Column: Black World
August/September1999

Clinton 'down in the Delta'

by Lou Turner

President Clinton's July 6 stop-over in Clarksdale, Miss., during the poverty tour he christened his "New Markets" initiative, shed more light on American poverty at century's end than Clinton and his entourage ever intended. At his stop at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, what got exposed was not only the obvious, namely that with a 75% unemployment rate the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge haven't exactly partaken of "our boom economy," but that radical Native American opposition to these conditions continues.

Clinton's trip to the Mississippi Delta, too, exposed more than he intended. It revealed that the whole reason behind the five-stop poverty tour to Appalachian Kentucky, Pine Ridge, a barrio in Arizona, South Central Los Angeles and Clarksdale lay in the Delta. For it was there that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas in 1990, headed the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, which gave the green light to the glitzy casino industry development that has become widespread throughout the South and on Indian reservations.

Now he's back, a decade later, with Jesse Jackson and an entourage of government and corporate honchos in tow, talking about "New Markets." Casinos docked on the Mississippi River in some of the poorest counties in the country, adjacent to mass production catfish ponds and cotton fields, are the legacy of Clinton's Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission. It's a legacy in which the wages for choppin' cotton, working in the casinos and processing catfish are roughly equal to the wage minimum.

So why has he "returned to the scene of the crime," as it were? Is it to tout the economic "boom" he, at every opportunity, takes credit for? Is it to cover his left flank by admitting that the same "booming" economy has also produced one of the greatest income gaps in the nation's history? Or is it in order to play one more card in the game of capitalist globalization by taking credit for initiating an economic policy that, in any event, capitalists have practiced for nearly three decades, that is, pursuing the same investment strategy in the South that they have in Third World developing countries?

One way or another, being "down in the Delta" means all of these things to Clinton. What's new, nonetheless, is that the economic recession that called for the 1990 Lower Mississippi Delta Development Initiative has become a so-called "boom," and little has changed in the lot of the working poor, especially African Americans, and women who are single heads of households. Of course, there's a new cabal of fetching Wall Street wannabes like Jesse Jackson for Clinton to entice with dreams of cockroach capitalism. Indeed, with Jackson on the platform with him, Clinton told his Clarksdale audience that his initiative to create a permissive environment for capitalist investment in poverty areas, complete with tax incentives and credits, is what transnational corporations already enjoy in Third World developing countries.

CLOSING THE GAP

"That is what we're trying to do here," Clinton told the Delta's power elite. "We're trying to close what Reverend Jackson calls the resource gap." Reverend Jackson's own self-help initiative has been to open his Rainbow PUSH offices on New York City's Wall Street and Chicago's Lasalle Street. Clinton's "New Markets" initiative in the "Other America" sounds just like his Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity in Africa and its congressional clone, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, that was showcased during his African tour last year.

This is what Black lumpen-bourgeois entrepreneurs call "from the homeland to the homeland," a euphemism for their roles as stalking horses for major capitalist players out to further underdevelop Black Africa and Black America.

However, there is something else to Clinton's poverty tour that may have had the unintended consequence of shining a light on the logic of today's global capitalist economy and the dialectic of Karl Marx's CAPITAL. In Clarksdale, Clinton made the following point: "Everybody in America has a selfish interest now in developing the Delta. Why? Because most economists believe that if we're going to keep our economic recovery going without inflation, the only way we can possibly do it is to find more customers for our products and then add more workers at home. If you come here [to the Delta], you get both in the same place. You get more workers and more customers. So it's good for the rest of America as well."

THE LOGIC OF CAPITALISM

In this, Clinton, his policy makers and Jesse Jackson follow as well as express the logic of capitalism, that is, they at one and the same time follow and express what is objective in the present moment with regard to the laws of motion of capitalist accumulation as Marx analyzed them in CAPITAL.

While "officially" inflation and unemployment are today at historic lows, in no other period has Marx's notion of the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" come more to life as in this so-called "booming" economy that has produced one of the widest ever gaps between unprecedented wealth and unconscionable poverty. The objectivity of what Clinton follows as well as expresses of capitalism's logic also makes Marx's abstract assumption of a single capitalist society, in the often neglected volume two of CAPITAL, quite concrete for our times.

The purpose of so seemingly extreme an assumption, which appears to remove the internal circulation of a capitalist society from its global environment, is to show that every attempt to attenuate the socioeconomic gap expressed by the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" that Marx theorized in volume one of CAPITAL, that is, providing unemployed workers with low-wage jobs in order to "get more workers and more consumers," will not resolve the absolute contradiction at the core of capitalist society. It is this dialectic which at every turn threatens to explode into social upheavals like the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. By now it's obvious then why Clinton's poverty tour took him from down in the Delta to South Central L.A.

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