March 9, 2016

CNN just said 90% of Bernie voters don't regard Hillary as honest and trustworthy

Below the percentage of Bernie supporters at DU that would say that, but we're getting there.

March 8, 2016

"It's the Inequality, Stupid"

I was looking around for some information on income and wealth inequality and came across this good summary in 11 charts from the March/April 2011 Mother Jones. The trends would have only continued since then.

The list of all of the 10 richest members of Congress (7 of the 10 were Democrats) voting for the extension of the Bush tax cuts during Obama's first term is one of the interesting data points.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

March 8, 2016

Michigan Polls

I thought it might be interesting to put up the latest polls for Michigan going into the primary and compare them with the results afterwards. Only the Michigan State poll has it close, projecting 52-47 Hillary. The other polls all have double digit margins

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-michigan-presidential-democratic-primary

I am hopeful these polls are wrong and that Bernie can pull off a win today. I suspect it will require a big voter turnout among young people that the polls have not anticipated.

March 7, 2016

Now that we're past the Southern primaries, Hillary was able to throw Obama under the bus

http://breakingbrown.com/2016/03/hillary-clinton-defends-wall-st-donations-obama-took-money-wall-st-anyone/

<During the run-up to the South Carolina primary, Hillary Clinton sharply criticized Bernie Sanders for not being supportive enough of President Obama. Now that we’re past primaries in states where the black vote is essential to victory, Clinton is throwing Obama under the bus for being even more in bed with Wall Street than herself.

During Sunday night’s debate, Sanders ripped Clinton for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street firms. Here’s how Hillary Clinton defended herself:

“President Obama took more money from Wall Street in the 2008 campaign than anybody ever had,” Clinton quipped. Then she saved herself, by adding, “when it came time to stand up to Wall St., he passed and signed the toughest regulations since the Great Depression.”

Clinton is referring to Dodd-Frank, but in many ways Dodd-Frank was actually gutted by the industry that Clinton claims had no power over Obama after financing his campaign.

Still, Hillary Clinton’s message was clear: Don’t come for me or I’ll come for Obama. Liberals may as well get used to this refrain since every future demand from the base will be met by a comparison to the centrist Obama.>

March 7, 2016

On Hillary and private prisons

After taking money directly from the private prison industry, when it became a political liability Hillary announced that she would no longer take contributions from them and was giving what she had recently received to charity.

So did Hillary really stop taking money from this industry? Not according to this article from Politico, which says that only applies to DIRECT contributions, not to contributions that go to SuperPacs and through bundlers who support Hillary.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/02/clinton-campaign-gives-private-prison-lobbyist-cash-to-charity-218524

<Despite the refunds, Clinton campaign continues to benefit handsomely from the fundraising assistance of some closely connected to the private prison business. In another report filed Sunday night, the campaign disclosed that Richard Sullivan of Capitol Counsel—until recently, a Raleigh, N.C.-based federally registered lobbyist for the for-profit prison operator GEO Group—bundled $69,363 in donations for Clinton in the fourth quarter, bringing his total for the year to a whopping $274,891.

That makes Sullivan the second-most prolific lobbyist-bundler for the Clinton campaign, beaten out only by D.C. lobbyist Heather Podesta, who's tallied up $348,581 so far.

Sullivan's firm, Capitol Counsel, has been registered for years to represent GEO Group subsidiary BI Inc.—which focuses on electronic monitoring of inmates. While the firm continues to represent BI, Sullivan no longer intends to do so, according to a disclosure form filed with Congress on Nov. 9.

The figures and the policy rejecting donations from prison lobbyists includes only direct donations to Clinton's campaign, not supportive super PACs or state and federal Democratic committees. (bold is mine)>

Some background information on just how vile this industry is. One method for creating the false narrative that they're more cost efficient is to refuse to take prisoners with chronic medical conditions, because providing healthcare is a big cost factor for prisons. So they're like insurance companies who could disqualify people for "pre-existing conditions". Another way they can drive earnings is by tagging their prisoners with minor violations to extend their prison terms.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/private-prisons-profit

<The for-profit prison industry sells itself as a cost-effective option for cash-strapped states, but according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin, privatized prisons are keeping inmates locked up longer in order to boost profits.

Researcher Anita Mukherjee studied eight years* of data from Mississippi, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and found that private prisons there doled out twice the amount of infractions against inmates, lengthening their sentences by an average of two or three months. The extra time, Mukherjee found, adds up to an increase of about $3,000 in additional costs per prisoner. Mukherjee also noted that inmates housed in private prisons were more likely to wind up back in the system after being released—despite industry claims of lower recidivism rates.>

<Looking specifically at California prisons, Petrella highlights how health expenditures are among the largest costs, second only to security, and account for 31 percent of the overall budget. But, private prisons set up contracts that say they only will house the youngest, healthiest—and cheapest—prisoners.

These details, Petrella writes, failed to make their way into a Temple University cost analysis often cited by the industry as proof that privatization produces cost savings. The economists behind the study were funded by three of the largest prison companies in the United States—a fact they failed to disclose when the study was first published. (bold mine)>


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/private-prison-exec-we-ha_b_8939898.html

The industry doesn't want change. An executive with GEO Group, the second largest private prison operator in the U.S., recently boasted that the country would continue to "attract" crime. He shared the 'good news' to investors: "The reality is, we are a very affluent country, we have loose borders, and we have a bad education system.”

March 7, 2016

Hillary's mentor Marian Wright Edelman on the Clintons and Welfare Reform

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/how-hillary-clinton-betrayed-the-childrens-defense-fund-for-political-gain

AMY GOODMAN: Marian Wright Edelman, we just heard Hillary Rodham Clinton. She used to be the head of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, of the organization that you founded. But you were extremely critical of the Clintons. I mean, when President Clinton signed off on the, well, so-called welfare reform bill, you said, “His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” So what are your hopes right now for these Democrats? And what are your thoughts about Hillary Rodham Clinton?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics. (emphasis mine) We have to build a constituency, and you don’t—and we profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we need health care, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.

And yet, you know, many years after that, when many people are pronouncing welfare reform a great success, you know, we’ve got growing child poverty, we have more children in poverty and in extreme poverty over the last six years than we had earlier in the year. When an economy is down, and the real test of welfare reform is what happens to the poor when the economy is not booming. Well, the poor are suffering, the gap between rich and poor widening. We have what I consider one of—a growing national catastrophe of what we call the cradle-to-prison pipeline. A black boy today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, a black girl a one-in-seventeen chance. A Latino boy who’s born in 2001 has a one-in-six chance of going to prison. We are seeing more and more children go into our child welfare systems, go dropping out of school, going into juvenile justice detention facilities. Many children are sitting up—15,000, according to a recent congressional GAO study—are sitting up in juvenile institutions solely because their parents could not get mental health and health care in their community. This is an abomination.

That is a staggering indictment, from the woman Hillary Clinton regularly mentions as her mentor, of a gap between Hillary Clinton's words and her record. It reflects upon a political decision that she and Bill made to leave many children behind in order to ensure a second term. (The "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act," as it was cynically called, was signed in August of 1996, just about three months before the '96 presidential election.)

March 7, 2016

Another new one for Hillary tonight, or at least new to me: "Clawbacks"

Tonight she said she would go after companies like Johnson Controls who had received government assistance or subsidies then moved overseas and claw back the benefits they had received.

1. Is this a new position for her or have I just missed it?
2. Is there anything in U.S. law that supports this if those provisions weren't written as strings attached to the prior government assistance?

March 7, 2016

Did anybody notice Hillary use the expression "debt free tuition"

in the discussion about public schools that kind of bled into college education? Did I hear that right? If so, what is she talking about? I saw somebody post the other day that Bill claimed that Hillary supported free tuition but in the prior debates she was against it. Has she changed her position on this issue to match Bernie?

March 7, 2016

Hillary "Well if we're going to talk about the 1990's"

I can't believe she's actually defending the Import/Export bank, which is corporate welfare.

March 7, 2016

Bernie hits Hillary over the head on trade agreements

"Glad she discovered religion"

Spectacular, just as many of us were advocating that he needed to do tonight!