2016 Postmortem

amborin

(16,631 posts) Mon Feb 8, 2016, 01:34 PM Feb 2016

Clintons' Shameful Hypocrisy on Racism:

New York: Former US President Bill Clinton had taken a racial jibe at Barack Obama in 2008, saying "this guy would have been carrying our bags", a report claimed on Monday.

Mr Clinton allegedly made the racially insensitive remark to Senator Ted Kennedy as he tried to convince the liberal to endorse his wife, Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama's rival, for the Democratic nomination, according to The New Yorker.
http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/bill-clinton-made-racist-remarks-about-barack-obama-in-2008-report-498484

Clinton's push to the right bore fruit in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill, authored by Joe Biden at the behest of the White House, established draconian three-strikes laws that sent people away to prison for decades for trivial crimes. It also included "truth in sentencing" provisions that eliminated early parole for huge numbers of prisoners.

Though the trend toward the era of mass incarceration had begun earlier and was largely driven on the state level, Clinton's passage of the 1994 law helped entrench the system even further.

As the crime bill was being debated in Congress, Hillary Clinton was a vocal advocate for it, repeating the kinds of racist talking points used to support the "war on crime." At a time when the U.S. prison population was skyrocketing, she declared, "There is something wrong when a crime bill takes six years to work its way through Congress and the average criminal serves only four...We need more police. We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets."

In 1996, the Clintons went further when Bill signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act into law. This legislation ended the federal welfare system that had existed since the Great Depression, replacing it with a program called Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), which was administered through the states. The ideological attack on welfare used to win support for the bill was chock full of racist abuse directed at African Americans, even though a majority of welfare recipients were actually white.

The Republicans, of course, led the way with racist scapegoating.... Democrats, however, were no less awful, with one governor boasting that welfare reform would "turn off the spigot" of teen pregnancy.
Hillary herself got in on the scapegoating after the fact, defending her husband's law with the same kind of rhetoric used to pass it. In 1999, she claimed that, before welfare reform, "[t]oo many of those on welfare had known nothing but dependency all their lives, and many would have found it difficult to make the transition to work on their own"--as if people on welfare were simply incapable of finding jobs.

Around the same time, she justified welfare reform with an anecdote from a woman whose daughter supposedly told her, "Mommy, I'm tired of seeing you sitting around the house doing nothing." To make sure no one was missing the message, she later said that because of welfare reform, "these people are no longer deadbeats."

All of this language was profoundly racialized. The image of a lazy Black woman on welfare, sitting around the house all day, as in Clinton's little story, was a stock in trade of reactionary opponents of government assistance, going back to Ronald Reagan and beyond.

As political scientist Martin Gilens has shown, this racialization of the welfare debate had profound effects on the politics of reform. Even though a majority of recipients were white, a majority of the images shown in the media of welfare recipients were Black. The drive to dismantle welfare was powered by portraying Black Americans as deadbeats living off the tax dollars of white Americans.

The fact that Hillary Clinton defended welfare reform in such a manner is particularly ugly given the devastating impact it has had on American workers. When the law decentralized control over welfare funding levels to the states, it helped ensure that, in addition to universal federal restrictions like work requirements and an inadequate 60-month lifetime limit, individual governors could cut benefits to the bone.

This is, indeed, what happened. In 16 states, TANF benefits have simply never been adjusted, and remain at the same level they were at nearly 20 years ago, despite two decades of inflation. Even in states that did adjust for inflation, benefits didn't keep up. As result, once inflation is taken into account, benefits are lower than they were in 1996 in 48 states.

At the same time, the onerous requirements and limitations of TANF have meant that even as the number of families with children in poverty has climbed, the number of families receiving TANF benefits have actually declined. Partially as a result of this stinginess, the number of families with children living in extreme poverty--less than $2 a day per person--has doubled since 1996......

http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/26/the-clintons-shameful-hypocrisy-on-racism