Immigrants: We Get The Job Done

So before we head into the next round of primaries I wanted to add a little context and depth to the conversation we are having on Climate Change and what candidate best reflects the concerns of the Climate Change movement.

Why Hillary Clinton is definitely NOT your candidate:

1. Hillary’s “safe and responsible” energy plan calls for expansion of domestic fracking, which has been shown to disproportionately impact communities of color.

2. She promoted fracking as Secretary of State both domestically & internationally and her own SuperPAC has credited her with selling fracking to the world.

3. The State Dept. under Hillary attempted to fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline, outsourcing the review process to TransCanada, a company with an extremely poor safety record which was building the pipeline.

4. She has deep ties to fossil fuel financiers and lobbyists including Jeff Berman who now holds a senior position on her 2016 campaign and was a top lobbyist for TransCanada.

5. Her financial bundlers for the 2016 campaign include several oil lobbyists. And Clinton has many of the same donors as far-right politicians, including one of the worst Gov. Rick Snyder.

6. Half of Clinton’s speaking fees come from groups lobbying Congress, several of which were lobbying on fossil fuels.

7. The Hillary campaign and her SuperPAC’s have received large contributions from fossil-fuel industry groups, along with all GOP candidates.

8. The Clinton Foundation has been called by some a “money laundering” operation, with Keystone-related groups, foreign oil companies, and other big oil interests giving millions to the foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State and actively lobbying Congress to fast-track the KXL pipeline.

9. Not surprisingly, Hillary has never offered a comprehensive plan on fossil fuel extraction or climate change, though she publicly supports climate action. the climate section of her website was recently scrubbed, and she has implicitly ruled out a carbon tax through her opposition to new taxes on anyone making less than $250K.

10. Clinton has a long and clear record of supporting Free Trade deals including NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP. Note: TransCanada is now suing the US for $15B for blocking the Keystone pipeline (via the NAFTA agreement).

11. The latest email dump from Clinton’s servers show she was aggressively promoting the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, despite having vowed to her voters to block it.

12. Under these neoliberal trade agreements supported by Clinton, the US just announced it will sue India for its “Solar Revolution” plan through the World Trade Organization.

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Why Bernie Sanders DEFINITELY is your candidate:

1. Sanders introduced the Keep It In The Ground Act – legislation that would put an end to fossil-fuel leases on public lands.

2. Sanders calls climate change our greatest national security threat.

3. Sanders supports a national ban on tracking (video), and is running television ads showing how fracking disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, polluting domestic water supplies (video).

4. Sanders has stated his support for the fossil-fuel Divest-Invest movement.

5. Sanders has a long record of introducing legislation and initiating programs to protect the environment and expand clean, renewable energy.

6. Sanders supports a strong and rising carbon tax to fund clean energy infrastructure, creating millions of working class jobs in America.

7. Sanders has a long and very clear record of opposing free trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP which allows corporations to sue governments if their environmental laws impact shareholder value.

8. Sanders called for Governor Rick Snyder’s resignation because of the Flint water crisis, in which government leaders at all levels knew they were poisoning this low-income community.

9. Sanders is one of the most outspoken critics of the Koch brothers and GOP climate deniers (video).

10. Sanders has a long record of supporting environmental justice and is the ONLY candidate with a climate justice plank in his comprehensive climate platform.

11. While Clinton’s campaign is being run by fossil fuel lobbyists, Sanders’ campaign is staffed with a roster of important climate activists, including Becky Bond, Zack Malitz, Karthik Ganapathy, Claire Sandberg.

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…