DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus The Clintons Had Slaves

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slaves

Contrary to popular understanding, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution did not prohibit slavery. The text makes it clear:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The nifty little loophole of that word “except” means that slavery isn’t actually banned outright; someone simply has to be convicted of a crime in order to be enslaved. This gave Southern states a welcome free hand in re-establishing forced servitude for African Americans in the years after Reconstruction collapsed; as Douglas Blackmon documents in Slavery By Another Name, the Jim Crow era was in many places characterized by a mass re-enslavement process, whereby criminal laws were devised that allowed states and municipalities to put black people in chains again. Today, forced labor among African Americans persists; in Louisiana, for example, felons are sentenced to “hard labor” as well as prison time, and inmates at the infamous Angola prison still pick cotton at gunpoint.

The prison labor system in the United States has long been an unacknowledged scandal. It’s quite plainly a form of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment even admits as much: it doesn’t say that when you’re forced to work for being convicted of a crime, that isn’t slavery. It says that slavery is legal if it is imposed as part of a conviction for a crime. All manner of people benefit from the system; as Mother Jones has reported, Congress actually incentivized private companies to use inmate labor, and the incarcerated now produce everything from bedding to eyeglasses. They even staff call centers, with a company called UNICOR encouraging companies to “smart-source” their call-center work to prisoners rather than sending it overseas.

But two possibly unexpected beneficiaries of the contemporary prison slavery system were none other than Bill and Hillary Clinton, who during their time at the Arkansas governor’s mansion in the 1980’s used inmates to perform various household tasks in order to “keep costs down.” Hillary Clinton wrote of the practice openly and without any apparent sense of moral conflict.

The Clintons’ practice has gotten some renewed attention over the last day, with the rediscovery of the relevant passage from It Takes a Village. Last year I wrote a bit about Hillary’s admission in my book Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America:

Clinton was, however, generous enough to allow inmates from Arkansas prisons to work as unpaid servants in the Governor’s Mansion. In It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton writes that the residence was staffed with “African-American men in their thirties,” since “using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs.” It is unclear just how longstanding the tradition of having chained black laborers brought to work as maids and gardeners had been. But one has no doubt that as the white residents of a mansion staffed with unpaid blacks, the Clintons were continuing a certain historic Southern practice. (Hillary Clinton did note, however, that she and Bill were sure not to show undue lenience to the sla…servants, writing that “[w]e enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.”

Indeed it’s really difficult, given the facts, to conclude that this practice was anything other than slavery. The Clintons were perfectly content to be waited on by black people who received no compensation and would have been pursued and dragged back in chains if they had tried to leave. There is only one word for such an arrangement.

One could almost respect the honesty with which Hillary spoke of her use of convict labor. She acknowledges that these men were black, and that she had a strict policy of sending them back to prison if they violated any rules. But Hillary Clinton isn’t like the Atlantic writer who dwelled on his upbringing as part of a family who held a woman in a state of slavery. Her forthrightness in It Takes a Village is not because she is attempting to grapple with the atrocity in which she was complicit, but because she doesn’t see anything wrong with what happened. Whereas many of us would be appalled at the idea of having our meals served by unpaid black servants, Clinton found the whole situation quaintly traditional, and was favorably impressed by the financial benefits of not paying her staff. What others might call “a crime against human dignity,” Clinton referred to in It Takes a Village as simply “an unusual aspect of living at the governor’s mansion.”

The Clintons’ use of prison labor was only one small part of a long and horrifying record. Both Clintons, but especially Bill, have consistently manipulated black political interests while showing complete disregard for the humanity of African Americans. This stretches from Hillary’s perpetuation of a hideous racist myth about a wave of hyper-violent “superpredators” to Bill’s politically-motivated execution of a mentally disturbed black inmate. (I know it’s a crass plug, but there really is far more on this, with a lot of sources, in Superpredator.)

Predictably, when people started to mention how disturbing it was that the Clintons had kept slaves, a few especially committed online Hillary fans began to issue impossibly contorted defenses, including blaming “DudeBros” for bringing the matter up and explaining that Hillary had tried to empathize with the convicts. (To see why the defenses fail, simply imagine how laughable they would seem if applied to any other situation of unpaid black labor, e.g. if a 19th century Southerner offered them.)

But let’s also be clear: the issue of prison labor isn’t just about the Clintons. I believe the Clintons have an indefensible record of behavior toward black people. But the story of the Clintons in the Arkansas governor’s mansion also just illustrates how ubiquitous and taken-for-granted situations of slavery are. It’s very easy to think “But that couldn’t possibly be slavery, the state is just assigning inmates to an interesting work detail.” Yet if we examine the facts critically, it’s hard to see how it could be anything else. Prison labor doesn’t seem like slavery because it no longer displays some of the imagery associated with slavery in our minds, such as the whippings and the auction blocks. But we’re still dealing with a situation in which people are working by compulsion rather than choice, and are threatened with violence if they leave. They are leased to corporations, as if they are property. The auction block may be gone, but the core aspect of slavery is not that people are bought and sold. Rather, it’s about the kind of dominance that is asserted over them. (After all, slavery can exist even if one party has a monopoly on slaveowning. It’s the forced labor and the experience of the slave that counts, not the trading element.)

Of course, one could draw a distinction between “slavery” (in which a person asserts all rights over a human being, including the right to sell them and their children and to take their life) and “involuntary servitude” (in which a person is simply forced to work), a distinction such as the Thirteenth Amendment contemplates. But “involuntary servitude” immediately begins to sound like little more than a euphemism for slavery, and many of the situations that modern anti-slavery advocates would consider to be slavery—such as that perpetrated by Alex Tizon‘s family—do not necessarily include people being murdered and having their children sold. (Though they sometimes do.) It is important never to minimize the distinct horrors of early American slavery, but the term also applies to situations in which the victims are treated comparatively “well,” and which are not characterized by all of the worst features of the pre-Civil War South. Thus I do think it’s fair to classify prison labor as a form of enslavement. Degrees of force obviously vary, but since the Angola prison plantation today looks exactly the same as it did in the 19th century, I believe the word helps us appreciate the evils of mass incarceration rather than diminishing the evils of the antebellum era.

The Clinton slavery controversy should not really be about the Clintons. It’s the prison labor system as a whole that is rotten, and they were only two especially amoral beneficiaries of it. Today, our attention should be focused on the cotton-pickers of Louisiana and the scores of other modern-day slaves. This is not a mere pathology of the Clintons, but a pathology of the country we all inhabit. And it is not just a single noxious political family that is complicit. We all are.

I'm glad you're back; I would've not known about this. This article reminds me of what I've heard of this book:

I actually bought that years ago, one of the many in the wall I never got around to. Thanks for the reminder.

The 2 page except in the book is pretty horrific reading, because her slavery taught her essentially to not judge a book by its cover and to be open to trust. She's such a cringe worthy individual. I really can't believe that she has such a popularity as she does.

DNC Nominee of 2017 Trivia in 2077:

One Candidate employed slaves while spouse of a govenor

One candidate marched with MLK Jr.

Please name what the winning candidate won nomination.

She's not popular.

Datawise, she's the second least popular presidential candidate in American history.

She lost to the least popular.

How sad is that? Debbie Wasserman Schultz is da devil!

We had an entire conversation when we met up at the Indians game about the prison system.

And I know I told you specifically before that making prisoners work isn’t that big of a deal, and you nodded your head.

But now that PDF is here, it’s all puppies and rainbows with you.

It’s funny when I make threads about the prison system, it gets hot and rocket doesn’t show up.

But now PDF is here, CHS and rocket can’t stop swinging off his ballsack.

Anyways, I read the article and there’s things I agree with and things I don’t. But we’ve talked about this topic a thousand times already so continue having y’all bromance moment.

You don't think it's a big deal if someone jailed for, say, marijuana possession, is forced to do unpaid labor? You don't see a slippery slope there given our nation's history?

i don't.

my issue with this is everything that happens BEFORE someone gets to prison. i think we need criminal justice reform and have said as much since day one of being on this board. i have a problem with the system and how people are treated when they get processed into the system. i have a problem with drug laws in general and once again have said as much since day one.

but i have also said since day one, and everybody here knows i've said it, that if i got caught smoking weed in a state where it's completely illegal, then i deserve to be in jail. because at the end of the day, i knew what the law was and did it anyway. and the only person who can compete with me on the amount of blazin' on this board is Portlanddawg.

i think there needs to be tweaking with how prisoners are handled/treated, but overall i don't have a problem with the labor aspect. because they are prisoners.

so you can try to single out a weed smoker, but then ask me if i care about unpaid labor of a child sex offender, or someone who murdered their kid. you're gonna get the same answer out of me.

so again, my beef is everything that happens before prison. once the person is actually in prison, oh well it sucks.

Not that I approve of this but I have to say that prisons across the country work prisoners for little or no money everyday and they are colorblind about it. This is a distraction story and a distraction thread. Don't look at the man behind the Iron Curtain, look at the smoke and pretty mirrors!

They always have the white woman's chain gang on the side of the road picking up trash here. If I was stuck in jail, I'd be happy for any excuse to get out.

Swish, I agree with most of what you said.. at the same time I completely see the slippery slope PDF is talking about..

If you build a small enterprise out of generally non-violent convicts, whether it's call centers, making license plates, making system furniture, picking up trash, keeping the governors mansion clean.. whatever it is... then you have a vested interest in making sure the laws and the court system function in such a way that the labor source is maintained.

I don't have a problem with them putting convicts to work either.. but you have argued repeatedly for relaxing drug laws, especially weed laws.. but if the prison "enterprise" needs XX people to handle these jobs so they can profit from it, and the best people for those jobs are simple weed offenders.. then it creates a conflict of interest in how those laws will be written and enforced.

Kind of funny... when Obama was President, the congressional and other republicans were the "story" and anything critical of the President was a distraction... now it's a republican so the President must be the "story" and any criticism of congressional or other democrats is the "distraction"..

Neat how that works.

i understood his point as well, but once you take the specific weed smoker point out and look at prisoners as a whole, that's where the argument falls apart. just my opinion though.



for me, this particular issue starts off with me advocating for system reform, specifically when talking about for-profit prisons. now obviously ending for-profit prisons isn't gonna end the problem, but it's definitely a huge part of it.

the unfortunate truth is that IF we have the criminal justice reform and end for profit-prisons and change drug laws, there's always gonna be a ton of people in prison in this country because 320 million + says we are gonna have our share of trash people in society.



i understand, but again, as even you have pointed out before, how many people are in for weed compared to other offenses?

and that's my thing. as someone who could be in heaven in a field of weed, i have to take a step back and look at the overall issue. it isn't just weed offenders, its sex offenders, thefts, women beaters, DUI offenders, child molesters, white collar criminals, etc.

we already have different prison systems for different level offenders as it is. and i dont see why, in general. make some of these rich white collar crime dudes do some work instead of being in federal vacation.

so to finish this off, yes i want criminal justice reform, for profit prisons ended, the archaic drug laws revised, sentencing changed, etc.

but even after all of that, if a person ends up in the system, i really don't care about whatever labor they are doing as long as it isn't some NK/Russian/Middle east style labor where it's becoming physical abuse.

but i really don't care about prisoners being forced to make license plates. it doesn't mean much to me.

You know me, always looking to deflect from the follies of our rapist game show host president and the morally bankrupt Congress that sniffs his rear every day.

smh. Just cuz I'm not wasting the time sharing thoughts with the like of 40 on here, doesn't mean I'm not woke. I like ya'll, but not enough to start posting more than a paragraph on my phone. And if I won't respond to it on my phone, then I probably won't remember it by the time I get to my computer. I've met Michelle Alexander multiple times and if that wasn't the case, I've read the Constitution.

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.


Do you remember last year when it was such a win! for the Left because for profit prisons would only have contracts with the federal government from then on (Even though they did a majority of their business with the fed gov't anyway)? Well, do you know where illegal aliens go? They go to those same private prisons, with serious inmate abuse issues, underfunding, who use slave labor! Now they have inmates who are not Americans, so who knows what liberties they have taken. Don't think I'm not woke, bruhbruh.

i missed the part of my post where i claimed you wasn't "woke".

can you show me that? thanks

i also don't remember that, and if people claimed that was a win then they are wrong.

the only way to claim a win on for-profit prisons is to shut down all for-profit prisons.