When I first entered the University of Washington, in 1954, along with
the many lectures at the University Unitarian Church, I was exposed to
thinking that declared our penal system as barbaric. But, as I've
said before, we have a culture of revenge. We have only paid lip
service to rehabilitation, while building a system based on relentless
punishment. Of course this penal system that I speak of is the one
established for the working and lower classes. There is another
system in place for our truly first class citizens. But just as long
as we buy into the thinking that some of us Americans are of a baser
nature, and are less human than are the 1%, we will continue to pack
our prisons to the place that we must privatize the entire system in
order to afford it. Private prisons are slave camps, and as such,
they can pay their own way. Especially with some governmental
support.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/17/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Frank writes: "I remember being warned by a scholar who has studied mass
incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask Americans to care
about
the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison system. Today, however, the
situation has reversed itself: now people do care about mass incarceration,
largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and the intense scrutiny
it has focused on police killings."
Bill Clinton. (photo: AP)
Bill Clinton's Crime Bill Destroyed Lives, and There's No Point Denying It
By Thomas Frank, Guardian UK
16 April 16
The former president made sure low-level drug users felt the full weight of
state power at the same moment bankers saw the shackles that bound them
removed
Here is an actual headline that appeared in the New York Times this week:
Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law.
It is an unusual departure for a newspaper, since what is being reported
here is not news but history - or, rather, a particular interpretation of
history. The "1994 Law" to which the headline refers is the Violent Crime
Control and Law Enforcement Act; the statement about the "prison rate"
refers to the fact that America was already imprisoning a large portion of
its population before that 1994 law was approved by Congress.
As historical interpretations go, this one is pretty non-controversial.
Everyone who has heard about the "War on Drugs" knows that what we now call
"mass incarceration", the de facto national policy of locking up millions
of
low-level offenders, began long before 1994. And yet similar stories
reporting that non-startling fact are now being published all across the
American media landscape. That mass incarceration commenced before 1994 is
apparently Big News.
Why report a historical fact that everyone already knows? The answer is
because former president Bill Clinton, the man who called for and signed
the
1994 crime bill, is also the husband of the current frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination, and Democratic voters are having
trouble
squaring his draconian crime bill with his wife's liberal image.
That might be the reason so many of these stories seem to unfold with the
same goal in mind: to minimize Clinton's moral culpability for what went on
back in the 1990s. Mass incarceration was already happening, these stories
agree. And besides, not everything in the crime bill was bad. As for its
lamentable effects, well, they weren't intentional. What's more, Bill
Clinton has apologized for it. He's sorry for all those thousands of people
who have had decades of their lives ruined by zealous prosecutors and local
politicians using the tools Clinton accidentally gave them. He sure didn't
mean for that to happen.
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my new book
documenting the sins of liberalism, I remember being warned by a scholar
who
has studied mass incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask
Americans to care about the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison
system. Today, however, the situation has reversed itself: now people do
care about mass incarceration, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter
movement and the intense scrutiny it has focused on police killings.
All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like
something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks
like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by
protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has
stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare
isn't real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.
Allow me to offer a slightly different take on the 1990s. I think today (as
I thought at the time) that there is indeed something worth criticizing
when
a Democratic president signs on to a national frenzy for punishment and
endorses things like "three strikes", "mandatory minimums", and "truth in
sentencing", the latter being a cute euphemism for "no more parole". The
reason the 1994 crime bill upsets people is not because they stupidly
believe Bill Clinton invented these things; it is because they know he
encouraged them. Because the Democrats' capitulation to the rightwing
incarceration agenda was a turning point in its own right.
Another interesting fact. Two weeks after Clinton signed the big crime bill
in September 1994, he enacted the Riegle-Neal interstate banking bill, the
first in a series of moves deregulating the financial industry. The
juxtaposition between the two is kind of shocking, when you think about it:
low-level drug users felt the full weight of state power at the same moment
that bankers saw the shackles that bound them removed. The newspaper
headline announcing the discovery of this amazing historical finding will
have to come from my imagination - Back-to-Back 1994 Laws Freed Bankers And
Imprisoned Poor, perhaps - but the historical pattern is worth noting
nevertheless, since it persisted all throughout Clinton's administration.
For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-for
deliverance from out of Glass-Steagall's house of bondage. For another
class
of Americans, Clinton brought discipline: long prison stretches for drug
users; perpetual insecurity for welfare mothers; and intimidation for
blue-collar workers whose bosses Clinton thoughtfully armed with the North
American Free Trade Agreement. As I have written elsewhere, some got the
carrot, others got the stick.
But what is most shocking in our current journo-historical understanding of
the Clinton years is the idea that the mass imprisonment of people of color
was an "unintended consequence" of the 1994 crime bill, to quote the New
York Daily News's paraphrase of Hillary Clinton. This is flatly, glaringly
false, as the final, ugly chapter of the crime bill story confirms.
Back in the early 1990s, and although they were chemically almost
identical,
crack and powder cocaine were regarded very differently by the law. The
drug
identified with black users (crack) was treated as though it were 100 times
as villainous as the same amount of cocaine, a drug popular with affluent
professionals. This "now-notorious 100-to-one" sentencing disparity, as the
New York Times put it, had been enacted back in 1986, and the 1994 crime
law
instructed the US Sentencing Commission to study the subject and adjust
federal sentencing guidelines as it saw fit.
The Sentencing Commission duly recommended that the 100-to-1 sentencing
disparity be abolished, largely because (as their lengthy report on the
subject put it) "The 100-to-1 crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity
ratio
is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and
white federal defendants." By the time their report was released, however,
Republicans had gained control of Congress, and they passed a bill
explicitly overturning the decision of the Sentencing Commission. (Bernie
Sanders, for the record, voted against that bill.)
The bill then went to President Clinton for approval. Shortly before it
came
to his desk he gave an inspiring speech deploring the mass incarceration of
black Americans. "Blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong,"
he
said on that occasion, ". when there are more African American men in our
correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African
American men, in their twenties, are either in jail, on parole, or
otherwise
under the supervision of the criminal system. Nearly one in three."
Two weeks after that speech, however, Clinton blandly affixed his signature
to the bill retaining the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity, a disparity that
had brought about the lopsided incarceration of black people. Clinton could
have vetoed it, but he didn't. He signed it.
Today we are told that mass incarceration was an "unintended consequence"
of
Clinton's deeds.
For that to be true, however, Clinton would have not only had to ignore the
Sentencing Commission's findings but also to ignore the newspaper stories
appearing all around him, which can be found easily on the internet to this
day. Here's one that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on 31 October 1995, in
which it is noted that:
Civil rights organizations had led a telephone campaign to pressure the
president to veto the bill. At a rally last week in Chicago, the Rev Jesse
L
Jackson said that Mr Clinton had the chance, 'with one stroke of your veto
pen, to correct the most grievous racial injustice built into our legal
system.'
It is impossible to imagine that Bill Clinton, the brilliant Rhodes
Scholar,
didn't understand what everyone was saying. How could he sign such a thing
right after giving a big speech deploring its effects? How can he and his
wife now claim it was all an accident, when the consequences were being
discussed everywhere at the time? When everyone was warning and even
begging
him not to do it? Maybe it didn't really happen. Maybe it was all a bad
dream.
But it did happen. There it is, Bill Clinton's signing statement on the
website of the American Presidency Project. Yes, the 100-to-1 disparity was
finally reduced in 2010, but we liberals still can't ignore what Clinton
did
back in 1995. Every historian who writes about his administration will
eventually have to deal with it.
Until then, we have our orders from the mainstream media: Clinton didn't
mean it. Clinton has apologized. Things were bad even before Clinton got
started.
It is a hell of a way to do history. Millions of proudly open-minded people
are being asked to twist themselves into propaganda pretzels to avoid
acknowledging the obvious: that the leaders of our putatively left party
aren't who we think they are.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Bill Clinton. (photo: AP)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/bill-clinton-crime-bill
-hillary-black-lives-thomas-frankhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/20
16/apr/15/bill-clinton-crime-bill-hillary-black-lives-thomas-frank
Bill Clinton's Crime Bill Destroyed Lives, and There's No Point Denying It
By Thomas Frank, Guardian UK
16 April 16
The former president made sure low-level drug users felt the full weight of
state power at the same moment bankers saw the shackles that bound them
removed
ere is an actual headline that appeared in the New York Times this week:
Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law.
It is an unusual departure for a newspaper, since what is being reported
here is not news but history - or, rather, a particular interpretation of
history. The "1994 Law" to which the headline refers is the Violent Crime
Control and Law Enforcement Act; the statement about the "prison rate"
refers to the fact that America was already imprisoning a large portion of
its population before that 1994 law was approved by Congress.
As historical interpretations go, this one is pretty non-controversial.
Everyone who has heard about the "War on Drugs" knows that what we now call
"mass incarceration", the de facto national policy of locking up millions
of
low-level offenders, began long before 1994. And yet similar stories
reporting that non-startling fact are now being published all across the
American media landscape. That mass incarceration commenced before 1994 is
apparently Big News.
Why report a historical fact that everyone already knows? The answer is
because former president Bill Clinton, the man who called for and signed
the
1994 crime bill, is also the husband of the current frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination, and Democratic voters are having
trouble
squaring his draconian crime bill with his wife's liberal image.
That might be the reason so many of these stories seem to unfold with the
same goal in mind: to minimize Clinton's moral culpability for what went on
back in the 1990s. Mass incarceration was already happening, these stories
agree. And besides, not everything in the crime bill was bad. As for its
lamentable effects, well, they weren't intentional. What's more, Bill
Clinton has apologized for it. He's sorry for all those thousands of people
who have had decades of their lives ruined by zealous prosecutors and local
politicians using the tools Clinton accidentally gave them. He sure didn't
mean for that to happen.
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my new book
documenting the sins of liberalism, I remember being warned by a scholar
who
has studied mass incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask
Americans to care about the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison
system. Today, however, the situation has reversed itself: now people do
care about mass incarceration, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter
movement and the intense scrutiny it has focused on police killings.
All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like
something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks
like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by
protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has
stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare
isn't real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.
Allow me to offer a slightly different take on the 1990s. I think today (as
I thought at the time) that there is indeed something worth criticizing
when
a Democratic president signs on to a national frenzy for punishment and
endorses things like "three strikes", "mandatory minimums", and "truth in
sentencing", the latter being a cute euphemism for "no more parole". The
reason the 1994 crime bill upsets people is not because they stupidly
believe Bill Clinton invented these things; it is because they know he
encouraged them. Because the Democrats' capitulation to the rightwing
incarceration agenda was a turning point in its own right.
Another interesting fact. Two weeks after Clinton signed the big crime bill
in September 1994, he enacted the Riegle-Neal interstate banking bill, the
first in a series of moves deregulating the financial industry. The
juxtaposition between the two is kind of shocking, when you think about it:
low-level drug users felt the full weight of state power at the same moment
that bankers saw the shackles that bound them removed. The newspaper
headline announcing the discovery of this amazing historical finding will
have to come from my imagination - Back-to-Back 1994 Laws Freed Bankers And
Imprisoned Poor, perhaps - but the historical pattern is worth noting
nevertheless, since it persisted all throughout Clinton's administration.
For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-for
deliverance from out of Glass-Steagall's house of bondage. For another
class
of Americans, Clinton brought discipline: long prison stretches for drug
users; perpetual insecurity for welfare mothers; and intimidation for
blue-collar workers whose bosses Clinton thoughtfully armed with the North
American Free Trade Agreement. As I have written elsewhere, some got the
carrot, others got the stick.
But what is most shocking in our current journo-historical understanding of
the Clinton years is the idea that the mass imprisonment of people of color
was an "unintended consequence" of the 1994 crime bill, to quote the New
York Daily News's paraphrase of Hillary Clinton. This is flatly, glaringly
false, as the final, ugly chapter of the crime bill story confirms.
Back in the early 1990s, and although they were chemically almost
identical,
crack and powder cocaine were regarded very differently by the law. The
drug
identified with black users (crack) was treated as though it were 100 times
as villainous as the same amount of cocaine, a drug popular with affluent
professionals. This "now-notorious 100-to-one" sentencing disparity, as the
New York Times put it, had been enacted back in 1986, and the 1994 crime
law
instructed the US Sentencing Commission to study the subject and adjust
federal sentencing guidelines as it saw fit.
The Sentencing Commission duly recommended that the 100-to-1 sentencing
disparity be abolished, largely because (as their lengthy report on the
subject put it) "The 100-to-1 crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity
ratio
is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and
white federal defendants." By the time their report was released, however,
Republicans had gained control of Congress, and they passed a bill
explicitly overturning the decision of the Sentencing Commission. (Bernie
Sanders, for the record, voted against that bill.)
The bill then went to President Clinton for approval. Shortly before it
came
to his desk he gave an inspiring speech deploring the mass incarceration of
black Americans. "Blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong,"
he
said on that occasion, ". when there are more African American men in our
correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African
American men, in their twenties, are either in jail, on parole, or
otherwise
under the supervision of the criminal system. Nearly one in three."
Two weeks after that speech, however, Clinton blandly affixed his signature
to the bill retaining the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity, a disparity that
had brought about the lopsided incarceration of black people. Clinton could
have vetoed it, but he didn't. He signed it.
Today we are told that mass incarceration was an "unintended consequence"
of
Clinton's deeds.
For that to be true, however, Clinton would have not only had to ignore the
Sentencing Commission's findings but also to ignore the newspaper stories
appearing all around him, which can be found easily on the internet to this
day. Here's one that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on 31 October 1995, in
which it is noted that:
Civil rights organizations had led a telephone campaign to pressure the
president to veto the bill. At a rally last week in Chicago, the Rev Jesse
L
Jackson said that Mr Clinton had the chance, 'with one stroke of your veto
pen, to correct the most grievous racial injustice built into our legal
system.'
It is impossible to imagine that Bill Clinton, the brilliant Rhodes
Scholar,
didn't understand what everyone was saying. How could he sign such a thing
right after giving a big speech deploring its effects? How can he and his
wife now claim it was all an accident, when the consequences were being
discussed everywhere at the time? When everyone was warning and even
begging
him not to do it? Maybe it didn't really happen. Maybe it was all a bad
dream.
But it did happen. There it is, Bill Clinton's signing statement on the
website of the American Presidency Project. Yes, the 100-to-1 disparity was
finally reduced in 2010, but we liberals still can't ignore what Clinton
did
back in 1995. Every historian who writes about his administration will
eventually have to deal with it.
Until then, we have our orders from the mainstream media: Clinton didn't
mean it. Clinton has apologized. Things were bad even before Clinton got
started.
It is a hell of a way to do history. Millions of proudly open-minded people
are being asked to twist themselves into propaganda pretzels to avoid
acknowledging the obvious: that the leaders of our putatively left party
aren't who we think they are.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
