1. Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.
2. The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested “swing state”) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning.
3. One of these candidates, Trump, denies the existence of global warming, calls for increasing use of fossil fuels, dismantling of environmental regulations, and refuses assistance to India and other developing nations as called for in the Paris agreement, the combination of which could, in four years, take us to a catastrophic tipping point. Trump has also pledged to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, offered to provide for the defense of supporters who have assaulted African American protesters at his rallies, stated his “openness to using nuclear weapons,” supports a ban on Muslims entering the US, and regards “the police in this country as absolutely mistreated and misunderstood” while having “done an unbelievable job of keeping law and order.” Trump has also pledged to increase military spending while cutting taxes on the rich, hence shredding what remains of the social welfare “safety net” despite pretenses.
4. The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.
5. [The previous point] should constitute sufficient basis to voting for Clinton where a vote is potentially consequential — namely, in a contested, “swing” state.
6. However, the left should also recognize that, should Trump win based on its failure to support Clinton, it will repeatedly face the accusation (based in fact), that it lacks concern for those sure to be most victimized by a Trump administration.
7. Often this charge will emanate from establishment operatives who will use it as a bad faith justification for defeating challenges to corporate hegemony either in the Democratic Party or outside of it. They will ensure that it will be widely circulated in mainstream media channels with the result that many of those who would otherwise be sympathetic to a left challenge will find it a convincing reason to maintain their ties with the political establishment rather than breaking with it, as they must.
8. Conclusion: by dismissing a “lesser evil” electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.

—Noam Chomsky
An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting)

Sometimes it’s difficult to conjure a clear memory of US political life before Donald Trump. But one of its most salient oddities was that the establishment elite considered it crass (if not outright slanderous) to suggest, in ideologically mixed company, that only one of the two major parties drew upon the support of bigots for political power.

This was true until about a year ago. That’s when Trump, who makes a habit of repurposing neo-Nazi propaganda for messaging on social media, began his march to the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and Occam’s razor finally sliced through the more strained explanations.

—Brian Beutler
Conservatives’ Silence After Trump’s Anti-Semitic Attack Is a Bad Omen

Most Americans have never heard of donor-advised funds and would be surprised to learn that, measured in donated dollars, the second-most-popular “charity” in 2015 (just behind the United Way) was not the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or Harvard or other universities. It was Fidelity Charitable, an organization created and serviced by Fidelity Investments for the purpose of holding charitable donations. Fidelity Charitable acts as a middleman, attracting its customers’ charitable donations and managing them in separate client accounts. Money in such donor-advised funds is invested and held until the clients give instructions (“advise”) about distributions to operating charities.

Because of a 1991 IRS ruling obtained by Fidelity (and similar rulings obtained by other commercially sponsored DAFs), clients get the same tax benefits when they transfer property to their donor-advised funds that they would get by making outright contributions to a museum, soup kitchen, university, or any other federally recognized charity. But no deadline is imposed for the eventual distribution of these funds to an operating charity. If a donor fails to distribute the account during her lifetime, she can pass on the privilege of making distributions to her children or grandchildren or anyone else she chooses. The effect of these rules is that assets that have been given the tax benefits of charitable donations can be held in a DAF for decades or even centuries, all the while earning management fees for the financial institutions managing the funds, and producing no social value.

—Lewis Cullman and Ray Madoff
The Undermining of American Charity

The UK, by its own volition, has been the route of austerity… They voted for it themselves. You know, similar outcomes, not as bad as you`ve seen across the eurozone [eg, Greece, Spain], still their economy`s not been great. Most people have very little to show over the last eight years, nine years. You`ve had cuts in public services. National Health Service has been a big issue. People are talking about older people. Older people need health care.

By a lot of accounts, the National Health Service has deteriorated because of budget cuts. Hasn`t been forced by Brussels but nonetheless, people may not realize that. You know, the Brexit people are blaming that on immigrants. It wasn`t an immigrant story. The fact is people they voted for
chose to make those cuts. They should have realized that but they didn`t… they blamed Brussels.

—Dean Baker
On All In With Chris Hayes

In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned the Crown in more forceful language, asserting that the king had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty” by perpetuating the African slave trade. Calling it “piratical warfare,” Jefferson asserted that “a CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain” was so “Determined to keep open a market where MEN” were bought and sold that he used his “negative” to suppress “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”

The Continental Congress removed Jefferson’s tirade from the Declaration, in part because it simply did not ring true. The colonists, for the most part, had been willing and eager purchasers of slaves. Nor is there any evidence that either Jefferson or any of the other leaders of Virginia had any interest in actually ending slavery. Virginia’s attempt to ban the trade was purely economic, and not based on any moral opposition to slavery. Similarly, the Crown’s refusal to allow them to limit or end the trade was economic.

—Paul Finkelman
The Abolition of the Slave Trade

Just think about what has happened when it comes to control over the world’s fifth most populous (and very oil-rich) country [Brazil]. The democratically elected president was impeached despite no allegations of personal corruption — by politicians who are knee-deep in bribery and kickback scandals. The primary pretext used to impeach her has just been debunked by the Senate’s own independent expert report. The corruption-plagued man they installed in her place — who currently has a 70 percent disapproval rating, and whom 60 percent of the country wants impeached — is now secretly meeting with the very judges whose supposed independence, credibility, and integrity were the prime argument against calling this a “coup,” all while he plots to save his bribery-enriched fellow party member. And while all this happens, they are blithely proceeding to impose a right-wing agenda of austerity and privatization that democracy would never allow.

—Glenn Greenwald
Major New Brazil Events Expose the Fraud of Dilma’s Impeachment

I for one am shocked that when terrorists strike the Istanbul airport, there’s not an outpouring of grief and sympathy from the west. Where’s all my Facebook friends changing their image status to the Turkish flag like they did with the French flag after the Paris attacks? Where’s all the talks about the threat to the glorious Turkish civilization? Where’s the 24/7 news coverage? It’s almost as if these things only matter to Americans if they happen to other white countries! If it’s outside Europe or one of its white settler states, it’s just another thing happening to those people.

—Erik Loomis
Where’s the Empathy for Istanbul?

Alito attempts to get around Smith through a kind of bait and switch. “A law that discriminates against religiously motivated conduct is not ‘neutral,'” Alito writes, and he tries to paint this law as one that singles out religious conduct — and religious conduct alone — for inferior treatment. “The [Washington State Board of Pharmacy] has specifically targeted religious objections,” Alito claims. “Upon issuing the regulations, the Board sent a guidance document to pharmacies warning that ‘[t]he rule does not allow a pharmacy to refer a patient to another pharmacy to avoid filling the prescription due to moral or ethical objections.'”

Did you catch what Alito did there? First, he complains that the state “specifically targeted religious objections.” Then he supports this claim by noting the Board’s warning that “the rule does not allow a pharmacy to refer a patient to another pharmacy to avoid filling the prescription due to moral or ethical objections.” But “moral and ethical” objections are an entirely different concept than “religious” objections. The implication of Alito’s opinion is that the only basis for a moral or ethical viewpoint is religious faith. But that is an offensive suggestion that redefines the words “moral” and “ethical” in an idiosyncratic way.

—Ian Millhiser
Justice Alito’s Bizarre And Offensive Attack On Atheists

The racists have successfully articulated a broad anti-establishment sentiment — originating in class injuries, regional decline, postindustrial devastation, generational anxieties, etc — along bigoted, national chauvinist lines. The vote cannot be reduced to racism and nationalism — but that is the primary way in which it has been organised and recruited and directed, and that is the primary way in which the outcome will be experienced. That this was achieved so soon after the fascist murder of a center-left, pro-immigrant MP, is stunning in a way. It says something about the truculence of some of the chauvinism on display. It says something about the profound sense of loss which a reasserted “Britishness” is supposed to compensate for.

There is a lot of finger-wagging on Twitter and elsewhere about how the exit voters have just triggered economic self-destruction. House prices will fall, savings will be diminished, the pound will weaken, jobs will dry up. Well, that’s all true. Except. Not everyone benefits from the insane property market. Not everyone has savings. Not everyone benefits, as the City does, from a strong pound. Manufacturing has suffered from that priority. Large parts of the country have been hemorrhaging jobs for years. “The economy” is not a neutral terrain experienced by everyone in exactly the same way. And some of the votes, coming in core Labour areas, not necessarily strongly racist areas at first glance, indicate that. So people have voted against an economy that wasn’t working to their benefit. That doesn’t mean the practical alternative will not be worse. I suspect it will be a great deal worse.

—Richard Seymour
EU Referendum Vote