Mafia connections, or the asking Russia to spy on us, or the threatening to betray our NATO allies, or threatening torture, or pretending he can get Mexico to pay for a wall, or threatening to ban Muslims, or threatening to punch Michael Bloomberg, or shamefully insulting John McCain and Humayun Khan and just about everyone else who has put on a uniform and faced shot and shell for this country… oh for fuck’s sake…), but I’ve gotta say a few things.
Let’s start with one of the biggest. While Hillary Clinton was fighting for working families, Trump was fleecing them with the “Trump University” scam. He told people that they’d get an education in real estate, but instead he stole thousands of dollars from them and gave them nothing.
One sales manager for Trump University, Ronald Schnackenberg, recounted how he was reprimanded for not pushing a financially struggling couple hard enough to sign up for a $35,000 real estate class, despite his conclusion that it would endanger their economic future. He watched with disgust, he said, as a fellow Trump University salesman persuaded the couple to purchase the class anyway.
“I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme,” Mr. Schnackenberg wrote in his testimony, “and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
How can you trust anyone about whom the Attorney General of New York, one of the many people suing him, says:
“More than 5,000 people across the country who paid Donald Trump $40 million to teach them his hard sell tactics got a hard lesson in bait-and-switch,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. “Mr. Trump used his celebrity status and personally appeared in commercials making false promises to convince people to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn’t afford for lessons they never got.
”But,” you say, “Trump’s not beholden to the rich elites, so he can break their grip on economic policy!”
Sure, maybe he could. But would he? Trump is a rich elite, and he has a long history of only doing what’s in his personal interest.
Suppose, for example, that you disagree with me and the economists, and you think that more trade and immigration restrictions would be good for American workers. Just because Trump says he’ll do that doesn’t mean he’ll do that. He’s a pathological liar, remember?
You want proof? Here’s a shitload of proof. Trump just imported 78 foreign workers to do low wage jobs on his golf clubs. That’s right. The filthy lying hypocrite just did exactly the thing he claims to be fighting against. Edited a bit for length:
This month, Trump is bringing jobs to Florida, as he looks to hire 78 servers, housekeepers, and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and the nearby Trump National Golf Club, Jupiter.
But instead of making sure those jobs go to Americans, he is seeking to import foreign workers for the positions, which pay $10.17 an hour for housekeepers, $11.13 an hour for servers, and $12.74 for cooks. He filed applications this month claiming he couldn’t find enough Americans to do that work, and is seeking temporary visas to bring in 65 workers at Mar-a-Lago along with another seven waiters and six cooks at the golf club.
Last year, Tom Veenstra, a senior director at Palm Beach’s career services center, told BuzzFeed News that he had “hundreds of people in our database that would qualify for a lot of those hospitality jobs.”
In an email Wednesday, Veenstra said his agency, which is chartered by the state of Florida, has a database of 1,327 Palm Beach County residents interested in server, cook, and chef positions.
In addition to this latest request for 78 visas, in the year since Trump launched his presidential campaign, companies owned by him or bearing his name had already sought and won permission from the Department of Labor to hire at least 149 foreign guest workers.
When Trump does hire Americans, he doesn’t pay them. There are hundreds of ordinary, day-to-day working Americans who have been stiffed by Donald Trump’s companies.
At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.
Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.
In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.
The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.
He continues stiffing people who work for him to this very day. Early in his primary campaign, he hired the “Freedom Kids,” a singing-dancing act of little girls, to perform at his events. Well, he cheated them too, and now their manager is threatening to sue.
Even if you think Trump’s proposals would be good for ordinary working folks, with a record like that, why would you ever think he’d carry them out?
