Bernie Sanders primary challenger appears to slur transgender people as 'lady boys'

[lunamagica]

167. You like pesky facts, huh? Here, I have some for you. But first, let me say this

You guys never cease to amaze me. You always manage to bring Clinton up, no matter what. Please, stay on subject. This is about St. Bernard of Vermont, superhero of the poor, so don't change the subject. If you want to talk about Clinton, start your own thread.

When someone is accused of something, and their best defense is to say "oh, well, so- and so did the same" It means they are completely lost.

You like peaky facts? let me give you some

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n 1998, then Representative Bernie Sanders cosponsored and actively ushered a bill through Congress that would allow Vermont and Maine to dump their nuclear waste in the poor disadvantaged Hispanic community of Sierra Blanca, Texas.

Three West Texan protestors went to Vermont to plead with then Representative Sanders that the dump site shouldn't be located in this poor minority community, Mr. Sanders told the three activists, "My position is unchanged and you’re not going to like it.” When asked if he would at least visit the proposed site in Sierra Blanca, he said: “Absolutely not. I'm gonna to be running for re-election in the state of Vermont."

“He didn't listen,” Curry said. “He had his mind made up."

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Reading this article, I had a real sense that Mr. Sanders just didn't care about their concerns or the plight of this poor Hispanic community. It wasn't his community to care about. If history tells us anything about minority communities they seemingly always get the short end of the stick. Flint, MI is one such community that comes to mind. In this case, the community of Sierra Blanca didn't have any real political clout and they were reaching out to Mr. Sanders for help.

Mr. Sanders could have stood behind this very poor Hispanic community, but as his response to the protestors revealed, he chose the political expedient route. In this case, he didn't stand up for the less fortunate in Sierra Blanca.

Paul Wellstone would later call this injustice against the people of Sierra Blanca a case of "environmental racism”.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/8/1481494/-Sierra-Blanca-Bernie-Sanders-Paul-Wellstone-a-Poor-Minority-Community-and-a-Nuclear-Waste-Dump

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In 1994, the states of Texas, Maine, and Vermont entered a compact allowing the disposal of low-level nuclear waste at a proposed Texas site. This creates the tenth such compact in the United States since 1980, when a Federal law was passed requiring states take responsibility for their low-level nuclear waste, urging cooperation. This compact demands both Maine and Vermont to pay Texas $25 million to build a disposal facility. Prior to becoming law, the compact first needed to gain Congressional approval. Following its approval on September 20, 1998, the compact then required the state of Texas to license the project before moving forward. October 22, 1998, Texas officials voted to deny the compact's proposed site located just outside of Sierra Blanca.

Sierra Blanca, a small West Texas town over two-thirds Hispanic, already hosts Merco Joint Venture. This company is the town's largest employer shipping over 400,000 tons of New York City sludge daily to a nearby ranch. Furthermore, Sierra Blanca is located only sixteen miles from the Mexico border, on top of an aquifer, and in an active Earthquake area. Residents, environmentalists, and community groups have made numerous cries of "environmental racism", even filing a suit under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The groups have faced an uphill battle defending the town from becoming a nuclear disposal site. However, while the fight was won in Sierra Blanca, the compact is law and these states will seek an alternative site.

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/blanca.html

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A factoid one should note here was that at this time, the governor for whom the TLLRWDA was working was none other than George W. Bush. So, despite all that has happened to select the nuclear waste site, what was the course of action taken by Bernie Sanders? He feigned ignorance. Instead of acknowledging the environmental injustice that was going on, he washed his hands clean of any responsibility for that.

But that is not the most egregious and inexcusable aspect of the Sierra Blanca scandal. Rather, it’s what Bernie did after progressive hero Paul Wellstone inserted language into the Senate bill giving the community legal rights to oppose the dump.

Bernie strongly supported stripping out Wellstone’s provisions and returning to the original bill that he co-sponsored (and aggressively promoted) which gave the Sierra Blanca community no rights to fight back.

That’s not a progressive revolution.

That's not even progressive

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2016 presidential candidate U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has been a proponent, cosponsor and yea voter on Sierra Blanca legislation, H.R. 558, 1995 and H.R.629, 1998.
Sanders wanted all protective amendments stripped from the final bill. These amendments offered protections to the compact by limiting nuclear waste shipments to Texas from Vermont and Maine compact members only (the Doggett amendment) and (Wellstone amendments) for the people of Sierra Blanca which created environmental safeguards and litigation rights, setting a precedent of protections for future cases of toxic and nuclear waste storage in or near communities across America.
The Sierra Blanca waste dump, WCS, was owned by powerful Texas tycoon and corporate raider, Harold Simmons, a GOP mega-donor. Another Simmons company was responsible for the lead poisoning of Cadillac Heights, TX, a low-income black community and other toxic sites costing U.S. tax payers $4.4 billion in multiple Superfund sites. The Man Behind Sierra Blanca’s Woes
Jane O’Meara Sanders, wife of Senator Bernie Sanders, is a commissioner for the nuclear waste waste compact. She is also a commissioner for the Vermont Economic Development Authority.

https://sandersguideblog.wordpress.com/tag/paul-wellstone/

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As Wellstone explained, the fight against the facility was about protecting poor, minority communities across the country from playing host to the toxic waste of more affluent neighbors. At the time that Sierra Blanca was selected for this project, it was one of the poorest towns in Texas: The average income was less than $8,000, and 39 percent of residents lived below the poverty line. The largely Hispanic community was already home to one of the largest sewage treatment facilities in the world, each day bringing a new load of 250 tons of sewage from New York City. Moreover, the town was far from ideal as a storage site: Sierra Blanca sits on a flood plain and is located approximately 30 miles from an earthquake fault line. “For good or ill, we bear moral responsibility for what happens to the people of Sierra Blanca,” Wellstone said at the time. And yet, even as the senator was becoming something of a folk idol to those fighting the project, Wellstone was marked an extremist by his colleagues in Congress.
When the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission bowed down to the tremendous popular opposition that had formed around the compact, and voted unanimously in October 1998 to deny the licensing application, Wellstone proclaimed, “Sound science, at least for now, has prevailed over politics of the lowest common denominator. We should remain vigilant to guard against future efforts to site dumps in areas like Sierra Blanca, areas chosen through the path of least political resistance.”
It was a statement that the overwhelming majority of American politicians, however much in agreement, would never have had the courage to utter.

https://middleburycampus.com/2339/opinions/wellstone-and-the-nuclear-question/

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Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, there is also an obvious concern about
the unsuitability of Sierra Blanca's geology--the exclusionary
criterion from the 1985 Dames & Moore report. Sierra Blanca is situated
right in the middle of the state's only earthquake zone. Its 1993
license application stated that this is ``the most tectonically active
area within the state of Texas.'' In April 1995 there was a 5.6
earthquake 100 miles away, in Alpine, Texas. And there have been two
tremors in the area in the last four years.
Radioactive Waste Management Associates (RWMA) of New York has
conducted an independent investigation of the dump site and found its
geology unsuitable for disposal of radioactive waste. RWMA notes that

research by the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal
Authority has found that [there is] a fault in the bedrock
buried beneath the Sierra Blanca site. Groups of earth
fissures up to seven feet deep occur nearby.

RWMA concludes that

some important natural features of the site--its seismic
hazard, its buried fault, and nearby earth fissures--are not
suited to radioactive waste isolation. In our professional
opinion, these are fatal flaws which mean that the proposed
Sierra Blanca site cannot provide a high degree of assurance
of waste containment.

I ask unanimous consent to enter the letter from RWMA into the
Record.
The concern about the environmental impact of this dump extends well
beyond the border. The Mexican equivalent of the EPA announced its
opposition on March 5 on grounds that the Sierra Blanca dump poses an
environmental risk to the border region. On February 11, the Mexican
Congress, represented by its Permanent Commission, declared

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1998-06-15/html/CREC-1998-06-15-pt1-PgS6349.htm

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And how did they come to a decision to pick that town? Fighting the passage of bill H.R. 629 in the senate, Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) spoke on the matter in great length and detail. In short, it was a case of environmental injustice. Despite the findings of the consultants that Sierra Blanca was not a good site due to its “complex geology” and also a history of earthquakes in the past due to tectonic faults in El Paso and Hudspeth counties, the Waste Authority still went ahead and picked the site because the people living there would be least likely to resist or make a fuss about it, since the majority of the residents are Spanish-speaking and poor. They had tried to pick other locations for the site, but was met with either lawsuit or fierce opposition. So, finally, the Waste Authority just gave up and chose the path of least resistance, procedures and recommendations be damned. Texas legislature also gave a helping hand by passing the Box Law and stripped the rights of the residents in Sierra Blanca from suing. The only recourse they could take was to obtain an injunction from the state Supreme Court, which means they would have to make the 500-mile trip to Austin just to be heard.

A factoid one should note here was that at this time, the governor for whom the TLLRWDA was working was none other than George W. Bush. Oh, and Jane Sanders, Bernie's wife, sits on the Board of this wonderful Texas authority.

http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2016/2/17/when-brown-lives-did-not-matter-to-bernie

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Enough facts for you? Sierra Blanca is on an active earthquake line, for heaven's sake!
Don't you think that what Sen. Wellstone did was heroic?