Arkansas was and is an incredibly corrupt state. I had relatives in politics there and the "ol' boys network" was the basis for almost all decisions. Plus of course some many rich white men in the South were and are involved in private clubs and "societies" and organizations that trying to ever learn the truth about these things is probably utter impossible.

Good training for national politics though I guess... Ask Frank Underwood.

to a 'whites only'' countryclub in Arkansas and more about where Bill really came and grew up which was Hot Springs Arkansas a hotbed of corruption and mob connections.

In Hot Springs... It's famous for being a place where crooks and celebrities could relax and rub shoulders... But that was decades ago... There's still plenty of rich crooks that live there... And across the state.

Saying that, it would have been impossible for anyone to be elected Governor of Arkansas in the 80s-90s without being crooked. It'd be like being the one honest guy in the mob.

And of course Arkansas - despite all the rhetoric - has and has had some of the most jaw dropping poverty in America. Hard to really express how bad it was when I was a kid... Or even in the early 2000s, the last time I was there.

Both which Bill and Hillary service well.


Which he discusses in this essay.

Tyson and Wal Mart aren't from Hot Springs, which is kinda South West of Little Rock; they're both from NW Arkansas... Springdale and Bentonville respectively...

but yeah, both are from Arkansas and both have deep ties to the political establishment their, and the Clintons... Wal Mart of course has always seen the Clintons are theirs... they helped Bill run in 1992, and even before that, and sure they've given over 300,000 to this Hillary campaign already.

Thank you, Ichingcarpenter.

The origins of his protean and malleable politics can be traced partly to his upbringing, and partly to the morphology of his home state. Arkansas is a bizarre polity which on a single night in 1968 cast its vote like this: Winthrop Rockefeller for governor, William Fulbright for senator and George Wallace for President. It has correctly been described as one of the richest little poor states in the union. Today’s Little Rock has a skyline of modern corporatism, housing numerous local monopolies such as Tyson Foods, the Worthen Bank, the Stephens Corporation and Wal-Mart. In the Quapaw district of town, the Flaming Arrow Club is the meeting point for lobbyists and legislators. (Gennifer Flowers used to be a lounge-singer at this joint, but more to the point is its role as the site of Governor Clinton’s off-the-record ‘budget breakfast’ meetings.) Go south into the Delta, however, and you are in what H.L. Mencken once termed ‘the hookworm and incest belt’. Here, sharecropper poverty and indebtedness are endemic, and the racial pattern is almost cartoonish. Prison farms are policed by armed men on horseback. Arkansas is a ‘right-to-work’ state, which means union-busting and a Third World minimum wage. It is also the only state of the union without a civil rights statute. Elected by the lower-income voters, Clinton soon became the favourite son of the high-rolling stakeholders. The contradiction is best expressed by the white lie he often tells about coming from ‘a little place called Hope’. No politician could reasonably be expected to pass up such a line, but though Clinton was technically born in the dull hamlet of Hope, Arkansas, he properly hails from the town of Hot Springs. And if Hope is a place of tin-roof piety and stagnation, Hot Springs is a wide-boy’s town full of hustlers and whores and easy money. I once went to a Labour Day rally there; Bill and Hillary both spoke. The future First Lady was breathless with enthusiasm. ‘When Bill first brought me here, I said to him: “Just look at all these small businesses.”’ Yes indeedy, ma’am. Ready cash preferred. Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, was a doyenne of the beauty-parlours, bars and race-tracks of this open city. His father, William Jefferson Blyth, was a smaller-time player in the travelling salesman line. Before his death in a roadside drainage ditch, he put flesh on the bones of every Dogpatch cliché about the region. (‘You know you’re from Arkansas if you find that you attend family reunions in search of a date.’) He formed sexual alliances with two sisters of the same family at the same time, while married to yet another woman, and fathered progeny with unusual casualness. His death left Virginia at the mercy of an alcoholic wife-beating successor.

They say that in the boyhood of Judas, Jesus was betrayed. The saying itself shows the treacherous ground on which psycho-history is based. But in the closing days of his campaign for the Presidency, Clinton began to tell the story of how he stood up to the brutal stepfather. Which makes it the odder that he then went to the registry and asked to take this man’s surname. If you read the Clinton family profile ‘in neutral’, so to speak, you would imagine yourself studying a problem kid from a ghetto, where it is a wise child who knows his own father. Yet Clinton’s great contribution to American domestic politics has been his stress on the deplorable lack of moral continence among the underclass. His mantra, as a leader of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, was ‘to end welfare as we know it’. In pursuit of this goal, he has advanced a spending bill which removes perhaps some millions of American children from the welfare rolls. Even Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first opened the argument about the cultural pathology of poverty when he was working for the Nixon Administration, has professed himself appalled at the callousness and want of discrimination which characterise the new dispensation. Marion Wright Edelman, one of Washington’s best-loved advocates of civil rights, chairs the Children’s Defence Fund. Hillary Clinton used to be the honorary president of this organisation, and drew on the experience for her sentimental book It Takes a Village ... And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. (This book, inter alia, recommends abstinence from sex until those troubled teen years are behind us.) Now, Ms Edelman complains that she cannot get her phone-calls to the White House returned. It is important, therefore, to bear in mind that the Clintons do not seek everybody’s approval. Below a certain threshold of power and income, they can be quite choosey.

And he documents it .

Few entertain me like Hitchens.

1996. And this is 2016 and ... nothing is new here.
There has been no "evolution".

Like a fly in amber.

In addition to being there he put it to paper for history.

If you won't read the article then here are some quotes which aren't in the article


The prolific Christopher Hitchens gloried in being quotable, particularly when he was at his most irascible and incendiary. Hitchens died Thursday after a long battle with cancer. He was 62. His collected bon mots – in books, online essays and magazine articles – run into the hundreds, but here are a baker’s dozen of the best:


1. “It [Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize] would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture.”


2. “Hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don’t let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing.”


3. “A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.”


4. “Cheap booze is a false economy.”


5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”


6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”


7. “The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.”


8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”


10. “[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”


11. About George W. Bush: “He is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

You know, the one where Bill is responsible for the deaths of everyone from Iran Contra figures to his mother's hairdresser.

Be just as productive.

And btw, I'm not a Hilary supporter. I'm just getting disgusted by the primary season.

No doubt about it.

This piece captures the utter corruption at the heart of the Democratic Party, then and now.

Was and should be an eye opener. Brown was blocked to speak before the convention by Clinton but then he used procedural convention rules that allowed himself to speak. What he said in that speech was prophetic on what he saw as the wrong direction the party was taking, never mentioned Bill, but did mention the corporate corruption poisoning the party and all the things we see now.

I worked on the Brown campaign then after the convention worked on Clinton. It was a bitter campaign.


I can find no text on that 33 minute speech, which I find interesting but can find a CSPAN tape of it.

It is something to watch here is the link.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?27116-1/gov-jerry-brown-1992-convention-remarks