CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Thu Apr 21, 2016 7:31 pm

Clinton To Cut Ties With Private Prison Industry
by Alice Ollstein
October 23, 2015

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Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, leaves the Longworth House office building at the conclusion of her testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

On Friday morning, the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton announced they will no longer accept donations from federally registered lobbyists or PACs for private prison companies.

“When we’re dealing with a mass incarceration crisis, we don’t need private industry incentives that may contribute — or have the appearance of contributing — to over-incarceration,” campaign spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa told ThinkProgress, explaining that Clinton will donate the large amount she has already received from these sources to a yet-to-be-named charity.

Hinojosa explained that the move is part of Clinton’s promise to “end the era of mass incarceration,” especially private prisons and private immigrant detention centers.

“She believes that we should not contract out this core responsibility of the federal government,” Hinojosa said. “This is only one of many ways that she believes we need to re-balance our criminal justice and immigration systems.”

Yet the decision came after months of pressure from civil rights and immigrant justice groups, who launched online petitions and interrupted Clinton’s public events, demanding she cut ties with the private prison industry.


“Our message was, ‘You can’t be pro-immigrant and still have this blemish on your record,'” said Zenén Jaimes Pérez with United We Dream, one of many organizations that teamed up to press Clinton. “She had [campaign donation] bundlers who worked for the Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, which run most of the immigrant detention centers in this country. For me, it was a big deal, because my dad was detained in a Geo facility. She was taking money from a group profiting from my family’s suffering.”

She was taking money from a group profiting from my family’s suffering.


Activists are still concerned however, that Clinton has not yet released a criminal justice reform plan, though she has said one is currently in the works. Pérez told ThinkProgress he hopes the plan specifically addresses mandatory incarceration minimums for immigration-related civil violations, such as crossing the border without authorization. Black Lives Matter has also met multiple times with the Clinton campaign to demand reforms that address mass incarceration and police violence.

In September, Clinton’s 2016 rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a bill to ban the federal government from awarding contracts to private prisons, saying, “Private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.” Sanders cited studies showing that private prisons, because of their profit motive, have an incentive to spend as little as possible on inmate care and rehabilitation. These companies also routinely pressure lawmakers to pass bills that will guarantee them more inmates by criminalizing low-level offenses.

Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who is challenging Sanders and Clinton for the party’s nomination, has also called for the end of federal private prison contracts.

Following Clinton’s announcement, activists are turning their attention to other 2016 candidates.

“Now it’s time for the presidential candidates who still accept private prison money to follow suit and commit to a future where no one is imprisoned for profit,” said Matt Nelson with the Latino civil rights group Presente.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is perhaps the industry’s favorite, as many of the largest for-profit prison companies are headquartered in his home state. Rubio has received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from private prison companies, going back to his time in the Florida legislature, and has hired consultants and staffers who used to work for these companies. During that time, he also steered a $110 million state contract to Geo Group.

As his prospects in the race for the GOP nomination improve, Rubio has been distancing himself from his own past proposals for immigration reform.
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Thu Apr 21, 2016 7:37 pm

Private Prison Lobbyists Are Raising Cash for Hillary Clinton
by Lee Fang
July 23, 2015

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As immigration and incarceration issues become central to the 2016 presidential campaign, lobbyists for two major prison companies are serving as top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton.

Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group could both see their fortunes turning if there are fewer people to lock up in the future.

Last week, Clinton and other candidates revealed a number of lobbyists who are serving as “bundlers” for their campaigns. Bundlers collect contributions on behalf of a campaign, and are often rewarded with special favors, such as access to the candidate.

Richard Sullivan, of the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel, is a bundler for the Clinton campaign, bringing in $44,859 in contributions in a few short months. Sullivan is also a registered lobbyist for the Geo Group, a company that operates a number of jails, including immigrant detention centers, for profit.

As we reported yesterday, fully five Clinton bundlers work for the lobbying and law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in America, paid Akin Gump $240,000 in lobbying fees last year. The firm also serves as a law firm for the prison giant, representing the company in court.

Akin Gump lobbyist and Clinton bundler Brian Popper disclosed that he previously helped CCA defeat efforts to compel private prisons to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Hillary Clinton has a complicated history with incarceration. As first lady, she championed efforts to get tough on crime.“We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Clinton said in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added.

Just desert advocates promoted the use of punitive laws, policies, and practices in the juvenile justice system, including three-strike laws, determinate sentences, longer sentences, sentencing to boot camps, electronic monitoring, drug testing, shock incarceration, and other punitive measures (Howell, 2003b). Such policies and practices, which deemphasize prevention of juvenile crime and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders, became common in the juvenile justice system through new state legislation. Together, DiIulio’s superpredator concept and just desert principles spawned a major myth that the juvenile justice system could not be effective with the new breed of juvenile offenders and was no longer relevant in modern-day crime control (Box 1.2).

-- Chapter 1: Superpredators and other Myths about Juvenile Delinquency, by James C. Howell


In recent months, Clinton has tacked left in some ways, and now calls for alternatives to incarceration and for greater police accountability. And while Clinton has backed a path to citizenship for undocumented people in America, she recently signaled a willingness to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” a move that could lead to more immigrant detentions.

The future of both criminal justice reform and immigration are critical for private prison firms. The Geo Group, in a disclosure statement for its investors, notes that its business could be “adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws.”
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Thu Apr 21, 2016 9:22 pm

Hillary Clinton and the Tragic Politics of Crime: The criminal-justice policies she now denounces once helped her husband capture the White House.
by Peter Beinart
The Atlantic
May 1, 2015

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With the exception of gay rights, no public-policy debate has shifted more dramatically in my adult lifetime than the debate over crime. In 1992, when Bill Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally retarded African American murderer, the move helped him in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary. In 1994, Clinton’s crime bill—which among other things, expanded the death penalty, encouraged states to lengthen prison sentences and eliminated federal funding for inmate education—garnered the votes of every Democratic Senator except one.

Today, by contrast, Hillary Clinton is loudly repudiating the “tough on crime” policies that she and her husband once championed. Even more remarkably, prominent Republicans are nodding along.

To those who see Hillary’s new crime agenda as a flip-flop, her campaign has a rejoinder: Different policies make sense at different times. As Clinton spokesperson Jesse Ferguson tweeted, “HRC policy on internet might also be different than WJC policy in 1994. Not b/c he was wrong but b/c times change.”

The problem with this argument is that many of the crime policies the Clintons supported in the 1990s were probably wrong even back then. Yes, the crime bill did some good: It put more cops on the street and increased penalties for sex crimes. But it also helped spawn the very “era of mass incarceration” that Hillary now denounces. It’s not just that the bill allocated almost $10 billion in federal-prison construction money. It only allocated it to states that adopted “truth-in-sentencing” laws that dramatically increased the amount of time criminals served. As NYU Law School’s Brennan Center has noted, the number of states with such laws rose from five when the bill was signed to 29 by Clinton’s last year in office. Over the course of Clinton’s presidency, the number of Americans in prison rose almost 60 percent.

All this might—I underscore, might—be justified if such prison expansion produced dramatic declines in crime. But while crime has indeed dropped dramatically—it’s about half what it was at its peak in 1991—the best evidence suggests that locking people up is not the primary reason. After spending close to two years testing 14 different potential causes of the reduction in crime, the Brennan Center this year concluded that “incarceration was responsible for approximately five percent of the drop in crime in the 1990s,” and an even lower percentage since then. A report last year by the National Academies’ National Research Council found that “the growth in incarceration rates reduced crime, but the magnitude of the crime reduction remains highly uncertain and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large.” Even a 2004 investigation by University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, who considers increased imprisonment more effective, only found that it accounted for roughly one-third of the crime drop.

Some might still argue that, as public policy, Clinton’s tough-on-crime policies were necessary. Listening to Hillary’s impassioned speech yesterday at Columbia, however, where she talked about seeing “how families could be and were torn apart by excessive incarceration,” it’s hard to believe she agrees.

But there’s a different, and more perplexing, defense of the Clinton record on crime. It’s that even if Clinton’s policies can’t be justified substantively, they were necessary politically. If he hadn’t embraced a “tough on crime agenda,” Clinton might never have become—or remained—president.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crime rates hit their peak, the issue enjoyed a salience in American politics that is hard to comprehend today. And for Democrats, the consequences of appearing soft were devastating. In 1988, the George H.W. Bush campaign’s most effective (and notorious) ad slammed Michael Dukakis for furloughing murderers in Massachusetts. (A separate ad, by a pro-Bush PAC, made African American furloughed murderer Willie Horton a household name). The most important moment in that year’s debates came when Dukakis, after being asked how he would react if his wife was raped and murdered, gave a bloodless, and politically catastrophic, answer. In January 1994, 37 percent of Americans said crime was the most important issue facing the country. And that fall, Mario Cuomo lost the governorship of New York State to a little-known Republican, George Pataki, who had made Cuomo’s opposition to the death penalty central to his campaign.

JJS Myth 2: The public no longer supports rehabilitation of juvenile offenders.

Others say that the efforts of “child savers” are all for naught anyway because of a lack of public support for rehabilitation of juvenile offenders (Box 1.4). These observers assume that the impact of the just desert movement on the adult criminal justice system—in greatly diminishing the use of treatment programs—has filtered down to the juvenile justice system. Is this a matter of fact? Decidedly not. “The notion that the American public is opposed to the treatment of juvenile offenders is a myth” (Cullen, 2006, p. 665). Cullen notes that a 2001 national survey found that 80% of the sample of adults thought that rehabilitation should be the goal of juvenile correctional facilities and that more than 9 in 10 favored a variety of early intervention programs, including parent training, Head Start, and after-school programs. “The legitimacy of the rehabilitative ideal—especially as applied to youthful offenders—appears to be deeply woven into the fabric of American culture” (p. 666). Therefore, it is not surprising that state and local juvenile justice officials have taken steps to soften the impact of punitive reforms (Bishop, 2006; Mears, 2002)....

The unifying theme in these four myths is the notion that punishment is now predominant in juvenile justice policies and practices, driven by shifting public opinion. However, Bishop (2006) astutely observes that “to the public, the idea of punishment versus rehabilitation is a false dichotomy” (p. 656) and that “we have sold the public short for a long time regarding the degree to which it supports the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders” (p. 656). The reality, she says, is that the public endorses both strategies simultaneously. Indeed, Bishop sees that the public embraces a balanced approach of punishment for offenses while also providing the necessary treatment to help offending youth move on into adulthood with their life chances intact. This is the essence of effective juvenile justice system philosophy, a concept that politicians and legislators appear to have difficulty grasping.

-- Chapter 1: Superpredators and other Myths about Juvenile Delinquency, by James C. Howell


In 1992, Bill Clinton faced a far tougher electorate than Hillary will this time around. African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, who constituted almost 25 percent of the voters in 2012, and Millennials, who also lean disproportionately left on cultural issues, were either in school or in diapers. There’s a reason Clinton reminded voters that year that his nickname was “Bubba.” It’s because in 1992, far more than today, a Democrat who didn’t appeal to Bubbas couldn’t win. And in 1992, being “tough on crime” was critical to getting most Bubbas to give a Democrat a second look.

Was electing Bill Clinton worth it? It’s the kind of question that separates reformist, “pragmatic” progressives from their more revolutionary, anti-establishment brethren. It can’t be answered empirically. It depends on your worldview.

Hillary Clinton needs to persuade voters that 2016 is no different than any other election in the past 40 years since the Supreme Court legalized political corruption by decreeing, in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), that money is speech. Therefore, she argues, Sanders is dreaming by thinking he can overcome plutocracy as he admits is necessary to deliver the policies that a majority wants. "Not gonna happen," says Clinton. "So hire me to get the crumbs the plutocrats will let us collect if they don't get angry. That is a job I know better."

-- "Hillary the Pragmatist vs. Bernie the Dreamer" Is "Big Lie" Propaganda, by Rob Hager


Every relatively progressive American president has made these brutal, tragic tradeoffs.


But it’s worth noting that every (relatively) progressive American president has made these brutal, tragic tradeoffs. In 1947, amidst the growing hysteria of the Red Scare, Harry Truman created review boards to investigate the loyalty of federal employees. Upon learning that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, John F. Kennedy privately mused, “What difference does it make? They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway.” But politically, he was sure that unless he risked war to get them removed, “[Republican Senator] Ken Keating will probably be the next president.” Upon becoming president, Barack Obama expanded America’s drone attacks, sent more troops to Afghanistan and backed away from closing Guantanamo Bay. For many progressives, myself included, these policies were difficult to swallow. But without them, Mitt Romney might be president.

Should progressives wish, in retrospect, that Bill and Hillary Clinton had never supported the mass-incarceration policies that candidate Hillary is now denouncing? Sure. But to stay honest, they should also admit that without those policies, Hillary probably wouldn’t be a presidential candidate today at all.
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Thu Apr 21, 2016 11:51 pm

Bill Clinton's Crime Bill Destroyed Lives, and There's No Point Denying It
by Thomas Frank
Guardian UK
16 April 16

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The former president made sure low-level drug users felt the full weight of state power at the same moment bankers saw the shackles that bound them removed


Here is an actual headline that appeared in the New York Times this week: Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law.

It is an unusual departure for a newspaper, since what is being reported here is not news but history -– or, rather, a particular interpretation of history. The “1994 Law” to which the headline refers is the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act; the statement about the “prison rate” refers to the fact that America was already imprisoning a large portion of its population before that 1994 law was approved by Congress.

As historical interpretations go, this one is pretty non-controversial. Everyone who has heard about the “War on Drugs” knows that what we now call “mass incarceration”, the de facto national policy of locking up millions of low-level offenders, began long before 1994. And yet similar stories reporting that non-startling fact are now being published all across the American media landscape. That mass incarceration commenced before 1994 is apparently Big News.

Why report a historical fact that everyone already knows? The answer is because former president Bill Clinton, the man who called for and signed the 1994 crime bill, is also the husband of the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Democratic voters are having trouble squaring his draconian crime bill with his wife’s liberal image.

That might be the reason so many of these stories seem to unfold with the same goal in mind: to minimize Clinton’s moral culpability for what went on back in the 1990s. Mass incarceration was already happening, these stories agree. And besides, not everything in the crime bill was bad. As for its lamentable effects, well, they weren’t intentional. What’s more, Bill Clinton has apologized for it. He’s sorry for all those thousands of people who have had decades of their lives ruined by zealous prosecutors and local politicians using the tools Clinton accidentally gave them. He sure didn’t mean for that to happen.

When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my new book documenting the sins of liberalism, I remember being warned by a scholar who has studied mass incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask Americans to care about the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison system. Today, however, the situation has reversed itself: now people do care about mass incarceration, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and the intense scrutiny it has focused on police killings.

All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.

Allow me to offer a slightly different take on the 1990s. I think today (as I thought at the time) that there is indeed something worth criticizing when a Democratic president signs on to a national frenzy for punishment and endorses things like “three strikes”, “mandatory minimums”, and “truth in sentencing”, the latter being a cute euphemism for “no more parole”. The reason the 1994 crime bill upsets people is not because they stupidly believe Bill Clinton invented these things; it is because they know he encouraged them. Because the Democrats’ capitulation to the rightwing incarceration agenda was a turning point in its own right.

Another interesting fact. Two weeks after Clinton signed the big crime bill in September 1994, he enacted the Riegle-Neal interstate banking bill, the first in a series of moves deregulating the financial industry. The juxtaposition between the two is kind of shocking, when you think about it: low-level drug users felt the full weight of state power at the same moment that bankers saw the shackles that bound them removed. The newspaper headline announcing the discovery of this amazing historical finding will have to come from my imagination – Back-to-Back 1994 Laws Freed Bankers And Imprisoned Poor, perhaps -– but the historical pattern is worth noting nevertheless, since it persisted all throughout Clinton’s administration.

For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-for deliverance from out of Glass–Steagall’s house of bondage. For another class of Americans, Clinton brought discipline: long prison stretches for drug users; perpetual insecurity for welfare mothers; and intimidation for blue-collar workers whose bosses Clinton thoughtfully armed with the North American Free Trade Agreement. As I have written elsewhere, some got the carrot, others got the stick.

But what is most shocking in our current journo-historical understanding of the Clinton years is the idea that the mass imprisonment of people of color was an “unintended consequence” of the 1994 crime bill, to quote the New York Daily News’s paraphrase of Hillary Clinton. This is flatly, glaringly false, as the final, ugly chapter of the crime bill story confirms.


Back in the early 1990s, and although they were chemically almost identical, crack and powder cocaine were regarded very differently by the law. The drug identified with black users (crack) was treated as though it were 100 times as villainous as the same amount of cocaine, a drug popular with affluent professionals. This “now-notorious 100-to-one” sentencing disparity, as the New York Times put it, had been enacted back in 1986, and the 1994 crime law instructed the US Sentencing Commission to study the subject and adjust federal sentencing guidelines as it saw fit.

The Sentencing Commission duly recommended that the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity be abolished, largely because (as their lengthy report on the subject put it) “The 100-to-1 crack cocaine to powder cocaine quantity ratio is a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and white federal defendants.” By the time their report was released, however, Republicans had gained control of Congress, and they passed a bill explicitly overturning the decision of the Sentencing Commission. (Bernie Sanders, for the record, voted against that bill.)

The bill then went to President Clinton for approval. Shortly before it came to his desk he gave an inspiring speech deploring the mass incarceration of black Americans. “Blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong,” he said on that occasion, “… when there are more African American men in our correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men, in their twenties, are either in jail, on parole, or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal system. Nearly one in three.”

Two weeks after that speech, however, Clinton blandly affixed his signature to the bill retaining the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity, a disparity that had brought about the lopsided incarceration of black people. Clinton could have vetoed it, but he didn’t. He signed it.

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CIA: CONTRAS/CRACK


Today we are told that mass incarceration was an “unintended consequence” of Clinton’s deeds.

For that to be true, however, Clinton would have not only had to ignore the Sentencing Commission’s findings but also to ignore the newspaper stories appearing all around him, which can be found easily on the internet to this day. Here’s one that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on 31 October 1995, in which it is noted that:

Civil rights organizations had led a telephone campaign to pressure the president to veto the bill. At a rally last week in Chicago, the Rev Jesse L Jackson said that Mr Clinton had the chance, ‘with one stroke of your veto pen, to correct the most grievous racial injustice built into our legal system.’


It is impossible to imagine that Bill Clinton, the brilliant Rhodes Scholar, didn’t understand what everyone was saying. How could he sign such a thing right after giving a big speech deploring its effects? How can he and his wife now claim it was all an accident, when the consequences were being discussed everywhere at the time? When everyone was warning and even begging him not to do it? Maybe it didn’t really happen. Maybe it was all a bad dream.

The secret society of Cecil Rhodes is mentioned in the first five of his seven wills. In the fifth it was supplemented by the idea of an educational institution with scholarships, whose alumni would be bound together by common ideals — Rhodes's ideals. In the sixth and seventh wills the secret society was not mentioned, and the scholarships monopolized the estate. But Rhodes still had the same ideals and still believed that they could be carried out best by a secret society of men devoted to a common cause. The scholarships were merely a facade to conceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which the members of the secret society could carry out his purpose. This purpose, as expressed in the first will (1877), was:

"The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, . . . the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire, the consolidation of the whole Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity."


-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley


But it did happen. There it is, Bill Clinton’s signing statement on the website of the American Presidency Project. Yes, the 100-to-1 disparity was finally reduced in 2010, but we liberals still can’t ignore what Clinton did back in 1995. Every historian who writes about his administration will eventually have to deal with it.

Until then, we have our orders from the mainstream media: Clinton didn’t mean it. Clinton has apologized. Things were bad even before Clinton got started.

It is a hell of a way to do history. Millions of proudly open-minded people are being asked to twist themselves into propaganda pretzels to avoid acknowledging the obvious: that the leaders of our putatively left party aren’t who we think they are.
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 12:04 am

Statement on Signing Legislation Rejecting U.S. Sentencing Commission Recommendations
by William J. Clinton
XLII President of the United States: 1993-2001
October 30, 1995

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Today I reject United States Sentencing Commission proposals that would equalize penalties for crack and powder cocaine distribution by dramatically reducing the penalties for crack. The Sentencing Commission would also reduce the penalties for money laundering by combining the guidelines on money laundering with those on transactions in unlawfully acquired property. I am opposed to both of these changes.

Since I took office, my Administration has fought to stop drug abuse and to stamp out the crime and violence that are its constant companions. We are battling drug traffickers at every level of their networks—from the very top to the very bottom.

The Cali Cartel, which pumped drugs into America with seeming impunity, is now on the run. We have intensified our efforts to work with drug producing countries to stop drugs from coming into the United States and to capture major drug traffickers. We told criminals convicted time and again for serious violent crimes or drug trafficking that from now on, it's three strikes and you're out. And we established the death penalty for drug kingpins, because they should reap what they sow.

We are putting 100,000 police officers on America's streets. We banned assault weapons because America doesn't want drug dealers to be better armed than police officers. We are helping schools to rid themselves of guns, and we are also helping schools to prevent teenage drug use by teaching children about the dangers of drugs and gangs. And we support schools who test student athletes for drugs.

All of this is beginning to work. For the first time in a very long time, crime has decreased around the country. But we cannot stop now.

We have to send a constant message to our children that drugs are illegal, drugs are dangerous, drugs may cost you your life—and the penalties for dealing drugs are severe. I am not going to let anyone who peddles drugs get the idea that the cost of doing business is going down.

Trafficking in crack, and the violence it fosters, has a devastating impact on communities across America, especially inner-city communities. Tough penalties for crack trafficking are required because of the effect on individuals and families, related gang activity, turf battles, and other violence.

Current law does require a substantial disparity between sentences for crack as compared to equal amounts of powder cocaine. Some adjustment is warranted, and the bill I am signing today, S. 1254, directs the Sentencing Commission to undertake additional review of these issues and to report back with new recommendations.

Furthermore, the sentencing structure should reflect the fact that all crack starts as powder. When large-scale cocaine traffickers sell powder with the knowledge that it will be converted into crack, they should be punished as severely as those who distribute the crack itself. I have asked the Attorney General to immediately develop enforcement strategies to bring about this result. As I said before, we are going after drug traffickers at every level of their networks.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON
The White House, October 30, 1995.

NOTE: S. 1254, approved October 30, was assigned Public Law No. 104-38.
Citation: William J. Clinton: "Statement on Signing Legislation Rejecting U.S. Sentencing Commission Recommendations," October 30, 1995. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolle
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 12:16 am

New law puts heat on crack dealers Clinton signs measure to fight cocaine use: Blacks decry disparity
by Lyle Denniston
Sun National Staff
Washington
October 31, 1995

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President Clinton signed into law yesterday a bill to continue punishing crack-cocaine crimes far more severely than powder-cocaine crimes -- a difference that civil rights activists say is racist.

"I am not going to let anyone who peddles drugs get the idea that the cost of doing business is going down," Mr. Clinton said in nullifying a plan by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to make punishments the same for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine.

As a result, those convicted of crack crimes -- mainly blacks -- will receive the same punishments as those who deal in much greater amounts of powder cocaine. The president, defending hTC the difference, said inner-city communities are hit much harder by crack-related violence.

The president acted within hours after the Supreme Court, at the Justice Department's request, agreed to consider giving federal prosecutors wide discretion to pursue crack cases, even if that means convicting a disproportionate number of blacks.

Yesterday's developments appeared certain to intensify the debate over allegations of racism in the prosecution of dealers and users of crack cocaine, a cheap alternative to powder cocaine.

Blacks account for more than 80 percent of those convicted of crack crimes; whites account for less than 5 percent.
By contrast, whites are involved in 32 percent of powder-cocaine convictions; blacks, 27 percent, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

But blacks tend to receive longer sentences for crack cocaine crimes than whites do for powder-cocaine crimes; federal law for years has provided much heavier sentences for crimes that involve crack cocaine, and Mr. Clinton's signature yesterday maintained that difference.

The punishment difference of 100 to 1 works this way: Crimes involving 1 gram of crack get mandatory sentences equal to crimes involving 100 grams of powder.

Civil rights leaders have protested that this approach results in a serious racial disparity in cocaine prosecutions. That disparity was one of the grievances cited by inmates in a recent series of federal prison uprisings.

Last spring, after a study of the sentencing differences and their effect on blacks, the federal Sentencing Commission decided to make sentencing equal for crack and powder cocaine crimes. Congress passed a bill to block the commission's plan from going into effect tomorrow, and Mr. Clinton's signature made the bill a law.

"Trafficking in crack, and the violence it fosters," the president said, "has a devastating impact on communities across America, especially inner-city communities. Tough penalties for crack trafficking are required because of the effect on individuals and families, related gang activity, turf battles and other violence."

Mr. Clinton took note of the "substantial disparity" in sentencing for crack crimes and said "some adjustment is warranted." He said the Sentencing Commission would study the issue further.

Civil rights organizations had led a telephone campaign to pressure the president to veto the bill. At a rally last week in Chicago, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said that Mr. Clinton had the chance, "with one stroke of your veto pen, to correct the most grievous racial injustice built into our legal system."

Crack cocaine is made from powder in a process that requires baking soda, water and a stove or a microwave oven. The Sentencing Commission has argued that powder and crack cocaine are merely different forms of the same drug. The Justice Department, however, argues that crack should be punished more severely because crack crimes contribute more heavily to violence in the poor communities targeted by narcotics dealers.

Several constitutional challenges to the cocaine-sentencing differences are in the federal courts. The Supreme Court two years ago turned down the first such challenge to reach it, thus leaving the dispute to unfold in lower courts.

Yesterday, however, the justices agreed to take on a related facet of the racism claim. The case involves five black Los Angeles men who were indicted on charges of crack distribution. They were prosecuted in a case growing out of a federal-state task force.

Claiming that their prosecution was based on race, and citing statistics showing the high rate of crack cases against blacks, the five men contended that the charges had to be thrown out as biased.

Federal prosecutors denied the claim of racism, but they balked at demands by the judge for information about how they decided to prosecute cocaine cases.

As a result, the judge threw out the charges.
The federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld that decision in March, saying that judges must be "vigilant in ensuring that impermissible prosecutorial biases do not remain hidden in files kept from public view."

A Supreme Court ruling is expected by next summer.
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

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The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done: A Clinton appointee who resigned in protest over the new welfare law explains why it is so bad and suggests how its worst effects could be mitigated.
by Peter Edelman
The Atlantic
March, 1997

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I HATE welfare. To be more precise, I hate the welfare system we had until last August, when Bill Clinton signed a historic bill ending “welfare as we know it.” It was a system that contributed to chronic dependency among large numbers of people who would be the first to say they would rather have a job than collect a welfare check every month—and its benefits were never enough to lift people out of poverty. In April of 1967 I helped Robert Kennedy with a speech in which he called the welfare system bankrupt and said it was hated universally, by payers and recipients alike. Criticism of welfare for not helping people to become self-supporting is nothing new.

But the bill that President Clinton signed is not welfare reform. It does not promote work effectively, and it will hurt millions of poor children by the time it is fully implemented. What’s more, it bars hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants—including many who have worked in the United States for decades and paid a considerable amount in Social Security and income taxes—from receiving disability and old-age assistance and food stamps, and reduces food-stamp assistance for millions of children in working families.

When the President was campaigning for re-election last fall, he promised that if re-elected he would undertake to fix the flaws in the bill. We are now far enough into his second term to look at the validity of that promise, by assessing its initial credibility and examining what has happened since.

I resigned as the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services last September, because of my profound disagreement with the welfare bill. At the time, I confined my public statement to two sentences, saying only that I had worked as hard as I could over the past thirty-plus years to reduce poverty and that in my opinion this bill moved in the opposite direction. My judgment was that it was important to make clear the reasons for my resignation but not helpful to politicize the issue further during an election campaign. And I did want to see President Clinton re-elected. Worse is not better, in my view, and Bob Dole would certainly have been worse on a wide range of issues, especially if coupled with a Republican Congress.

I feel free to speak out in more detail now, not to tell tales out of school but to clarify some of the history and especially to underscore the damage the bill will do and explain why the bill will be hard to fix in any fundamental way for a long time to come. It is also important to understand what is being done and could be done to minimize the damage in the short run, and what would be required for a real “fix”: a strategy to prevent poverty and thus reduce the need for welfare in the first place.

Four questions are of interest now. Did the President have to sign the bill? How bad is it really, and how can the damage be minimized as the states move to implement it? Can it be fixed in this Congress? What would a real fix be, and what would it take to make that happen?

DID THE PRESIDENT HAVE TO SIGN THE BILL?

WAS the President in a tight political box in late July, when he had to decide whether to sign or veto? At the time, there was polling data in front of him showing that very few people were likely to change their intended vote in either direction if he vetoed the bill. But even if he accurately foresaw a daily pounding from Bob Dole that would ultimately draw political blood, the real point is that the President's quandary was one of his own making. He had put himself there, quite deliberately and by a series of steps that he had taken over a long period of time.

Governor Clinton campaigned in 1992 on the promise to “end welfare as we know it” and the companion phrase “Two years and you’re off.” He knew very well that a major piece of welfare-reform legislation, the Family Support Act, had already been passed, in 1988. As governor of Arkansas he had been deeply involved in the enactment of that law, which was based on extensive state experimentation with new welfare-to-work initiatives in the 1980s, especially GAIN in California. The 1988 law represented a major bipartisan compromise. The Democrats had given in on work requirements in return for Republican concessions on significant federal funding for job training, placement activities, and transitional child care and health coverage.

The Family Support Act had not been fully implemented, partly because not enough time had passed and partly because in the recession of the Bush years the states had been unable to provide the matching funds necessary to draw down their full share of job-related federal money. Candidate Clinton ought responsibly to have said that the Family Support Act was a major piece of legislation that needed more time to be fully implemented before anyone could say whether it was a success or a failure.

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Inadequate safety net

Instead Clinton promised to end welfare as we know it and to institute what sounded like a two-year time limit. This was bumper-sticker politics—oversimplification to win votes. Polls during the campaign showed that it was very popular, and a salient item in garnering votes. Clinton's slogans were also cleverly ambiguous. On the one hand, as President, Clinton could take a relatively liberal path that was nonetheless consistent with his campaign rhetoric. In 1994 he proposed legislation that required everyone to be working by the time he or she had been on the rolls for two years. But it also said, more or less in the fine print, that people who played by the rules and couldn't find work could continue to get benefits within the same federal-state framework that had existed since 1935. The President didn't say so, but he was building—quite incrementally and on the whole responsibly—on the framework of the Family Support Act. On the other hand, candidate Clinton had let his listeners infer that he intended radical reform with real fall-off-the-cliff time limits. He never said so explicitly, though, so his liberal flank had nothing definitive to criticize. President Clinton's actual 1994 proposal was based on a responsible interpretation of what candidate Clinton had said.

Candidate Clinton, however, had let a powerful genie out of the bottle. During his first two years it mattered only insofar as his rhetoric promised far more than his legislative proposal actually offered. When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, the bumper-sticker rhetoric began to matter. So you want time limits? the Republicans said in 1995. Good idea. We’ll give you some serious time limits. We now propose an absolute lifetime limit of five years, cumulatively, that a family can be on welfare. End welfare as we know it? You bet. From now on we will have block grants. And what does that mean? First, that there will be no federal definition of who is eligible and therefore no guarantee of assistance to anyone; each state can decide whom to exclude in any way it wants, as long as it doesn't violate the Constitution (not much of a limitation when one reads the Supreme Court decisions on this subject). And second, that each state will get a fixed sum of federal money each year, even if a recession or a local calamity causes a state to run out of federal funds before the end of the year.

This was a truly radical proposal. For sixty years Aid to Families with Dependent Children had been premised on the idea of entitlement. "Entitlement" has become a dirty word, but it is actually a term of art. It meant two things in the AFDC program: a federally defined guarantee of assistance to families with children who met the statutory definition of need and complied with the other conditions of the law; and a federal guarantee to the states of a matching share of the money needed to help everyone in the state who qualified for help. (AFDC was never a guarantor of income at any particular level. States chose their own benefit levels, and no state's AFDC benefits, even when coupled with food stamps, currently lift families out of poverty.) The block grants will end the entitlement in both respects, and in addition the time limits say that federally supported help will end even if a family has done everything that was asked of it and even if it is still needy.

In 1995 the President had a new decision to make. What should he say about the Republican proposal? The Republicans started considering the issue in the House in the heady post-election period, when it seemed not at all dissonant for them to talk of reviving orphanages and turning the school-lunch program into block grants. The Administration concentrated its fire on these exponentially extreme measures and said nothing about time limits and the destruction of the entitlement. The President won the public argument about orphanages and school lunches, but his silence on the rest of the bill made it more difficult to oppose the time limits and the ending of the entitlement. For months, while the Republican bill was going through the House and the Senate, the President said nothing further. He might have said, “This isn't what I meant in my campaign rhetoric of 1992.” He might have said, “This is totally inconsistent with the bill that I sent up to the Hill last year.” He might have sent up a new bill that clearly outlined his position. He might have insisted that the waivers he was giving the states so that they could experiment with reform under the existing law were a strategy superior to the Republican proposals. He did none of these things, despite importuning from Hill Democrats, outside advocates, and people within the Administration.

The House Democrats had remained remarkably unified in opposition to the House Republicans’ bill, which gave new meaning to the word “draconian.” But when Democratic senators were deciding how to vote on the more moderate Senate bill, which nonetheless contained the entitlement-ending block grants and the absolute time limit, they looked to the President for a signal. Had he signaled that he remained firm in opposing block grants and the arbitrary time limit, there is every reason to believe that all but a handful of Democratic senators would have stayed with him. The opposite signal left them with no presidential cover for a vote against the Senate bill. It invited them to vote for the bill.


Prior to the Senate vote on September 19, 1995, the President sent the signal that he could sign the Senate bill (but warned that he would veto a bill that was too much like the House version). The Senate Democrats collapsed and the Senate passed its version of the bill by a vote of 87 to 12. To make matters worse, the President had been presented with an analysis showing that the Senate bill would push more than a million children into poverty. The analysis had been commissioned from the Urban Institute by Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala's staff (specifically Wendell Primus, the deputy assistant secretary for human-services policy), and Shalala had personally handed it to the President on September 15.

THE BOTTOM, REACHED

THIS was the major milestone in the political race to the bottom. The President had said he was willing to sign legislation that would end a sixty-year commitment to provide assistance to all needy families with children who met the federal eligibility requirements. In the floor debate Senator Edward Kennedy, who voted against the bill, described it as “legislative child abuse.” In late 1995 and early 1996 the Republicans saved the President from having to make good on his willingness to sign a welfare block-grant bill by sending him versions of the bill that contained horrible provisions concerning food stamps, disabled children, and foster care, which he vetoed. The Republican strategy at the time was to run against the President as a hypocrite who talked welfare reform but wouldn't deliver when he had the chance.

But President Clinton was not finished. Perhaps he saw some threat to himself in the Republican strategy. Perhaps he did not see the entitlement as being quite so meaningful as others did. It is important to remember that he is not only a former governor but the former governor of Arkansas. AFDC benefits in Arkansas were so low that he might not have seen the entitlement as meaning what it does in higher-benefit states. He might have thought that as governor of Arkansas he would have been able to design a better program if he had received the federal money in the form of a block grant, without the restrictions, limited as they were, that were imposed by the federal AFDC program. And many people have remarked that he seems never to have met a governor he didn't like—an observation that appeared valid even after the 1994 elections reduced the number of Democrats in the gubernatorial ranks.

Whatever the reason, when the governors came to town for their winter meetings early last year, the President invited them to draft and submit new proposals on welfare and, for that matter, Medicaid. For a time it seemed to some observers that the President might even be willing to consider block grants for Medicaid, but it quickly became apparent that Medicaid block grants would have negative consequences for a much larger slice of the electorate than would welfare block grants. Large numbers of middle-income people had elderly parents in nursing homes whose bills were paid by Medicaid—to say nothing of the potential impact on hospitals, physicians, and the nursing homes themselves, all of which groups have substantial political clout. Welfare had no politically powerful constituency that would be hurt by conversion to block grants.

Hill Republicans, still pursuing the strategy of giving the President only bills that he could not sign, tied the governors’ welfare and Medicaid proposals into a single bill. It was clear that the President would veto the combined bill, because by spring he had come out firmly against block grants for Medicaid.

As of late spring it looked as if a stalemate had been reached, and that 1996 might pass without enactment of a welfare bill. Behind the scenes, however, White House political people—Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, in particular—were telling Hill Republicans almost daily that if they separated the welfare and Medicaid bills, they could get a bill that the President would sign. In early summer a new dynamic arose on the Hill. House Republicans, especially freshmen, began to worry that they were vulnerable to defeat on the basis that they had accomplished so little of what they had come to Washington to do. Thinking that Bob Dole was a sure loser anyway, they decided to save their own skins even though it would be to the detriment of the Dole candidacy. The Republicans decided to separate welfare and Medicaid, and began to move a freestanding welfare bill through Congress. The Senate and House bills were each roughly comparable to the respective Senate and House bills passed in 1995, but this time the conference outcome was very different: the conference produced a bill that was fairly close to what the Senate had passed. This time the Hill Republicans wanted the President to sign it.

The game was over. Now no one could ever say again with any credibility that this President is an old liberal.

HOW BAD IS IT, REALLY?

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Up in a puff of smoke

BEFORE I begin my critique, I need to say something about the motivations of those who genuinely support this new approach. Some of them, anyway, had in my estimation gotten impatient with the chronicity of a significant part of the welfare caseload and the apparent intractability of the problem. I believe they had essentially decided that handing everything over to the states was the only thing left to try that didn't cost a huge amount of money. They may well understand that there will be a certain amount of suffering, and may believe that the bucket of ice-cold water being thrown on poor people now will result in a future generation that will take much more personal responsibility for itself and its children. I think they have made a terrible mistake, as I will try to show, but I respect the frustration that motivated at least some of them. How bad, then, is it? Very bad. The story has never been fully told, because so many of those who would have shouted their opposition from the rooftops if a Republican President had done this were boxed in by their desire to see the President re-elected and in some cases by their own votes for the bill (of which, many in the Senate had been foreordained by the President's squeeze play in September of 1995).

The same de facto conspiracy of silence has enveloped the issue of whether the bill can be easily fixed. The President got a free ride through the elections on that point because no one on his side, myself included, wanted to call him on it. He even made a campaign issue of it, saying that one reason he should be re-elected was that only he could be trusted to fix the flaws in the legislation. David Broder wrote in The Washington Post in late August that re-electing the President in response to this plea would be like giving Jack the Ripper a scholarship to medical school.

Why is the new law so bad? To begin with, it turned out that after all the noise and heat over the past two years about balancing the budget, the only deep, multi-year budget cuts actually enacted were those in this bill, affecting low-income people.

The magnitude of the impact is stunning. Its dimensions were estimated by the Urban Institute, using the same model that produced the Department of Health and Human Services study a year earlier. To ensure credibility for the study, its authors made optimistic assumptions: two thirds of long-term recipients would find jobs, and all states would maintain their current levels of financial support for the benefit structure. Nonetheless, the study showed, the bill would move 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, into poverty. It also predicted some powerful effects not contained in the previous year's analysis, which had been constrained in what it could cover because it had been sponsored by the Administration. The new study showed that a total of 11 million families—10 percent of all American families—would lose income under the bill. This included more than eight million families with children, many of them working families affected by the food-stamp cuts, which would lose an average of about $1,300 per family. Many working families with income a little above what we call the poverty line (right now $12,158 for a family of three) would lose income without being made officially poor, and many families already poor would be made poorer.

The view expressed by the White House and by Hill Democrats, who wanted to put their votes for the bill in the best light, was that the parts of the bill affecting immigrants and food stamps were awful (and would be re-addressed in the future) but that the welfare-reform part of the bill was basically all right. The immigrant and food-stamp parts of the bill are awful, but so is the welfare part.

The immigrant provisions are strong stuff. Most legal immigrants currently in the country and nearly all future legal immigrants are to be denied Supplemental Security Income and food stamps. States have the option of denying them Medicaid and welfare as well. New immigrants will be excluded from most federal means-tested programs, including Medicaid, for the first five years they are in the country. All of this will save about $22 billion over the next six years—about 40 percent of the savings in the bill. The SSI cuts are the worst. Almost 800,000 legal immigrants receive SSI, and most of these will be cut off. Many elderly and disabled noncitizens who have been in the United States for a long time and lack the mental capacity to do what is necessary to become citizens will be thrown out of their homes or out of nursing homes or other group residential settings that are no longer reimbursed for their care.

The food-stamp cuts are very troubling too. Exclusive of the food-stamp cuts for immigrants, they involve savings of about $24 billion. Almost half of that is in across-the-board cuts in the way benefits are calculated. About two thirds of the benefit reductions will be borne by families with children, many of them working families (thus reflecting a policy outcome wildly inconsistent with the stated purposes of the overall bill). Perhaps the most troubling cut is the one limiting food stamps to three months out of every three years for unemployed adults under age fifty who are not raising children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities describes this as "probably the single harshest provision written into a major safety net program in at least 30 years"
-- although it turns out that more states than the drafters anticipated can ask for an exception that was written to accommodate places with disproportionate unemployment. One of the great strengths of food stamps until now has been that it was the one major program for the poor in which help was based only on need, with no reference to family status or age. It was the safety net under the safety net. That principle of pure need-based eligibility has now been breached.

Neither the cuts for immigrants nor the food-stamp cuts have anything to do with welfare reform. Many of them are just mean, with no good policy justification. The bill also contains other budget and benefit reductions unrelated to welfare. The definition of SSI eligibility for disabled children has been narrowed, which will result in removal from the rolls of 100,000 to 200,000 of the 965,000 children who currently receive SSI. Although there was broad agreement that some tightening in eligibility was warranted, the changes actually made will result in the loss of coverage for some children who if they were adults would be considered disabled. Particularly affected are children with multiple impairments no one of which is severe enough to meet the new, more stringent criteria. Child-nutrition programs have also been cut, by nearly $3 billion over six years, affecting meals for children in family day care and in the summer food program. Federal funding for social services has been cut by a six-year total of $2.5 billion. This is a 15 percent cut in an important area, and will hamper the states in providing exactly the kind of counseling and support that families often need if a parent is going to succeed in the workplace.

So this is hardly just a welfare bill. In fact, most of its budget reductions come in programs for the poor other than welfare, and many of them affect working families. Many of them are just cuts, not reform.
(The bill also contains an elaborate reform of federal child-support laws, which had broad bipartisan support and could easily have been enacted as separate legislation.)

THIS brings us to welfare itself. Basically, the block grants mean that the states can now do almost anything they want—even provide no cash benefits at all. There is no requirement in the new law that the assistance provided to needy families be in the form of cash. States may contract out any or all of what they do to charitable, religious, or private organizations, and provide certificates or vouchers to recipients of assistance which can be redeemed with a contract organization. So the whole system could be run by a corporation or a religious organization if a state so chooses (although the latter could raise constitutional questions, depending on how the arrangement is configured). Or a state could delegate everything to the counties, since the law explicitly says that the program need not be run “in a uniform manner” throughout a state, and the counties could have varying benefit and program frameworks. For good or for ill, the states are in the process of working their way through an enormous—indeed, a bewildering—array of choices, which many of them are ill equipped to make, and which outside advocates are working hard to help them make well.

The change in the structure is total. Previously there was a national definition of eligibility. With some limitations regarding two-parent families, any needy family with children could get help. There were rules about participation in work and training, but anybody who played by the rules could continue to get assistance. If people were thrown off the rolls without justification, they could get a hearing to set things right, and could go to court if necessary. The system will no longer work that way.

The other major structural change is that federal money is now capped. The block grants total $16.4 billion annually for the country, with no new funding for jobs and training and placement efforts, which are in fact very expensive activities to carry out. For the first couple of years most of the states will get a little more money than they have been getting, because the formula gives them what they were spending a couple of years ago, and welfare rolls have actually decreased somewhat almost everywhere (a fact frequently touted by the President, although one might wonder why the new law was so urgently needed if the rolls had gone down by more than two million people without it).

Many governors are currently crowing about this “windfall” of new federal money. But what they are not telling their voters is that the federal funding will stay the same for the next six years, with no adjustment for inflation or population growth, so by 2002 states will have considerably less federal money to spend than they would have had under AFDC. The states will soon have to choose between benefits and job-related activities, with the very real possibility that they will run out of federal money before the end of a given year. A small contingency fund exists for recessions, and an even smaller fund to compensate for disproportionate population increases, but it is easy to foresee a time when states will have to either tell applicants to wait for the next fiscal year or spend their own money to keep benefits flowing.

The bill closes its eyes to all the facts and complexities of the real world and essentially says to recipients, Find a job. That has a nice bumper-sticker ring to it. But as a one-size-fits-all recipe it is totally unrealistic.

Total cutoffs of help will be felt right away only by immigrants and disabled children—not insignificant exceptions. The big hit, which could be very big, will come when the time limits go into effect—in five years, or less if the state so chooses—or when a recession hits. State treasuries are relatively flush at the moment, with the nation in the midst of a modest boom period. When the time limits first take effect, a large group of people in each state will fall into the abyss all at once. Otherwise the effects will be fairly gradual. Calcutta will not break out instantly on American streets.

To the extent that there are any constraints on the states in the new law, they are negative. The two largest—and they are very large—are the time limit and the work-participation requirements.

There is a cumulative lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid for with federal money, and states are free to impose shorter time limits if they like. One exception is permitted, to be applied at the state's discretion: as much as 20 percent of the caseload at any particular time may be people who have already received assistance for five years. This sounds promising until one understands that about half the current caseload is composed of people who have been on the rolls longer than five years. A recent study sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation found that 30 percent of the caseload is composed of women who are caring for disabled children or are disabled themselves. The time limits will be especially tough in states that have large areas in chronic recession—for example, the coal-mining areas of Appalachia. And they will be even tougher when the country as a whole sinks into recession. It will make no difference if a recipient has played by all the rules and sought work faithfully, as required. When the limit is reached and the state is unable or unwilling to grant an exception, welfare will be over for that family forever.

Under the work-participation requirements, 25 percent of the caseload must be working or in training this year, and 50 percent by 2002. For two-parent families 75 percent of the caseload must be working or in training, and the number goes up to 90 percent in two years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill falls $12 billion short of providing enough funding over the next six years for the states to meet the work requirements. Even the highly advertised increased child-care funding falls more than $1 billion short of providing enough funding for all who would have to work in order for the work requirements to be satisfied. States that fail to meet the work requirements lose increasing percentages of their block grants.

The states are given a rather Machiavellian out. The law in effect assumes that any reduction in the rolls reflects people who have gone to work. So states have a de facto incentive to get people off the rolls in any way they can, not necessarily by getting them into work activities.

The states can shift a big chunk of their own money out of the program if they want to. There is no matching requirement for the states, only a maintenance-of-effort requirement that each state keep spending at least 80 percent of what it was previously contributing. This will allow as much as $40 billion nationally to be withheld from paying benefits over the next six years, on top of the $55 billion cut by the bill itself. Moreover, the 80 percent requirement is a static number, so the funding base will immediately start being eroded by inflation.

Besides being able to transfer some of their own money out, the states are allowed to transfer up to 30 percent of their federal block grants to spending on child care or other social services. Among other things, this will encourage them to adopt time limits shorter than five years, because this would save federal money that could then be devoted to child care and other help that families need in order to be able to go to work. Hobson's choice will flourish.

The contingency fund to cushion against the impact of recessions or local economic crises is wholly inadequate—$2 billion over five years. Welfare costs rose by $6 billion in three years during the recession of the early nineties.

The federal AFDC law required the states to make decisions on applications within forty-five days and to pay, retroactively if necessary, from the thirtieth day after the application was put in. There is no such requirement in the new law. All we know from the new law is that the state has to tell the Secretary of Health and Human Services what its “objective criteria” will be for “the delivery of benefits,” and how it will accord “fair and equitable treatment” to recipients, including how it will give “adversely affected” recipients an opportunity to be heard. This is weak, to say the least.

FIFTY WELFARE POLICIES

GIVEN this framework, what can we predict will happen? No state will want to be a magnet for people from other states by virtue of a relatively generous benefit structure. This is common sense, unfortunately. As states seek to ensure that they are not more generous than their neighbors, they will try to make their benefit structures less, not more, attractive. If states delegate decisions about benefit levels to their counties, the race to the bottom will develop within states as well.

I do not wish to imply that all states, or even most states, are going to take the opportunity to engage in punitive policy behavior. There will be a political dynamic in the process whereby each state implements the law. Advocates can organize and express themselves to good effect, and legislatures can frustrate or soften governors’ intentions. There is another important ameliorating factor: many welfare administrators are concerned about the dangers that lie in the new law and will seek to implement it as constructively as they can, working to avoid some of the more radical negative possibilities.

Citizens can make a difference in what happens in their state. They can push to make sure that it doesn't adopt a time limit shorter than five years, doesn't reduce its own investment of funds, doesn't cut benefits, doesn't transfer money out of the block grant, doesn't dismantle procedural protections, and doesn't create bureaucratic hurdles that will discourage recipients. They can press for state and local funds to help legal immigrants who have been cut off from SSI or food stamps and children who have been victimized by the time limits. They can advocate an energetic and realistic jobs and training strategy, with maximum involvement by the private sector. And they can begin organizing and putting together the elements of a real fix, which I will lay out shortly.

THE JOBS GAP

EVEN given effective advocacy, relatively responsive legislatures and welfare administrators, and serious efforts to find private-sector jobs, the deck is stacked against success, especially in states that have high concentrations of poverty and large welfare caseloads. The basic issue is jobs. There simply are not enough jobs now. Four million adults are receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Half of them are long-term recipients. In city after city around America the number of people who will have to find jobs will quickly dwarf the number of new jobs created in recent years. Many cities have actually lost jobs over the past five to ten years. New York City, for example, has lost 227,000 jobs since 1990, and the New York metropolitan area overall has lost 260,000 over the same period. New York City had more than 300,000 adults in the AFDC caseload in 1995, to say nothing of the adults without dependent children who are receiving general assistance. Statistics aside, all one has to do is go to Chicago, or to Youngstown, Ohio, or to Newark, or peruse William Julius Wilson's powerful new book, When Work Disappears, to get the point. The fact is that there are not enough appropriate private-sector jobs in appropriate locations even now, when unemployment is about as low as it ever gets in this country.

For some people, staying on welfare was dictated by economics, because it involved a choice between the “poor support” of welfare, to use the Harvard professor David Ellwood's term, and the even worse situation of a low-wage job, with its take-home pay reduced by the out-of-pocket costs of commuting and day care, and the potentially incalculable effects of losing health coverage. With time limits these people will no longer have that choice, unappetizing as it was, and will be forced to take a job that leaves them even deeper in poverty. How many people will be able to get and keep a job, even a lousy job, is impossible to say, but it is far from all of those who have been on welfare for an extended period of time.

The labor market, even in its current relatively heated state, is not friendly to people with little education and few marketable skills, poor work habits, and various personal and family problems that interfere with regular and punctual attendance. People spend long spells on welfare or are headed in that direction for reasons other than economic choice or, for that matter, laziness. If we are going to put long-term welfare recipients to work—and we should make every effort to do so—it will be difficult and it will cost money to train people, to place them, and to provide continuing support so that they can keep a job once they get it. If they are to have child care and health coverage, that will cost still more. Many of the jobs that people will get will not offer health coverage, so transitional Medicaid for a year or two will not suffice. People who have been on welfare for a long time will too often not make it in their first job and will need continuing help toward and into a second job. Both because the private sector may well not produce enough jobs right away and because not all welfare recipients will be ready for immediate placement in a private-sector job, it will be appropriate also to use public jobs or jobs with nonprofit organizations at least as a transition if not as permanent positions. All of this costs real money.

For a lot of people it will not work at all. Kansas City's experience is sadly instructive here. In the past two years, in a very well-designed and well-implemented effort, a local program was able to put 1,409 out of 15,562 welfare recipients to work. As of last December only 730 were still at work. The efforts of Toby Herr and Project Match in Chicago's Cabrini-Green public-housing project are another case in point. Working individually and intensively with women and supporting them through successive jobs until they found one they were able to keep, Herr had managed to place 54 percent of her clients in year-round jobs at the end of five years. This is a remarkable (and unusual) success rate, but it also shows how unrealistic is a structure that offers only a 20 percent exception to the five-year time limit.

I want to be very clear: I am not questioning the willingness of long-term welfare recipients to work. Their unemployment is significantly related to their capacity to work, whether for personal or family reasons, far more than to their willingness to work. Many long-term welfare recipients are functionally disabled even if they are not disabled in a legal sense. News coverage of what the new law will mean has been replete with heartbreaking stories of women who desperately want to work but have severe trouble learning how to operate a cash register or can't remember basic things they need to master. A study in the state of Washington shows that 36 percent of the caseload have learning disabilities that have never been remediated. Many others have disabled children or parents for whom they are the primary caretakers. Large numbers are victims of domestic violence and risk physical retaliation if they enter the workplace. These personal and family problems make such people poor candidates for work in the best of circumstances. Arbitrary time limits on their benefits will not make them likelier to gain and hold employment. When unemployment goes back up to six or seven or eight percent nationally, as it will at some point, the idea that the private sector will employ and continue to employ those who are the hardest to employ will be even more fanciful than it is at the current, relatively propitious moment.

When the time limits take effect, the realities occasioned by the meeting of a bottom-line-based labor market with so many of our society’s last hired and first fired will come into focus. Of course, a considerable number will not fall off the cliff. An increased number will have obtained jobs along the way. The time limits will help some people to discipline themselves and ration their years of available assistance. Some will move in with family or friends when their benefits are exhausted. The 20 percent exception will help as well.

But there will be suffering. Some of the damage will be obvious—more homelessness, for example, with more demand on already strapped shelters and soup kitchens. The ensuing problems will also appear as increases in the incidence of other problems, directly but perhaps not provably owing to the impact of the welfare bill. There will be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality, and increased drug and alcohol abuse. There will be increased family violence and abuse against children and women, and a consequent significant spillover of the problem into the already overloaded child-welfare system and battered-women's shelters.

CAN THE WELFARE BILL BE FIXED THIS YEAR?

I AM amazed by the number of people who have bought the line that the bill was some little set of adjustments that could easily be done away with. Congress and the President have dynamited a structure that was in place for six decades. A solid bipartisan majority of Congress and the President himself have a stake in what they have already done. Fundamental change in the bill is therefore not possible this year. So the answer to the question is no, not in any fundamental way. One possible area for adjustment is in the immigrant and food-stamp provisions. These occasioned the most hand-wringing from the President and some of the people who voted for the bill. They could be changed without redoing everything. The President has made some proposals for limited change on these items.

The bigger question is welfare. If there is going to be a short-term fix of the new law, it will be not in the fundamentals of the new structure but rather in some of the details. It might possibly include the following, although I hasten to say that even this list stretches credulity.

• Congress could make extra funds available to the states for job creation, wage subsidies, training, placement, support and retention services, and so on. The President has proposed a fund of $3 billion over three years for this kind of activity, saying it would result in a million new jobs. As campaign rhetoric, this was pure spin. It amounts to $3,000 per job. There is simply no way in which $3,000 per job will get a million jobs for people who have been on the welfare rolls for extended periods of time. The President has also proposed a modest additional tax credit for hiring welfare recipients. This, too, will have little practical effect.

• The Democrats tried very hard to create a voucher covering basic necessities for children in families that had run up against the time limit. The idea failed by a narrow margin in the Senate, and is worth pursuing. Another item worth advocating would be raising the 20 percent exception to the time limit to 25 or even 30 percent.

• The states are chafing under the requirements about the percentage of the caseload that has to be participating in work or related activities. It would help a little if people were permitted to receive vocational training for longer than the twelve months the law allows.

• The law is excessively flexible on what the states can do with the block-grant funds. A number of possible changes would be helpful: reducing the percentage that can be transferred out of the block; raising the requirement for states' contributions of their own funds; requiring states to comply with the plans they adopt; requiring states to process applications for assistance expeditiously; and clarifying the procedural protections for people denied or cut off from assistance.

• It is vitally important that adequate data be gathered and reported on what happens under the new legislation. The new law contains some funding for research and some instructions about data to be gathered, but additional funds and specification would be helpful.

If reliable and affordable health care and child care were added to this list, and were available beyond a transitional period, it would help a lot. However, my crystal ball tells me that whatever is enacted in these areas will be modest at best, and the new structure will remain substantially in place. And of course not even these adjustments would solve the fundamental problems created when the previous structure was dynamited: the disappearance of the national definition of eligibility and of the guarantee that federal funds will be available for all eligible children.

WHAT WOULD A REAL FIX INVOLVE?

A REAL fix would involve, first, jobs, jobs, jobs—preferably and as a first priority in the private sector, but also in the public sector, where there is real work to be done. And then everything that enables people to be productive citizens. Schools that teach every child as well as they teach every other child. Safe neighborhoods. Healthy communities. Continuing health-care and day-care coverage, so that people can not only go to work but also keep on working. Ending the racial and ethnic discrimination that plagues too many young people who try to enter the job market for the first time.

When we discuss jobs, we need to be talking about opportunities for men and women both. That may seem obvious, but the welfare bill skews our focus. By allocating to long-term welfare recipients such a large share of the limited resources available for jobs and training, we may be draining funds and attention from others who deserve to be a higher priority. Inner-city young men come particularly to mind. We need to be promoting responsible fatherhood, marriage, and two-parent families. If young men cannot find work, they are far less likely to marry. They may have children, but economics and low self-esteem may defeat responsibility. Tough child-support enforcement is part of the solution, but genuine opportunity and clear pathways to opportunity are vital.

The outside world tends to believe that the inner city is hopeless. (I do not mean to neglect strategies to reduce rural poverty.) That is not the case. In the toughest neighborhoods, with all the dangers and pitfalls of street life, there are young people who beat the odds, stay in school and graduate, and go to college or get a job. These young people have exceptional strength and resiliency. But there are many more who could make it with a little extra support and attention. It is enormously important that we increase the number of young people who make it. We give a lot of lip service to prevention, whether of crime or drug abuse or teen pregnancy. But we will never prevent these negative outcomes as well as we could until we pursue a general strategy of creating opportunity and clear pathways to opportunity—a positive youth-development strategy.

Many of the jobs that welfare recipients and other low-income people get do not pay enough to pull them out of poverty. Continuing attention to the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit will be necessary. States should insist, as the city of Baltimore has, that all their contractors pay all their workers a sufficient wage to keep them out of poverty (or at least approximately enough to keep a family of four out of poverty), and should fund their contracts accordingly. Current child-care and health-care policies are insufficient to allow low-wage workers to stay out of poverty even if transitional subsidies let them escape temporarily when they leave the welfare rolls. Federal and state child-care subsidies should help all workers who would otherwise be poor, not just those who have recently left the welfare rolls. And at the end of the day we still have 40 million Americans, including 10 million children, who do not have health coverage. We still have to deal with that as part of a real antipoverty strategy.

We have been reduced to the politics of the waitress mom. She says, all too legitimately, “I bust my tail. I don’t have decent child care. I don’t have health coverage. Why should ‘these people’ get what I don't have?” We started to bring greater equity to the working poor but, except for the recent minimum-wage increase, progress was halted by the 1994 congressional elections. A real fix would help the waitress mom as well as those a rung below her on the income ladder.

We are not just talking policy; we are talking values. We are talking people, especially young people growing up, who understand that they have to take responsibility for themselves, both as earners and as parents.

Personal responsibility and community responsibility need to intersect. The community has a responsibility to help instill and nurture values. The community has a responsibility to offer support, especially to children and youths, so that everyone has an opportunity to acquire the tools necessary to achieve the personal responsibility that is such a vital element in the equation. The community has a responsibility to help parents do their job. And community means something different from programs, something larger, although programs are part of the equation. Liberals have tended to think in terms of programs. The community's taking responsibility is a much larger idea. But communities cannot succeed in isolation. National leadership and policy are essential as well.

Welfare is what we do when everything else fails. It is what we do for people who can't make it after a genuine attempt has been mounted to help the maximum possible number of people to make it. In fact, much of what we do in the name of welfare is more appropriately a subject for disability policy. The debate over welfare misses the point when all it seeks to do is tinker with welfare eligibility, requirements, and sanctions. The 1996 welfare law misses the point.

To do what needs to be done is going to take a lot of work—organizing, engaging in public education, broadening the base of people who believe that real action to reduce poverty and promote self-sufficiency in America is important and possible. We need to watch very carefully, and we need to document and publicize, the impact of the 1996 welfare legislation on children and families across America. We need to do everything we can to influence the choices the states have to make under the new law. We can ultimately come out in a better place. We should not want to go back to what we had. It was not good social policy. We want people to be able to hold up their heads and raise their children in dignity. The best that can be said about this terrible legislation is that perhaps we will learn from it and eventually arrive at a better approach. I am afraid, though, that along the way we will do some serious injury to American children, who should not have had to suffer from our national backlash.

Illustrations by Robert Goldstrom
The Atlantic Monthly; March 1997; The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done; Volume 279, No. 3; pages 43-58.
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 3:40 am

Hillary Clinton Should Ask for Black America’s Forgiveness Before She Asks for its Vote
by Antonio Moore
Los Angeles Attorney, Producer "Crack in the System" Documentary
February 18, 2016

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Houston, we have a problem. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has run into a major speed bump and it’s called Bernie Sanders. As we move toward the day of reckoning known as Super Tuesday, she’s dialing up Black America to answer the call to action.

The woman that was supposedly married to America’s first black president is now hoping that it is Black America that buoys her campaign. The problem is that regardless of whether Bill Clinton believes, as he has recently stated, that “we are all mixed-race people...”, he is white and the Clintons were far from good for Black America in their last go around in the White House.

Whether we look at “The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act “ signed by President Clinton in 1994, a piece of legislation which led to more black men being incarcerated than we had seen in all of America’s dark history, which is saying a lot. Or, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which nearly gutted black media ownership by removing caps on corporate media ownership. The Clinton era was marked by a reality of setbacks for African Americans that are too often understated, and are best summed up by Michelle Alexander, author of the bestseller “The New Jim Crow”.

“If anyone doubts that the mainstream media fails to tell the truth about our political system (and its true winners and losers), the spectacle of large majorities of black folks supporting Hillary Clinton in the primary races ought to be proof enough. I can’t believe Hillary would be coasting into the primaries with her current margin of black support if most people knew how much damage the Clintons have done — the millions of families that were destroyed the last time they were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes. There’s so much more to say on this topic and it’s a shame that more people aren’t saying it. I think it’s time we have that conversation.” Michelle Alexander


Under former President Bill Clinton’s administration the number of incarcerated rose dramatically, the increase primarily being composed of young black males. According to the Los Angeles Times, “During Clinton’s eight-year tenure, the total population of federal and state prisons combined rose by 673,000 inmates—235,000 more than during Reagan’s two terms.” As I wrote in one of the more popular pieces on incarceration, The Black Male Incarceration Problem Is Real and It’s Catastrophic,

“... there are currently more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined. India alone is a country of 1.2 Billion people, the country in total only has around 380,000 prisoners.”


Image
The Black Male Incarceration Problem is Real and It's Catastrophic

Recently Bill Clinton admitted regret for his part in the incarceration increase stating, “... the president spoke a long time and very well on criminal justice reform,..But I want to say a few words about it. Because I signed a bill that made the problem worse and I want to admit it.” But his words do little to correct the effects his legislative pen had on millions of black families. This is covered extensively in the documentary I served as a producer on “Freeway: Crack In The System”, which details how lawmakers racialized the punishment of non-violent crimes, and the devastating impact that approach had on black homes across the nation. The increase in gangs and drugs that we covered in our film, resulted in Hillary Clinton calling those convicted ‘super-predators’, and stating they needed to be brought to heel. An action often reserved for breaking an animal, rather than rehabilitating human beings.



“ They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel...” Hillary Clinton 1996


The problem was they were not super, nor predators, they were just a generation of misguided young black men. In actuality they were brothers, fathers and sons caught in a webbing of economics that was 30 years in the making, one that dated back to a time when President Nixon formally declared a “war on drugs”. This entanglement closed in on them as cheap drugs became available, and cities across the nation lost manufacturing jobs leaving employment deserts in urban ghettos.

Following her earlier statement, Michelle Alexander wrote a scathing critique, being highly critical of Hillary Clinton receiving support from Black America. In it she details the reasons why Hillary should not get Black America’s vote, and calls on African Americans to take on a deeper review of the Clintons’ policy history.

Bill Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare... Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on black communities than Republicans had been... An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates.

The truth is more troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.”

-- Why Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve the Black Vote” - The Nation


Hillary Clinton’s backing from blacks should not be a given, it should be a question mark given the very questionable past the Clintons have with Black America. As stated by Shaun King of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, “The idea of an African-American firewall for Hillary Clinton is deeply insulting.” For those that conveniently try to separate Bill Clinton’s time in the oval office from Hillary, no matter how you slice it Hillary Clinton’s campaign is indelibly intertwined with Bill’s administration. It is undeniable her record of preparedness for the White House is based in large part on his presidency.

Focusing in on the economy, the Clinton era is remembered as a great time for America, a time when everyone prospered. But so often what is forgotten is a detail of how at least in part all those supposed good times occurred. The prosperity everyone remembers was short lived, and it lacked sound fundamentals to sustain itself. As an example, in 1999 President Bill Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, effectively repealing Glass Steagall the law that separated commercial banks and investment banks. Many economists credit Bill Clinton signing this legislation with the creation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. A financial catastrophe, which particularly ended up targeting so many Latino and African American families across the nation.

Incarceration was yet another instrument used to skew economic numbers. Under the administrations of Reagan and Clinton, incarceration as a social tool used for punishment also became a major job creator. According to a PrisonPolicy.org piece written in 2002,

During the last two decades, the large-scale use of incarceration to solve social problems has combined with the fall-out of globalization to produce an ominous trend: prisons have become a “growth industry” in rural America. Communities suffering from declines in farming, mining, timber-work and manufacturing are now begging for prisons to be built in their backyards. The economic restructuring that began in the troubled decade of the 1980s has had dramatic social and economic consequences for rural communities and small towns. Together the farm crises, factory closings, corporate downsizing, shift to service sector employment and the substitution of major regional and national chains for local, main-street businesses have triggered profound change in these areas. The acquisition of prisons as a conscious economic development strategy for depressed rural communities and small towns in the United States has become widespread. Hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions have become dependent on an industry which itself is dependent on the continuation of crime-producing conditions.


The incarceration of young blacks is part of the reason the unemployment numbers fell under the Clintons. Effectively by incarcerating young black men they became an invisible population and no longer counted as unemployed, despite still being jobless behind bars. In addition, through their imprisonment jobs were created for officers, judges, prison guards and the like, in communities across the country.

While Hillary’s recent speech in New York on Black America’s social issues is respected, I have reviewed her plan and it falls short on specifics and timelines. At a time when the black and white wealth gap has reached astronomical levels, African Americans need more than a message in exchange for their votes in 2016. They need a commitment with performance benchmarks, and a plan focused on them and the effects of their legacy of disenfranchisement in America. Her speech lacked the recognition that would come alongside an apology, whereby it would be clear she has a better grasp these actions she is proposing are corrective in nature. In one of the more tepid moments of the same speech she stated,

“I’ve made mistakes, I’ve walked my own journey... we also learned about what doesn’t work, some of what we tried didn’t resolve problems. Some ended up creating new ones. And that caused disappointment, frustration, even anger.” Hillary Clinton 2016


It is not enough to say Black America faces problems; the Clintons must go further and take responsibility for playing a role in planting part of those problems’ roots. The great irony of her speech came when she referenced second chances for convicts stating, “... in my faith we believe in second chances, in America we believe in second chances. Let’s give those chances to people who need them the most.” If we take full stock of the lasting effects that resulted from the legislative policies enacted by the Clintons, we are ultimately lead to the question, why should we give you a second chance in the White House?

As the Congressional Black Caucus places their backing behind Clinton, Black America should take this moment to demand more for their support.
The question African Americans should ask Hillary Clinton, is what will you commit to doing in the first one hundred days that addresses our needs? Demand a real reform of criminal justice with benchmarks, demand America apologize for the institution of slavery and it be coupled with a review of the United Nation’s recommendation of implementation of some form of reparatory justice, demand more avenues for black owned business to grow with improved access to commercial loans from banks. In the end Black America should come with a succinct ask, and also demand that Hillary Clinton apologize to get the black vote.



———————
Antonio Moore is a Los Angeles Attorney. He is also one of the producers of the documentary on the Iran Contra, Crack Cocaine Epidemic and the resulting issues of Mass Incarceration “Freeway: Crack in the System”. Mr. Moore has contributed pieces to Huffington Post, Inequality.org and thegrio on topics of race, mass incarceration, and economics.

Follow Antonio Moore on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tonetalks
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 3:52 am

I Was 16 and in Solitary Before I Ever Even Went to Trial
by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Legal Intern, ACLU
July 10, 2014

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February is cold in Northern Virginia. It's even colder when you're in a cell alone, without a mattress, a blanket, a pillow, or a sheet.

When I walked into that cell in the basement of the Fairfax County Jail, my hands cuffed behind my back and stomach grumbling from a half a day without food, I was almost relieved. Happy to be soon free from cuffs, to be close to being processed, and to be moved to wherever I'd suffer next. What I didn't know is that once the deputy uncuffed me and closed the small opening that I'd slipped my hands through, no one would talk to me again for days.

This was February 21, 1997. Seventeen years ago and still the date, the time of day I arrived, and the exact location of the cell in solitary confinement are permanent fixtures in my memory. I was sixteen years old and being held in pre-trial detention on carjacking and robbery charges.

After spending three months in juvenile facilities, I had grown strangely familiar with being in a cell. But nothing prepares you for solitary confinement.

I spent ten days in that cell. I learned to pace, seven steps back and forth, again and again. I stared at the wall, sought out figures in the cracks. Across from me was the padded room where they sent prisoners who threw things on the deputies. The kid in the cell beside me, he too only sixteen or seventeen years old, told me about all of his fears of a straightjacket. Those days felt like a straightjacket to me.

Eight of those days were without a shower or any of the other small allowances that helped men from freezing in the night. I wore the same clothes and slept on a concrete slab that was covered in phlegm. For a time I told myself that the ordeal couldn't be real. I wondered if one of the punishments for guilt was solitary. How would I know otherwise? I hadn't been to court, hadn't seen my lawyer in a few weeks, had yet to have a trial – and yet, without explanation I was in solitary confinement.


After those first ten days in solitary, I would go on to plead guilty to carjacking and robbery. Sentenced to eight years in prison, the better part of my youth was spent confined. And during those eight years, I spent a year and a half doing various short stints in solitary confinement. I watched grown men crack under the pressure of a solitary cell. I watched men beg for relief, strapped to a bed by their arms and legs.

Seventeen years later, I find that I'm again constantly thinking about solitary confinement. The horror stories that drive the public conversation about solitary are not stories to me, but memories. It's unsettling because as much as I know the truth of what the noise of silence can do to a person's mind, I know the dangers for juveniles are worse.

It's good to see this issue getting more press. And it's encouraging to see some states slowly making changes. But it's still unacceptable that every day children are held in solitary confinement for upwards of 22 hours — in adult prisons and jails and juvenile facilities alike. It's unacceptable that we still have a practice on the books that devastates children's minds. We know that solitary confinement does not reduce violence and likely increases recidivism, and we must end this child abuse nationwide.

To help address the widespread issue of solitary confinement and isolation in juvenile facilities, check out the ACLU's new advocacy toolkit, "Ending the Solitary Confinement of Youth in Juvenile Detention and Correctional Facilities."
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Re: CNN Tonight with Don Lemon on Bill Clinton & BLM

Postby admin » Fri Apr 22, 2016 8:00 am

Federal and State Prison Populations Soared Under Clinton, Report Finds
Justice: An analysis of federal statistics shows that more inmates were added than during any previous administration.

by Greg Krikorian
Times Staff Writer
February 19, 2001

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The federal and state prison populations rose more under former President Bill Clinton than under any other president, according to a report from a criminal justice institute to be released today.

In fact, the analysis of U.S. Justice Department statistics by the left-leaning Justice Policy Institute, a project of a San Francisco-based justice center, found that more federal inmates were added to prisons under Clinton than under presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan combined.

"I remember thinking when Bill Clinton got elected that we would have a chance to turn things around," said Vincent Schiraldi, president of the institute, a project of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. "But I think we read the tea leaves wrong."

From opposing a federal commission's push for equalization of drug sentences for powder cocaine and crack cocaine to embracing a 1994 crime bill that accelerated the rate of prison construction, the Democratic president often stole the show from "tough-on-crime" Republicans, the study said.

In doing so, it said, he left a record that did not square with his rhetoric on such topics as easing mandatory sentences.

While calling as recently as last fall for a review of the nation's prison policies, Clinton presided over an administration that, in its first term, saw an additional 277,000 prisoners incarcerated in federal and state facilities, according to the study. That number compared with 243,000 prisoners during Bush's four years in office and 129,000 during Reagan's first four years in office.

During Clinton's eight-year tenure, the total population of federal and state prisons combined rose by 673,000 inmates--235,000 more than during Reagan's two terms.


In California, the state prison population rose from 105,467 in 1992 to 161,401 as of last June, according to California Department of Correction figures.

Although most of the national increase in incarceration occurred in state-run prisons, the study found that the number of prisoners under federal jurisdiction doubled during the Clinton years and grew more than during the previous 12 years of Republican control of the White House.

Nearly 60% of those sentenced to federal prison during the Clinton administration are serving time for drug offenses, the study said. The total number of people in federal prison on drug charges--63,448--is 62% more than the number in 1990.

The dramatic increase in prison populations was attributable to several factors, Schiraldi said, including the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which earmarked $30.2 billion over six years for, among other things, new state prisons. One condition for receiving the federal funds, he noted, was that states scale back early paroles and adopt sentencing policies requiring that inmates serve more time in prison.

Also contributing to the increase, Schiraldi said, were tougher three-strikes sentencing laws adopted in more than 20 states, including California, during 1994 and 1995.
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