Clinton Plantation: Bill and Hillary Kept Slaves at Governor’s Mansion

Hillary Clinton is back in the news again, but this time, she’s not there because of a speech to her adoring Leftist fans about Trump and his disgusting posse known as middle American voters and how, if we just love and hug the terrorists (and eat their falafel) they’ll end this habit of “acting out” against us.  No, this time, Hillary is back in the news because of a little book she had published back in the ’90s about Big Brother government and how they’re essential to the proper upbringing and nurturing of a child.

The book was entitled, “It Takes A Village,” and quite frankly, the dry narrative style of the book takes a village to read it, because I can’t tell you how often I fell asleep reading it (usually that just happens reading Obama speeches).  Seriously though, I’d much rather be reading the long, descriptive passages of the climate and topography of Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien than have to plod through Mrs. Clinton’s beast of a tome.  Not that it was a big book, but man, if I had to read one more time about her husband saved the human race…

Here is the passage that has some people wondering about modern-day slavery and the Clintons’ acceptance of that “Southern tradition”:

When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs, and I was assured that the inmates were carefully screened. I was also told the onetime murders were far the preferred security risks. The crimes of the convicted murderers who worked at the governor’s mansion usually involved a disagreement with someone they knew, often another young man in the neighborhood…

I saw and learned a lot as I got to know them better. We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule. I discovered as I had been told I would, that we had far fewer disciplinary problems with inmates who were in for murder than with those who had committed property crimes. In fact, over the years we lived there, we became friendly with a few of them, African-American men in their thirties who had already served twelve to eighteen years of their sentences.

Clearly, Hillary, when speaking about getting “to know them better” and becoming “friendly with a few of them” is not really doing this passage any justice.  I imagine that the getting to know them part happened while she and Bill and little Chelsea were being served tea in the parlor, or perhaps in front of the fireplace while one of them massaged her sore feet.  I even imagine that they grew friendly with a few of them when they were giving them a winter solstice present of a brand new straw broom or kindling basket.

There is no doubt in my mind that the tone of this passage was not one of delving into the human dignity aspect of modern-day slavery, but of a genteel, Southern aristocratic way of viewing a long-standing tradition of slaveholding and the practice of sending them back to the hovel (prison) if they got uppity.

Maybe it’s just me, but this passage spanks of someone who just doesn’t understand the plight of the African-American, nor does she even have the faintest idea that this passage is the very definition of [gasp!] racism.

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.

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.”

As author, Nathan J. Robinson, for Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics and Culture points out, though, this is not just about the Clintons and their penchant for taking advantage of the Black community, but of the broader issue of the government’s use of prison inmates in a capacity that mimics very clearly the practice of slavery.

And while I agree with that assessment and conclusion, there’s no denying this: there’s a small part of me that is satisfied with the fact that, once again, the woman who can’t seem to shut up, may just require a little help from the DNC in doing just that.

Source:  Current Affairs