Letter to the Electoral College

Dear Elector,

I write you as an American, a Texan, and a U.S. Army veteran. Please consider casting your vote for Hillary Clinton on December 19^th. Allow me to explain why I make this request.

Hillary Clinton has received 63.7 million of the popular vote. Donald Trump has received 62 million, making Mrs. Clinton the clear choice of the majority of American voters.

Donald Trump’s campaign was built on impractical promises designed to stir up racism and activate white nationalists. Among his more irresponsible promises:

• To build a wall on our southern border and “make Mexico pay for it” – a plan that is not only fiscally irresponsible but also served to insult and alienate the Mexican government.
• To ban Muslims from entering the United States – a plan that violates human rights and our constitution would cause needless suffering to innocent refugees fleeing war.
• To impose tariffs on goods produced in China and Mexico – which violates international trade rules and could lead to a trade war which would cost thousands of Americans their jobs and have a detrimental effect on the world’s economy.
• To withdraw the U.S. from NAFTA – which would not increase American jobs and could result in the U.S. being unable to negotiate favorable trade deals in the future.
• To repeal the Affordable Care Act – The ACA has resulted in the lowest ever uninsured rate in the U.S., has ensured adequate health care coverage for all insured, and has saved Americans approximately $2.6 trillion in health care costs. Repealing the ACA would result in economic hardships and lost lives due to lack of healthcare.
• To renegotiate with Iran – The deal that President Obama struck with Iran resulted in Iran shipping 25,000 pounds of uranium out of the country, dismantling 2/3 of its centrifuges, filling its heavy water reactor with concrete, and providing unprecedented access to its nuclear facilities. It’s hard to see what Trump hopes to achieve by “renegotiating” but it seems very likely that the results will be an erosion of our relationship with Iran and further destabilization of the Middle East.
• To “bomb the shit out of ISIS” – Trump’s ignorance about the nature of international relations and his accusations that the U.S. military is “weak and ineffective” is deeply troubling and offensive. The U.S. has the largest, most modern, and most effective military in the world. “Bombing the shit” out of any place tends to further radicalize the survivors without accomplishing any positive military or political goal. Trump is a loose cannon on the international stage and likely to at best embarrass the country, at worst plunge us into deeply destructive and pointless wars.

Donald Trump’s proposed cabinet picks illustrate the kind of president he will be and presents a clear threat to all non-whites and women in the country:

• Attorney General – Jeff Sessions. Three decades ago Sessions was deemed too racist to be a federal judge, having once called a black lawyer “boy” and advising him to “be careful how you talk to white folks.” He has spent his career fighting against all advances for racial equality, women’s rights, due process, or voting rights. His appointment is a clear message that Trump’s America will provide justice only to white men. White supremacists are drooling.
• National Security Advisor – Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn is known for exaggerating his credentials and his accomplishments. He served in Iraq as General McChrystal’s yes man and was known to bully anyone who disagreed with him. His brief tenure at the DIA was a disaster, his attempts to “shake up” the organization drowned in his own naiveté and arrogance. Even more worrying, Flynn was paid to speak in Moscow to honor a pro-Putin propaganda outlet, RT.
• Director of the CIA – Mike Pompeo. Mike rose to fame as the congressman from Kansas who led the expensive and completely fallacious “Benghazi” attacks on Mrs. Clinton. He has also called for renewing the bulk collection of American’s domestic telecommunications records and advocates for the use of torture in interrogations, both illegal. He has close ties to Koch industries and has received large contributions from Koch employees. Pompeo would be the most blatantly partisan CIA director in that organization’s history.

The list of Donald Trump’s ethical challenges is far too long for me to list here. A little research reveals that he has no standards of professional or private behavior. He is completely without morals and acts without thought of legality or harm to others. Here are a few of the more newsworthy issues:

• Has been accused by at least a dozen different women of sexual assault and has been recorded bragging about assaulting women.
• He has been accused by a victim and a witness of violently raping a 13-year-old child, who withdrew her charges after receiving an avalanche of death threats from Trump supporters.
• Donald Trump settled a lawsuit for his fraudulent Trump University for $25 million, then bragged on Twitter how it was a “small fraction of the potential award.”
• On 11/21, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with top media execs, and then proceeded to harangue and bully the attendees, saying that the media were a bunch of deceitful liars and that they got “everything wrong” in their coverage of him.
• He registered 8 companies in Saudi Arabia during the campaign, remaining today the president or director of 4 of them. He said of the Saudis during a campaign rally “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
• Has been actively soliciting business from agents of foreign governments – a clear violation of the constitution that states “no person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever from any king, prince, or foreign state.”
• He has refused to put his business holdings in a true blind trust, insisting that his children would run his business and he “wouldn’t talk to them about it.” This creates a clear conflict of interest, especially where his heavily leveraged real estate holdings are concerned. How can he make disinterested decisions about economic policy?
• Only 15% of Trump’s statements during his campaign have been rated as true or mostly true by fact-checkers. The American people and our allies can have no assurance that he is speaking or will ever speak the truth in his role as the President.
• Trump has been sued over 3,500 times in the course of his career, often for “stiffing” contractors for work they have performed for his businesses. Even compared to other businesses of similar size and type, this is an exceptional number of lawsuits. Trump has settled in at least 100 of these cases, sometimes paying thousands of dollars in damages.
• Trump’s family’s decision to remain in New York means that the U.S. taxpayers will pay $1 million A DAY to provide security for them. Considering that some of that money is rent that the Secret Service will pay to Trump Tower, this is an unacceptable waste and ethically untenable.

But the most important reason, to me, to deny Trump the presidency is because of his clearly dangerous relationship with Russia and with the Russian autocrat Putin. We know that Trump’s campaign manager had questionable if not illegal entanglements with Russia, that Trump surrounded himself by pro-Russia advisors, that Putin manipulated Wikileaks to influence the election, that Trump had access to these Wikileaks documents before they had been reported by the press, that Trump had server hookups directly to a Russian bank, and that Putin and the Russian parliament gleefully celebrated Trump’s announced win. This tied with the fact that Trump continues to refuse to release any tax returns that might clear him of financial entanglements with Russia, should be a warning bell to anyone considering the impact of a Trump presidency. Will Trump put Russia’s interests ahead of our long-standing relationships with NATO and our allies? Will Trump’s friendship enable further atrocities by Putin in the Crimea and Syria?

For all of these reasons, I implore you to put the good of your country ahead of partisan politics and cast your vote for Hillary Clinton, the ethical, experienced candidate with the majority of votes in this election.

Thank you,

Geraldine Mongold

Breaking circles

As if the election wasn’t bad enough, sitting at Scholz’s Garten watching the returns with my daughter crying next to me, the days since the election have been some of the most wretched I have experienced. Yes, there have been some hugs and a glass or two raised with gentle friends. But there’s also been an enormous amount of dumbassery.

I’ve been doing the activist thing long enough to have acquired an assortment of motley friends, a little insight, and some ‘cred.’ It started by showing up at an event at the Oklahoma state capitol. Just showing up, wearing the tee-shirt someone gave me, chatting with some folks. I showed up to another event. I moved to Austin for a job. I marched with the Occupy folks. I didn’t know anything except that I was frustrated and wanted to make a difference. It seemed like change was possible if we just spoke up and educated people and made issues visible. 

Now we struggle to make sense of a country that has selected, by grace of the anachronistic electoral college, the most disgustingly unqualified, ignorant, angry, bigoted presidential candidate that our country has ever known. That he will lead us to economic and environment disaster is certain. That he and his cronies could and desire to destroy our democracy seems like a pretty high probability also.

There has been outrage. There has been marching in the streets every day. There has been an outpouring of grief and confusion and pain on social media. And suddenly there are a lot of people saying “What should I have done? What can I do now?” Many of them are young and just becoming aware. Some of them are older folks who have maybe never been political beyond voting and going to the school board meetings.

I know there have always been and always will be ignorant, violent, hateful people in the world. Their existence does not surprise me. But what has surprised and distressed me beyond imagining is the reaction of many of the activists I know.

I don’t know very well how to explain, but I’ll try to illustrate the point with a safety pin. Someone pointed out that people in Britain started wearing safety pins after the Brexit vote to indicate their solidarity with immigrants and their willingness to help people victimized by racism. So folks here got the idea to do the same. Stories of people finding the courage to wear the pins and of people who thereby found kindness and help from strangers began to trickle in. But activists began a furious barrage of criticism. Apparently this new crop of people who are trying to do some good, trying to find their voice, just don’t have the cred to wear the pin. They haven’t been marching in the streets with us. They haven’t been vocal about black lives and justice. They don’t understand the risks. They don’t understand the responsibility. They haven’t done all the hard work. 

I don’t understand this tribalism. I don’t condone this exclusive attitude. And I’m beyond depressed that the people who are so busy criticizing and standard setting are women. It struck me today, as I sat on the front steps of City Hall for a protest, crying softly behind my sunglasses, that this is no different than the hundreds of other ways that women enforce the patriarchy by policing each other’s dress and behavior and ensuring that women who step out of line are ostracized and punished. It’s the mentality of powerlessness, the tactics of oppression turned against the other victims of that oppression. It’s a purity test that no one can pass. It holds us down instead of lifting us up, damages our cause rather than advancing it.

I may not have been much of a soldier, back in my military days, but I did learn the difference between defense and offense, and which was more likely to bring victory. I also learned that you have to plan and fight your battles with the soldiers you have in your platoon. The strong ones; the weak ones, the seasoned troops, the kid just out of basic, the expert marksman, the swaggering fool who’s likely to get the first bullet. You don’t get to pick and choose. You just figure out how to make it work with what you’ve got.

I’m dropping out of most of the groups I’ve worked with in the past. I realize my sphere has been too small, my mind too comfortable. I have no idea what the future holds for any of us, least of all me. But I do know that I’m not going to circle the wagons if that means leaving people outside in the cold.