As the campaign clock winds down to zero, the choices before the voters seem incredibly grim, especially if one is a Black voter. The polls say 91% of Black voters will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and a scant 1% will vote for her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump. It seems clear that the Black vote, and perhaps the Latino vote, will prove decisive when rule will live in the house that slaves built and rebuilt, called the White House.
But in a sense, it doesn’t matter who wins, for Black folks lose. For choice A means voting for an overt racist, and choice B means voting for someone who supported one of the most poisonous public policies in decades, that is, the prison industrial complex. That’s because neoliberalism, in other words, Clintonism, is the politics of repression with a smile. Today’s neoliberalism is yesterday’s conservatism, and today’s conservatism is little more than neo-fascism, and both are servants of Wall Street, which not surprisingly bankrolls them both.
What we are seeing is the total destruction of democracy for a kind of market realism. What makes money rules. We are witnessing the rotting of capitalism, and our politics, as ugly as it is, is a symptom of this disease. For neoliberalism and neoconservatism equal naked corporatism. In a very real sense, Clintonism equals Trumpism, with differences in degree, not kind. In a real democracy, informed citizens vote on knowledge, not emotions. Instead, they are driven, like herds of cattle, from one disaster behind them to the disaster looming before them, driven from fear to hope, and from hope to new fears. Such a politics as this can only bode ill for the future. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
