Hillary Clinton Could Not Care Less About Murder by Police, Other Than to Derail the Struggle Against It
July 27, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
It has to be said: Despite their very sincere intentions, despite their courage over the course of years in demanding justice for their children who were murdered by police or racists, it was not helpful when mothers of some of the victims endorsed Hillary Clinton last night at the DNC. It will, despite their heartbreakingly sincere intentions, not lead to less but to MORE such violence. Two points on this:
One. Anybody, even Hillary Clinton, can look sincere for two hours, do a photo-op and then have their staff stay in touch once in a while. But what have they really done? Hillary Clinton has a political record stretching over years. Hillary Clinton was a key player in her husband's administration. Over eight years of the Clintons, the number of people in prison doubled. The Clintons got Congress to finance and unleash tens of thousands of new police in the cities. They gutted protections against the death penalty and in fact "kindly old" Bill Clinton not only enthusiastically endorsed the death penalty but made a point of interrupting his campaign to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged Black man.
Hillary Clinton's "great love for children" and her "sympathies as a mother" didn't stop her from helping to destroy welfare, thereby making the lives of millions of mothers—and children—who had been on welfare even more miserable than they were. Mothers had to choose between starving and homelessness, or leaving their children home alone all day or night as they worked for $8 an hour as security guards or park cleaners. These changes and more affected millions and millions and made their lives much harder, much worse.
Why did Hillary Clinton do this? Because, before she is anything else, she is a willing instrument and enforcer for this system, and this system required—and still requires—the incarceration and terrorization of whole peoples, especially the masses concentrated in the inner-city cores. These are people for whom this system has no use and who it and its guardians and enforcers—including Hillary Clinton—regard as potential "social dynamite." And no matter who is chosen to run this system, as long as we remain confined within it, that is what they will do.
Two. Hillary wants people who know about her real history to think that she's had a change of heart, that now she's gonna take up this question, and it's gonna be a whole new day. At least that's what her advisers and spin doctors want us to believe.
But wait a minute! Didn't we hear that before? Like, eight years ago, with Obama? And what actually happened with Obama?
How many mothers on stage last night lost their children during the era of Obama? All of them. And how many mothers on that stage saw Obama's Justice Department go after the killers? None of them. Did Obama say word one about police murder and mass incarceration, which is clearly the most flagrant outrage in America today, until people rose up? No, he did not. Did he "invest any of his political capital" to go up against it? Again, no. And even after people rose up, much to his open chagrin, did Obama do anything meaningful on this? Once more, no. Oh, there were speeches, and promises, there were commissions and investigations, there were conversations and roundtables, and some activists were invited into the White House to get stroked—all the stuff that the Democrats specialize in. And still the killings and the incarceration and the school closings and lead poisoning and the hopelessness went on and go on, and still there is NO JUSTICE. Why?
Again, because this system has no future for millions of youth in the inner cities and has thus decided to terrorize and incarcerate them; because white supremacy has always been and remains the ideological glue of this system and therefore saturates the police forces and the minds of the whites who themselves decide to kill Black people and the many more who carry out the daily discrimination that makes life hell. Ending that requires an overthrowing revolution. A real revolution—not just voting for some guy who then goes on to sell you out, but actually overthrowing this system and going on to revolutionize every single sphere of society—the economic and political structures, and the way people relate and think.
The ONLY way that people have ever won anything has been through struggle, not voting. It is only through both intensifying this struggle and increasingly building it as part of a movement for actual REVOLUTION that we can ever realize the goal so movingly put forward by these mothers: to never have another parent join this club of those whose children have been killed by the violence caused by this system.
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