[quote]“We’ve got to stand up for unions,” Hillary Clinton declared in her closing statement during the Democratic debate in Milwaukee last month. The line offered the labor-friendly audience a comforting rebuke to Gov. Scott Walker’s relentless attacks on Wisconsin’s unions. It generated passionate applause.
But Mrs. Clinton’s show of support contrasted with her long indifference to the concerns of organized labor. The results of Michigan’s primary last week highlighted this problem; exit polls showed that Mrs. Clinton narrowly lost union households to Senator Bernie Sanders. Over all, nearly 60 percent of Democratic voters thought free-trade agreements, which Mrs. Clinton has generally supported, caused job losses. Mr. Sanders won a majority of those voters, too, which raises the possibility of further upsets on Tuesday in primaries in Illinois and Ohio, where opposition to free-trade pacts is strong.
Mrs. Clinton’s troubles with labor began before she arrived in Washington. From 1986 to 1992, as a corporate lawyer in Arkansas, she served on the board of Walmart. By then, Sam Walton, the company’s founder, was notorious for his anti-union fervor; in the early 1970s, Mr. Walton hired an attorney named John E. Tate to break up an organizing campaign at two Missouri Walmart stores. For decades afterward, Mr. Tate drove Walmart’s successful anti-union strategy. In 1988, Mr. Tate joined Walmart’s board, where he served alongside Mrs. Clinton.
During Mrs. Clinton’s first presidential run, a former Walmart board member told ABC News that he could not recall her ever defending unions during more than 20 private board meetings. “She was not a dissenter,” Donald G. Soderquist, the vice chairman of the board during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, told The Los Angeles Times in 2007. “She was a part of those decisions.”
“I’m always proud of Walmart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else,” Mrs. Clinton said at a 1990 shareholders meeting in Fayetteville, Ark. But over the years, as Walmart’s reputation was sullied by allegations of unsafe working conditions, overtime theft and sex discrimination, Mrs. Clinton distanced herself from the company. Still, the Walton family’s fondness for her endures; in December, Alice L. Walton, Mr. Walton’s daughter, donated more than $350,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund.
[...]
During her 2008 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton also publicly opposed free-trade agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia, the last of which was opposed by human rights groups as well as organized labor in Colombia and the United States. “I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” she said at a gathering of the Communications Workers of America in Washington.
But recently released emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private server show that as secretary of state Mrs. Clinton lobbied Congress to support the agreement with Colombia, which passed in 2011. Describing her effort to sway Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mrs. Clinton wrote to a State Department official: “I told him that at the rate we were going, Columbian workers were going to end up w the same or better rights than workers in Wisconsin and Indiana and, maybe even, Michigan.” According to Escuela Nacional Sindical, a Colombian labor rights group, 105 union activists have been assassinated since the agreement passed.
[...]
After the Milwaukee debate, Mr. Poklinkoski told me that two of his members who watched it came away as Sanders supporters. But Mr. Poklinkoski was alarmed to hear that the men’s second choice was Mr. Trump. Mr. Poklinkoski believes Mrs. Clinton could be vulnerable in Wisconsin.
[B]“I’m worried about Trump versus Hillary,” Mr. Poklinkoski said. He noted that at home Governor Walker had successfully portrayed himself as an anti-tax, blue-collar politician, an image that helped him divide Wisconsin’s workers during the state’s labor battles. “If you have a right-wing populist, you can beat a corporate Democrat,” Mr. Poklinkoski said. “Scott Walker did it three times here.”[/B][/quote]
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/campaign-stops/which-side-are-you-on-hillary.html?_r=0[/url]
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("Not a news article" - Big Dumb American))[/highlight]
She's obviously copying Sanders to sway voters.
[QUOTE=Satansick;49931937]She's obviously copying Sanders to sway voters.[/QUOTE]
I think she's screwed in the end. She's flip-flopped on so much already that she looks shifty and untrustworthy to most americans, and that in the general election she either has to pretend to be a hard-liner (which if she wins will bite her in the ass when the donor class calls in their "favors") or she'll flip-flop in vain to try and swoon republican voters and just come off as even more untrustworthy.
I don't think she's electable, the only reason she has a shot is because she has large media companies shilling for her. Were it not for that, she'd have never even gotten off the ground.
Are opinion pieces/blogs allowed in sh?
[QUOTE=Reshy;49931962]I think she's screwed... gotten off the ground.[/QUOTE]
If I as non-American can see through the charade so easily then I hope for U.S. the average American can too.
Yeah, this is an opinion piece, not news.
she's on the union leadership's side, not the union worker's side
every union boss is going to endorse her, every union worker is going to rally for sanders, thats the way this has gone
[QUOTE=Sableye;49931997]she's on the union leadership's side, not the union worker's side
every union boss is going to endorse her, every union worker is going to rally for sanders, thats the way this has gone[/QUOTE]
Kinda shows just how pervasive the anti-worker rhetoric is when Union leaders vote against their own base.
This should probably be in GD. Maybe include a news story reporting on one of her flip flopped positions (shouldnt be hard to find one) so this can stay here
This subgroup is for news articles, not opinion blogs.
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