CW Political and Social Thought

Being a Double Minority: Gay and Asian

Just as with gay people in general, it's easy for people to overlook double minorities. When we are taken somewhat seriously, we're often forced into one corner or the other, having to be 'Black' or 'Asian' or 'Hispanic' while downplaying our gay identity. When we are  within the gay community, double minorities are often subjected to the  standards of white beauty and  struggle for recognition as a racial and gay minority. Though with various gay minority communities having created their own permanent and racially separate organizations, I am not sure that anyone has become invested in challenging the status quo. In any case, here are the stories of many gay Asian men in a film called Forbidden Fruit.

Weep Not, Weep Not, She is Not Dead

Go Down Death (1927) by James Weldon Johnson is one of my favorite poems of all time, which probably has to do with the fact that I performed it hundreds of times in competitive public speaking in high school.

Weep not, weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband--weep no more;
Grief-stricken son--weep no more;
Left-lonesome daughter --weep no more;
She only just gone home.


Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great, high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eye fell on Sister Caroline,
Tossing on her bed of pain.
And God's big heart was touched with pity,
With the everlasting pity.


And God sat back on his throne,
And he commanded that tall, bright angel standing at his right hand:
Call me Death!
And that tall, bright angel cried in a voice
That broke like a clap of thunder:
Call Death!--Call Death!
And the echo sounded down the streets of heaven
Till it reached away back to that shadowy place,
Where Death waits with his pale, white horses.


And Death heard the summons,
And he leaped on his fastest horse,
Pale as a sheet in the moonlight.
Up the golden street Death galloped,
And the hooves of his horses struck fire from the gold,
But they didn't make no sound.
Up Death rode to the Great White Throne,
And waited for God's command.


And God said: Go down, Death, go down,
Go down to Savannah, Georgia,
Down in Yamacraw,
And find Sister Caroline.
She's borne the burden and heat of the day,
She's labored long in my vineyard,
And she's tired--
She's weary--
Go down, Death, and bring her to me.


And Death didn't say a word,
But he loosed the reins on his pale, white horse,
And he clamped the spurs to his bloodless sides,
And out and down he rode,
Through heaven's pearly gates,
Past suns and moons and stars;
on Death rode,
Leaving the lightning's flash behind;
Straight down he came.


While we were watching round her bed,
She turned her eyes and looked away,
She saw what we couldn't see;
She saw Old Death.  She saw Old Death
Coming like a falling star.
But Death didn't frighten Sister Caroline;
He looked to her like a welcome friend.
And she whispered to us: I'm going home,
And she smiled and closed her eyes.


And Death took her up like a baby,
And she lay in his icy arms,
But she didn't feel no chill.
And death began to ride again--
Up beyond the evening star,
Into the glittering light of glory,
On to the Great White Throne.
And there he laid Sister Caroline
On the loving breast of Jesus.


And Jesus took his own hand and wiped away her tears,
And he smoothed the furrows from her face,
And the angels sang a little song,
And Jesus rocked her in his arms,
And kept a-saying: Take your rest,
Take your rest.

Weep not--weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.

Credits: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15586

Before Plymouth or Jamestown or Even Roanoke Island, There Was San Miguel de Guadalupe

In his book, Black Indians, William Loren Katz, claims that the first foreign colony on 'U.S.' soil was neither Jamestown, nor Roanoke Island. More interestingly, he asserts that while Europeans left the colony several months later in 1526 because of harsh weather, a labor storage, and inadequate shelter, "Africans remained to build their own society with Native Americans." For reasons which he believes are related to a belief that "U.S. life began with the arrival of English-speaking Anglo Saxons" and its challenge to "white U.S. heritage", the story of San Miguel de Guadalupe, which was settled near what became Georgetown, South Carolina, garners very little attention in terms of pre-British, pre-United States North American history.

The story of San Miguel de Guadalupe begins when Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a wealthy Spanish official in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola sent an expedition in 1520 to canvass the North American mainland to establish a colony. Though, according to Katz, Ayllon wanted to build "friendly relations with the local inhabitants," Ayllon's men, among whom was a slave-hunter, captured seventy Native Americans. One of these natives, Chicorana, would help Ayllon persuade the Spanish king  to permit a settlement on the mainland of the U.S.  "The  king's  orders  forbade  enslavement of the Indians, and added 'you be very careful about the treatment of the Indians," but this had little effect as "one hundred enslaved Africans", along with Spanish men and women, were on the crew headed for San Miguel de Guadalupe.

Though dogged by Indian desertions, Ayllon and his crew resolved to settle the land in hopes of exploiting African labor and nature's land. This would be short-lived. In a matter of time, "disease and starvation ravaged their colony and internal disputes tore it apart," culminating in a slave revolt, in which slaves fled to the Indians and the departure of the surviving Spanish settlers.  In a series of events, "African began  setting  fires and Native Americans (who also hated slavery) sided with the slaves and made trouble."

What was left of this was a mixed community of Africans and Native Americans and the "first settlement of any permanence on these shores to include people from overseas." The frequency with which Blacks and Indians established familial ties of interdependency and mutual respect throughout American settlements suggests that San Miguel de Guadalupe being described as the "first colony on this continent to practice the belief that all people -newcomer and native- are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"  is likely accurate.  We may never know the exact nature of Black and Indian life in San Miguel de Guadalupe, as the story still remains ignored and understudied, but what San Miguel de Guadalupe clearly foreshadows is how Indians and Blacks would learn how to consolidate their power to overcome a common enemy. Much of the lessons of San Miguel de Guadalupe is about adaption, except in this story the enemy did not permanently stay, as the rest of American history would fold out, but slithered away like a snake.       

Benjamin Banneker: Beyond What We Think We Know

If you are like me, then what you learned about Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) in secondary school  is probably summed up by this passage from my high school history book, which I've managed to keep a copy of after all these years.

"Under such circumstances, most free black remained poor laborers or tenant farmers. However, even under such extreme disadvantages, some free blacks became landowners or skilled artisans. One who achieved considerable fame was Benjamin Banneker of Maryland, a self-taught mathematician and astronomer. Later, in 1789, he served on the commission that designed Washington, D.C. and after 1791 he published a series of almanacs."

Of course, what this passage does not capture is Banneker's remarkable brilliance and even his missed potential, a brilliance that "brought him international fame in his time" and a potential that would have undoubtedly made him "a far more important figure in early American science than merely as the first black man of science" save for the limitations...of the burgeoning American Dream" for Blacks, free or not.

In a time in which the free Blacks "were confined by racism to low-paying jobs...and...(to live in) cellars or shanties on narrow streets," Blacks had to petition their government to no avail for education dollars equal to that given to white students, the right to testify in court, to have equal trading rights as white artisans, etc, so limiting Benjamin Banneker to a mathematician or astronomer, while worthwhile, does not place Banneker in an important historical context.

He was after all a Black man in 18th century United States. Before Banneker published his first edition of his almanac, of which there would be twenty-eight, he sent Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, a letter, which shows Banneker injecting himself into one of the most contentious and certainly most moral issues of his day. With the Constitutional Convention of 1787 having firmly given way to pro-slavery forces, Banneker challenged Jefferson on the question of slavery and American hypocrisy.  Written in the sort of gentlemanly style of the day and widely distributed, along with the exchange of letters, Banneker asserts an audacious confidence.

Benjamin Banneker, Letter to Thomas Jefferson
August 19, 1791

"I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of Beings who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have been looked upon with an eye of contempt, and that we have long considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowment."

"...that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the Same Sensations, and [endowed] us all with the same faculties, and that however variable we may be in Society or religion, however diversified in Situation or color, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him."

"Sir, Suffer me to recall to your mind that time in which the Arms and tyranny of the British Crown were exerted with every powerful effort in order to reduce you to a State of Servitude...This, Sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a State of Slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its condition. [I]t was now Sir, that your abhorrence thereof was so excited that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine...that all men are created equal...but Sir how pitiable is it to reflect, that altho you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges...that you should at the Same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in other, with respect to yourselves."

No doubt, Banneker sees the tragedy in American democracy, that the American democratic experiment, though revolutionary in spirit and rhetoric, never was intended for such a revolution to take place. "The Constitution, then,...serves the interests of a wealthy elite" to control its population," from the race-based anger of Blacks and Indians and the economic-based anger of poor and landless whites both groups of which frequently rose in small-scale and large-scale rebellions against what was clearly the making of a  classist and racist society.

But there is still one last unresolved question, "How does Jefferson reply, since he obviously is interested in maintaining the status quo of slavery and subjugation?"

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Banneker
August 30, 1791

"I thank you sincerely for your letter of the 19th. instant and for the Almanac it contained. no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity (sic) of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit....

Note that Jefferson assumes for the sake of argument that his assumptions about Black inferiority are linked only to the slave condition that Blacks find themselves in. Also note that despite his seeming concern for the "body and mind" of Blacks that he evades the question of emancipation, as he, like all slave owners, tied emancipation to their own wealth. To free even one slave, in his mentality, would be like burning money. 

So part of the success in Banneker's letter is his appeal to Enlightenment thinking, but in Jefferson's response surfaces one challenge that Banneker omits altogether. It is a practical one, not a moral one or even an Enlightenment one. It is a question of how to loosen the tie between a practice that is utterly immoral and a practice that is utterly prosperous. This is not just an 18th century question either.

Credits:
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Voices of a People's History by Howard Zinn
African American Lives by Gates and Higginbotham
The Enduring Vision by multiple authors
Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Why I Love to See Cross-Musical Collaborations

Josh Turner, my favorite male country artist, and Anthony Hamilton, my favorite male R&B artist, recently collaborated on a song for Josh's new album, Everything is Fine. The song, which is called Nowhere Fast, features these Carolina natives whose classic yet timeless approach to music makes for a mellow and smooth sound. In fact, Josh's official website reports, "Hamilton wrote and tailored (the song) for Turner." The website goes on to say that, "It turns out, they are fans of each other's music and they decided to perform the duet live for the first time this weekend" (10/25). I think that we should encourage more of this sort of collaboration, not only to expand and develop the musical talents of the artists involved, but this sort of localized gesture to reach out to different musical communities, particularly genres of music that are considered "black", as the case with R&B or "white", as the case with country, can become a model for race relations in the United States.

No matter how we may spin it, the United States is still a very segregated society. Sure, we may attend integrated schools and workplaces, but unfortunately within these very environments often lurks the ugly side of our so-called end to segregation; that is, we think that because certain institutional barriers have been broken down, we don't have any individual responsibility in creating an integrated society. This is why we have black and white students sitting on separate sides of the cafeteria, minorities who are concentrated in 'regular' classes, employees who befriend people of their own race, a political system that has made the costs greater for tolerating differences, and a society that lacks humanity and collective action.  It's no longer a question of why we can't all get along, but why can't we all see and embrace our universal humanity, which includes appreciating what makes us different.

Credits:
Josh Turner Official Website

A Case of DWB (Driving While Black)

“It’s because the ticket that I received is symptomatic of what has been taking place with many people in the African-American community...”  Congressman Danny Davis [1]

There is a major story coming out of Chicago where Congressman Danny Davis has accused two police officers of racial profiling when he was ticketed earlier this week. This story comes on the heels of several reports/cases of abuse, including 1) a published report of the high incidence of citizen complaints against police brutality, 2) a multi-million dollar settlement for a man who accused the department of assaulting him with a screwdriver, and 3) a state senator's similar accusation that police officers stopped him for driving while black in 2005.

Congressman Davis had three Black passengers in his car, passengers who were guests on his radio show, which he had just finished wrapping. The police officers are saying they pulled Davis over for "weaving" in and out of traffic, which Davis denies. The Department is also countering by arguing the race of the car's passengers could not have been determined before the police officer pulled Davis over, but history is not on the side of the CPD.

In 2001, Reverend Jesse Jackson led a 400-500 member demonstration to protest racial profiling against Blacks and the recommended firing of Rodney Watt, a white officer who blew the whistle on the department's prevalent practice of racial profiling. [2]

There is also the story of Michael Pleasance who was murdered point-blank by a black police officer in March 2003, which according to Chicago reader, "Cline (the police superintendent) and other high-ranking officers helped make the problem go away" for years. Chicago Reader has also made the video feed available.

More recently, there is the story of Frankie Brown, a gay resident of a Chicago suburb, who police "cuffed.. to a chair in his front door and ridiculed him for hours for being gay and HIV-positive." [1] Brown has filed a federal suit against the police.

Congressman Danny Davis plans on challenging the ticket.

Credits:

New York Times,
Chicago Defender
Illinois Law Blogger

Michael Pleasance's Death at the Hands of the CPD

Why David Could Not Love Giovanni...the Stink of Love

James Baldwin's 1956 groundbreaking novel, Giovanni's Room, tells the story of David, an American in Paris, who has an affair with an Italian immigrant, Giovanni.  Their romance never fully develops and Giovanni explains why in his final plea to David, who plans to return to life with his fiancée, who has just returned from Spain.

Pages 140-142 in Delta Trade Paperbacks

"You are not leaving me for her," he said. You are leaving me for some other reason. You lie so much, you have come to believe all your lies. But I, I have senses. You are not leaving me for a woman. If you were really in love with this girl, you would not have had to be so cruel to me."

"She's not a little girl," I said. "She's a woman and no matter what you think, I do love her-"

"You do not," cried Giovanni, sitting up (in bed), "love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror-you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it - man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap- and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime." He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once, saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. "You despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all of your lying little moralities. And you- you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look, what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?"...

"You know very well," said Giovanni slowly, "what can happen between us. It is for that reason you are leaving me." He got up and walked to the window and opened it. "Bon," he said. He struck his fist once again against the window sill. "If I could make you stay, I would," he shouted. "If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you- if I could make you stay, I would." He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. "One day, perhaps, you will wish I had."

The Lost History of Dunbar High School in Virginia

When I attended Dunbar Middle School from 1996-1998, I had no idea that the school that I had known as an integrated middle school was once one of two Black high schools in Lynchburg, VA for almost half a century. With only some of the original structure now standing, Dunbar High School was a "community institution" for the Black community, "focusing on community, on meeting the needs of all African-American children in Lynchburg while offering cultural, athletic, and educational community programs." In fact, the beginnings of the school resulted from African Americans lobbying for a new high school in the 1910s, with their request being granted when Dunbar High School was approved by the school board in 1920. Though the first teachers and administrators were composed of whites, eventually Blacks gained an upper hand in their school, with Clarence Williams Seay becoming the first African American principal in 1938 and remaining there until his retirement in 1968.

Under Seay's dynamic leadership, Dunbar High recruited the best qualified teachers throughout Virginia, created a larger and more diverse faculty, expanded the curriculum to include more college preparatory programs and vocationally-oriented programs, and increase extra-curricula activities like the Dunbar choir, football, tennis, basketball and track.

With little financial assistance from the school board, Black citizens formed the school's PTA in 1934, which was "to play a vital role in the life of Dunbar High School." In fact, it was the PTA that was mostly responsible for the school receiving a library in the 1940s, as its Black students were not allowed to directly borrow books from the Dunbar 'branch' of the Jones Memorial Library, a private and segregated library.

A return to peace with the end of WWII ushered in the golden age of Dunbar High. So from the mid-1940s and into the 1960s, Dunbar experienced growth in its facilities, national and state success in athletics, graduates who went to college and had careers in law, medicine, education, and civil service and remained a mainstay of the Black community, hosting  homecoming parades and senior proms. 

With Virginia having finally accepted integration in the 1960s, this put Dunbar High in jeopardy. "Some black favored the transfer of black student to the white school. Others argued that desegregation could be achieved by brining whites to Dunbar."

Finally, Dunbar High closed in 1970. And in 1976, according to Christina Draper, Director of the Virginia African American Heritage Program, "The East building of the high school was demolished leaving the remaining building as part of the new Dunbar school" in the 1970s.

In 1994, Dunbar became Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School for Innovation, which is the school I entered in August of 1996. It was a school that treated every student as having equal potential and worth. In fact, I have yet to experience an academic setting that was so integrated, with advanced classes having proportionate numbers of whites and blacks. This is perhaps surprising because the admission favored students who lived in the surrounding relatively poor areas, which was heavily Black and required students outside the district, who were mostly white, to apply. The faculty went to great lengths to create a community at Dunbar, so much so that they would put me on a path for future success in high school, college, in drama and public speaking, and above all, a belief that I could do anything I set my mind to.

In this way, Dunbar Middle School is not much different from Dunbar High. Though society experienced immense racial changes during the four decades since Dunbar High's demise, the school remains a testament to the power of a "community institution."

Credits:

Virginia African American Heritage Program

Lynchburg.org

Dunbar High in 1924
from the Jackson Davis Collection

 

Reconsidering the Clinton Presidency

This excerpt on the Clinton presidency is from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

"The eight-year presidential term of Bill Clinton, personable, articulate graduate of Yale Law School, a Rhodes Scholar, and former governor of Arkansas, began with a hope that a bright, young person would bring to the country what he promised: "change." But Clinton's presidency ended with no chance that it would, as he had wished, make his mark in history as one of the nation's great presidents.

His last year in office was marked by sensational scandals surrounding his personal life. More important, he left no legacy of bold innovation in domestic policy or departure from traditional nationalist foreign policy. At home, he surrendered again and again to caution and conservatism, signing legislation that was more pleasing to the Republican Party and big business than to those Democrats who still recalled the bold programs of Franklin Roosevelt. Abroad, there were futile shows of military braggadocio, and subservience to what President Dwight Eisenhower had once warned against: "the military-industrial complex."

On 1992 and 1996 "Victories"
Clinton had barely won election both times. In 1992, with 45 percent of the voting population staying away from the polls, he only received 43 percent of the votes, the senior Bush getting 38 percent, while 19 percent of the voters showed their distaste for both parties by voting for a third-party candidate, Ross Perot. In 1996, with half the population not voting, Clinton won 49 percent of the votes against a lackluster Republican candidate, Robert Dole…

By the time King was assassinated in 1968, he had come to believe that out economic system was fundamentally unjust and needed radical transformation. He spoke of "the evils of capitalism" and asked for "a radical redistribution of economic and political power." On the other hand, as major corporations gave money to the Democratic Party on an unprecedented scale, Clinton demonstrated clearly his total confidence in "the market system" and "private enterprise." During his 1992 campaign, the chief executive officer of Martin Marietta Corporation (which held huge and lucrative government contracts for military production) noted: "I think the Democrats are moving more toward business and business is moving more toward the Democrats."…

Martin Luther King's reaction to the buildup of military power had been the same as his reaction to the Vietnam War: "This madness must cease." And. "...the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together..."

Clinton was willing to recall King's "dream" of racial equality, but not his dream of a society rejecting violence. Even though the Soviet Union was no longer a military threat, he insisted that the United States must keep its armed forces dispersed around the globe, prepare for "two regional wars," and maintain the military budget at cold war levels.

On Clinton's Political Philosophy
Despite his lofty rhetoric, Clinton showed, in his eight years in office, that he, like other politicians, was more interested in electoral victory than in social change. To get more votes, he decided he must move the party closer to the center. This meant doing just enough for blacks, women, and working people to keep their support, while trying to win over white conservative voters with a program of toughness on crime, stern measures on welfare, and a strong military. …Clinton in office followed this plan quite scrupulously. He made a few Cabinet appointments that suggested support for labor and for social welfare programs, and appointed a black pro-labor man as head of the National Labor Relations Board. But his key appointments to the Treasury and Commerce Departments were wealthy corporate lawyers, and his foreign policy staff- the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the CIA, the National Security Adviser-were traditional players on the bipartisan cold war team…

On Judicial Appointments
He showed the same timidity in the two appointments he made to the Supreme Court, making sure that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would be moderate enough to be acceptably to Republicans as well as Democrats. He was not willing to fight for a strong liberal to follow in the footsteps of Thurgood Marshall or William Brennan, who had recently left the Court. Breyer and Ginsburg both defended the constitutionality of capital punishment, and upheld drastic restrictions on the use of habeas corpus. Both voted with the most conservative judges on the Court to uphold the “constitutional right” of Boston’s Patrick’s Day parade organizers to exclude gay marchers.

In choosing judges for the lower federal courts, Clinton showed himself no more likely to appoint liberals than the Republican Gerald Ford had in the seventies. According to a three-year study published in the Fordham Law Review in early 1996, Clinton’s appointments made “liberal” decisions in less than half their cases. The New York Times noted that while Reagan and Bush had been willing to fight for judges who would reflect their philosophies, “Mr. Clinton, in contrast, has been quick to drop judicial candidates if there is even a hint of controversy.”

On 'Law and Order'
Clinton was eager to show he was “tough” on matters of “law and order.” Running for President in 1992 while still Governor of Arkansas, he flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally retarded man on death row. And early in his administration, in April 1993, he and Attorney General Janet Reno approved an FBI attack on a group of religious zealots who were armed and ensconced in a building complex in Waco, Texas. Instead of waiting for negotiations to bring about a solution, the FBI attacked with rifle fire, tanks, and gas, resulting in a fire that swept through the compound, killing at least 86 men, women, and children...Clinton and Reno gave feeble excuses for what clearly what a reckless decision to launch a military attack on a group of men, women, and children. Reno at one time talked of children being molested, which was totally unsubstantiated, and even if true could hardly justify the massacre that took place…Timothy McVeigh, who some years after the Waco tragedy was convicted of bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which cost about 168 lives, had visited the Waco site twice. Later, according to an FBI affidavit, McVeigh was “extremely agitated” about the government’s assault on Waco…

The “Crime Bill” of 1996, which both Republicans and Democrats in Congress voted for overwhelmingly, and which Clinton endorsed with enthusiasm, dealt with the problem of crime by emphasizing punishment, not prevention. It extended the death penalty to a whole range of criminal offenses and provided $8 billion for the building of new prisons… But, as criminologist Todd Clear wrote in the New York Times (“Tougher is Dumber”) about the new crime bill, harsher sentencing had added 1 million people to the prison population, giving the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and yet violent crime continued to increase…

On Clinton's  Use  of Immigration Issue
Those holding political power- whether Clinton or his Republican predecessors- had something in common. They sought to keep their power by diverting the anger of citizens to groups without the resources to defend themselves…Immigrants were a convenient object of attack, because as nonvoters their interests could be safely ignored. It was easy for politicians to play upon the xenophobia that has erupted from time to time in American history: the anti-Irish prejudices of the mid-nineteenth century; the continual violence against Chinese who has been brought in to work on the railroads; the hostility toward immigrants from eastern and southern Europe that led to the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s…Both major political parties joined to pass legislation, which Clinton signed, to welfare benefits (food stamps, payments to elderly and disabled people) not only illegal but legal immigrants….In early 1996, Congress and the President joined to pass an “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,” allowing deportation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, no matter how long ago or how serious. Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt…

On Clinton's Use of Welfare Issue
In the summer of 1996 (apparently seeking the support of “centrist” voters for the coming election), created under the New Deal, of financial help to poor families with dependent children….The aim of the welfare cuts was to save $50 billion over a five-year period. Even the New York Times, a supporter of Clinton during the election, said that the provisions of the new law “have nothing to do with creating but everything to do with balancing the budget by cutting programs for the poor.” There was a simple but overwhelming problem with cutting off benefits to the poor to force them to find jobs. There were not jobs available for all those who would lose their benefits…. What the Clinton administration steadfastly refused to do was to establish government programs to create jobs, as had been done in the New Deal era, when billions were spent to give employment to several million people, from construction workers and engineers to artists and writers…Both parties were misreading public opinion, and the press was often complicit in this. When, in the midyear election of 1994, only 37 percent of the electorate went to the polls, and slightly more than half voted Republican, the media reported this as a “revolution.”…But in the story below that headline, a New York Times/CBS News public opinion survey found that 65% of those polled said that “it is the responsibility of government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves…

The Implications of a Balanced Budget
Reduction of the annual deficit to achieve a “balanced budget” became an obsession of the Clinton administration. But since Clinton did not want to raise taxes on the wealthy, or to cut funds for the military, the only alternative was to sacrifice the poor, the children, the aged – to spend less for health care, for food stamps, for education, for single mothers. Two examples of this appeared early in Clinton’s second administration, in the spring of 1997: From the New York Times, May 8, 1997: ‘A major element of President Clinton’s education plan- a proposal to spend $5 billion to repair the nation’s crumbling schools- was among the items quietly killed in last week’s agreement to balance the federal budget…” From the Boston Globe, May 22, 1997: “After White House intervention, the Senate yesterday…rejected a proposal…to extend health insurance to the nation’s 10.5 million uninsured children…Seven lawmakers switched their votes…after senior White House officials…called and said the amendment would imperil the delicate budget agreement.”…

Military Spending Under Clinton
The concern about balancing the budget did not extend to military spending…In Clinton’s presidency, the government continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine. He was accepting the Republican claim that the nation must be ready to fight “two regional wars” simultaneously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At that time, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had said, “The threats have become so remote, so remote that they are difficult to discern.” General Colin Powell spoke similarly (repored in Defense News, April 8, 1991): “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”…

In the summer of 2000, the New York Times reported that in the previous year the United States had sold over $11 billion of arms, one-third of all weapons sold worldwide. Two-thirds of all arms were sold to poor countries. In the 1999 the Clinton administration lifted a ban on advanced weapons to Latin America. The Times called it “a victory for the big military contractors, like Lockheed-Martin Corporation and the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.”….

On Excesses of Baghdad bombings
He had been in office barely six months when he sent the Air Force to drop bombs on Baghdad, presumably in retaliation for an assassination plot against George Bush on the occasion of his visit to Kuwait. The evidence for such a plot was very weak, coming as it did from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police, and Clinton did not wait for the results of the trial supposed to take place in Kuwait of those accused of the plot…The Boston Globe reported: “Since the raid, President Clinton and other officials have boasted of crippling Iraq’s intelligence capacity and of sending a powerful message that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had better behave.” It turned out later that there was no significant damage, if any, to Iraqi intelligence facilities and the New York Times commented…

On Clinton's Hypocrisy on Human Rights
Clinton’s foreign policy had very much the traditional bipartisan emphasis on maintaining friendly relations with whatever governments were in power, and promoting profitable trade with them, whatever their record in protecting human rights. This aid to Indonesia continued, despite that country’s record of mass murder (perhaps 200,000 killed out of a population of 700,000) in the invasion and occupation of East Timor….Human rights clearly came second to business profit in U.S. foreign policy…This criticism was borne out by the Clinton administration’s bizarre approaches to two nations, China and Cuba, both of which considered themselves “communist.” China had massacred protesting students in Beijing in 1991 and put dissenters in prison. Yet the United States continued to give China economic aid and certain trade privileges (“most favored nation” status) for the sake of U.S. business interests. Cuba had imprisoned critics of the regime, but had no bloody record of suppression, as did communist China or other governments in the world that received U.S. aid…

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both dominated by the United States, adopted a hard-nosed banker’s approach to debt-ridden Third World countries. They insisted that these poor nations allocate a good part of their meager resources to repaying their loans to the rich countries, at the cost of cutting social services to their already-desperate populations….

On Clinton's  Preservation of Class Structure
The United States was the richest country in the world, with 5% of the earth’s population yet consuming 30% of what was produced…As a result of changes in the tax structure, by 1995 that richest 1 percent had gained over $1 trillion and now owned over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth…Meanwhile, 40 million people were without health insurance (the number having risen by 33 percent in the nineties) and infants died of sickness and malnutrition at a rate higher than that of any other industrialized country. There seemed to be unlimited funds for the military, but people who performed vital human services, in health and education, had to struggle to barely survive…According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1998, one of every three working people in the United States had jobs paying at or below the federal poverty level…For people of color, the statistics were especially troubling. Black infants died at twice the rate of white children, and the life expectancy of a black man in Harlem, according to a United Nations report, was 46 years, less than that in Cambodia or the Sudan…

However, the military budget kept increasing, even after the fall of the supposed target of the military budget, and by the end of Clinton’s term was about $300 billion a year…

On Clinton's Prison Policy
The response of the government to such signs of desperation, anger, and alienation has been, historically, quite predictable: Build more jails, lock up more people, execute more prisoners…And so, by the end of the Clinton administration, the United States had more of its population in- prison per capita- a total of two million people- than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of China.