Michelle Alexander's take on race, criminal justice, mass incarceration...Pres. Clinton
the 'War on Drugs'...'Get Tough on Crime'... 'Welfare Reform'...and Bernie Sanders has a POC issue? Where does the support for the Establishment Democratic Party of HRC, DWS, et al. come from in the non-white communities?
Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, the Clinton Administrations tough on crime policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.99 Clinton eventually moved beyond crime and capitulated to the conservative racial agenda on welfare. This move, like his get tough rhetoric and policies, was part of a grand strategy articulated by the new Democrats to appeal to the elusive white swing voters. In so doing, Clintonmore than any other presidentcreated the current racial undercaste. He signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which ended welfare as we know it, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a block grant to states called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). TANF imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, as well as a permanent, lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offenseincluding simple possession of marijuana.
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
"Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system."
Martin Luther King, Jr.