2016 Postmortem

AOR

(692 posts) Tue Nov 10, 2015, 02:54 PM Nov 2015

On Black Lives Matter, Hillary Clinton, and the Necessity of Demands

-- by Danny Haiphong

“The Black Lives Matter conversation with Hillary Clinton teaches us critical lessons for future movement building efforts.”

(Snip)

"We came, we saw, he died," said then State Department head Hillary Clinton soon after leading the successful extrajudicial lynching of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Her statement came after the US-NATO imperialist invasion overthrew one of the few truly independent nations left on the African continent. But Hillary's grossly racist and paternalistic statement went largely unheard in the US precisely because the rule of imperialism has been so normalized and cleverly cloaked in the two-party corporate state. The election of 2016 is quickly approaching and the stars are aligned for Hilary Clinton to become the next Democratic Party presidential candidate. Black Lives Matter Boston and Worcester activists made a media splash following their encounter with Clinton earlier in the month. The encounter imparted two lessons: we must know who Hillary Clinton is and why demands are important for the struggle against imperialism as a whole."

"First, just who is Hillary Clinton? I wrote about the former secretary of state in 2014, detailing how the prospect of her taking the reigns from the Obama Administration meant more of the same imperialist Democratic Party politics to come. Hillary has never seen a war she did not like, whether waged on Black people in the US or nations abroad. Hillary supported the Iraq invasion of 2003 and the Afghan invasion before that. She was instrumental in the destabilization of Libya and remains actively involved in doing the same to Syria. Hillary has stated many times that her presidency would mean the obliteration of Iran and further provocations toward Russia. And this only skims the surface of Hilary Clinton's imperialist war policy."

"Furthermore, Hillary Clinton is a capitalist. Her racist and anti-working class policies have ruined countless lives. She began her career as a corporate lawyer and Wal-Mart board member. In these roles, Hillary worked tirelessly to keep wages low for Wal-Mart workers and austerity and bank bailouts high on the imperial agenda. When she became the "First Lady" of President Bill Clinton, she was an outspoken supporter of her husband's expansion of the Mass Black Incarceration State, his destruction of welfare, and his facilitation of the genocidal war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which continues to this day. She currently receives millions in donations from the largest banks to protect their predatory lending, austerity, and privatization measures. Hillary Clinton has always been, and will always be, an enemy of the oppressed for as long as her class is in power."

"So when Black Lives Matter Boston and Worcester activists attempted to appeal to her sensibilities and feelings, they quickly learned that she possesses none that overrule her thirst for profit and power. Hillary lectured the activists about what she believed was their flawed strategy. She told them to change laws and policies, not minds. But the activists lacked demands that could have forced Hillary to explain just how she would change laws and policies related to the Mass Black Incarceration State. Hillary used the space to paternalistically treat the activists like children in typical white supremacist fashion. The activists’ response to her racist paternalism included a request for Hilary to come up with a plan to reverse the US regime’s racist criminal justice policies. One activist even stated she "looked up" to Hillary Clinton as a young feminist. To “look up” to Hillary and expect her to reverse policies that have shaped her very career sheds light on both the importance of demands and a larger crisis of consciousness."

Full article here...

http://www.blackagendareport.com/black_lives_matter_hilllary_demands