If This is a War, Then Black Lives Matter is Losing [View all]

[ellenrr]

That tells us that our conditions – or real material conditions – have not changed substantially for over ½ century – over 60 years.

Indeed, in many ways, those conditions have worsened, such as the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

Why? Because the material conditions of millions of Black folk have changed due to de-industrialization, the resultant loss of the tax base, the corporatization of the public school systems, and the explosive expansion of the imprisonment industry – the creation of what I call the White Rural Jobs Program – prisons.
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As the late historian Howard Zinn (1922 – 2010) has written in his book The Twentieth Century:

‘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.’ (Zinn, 428)

The neoliberal Clinton regime ushered in a program of repression that included the scuttling of habeas corpus via the anti-terrorism and effective death penalty act; the closing of the courthouse doors to prisoners via the Prison Litigation Reform Act; and the notorious 1996 Crime Bill, which spent billions on new prisons, and added some 60 new death penalties to the books.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/16/if-this-is-a-war-then-black-lives-matter-is-losing/