How Hillary Clinton Fools Black Voters

Watch Video: How Hillary Clinton Fools Black Voters

The black community has an unbreakable bond with the Clintons but learn as I uncover two horrible pieces of legislation produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure that did unspeakable damage to the African American community.

Remember the Clinton era catchphrase “hand-up, rather than a handout”. This was the marketing tagline of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The bill was a cornerstone of the Republican ‘Contract with America’ and was signed by President Bill Clinton on August 22, 1996. The legislation remade the welfare system and helped Clinton fulfill one of his 1992 campaign promises of ending welfare as we knew it.

Prior to this legislation Mrs. Clinton was actively involved in trying to get the children’s health care bill passed and in fact opposed this welfare reform bill because it would block food stamps and medical care directly impacting the safety and security of poor children. Nonetheless she reversed her support and took a critical role in whipping up votes for the bill simply because the Clinton political machine recognized the legislation as an opportunity to deny the GOP a potent wedge issue in Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign.

Watch Video: How Hillary Clinton Fools Black Voters

The bill’s primary requirements and effects included changing public assistance from a federal entitlement program to state block grants; ending eligibility for cash welfare; requiring recipients to begin working after two years; and placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds. It also greatly limited funds available for unmarried parents under 18 and barred legal immigrants from receiving federal benefits, including food stamps and Social Security income and pushed states to drastically reduce their caseloads.

In the aftermath of this reform three prominent Clinton administration officials working at Health and Human Services: Mary Jo Bane, Wendell Primus, and longtime friend of the Clinton’s Peter Edelman resigned in protest. Edelman then went on to write an article about the bill in The Atlantic titled “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton has Done”. In the article he correctly predicted the bill would hurt millions of poor children, people most in need and disproportionately families of color making it increasingly difficult for them to escape poverty.

Today, the reformed system provides little safety net, and no hand-up. Instead, it traps poor mothers into exploitive poverty-wage jobs and makes it extremely difficult for recipients to pursue higher education as four-year college no longer counts as a work-related activity. In 1995, 649K student parents were receiving cash assistance while enrolled full-time in educational programs, only 35K full-time students received aid in two thousand and four (2004).

In 2014, a record 47 million Americans that’s nearly one in six lived below the poverty line. Before the reform, cash assistance reached 68% of eligible poor households but has dropped to 26%. In 10 states today, fewer than 10 out of every 100 eligible families receive cash assistance. In most states, the value of the check has dropped by 20% or more since 1996. And because the Reconciliation Act moved the onus of funding from federal to state it allowed Southern states to mostly dismantle their welfare systems and pay some of the lowest benefits in the nation.

Now the United States has the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world standing at 19.6%. Extreme poverty is most pronounced for black families, who have experienced a 183% sharp decline in their socio-economic status from 1996 to 2011. And this is all because Hillary Clinton betrayed her black constituents and undermined her image as a lifelong champion for women and children just to gain political ground during an election year.

Now let’s move onto the other piece of legislation that directly negatively impacts the black community at the hands of the Clintons. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act is the largest crime bill in the history of the United States signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. It provided for 100K new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons. $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. Allocated $1.6 billion to help prevent violence against women. Barred the manufacture of 19 specific semi-automatic firearms, classified as “assault weapons”, which has since been overturned and created 60 new death penalty offenses under 41 federal capital statutes.

All of that is great but the bill also included the elimination of inmate education which previously provided lower-income inmates an ability to receive college educations during their term of imprisonment. Now we’ve essentially ensured the education level of most inmates will remain unimproved. The worst aspect of the bill is the “Three Strikes, You’re Out” provision, which immediately increases the prison sentences of a person convicted of a felony who had been previously convicted of two or more felonies and automatically requires these offenders receive a life sentence punishment.

It was the fight for this prevision of the law that had then First Lady Hillary Clinton famously remark her super-predator quote saying: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators, No conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

This increase in incarceration has led to prison overcrowding and the legal system forced to rely on plea bargains to minimize the increased caseload. President Bill Clinton has expressed regret over the portions of the measure that led to increased prison population like the three strikes provision. And Hillary Clinton has publicly apologized to the black community for her super-predator quote as being racist. Many in the Black Lives Matter organization haven’t forgiven the Clinton’s and I hope that many more in the African-American community come to their senses and see that the Clinton’s are a terrible choice for them.

Watch Video: How Hillary Clinton Fools Black Voters