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Luminous Animal

Luminous Animal's Journal
Luminous Animal's Journal
November 19, 2015

….

October 23, 2015

I do believe you've got that backwards.

Dylan Matthews: In 2007, you had some concerns about the immigration bill being weighed by the Senate, and voted against it. Now that the new Gang of Eight bill is out of committee, what do you make of it?

Sen. Bernie Sanders: Thanks for calling. Let me just say this. I'm a strong supporter of immigration reform, and of the need to provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. I very strongly support the DREAM Act, and will continue to strongly support it. I very strongly believe, as someone who knows what's going on in the dairy industry in Vermont, that there's no question we need to create a status for immigrant workers in agriculture, and I think the committee is making good progress there.

My concerns are in regards to where we stand in terms of guest workers programs, made worse by amendments offered by Senator Hatch. What I do not support is, under the guise of immigrant reform, a process pushed by large corporations which results in more unemployment and lower wages for American workers.


Southern Poverty Law Conference - Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States

https://www.splcenter.org/20130218/close-slavery-guestworker-programs-united-states

Under the current H-2 program overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), employers brought about 106,000 guestworkers into this country in 2011 — approximately 55,000 for agricultural work and another 51,000 for jobs in forestry, seafood processing, landscaping, construction and other non-agricultural industries.

But far from being treated like “guests,” these workers are systematically exploited and abused. Unlike U.S. citizens, guestworkers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a competitive labor market — the ability to change jobs if they are mistreated. Instead, they are bound to the employers who “import” them. If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation.

Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are routinely:

Cheated out of wages

Forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs

Held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents

Subjected to human trafficking and debt servitude

Forced to live in squalid conditions

Denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.




October 8, 2015

So you support the Rovian candidate, eh? The liar? I quote you below (emphasis mine)

Hillary Clinton's Released White House Records show she Lied about Opposing NAFTA

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steven_l_080320_hillary_clinton_s_re.htm

In fact, the documents released today show a meeting that Hillary chaired at the White House on November 10, 1993 where she promoted the passage of NAFTA to 120 people. Reports are coming out in every news agency pointing out the contradictions between her stated positions since announcing her bid for the Presidency and everything before that.

One of the things you would expect of someone who really has good experience and judgment is that they can articulate a basic set of principles and positions on issues that they can run on and defend and that stay relatively static. I'm not saying you have to stick to them in the face of overwhelming evidence that one of your positions has been proven to be wrong, like George W. Bush does, even someone who has good experience and judgment occasionally changes their mind. That is not what we have with Hillary. Hillary gives a different opinion on the same subjects every couple of weeks depending on her audience and what she thinks it will net her. As evidence of this is now coming out and is going to be presented to the American people in the starkest terms, how can one be expected to trust her to do anything that she says she is going to do? How can one really know what she believes or intends to do about anything? The only things Hillary's experience seems to be good for is perfecting how to talk out of both sides of her mouth, engaging in the politics of personal destruction and other aspects of her ruthless pursuit of power that remind one of what a Karl Rove might do. That kind of person ought not to be the Democratic nominee.
October 8, 2015

According to her own records, her stated opposition to NAFTA is a lie.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillarys-nafta-lie/

What is the proper word for the claim by Hillary Clinton and the more factually disinclined supporters of her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination - made in speeches, briefings and interviews (including one by this reporter with the candidate) - that she has always been a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement?

Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; now that we know she held at least five meetings to strategize about how to win congressional approval of the deal; now that we know she was in the thick of the manuevering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement. Now that we know all of this, how should we assess the claim that Hillary's heart has always beaten to a fair-trade rhythm?

Now that we know from official records of her time as First Lady that Clinton was the featured speaker at a closed-door session where 120 women opinion leaders were hectored to pressure their congressional representatives to approve NAFTA; now that we know from ABC News reporting on the session that "her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA" and that "there was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time;" now that we have these details confirmed, what should we make of Clinton's campaign claim that she was never comfortable with the militant free-trade agenda that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of union jobs, that has idled entire industries, that has saddled this country with record trade deficits, undermined the security of working families in the US and abroad, and has forced Mexican farmers off their land into an economic refugee status that ultimately forces them to cross the Rio Grande River in search of work?
October 6, 2015

HILLARY'S message to 'Urban America'. Respect gun culture.

“You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl,” she said.

“You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are. Not because they are bitter.”


http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/12/clinton-touts-her-experience-with-guns/

October 6, 2015

Obama's message to 'Urban America' respect rural gun culture

"Part of being able to move this forward is understanding the reality of guns in urban areas are very different from the realities of guns in rural areas. And if you grew up and your dad gave you a hunting rifle when you were ten, and you went out and spent the day with him and your uncles, and that became part of your family's traditions, you can see why you'd be pretty protective of that."

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112190/obama-interview-2013-sit-down-president

September 28, 2015

From Hillary's PAC: Gov. Bill Clinton apppoints his wife as chairwoman of the Rural Health Advisory

Committee.
http://correctrecord.org/correcting-the-record-republicans-attack-hillary-on-health-care/

While he was Governor of Arkasas, Ms. Clinton also sat on the board of directors for Arkansas headquartered Wal-Mart was $18,000 a year for doing it and Arkansas based TCBY. Both contributed to Bill Clinton's governor campaigns.


Jane O'Meara Sanders made $4900 a year for her work on the radioactive waste commission. An appointment that has been described on this board as "plum" and "cushy" with zero evidence of either.

The biggest chunk of the Sanders' income last year came from the senator's $174,000-a-year congressional salary. (His occupation, as noted on his federal return: "Government Service.&quot Sanders' presidential campaign spokesman, Michael Briggs, explains the Sanders took in another $39,281 from Social Security benefits; $4,982 from the senator's Burlington mayoral pension; and $4,900 from Jane Sanders' governor-appointed spot on a low-level, radioactive waste commission.



I am aghast at the cronyism. Aghast I tells ya. Far more disturbing for me is the fact that Ms. Clinton sat on the board of directors of at least two disgusting corporations.


Hillary Clinton announced yesterday that she is resigning her seat on the boards of directors of three companies because she is working full time on the presidential campaign of her husband, Bill Clinton.

In doing so, she is giving up a significant portion of the couple's income. Last year, Hillary Clinton reported earning $60,700 from being a director of Wal-Mart, TCBY Enterprises and LaFarge Corp. This was far more than Clinton's $35,000-a-year salary as Arkansas governor and more than a quarter of their $235,000 total income.

...


Clinton joined the board of Wal-Mart, the nation's largest discount retail chain, in 1986. She joined TCBY Enterprises, a yogurt manufacturing and franchise firm, in 1989 and LaFarge, the U.S.-based arm of a French concrete company, in 1990.

Top executives of Wal-Mart and TCBY, both based in Arkansas, have made donations to her husband's races for governor.


http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19920505&slug=1490107

Funny thing about LaFarge (a company that paid Hillary $31,000 a year to sit on their board)

Bill Clinton is renowned today for the millions he commands as a public speaker and business consultant. But in the early 1990s when he was making $35,000 a year as the governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was the family's breadwinner, earning more than $100,000 a year from her law firm salary and corporate board fees. Lafarge, a U.S. cement maker owned by a French conglomerate, was one of her largest sources of income, paying her $31,000 a year to serve on its board. Shortly before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution violations at its Alabama plant. A year later, the Clinton administration reduced that fine to less than $600,000. Hillary Clinton had left the board in spring 1992 after her husband won the Democratic nomination.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/08/AR2007120801551.html
September 16, 2015

Hillary's historian refutes Sanders claim that this country is "created on racist principles".

In an OP for the NY Times, historian and advisor to Hillary Clinton, Sean Wilentz, claims that Bernie Sanders threatens to

"poison the current presidential campaign. The United States, Bernie Sanders has charged, “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.”"


And that, Sanders, stating such is furthering "one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history."

He then goes on to myopically restrict the topic of racism solely to the institution of slavery and defends the Constitution with merely tolerating slavery as a local institution rather than enshrining it as a national law as proof that Sanders is promoting a falsehood. Unbelievably, he attempts to downplay the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/opinion/constitutionally-slavery-is-no-national-institution.html?ref=opinion&_r=1

Fortunately, he is getting his ass handed to him in the comments.


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