From the years 94’ to 96’, William Jefferson Clinton launched an unprecedented and calculated extension of the Neoliberal agenda, delivering a crushing blow to the country’s most vulnerable citizens: namely, poor and working class blacks.
Anticipated as a much-needed break in the proceedings of the “small government”, anti-poor onslaught of the Reagan-Bush era, the Clinton presidency should be regarded as anything but.
On January 1, 1994, Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Championed as a necessary step toward a more prosperous global market, NAFTA cost Americans over one million jobs and produced an astounding $181 billion trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. The agreement applied downward pressure on domestic job growth, which worsened inequality, incentivized offshoring, and ineffectually fell short of the president’s promise of adding 200,000 jobs per year.
In its essence, NAFTA marked a shift in liberal economic policy that supported trade deals promoting both the export of jobs and an increase in domestic labor force “flexibility”—a Clintonian euphemism for the normalization of low-wage, low-security jobs with paltry benefits and little workplace control. Subsequent moves made to deregulate the financial sector were aimed at absorbing depression in the labor market. This would lead to the replacement of viable jobs with tenuous credit schemes and triggered the unprecedented rise of speculative finance over the course of the next two decades.
Next in Clinton’s quiver was the passage of the 1994 crime bill: his administration’s response to the staggering 500% uptick in violent crime over a 30-year period. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was the most comprehensive expansion of the criminal justice system in American history. It allocated over $30.2 billion dollars over a six-year period for crime control and attendant social programs. Included in the bill’s contents was the creation of an $8.8 billion dollar program to add 100,000 police officers to nationwide patrolling efforts and an apportionment of an additional $8 billion for the construction of state prisons. Conversly, preemptive social programs like after-school “safe havens”, anti-gang programs, and drug and alcohol prevention received a far smaller endowment.
The crime bill contributed to falling rates of crime, but it did so at the cost of locking up millions for non-violent offenses, and proliferating mass surveillance and racial profiling in afflicted communities. With the addition of ramped-up charges for firearm possession, including bans on assault weapons and the introduction mandatory minimum sentencing, the 1994 Crime Bill disproportionately jailed minorities and converted entire neighborhoods into temporary holding sites for soon-to-be criminals awaiting a stint in the pen.
Finally, in 1996, the Clinton administration implemented sweeping reforms of the welfare system with The Personal Work Responsibility and Opportunity Reconciliation Act. PWRORA upended the traditional federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and transformed it into a block grant scheme. The new system, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), mandated thirty-hour per week employment requirements for recipients, and set limits on how long individuals could receive aid—assistance was eventually capped at two consecutive years or a total of five years over the course of a lifetime.
The reforms gave more freedom to the states in deciding where funds would be spent, which allowed for the funneling of money into private childcare providers and granted subsidies to companies hiring welfare recipients in lieu of direct cash assistance. Moreover, demeaning drug tests and fingerprinting procedures augmented the application process with the purpose of “weeding out” illicit activity in recipients (for which there is no explicit evidence suggesting rates of drug usage are higher amongst recipients), which reinforced the criminalization of individuals receiving welfare and advanced the anti-poor and anti-black sentiments that characterized the passage of the reforms.
The Clinton administration’s three-pronged approach to push the US labor market into international competition, gut the welfare system, and further criminalize the poor while simultaneously beefing up the carceral state was an elaborate and far-reaching series of policy measures deployed to “streamline” an already evaporating labor market and bolster economic growth despite a consumer base that had been facing a twenty year period of wage stagnation following the fervent dismantling of labor unions during the Carter and Reagan years.
Those targeted by the Clinton era reforms were considered, in the eyes of Capital, devoid of labor value and thereby intrinsically useless to the system at large. Resultantly, prisons in the Clinton system served not only their conventional role as penal institutions, but as quasi-ghettos intended to warehouse those who did not integrate neatly during the transition from welfare to workfare. That is, the transition from a state of dependence due to a fundamental lack of resources, education, training, and viable employment, to a state of coerced servitude due to mandated employment in an eminently precarious labor market.
“This is the real austerity project”, writes Paul Mason, referencing Neoliberal measures in his most recent book: “to drive down wages and living standards in the West for decades, until they meet the levels of the middle class in India and China on the way up”.
I would like to extend the notion just a bit further.
It is no secret that Neoliberalism’s endgame is to drive down wages to unheard of levels. Yet this is rarely a new phenomenon. In fact, it is rather evident that the “austerity project” Mason talks about has been the guiding hand of Capitalism from the outset. Strong organized labor movements that had forced the state to reorient its economic approach to accommodate livable wages, dignified working conditions, employee benefits, etc., prolonged the implementation of such a project. But after labor had come undone by the mid 80’s, Neoliberalism became the logical sequence in the procession of American Capitalism—and the Clinton presidency is its most salient manifestation.
Though considered unique by some, there is nothing particularly novel about the Clinton administration if it is viewed, rightly, for what it is: an appendage of Capitalism.
To understand this, it is important to examine how the methods used by Capital and the state to demobilize and extract labor through the use, or threatened use, of politically sanctioned violence from poor and working class blacks have developed over time.
The identity of the black American has been almost exclusively fashioned and refashioned throughout the course of history by his relations to Capital and the various state institutions that have come to define them. The intimate relationship between the political economy and the structural alienation and exploitation of black labor is central to the history of American Capitalism and a useful thread by which one can trace its advance.
Slavery Onward
Sociologist and University of California Berkeley Professor Loïc Wacquant lays out a framework for a historical analysis of the dynamics of race, class, punishment (structural violence), and Capital. He suggests that the existence of four “peculiar race-making institutions” have allowed for the alienation, domination, and ensuing mining of white labor to occur throughout American history: 1. Chattel slavery (1619-1865); 2. The Jim Crow laws (1865-1965); 3. The Ghetto (1915-1968); and 4. The Hyperghetto-carceral complex (1968-present).
Under the race-based chattel slavery system that began at the outset of the colonization of the Americas, black slaves were brought from Africa as “living property”—an immediate relegation of blacks’ status to dispensable components of the production process—and put to work on plantations, which served as the major economic institutions of the age. The plantation, in conjunction with other prevailing cultural forces, also offered the first definition for what it meant to be black in America. The slave was an exchangeable commodity unworthy of the basic human rights afforded to persons living within political borders.
Simply put, blacks were immediately consigned to the status of capital upon their arrival to America.
The survival of the plantation system was incumbent upon the availability of “unfree” slave labor that allowed for sugar, rice, tobacco, and, later on, cotton to be sold at the inexpensive prices that sustained the American South’s prosperous agrarian economy. “Unfree” because slaves had to be kept alive long enough to be replaced either through purchase of new slaves or until children born on the plantation matured, which necessitated the nominal provision of food, shelter, and clothing. The North’s triumph in the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery in 1865 signaled the end of the conventional plantation, which endangered the Southern economy and its owners.
Worried that their grasp on cheap labor would soon vanish as blacks began to leave their farms for industrial centers, the South’s planter class pressed white supremacist Democrats to enact various means of voter disenfranchisement—from poll taxes to literacy tests, to brutality and violence— to keep blacks and Populist whites away from the polls. The tactic proved effective, and with a legislature stacked in the favor of the Democrats and planters, the Jim Crow laws were enacted across the Southern States in 1890 and reined until they were finally overturned in 1965.
Jim Crow laws were a successful means of keeping blacks in positions of servitude through the legal coordination of discrimination and segregation that prevented former slaves from moving or acquiring property. The system entrenched the racialized identity of the black sharecropper and institutionalized the quasi-feudal system that produced the term. Ultimately, Jim Crow was the means by which the South’s planter class was able to retain control of the infinitely cheap labor of blacks and reinforce rigid racial divisions that aimed to prevent rapport with poor and working class whites who shared similar arrangements.
During the Jim Crow era, white property owners refused to itemize accounts and controlled nearby general stores where supplies could be purchased at outrageous prices that would cripple tenants with debt. Any opposition to the feudal creditor-debtor schemes of the sharecropping system was met with excessive force that was condoned and frequently occasioned by the South’s local and state governments. Law enforcement was deployed at the will of the upper class and political elite to brutally suppress any threat of dissidence or organization. Private citizens and organized supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan took matters into their own hands when they felt the state had not done enough to keep blacks in their place, committing unconscionable acts of terror with practical impunity. The regular lynching and killing of blacks by mobs of angry whites were carried out to reinforce the racial divide, terrorize sharecroppers, and deter any future efforts at resistance.
The Elaine Massacre of 1919 serves as an example of the merciless repression faced by blacks attempting to organize for the advancement of their material conditions.
Black farmers in rural Phillips County, Arkansas began to hold regular meetings in order to contest the arbitrary manner in which landowners handled accounts. Sharecroppers were purposefully kept in the dark about what was owed to creditors so as to be kept in states of insurmountable debt, and it was standard practice for families who tried to flee their farms with outstanding payments to be hunted down and killed. Thus, union members in Elaine demanded a higher degree of financial transparency and uniformity from landowners, as well as better compensation for their crops.
On September 29th a group of approximately 100 black farmers and union advocates led by prominent organizer Robert L. Hill met at a church near Elaine to discuss the grievances brought against landowners. The congregation brought armed guards to protect the meeting. When two deputized white men and a black trustee came to investigate the event, shots were exchanged and one of the men was killed. Emboldened by sensationalist newspapers like the Little Rock Gazette, a mob of nearly 1,000 white vigilantes marched into Elaine and its surrounding territories and slaughtered hundreds of innocent black men, women, and children.
The massacres persisted for 3 days until it was broken up by U.S. troops who disarmed both parties and arrested 285 black residents for various offenses. Following the arrests, testimonials against fellow union members were extracted from detainees through torture and coercion, and those who wished to recant were threatened with death. In total, corrupt courts slanted with all-white juries indicted 122 blacks and charged 73 with murder even though evidence suggests that only five whites were killed in the conflict.
The Elaine race riot is only one such instance of similar events that began to take place across America involving blacks unifying against economic and social marginalization. In Northern factories, recently migrated blacks were beginning to organize with regularity.
From Peasantry to Proletariat
At the culmination of WWI, high demand for inexpensive labor in the Northern factories and the decline of cotton production as well as incessant violence and disenfranchisement in the South had prompted a mass-exodus of millions of Southern blacks into the North’s industrial centers. The North offered blacks fleeing the South moderate relief from the rigid caste and unfavorable material conditions of sharecropping arrangements and harsher segregation laws, but it was far from the idyllic fantasyland of racial parity, economic security, and full citizenship that they longed for. Upon reaching the North, migrant blacks were promptly shuffled into ghettos, which were yet another mechanism designed to sequester and exploit black labor.
Ghettos were created through carefully orchestrated separation and ethnoracial discrimination that pervaded housing, education, and nearly every public accommodation and facility. As a consequence, blacks were cloistered in heavily concentrated communities and barred from travelling beyond the geographic and economic boundaries of the “ghetto” per strict perimeters enforced by city governments and workplace barriers imposed on them by manipulative employers and unions.
In heavily segregated cities, blacks that tried to breach the color bar were assaulted by their white counterparts, their houses firebombed, and entire families murdered. The terror and violence experienced by those attempting to move outside the ghetto pulled more black people who lived on the margins into neighborhood centers. In many cases, low-paying jobs with little security effectively kept most blacks from ever attempting to leave the ghetto in the first place. Those that did escape were almost exclusively amongst a small elite of doctors, lawyers, educators, and businesspeople that comprised the “black bourgeoisie”, whose livelihoods depended on providing goods and services to fellow blacks.
For the majority of black workers, however, “job ceilings” and other workplace prejudices kept them in the lower ranks of the occupational hierarchy, which impeded upward mobility from the menial work that had come to define blacks in the early 20th century and also left them extremely susceptible to business turns and sporadic periods of unemployment.
Because black workers were forced into such a volatile position in the industry structure, many were willing to work for much lower wages than unionized whites. Consequently, when unions went on strike, blacks were the first to be hired. When whites returned to work, they were also the first to be fired.
“Strikebreaking” initially caused a great deal of animosity between black and white workers. Race relations within unions were extremely poor for the first portion of the century as a result. Gradually, organizers began to realize that if internal racism excluded blacks and certain immigrants from their unions, they would leave an increasingly large sector of interchangeable workers at the employers’ disposal. With their overall success contingent upon black participation, major unions like the CIO began recruiting more black workers.
Unions were an invaluable political apparatus in the struggle for racial equity. They offered black workers their first real semblance of democracy in granting them a say in how their workplaces were run, providing them protection from racist firings, and preempting other discriminatory practices that would have otherwise occurred. Not to mention the fact that unions in cities like Birmingham, Alabama, where Jim Crow laws were enforced harshly, were the only integrated institutions in the area.
Union leadership also proved instrumental to the Civil Rights era. For instance, AFL-CIO chair George Meany was an undeniable force in the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1963. Meany was especially concerned with Title VII of the act, which made employment discrimination illegal, because the legislation would effectively hold the employers, rather than the unions, liable for workplace prejudice.
Though the North was not the “promised land” it was made out to be by some, blacks had made serious political and social strides via industrial employment. The move to the Northern cities and industrial centers signaled a move from a mostly rural, landless peasantry to an urban proletariat capable of political mobilization. Integrated unions made this a reality. It should come as no surprise, then, that when the economy began to sputter in the late 1960’s and unions began to be aggressively disassembled, black labor suffered most significantly.
Turning Right
When Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he inherited a turbulent economy marked by a waning manufacturing sector, Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard, and a severe oil crisis that was induced by U.S. support to Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Corporate profits had already been on the decline since the late 1960’s and hovered between 2-4% for the next decade. Looking to cut labor expenses to compensate for their receding profits, US firms became extremely resistant to unionization efforts and many Northern manufacturers began to relocate to the South where unions were less prevalent. Carter’s presidency was received favorably by labor leaders who attributed the success of his candidacy to effective political organizing of the working class.
As it turns out, this is a bit of wishful thinking on their part.
In the wake of the post-WWII surplus, creeping unemployment rates began to weaken unions and the threat of sizeable labor insurgency decreased in propensity. Radical labor did not have the clout to sway firms who could afford higher wages to compromise like it had during the Depression. Without pressure from unions, businesses motioned to strip labor to the bone rather than absorb the costs of instituting higher wages. As a direct result, more workers were laid off and extant workers’ pay stagnated. To make matters worse, Carter began to capitulate to the will of the private sector.
The second oil shock in 1979 was a watershed moment for the Carter administration. Faced with climbing oil prices, he endorsed a windfall tax on the oil companies instead of forcing enemy consumers to front the bill, which prompted the flight of oil from the Democratic Party and left the administration reeling. Viewing the oil fiasco an opportunity to push for deregulation, corporate America began to place pressure on Carter to reduce tax rates on account of fierce international competition. Once again, the president acquiesced; this time, slashing corporate taxes, deregulating large sectors of corporate America, and shrinking government expenditures—which inexorably led to the imposition of immense austerity measures on social welfare programs.
At the same time, swaths of Southern whites began to leave the Democratic Party, citing the Carter’s inability to rein in the economy as the main reason for their departure. Their flight was sustained, in large part, by the Party’s engagement with identity politics.
The high-stakes battles waged during the Civil Rights era paid off considerably. Legally speaking, blacks could vote in elections and transcend the ghetto without the threat of state violence. But where the state could no longer infringe on the legal rights of blacks, the economy did. US manufacturing had already shrunk substantially by the mid-1960’s, and the majority of the American industrial sector was being superseded by the suburban service industry.
Because they were, as a totality, less adept than their white counterparts, black workers were usually the first to be fired when a firm began to make employment cuts—it is obvious that outright racism, especially in the South, contributed to layoffs as well. In effect, blacks living within urban centers began to experience astronomically high rates of joblessness. The ghettos that had once served as reservoirs of cheap labor for urban factories lost productive economic function due to the rampant deindustrialization of the US economy.
In Chicago’s ubiquitously black Bronzeville neighborhood, unemployment skyrocketed from under half the total adult population in 1950, to nearly two-thirds by the time 1980 rolled around. Though staggering, these statistics are hardly an aberration. In industrial cities across America, black labor was fading. The effects such pervasive joblessness had on neighborhoods was disastrous
The institutions that formed the basis of everyday life in the ghetto were created by blacks, for blacks. Invariably black-owned, black-operated organizations like the black press, churches, lodges, beauty parlors, grocers, and barbershops all contributed to a vast network of resources that cultivated sociable, mutually inclined communities with profound ethnic and cultural pride. But as black labor began to suffer, the nexus of institutions they had created began to collapse.
Up and down the streets of America’s ghettos, storefronts were boarded up, factories sat idle, and entire buildings were abandoned; most public and commercial institutions were shut down altogether. Churches lost their ability to organize their congregations, and entire communities fragmented. The appearance of the once-bustling ghetto became abysmal. As its infrastructure crumbled and its citizenry disintegrated, state bureaucracies of social control filled the void.
Rampant job loss meant that humiliating and astringent welfare programs became the only means by which many families in the ghetto could put food on the table. Dingy, overcrowded public housing projects replaced foreclosed homes and subjected occupants to sub-standard living conditions and created prison-like subcultures rife with criminal insecurity. The permanently derelict and deteriorating public health centers and schools provided services akin to those of social amenities in developing countries, eroding the overall health and education levels of residents.
The presence of the court system and law enforcement intensified within the devolving ghettos of America’s urban centers to maintain order. State agents of mass surveillance and supervision pervaded black neighborhoods, engendering fear and paranoia amongst residents. As privacies were limited, relations between neighbors became suspicious and caused many to resort to violence as a way to protect themselves and their families from potential harm. The ghetto was now a place of social anxiety, of habitual violence and drug usage: of unrelenting poverty and its typical concomitants. Prisons emerged as the preeminent and expedient way to funnel the dejected, recalcitrant, and invariably dark-skinned members of the ghetto into institutions of containment, constituting what Wacquant calls the Hyperghetto-carceral complex, or the fourth “peculiar race-making institution”.
Meanwhile, faced with Carter’s failure to effectively manage the economy, the Democratic Party decided to completely shift its focus from the consolidation of integrated labor unions to the mobilization black vote. This was a costly mistake for two reasons:
Firstly, it was inevitable that the Democrats would retain the support of black voters regardless of Carter’s blunders. Many blacks depended upon the social programs that made up a significant portion of the Democratic platform and would be casting votes in direct opposition to their own interests if they voted Republican. The Reagan campaign vehemently touted the by-then-ensconced tropes of “welfare queens” and “violent black males” as a way to legitimate the massive scaling back of social services like welfare and others that underpinned his campaign.
Secondly, and most importantly, integrated unions were the only surefire way to anchor Southern whites within the Democratic Party. Unions came under intense scrutiny and had begun to dissolve as a result of private sector deregulation and constant pressure from uncompromising employers. The departure of unions was especially prevalent in the South where unionization had been historically less prolific and more restricted.
With little perceived reason to remain loyal to the party, white Democrats changed their allegiances. They digested the anti-poor, anti-black, “free market” rhetoric of the Reagan bid, and turned their anger and frustration with the economy on the poor and disenfranchised. Reagan won the 1980 elections handily, walloping Carter in nearly every state. Received as a monumental ideological win for conservatism, the regressive economy and Democrats’ abandonment of an integrated labor movement was the chief proprietor of Reagan’s success and is what allowed for Neoliberalism to flourish in the following decades.
Clinton Takes the Stage
When Bill Clinton was elected in 92’, it was supposed to be a breath of fresh air from the Reagan-Bush years—an era that was marked by huge tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization and deregulation, the outsourcing of jobs, and increased competition in public services. In short, Reagan and Bush had conducted a Neoliberal experiment to a degree that had not been experienced since Keynesianism had taken hold of economic policy during WWII, and the onus was on Clinton to reverse the blight.
What liberals got in Clinton, however, was the “Third Way”, which turned out to be the Democrat’s version of the same tactics that came to typify the New Right in the 80’s.
NAFTA was an overt move to push US labor into competition with Mexican labor, which was exceedingly cheaper, causing significant domestic wage depression and setting the stage for China’s entrance into the global labor market. A move that would cripple the US job market and exacerbate trade deficits. The scraps of manufacturing and service sector jobs that had been left behind were largely eaten up by migrant labor and offshoring.
Lacking economic efficacy, dependent blacks had to be managed. The expedient was to force welfare recipients into “bullshit jobs” and lock up those who were unable to secure work. Clinton adopted conservative buzzwords like “superpredator”, which was used to describe young black men living in urban centers, and pushed stereotypes about black women to ensure his measures garnered support from both sides of the aisle. The 1994 Crime Bill, for instance, was the last major instance of bipartisan firearms legislation. It contained a wide scale assault weapons ban that passed through congress without contention because it invoked images of “violent black males”, drug dealers, and gang members who had come to be viewed as subhuman ghetto dwellers.
The passage of PRWORA was no different. Arguments about dependent black mothers that were lacking even the slightest aspect of context were trotted out in support of rigorous welfare reform. Clinton alleged that his reforms would pull blacks and minorities out of the cycle of poverty and into the job market where they could begin to stand on their own two feet. Though welfare caseloads dropped precipitously in the years following its passage, several reports have found the results of PRWORA to be adverse.
A 2002 report from the Economic Policy Institute suggested that the Clinton reforms may have decreased welfare dependency in some respects, but actually worsened the level of poverty experienced in those most affected by PRWORA: single, working mothers. Further, the EPI attributed much of the drop in caseloads to the surging economy, but postulated that growth would subside and wages would be too low to allow working families to escape poverty.
The report cites the inability to receive healthcare subsidies and adequate housing as other unwanted side effects that resulted from the move to workfare:
A parent earning over $7,992 would be unable to receive Medicaid, and a non-group health insurance plan would cost a family around $350 per month—no small sum for a family living below the poverty line. The report also found that very few states had separate housing allowances provided with connection to TANF to ensure families who were struggling with housing bills would be accounted for. Unsurprisingly, 28% of recipients who had recently left welfare reported that they were unable to pay housing or utility bills.
Similarly, the Crime Bill appeared to have unilaterally mitigated crime rates, but its achievements, too, were predicated on the economy. Had the employment rate of blacks not improved in the mid 90’s due to newly enforced welfare constraints, it is likely rates of crime would have been reduced to a lesser extent given the very strong correlation between unemployment rates and violence in impoverished communities. And while its contributions to the falling crime rate may be questionable, its expansion of the penal system and the police state is undeniable. Billions of dollars were funneled into the court systems and law enforcement to combat inner-city violence, and yet, nothing was to done to address poverty and unemployment rates beyond the mandated employment requirements of TANF. Instead, quite the opposite took place.
Clinton programs incentivized the flight of US jobs but did little to stimulate domestic growth, especially in urban areas where good-paying jobs were virtually nonexistent. There was no effort to improve the material conditions of blacks, there was only the application of mechanisms designed to govern and contain them. Law enforcement and the court system took the place of the lynch mobs and legal segregation of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They kept blacks that attempted to flee the system at bay, and imprisoned or killed those who were especially intractable.
Penitentiaries became indiscernible from ghettos, disproportionately inhabited by inexorably poor, dark-skinned residents. Nowadays, prison populations are shockingly analogous with the make-up of the adjacent region’s inner-city communities. Looking at the makeup of prisons in Cook County, the demographics of the ghetto and the prison are nearly the same. Two-thirds of the total prison population is African American. The same fraction of individuals reside in Chicago’s notorious South and West sides, where rates of poverty are unthinkable. According to a recent report, Chicago communities like Burnside, Riverdale, Englewood, East and West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, and Washington Park each had more than 1 in 5 residents living in deep poverty. In 2015 terms, this is $5,885 a year for an individual or less than $12,125 for a family of four. In the Dearborn housing project in Bronzeville, over 50% of its residents were living in deep poverty, which are the worst levels of poverty experienced in Chicago.
What these statistics demonstrate point to is self-evident: poverty, crime, and incarceration are correlatives. Areas that suffer the highest rates of poverty have the highest rates of crime and violence, and consequently, the highest rates of incarceration. It is the poor material conditions of these neighborhoods, and the generational inheritance of a cultural poverty that reinforces feelings of inadequacy and desperation that drive black men and women out to the street corners to sell loose cigarettes, or CD’s, or illicit substances, or even solicit themselves as sexual commodities, where they can then be victimized by law enforcement, detained, and, in the worst cases, killed. That being said, there should be no question as to whom the newly fortified prison system was intended to house. Clinton’s legacy lives on in the demographic makeup of America’s prisons.
The air of novelty that surrounded the Clinton presidency was due to the situation he was presented with, but not his policy choices. There was nothing unusual about driving wages down through deregulation and international competition, or using the implied threat of state violence and punishment to guarantee the participation of blacks in the labor market. The circumstances that beset blacks were different.
As a whole, black labor had lost market utility. Deindustrialization destroyed the majority of jobs once available to unskilled blacks, and internationalized labor, which included imported migrant labor, lapped up whatever opportunities remained. Unable to regain a foothold in the job market, blacks living in cities turned to secondary economies, faulty credit arrangements, and welfare programs for sustenance. The state swept in accordingly to force employment, scale-back welfare, and jail anyone who resisted.
It was the same formula of isolation, structural violence, and extraction utilized by American Capitalism and its state boughs since its advent. The devices may have appeared different, but the means were consistent. The nuance was that the majority of blacks now found themselves unable to produce economic value since the jobs that matched their level of skill and experience were gone. Those who fell into this unfortunate category would be forced to finance themselves through alternative means, and many would soon be warehoused by the swollen prison system, where business was, and still is, booming.