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| The Williams family is pictured above. Douglas Williams penned an open letter to John Lewis in In These Times: "The movement that you, my grandmother, Senator Sanders and countless thousands were a part of was the largest grassroots movement for social, political and economic change that this country has ever seen. It was a movement that was bigger than any one participant in it; a movement that, at its best, was unapologetically radical and driven by the Black working class. We should live every moment in awe and praise of all of those people and not sweep them under the rug when it is politically expedient. Hillary Clinton ain’t worth that." |
Who knew two caucuses and one primary make an entire 2016 Democratic Primary? (2106 Primary Schedule)
One slight omission in the Clinton spin, dutifully reported by Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), is the fact Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly leads in the total of actual people who voted in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
Voters may matter in the Democratic Party campaign for the nomination of the presidency, but not if Hillary and Party insiders get their way.
How do you think this fact would play in a general election against a Donald Trump?
This is Clintonomics math. The same math that is the foundation of the Clinton myth.
Notes Joshua Frank at CounterPunch:
As economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst explains in Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity, Clintonomics was not all it was cracked up to be. 'The distribution of wealth in the US became more skewed than it had at any time in the previous forty years,' he argues. 'No question, an increasing number of US jobs began to be outsourced at an unprecedented rate as well.'
'Unlike Clinton, Bush is unabashed in his efforts to mobilize the power of government to serve the wealthy,' he continues. 'But we should be careful not to make too much of such differences in the public stances of these two figures, as against the outcomes that prevail during their terms of office … the ratio of wages for the average worker to the pay of the average CEO rising astronomically from 113-to-1 in 1991 under Bush-1 to 449-to-1 when Clinton left office in 2001.'
As for the future, consider Andrew Levine's analysis:
Why would [Hillary] think she needs Obama now?
The short answer is: the South Carolina primary. If the gods are merciful and Hillary gets schlonged there, her chances of winning the nomination will be toast, no matter how many 'super delegates' she currently has in her pocket.
The slightly longer answer is that the Clintons don’t want all their years of flattering and cajoling black politicians to be for naught. They think that African Americans owe them; and indeed many of their notables do. But when the people those notables purport to represent start removing the scales from their eyes and/or if they start thinking of Hillary as a loser, the jig will be up: it will be plain to all that it was all a waste of time and effort.
African Americans in South Carolina forsook the Clintons before, in 2008, but at least that was for one of their own – sort of. If they do it again, it will be for a septuagenarian Jewish man with a Brooklyn accent. This must get Bill and Hillary’s goat.
The Clintons understand identity politics; Hillary is playing that game now to win the votes of women of a certain age. But they have always treated adversaries to their left with contempt. Thanks to the Sanders campaign, Hillary has lately found it expedient to strike leftish poses. Under the skin, though, the old animosities remain.
She and Bill simply cannot abide the thought of being beaten by a 'democratic socialist,' someone who espouses an up-dated version of the old fashioned liberal political line that the Clintons have been working their entire lives to eradicate. They are therefore pulling out all the stops. If that requires strategic extrusions of shameless Obamaphilia on Hillary’s part, so be it.
It wasn’t supposed to come to this. Weeks, even days, ago, the Clintons could reasonably hold fast to the belief that, like the poor (and for much the same reason), African Americans would always be with them.
Now, though, they are starting to wonder if they can trust anybody — black, brown or white — under thirty. They have reason to be concerned: black youths in South Carolina are fast becoming as lucid about the Clintons and Clintonism (Democratic Party style neoliberalism and liberal imperialism) as their white counterparts in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In view of the Clintons’ role in encouraging the mass incarceration of African American men, and their assault on the already feeble welfare state institutions that used to keep oppressed and impoverished African American communities on life support — and in light of their role in forging trade and industrial policies that have decimated the entire American working class — this was bound to happen eventually. But Hillary was counting on it not happening soon. The question now is whether consciousness can dawn quickly enough to throw her off her track.
One would think that she and her handlers could think of a better way to stave the inevitable off than by lauding Obama and vowing to continue his good work.
Hillary Clinton just is not worth that.
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