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Donald Trump's Policies Are Not Anathema to US Mainstream but an Uncomfortable Reflection of It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Friday, 04 March 2016 15:38 |
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Greenwald writes: "What establishment mavens most resent is not what Trump is, does, or says, but what he reflects: the unmistakable, undeniable signs of late-stage imperial collapse, along with the resentments and hatreds they have long deliberately and self-servingly stoked but which are now raging out of their control."
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg and Bill Clinton. (photo: NY Daily News/Getty Images)
Donald Trump's Policies Are Not Anathema to US Mainstream but an Uncomfortable Reflection of It
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
04 March 16
 he political and media establishments in the U.S. — which have jointly wrought so much destruction, decay, and decadence — recently decided to unite against Donald Trump. Their central claim is that the real estate mogul and longtime NBC reality TV star advocates morally reprehensible positions that are far outside the bounds of decency; relatedly, they argue, he is so personally repellent that his empowerment would degrade both the country and the presidency.
In some instances, their claim is plausible: There is at least genuine embarrassment if not revulsion even among America’s political class over Trump’s proposed mass deportation of 11 million human beings, banning of all Muslims from entering the country, and new laws to enable him to more easily sue (and thus destroy) media outlets that “falsely” criticize him. And his signature personality brew of deep-seated insecurities, vindictive narcissism, channeling of the darkest impulses, and gaudy, petty boasting is indeed uniquely grotesque.
But in many cases, probably most, the flamboyant denunciations of Trump by establishment figures make no sense except as self-aggrandizing pretense, because those condemning him have long tolerated if not outright advocated very similar ideas, albeit with less rhetorical candor. Trump is self-evidently a toxic authoritarian demagogue advocating morally monstrous positions, but in most cases where elite outrage is being vented, he is merely a natural extension of the mainstream rhetorical and policy framework that has been laid, not some radical departure from it. He’s their id. What establishment mavens most resent is not what Trump is, does, or says, but what he reflects: the unmistakable, undeniable signs of late-stage imperial collapse, along with the resentments and hatreds they have long deliberately and self-servingly stoked but which are now raging out of their control.
Two of the most recent, widely discussed anti-Trump outrage rituals — one from Wednesday and the other from last night’s Fox News debate — demonstrate the sham at the heart of the establishment display of horror. This week, American political and media figures from across the spectrum stood and applauded a tawdry cast of neocons and other assorted warmongers who are responsible for grave war crimes, torture, kidnappings, due process-free indefinite imprisonment, and the worst political crime of this generation: the attack on and destruction of Iraq.
These five dozen or so extremists (calling themselves “members of the Republican national security community”) were the toast of the town because they published an “open letter” denouncing Trump on the ground that his “own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.” This was one of their examples:
His embrace of the expansive use of torture is inexcusable.
Most decent human beings, by definition, would express this sentiment without including the qualifying word “expansive.” Even Ronald Reagan, whom virtually all the signatories claim to idolize, advocated for and signed a treaty in 1988 that stated that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever … may be invoked as a justification of torture” and that “each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law.” The taboo is on “all acts of torture,” not its “expansive use” — whatever that means.
But the group signing this anti-Trump letter can’t pretend to find an embrace of torture itself to be “inexcusable” because most of them implemented torture policies while in government or vocally advocated for them. So instead, they invoke the Goldilocks Theory of Torture: We believe in torture up to exactly the right point, while Trump is disgraceful because he wants to go beyond that; he believes in “the expansive use of torture.” The same dynamic drove yesterday’s widely cheered speech by Mitt Romney, where the two-time failed GOP candidate denounced Trump for advocating torture while literally ignoring his own clear pro-torture viewpoints.
Here we see the elite class agreeing to pretend that Trump is advocating views that are inherently disqualifying when — thanks to those doing the denouncing — those views are actually quite mainstream, even popular, among both the American political class and its population. Torture was the official American policy for years. It went way beyond waterboarding. One Republican president ordered it and his Democratic successor immunized it from all forms of accountability, ensuring that not a single official would be prosecuted for authorizing even the most extreme techniques, ones that killed people — or even allowed to be sued by their victims.
Many of the high officials most responsible for that torture regime and who defended it — from Condoleezza Rice and John Brennan — remain not just acceptable in mainstream circles but hold high office and are virtually revered. And, just by the way, both of Trump’s main rivals — Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz — refuse to rule out classic torture techniques as part of their campaign. In light of all that, who takes seriously the notion that Trump’s advocacy of torture — including techniques beyond waterboarding — places him beyond the American pale? To the contrary, it places him within its establishment mainstream.
Then there’s the outrage du jour from last night. A couple of weeks ago, George W. Bush’s NSA and CIA chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, claimed that members of the military would never follow Trump’s orders if it meant committing war crimes such as torturing detainees or killing a terrorist’s family members (perish the thought). When asked about this last night, Trump insisted that the U.S. military would do so: “They’re not going to refuse. Believe me,” he said. “If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is about.” Of all the statements Trump made last night, this was the one most often cited by pundits as being the most outrageous, shocking, disgusting, etc. Even bona fide war criminals such as the Bush White House’s pro-invasion and torture propagandist got in on the moral outrage act:
But is there any doubt that Trump is right about this? Throughout the 14-year war on terror, a handful of U.S. military members have bravely and nobly refused to take part in, or vocally denounced, policies that are clear war crimes. But there was no shortage of people in the military, the CIA, and working for private American contractors who dutifully carried out the most heinous abuses and war criminality. The military official in charge of investigating war on terror policies, Gen. Antonio Taguba, said this in 2008:
After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.
In 2009, Gen. Barry McCaffrey said, “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” The notion that the U.S. intelligence and military community will collectively rise up in defiance of the commander-in-chief if they are ordered to obey polices that are illegal is just laughable.
It’s obviously a pleasing fiction to believe — it produces nice, nationalistic feelings of nobility — but everything in the past decades proves that Trump is right when he says, “They’re not going to refuse.” Some likely would, but nowhere near enough to preclude the policies being carried out. In fact, the primary argument used to justify immunizing America’s torturers is that they were just following orders as approved by John Yoo and company: reflecting a moral code that dictates that, even when it comes to plainly illegal policies, obedience is preferable to defiance.
Then there’s the feigned horror over Trump’s proposal to kill the family members of terrorists. Though they claim they don’t do it deliberately, the fact is that this is something both the U.S. and Israel, among others, have routinely done for years: They repeatedly bomb people’s homes or work places, killing innocent people including family members, and then justify it on the ground that a terrorist was among them. While they claim they don’t target terrorists’ family members, they certainly target their homes and other places family members are certain to be found.
When a U.S. drone strike in 2011 killed the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, and then another drone strike two weeks later killed his 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman (who nobody claimed was involved with terrorism), former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs justified it this way:
If you really think you can locate fine distinctions — we merely keep killing the children, spouses, and other family members over and over by accident, not by purposely targeting — at least don’t pretend that what Trump is advocating is something our civilized minds have never previously encountered. He may be more gauche for saying it aloud and gleefully justifying it rather than feigning sorrow over it, but the substance of what he’s saying — despicable though it is — is hardly categorically different from what the U.S. government and its closest allies actually do over and over. And that’s to say nothing of the unpleasant fact that we’re all now supposed to ignore lest we be smeared as Trump supporters: that even as he advocates clear war crimes, he also, in some important cases, is advocating policies and approaches less militaristic and warmongering than not only his GOP rivals, but the war-loving leading Democratic candidate as well.
As for his starkly disgusting personal qualities, none of these is new. Anyone who has lived in New York has known for decades that this is who and what Donald Trump is. And yet he was fully integrated within and embraced by America’s circles of power and celebrity, including by those who now want to pretend to find him so hideously offensive. As the New York Times put it in December, “For years, President Bill Clinton was the best friend Donald J. Trump always hoped to have.”
One can argue, with some validity, that there’s value in collectively denouncing the most extreme expressions of imperial violence and war criminality in the context of a national election, even if it’s tinged with some inconsistency and hypocrisy. That’s fine, provided doing so does not serve to consecrate feel-good fantasies about American government and society. Finding a villain we can collectively condemn by consensus is a natural tribalistic desire: Declaring someone uniquely evil and then denouncing him is an affirmation of one’s own virtue. It feels good. As an excellent New York Times op-ed last week by psychology researchers at Yale explained, “human beings have an appetite for moral outrage” because it’s often “a result of a system that has evolved to boost our individual reputations.”
Collective moral condemnation can be genuinely valuable if it’s grounded in honest moral line-drawing. But when it’s driven largely by self-delusion and self-glorification — by the fiction that what is being condemned resides in a different moral universe rather than just a couple of degrees farther down the road — it can be quite destructive: ennobling that which is decisively ignoble.
Over the past few weeks, there has been a tidal wave of establishment denunciations of Donald Trump. It’s now not only easy to do but virtually obligatory. But very few of those denunciations contain any real examination of what accounts for his popularity and appeal: why a message grounded in contempt for the establishment resonates so strongly, why anxiety and anger levels are so high that the ground is so fertile for the angry strongman persona he represents. That’s because answering that question requires what U.S. establishment guardians most fear and hate: self-examination.
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ICE's War on Refugees |
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Friday, 04 March 2016 15:33 |
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Tabor writes: "The federal government's deportation raids are an inhumane response to a humanitarian crisis."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. (photo: Reuters)
ICE's War on Refugees
By Nick Tabor, Jacobin
04 March 16
The federal government’s deportation raids are an inhumane response to a humanitarian crisis.
 rom the time that she fled from El Salvador and was picked up at the US border, Ana Silvia Orellana Urias wore an ankle monitor so the immigration police could track her between check-in dates. On January 2, when immigration agents surrounded her house and she awoke to them banging on the door, she was living just outside Atlanta with her four children. The agents said they’d only come because of her ankle monitor. She was confused — she’d just changed the batteries. When she tried to call her lawyer, an agent reportedly seized her phone.
Then they rounded up Urias and her children and sent them to a jail in south Texas, where she said an agent tried to make her sign a paper agreeing to be deported.
Hers is one of twenty-eight families the federal government arrested over New Year’s weekend, in a series of deportation raids intended to scare off other would-be asylum seekers from Central America. News of similar arrests has trickled in since, and the secretary of homeland security has pledged to keep them up indefinitely.
In reaction to the roundups, activists across the country have launched a social media campaign, “Know Your Rights” workshops, and street protests in at least ten cities. On the legal front, attorneys have set up a makeshift bureau in the Texas jail where deportees are being housed and halted the deportation of a dozen families. Other attorneys are investigating possible civil rights abuses during the raids.
Amid this pushback, 146 Democrats in the House and 22 in the Senate have signed letters to President Obama, urging him to halt arrests and let immigrants stay temporarily, and a group of Senate Democrats is pushing a bill that would guarantee legal representation to certain migrants. Some city governments, including those of Philadelphia and Durham, North Carolina, have also publicly repudiated the raids.
In short, grassroots pressure does seem to be yielding results. But, with Obama apparently unwilling to call off immigration agents, many migrant families are being needlessly forced to live in fear.
The targeted refugees are coming primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — countries ravaged by gang violence and civil wars the US has, over the decades, played no small part in fostering.
Virtually all of them are fleeing for reasons of safety. Mohammad Abdollahi, an advocate with the San Antonio-based Refugee and Migrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), says that of the four to five thousand cases the group has handled since July 2014, only about a dozen have involved migrants seeking better-paying jobs.
US officials declared in 2014, after the Border Patrol apprehended some 140,000 unaccompanied children, that they were facing a crisis. A crisis not of need, it seems, but of security. That year the US government opened three new migrant jails in Texas and New Mexico — all operated by the notorious private-prison contractor GEO Group — and expanded an existing facility in Pennsylvania.
A year later, a federal judge found the government was violating its legal obligations to child immigrants: namely, to treat them humanely (GEO wasn’t licensed for child care) and to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions. She ordered the authorities to empty the facilities.
Meanwhile, refugees just kept arriving; more than 21,000 were picked up in the last three months of 2015 alone. The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) doubled down on its carceral response.
For instance, immigration agents began jailing for longer stretches single adults who presented themselves at the border. They’re now held for an average of two to six months while awaiting hearings. For some, it proves to be too much — every week, a RAICES client reported, five or six women sign papers to self-deport simply to get out from behind bars. “They’re coercing people to say, ‘You know what? I’d rather go back,’” said Victor Nieblas, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s a psychological battle.”
For many refugees, however, the hostility they endure from ICE pales in comparison to the dangers they face at home. When families are deported, Abdollahi said, they often start saving money immediately to make a return journey.
While families are usually processed faster, those sent to jails in remote towns like Artesia, New Mexico and Dilley, Texas often can’t access attorneys. At the Dilley jail, a population of some 2,400 detainees is served by just twelve legal rooms (even though lawyers are now staffing the facility full-time).
And last year, a Syracuse University report found that 73 percent of Central American mothers migrating to the US with children didn’t have legal representation in immigration court, while 98.5 percent of those without lawyers had their asylum claims rejected.
This lack of legal representation left migrants ill equipped to deal with President Obama’s next move.
In December, the Washington Post reported that ICE was preparing to round up and expel families who had arrived after January 2014. While the plan was to target those who had been denied asylum status, the raids reportedly could impact hundreds, if not more. “The adults and children would be detained wherever they can be found and immediately deported,” the Post wrote.
The raids came as promised with the start of the new year. In Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina 121 people from 28 families were detained.
What little details we know about the roundups come from an investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). In addition to Urias, numerous detainees said ICE officers tricked them, sometimes getting them to open their doors voluntarily so they wouldn’t need warrants.
Lesly Padilla Padilla, a twenty-six-year-old from Honduras, said ICE agents showed her a picture of an African-American man and claimed they’d been told he lived at her address. They insisted on searching the residence; when Padilla permitted them to enter, they took her away.
Another woman, Rosa Morales, who fled from Guatemala, said they blocked her brother on the road and threatened to arrest him unless he let them into Morales’s home. Once inside, they took her and her kids into custody.
While there have been no mass raids since January 2, in Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina, a few families have reported that ICE agents arrested their sons and daughters, sometimes on the way to school. Activists in New Jersey have also reported several raids. (ICE denies anyone was detained.) Pania Unzueta, an organizer in Chicago with the anti-deportation campaign #Not1More, said the sweeps have paralyzed immigrant communities with fear. Earlier this year, some families canceled ESL classes and kept their kids home from school.
Immigration attorneys have managed to secure stays of deportation for the twelve families with whom they’ve been able to connect, often on due-process grounds. Abdollahi recounted the case of one woman whose attorney had apparently manipulated her during an early hearing: she didn’t understand that she’d accepted voluntary deportation until the interpreter informed her.
But a more systemic problem, Abdollahi says, is that asylum law needs to be updated to correspond with the reality in Central America. In the federal court districts where cases are being tried, many judges don’t recognize the kinds of violence refugees are fleeing as satisfying the legal criteria for granting asylum status.
It’s not for lack of lawyerly effort. Shortly after the initial raids, a group of nonprofit attorneys rented a ranch near the jail in Dilley to stay in while they work on immigrants’ cases. Others began making day trips or checked in to a Days Inn nearby. While waiting on decisions from the Board of Immigration Appeals, they’ve also managed to get most of the families temporarily released, in keeping with established case law that prohibits migrants from being detained for more than twenty days.
For their part, immigrant rights organizations have deployed a two-pronged strategy involving both education and resistance. Activist groups, especially those affiliated with #Not1More, an anti-deportation campaign that grew out of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, have used social media to share resources, disseminate information, and schedule demonstrations.
Take the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR), an organization founded in 2001 that houses eighteen community groups under its institutional umbrella. After the raids were announced in December, GLAHR held a press conference with #Not1More and used social media to distribute a Spanish-language video informing migrants of their rights. When the raids began, families used GLAHR’s hotline to report arrests, and the group then connected them with the SPLC. In the intervening weeks, GLAHR has also put on Know Your Rights workshops all over Georgia.
The resistance component began on December 30 — after the Post report but before any roundups — with a march in Washington, DC. In the weeks since, demonstrations have been held in smaller cities like Durham, North Carolina and Homeland, Florida, and larger metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
The government’s response has been contradictory and convoluted. In mid-January, Secretary of State John Kerry was caught in a flagrant act of doublespeak when he pledged to make more room for Central Americans in the US’s refugee program, but didn’t even offer to stop the raids until the current asylum seekers could be properly evaluated.
Then later in the month, Vice President Joe Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed no deportation raids had even occurred. (Pelosi’s muddled explanation: “They were individuals who had broken the law in other than ways — other than [legal] status — or were newcomers to the country.”)
At the very least, it appears the government has changed course, dialing back mass sweeps in the face of activist pressure. Earlier this month, a band of Senate Democrats, led by Harry Reid, also introduced a bill that would guarantee certain migrants — including kids and those with disabilities — access to government lawyers.
This would be a helpful step. But the most immediate priority is halting the deportation of Central American asylum seekers and closing recently opened migrant jails. Congress should investigate whether ICE abridged detainees’ rights during the raids. And local governments should rescind their cooperation with ICE, as Philadelphia has done.
In the long run, the federal government should increase the number of refugee slots allocated for migrants from Central America. Kerry promised a paltry nine thousand slots (an increase from the current three thousand). That figure should be in the tens of thousands.
In addition, the United States, for years an accomplice in the repression of popular movements in the region, must change its foreign policy posture. A more just Central America wouldn’t send people fleeing by the thousands.
Liberals have praised Obama for his deft use of executive actions to circumvent a hostile Congress. Yet it’s the president alone who must answer for this unilateral call. For those pushed from their homelands by unabating bloodshed, the Obama administration hasn’t offered safe haven, but targeted deportations intended to sow fear. He’s brought law-and-order tactics to a humanitarian crisis.
The raids must come to an end, and those detained must be released. A warm welcome is the only humane response.
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FOCUS: The Congressional Black Caucus PAC Must Cut Ties With Corporations That Prey on the Black Community |
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Friday, 04 March 2016 13:11 |
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Alexander writes: "Although the Congressional Black Caucus PAC bears the name of the CBC, it's 21-member board only includes 8 of the 46 Black Caucus members. The majority of the board is made up of lobbyists representing various corporate interests, including private prisons."
Professor Michelle Alexander. (photo: TheNewJimCrow.com)
The Congressional Black Caucus PAC Must Cut Ties With Corporations That Prey on the Black Community
By Michelle Alexander, Michelle Alexander's Facebook Page
04 March 16
his is a critically important initiative demanding that the Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee (CBC PAC) cut ties with corporations that do harm to black communities and remake its membership to reflect CBC leadership. Although the CBC PAC bears the name of the Congressional Black Caucus, it's 21-member board only includes 8 of the 46 Black Caucus members. The majority of the board is made up of lobbyists representing various corporate interests, including private prisons.
Two weeks ago, the CBC PAC, with it's lobbyist-dominated board, made a high-profile endorsement of Hillary Clinton and quietly decided NOT to endorse fellow CBC member Rep. Donna Edwards' historic bid to become only the second Black woman to be elected to the Senate.
Read this petition to learn why Donna Edwards wasn't endorsed and get a small glimpse of how utterly corrupt our politics have become. The Congressional Black Caucus presents itself as the "moral conscience" of our government, yet its PAC exemplifies so much of what is wrong with our withering democracy.
For thousands of years it has been said that one cannot faithfully serve two masters, yet we're supposed to believe that our politicians can be supported and bankrolled by tobacco companies, private prison lobbyists, payday lenders, and pharmaceutical companies and still serve our communities well. Surely we know better than that.
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FOCUS: Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary Clinton |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 04 March 2016 12:06 |
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Boardman writes: "Over 50 years ago, in a 1963 Chicago protest against school segregation, one of today's Democratic candidates for president was chained to a black woman and then arrested for resisting arrest. That protestor for black rights was not Chicago native Hillary Clinton, then a politically active Republican supporting Barry Goldwater for President, even though he opposed the Civil Rights Act. Now Clinton is politically strongest in the same southern states Goldwater won in 1964 - ponder that irony."
The Democratic front-runner was confronted in a Minnesota coffee shop by a young black woman who wanted her to expand on the lack of diversity among elected Democratic officials. (photo: YouTube)
Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary Clinton
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
04 March 16
Black voters support a fantasy champion for black lives
 ver 50 years ago, in a 1963 Chicago protest against school segregation, one of today’s Democratic candidates for president was chained to a black woman and then arrested for resisting arrest. Now that moment appears in an unofficial campaign poster emphasizing the candidate’s commitment to civil rights. That protestor for black rights in 1963 was not Chicago native Hillary Clinton, then a politically active Republican supporting Barry Goldwater for President, even though he opposed the Civil Rights Act. Now Clinton is politically strongest in the same southern states Goldwater won in 1964 – ponder that irony.
In 1962, Hillary Clinton’s youth minister took her and her class to hear Dr. Martin Luther King preach a sermon titled “Sleeping Through the Revolution,” referring to the civil rights activism of the time. She shook Dr. King’s hand. Recalling the event in 2014, Clinton said:
Probably my great privilege as a young woman was going to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak…. I sat on the edge of my seat as this preacher challenged us to participate in the cause of justice, not to slumber while the world changed around us. And that made such an impression on me.
But it did not make such an impression that she couldn’t support Goldwater (to be fair, he helped integrate the Arizona Air National Guard). And it didn’t make such an impression on her that she actually participated in the Civil Rights Movement (making Clinton-supporter Rep. John Lewis’s denigration of Sanders’s civil rights record look like a pretty hypocritical cheap shot, but that’s what happens when the establishment circles the wagons). It’s not that Hillary Clinton is terrible on civil rights, she usually manages to end up on the side of the angels, more or less, but she has never shown the willingness or capacity to lead them.
Hillary Clinton: “We have to bring them to heel.”
On February 24, in Charleston, South Carolina, Hillary Clinton held a private fundraiser at a posh private home before a predominantly white crowd of about 100 who paid $500 each to attend. Clinton had just started to speak when a young black woman (who also paid $500 to get it) quietly held up a pillow case with a handwritten message in capital letters – “WE HAVE TO BRING THEM TO HEEL” – followed by #WhichHillary. Making nice at first, Clinton started reading the message aloud and the following exchange took place.
ASHLEY WILLIAMS: I’m not a superpredator, Hillary Clinton.
HILLARY CLINTON: OK, fine. We’ll talk about it.
ASHLEY WILLIAMS: Can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, can I talk? OK, and then maybe you can listen to what I say.
ASHLEY WILLIAMS: Yes, yes, absolutely.
HILLARY CLINTON: OK, fine. Thank you very much. There’s a lot of issues, a lot of issues in this campaign. [...]
ASHLEY WILLIAMS: I know that you called black youth superpredators in 1994. Please explain your record. Explain it to us. You owe black people an apology.
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, if you will give me a chance to talk, I’ll—I’ll tell you something. You know what? Nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to ask me, and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me, dear.
By this time the audience has become hostile, and security is leading Ashley Williams away (filmed by her confederate who appears to be ignored).
HILLARY CLINTON: Um, OK, back to the issues.
The issue Clinton ducks here is massive black incarceration
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed a vicious crime bill (to go with his vicious welfare reform bill) that has had a devastating impact on black families and communities across America. In 2010, Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow (a New York Times bestseller) to address “mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.” In her preface, Alexander wrote that “something is eerily familiar about the way our criminal justice system operates, something that looks and feels a lot like an era we left behind,… America’s latest caste system.” (The scandal of over-imprisonment in America is or should be well known to any sentient reader, along with the scandal of disproportionately locking up people of color, along with the scandal of making imprisoned black people a profit center for largely white-owned private prisons.)
For the February 10, 2016, issue of The Nation, Michelle Alexander wrote a piece titled “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” in which she summarizes the Clinton record on racial justice:
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.
Campaigning for President Clinton’s re-election in 1996, Hillary Clinton chose to defend the 1994 crime bill and its increased mass incarceration with hard-edged, unsympathetic rhetoric, based in part on the scare tactic of invoking imaginary “super predators.” (Clinton has since offered a non-apology apology for the rhetoric: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”)
To date, Clinton has not addressed the substantive issue of mass incarceration, which seems a pretty clear systemic injustice of long standing. Clinton has taken contributions from the private prison industry, and has given a small proportion of the money to a charity that helps women prisoners adjust to society on release. In October 2015, after months of pressure from civil rights and immigrant justice groups, the Clinton campaign had promised not to accept clearly labeled prison industry contributions.
By July 2015, the injustice of the American justice system was plain enough that even Bill Clinton sort of apologized for the 1994 Violent Crime Act. Speaking before the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on July 15, Clinton said: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse…. And I want to admit it.” He did not propose to do anything about it. Nor has Hillary Clinton proposed to do anything about the mass incarceration of black Americans or other minorities. She has offered at best kinder, gentler rhetoric.
And at the same time, she claimed in Charleston: “You know what? Nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to ask me, and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me, dear.”
Clinton lies – what else is it? – and the media can’t tell it’s a lie?
The reality is that Hillary Clinton has been asked before about mass incarceration, she has been asked before about mass incarceration by Black Lives Matter people, she has been asked before about mass incarceration of black people only to turn pettish and say, “if that is your position, then I will talk only to white people about how we are going to deal with a very real problem.” On August 11, 2015, in the course of a 15-minute videotaped meeting, Daunasia Yancey pressed Clinton on her role in oppressing black people:
… you and your family have been personally and politically responsible for policies that have caused health and human services disasters in impoverished communities of color through the domestic and international war on drugs that you championed as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State. And so I just want to know how you feel about your role in that violence and how you plan to reverse it?... those policies were actually extensions of white supremacist violence against communities of color. And so, I just think I want to hear a little bit about that, about the fact that actually while … those policies were being enacted, they were ripping apart families … and actually causing death.
In response, Clinton tried to change the subject. (On August 25, 2015, Reader Supported News published my long report on Clinton’s dismal and unresponsive meeting with Black Lives Matter people in Keene, New Hampshire. The event was reported by others as well, but not widely.) Perhaps that limited coverage contributed to Clinton’s willingness to claim, absolutely falsely, that nobody had ever asked her before. Perhaps she gambled that no one would remember, or even google, the truth.
And she would have won that bet with one of the best columnists at The New York Times, Charles M. Blow, whose work is consistently probing and thoughtful. Just not this time – in his February 29 piece, “I’m Not A Super Predator,” about Ashley Williams, he quotes Hillary Clinton saying, “You’re the first person to ask me …” about mass incarceration of minorities.
“How could this be true? How was this possible?” Blow wrote, with instinctive, accurate skepticism. But he accepted the Clinton claim’s veracity at face value, apparently not bothering to do basic fact-checking of a claim that is not even close to being true. This Clinton dishonesty was not widely reported. And Blow, having accepted the truth of Clinton’s falsehood, used it in a weird kind of victim-blaming:
In that moment, I knew that the people of my generation had failed the people of Williams’s. Her whole life has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when I was the age she is now.
She said she has grown up knowing families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage. That night, Williams forced a reckoning.
But that’s not true. There has been no reckoning, not so far as Clinton is concerned. There is no Clinton acceptance of responsibility or accountability for inhumane policies, the Democratic Party is still in bed with those who want to privatize government, and the establishment candidate and her party have yet to promise any serious change, much less any real improvement. The private prison scam will continue to be just one more way to loot the public treasury, while having the perverse effect of pressuring governments from local to federal to keep arresting people fast enough and jailing them long enough to keep the profits flowing to people who have no vested interest in justice, rehabilitation, or freedom. Black lives don’t matter to the bottom line of the prison-industrial complex any more than they matter to Hillary Clinton.
What does matter to Hillary Clinton? Or Bernie Sanders?
Clinton gives the game away at the end of her brief encounter with Ashley Williams in Charleston. As the black college graduate student is led away by security for objecting to policies that destroy black lives, Clinton says calmly, revealing her actual priorities, “OK, back to the issues.”
In other words, more than two decades of life-destroying criminal policy that she helped implement and support is not an issue for her. She might just as well have said, “I will talk only to white people,” which is pretty much what she did for the rest of the evening.
Ashley Williams has also criticized Sanders for voting for the 1994 Violent Crime Act. At the time, April 13, 1994, he also spoke out strongly against the likely – now actual – consequences of the crime bill, concluding:
Mr. Speaker, it is my firm belief that clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them. But it is also my view that through the neglect of our Government and through a grossly irrational set of priorities, we are dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence. And Mr. Speaker, all the jails in the world, and we already imprison more people per capita than any other country, and all of the executions in the world, will not make that situation right. We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails. Mr. Speaker, let us create a society of hope and compassion, not one of hate and vengeance.
This demonstrates that the consequences of the crime bill were knowable in 1994, and that some people knew them. This also illustrates the political pressure politicians were feeling about “crime” issues, leading some like Bernie Sanders to vote for a “solution” that he did not believe to be any solution at all. There is no such contemporary prescience expressed by either of the Clintons, leaving their supporters to defend horrible policies with weak excuses like, well, lots of people supported it. One of them in 1994 was Hillary Clinton, whose hardline defense of more cops and more prisons contains no compensating humane concern even close to what Sanders expressed.
More than fifty years of commitment to civil rights has earned Sanders only a tiny fraction of the black vote in primaries so far, despite articulate and heartfelt support from black rapper Killer Mike talking about Hillary Clinton’s cold dismissal of Ashley Williams and Black Lives Matter – “The only person that I have the conscience to vote for is Bernard Sanders, I know that the only person that my logical, beautiful black mind will allow me to vote for is Senator Bernie Sanders!” His argument has yet to gain significant traction with black voters. On February 29, before the black vote crushed him in South Carolina, Sanders told a rally:
There is no rational reason why a black male baby born today has a one-in-four chance of ending up in jail. That’s a disgrace. And together, we are going to bring justice to a broken criminal justice system.
Hillary Clinton could have said something like that to Ashley Williams at that mostly-white fundraiser in Charleston. She didn’t say anything like that. She didn’t even make the effort. With the removal of the black nuisance, Hillary Clinton said only: “OK, back to the issues.” Three days later, at a Hillary Clinton rally in Atlanta, two Georgia State University students were removed for holding “Black Lives Matter” signs. The Clinton campaign denied any responsibility.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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