I'm now reading My Turn, the book about Hillary that Deborah Murray has just
scanned for Bookshare. I think back to the 90's, and realize how little
information I had, at the time, about what the Clintons were actually doing.
True, I had National Public Radio which, back then, was somewhat more
trustworthy than it is now. But when I got a computer, I think in 1993, I
used it for work, only. And most of my time was spent in living my life. I
didn't have access to all of the reading material that I do now. I was
uncomfortable about the crime bill, NAFTA, and certainly, welfare reform.
But I still felt that basically, the Democratic Party was on my side. In the
last nine years, I've done an amazing amount of reading. I know things now
that I either didn't know before, or that I only new bits and pieces of. I
did read books about Bill and Hillary in the 90's, but I don't think I had
context for them, or else they were very mainstream books, or else I just
wasn't paying attention. It seems to me that in order to experience true
democracy, one must be part of a small community in which everyone has equal
responsibility. Expecting that everyone will be able to function as a
knowledgeable, responsible citizen in a mass society in which the political
and economic structures have been fashioned to control the citizens, is
impossible.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2016 11:43 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Bill Clinton's Crime Bill Destroyed Lives,
and There's No Point Denying It
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:
the "prison rate"
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
refers to the fact that America was already imprisoning a largehappen.
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
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my newbest he could as president.
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
Allow me to offer a slightly different take on the 1990s. I thinkthink about it:
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
low-level drug users felt the full weight of state power at the sameClinton's administration.
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
For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-forchapter of the crime bill story confirms.
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
Back in the early 1990s, and although they were chemically almostthe "prison rate"
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-crim
e-bill
-hillary-black-lives-thomas-frankhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisf
ree/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
refers to the fact that America was already imprisoning a largehappen.
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
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my newbest he could as president.
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
Allow me to offer a slightly different take on the 1990s. I thinkthink about it:
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
low-level drug users felt the full weight of state power at the sameClinton's administration.
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
For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-forchapter of the crime bill story confirms.
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
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
