The Evolution of Legalized Slavery in the US Prison System

13th

Directed by Av DuVernay (2016)

Film Review

This documentary is a thoughtful exploration of the crucial role of the 13th amendment played in the president mass incarceration of African Americans, who currently provide captive labor for major Wall Street corporations for pennies a day. Featuring such luminaries as Van Jones, Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, retired Black Congressional Caucus member Charles Rangel, and former (Republican) House Speaker Newt Gingrich*, the film highlights major landmarks in the evolution of the US prison industrial complex.

According to filmmakers, the 13th amendment was the most significant in that it essentially preserved slavery as “punishment for a crime.” Having lost their four million strong slave labor force, Southern states facing economic collapse, were quick to adopt “convict leasing” systems. In this way former slaves arrested for minor crimes such as loitering and vagrancy (ie failure to carry a letter certifying employment), could be leased to plantations, mines, and developing industries.

Likewise the 2015 release of D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was instrumental in the emerging mythology of black criminality. The overtly racist films glamorizes the Klu Klux Klan, while implanting the fiction in the public mind of an irresistible African American desire to rape white women. KKK cross burning was another fiction Griffith invented, which the terrorist organization subsequently adopted. .

The film’s release, which greatly increased KKK membership, also triggered thousands of lynchings between World War I and World War II. This state sanction terrorism against Southern Blacks, rather than economic privation, would be the main driver of northward African American migration in the early 20th century.

The film also recounts Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” in which he used subtle “war on drugs,” “law and order,” and “tough on crime” rhetoric to appeal to Southern Democrats’ unease with the civil rights movement – thus persuading them to vote Republican.

Reagan, in turn, would provide the legislation and funding to prosecute the war on drugs, significantly ramping up the arrest and conviction of low income minorities for victimless crimes such as marijuana and crack cocaine possession.

The film attributes most responsibility for the America’s obscene incarceration rate (2 million+ and growing) to Bill Clinton and his 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill. The latter significantly increased the militarization and numbers of cops on the street. Clinton also heavily promoted “three strikes you’re out” and minimum mandatory sentencing laws that have massively increased the US prison census.

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*Newt Gingrich: “No one who is white understands the difficulty of being Black in the US.”

How Bill Clinton Tried to Privatize Social Security in 1998

In this presentation, author Thomas Franks talks about his recent book Hey Liberal, Listen Up: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People. The focus of his latest book is the blue collar backlash that has resulted in the probable selection of fake populist Donald Trump as the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Franks places the blame for this squarely on Democrats, owing to their abandonment of working people.

As Franks describes it, the pro-Wall Street swing of the Democratic Party is based on a very deliberate strategy by Bill Clinton and his supporters to “screw over” their traditional power base (ie African Americans and organized labor).  Clinton proudly justified this strategy with the observation, “they have nowhere else to go.”

Franks most shocking revelation is that Clinton took office in 1992 with a deliberate determination to repeal the New Deal. In 1997, he made a secret deal with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to ram a bill through Congress privatizing Social Security (which Clinton mentions in his 1998 State of the Union address). Thanks to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, this bill never happened.