Donald Trump's campaign isn't funny any more. This man has been abusing children.
Two days ago "Mother Jones" broke the story that Donald Trump has preyed upon under-age girls as young as 14, keeping them in virtual slavery. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and reporters at USA Today and some other media have also published the story of Trump operating a modeling agency which coached the immigrant girls in breaking federal law by working as models without work permits. His agency then stole their wages. The report is based on the claims of four models who worked for his agency. motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/donald-trump-model-manag...
His agency "boarded" these girls in tiny one-bedroom apartments, providing bunk beds for between five and eleven girls all at one time in each apartment, charging each girl over $1600 a month. That's enough for each girl to have had her own studio apartment! Trump was therefore making an outrageous profit on the ignorance and timidity of these youngsters who didn't know how to cope on their own with the big city. And let's not kid ourselves. It was Trump who personally pocketed the girls' money. He owns 85% of the agency.
He took the rent money out of their earnings before the girls saw a cent of what had been paid by magazines and other users of the photographs. He also docked the girls for "services" his agency provided, such as makeup, hairdos, etc. These services were apparently also at exorbitant rates.
Most of the girls had virtually no money after Trump did all this withholding. He had stolen their wages. He had stolen from children!
He did it in a modern-day version of what the coal mining companies used to do to the miners. These poor guys would come to America, desperate for jobs, and have to live in the company's housing and buy everything at the company store. Typically their wages never stretched to cover the jacked-up prices they were paying for the housing and food. The resulting debt kept them in bondage to the mining companies.
A beloved singer of the 1950s, Tennessee Ernie Ford, immortalized their plight in the song "Sixteen Tons" with the recurring line, "Saint Peter, don't ya call me cuz I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store."
The miners were held in virtual slavery, provided with only bare sustenance and unable to leave their jobs. This was a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery, as well as being a violation of human decency. In due course, unions were formed and though suffering physical beatings and even deaths, they persisted and finally could stop these company abuses. State laws were subsequently enacted to forbid such abuses.
So why is Donald Trump able to get away with these "slavery" practices in the 21st Century?
Isn't this child abuse?
And why has there been no general outcry in the two days since the story broke? Where's the New York Times on this one? The Associated Press? NBC Nightly News? CBS?
Where's the New York State Attorney General with an investigation? As the GOP presidential nominee, is Donald Trump above the law?
And here's another question: Is this Trump modeling agency still in business and still committing these outrages?
Everybody who is thinking of staying home on election day or voting for a third party because they don't like Hillary had better stop considering their preferences and think about fourteen-year-old girls at the mercy of Donald Trump. To fail to vote against him is to be an enabler of his despicable ruthlessness by letting it go unpunished.
Trump must not be tolerated. We voters can't bring him to court as a criminal but we sure as hell can repudiate him overwhelmingly at the polls. That wouldn't just "make America great again", but it would make it a more decent place.
And that's far more important!
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