Hillary Clinton Goes to Welfare Island By Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/hillary-clinton-goes-to-welfare-island/print/
Hillary Clinton decided to deliver her first major policy speech on Welfare Island; the site of a notoriously brutal prison and lunatic asylum.
Like Hillary, Welfare Island has gone through many identities to try and fix its image problem. It was Blackwell’s Island when it was the site of the New York City Lunatic Asylum described by Dickens as a place of “naked ugliness and horror.” You can see the grim ruins [2] of the Smallpox Hospital which some have claimed is haunted [3] by the ghosts of those who suffered and died there.
And the ghosts, those of Welfare Island and of the Clintons, were out in force during her appearance.
The Smallpox Hospital was a wonderful example of the socialized medicine advocated by Hillary Clinton. Patients died there by the thousands while the nurses held their families hostage for bribes. Like the NHS horror stories today [4], patents starved and begged for a drink of water, but were given nothing.
When Hillary Clinton spoke, she overlooked the site of some of the worst atrocities committed by her Democratic Party for the sake of “helping” the poor. Mayor Mickle, who got the job after his mother-in-law wrote a $5,000 check (over $100,000 today) to Tammany Hall, made the island a prison for the poor. The Democratic Party’s corrupt politicians made out like Clintons from their misery, suffering and death.
The site of Hillary’s speech was renamed Welfare Island in an attempt to improve its image. It didn’t work. In the seventies, a collapsing city renamed it Roosevelt Island to remind people of a time when the welfare state had a better image than corruption, corpses and crumbling ruins.
That was also Hillary Clinton’s goal in convening her campaign rally on Welfare Island.
While arguing that the Republican candidates were “A song called Yesterday,” all she had to offer were ideas that had been discredited in the nineteenth century in the very place where she was standing.
Hillary Clinton proposed universal, automatic voter registration. That was also a priority on Welfare Island where prisoners were illegally kept locked up to get them to vote for the Democratic Party. Other prisoners meanwhile were allowed to escape as long as they voted for the Democrats.
During one election, the prisoners were shipped off the island to vote and campaign for the Democrats.
Hillary Clinton called for legalizing illegal aliens. Tammany Hall was notorious for mass naturalizations in time for elections. “Immigrants were quickly naturalized by Tammany judges- on one occasion, under the eyes of horrified Republican observers in 1867, at a rate of 3 per minute.”
After having accepted bribes from everyone and their sheikh, Hillary Clinton is running on a platform of helping the common man. Like every Tammany Hall crook, she’s a richly corrupt “friend of the poor.”
She denounced “corporations making record profits,” tax cuts for the rich and complained of “the top 25 hedge fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined.”
Hillary Clinton makes more in one minute [5] than a kindergarten teacher makes in a week. Unlike those evil CEOs and hedge fund managers, she hasn’t actually worked for the money. As she slowly recited her speech from a teleprompter, everyone was reminded that she isn’t a good speaker. When corporations and lobbies were paying her six figures for a speech, they were really slipping her a massive bribe.
In the time between her incompetent tenure as Secretary of State to the launch of her campaign, she took in enough dirty money to fund an entire district’s worth of kindergarten teacher salaries.
And that’s just the opening round.
The Hillary Clinton campaign wants $2.5 billion. That money will be only a shadow of the full election spending which will take place. And it is going to come from the same billionaires, corporations, CEOs, hedge funders and other villains she denounced in her speech.
Either all those people are giving Hillary a fortune without expecting anything in return or anyone who believes her class warfare rhetoric is a sucker being taken for a ride.
The ugly “H” logo seen everywhere on Welfare Island didn’t stand for Hillary, but for Hypocrisy.
The woman, who illegally made a fortune on cattle futures [6] and then lied about it, denounced “complex trading schemes” by the financial industry.
The wife of the president who had overseen the financial deregulation that helped cause the economic crisis condemned those seeking “fewer rules for the biggest corporations” and refusing to “rein in the banks that are still too risky.”
During her original campaign, Hillary Clinton had managed to be both for and against the bailout while claiming [7] that she was only for it because she was worried about students and small business owners.
At a private Goldman Sachs event two years ago, Hillary had said that [8] banker-bashing was foolish and unproductive and that beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy.
But you can choose which Hillary to believe; the one who was lying in 2013 or the one who is lying now.
Hillary Clinton has gone from saying, “a marriage has always been between a man and a woman” to condemning Republicans for turning “their backs on gay people who love each other.”
“I believe that success isn’t measured by how much the wealthiest Americans have, but by how many children climb out of poverty,” she claimed.
No children will be climbing out of poverty when she and her husband are around.
Only 15 percent of their family foundation’s money is going to charity. Bill Clinton took a $500,000 contribution to the family slush fund in exchange for accepting an award from an organization building schools. The money could have been used to build 10 preschools [9]. Haitian protesters continue to denounce the Clintons after billions were taken in, but less than a thousand homes [9] were built.
Hillary Clinton kept referencing student debt when it was her husband’s administration that worked to privatize Sallie Mae while giving it nearly limitless financial enforcement powers.
Finally, the queen of dirty cash denounced the “endless flow of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political process, and drowning out the voices of our people.”
If there’s anyone who knows about the endless flow of secret unaccountable money, it would be Hillary.
The Clintons were the first to use a family foundation as a fake global charity to finance a presidential campaign, taking in money from some of the dirtiest and most dangerous foreign companies and governments to fund a political platform for the Hillary 2016 campaign.
Before Hillary officially ran for office, the Clintons were accepting foreign bribes hand over fist.
Even the friendly media is swimming in stories about the Clinton Foundation’s dirty money, its political connections and the influence that was bought and sold by an aspiring future president.
Hillary’s policy speech mixed empty slogans with outright lies to cover up her shameless corruption.
“Here, on Roosevelt Island,” Hillary said. “I believe we have a continuing rendezvous with destiny.”
And that’s true. But it’s the destiny of Welfare Island and Tammany Hall that can’t be escaped with all the rebranding in the world. Bad policies can be changed, but corruption does not change. Crooks and liars don’t stop being what they are just because they unveil new lies, a new logo and a new slogan.
And the destiny of Welfare Island may not be the one that Hillary wants.
After Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed had his dirty financial dealings exposed, much the same way that the Clintons are being exposed now, he was locked up here. All the Democratic Party corruption that had made Welfare Island such a terrible place ended with its boss sitting behind his own iron bars.
In 2001, the New York Times’ Bob Herbert wrote that, “The Clintons may or may not be led away in handcuffs someday.” The latest revelations about their financial dealings are a warning that like so many of her Tammany forebears, Hillary is in a race between the White House and the Big House.
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