2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Black Leaders who support Hillary Slam Bernie Sanders on race issues [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)Saying someone is to the left or the right doesn't explain your rationale for saying that to be so. You also still don't have any specifics on how he opposes Obama mercilessly. Where does Hillary support him that you do that Bernie doesn't? THAT would be a very interesting answer to hear you give.
I'll say a few things that has me supporting him more.
1) Hillary supports guest worker programs like H-1B and H-2B and takes a lot of money from outsourcing companies like Tata that arguably has her talking in favor of that. But she's avoided taking ANY public stance on these programs since the 2008 election when she "strongly supported it" (in her own words). These programs hurt the foreign workers too, who are steered towards these temporary "cheap labor" versus real immigration, so it's not that he doesn't support real immigration, which he constantly has said he's supported fully, without the pollution of guest labor programs (NON-immigrant issues) in these bills. Bernie is against the way these guest labor programs have been set up to put in place "cheap labor" for corporate sector benefit.
2) Hillary has supported problematic trade deals which her husband has signed in the past in NAFTA, etc. and has helped discuss/negotiate TPP, etc. as SOS that has also taken away our jobs. She's also avoided talking about positions on them as well, until right before the debates started. Bernie is against these trade deals.
3) She had many on her staff that helped lobby for Keystone oil pipeline, and even though she came out against it (once she knew that there was a pathway for WTO or later ISDS courts to restore it without her help).
I could go on and on, but if you bring up specific issues, I can explain why I feel better about Bernie's position on them than hers, or if I can't, I'll acknowledge it is something I need to look at. Many of these issues aren't specific to people of color, but affect them as much of the rest of us who aren't rich, or who have to live on a planet soon to be ravaged by climate change.
Bernie cares about keeping people out of prison for non-violent crimes such as drug possession, that affect people of color a lot more, and therefore when he speaks of ending the drug war, etc., he's doing more than other politicians (like Hillary) who want to keep more people in prison, and therefore keep more POC in prison.
To see how much the war on drugs was actually a war on POC that Nixon started, read more here from Thom Hartmann's show at the end of last year. Nixon's lawyer and aide John Ehrlichman's comments quoted here are pretty to the point on this. It also speaks on how we at places like DU are being divided as we are here in this thread.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/big-lie-war-against-drugs
Here's the video clip on this.