Back when I first was collecting articles, I developed a rather
complex system for referencing topics and the important public
figures. But when that computer crashed, I now just shove stuff in a
variety of folders and spend time hunting for the article I want. My
memory is not getting any better and my files are bulging. But in all
of that, I have many examples of Hillary Clinton selling out the
working class. Is she a better deal than Trump or Cruz? Well since
she's already telling us that we'll need to go slow when it comes to
reform, she might be a bit better in the short haul. But in the long
haul there is not a single strong leader for all of us outside the
System. Bernie Sanders might be able to make a little headway, but
he'll be reeled in if he gets too deeply involved in working class
issues.
Still, if I have the chance, I'll vote for Sanders in the Primary. If
the general election offers only Clinton and any of the Republican's
Angry Men, I'll vote for Jill Stein, and become an onlooker, sort of
like watching the Sea Hawks playing the 49ers.
The teams are not owned by the local people, they do not consist of
local talent, they charge whatever they can get away with in order for
you to even sit on the sidelines. It's very much like the two-headed
American Political Party.
When your guys do something positive, you get to cheer and say things
like, "We're the best!" When things go bad, you get to shout, "Kill
the Ref!"
And you even begin to believe that this is, "Your" team. Until the
real owners get mad and pack up their marbles and move to another
town.
Very much like our current political system.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/6/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think that a lot of people are unaware of what the Clintons' actions
were.
I certainly didn't understand how negatively their actions affected our
country until so much reading material became accessible to me and that
didn't really begin to happen until the end of the 90's. But most people,
even though they're sighted, don't read all that much.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2016 1:54 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary
Clinton
How do we teach ourselves to look past a person's words and measure them by
their actions?
Carl Jarvis
On 3/4/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
communities?
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
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. 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
DidCrime Act.
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
Speaking before the annual meeting of the National Association for therhetoric.
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
And at the same time, she claimed in Charleston: "You know what?incarceration of minorities.
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
"How could this be true? How was this possible?" Blow wrote, withWilliams forced a reckoning.
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,
But that's not true. There has been no reckoning, not so far asconcluding:
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,
Mr. Speaker, it is my firm belief that clearly, there are some peopleCarolina, Sanders told a rally:
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
There is no rational reason why a black male baby born today has acommunities?
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.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
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)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
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
DidCrime Act.
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
Speaking before the annual meeting of the National Association for therhetoric.
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
And at the same time, she claimed in Charleston: "You know what?incarceration of minorities.
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
"How could this be true? How was this possible?" Blow wrote, withWilliams forced a reckoning.
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,
But that's not true. There has been no reckoning, not so far asconcluding:
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,
Mr. Speaker, it is my firm belief that clearly, there are some peopleCarolina, Sanders told a rally:
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
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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