Alice,
It's interesting seeing the different ways people justify who they
vote for. My mother-in-law voted for John McCain because she liked
the way he looked. Many of our clients live in very expensive
retirement apartments, and yet they vote for men like George Bush.
Lately more and more of them are planning to vote for Ted Cruz, if he
can get past Donald Trump. I think that many of them would vote for
Trump, even while not admitting it, just because they've been
conditioned to believe that a woman president would be too weak.
Which is funny to me. Hillary Clinton's big mouth is just as big a
mouth as is Ted Cruz's big mouth. I seriously believe that if Clinton
is elected, she will lead us into 8 years of mediocrity.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/6/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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> 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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