Dick,
I'm not sure what you're referring to. However, it is certainly a fact that
the economic conditions of a majority of people of color are caused by the
institutional racism in this country. There are numerous scholarly books
that trace the links between slavery, the development of our financial
system, and the ways in which a majority of African Americans have been
locked out of opportunities. Black political leaders have rightfully
publicized these societal trends.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of R. E. Driscoll Sr
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2016 6:23 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary
Clinton
Miriam:
And, in my opinion, the so-called 'leaders' of the black community have done
a wonderful job of spreading around a lot of snow as to causative factors of
their majority economic conditions.
R. E. (Dick) Driscoll, Sr.
On 3/6/2016 12:51 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
because the Clintons have cultivated the black political leadership
for
years and because many of the black politicians have been co-opted
by money
like white politicians.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice
Dampman
Humel
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2016 1:24 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Black Lives Matter, Just Not to
Hillary
Clinton
and yet, the black vote seems to be going to Hillary.go figure...
On Mar 4, 2016, at 4:35 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
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.
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
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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