How the Clinton Campaign Armed a Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada: Divide & Conquer Politics

[democracy1st]

Ok grassfed just posted this info
Clinton Superdelegate: "Clinton Wanted to Exploit Jewish-Black Tension"

Rep. Rob Andrews, who supported Hillary Clinton throughout the primary season, disclosed he received a phone call shortly before the April 22 Pennsylvania primary from a top member of Clinton's organization and that the caller "explicitly" discussed a strategy of winning Jewish voters by exploiting tensions between Jews and African-Americans.

"There have been signals coming out of the Clinton campaign that have racial overtones that indeed disturb me,"

"Frankly, I had a private conversation with a high-ranking person in the campaign ... that used a racial line of argument that I found very disconcerting. It was extremely disconcerting given the rank of this person. It was very disturbing."

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/06/superdelegate_says_clinton_cam.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=6302343&mesg_id=6302343





How the Clinton Campaign Armed a Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada: Divide & Conquer Politics

The chairs in the Concorde Ballroom of the Paris Casino were arranged as if for a wedding, but were more a prelude to an ugly divorce.

On one side of the at-large caucus room were supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton, led by an organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), overwhelmingly Mexican-American.

On the other side of the aisle were supporters of Senator Barack Obama, led by a shop steward for the Culinary Workers Local 226, overwhelmingly African-American.
Both groups were made up predominantly of women. They shouted at each other, booed, hissed and hurled thumbs down in open, sneering contempt for the opposition. The hostility toward their sister workers on each side had more to do with each other than with the candidates they supported.

Capitalism and its politicians have long played divide-and-conquer to divide immigrants from other economically suppressed demographic groups. A generation or two ago, Irish, Italians and Jews were districted by those in power into the same Congressional, legislative and city council districts to compete for the same scraps of political representation while White Anglo-Saxon Protestants took the rest of the pie. The same has occurred in recent years to shoehorn blacks and Latinos--the two most solid Democratic Party voting demographic groups - into increasing conflict.

During last June's debate over the federal Immigration Reform Bill, the overtly racist Minutemen organization took time off from patrolling the border vigilante style to hold a small march in Los Angeles against reform. They recruited a sole black minister who brought along half-a-dozen men from his congregation for an anti-immigrant rally that had no more than two-dozen participants. This, justifiably, provoked anger among Mexican-Americans and others in LA, and thousands marched in counter-demonstration. Truth is, there were far more African-Americans marching with the pro-immigrant group than that stood with the Minutemen, and that fact saved the situation from becoming uglier.

As census trends explode to bring, just two or so decades from now, the Caucasian population of the United States into minority status, entire industries have been launched to prevent a majority alliance from forming along class-solidarity lines. There are book contracts aplenty waiting for divisive pundits like Earl Ofari Hutchison, author of The Emerging Black GOP Majority (2006) and Latino Challenge to Black America (2007) and who dedicated much of 2007 and, now, 2008 to bashing Obama over on The Huffington Post. Black-Latino tensions bubble up from high school brawls in Los Angeles to City Council antics in Buffalo, and of course in the prison system where gangs choose up sides so often along ethnic and racial lines.

But now it's exploded out into the open in the Democratic presidential nomination battle, with the Clinton campaign leading the charge. In recent weeks, efforts by Clinton surrogates to wage racial politics against Obama were viewed by reporters as efforts to sway white voters away from Obama: a national Clinton co-chair implied that Obama had a drug-dealing past, a former US senator repeated disproved Islamic smears, and most recently a billionaire black entertainment mogul introduced Clinton by resurrecting the drug canard. All three then staged public "apologies." But it's the words of Bill and Hillary Clinton that have sent the signals from above, from the latter's angry uncle acts in New Hampshire and Nevada and his defense of a voter suppression lawsuit there, to the former's exaltation of LBJ as the real MLK, the strategy has been to bait Obama supporters into respond in kind. Then they claim to be "victims" of false accusations of racism.

The Clinton White House vs. Mexican-Americans


When president from 1989 to 2001, George H. W. Bush tried to gain approval for a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, just as Ronald Reagan tried before him, he couldn't convince a Democratic Congress to go along. That magic trick required the Democratic regime of Bill Clinton--backed by a multi-million dollar corporate lobbying campaign, off which many Clinton '92 campaign staffers made good money pressuring fellow Democrats--who rammed NAFTA through.

NAFTA took effect in 1994, soon devastated the Mexican family farmer, many of whom fled across the US border while many more were displaced into Mexican cities and border states to work in post-NAFTA sweatshops. That, in turn, sparked a marked increase in undocumented workers in the US, who are now on the receiving end of the same repressive policies and media-fed demonization that were perfected against African-Americans and now utilized, likewise, against Hispanic-Americans.

Obama--not Clinton--was a co-sponsor of the Immigrant Reform Bill that was the central issue of 2007 for the Latino population. He has to make that case and do so fast or the black-Latino rift that the Clintons have so cynically encouraged could become the story of the remaining Democratic primaries, leading to such acrimony that one group, or the other, stays home in November.

In addition to those factors, Obama needs to shine an eviscerating light upon the actual record of the first Clinton administration and the brutality of its increased prosecution of Hispanics for non-violent federal drug crimes. According to a 2003 survey by Fairbanks, Maslin, Maulin & Associates for the Drug Policy Alliance, a wide majority of Latinos in California oppose prison terms for drug offenders.

Short of a rumored, pending--but as of yet unconfirmed--Obama endorsement by Senator Ted Kennedy, the most visible sponsor of the Immigration Reform Bill and highly respected by many Latino voters, Obama is going to have to confront the black-Latino rift seen in Nevada head-on if he has hope of gaining the nomination.

The terrible Clinton legacy of US government mistreatment of Mexican-Americans--including the majority that are legal citizens--provides the constitutional law professor and civil rights lawyer from Illinois the opening to do so. But the time bomb of black-Latino division is ticking and could explode, if not disarmed in the next week, as soon as Tsunami Tuesday rolls in on February 5.

Parts of this story were originally published in The Field--http://ruralvotes.com/thefield - where Al Giordano has been writing about the presidential campaign.

Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary, critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address: [e-mail].

In 1993, when President Bill Clinton took office, there were 80,815 men and women in federal prisons. By the end of his two terms, in December of 2000, there were 125,692: an increase of 55 percent over eight years, according to the US Department of Justice.

Federal drug enforcement counted for more than half of the 45,000-strong increase in federal prisons, leaving a total of 63,898 drug war prisoners, more than half of the federal prison population, at the end of Clinton's term. That was the consequence of mandatory minimum sentences, which the Clinton administration, and particularly Attorney General Janet Reno, pledged to reform in January 1993, but quickly abandoned during those eight years in power.

http://sarasota.indymedia.org/other-media/how-clinton-campaign-armed-black-latino-time-bomb-nevada-divide-conquer-politics

[papau]

1. Andrews is a liar if he says Hillary or her campaign had any thing to do with his call - he's an ass

[democracy1st]

3. what do you think about what Sergio Bendixen articulated

Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Hispanic expert, publicly articulated and Hillary agreed that this was an "historical Fact".

“The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” —Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen
http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2...

[FrenchieCat]

2. No matter how painful to some, what you are saying about Nevada is true.....

:(

Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Hispanic expert, publicly articulated and Hillary agreed that this was an "historical Fact".

“The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” —Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen
http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/index.php/2008/01/12/clinton-pollster-latinos-too-racist-to-vote-for-obama

Clinton at Root of Racist Stereotyping - Hispanics vs Blackswashingtonpost.com — Where did this come from? "Hispanics traditionally do not like Blacks." Since when? This is a racist, divisive falsehood that the Clinton Campaign has created and nurtured as a 'historical statement' in an attempt to pit the political arena against Obama. First mentioned by a Hillary pollster and then affirmed by Clinton herself. There is no proof.
http://www.digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_at_Root_of_Racist_Stereotyping_Hispanics_vs_Blacks

A few weeks ago, Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Hispanic expert, publicly articulated what campaign officials appear to have been whispering for months. In an interview with Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, Bendixen explained that "the Hispanic voter - and I want to say this very carefully - has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."

The spin worked. For the last several weeks, it's been on the airwaves (Tucker Carlson, "Hardball," NPR), generally tossed off as if it were conventional wisdom. And it has shown up in sources as far afield as Agence France-Presse and the London Daily Telegraph, which wrote about a "voting bloc traditionally reluctant to support black candidates."

The spin also helped shape the analysis of the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus, in which Clinton won the support of Hispanic voters by a margin of better than 2 to 1. Forget the possibility that Nevada's Hispanic voters may have actually preferred Clinton or, at the very least, had a fondness for her husband; pundits embraced the idea that Hispanic voters simply didn't like the fact that her opponent was black.

But was Bendixen's blanket statement true?

Far from it, and the evidence is overwhelming enough to make you wonder why in the world the Clinton campaign would want to portray Hispanic voters as too unrelentingly racist to vote for Barack Obama.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=713782

[democracy1st]

4. kick this media is still repeating this nonsense