Organizing for America | Greg Jones' 'BLACKS 4 BARACK !': Mirian Wright Edelman Very Disappointed With Clintons

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Mirian Wright Edelman Very Disappointed With Clintons

By Greg Jones' Blacks4Barack ! - Jan 27th, 2008 at 6:08 pm EST

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Hillary Clinton loves to visit black churches and tell folks about how her involvement in Miran Edelman's Children's Defense Fund shows how much she cares for the poor and struggling blacks. She claims to have seen Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was supposedly transformed into this civil rights, caring, wonderful woman. Fact is, at the same time Hillary claims in our churches to have been so pro Civil Rights, she was actually what she called a 'Goldwater Girl', meaning a staunch supporter of Senator Barry Goldwater who was not only a segragtionist but was adamently AGAINST the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Now, Hillary, or make that Billary, have been tauting their wonderful Childrens Defense Fund history. Well, fact is, Ms. Marian Wright Edelman is extremely disappointed in the Clintons and has been for many years. But the Clintons don't mention that part in their smoooooth speeches. Below is an article and excerpt from an interview by Marian Wright Edelman that everyone should read..It discusses facts from a book entitled Her Way about Hillary Clinton
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Marian Wright Edelman -- founder of the Children's Defense Fund and something of a saint -- hired Hillary back in 1970 to lead the organization, is a big deal to me. The fact they became close friends is an endorsement. Discovering how badly the Clintons alienated Edelman with the welfare reform bill is a major strike against them.

According to Her Way, "a key opponent of the legislation was Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, and the woman who Hillary credited with inspiring her in 1970 to commence a lifelong advocacy for children. Twenty five years later, however, Hillary was no longer an idealistic advocate..."
Edelman was devastated by the Clintons' support for this bill and took great pains to let her position be known. A New York Times story at the time reported that Edelman "sent a blistering memorandum to the Cabinet, warning that one of the welfare options being considered will 'violate every standard of decency and fairness.'"

Her Way: "Publicly, Hillary denied compromising her principles or values when she endorsed her husband's support of the welfare legislation, which came as he was facing reelection. She believed, she claimed, that the third bill passed by Congress went far enough in its guarantees of medical benefits, child care and food stamps to warrant her and Bill's support. (Others, both liberals and conservatives, noted that the third bill was almost the same as the previous two Bill had vetoed.)"

This sort of self-deceptive justification sounds too familiar. When Hillary describes her vote for this blood-draining, money burning, illegal occupation known as the Iraq War, she likes to say the bill she voted for was for diplomacy. She's the only one who believes that.

Back to Her Way: "Years later, the welfare reform bill was viewed by many as a success; others considered it an abandonment of the truly needy for the sake of scoring political points. In her book Living History, Hilary found the space to acknowledge more than four hundred friends, colleagues and supporters. Marian Wright Edelman was not one of them"

Wow. That's cold . It's one thing to have a disagreement. It's another to completely and utterly dis a friend, supporter and mentor of over 20 years.

This past July, Marian Wright Edelman was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. The subject was, in part, Hillary Clinton and welfare reform. Here is the exchange:

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. 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 healthcare, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.
For the sake of looking tough on "welfare queens," Bill and Hillary (and they were indeed a team) sacrificed the well-being of millions, forced single mothers into underpaid, underinsured work and added further strain to many families. Edelman continues:

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 healthcare in their community. This is an abomination.
You know what else is an abomination? The way the Clintons so quickly sacrificed so many friends, black women especially, in their quest to appease the Right, move to the center, win elections or all three. Yall remember Lani Guinier? Oh yes, let's revisit that painful episode..

Guinier was nominated by Bill to head the DOJ's Civil Rights division. The two knew each other from back in the day at Yale Law School, but when a fanatical group of conservatives and a shamefully lazy press manipulated Guinier's positions on race to the point that she was being called "quota queen," the Clintons were nowhere to be found. They withdrew Guinier's nomination with the quickness rather than defend a friend and intellectual powerhouse who they'd know for 20 years.

The Center for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting put out an article on the manipulative press and cowardly Clinton:.

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So the next time Hillary comes to your church and tells you all about how much she is loved by Marian Edelman, during the question and answer segment, just raise your hand politely and ask Hillary (or Bill), " When Are You Gonna Stop Lying!"

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