Working as crayfish peelers, the two women claimed pay was as little as $4 an hour.
Jessica Garrison:
The police brought the women, who were both in their twenties, to the station house. McGee told them they couldn’t leave West’s farm without permission, warning that they could wind up dead. To drive home the point, an officer later testified, McGee stood over Valdez and Gonzalez and pantomimed cutting his throat. He also brandished a Taser at them and said they could be deported if they ever left West’s property without his permission.
A little after 2 in the morning, they released the women to West for the 15-minute drive through the steamy night to his compound — a place where, the women and the Mexican government say, workers were stripped of their passports and assigned to sleep in a filthy, foul-smelling trailer infested with insects and mice. Valdez and Gonzalez also claimed that they and other women were imprisoned, forced to work for little pay, and frequently harassed by West, who demanded to see their breasts and insisted that having sex with him was their only way out of poverty.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—We'll Make It Up With Volume!:
As the old joke goes, an out of touch CEO is informed by a junior manager that the company is losing money on every sale. The big-wig thinks about it about for a second, and then explains that that's OK, because the company is going to make it up with volume. Well, the joke's on us: that's how the GOP approachs our nation's finances.
Reagononomists, Neoconomists, and now McConomists keep trying to sell that same old trickle-down voodoo, promising the dramatic results are just around the corner. Sure, the deficit has exploded, middle class wages are stagnant or down for three decades, the super rich are getting richer still, and once again the economy is in the tank while fuel prices are through the roof. But really, we're assured over and over, it will work this time.
Why it's so simple! Giving giving gazillionaires more gazillions will create a growing economic tide lifting all boats, trickle down to grateful wage earners, and generate gads of tax revenue to shrink the massive deficit conservatives created by giving gazillionaires more loot.
The only problem—well there's clearly a lot of problems not the least of which is the awfully suspicious coincidence that the GOP's reverse Robin Hood scam happens to grotesquely benefit the same people telling us hardworking saps what a swell idea it is—it doesn't work
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show,
David Waldman covers a yuge amount of topics classier than anyone, except when you add
Greg Dworkin, which adds more class. RIP Cecil. And Tom Brady’s phone. Taliban Leader Mullah Omar still dead. Trump loved by Hispanics! Trump rockets! Hillary wounded! (Not “factually”.) Facts also intrude on Obamacare narrative.
Joan McCarter, the classiest. What about Cheesesteak? Good and bad political State Fair food. Boehner wins as the House is set to pass a highway bill. The Cruz Rebellion. Another feeble attempt at a Boehner coup. Oklahoma keeps it classy.
Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!
High Impact Posts • Top Comments • The Evening Blues