Reply With Quote
^
Case in point
^
Mic e Alexander Just Responded to Bill Clinton
Ohio State University law professor Mic e Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, took the former president to task in a scathing Facebook post on Friday, starting off by thanking Clinton for revealing his true colors.
“Thank you, Bill, for giving the nation a ten-minute tutorial on everything that was wrong (and apparently remains wrong) with the ‘New Democrats’ and their approach to racial politics,” Alexander wrote.
She then went on to talk about how Clinton’s strategy to win the White House was based on a racist appeal to white independent voters by convincing them that he could take even more of a hardline approach to crime than his Republican predecessors — something Clinton and his surrogates in the media argue was supported by the black community.
It is a gross distortion to suggest that black people wanted billions of dollars slashed from child welfare, housing and other public benefits in order to fund an unprecedented prison building boom.
It was Bill Clinton’s deliberate political strategy — one he championed along with the “New Democrats” — to appeal to white swing voters by being tougher on struggling black communities than the Republicans had been, ramping up the drug war and gutting welfare.
She continued to excoriate Bill Clinton for driving a wedge between the protesters and Clinton supporter U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) by saying, “You can listen to [the protesters], or you can listen to Congressman John Lewis, the last remaining hero of the civil rights movement.”
Alexander pointed out that Rep. Lewis himself was a fierce opponent of Clinton’s endeavor to “reform welfare as we know it.”
That strategy of “getting tough” while at the same time eviscerating the federal social safety net was NOT supported by many of the black politicians he seeks to use as cover.
Rep. John Lewis (who Clinton referred to yesterday as the “last remaining hero of the civil rights movement”) fiercely opposed welfare reform, accurately predicting that it would thrust more than a million more kids into severe poverty.
John Lewis said back then: “How can any person of faith, of conscience, vote for a bill that puts a million more kids into poverty? What does it profit a great nation to conquer the world, only to lose its soul?”
Alexander and Lewis are right. As the Huffington Post recently reported, up to 1 million people will soon lose their access to food stamps as a result of Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts. The law includes provisions that cut food stamps after a certain period of time for unemployed welfare recipients with no dependents.
At the bill’s signing ceremony, Clinton himself even admitted the bill “fails to provide Food Stamp support to childless adults who want to work, but cannot find a job or are not given the opportunity to participate in a work program.”
“These totally unnecessary cuts would increase demand on the nation’s charitable food system at a time when food banks and other hunger-relief groups are stretched to meet sustained high need,” Feeding America CEO Diana Aviv said in a public statement.
At the end of her post, Mic e Alexander congratulated the protesters for “fighting for the soul of the Democratic party and American democracy itself.”
http://usuncut.com/politics/mic e...nton-blm-rant/
Bernie's campaign people need to get Smart Sista Mic e Alexander's FB post out to the black community, showing Bill was no friend to blacks, was not the First Black President, and Hillary was right there with him as he "got tough" on knitters into jail, and signed massive destruction of the safety net, esp bad for single black mothers.
Note that 40% of people on public assistance are white, and probably avid fans of Trump, who promises to keep the low-wage, low-info white male losers above, just a little, the blacks and browns so they can look down on them.
Bernie's $15/hour FEDERAL minimum would help blacks a more than Hillary's "incrementalism" $12, which she, nor Bernie, will "get done" because Dems stuff is not doable because the Repug racist block everything not for the 1%/BigCorp.
"Clinton continues to do well among minority groups, with 72 percent support among African-Americans compared to the 28 percent who support the Vermont senator."
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/...oses-gap-in-ny
Blacks supporting Hillary against their own best interests, just like rural whites "clinging bitterly to their guns and Bibles" supporting Repugs.
Bill Clinton Fundamentally Doesn't Understand What Black Lives Matter Is About
When did he suddenly cease to be a gifted politician?
Here's a question for the poli-sci folks here in the shebeen: When did Bill Clinton become such a fcking political maladroit?
His godawful answers to the folks from the Black Lives Matter movement who showed up to heckle him—and whose points, however raucously made, were damn good ones—turned an uncomfortable moment into (at least) a two-day story.
It also opened wide the question of how much damage he had to do in order to hold off the worst impulses of his political opposition in the 1990s. Or, more simply, how sharp were the edges of that triangle, and who got cut the deepest?
There always have been tales from the inside about his quick trigger, which certainly was on display Thursday when the BLM folks came to call.
"I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children," he said, shaking his finger at a heckler as Clinton supporters cheered, according to video of the event.
"Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She [Hillary Clinton] didn't…You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter," he told a protester. "Tell the truth."
First of all, "hopped up on crack"? Who are you? Jack Webb?
Second, many of the people in BLM weren't even born when Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill—an act, we should note, for which he has already apologized — but they grew up watching their brothers and uncles and parents get hauled off for preposterously long sentences.
The movement arose because of the unwarranted killing of black people by law enforcement, and by crackpot vigilantes like George Zimmerman, not because the BLM members felt tender toward drug kingpins.
And, not for nothing, but even drug kingpins deserve fair trials and equitable sentences under the law.
(Also, Clinton is going to have to fight for space on this particular fainting couch with the newly resurrected Andrew Sullivan, who went on Chris Matthews show Wednesday night and decided that Ta-Nehisi Coates was a Marxist, or some such crapola. Welcome back, Andrew.)
There's no question that the 1994 law exploded the country's prison population. (That a great deal of that explosion occurred at the state level is beside the point. A Democratic president helped point the way—again, as Clinton already has acknowledged.)
There's no question that it helped establish the ludicrous disparity in sentences for crack cocaine as opposed to the powdered variety, a disparity that fell most heavily on African-American defendants.
A lot of the law enforcement abuses — militarized policing, no-knock warrants, asset forfeiture — that so many people deplore today had their roots in the 1984 Omnibus Crime Bill signed by Ronald Reagan.
Those trends accelerated behind Clinton's bill a decade later. And if you believe, as I do, that the "war" on drugs was the template for the subsequent abuses of the "war" on terror, then Bill Clinton has a few things for which he should be called to account, and yelling "Soft on murder!" from a public platform is no way to do that.
Bill Clinton remains one of the most gifted politicians of my lifetime. And it is true that he did a great job holding back the worst excesses of Gingrichism during his term of office—including that exercise in Gingrichism that sought to deprive him of said office.
But this is the second election in a row in which he is turning out to be one of his wife's clumsiest surrogates.
I would make the modest suggestion to him that This Is Not About You. If you want to defend your record, write another massively unreadable book. If you want someone to defend your record ably, ask your wife. She seems to know how to do it best.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics...-lives-matter/
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions