April 14, 2016
by Rob Urie
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/14/why-bill-clinton-is-full-of-shit/
Former U.S. President Bill
Clinton has been making the rounds to defend his policies while in office to
support his wife’s run for President. The close working relationship that he
and Hillary Clinton have infers a symbiosis that other ‘First Couples’ wouldn’t
be jointly held accountable for. And in contrast to the oft offered argument
that Mrs. Clinton isn’t responsible for her husband’s policies, she has taken
responsibility (links below) for her role in developing, promoting and
implementing the omnibus crime bill of 1994 that led to the massive buildout of
the carceral state (mass incarceration) and for her use of the term
‘super-predator’ as racist slander against Black children.
When Bill Clinton was recently confronted
by Black Lives Matter protestors he reiterated the talking points that he (and
Hillary) used in 1994, that drug ‘gang’ violence was real, that his (and
Hillary’s) interest was humanitarian, that many Blacks supported the crime bill
and that the growth in incarceration rates for people of color was an
unintended consequence. Left unsaid was that the crime bill was but one part of
the Clinton’s opportunistic ‘dog-whistle’ strategy, that the policies tied to
more than three centuries of racial repression in the U.S. and that regardless
of whether the Clintons fully thought through the implications, they were
willing to gamble with the lives of millions of Black and Brown youth for
political gain.
Contemporary political
rhetoric ‘works,’ to the extent that it does, by erecting walls between ideas,
acts and policies that might otherwise be plausibly related. Basic physical
security, as in freedom from violence for one’s person, family, neighbors and
community, is a human right in a most basic sense. It is also the human right
that has been most tightly circumscribed throughout American history. The
American ‘story,’ as in the history written by the dominant culture, has been
of White America ‘under attack’ from hostile indigenous peoples and inner-city
‘criminals’ whereas the overwhelming preponderance of actual violence has been
committed against the indigenous population, kidnapped Africans held in slavery
and their descendants.
This same disjoint ‘history’
is true of American military adventures overseas, always undertaken in official
explanations to benefit those being bombed, sanctioned, starved, imprisoned and
forced to migrate. Bill Clinton spent most of his two terms in office bombing
and sanctioning Iraq to ‘contain’ former CIA ‘asset’ Saddam Hussein as Mr.
Hussein continued to eat well and sleep comfortably at night. It was the Iraqis
who were least able to defend themselves who were bombed, starved, and from
whom life-saving medicines and medical care were withheld. Somewhere between 300,000
and 500,000 innocent
Iraqis— mostly women and children, were killed by Mr. Clinton’s bombs and
sanctions.
This context is necessary
because when Bill Clinton chose to defend his
and Hillary
Clinton’s omnibus crime bill and its social consequences he framed it, once
again, as a domestic ‘humanitarian intervention.’ The localized ‘truth’ that
Mr. Clinton used to do so— that freedom from violence is a basic right that
‘even’ the communities subsequently targeted with repressive policing, racially
biased drug laws and mass incarceration deserved, removes the broader context
of American racial history. Alternatively, without an antique-progressive
racial or genetic theory of ‘crime,’ why would liberal Democrats choose police
repression and creation of a carceral state before first resolving the
political and economic exclusion that correlate 100% with the communities
suffering from ‘internal’ violence?
In history, the first
‘professional’ police department in the U.S. was created in Charleston, S.C.
from mercenary ‘slave patrols.’ Following the Civil War ‘Black laws’ (codes)
were used to maintain civil control over nominally freed slaves for purposes of
creating neo-chattel conditions of expropriated labor and social control. Jim
Crow used racially targeted laws, policing and carceral policies as tools of
civil enforcement of racial repression. Ronald Reagan began his 1979 campaign
for President in Philadelphia, MS, where in 1964 three civil rights activists
were brutally murdered by local police working with the Ku Klux Klan. It was in
this historical context that in 1994 Hillary Clinton used the term ‘super-predator’ as racist code for poor
black youth to sell the omnibus crime bill.
In fact, the Clinton’s spent
most of Bill Clinton’s two terms using coded racist themes—‘dog-whistle’
politics, to benefit politically through raising racial animosity and
repression. Mr. Clinton’s welfare ‘reform,’ framed as ‘ending welfare as we
know it,’ followed directly from Ronald Reagan’s racist caricature of the
‘welfare queen’ living high on the public dime. Mrs. Clinton’s
‘super-predators’ likewise had implied race and class that tied to racist
themes of Black ‘supermen’ all ‘hopped up’ and impervious to pain, bullets and
‘normal’ human emotions. That the overwhelming preponderance of American racial
violence has been perpetrated against Blacks and the indigenous population
seems a murderous flaw in the dominant culture id— complete reversal of factual
history into misdirected fear.
Put forward as support for the
Clinton’s policies is that many Blacks buy-into dominant culture stereotypes
much the same as White people do. In areas where drug violence persists, Blacks
are often featured on the local news thanking the police for arresting the kids
who have been shooting up neighborhoods and killing one another. To state the
obvious: these circumstances are tragic and require social resolution. However,
the argument that repressive policing, racist drug laws and mass incarceration
are socially constructive solutions in no way follows from the tragedy of the
circumstances. The Clinton’s ‘market-based’ solutions to poverty ultimately
destroyed the near totality of Black wealth and many inner city neighborhoods
in the housing bust.
Most adult Americans live no
more than a ten minute walk or drive from a place where, for less than twenty
dollars, they can buy a lethal dose of a debilitating and violence inducing
drug. Eighty-eight
thousand people drink themselves to death every year in the U.S. Two
hundred and ten thousand people die each year from preventable
medical errors. The worst case scenario under the racist hysterics of
‘super-predator’ theories was that 6,000 people
per year would die. In other words, Americans are 35X more likely to die from
an accident at the doctor’s office than they were in 1994 to die from ‘gang’
violence. The Clintons knew exactly what they were doing when they used coded
racist appeals to ‘peel away’ White suburban voters from national Republicans.
The strategy worked politically for them at the time, never mind the body-count
of destroyed lives they left behind.
Drug (alcohol) Prohibition in
the 1920s produced a violent culture of (White) alcohol distributors that used
gun violence against one another, the police and occasionally innocent
bystanders. No racialized pseudo-science was created in response around a White
predisposition toward wanton murder. The social ‘choice’ of which drugs are
legal or illegal has always been a proxy for racial and cultural politics. As Dan Baum wrote
recently in Harper’s, Richard Nixon’s rationale for launching the ‘war on
drugs’ was to provide the Federal government with plausible cover to spy on,
disrupt, arrest and otherwise impede Black communities and the anti-war Left
for political gain. From its inception the war on drugs has been a racialized
tactic of political repression waged by the authoritarian Right, often with the
help of progressive ‘science.’
Many commentators have pointed
the sudden compassion that White Americans found for the drug-addicted as
heroin has once again become a major cause of death among Whites. Portugal decriminalized
all drugs (heroin, methamphetamine, etc.) fifteen years ago, at about the
same time that the Clintons were leaving office. Since then drug usage in that
country has declined substantially (link above). Canadian physician Gabor Mate
has been (plausibly) arguing for several decades now that drug
addiction is a symptom, not a cause, of social dysfunction. Were the
Clinton’s intention other than political gain through racial division and
racist repression their lack of political imagination might have only been
depressing, rather than socially catastrophic.
The broader frame of the
American carceral response to social problems is inextricably tied to three
centuries of racial repression. Bill Clinton slaughtered 300,000+ innocent
(Brown) women and children in Iraq and social circumscription places those
deaths in the category of ‘acceptable’ behavior. But when Black children tossed
onto the social garbage heap express a tiny fraction of the social pathos
hurled at them they are suddenly too dangerous to be left un-imprisoned. To
reiterate, in the context of broader threats to life and livelihood, the
threats to the children the Clinton’s imprisoned far outweighed any plausible
threats from them. Had Bill and Hillary Clinton given the slightest crap about
these children they would have been increasing funding to their communities,
not cutting it as they were.
In an interview that followed
Bill Clinton’s derision of Black Lives Matter protestors in Philadelphia,
Hillary Clinton demonstrated
that she understands that their use of dog-whistle politics in the 1990s is a
political problem for her in 2016. And therein lies part of the problem. The
lives that the Clinton’s destroyed in Iraq, Kosovo and in the American carceral
system are just so much detritus, a political problem to be overcome, rather
than human catastrophes to weep over and try to make right. Hillary Clinton
wants to ‘tweak’ the carceral state (link above) without revisiting the base
premise that if punishing socially destructive acts is the legitimate function
of incarceration she, her husband and some fair portion of their moneyed
supporters belong in prison for ‘the remainder of their natural lives.’
This isn’t a gratuitous slam—
what the Clinton’s use of racialized politics demonstrates is that it is the
entire American system of governance that needs to be reworked. The
distinctions between the ‘innocent’ and the ‘guilty’ used to legitimate the
carceral state have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with the
maintenance of social privilege and power for the Clinton’s and the cohort of
plutocrats and power brokers that they represent. The ‘thirteen year old boy’
that Bill Clinton uses to convey moral outrage at Black-on-Black violence
deserves more than to be used as a prop in his racist ploy to win votes. Mr.
Clinton need not even be insincere in his outrage— some of the most effective
demagogues are those that sincerely believe their destructive rhetoric.
The starting point to address
social violence is creation of a state of social justice for all people. This
includes a right to work for decent wages, adequate housing, quality public education,
public health care from cradle to grave, adequate pensions and the right of
political participation. Hillary Clinton and her liberal apparatchiks have argued
convincingly that Hillary Clinton has no concept of how to affect such an
outcome. In fact, in their view no such outcome is possible. In defending his
own programs, what Bill Clinton confirms is that Hillary Clinton was an active
participant in their development and implementation. The public record
substantiates Mrs. Clinton’s active role in the Clinton’s dog whistle politics.
And in fact, her ‘experience in public life’ is the central selling point that
Mrs. Clinton claims for herself.
As Bernie Sanders readies his
capitulation and asks that followers of his ‘revolution’ get in line behind
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment the question needs to be
asked: if the Clintons are the best that the Democrats have to offer, why would
anyone in their right mind vote for Democrats? How what the Clintons did in the
1990s comes across in 2016 is absolutely the point— their policies and politics
were cynical bullshit then and that is exactly how they appear now. The only
guarantee in the present is that whichever establishment candidate becomes
President, it is the overwhelming preponderance of the world’s citizens who
will suffer the consequences. Revolution is the only solution.
Rob Urie is an artist and
political economist. His book Zen Economics will be published by CounterPunch
later this month.
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