Vanity Fair: “I REALLY THINK HE IS AGAINST AMERICA”: IS TRUMP A TRAITOR?
A.
Prison-loving president. In
May, on the heels of the unrest in Baltimore sparked by Freddie Gray’s death in
police custody, Clinton apologized for locking too many people up. Thanks,
Bill. He signed into law the 1994 crimes Bill. Written by none other that Joe Biden current Democratic nominee.
The 2.4 million people in prison and the
160,000 Americans serving life in prison largely because of his policies might
be excused for not accepting Clinton's apology. Tag-teaming with ex-President
Ronald Reagan, Clinton is the president most responsible for the mass
incarceration of Americans on an epic scale. The gung-ho crime fighter-in-chief
passed the single most damaging law with his omnibus federal crime bill in
1994, which included the infamous “three strikes” law (three felony convictions
means a life sentence) and ensured that mandatory minimum sentences imprisoned
even low-level, non-violent offenders for a long, long time.
Clinton discussed his regrets about the crime
bill with CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "The problem is the way it was
written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in
prison," he said. "And we wound up… putting so many people in prison
that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs
and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive
lives."
All true, except it was not just lack of funds
that eliminated education and rehabilitation programs in prison, it was a deliberate
choice. (Thus Ronald Reagan it was like a planned one-two punch) Sensing the political popularity of being tough on crime, Clinton fully
embraced the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality, and gloated about
three strikes. It strains credulity to think that this exceptionally
intelligent man did not understand the dire consequences of what he was doing,
as his wife now says.
Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994 helped set the national mood. Dozens of states followed
with their own mandatory minimum laws. While there is some talk today of
criminal justice reform on a minor level (like for low-level drug offenses), no
one is talking about the all-but-forgotten population doing hard time thanks in
large part to Clinton.
B. Punitive welfare reform. The consequences of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill have been devastating for millions of American families. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 took a page directly from Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. In an atmosphere steeped in decades of conservative scaremongering around the specter of sexually reckless “welfare queens,” Clinton’s 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” played directly to white voters' fears of black crime and poverty. Twenty years after scrapping the longstanding Aid to Families with Dependent Children in favor of the right wing’s underfunded and more punitive vision, the number of poor American children has exploded and black welfare recipients are subject to the system’s most stringent rules.
In 2012, the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities found that while “in 1996, for
every 100 families with children living in poverty, TANF [Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families] provided cash aid to 68 families,” that number plunged to
27 out of every 100 families living in poverty by 2010. Conservatives trumpet
these numbers, often citing the fact that nationally, TANF enrollment fell 58
percent between 1995-2010. But they neglect to mention that the number of poor
families with children rose 17 percent in the same period.
Sociologist Joe Soss,
who has examined the long-term racial consequences of welfare reform, which
allowed states to decide how funds were allotted and eligibility
determined, also
noted that, “all of the states with more African Americans
on the welfare rolls chose tougher rules…[E]ven though the Civil Rights Act
prevents the government from creating different programs for black and white
recipients, when states choose according to this pattern, it ends up that large
numbers of African Americans get concentrated in the states with the toughest
rules, and large numbers of white recipients get concentrated in the states
with the more lenient rules.”
C.
Wall Street’s Deregulator-in-Chief. As president, Clinton outdid the GOP when it came to
unleashing Wall Street’s worst instincts, by supporting and signing into law
more financial deregulation legislation than any other president, according to
the Columbia Journalism Review.
He didn’t just push
the Democrats controlling the House to pass a bill (Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act) that dissolved the Depression-era Glass-Steagall
law, which barred investment banks from commercial banking
activities. He deregulated the
risky derivatives market (Commodity Futures Modernization Act), gutted state
regulation of banks (Riegle-Neal)
leading to a wave of banking mergers, and reappointed Alan Greenspan as Federal
Reserve chair. In recent years, Clinton has ludicrously claimed that
the GOP forced him to do this, which led in no small part to the global
financial crisis of 2008 and the too-big-to-fail ethos, with the federal
government obligated to bail out multinational banks while doing little for
individual account holders. People lost all of their retirement funds and only to received a modified $250,000 of the multi-millions
“What happened?”
he told CNN
in 2013. “The American people gave the Congress to a group of very conservative
Republicans. When they passed bills with veto-proof majority with a lot of
Democrats voting for it, that I couldn’t stop, all of a sudden we turn out to
be maniacal deregulators. I mean, come on.” As CJR put it,
“This is, to be kind, bullshit,” reciting a list of Clinton deregulatory
actions that began while Democrats were the majority, starting with appointing
“Robert Rubin and Larry Summers in the Treasury, which officially did in
Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which left the
derivatives market a laissez-faire Wild West.”
CJR concludes, “The
bottom line is: Bill Clinton was responsible for more damaging financial
deregulation—and thus, for the [2008] financial crisis—than any other
president.”
D. Gutted manufacturing via trade agreements. Bill Clinton helped gut America’s manufacturing base by promoting and passing the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, in 1993, when Democrats controlled Congress. That especially resonates today, when another Democratic president, Barack Obama, and Republicans in Congress, are allied against labor unions and liberal Democrats to pass its like-minded descendant, the Trans Pacific Partnership. “NAFTA signaled that the Democratic Party—the “progressive” side of the U.S. two-party system—had accepted the reactionary economic ideology of Ronald Reagan,” wrote Jeff Faux, on the Economic Policy Institute Working Economics Blog.
In 1979, then-candidate Reagan proposed a
trade pact between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But the Democrats who
controlled the Congress would not approve it until Clinton pushed it in his
first year in office. NAFTA has affected U.S. workers in four major ways, EPI
said. It caused the permanent loss of 700,000 manufacturing jobs in industrial
states such as California, Texas and Michigan. What amazes me is that most Americans are totally oblivious as to the job loss; moreover the value if Trump[It gave corporate managers an
excuse to cut wages and benefits, threatening otherwise to move to Mexico.
Selling U.S. farm products in Mexico “dislocated millions of Mexican workers
and their families,” which “was a major cause in the dramatic increase in
undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market.” And NAFTA became a
“template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would
flow to capital and the costs to labor.”
The World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund all applied NAFTA's principles, which gave corporations the power to challenge local laws protecting health and safety if they cut into profits—like labeling tobacco packaging. The NAFTA “doctrine of socialism for capital and free markets for labor” could also be seen in the way the U.S. government “organized the rescue of the world’s banks and corporate investors and let workers fend for themselves” in the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-'95, the Asian financial crash of 1997, and the global financial meltdown of 2008.
E. Expanded the war on drugs. Although Clinton called for treatment instead
of prison for drug offenders during his 1992 campaign, once in office he
reverted to the same drug war strategies of his Republican predecessors. He
rejected the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recommendation to eliminate the
disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences. He rejected lifting the
federal ban on funding for needle exchange programs. He placed a permanent
eligibility ban on food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense,
even marijuana possession. And he prohibited felons from living in public
housing.
He also championed the
1994 crime bill, a $30 billion effort that included more mandatory minimum
sentences for crack cocaine, extra funds for states that severely punished
convicts, limited judges' discretion in sentencing, and allocated billions for
federal prison construction and expansion. During Clinton's tenure, federal
prison spending jumped $19 billion (171%), while funding for public housing
declined by $17 billion (61%). Under Clinton, nearly $1 billion in state
spending shifted from education to prisons.
The U.S. prison population doubled from about 600,000 to about 1.2 million during the Clinton years, and the federal prison population swelled even more dramatically, driven almost entirely by drug war prosecutions. Yet a month before leaving office, Clinton said in a Rolling Stone interview that "we really need a re-examination of our entire policy on imprisonment" of drug users and that pot smoking "should be decriminalized." If only he had acted on those sentiments when it mattered. Damage was done there is nothing he can do about it how. His wife just sought to enrich herself as secretary of state. Why would anyone believe anyone that has their backing is beyond me!!!
F. Expanded the death penalty. When running for president in 1992, then-Arkansas Gov.
Clinton allowed his
state to execute Ricky Ray Rector, a convicted murderer with severe mental
impairments. Despite much criticism, Clinton's decision not to commute the
sentence not only established his tough-on-crime credentials as a national
candidate, it also became a precedent to the expansion of the federal death
penalty under his White House.
Clinton’s 1994 crime
bill expanded the death penalty to 60 additional crimes including
three that don’t involve murder: espionage, treason and drug trafficking in
large amounts. Throughout his presidency he ignored calls for a national
moratorium on federal executions. In April 1996, Clinton followed up and signed
the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) into law.
Introduced by Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole in response to the Oklahoma City
bombings in 1995, it severely restricted the ability of federal judges to grant
relief in cases, reduced trials for convicted criminals and sped up the
sentencing process.
In 2011, Troy Davis,
an African American convicted of
killing an off-duty cop, was put to death in Georgia. Davis’ case sparked
nationwide protests as many believed he was innocent. There was no evidence
linking him to the crime and seven witnesses who helped put him on Death Row
later recanted their testimony.
Many believe Bill
Clinton helped seal Davis’ fate years before. Many of Davis’ appeals were
denied for procedural reasons and his 2004 petition, which included the
recanted testimony and the possible identity of the killer, was rejected by the
federal judge since, under current regulations, such evidence has to be
presented first in state court. Davis’ defense was unable to do that because,
shortly before AEDPA became law, Congress slashed $20 million from
post-conviction legal defense organizations. In a piece
in Time, Brendan Lowe
quoted Dale Baich, an assistant federal public defender in Arizona: “The bottom
line is that the AEDPA is very harsh and unforgiving.”
G. Political smears: Sistah Souljah. Clinton was highly regarded by African
Americans during the 1992 election cycle for his ability to articulate how
racism impacted their communities. However, when it mattered most, he dropped
the ball on race when it was completely unnecessary. It started when he blasted
hop-hop artist Sistah Souljah over
her comments in a Washington
Post article about the Los Angeles riots, which were
sparked by the acquittal of several Los Angeles policemen who beat truck driver
Rodney King. “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week
and kill white people?” she said.
Souljah claims she was
misquoted. However, a few weeks later, both she and Clinton spoke at Jesse
Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington. Clinton used his
appearance to criticize
her statements, saying, “We can’t get anywhere in this country
pointing the finger at one another across racial lines.” He compared her
remarks to former KKK wizard David Duke.
As Matt Bai wrote for
Yahoo, Clinton was not going to lose black votes by calling the
rapper out. Black people were (and still are) hyper loyal to the Democratic
Party. But since Clinton is being reflective about his presidency, perhaps he
needs to go back to 1992 and rethink why he used his time at the Rainbow
Coalition to appeal to a segment of white voters who may have wanted to see him
distance himself from Rev. Jackson, still a key leader in the Democratic Party
at the time.
If you read the full Washington Post coverage and listen to some of Sistah Souljah's commentary on white supremacy, you’ll see she makes some valuable points about anti-blackness and structural racism that are worth considering. But Clinton chose not to delve into that. Instead, he preferred to sell a sistah out and play the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show.
There are meany more references to Clinton however, I will leave it here. If you look at his failures you can see a through line from Reagan to Obama. The agenda did not include blacks. It was the implementation of COINTELPRO.
References:
Alternet.org: Article - "15 ways Bill Clinton failed America and the world."
Wikipedia - Uranium One Deal Conspiracy
Vox - "Bill Clinton apologized for his 1994 crime bill, but he still doesn’t get why it was bad"
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