Iowans: Stay Home and Sulk or Vote to Defeat Trump

Caption: Maria Houser Conzemius

Did you watch the Clinton-Trump debate Monday night, 9/26/16? My husband and I did. Despite Trump's bullying Lester Holt into giving him more time than he had coming to him, Hillary Clinton kept her cool and let him look as impetuous, petulant, and lacking in impulse control as he really is. He lied repeatedly, and while Holt called him out on some of his lies, it was impossible to call him out on all of them because there were so many. So Hillary called him out on his lies. She called him out on stealing wages from his workers and contractors. She pointed out that there was an architect in the audience who Trump hadn't paid for his work.

Trump jutted out his chin and said, "Well, maybe I was dissatisfied with his work."

That's his standard excuse for not paying his workers and contractors. If they object to his excuses for not paying them, he sues them. Deep pockets usually intimidate workers. Some contractors go so far out on a limb to serve Trump that when he doesn't pay them, he forces them into bankruptcy. Trump is proud of paying no federal taxes in the tax return we know about.

"That's smart," he said during the debate.

He hasn't released his tax returns for 2015 and claims it's because he's being audited. The Internal Revenue Service has made it clear that there's no problem with revealing your tax returns while you're being audited, but Trump continues to give the same tired excuse for not releasing his tax returns, though every nominee for the past 40 years has released his tax returns: "I'm being audited."

Hillary speculated on some of the reasons that Trump might not want people to know what's in his tax returns:

1. He's not as rich as he says he is.

2. He's not as charitable as he would like us to think.

3. He does not want us to know that he owes $650 million to Wall Street and foreign nationals.

4. Maybe he didn't pay any federal income tax in 2015. He paid no federal income tax in the year he applied for a casino license and was forced to reveal how much he paid in federal income taxes.

Some young adults who caucused for Bernie Sanders like I did avoided the debate and actually are proud that they avoided informing themselves. I caucused for Hillary in 2008 and was mad as hell when she lost. There were Obama shenanigans that contributed to her loss and I was very unhappy about them. But when it was a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama, I voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. McCain was overtly misogynistic, said he wouldn’t be in Congress for the vote for equal pay for equal work and wouldn’t vote for the bill if he was, and so was Romney with his “binders full of women.”

In other words, when push came to shove, I sucked it up. I voted for the nominee, Obama, who defeated my candidate, Hillary Clinton. I didn’t stay home and sulk. I didn’t vote for a third-party candidate. I voted for the lesser of two evils, and believe me, that was my opinion at the time and it hasn’t changed. Why? Because Obama let Wall Street CEOs off the hook by hiring a Wall Street white-collar criminal defense lawyer, Eric Holder, as his Attorney General. The only crooked CEO who went to prison was Bernie Madoff, who made the mistake of ripping off rich people (in a pyramid scheme). Taxpayers bailed out Wall Street CEOs who gambled away our economy without making Wall Street accountable for how they spent the money (they gave bonuses to the very financial products officers who bankrupted them in the case of AIG) and at the expense of Main Street. Obama justified that decision by saying that Wall Street CEOs were “unethical but did nothing illegal.” That’s not true. Crimes committed were securities fraud, accounting fraud, honest services violations (mail fraud statute), bribery, perjury and making false statements to federal investigators, Sarbanes-Oxley violations (certifying false accounting statements), racketeering (RICO) offenses and criminal antitrust violations, federal aid disclosure regulations (related to Federal Reserve loans), and personal conduct offenses (many forms: drug use, tax evasion, and the use of prostitution for business purposes (see Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, by Charles H. Ferguson, director of the Academy Award-winning film Inside Job.)

Obama supports the Trans-Pacific [Trade] Partnership which includes the investiture of investor-appointed judges who would decide who wins in any trade dispute, completely bypassing American courts and the courts of any other nation, resulting in a worldwide oligarchy. Why is it that Republicans and Obama both support the TPP and most Democrats do not? Corporations, not workers, would be the main beneficiaries.

So in my view, anybody who stays home and doesn’t vote or votes for a third-party candidate in Iowa, one of the few battleground states in this election is helping to throw our state into Donald Trump’s hands. Donald Trump is currently ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa, but not by much.

Iowa, which already claims Gov.-for-Life Terry Branstad (R); U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R); “make ‘em squeal” U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R); 4th District Congressman Steve King (R), 1st District Congressman Rod Blum(R), and other embarrassments to the state will claim victory for narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, self-dealing, wage-stealing, fraudulent, litigious Donald Trump in November if we don’t have enough grown-ups show up at the polls November 8th.