Nobility of cause is no surety for nobility of outcome.
Victorious in the pivotal New York Democratic Party primary, Hillary Clinton is virtually assured the party nomination. Bernie Sanders tried arduously to snatch victory from Clinton in the state of his birth. He hoped his Brooklyn antecedents and New York’s reputation as a bastion of liberal politics would conspire to yield an upset. His supplication was tantamount to requesting a small miracle. Sanders might have been born in New York but Clinton’s ties were more recent and stronger. She had been one of its senators.
Subsequent Clinton victories in Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, and the important Pennsylvania primaries inched her even closer to the nomination. Narrow victories for Sanders in Indiana and tiny Rhode Island could do little to halt the inevitable.
Sanders prayer apparently was muffled by the hum of the political establishment at work against him. Neither political upset nor miracle was to be had. Clinton steamrolled the Vermont senator, securing a win inNew York by a large-than-expected margin. The machine rolls on.
Sanders fought and strained. In the end, the quixotic senator proved unequal to the leviathan. He was overcome. Ideals are wondrous glances into a better tomorrow. Yet in politics, organization and power usually take the day. The pen is mightier than the sword and gun until the first volley is fired.
Fustigated by this loss, Sanders’ attempt at the party nomination now becomes a more desperate heave. With his nomination now firmly resident in the house of make believe, Sanders must decide whether to surrender or brave forth when carrying on the fight means incurring the acute opprobrium of the party establishment; meanwhile, the effort will still result in the clear failure of his personal ambition to obtain the party nomination. However, there may be what appears to him a more transcendent reason to walk further into the den of personal setback and mainstream sanction.
If Sanders has accomplished anything, it is has been to force Clinton to make the stand she abhors. His somewhat progressive ideas have caught fire with a significant amount of the party. To remain within calling distance of that wing, the mainstream Clinton has been forced to tack left, against her natural inclinations. The Clinton formula has always been to force the liberals to succumb to the tired nostrum that no other alternative existed; evil was the only thing for sale in the political market and the Clintons were the lesser evil of them all. Sanders altered the equation. For liberals, he was a positive good that represented a welcome change from the amoral ways of the Clinton political stock.
The longer Sanders keeps to the race, particularly if he persists to the party convention, is the longer he will stall Clinton from her planned swing to the right. He may see utility in remaininga walking cadaver of a candidate until the convention so that he might exert some influence on the party platform. He will seek inclusion of progressive positions in that platform. These ideals will appeal to the poor and working class, the laborers, young people and the unions, that along with minority voters, form the electoral spine of the party.
However, this scenario speaks caustic to Clinton’s appetite. She does not want to be pinned left or to be beholden to it to any degree. The mainstream is her home; this is by conscious design. That is where the money is. End of story.
Try as he might to score something meaningful from his exertions, Sanders will likely but exchange one quixotic pursuit for another. Forgetting his personal ambitions to press Clinton to accept some of his progressive stances will be to no avail. She will say “yes” all the while resenting being placed in this leftward position, thus, all thewhile meaning”no.” To get the liberals to return to the fold, she will agreeto essentially anything short of excision of a vital organ. At the operative time, she will renege and veer right. That is how the Clintons have always played; there is no reason to think they have voluntarily quit this game after it has given them such a successful run. The machine rolls on….until it breaks down.
Despite his defeat, Sanders’ demonstration showed the political establishment to be vulnerable. However, he started too late, had no grassroots organization and came from a state that was too small for him to overcome the advantages that Clinton had built. That he came from over 50 percent points behind to achieve near parity in the latest national poll speaks more to Clinton’s vulnerabilities and to the gravitational pull of progressive ideals during this high noon of economic inequality. Sanders was just the happy messenger and barely adequate campaigner. Had he cut a more charismatic figure, the race might be on still. Clinton might even be sunk.
An assessment of how Democrats perceive the candidates on four key issues demonstrates why Hillary has consumed the Sanders mini-revolt even before the final inning. The 2009 Financial Crisis presents the great divide between Democrats of the Clinton/Wall Street variety and the party’s liberal/progressive elements. The Wall Street grouping believes Obama was right to solely bail out the banks and allow the people to fend for themselves. They laud the president for staving depression, claiming it was all that could be achieved given political realities. They believe as Obama and many mainstream economists have chirped that the economy is running just fine albeit most people are hurting.
(I cannot fathom how supposedly liberal figures express comfort with an economy where the wealthy are suborned yet the bulk of the people remain put out. For them, aggregate statistics have primacy over the people’s welfare. Man was built to serve the economy and not the economy to serve man. This is not progressive thought. If it is thought at all, it is one cast of intellectualized greed.)
Progressives too applaud Obama for staving depression but lament he left the field with the game half finished. To have rescued miscreant banks but not equally bolstering the public was to save the situation, but leave without material amendment the financial system that caused the grave danger.
To Clinton’s chagrin, rank-and-file party membership would reach the same conclusion the progressives did. Amidst their smugness of position and myopia of thought, the party royalty had blinded itself to the signs of the time; they missed the stirrings of the progressives and of the masses. The Clinton machine was jolted by the fact that the progressives and working class have united on economic issues.
The Clintons thought they had isolated the progressives, denuding them as a potent force within the party. Ironically, the economic unfairness, financial collapse and fear of morechurned by muddling Clintonian policies rescued progressivesfrom the political wilderness; those they sought to bury, the Clintons resuscitated by the consequences of their warped economic policies.
If this were the only matter on the table, Sanders might have eventually outflanked Clinton. However other considerations, coupled with Clinton allies’firm control of the party machinery, have given the overall contest to her.
The people are more familiar with Hillary than with Sanders. Hers is an impressive resume. She touts her experience and ability to get things done. Yet, her resume is one more of position than of feat. We can name the numerous posts she has held; one is hard pressed to identify concrete achievement derived from her time in these postings. In her last official job — secretary of state — the policy that most bore her signature was in Libya. The strategy she championed turned a once stable country into convulsing disaster. The three presidents with resumes as full as Ms. Clinton’s were Herbert Hoover, James Buchananand Bush the First. A mild disappointment, Bush fared better as president than the other two. The earlier men became disappointment personified.
Unable to grasp the dynamics of the Great Depression, Hoover initiated policies that worsened the hardship. Fearful of taking action that would offend north or south, Buchanan did what was politically expedient: he did nothing. Buchanan hid in the White House, watching fecklessly and doing nothing to halt the drift toward civil war. In both instances, the experienced hand fell paralytic upon encountering unexpected peril.
It would take relative newcomers to national office, Lincoln and Roosevelt respectively, to dare what these vaunted men had not the courage to envision. Concerning the presidency, experience is a less reliable coin than fortitude and character. However, the sense that Clinton is better prepared has been proffered wholesale, whittling Sanders advantage on economic policy and typecasting him as a dangerous novice.
Regarding substantive issues, Clinton and Sanders stand close on immigration, an important issue to the Latino community. However, Clinton has a slight edge in that community because she is better known than Sanders. Female Democrats over 40 overwhelmingly back Clinton. Younger adults, both men and women, tend toward Sanders but they also tend not to vote with the frequency of their older counterparts.
Clinton’s lead over Sanders would evaporate if but for the vast support given by the Black community. Her impending nomination will be underwritten by the Black community. This is tragic; the Black voter doth himself a disfavor more severe than any advantage he could possibly attain from this act of blind loyalty. Cut by his own knife, his prayer for healing is nullified by his commission of self-injury.
Part of Clinton’s claim to the nomination is that she gets things done. Under scrutiny, the claim acquires a hue more ominous than impressive. Reviewingher policies toward Blacks produces the nauseous feeling that she and her spouse have done more to Black people than for them.
No tandem has done more harm to us in the past quarter century than the Clintons. As president, Bill Clinton cast drug trafficking in total blackface although knowing full well that Whites were more active traffickers and users per capita. In 1994, Clinton passed a crime bill purposefully tagging drugs more common to Black areas with stringent penalties. There was no empirical evidence to support this. A sinister Richard Nixoninitiated the war on drugs. He did so as a disguised attack on Black activism and the general Black male population. Ronald Reagan would advance this agenda.
It would take Bill Clinton, publicly endorsed by Hillary, to perfect it. Clinton pursued this path knowing it would consign many Blacks to prison; he saw this as a small price to be paid to secure his position with the White electorate. This tact proved a cruel success. As if they were broken tools, millions of Black men were piled away in prison for nonviolent, small-time drug offenses while White offenders were frequently let off the hook. Black men got more punishment than was fairly due them only to suffer the further ignominy of having added to that punitive burden the punishment which should have been meted the white offender. The Black man was made the Jesus of the criminal justice process. He was to bear the punishment and sins of others that they might go free.
Millions of men were rendered permanent denizens of an inescapable underclass. In this netherworld, jobs and often housing could not be found. Life on the margins is to be invisible to all except those who impose more punishment and more prison.
As such, Clinton took a wrecking ball to the lives of millions of Black men, tearing apart families and communities in his effort to feed the racist idol that he believed demanded sacrifice to win elections.
Painting poverty in blackface and depicting the poor as slothful cheats instead of unfortunate or even victims of society, Clinton eagerly curtailed unemployment relief and welfare assistance. He signed legislation approving predatory lending that soon targeted the Black and other minority communities. Practices once considered illegal loansharking and usury became legal. A great number of Blacks lives and homes would crash into bankruptcy and foreclosure under the weight of mounting debt when the financial system Clinton had reengineered collapsed years later.
When Clinton moved into Harlem after his presidency, the event was hailed as evidence of his affinity for Black people. Sad when a people choose to see what they are told to believe instead of what lies before their eyes. Clinton did not come to sitin Harlem because of his admiration forBlack people. He did so as the vanguard of gentrification under the direction of his downtown financiers.
He acted as the real estate equivalent of a Trojan horse. Adjacent to upper Manhattan, lower Harlem was choice realty. The problem was working class and poor black inhabited it. Clinton did not move to Harlem to enrich the community. He came to conquer it. After Clinton arrived, gentrification that would begin to evict Blacks in lower Harlem as it was doing to Blacks in other American cities.That area was to be incorporated into upper Manhattan. Bye, bye black people in the process.
Clinton did not confine his disdain for blacks to America’s shores. Believing the hundreds of thousands of lives that perished were not worth the effort, he twitched not an American finger but watched as Rwanda turned into a maelstrom of death. He forbade any UN intervention when such action could have saved legions. After the bloodletting, he would emit a stream of reptilian tears and false remorse.
Haiti has been a favored target of Clinton racism. The Clintons have been in league with Citigroup. That institution has shoved its arm into the Haitian till for over a century. With the American military as its street muscle, Citigroup controlled the Haitian treasury when America occupied that island nation for roughly 20 years.
The current idea is to turn Haiti in the rich man’s paradise Cuba had been prior to Castro ruining the good times. This means seizing a good portion of the island from its people. The Clintons have been among the prime architects of this confiscation. They helped manipulate elections to install those they and not the Haitian people. This year, the people rebelled, stalling a blatantly rigged process the American government backed because it would usher their puppet to the highest seat in the impoverished land. Working with their chosen marionettes, the Clintons and allied financiers have cleared thousands of people from their ancestral lands to make way for a resort and industrial parks that would be opened to favored businesses.
During her time as secretary of state, Madame Clinton stomped her foot, basically pressing the client, captive Haitian president to veto a popular measure increasing the abysmal minimum wage. The people were not seeking largesse; they just wanted a wage slightly above that associated with serfdom. Clinton nixed the measure because she needed to suppress labor costs for American textile industries seeking to relocate in northern Haiti. In one swoop, she maintained the wage peonage of Haitian labor while promoting the unemployment of many Black textile workers in South Carolina and elsewhere. The firms moving to Haiti would close their factories in these American locales. That her friendscould save a dollar, Clinton gave Black workers the double slam. Yet, American Blacks would vote for her in the recent primaries as if she were of their own.
In this, Hillary follows the lead of her leading man. Bill Clinton mastered the art of deceiving Black people at an early age. He knows we are easily led and even more easily fooled. Anyone raised in the southern United States is familiar with such a figure. Almost every small town had one: the white guy who spent his recreational time with Blacks. Coming from a poor background of low social status, Clinton was outcast from his own. Yet, he was ambitious; he was not satisfied with becoming accepted. He wanted to rise to the top of the social structure that had forbade him. Partly to compensate for this ostracism and to have more fun, Clinton and those like him would find solace in the Black community. Around Blacks, he could act and feel superior while also learning “cool.” Even the poorest, most outcast White had privileges no Black man possessed.
This friendship with Blacks was more situational than sympathetic. Blacks were not equals but were useful pawns. Like most of White society, he believed the myths about Black social pathology. He needed to believe these because he had not cast aside the myths about poor Whites like himself. His goal was not to destroy those myths but to disassociate himself from them by climbing the social ladder.
To be useful to the White community, he exploited his entrée into the Black community. Early on, he realized he could use his special knowledge to help the White power structure keep Blacks in their place. This would make him valuable to those who wanted to maintain racist boundaries without consciously seemingto do so. A subtle yet functional racism would replace its overt brother.
Mostly, people like him grew up to become insurance or car salesmen. The more talented ones, would become a town’s mayor or the county sheriff. This time, one became governor and then president. Sadly, he would come to be viewed by Black people as a demi-savior. In fact, he is nothing more than a glossy sachet of biased myths and unresolved pathologies. We took as a hero a man who never liked us and who had given up on true heroism a long time ago.
Faced with the choice between a smile masking sinister purpose or a frown accompanied by a fair deal, Blacks showed in the Democratic primaries their preference for fraudulent affection. Objectively, Clinton’s positions are not as beneficial as those of Sanders. Moreover, Clinton’s word is not a reliable barometer of her subsequent action. Her inherent conservatism on economic matters is such that ulta-right wing financier Charles Koch recently stated Clinton might be a better choice than her Republican rivals. If Koch’s interests would be served by Clinton, rest assured Black people’s would not be. Koch and Blacks cannot be helped at the same time. Sad that we have indiscriminately chosen to continue a relationship with the Clintons of distorted intimacy without more fully exploring the merits of the dispassionate yet fairer partnership Sanders appears to have placed before us. The machine rolls on.
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