How the Clinton Campaign Armed a Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada

Divide and Conquer Politics
By AL GIORDANO

Las Vegas, Nevada.

The chairs in the Concorde Ballroom of the Paris Casino were arranged as if for a wedding, but were more a prelude to an ugly divorce.

On one side of the at-large caucus room were supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton, led by an organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), overwhelmingly Mexican-American.

On the other side of the aisle were supporters of Senator Barack Obama, led by a shop steward for the Culinary Workers Local 226, overwhelmingly African-American.

Both groups were made up predominantly of women. They shouted at each other, booed, hissed and hurled thumbs down in open, sneering contempt for the opposition. The hostility toward their sister workers on each side had more to do with each other than with the candidates they supported.

Capitalism and its politicians have long played divide-and-conquer to divide immigrants from other economically suppressed demographic groups. A generation or two ago, Irish, Italians and Jews were districted by those in power into the same Congressional, legislative and city council districts to compete for the same scraps of political representation while White Anglo-Saxon Protestants took the rest of the pie. The same has occurred in recent years to shoehorn blacks and Latinos--the two most solid Democratic Party voting demographic groups - into increasing conflict.

During last June's debate over the federal Immigration Reform Bill, the overtly racist Minutemen organization took time off from patrolling the border vigilante style to hold a small march in Los Angeles against reform. They recruited a sole black minister who brought along half-a-dozen men from his congregation for an anti-immigrant rally that had no more than two-dozen participants. This, justifiably, provoked anger among Mexican-Americans and others in LA, and thousands marched in counter-demonstration. Truth is, there were far more African-Americans marching with the pro-immigrant group than that stood with the Minutemen, and that fact saved the situation from becoming uglier.

As census trends explode to bring, just two or so decades from now, the Caucasian population of the United States into minority status, entire industries have been launched to prevent a majority alliance from forming along class-solidarity lines. There are book contracts aplenty waiting for divisive pundits like Earl Ofari Hutchison, author of The Emerging Black GOP Majority (2006) and Latino Challenge to Black America (2007) and who dedicated much of 2007 and, now, 2008 to bashing Obama over on The Huffington Post. Black-Latino tensions bubble up from high school brawls in Los Angeles to City Council antics in Buffalo, and of course in the prison system where gangs choose up sides so often along ethnic and racial lines.

But now it's exploded out into the open in the Democratic presidential nomination battle, with the Clinton campaign leading the charge. In recent weeks, efforts by Clinton surrogates to wage racial politics against Obama were viewed by reporters as efforts to sway white voters away from Obama: a national Clinton co-chair implied that Obama had a drug-dealing past, a former US senator repeated disproved Islamic smears, and most recently a billionaire black entertainment mogul introduced Clinton by resurrecting the drug canard. All three then staged public "apologies." But it's the words of Bill and Hillary Clinton that have sent the signals from above, from the latter's angry uncle acts in New Hampshire and Nevada and his defense of a voter suppression lawsuit there, to the former's exaltation of LBJ as the real MLK, the strategy has been to bait Obama supporters into respond in kind. Then they claim to be "victims" of false accusations of racism.

Remarkably, the race-baiting has had little effect on those white voters that would be expected to bite, particularly those in rural areas--considered by white urban and suburban liberals to be the racist ones--who in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada delivered bigger percentages for Obama than urban and suburban voters. But perhaps the white folk were never the intended target of such divisive politics. No, it led, instead, to the afro-hispano-divide on Saturday in Las Vegas, one that could cause lasting harm to all progressive efforts--electoral or not--in the near future of the United States of America.
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http://counterpunch.org/giordano01222008.html

I'm not posting this cause I agree. I'm posting this because its an interesting take on what happened in Nevada. We don't want any split in the LW! He is pissed about the rise of prisoners during the Clinton era. I'm pissed about that too, but I haven't brought it up.

I'm presuming you are male and not over 30.