The Clinton Legacy Is Black Impoverishment—so Why Are We Still Voting for Hillary?
From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies that Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.BY: MICHELLE ALEXANDER
The Root, Posted: Feb. 10 2016
EXCERPT...
And it seems that we’re eager to get played. Again.
The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing; you wouldn’t understand,” Bill seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.
Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries. Now Hillary is running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal health care, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed and the dismantling of the vast prison state—many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life. Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.
What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization and the disappearance of work?
No. Quite the opposite.
CONTINUED...
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/02/the_clinton_legacy_decimated_black_america_so_why_are_we_still_voting_for.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Once elected, Bill Clinton had nothing to lose from defending POC against racist attack. At the very least, he could have pointed out that most of the RW memes about AA's(especially the ideas that crime, out-of-wedlock births and welfare abuse were "black things"
.
Nobody who wanted people on welfare to be punished just for being on welfare(and no, this isn't racial-most people on welfare were and are white, actually)was going to vote for any Dem. If you hated the poor, you weren't going to care about the environment or reproductive choice.
He could have mobilized the anti-racist half of the country to defend basic decency on all of this.
who knew?
of the Third Way triangulation.
Give something only on the surface to the rubes on both sides while you and your crony buddies laugh all the way to the neoliberal economic paradise of free trade, slave labor, mass incarceration, a dumbed down electorate, and a dying middle class. You can't have a banana republic with a strong middle class.
The War on Drugs and the New Jim Crow
By Michelle Alexander
EXCERPT...
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades—they are currently at historical lows—but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.
The drug war has been brutal—complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods—but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.
That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.
This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.
Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “(T)he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.
The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes—sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.
CONTINUED...
http://reimaginerpe.org/20years/alexander
"Both Clintons declined to be interviewed or comment for this article."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/clinton-money
Published on
Thursday, March 03, 2016
by Common Dreams
'The things we’re doing aren’t just wrong because we’re doing them to kids, they’re wrong because we’re doing them to humans'
by Nika Knight, staff writer
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54,000 youth are incarcerated in juvenile prisons in America on any given day, according to a new campaign to reform the system. (Photo: Richard Ross/Youth First)
"Youth First argues that the current system "isn't safe, isn't fair, and doesn't work" and advocates for a new model of treatment for youth convicted of crimes, including involving family in a treatment plan that emphasizes rehabilitation and prevention. The group also argues for closing incarceration facilities and using the resultant savings to fund new community-based programs."
"Support for Youth First's reform proposals was robust even among those who have been victims of crime and those who have family members who have been victims, the poll found. Crime victims do not support the "tough on crime" rhetoric and punishment-based programs that were touted by U.S. politicians in recent decades, which were responsible for the corresponding dramatic rise in juvenile incarceration rates, the group said."
snip~
"Beaver described mentally ill children being placed in isolation units in lieu of treatment, legally-mandated school hours being called off for days at a time because of "lack of security staff," and kids doing nothing for 12 hours a day but sitting in a tiny windowless room watching "a box TV with about four channels." This is not to mention the violence, the ever-present threats of sexual assault, and the prevalent use of chemical and physical restraints by correctional officers in youth detention centers also cited by Youth First in its reform initiative."
"Youth First also announced the release of an online mapping tool that allows visitors to explore the racial disparities of youth incarceration—children of color are incarcerated at far higher rates than white children charged with the same crime, the data showed. Its mapping tool also brings to light the surprising number of enormous detention centers built for children in the 19th century that are still in use today."
Full article: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/03/03/stop-locking-children-americans-say
bbm
I don't get it either. From indiscriminate profiling by LE to indiscriminate sentencing by the courts to the profit-prison system that often not only ruins one life, but a whole family left behind as well - keeping many of those convicted from ever being able to vote again, get decent employment - and the racial disparities pointed out above for children - why are Clinton policies supposed to be so good for people of colour? I honest to god don't understand.