educating americans in the subtle art of imperial domination?

andrewgavinmarshall | In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation facilitated the development of African studies in American universities to create an American elite well-trained and educated in being able to manage a more effective foreign policy over the region. Another key project was in developing the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, where American social scientists would have overseas research subsidized by the Ford Foundation. The fellows also became closely tied to the CIA, who saw them as important sources of information to recruit in the field. However, when this information began to surface about CIA connections with foundation-linked academics, the Ford Foundation leadership became furious, as one Ford official later explained that the President of the Foundation had gone to Washington and “raised hell,” where he had to explain to the CIA that, “it was much more in the national interest that we train a bunch of people who at later stages might want to go with the CIA… than it was for them to have one guy they could call their source of information.”[26] It is, perhaps, a truly starting and significant revelation that the president of a foundation has the ability, status, and position to be able to go to Washington and “raise hell,” and no less, lecture the CIA about how to properly conduct operations in a more covert manner.

The Carnegie Corporation, for its part, was “encouraging well-placed American individuals to undertake study tours of Africa.” In 1957, the Carnegie Corporation gave funds to the Council on Foreign Relations to undertake this task of identifying and encouraging important individuals to go to Africa. Among the individuals chosen were Paul Nitze, who became Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in 1962; Thomas Finletter, a former Secretary of the Air Force; and David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank.[27]

The Rockefeller Foundation also initiated several funding programs for universities in Latin America and Asia, notably in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. By the early 1980s, the Rockefeller Foundation had awarded over 10,000 fellowships and scholarships. From the Ford Foundation’s inception in 1936 until 1977, it had allocated roughly $919.2 million to “less-developed countries.”[28] The Ford Foundation even maintained “a steady stream of scholarly exchange with the Soviet Union and other countries of Eastern Europe since 1956, and with the People’s Republic of China since 1973.” Ford and other foundations had also played significant roles in channeling intellectual dissent in developing nations into ‘safe’ areas, just as they do at the domestic level. This has required them to fund several radical (and sometimes even Marxist) scholars. The Ford Foundation had also supported the relocation of displaced scholars following the military coups in Argentina in 1965 and Chile in 1973. However, such foreign ‘assistance’ has not gone unnoticed entirely, as in 1971 there was violent resistance by radical university students and faculty at the University of Valle in Colombia, “a favored recipient of Ford and Rockefeller monies.”[29] As noted in the book, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism:

The power of the foundation is not that of dictating what will be studied. Its power consists in defining professional and intellectual parameters, in determining who will receive support to study what subjects in what settings. And the foundation’s power resides in suggesting certain types of activities it favors and is willing to support. As [political theorist and economist Harold] Laski noted, “the foundations do not control, simply because, in the direct and simple sense of the word, there is no need for them to do so. They have only to indicate the immediate direction of their minds for the whole university world to discover that it always meant to gravitate to that angle of the intellectual compass.”

It is interesting to note the purposes and consequences of foundation funding for highly critical scholars in the ‘developing’ world, who are often very critical of American economic, political, and cultural domination of their countries and regions. Often, these scholars were able to collect information and go places that Western scholars were unable to, “generating alternative paradigms which are likely to provide more realistic and accurate assessments of events overseas.” One example was the funding of dependency theorists, who rose in opposition to the prevailing development theorists, suggesting that the reason for the Global South’s perceived “backwardness” was not that it was further behind the natural progression of industrial development (as development theorists postulated), but rather that they were kept subjugated to the Western powers, and were specifically maintained as ‘dependent’ upon the North, thus maintaining a neo-imperial status directly resulting from their former overt colonial status. Thus, the foundations have gained better, more accurate information about the regions they seek to dominate, simultaneously employing and cultivating talented scholars and professionals, who might otherwise be drawn to more activist areas of involvement, as opposed to academic. Thus:

[A] situation exists where information, produced by Latin Americans on situations of internal and external domination, is flowing to the alleged sources of oppression – rather than toward those who need the information to defend themselves against exploitation.

An example of this is in Brazil, where a regime tolerated the writings of radical social scientists who are supported by foundations. Many of these scholars have received international recognition for their work, which would make it unlikely that the regime itself would be unaware of it. Thus, the work itself may not be perceived as an actual threat to the regime, for two major reasons:

(1) it is not intelligible to the masses, for certainly, if the same sentiments were expressed not in academic journals but from a street corner or as part of a political movement which mobilized large numbers, the individual would be jailed or exiled; and (2) the regime itself benefits from the knowledge generated, while simultaneously enhancing its international image by permitting academic freedom.

Thus, the ultimate effect abroad is the same as that at home: prominent and talented scholars and intellectuals are drawn into safe channels whereby they can aim and hope to achieve small improvements through reform, to ‘better’ a bad situation, improve social justice, human rights, welfare, and ultimately divert these talented intellectuals “from more realistic, and perhaps revolutionary, efforts at social change.”

Again, we have an image of the major philanthropic foundations as “engines of social engineering,” and agents of social control. Not only are their efforts aimed at domestic America or the West alone, but rather, to the whole world. As such, foundations have been and in large part, remain, as some of the most subtle, yet dominant institutions in the global power structure. Their effectiveness lies in their subtle methods, in their aims at incremental change, organizing, funding, and in the power of ideas. Of all other institutions, foundations are perhaps the most effective when it comes to the process of effecting the ‘institutionalization of ideas,’ which is, as a concept in and of itself, the central facet to domination over all humanity.

how corporate power converted wealth into philanthropy for social control

alternet |  Given that the World Bank has more or less directed the economic policies of the Third World, coercing and cracking open the market of country after country for global finance, you could say that corporate philanthropy has turned out to be the most visionary business of all time.

Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade, and channel their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard through a system of elite clubs and think tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors. Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.

The transnational equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the former US national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski (founder-member of the Afghan mujahidin, forefathers of the Taliban), the Chase Manhattan Bank, and some other private eminences. Its purpose was to create an enduring bond of friendship and cooperation between the elites of North America, Europe, and Japan. It has now become a pentalateral commission, because it includes members from China and India (Tarun Das of the CII; N. R. Narayana Murthy, ex-CEO of Infosys; Jamsheyd N. Godrej, managing director of Godrej; Jamshed J. Irani, director of Tata Sons; and Gautam Thapar, CEO of Avantha Group).

The Aspen Institute is an international club of local elites, businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians, with franchises in several countries. Tarun Das is the president of the Aspen Institute, India. Gautam Thapar is chairman. Several senior officers of the McKinsey Global Institute (proposer of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor) are members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, and the Aspen Institute.

The Ford Foundation (liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller Foundation, though the two work together constantly) was set up in 1936. Though it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear, well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US State Department. Its project of deepening democracy and “good governance” is very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardizing business practice and promoting efficiency in the free market. After the Second World War, when communists replaced fascists as the US Government’s Enemy Number One, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal with the Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a military think tank that began with weapons research for the US defense services. In 1952, to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to penetrate and disrupt free nations,” it established the Fund for the Republic, which then morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, whose brief was to wage the Cold War intelligently, without McCarthyite excesses. It is through this lens that we need to view the work that the Ford Foundation is doing with the millions of dollars it has invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers, and activists, its generous endowment of university courses and scholarships.

The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind” include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and internationally. In the United States it provided millions in grants and loans to support the credit union movement that was pioneered by the department store owner Edward Filene in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was a more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion and, by disbursing “affordable” loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.

Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. The poor of the subcontinent have always lived in debt, in the merciless grip of the local village usurer—the Baniya. But microfinance has corporatized that too. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—two hundred people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an eighteen-year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last 150 rupees, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note read, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”

There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.

how the ford foundation created multiculturalism

Frontpagemag | Editor’s Note: One of the largest and most dangerous concentrations of unchecked power in the United States is the Ford Foundation with discretionary spending power that rivals that of government. It is spending power moreover, for the political left and often the hard left. As a public service Frontpage Magazine is devoting a series of articles to the malign influence of Ford. The story posted below, which originally appeared in Heterodoxy magazine, reveals Ford’s crucial role in creating the ideological movement called “multiculturalism” in our universities. -- David Horowitz.

The Pasadena Doubletree is an unlikely site for a conspiracy. The elegant pink structure is sumptuously landscaped and fragrant breezes circulate in the spacious courtyards even on the sultry afternoons of Southern California's Indian Summer. And the dozens of scholars from campuses all over the country who met here late last month did not look like revolutionaries. But behind closed doors of the meeting rooms, the conference of "Cultural Diversity Enhancement" had the tone of one of those "by any means necessary" conventions staged by SDS in the late 60s. The subject was how to turn American higher education inside out. It was sponsored by the Ford Foundation, whose strategy for a radical transformation of the university one critic has called "the academic equivalent of an 'ethnic cleansing.'"

In an afternoon session entitled "Restructuring the University," spokespersons summarized the thinking of the workshops that had taken place earlier that morning. Robert Steele, a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan, noted that his group was aware that coercion would be required to change the university: "People will not be quietly assimilated to multiculturalism by truth through dialogue." They will have to be bought off as well as brought along. Steele described the terms of the deal: "You get research assistants, you give mentoring." In other words, using the largesse of Ford and other philanthropic institutions, advocates of multiculturalism convince the hesitant to join up by paying for research assistants. These assistants — mentors of multiculturalism — must be women or people of color. "We will have changed the university when women and people of color can see themselves running the place," Steele concluded.

Steele was followed by Jonathan Lee, a Philosophy Professor at Colorado College, who began by reporting that the workshop he represented had wondered if "consensus was an appropriate goal." That is, should advocates of multiculturalism act as a popular front or a vanguard? One of Lee's prescriptions for success was to "divorce courses from instructors" — that is, conceive and institute courses without regard to those who would be doing the teaching. Continuing in this vein. Lee reported that his group had considered the question, "Is the multicultural approach an adaptation or a revolutionary transformation? They had come down on the side of the more radical position: "At stake in multiculturalism is a direct challenge to privatized teaching, to privatized work and to privatized life." Even science, the one area so far immune to this radical transformation, would have to change, according to Lee: "Instead of teaching science as a doctrine divorced from its social context, we could teach science from a historical, economic perspective."

The final speaker was Eve Grossman, a Princeton dean, who said that her group had worried about tenure: "If we want to restructure the university, tenure stands in the way." She said that her group was aware that promotion and tenure were predicated on "discipline-based" research. Therefore "When we talk about changing things, we're really talking about something no less radical than changing disciplines." Grossman made it clear that her group of thinkers had kept their eyes on the prize: "If we want to change the world, we have to change the students."

As the session adjourned and the participants got ready to leave for a multicultural reception at the Asia-Pacific Center across the street from the Doubletree ("an important meeting place for the cultures of East and West"), it was hard not to feel a sense of unreality. How did the biggest foundation in the world get into the business of academic revolution? Why was Ford pushing so hard for the deconstruction of American higher education?

seriously, not even a single solitary 1% perp from israel or the u.s. in this spectre leak?!?!?!

winteractionables |  Curiously, in the initial illustration when you click by country, not a single individual from the United States or Israel is listed.

Clearly, this kind of leak is subject to tremendous abuse in the hands of a Crime Syndicate controlled media. ICIJ Mansu Shrestha who “leaked” the files, is directly funded by the Open Society Foundations of George Soros.

Recent ICIJ funders include: Adessium Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Omidyar, Oak Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and Waterloo Foundation,  Atlantic Philanthropies of New York, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, David B. Gold Foundation, Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
Rockefeller Family Fund, The Stanley Foundation, Law Office of Steven Birnbaum, Isadore Sadie Dorin Foundation, The Grodzins Fund, Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, Michael and Ina Korek Foundation Trust, The Harman Rasnow and Eleanor Rasnow Trust, Rotberg Comens Bray Foundation, Skeist Family Charitable Trust

Who Funds Black Lives Matter?

WSWS  |  Last summer, the Ford Foundation, one of the most powerful private foundations in the world, announced that it was organizing to channel $100 million to the Black Lives Movement over the next six years.

“By partnering with Borealis Philanthropy, Movement Strategy Center and Benedict Consulting to found the Black-Led Movement Fund, Ford has made six-year investments in the organizations and networks that compose the Movement for Black Lives,” according to the Ford Foundation web site. In a statement of support, Ford called for the group to grow and prosper. “We want to nurture bold experiments and help the movement build the solid foundation that will enable it to flourish.”

In the wake of the monetary commitment by the big-business foundation network, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has explicitly embraced black capitalism. It appears the group is now well positioned to cash in on the well-known #BLM Twitter hashtag. Announcing its first “big initiative for 2017,” BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors stated that it would be partnering with the Fortune 500 New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT) to create “the biggest and most easily accessible black business database in the country.”

BLM joins the ranks of prestigious JWT clientele including HSBC Bank, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Shell Oil. JWT also represents the US Marine Corps. CEO Lynn Power suggested that the BLM partnership would provide the advertising firm with an opportunity to “shape culture positively.” “I am really glad that our partnership with Black Lives Matter is giving us the opportunity to play a truly active role,” she enthused.

The joint project, Backing Black Business, is a nationwide interactive map of black-owned enterprises. This virtual Google-based directory has nothing to do with opposing police violence, from which Black Lives Matter ostensibly emerged. Cullors nevertheless portrayed the venture as enabling blacks to have “somewhere for us to go and feel seen and safe,” concluding, “In these uncertain times, we need these places more than ever.”

Such developments may come as a surprise to those who embraced the sentiment that “black lives matter” because they saw it as an oppositional rebuke to the militarization of police and the disproportionate police murder of African Americans. Many did not realize that the political aims and nature of Black Lives Matter were of an entirely different nature.

In fact, the election of Donald Trump has served to put even more distance between the large layers of workers and young people opposed to police violence and the privileged upper middle class layer that Black Lives Matter represents. The latter, developments have shown, are leveraging #BLM as a brand to make a name for themselves, find lucrative sinecures and, more generally, get on the gravy train.

BLM’s most recent scheme is even more crass than Backing Black Business. In February, BLM launched a “black debit card” underwritten by OneUnited Bank. “A historic partnership has been born between OneUnited Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the country, and #BlackLivesMatter to organize the $1.2 trillion in spending power of Black people and launch the Amir card during Black History Month,” boasts OneUnited’s web site.

is j.p. morgan getting a good return on its invesment?

Video - NYPD's infamous Brooklyn Bridge barrelfish tactic.

NakedCapitalism | No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

Perhaps I remember too much of the scruffy and not exactly safe New York City of the 1980s, where getting your wallet pinched was a pretty regular occurrence. My perception has been that police-related charities have relied overmuch on the never-stated notion that if you didn’t donate, you might not get the speediest response if you needed help. As a mere apartment-dweller, I can’t imagine that anyone could scan incoming 911 calls against a priority list. But the flip side is if I owned a retail store and thought the beat police would keep an extra eye on it if I gave to a police charity, it would seem like an awfully cheap form of insurance.

But what, pray tell, is this about? The JPM money is going directly from the foundation to the NYPD proper, not to, say, cops injured in the course of duty or police widows and orphans. But that is how the NYPD Police Foundation works. From its website:

The New York City Police Foundation, Inc. was established in 1971 by business and civic leaders as an independent, non-profit organization to promote excellence in the NYPD and improve public safety in New York City.

The Police Foundation supports programs designed to help the NYPD keep pace with rapidly evolving technology, strategies and training.

The New York City Police Foundation:

Provides resources that are not readily available through other means – to date over $100 million has been invested in 400+ innovative NYPD programs;

Serves as a vehicle for tax-exempt gifts and grants from individuals, businesses, and philanthropies;

Is the first municipal foundation of its kind in the country, and serves as a model for similar organizations in other cities;

Is the only organization authorized to raise funds on behalf of the NYPD and;

Does not solicit by telephone or use telemarketers.

The Police Foundation works closely with the Police Commissioner to develop a strategic program agenda. The Foundation encourages and supports NYPD programs in two main areas:

Projects, research studies, and equipment to improve the effectiveness of police activities; and

Education, training and skill development to strengthen the partnership between the police and the public.

Given when the NYC Police Foundation was formed, it looked to have been a desperate move during New York City’s fiscal crisis (remember the infamous headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead”?) When I moved to the city in 1981, pretty much everyone I knew who lived in a non-doorman building had suffered a break-in. Guiliani’s reputation was built on cleaning up a perceived-to-be unsafe city (which he did by hiring William Bratton). Even in the later 1980s, when I lived in a townhouse on 69th between Park and Madison (translation: good neighborhood), I’d be the first out of the building in the AM. The inner door to the townhouse was locked, the outer one was closed but unlocked. I’d always have to navigate my way out carefully so as not to waken the homeless person sleeping in the vestibule.

So while this effort to supplement taxpayer funding has a certain logic, it raises the nasty specter of favoritism, that if private funding were to become a significant part of the Police Department’s total budget, it would understandably give priority to its patrons.

And look at the magnitude of the JP Morgan “gift”. The Foundation has been in existence for 40 years. If you assume that the $100 million it has received over that time is likely to mean “not much over $100 million” this contribution could easily be 3-4% of the total the Foundation have ever received.

Now readers can point out that this gift is bupkis relative to the budget of the police department, which is close to $4 billion. But looking at it on a mathematical basis likely misses the incentives at work. Dimon is one of the most powerful and connected corporate leaders in Gotham City. If he thinks the police donation was worthwhile, he might encourage other bank and big company CEOs to make large donations.

And what sort of benefits might JPM get?

Fist tap Uncle John.

V - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

Preface: This is the 5th of what should conclude as a 6 post series on what appears to me to be a serious effort on the part of the U.S. Establishment to re-ignite eugenic ideology and policy in the American public sphere. This post is about the pernicious long term effect of the systematic application and use of strategic capital to drive popular belief and public policy.

Once upon a time, my man Cobb constructed a race man's home companion. In it, you could find extremely useful and fairly comprehensive information resources like this handy overview of eugenic point sources in the 20th century.

Somewhere between then and now, brah'man let the sharp edge of his vigilance fall off. I can't explain it to you, and I don't expect him to either. This post isn't about him. Rather, it's about the insidious way in which conscious political discourse can be infected, manipulated and ultimately undermined by determined, well funded, and persistent partisans whose backers have taken the long view of politics. Please recall that this was my starting point for questioning the unseemly behavior of the NY Times serving as a platform for neo-eugenic propaganda.

Under the pretense of a column about the convergence of science, technology, and society - Amy Harmon gave a validating mainstream platform and broad national and international distribution to the racist pseudo-scientific blather of an anonymous racist blogger. As one knucklehead at that blog noted;

Nevertheless, she did it, and an imprimatur from the New York Times along with evidence of specific genetic differences is an immensely valuable thing for the debate. I sent the article to a lot of friends, and it really opens up the dialogue. Of course there is still some doublethink to it, but Rome wasn't built in a day. This is a major attitude shift for most people, and there is a lot of race guilt to overcome.

No one seriously expects the NY Times to function as an organ of the most regressive and racist politics in America. To hear conservative talk radio tell it, the NY Times is a left leaning organ of progressive politics, actively engaged in the defeat of "traditional" American interests. To all intents and purposes, both Amy Harmon, and the Times are above reproach. But are they?

A little over a year ago, I had a vigorous set to with Bro. Bowen when he called me out for his First Annual Internet Racist Hunt. Some of the things he wrote then remain instructive;

I basically have no patience with the theory of racism as background radiation left over from the dark ages that selectively infects whitepeople leaving everyone else on the planet unaffected. There are either specific identifiable sources of racist thought which can be objectively dealt with, or not. Basic empirical scientific method.....

I'm talking about ideological racists who are trying to exert influence over Americans as intellectuals, pundits, policy wonks and otherwise trying to literally establish racial policy in American institutions.

I don't think any of them has the political clout required to undo non-discrimination law, but some are trying and some would like to. I'm also talking about racial separatists and people who delight in speculation over racial conflict. People who are overly concerned about the survival of their race or generally see racial conflict as an inevitable biological fact. People who argue very strongly for or against race mixing, ie would like to see some race biologically destroyed.

I believe I met the challenge as he asserted it at that time. The Southern Poverty Law Center certainly indicates that I did - particularly and rather spectacularly in the case of Kevin T. Lamb (scroll down the SPLC page linked) who was a clear nexus connecting hardcore racists with mainstream conservatism. The trouble for those of us on the side of social justice and democratic ideals is that keeping track of racist and eugenic point sources backed by strategic capital to influence popular belief and political policy is a full-time job. Finding and outing these elements is the kind of tiring and thankless task that will wear you out and make you drop your guard.

I believe that that's principally what has happened with Bro. Bowen, i.e., basically he's hung up his vigilant spurs. In certain regards, I don't blame him because there are plenty enough crackpots under the Black partisan banner who forget about the human essentialist core of the undertaking. But weariness aside, it's a job that has to be done because there's entirely too much at stake. Sadly, as the exchange with David Mills bore out, many Black folks have ignorantly or uncritically internalized some deeply pernicious and profoundly unscientific beliefs and this has further compounded the difficulty of the challenge at hand. My former Vision Circle blogmate Ed Brown addressed this issue this past week.

A new Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 40 percent of Blacks think "blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race."

The phrasing of that bothers me. It's as if a "poor" Black person is considered to be a different "race" than a "not poor" Black person. It should be stated that 40% of Blacks are acknowledging class differences. Or better yet, that people are now recognizing class differences and are finally being ASKED about it.

Or maybe not. I'm still thinking... Marinading....

A “Negro” said it! - is a favorite and very effective tactic of the conservative right. It boils down to utilizing a small group of “captive negroes” to say things which otherwise would be considered racist - and to provide cover for white conservatives (”My best friend is a Negro!).

In any oppressed community it’s possible to find folks who are so psychologically damaged that they will work against the very community they come from. Whether selling heroin on street corners to neighborhood kids, or pandering the right’s need for Negroes to provide racial cover - the dynamic and morality are the same. A good article on how the conservative racist right utilizes these folks:

Bashing Black folks is a $40 -100 million industry, funded by the very same folks who fund the conservative movement. Like the enticement of “easy money” in the drug industry, negro conservatives willing to front for “the Man”, can rake in salaries and book sales in excess of $250,000 a year. Indeed, the bashing black folks industry can provide the black conservative far more media and ego polishing recognition than they are ever going to earn in their field of study through quantitative accomplishments.

Having briefly touched upon the pedigree of the silicon valley ku klux kali in installment IV of this series - I'll leave you to connect the dots between this especially noxious fat bastard - Mr. Wardell Connerly - and the bigoted backers providing him with the strategic capital to do his long term dirty work. Wardell is the deliverable work product of precisely that northern california element of the U.S. Establishment that has had us in its eugenic crosshairs for generations.

In his most recent anti Black partisan article, Cobb gave undeserved dap to Wardell as an agent of Black nationalist demise;

What's so laughable about it is that only the Socialists and the Commies, as well as throroughly mau-maued dowagers like Jane Fonda bought into this program for any reasonable duration. What a pity. It's rather pathetic to see how somebody as mediocre as Ward Connorly could absolutely devastate the black nationalist agenda by deracinating public institutions. It only goes to show how dependent black nationalists are on the welfare state. Malcolm is spinning in his grave, and you're mouthing psychobabble about prestige-dependency. Who's really the dependent one?

Connerly is not an agent of anybody's political demise, he's an instrument of a much larger institutional agenda systematically carried out over an extended period of time. Absent a clear understanding of the immense strategic capital afforded this icon of Black disenfranchisement - Cobb asserts that a lowly mediocrity has taken out both Affirmative Action and "the" Black nationalist agenda - without any consideration given to the sustained, long-term, generous backing of explicitly racist elements of the U.S. Establishment. No political statement could be further from the truth. Wardell was not the architect of the process most closely identified with him, rather, he is simply the very handsomely compensated mouthpiece for this process, providing it with indispensible memetic camoflauge...,

Much “mainstream” racism is funded by 4 Foundations – variously called the “4 Sisters”.

Wardell Connerly gets his grip from these folks;

• Scaife Family Foundations

The Scaife Family Foundations. Sarah Scaife, Carthage and Allegheny are funded by industrial tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited $200 million from his mother in the 1960s. He was a presidential appointment of the U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Scaife gave former U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese $1.9 million to start PLF. Between 1985 and 2005, Scaife gave more than $4.5 million to PLF. He is the primary supporter of the Heritage Foundation, of which he is a trustee and Meese a former staff member. Many Heritage Foundation staff members held or hold high-ranking federal positions, including current Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and former U.S. Civil Rights Commission (UCCR) staff director and Manhattan Institute fellow Linda Chavez, founder of the right-wing Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO).

Scaife funds Connerly’s ACRI, Chavez’s CEO, and the Center for Individual Rights, which together comprise the triumvirate leading the campaign to end affirmative action. Other major grant recipients include the National Association of Scholars, co-author of Prop. 209, which banned affirmative action in California, and the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research. UCCR Vice Chair Abigail Thernstrom, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, is on the board of the Equal Opportunity Foundation, which directs funding for CEO.

• Castle Rock Foundation

Coors Brewing Co.’s support for anti-gay groups led to a 10-year boycott led by AFL-CIO in 1977. Pressured to reform, Coors began funding black and Latino groups through the Adolph Coors Foundation and became one of the first companies to offer domestic-partner benefits to employees in 1995. In 1993, the Coors family created Castle Rock to separate the Coors name from its conservative agenda. The Castle Rock and Adolph Coors Foundations have the same board of directors, the same staff and the same address.

Coors co-owner Joseph Coors founded and financed the conservative Heritage Foundation, which later received most of its support from Richard Mellon Scaife. Coors was a Heritage trustee until March 2003. Ambassador Holland Coors, President Reagan’s appointment to the National Year of the Americas, has been on the board since 1998. Major grant recipients include the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the Institute for Justice, which was founded by anti-affirmative-action leader Clint Bolick, a disciple of ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Castle Rock gave PLF $340,000 between 1985 and 2005. Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a right-wing legal advocacy group founded in 1973, represents the Seattle parents in the recent Supreme Court case eliminating even voluntary integration. In 2001, PLF represented Ward Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and provided pro-bono counsel to then Calif. Gov. Pete Wilson in a successful effort to expand the scope of Prop. 209, which banned affirmative action in public education, employment and contracting.

• Olin Foundation

The New York-based John M. Olin Foundation grew out of a family-owned chemical and munitions manufacturing business. The foundation, which dissolved in 2005, was charged with spending all assets within a generation of Olin’s death, lest its mission be altered. Grant recipients included CEO, the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the Manhattan Institute. Specifically, Olin funded the research of CEO founder Linda Chavez and former Secretary of Education William Bennett.

When former Olin Foundation President Michael Joyce left to run the Bradley Foundation, William Simon, who was secretary of the treasury for Nixon and Ford, took over. Joyce had worked under Simon at a neoconservative think-tank prior to joining Olin, and it was Simon who asked him to take the helm at Bradley. Olin gave PLF $669,000 between 1985 and 2005.

• Bradley Foundation

The Allen-Bradley Company, a manufacturer of electronic and radio equipment, was one of the last major Milwaukee-based companies to racially integrate, which it did only under legal pressure. In 1968, the company had 7,000 employees, only 32 of whom were black and 14 Latino. When the Allen-Bradley company was sold in 1985, the name of the foundation was changed to the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation to separate the company name from its conservative cause.

Bradley is the principal supporter of Connerly’s ACRI. ACRI co-chair Thomas Rhodes is on the Bradley board of directors. Bradley Foundation President Michael Joyce, formerly with the Olin Foundation, served on President Reagan’s transition team and other presidential commissions and worked closely with William Bennett prior to his appointment as Secretary of Education.

The foundation gives to the Institute for Justice, where founder Clint Bolick drafted a federal bill to eliminate affirmative action. Other major grant recipients include the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the American Enterprise Institute, a literary outlet for conservative thinkers such as William Bennett and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who will take part in deciding the Seattle case this December. Bradley gave PLF $327,000 between 1985 and 2005.

Attacks from eugenically minded, conservative instruments play on a few basic themes:

Black Dysfunctionality - That black folks are less intelligent, perform worse on tests, have lower educational indicators, commit more crime, etc. Where numbers don’t exist to support the premise, they make them up, and/or selectively parse data to support their points.

Here are the principal funders of eugenic racism actively operating at the convergence of science, technology, and society. In the last installment, I'll address myself to some of the leading "scientific" instruments working in support of this cause.

the war you don't see - redux

John Pilger in conversation with Julian Assange from John Pilger on Vimeo.

quoth Jay Hanson:

This is good in the same tradition as Adam Curtis' videos. It has a dozen or so interviews with media people. It contains a long interview with Julian Assange. Here is the gist.

Everyone in the media and government works for large corporations that demand endless economic growth. The public is a problem that must be dealt with.

If you are a reporter who tells the truth, you won't have access and you can't do your job. Corporations demand that everyone in the media (e.g., Fox News) and government (e.g., Colin Powell) must lie to the people. This explains why we invaded Iraq on a sea of lies. Every decision in our government and the media is an economic calculation.

Assange said he saw several analogies to "money laundering" in government. Money laundering is moving money to a location where normal laws do not apply.

Guantanamo is "people laundering." We send people to places where normal laws do not apply.

Besides the obvious oil interest, Iraq Afghanistan, and Columbia are "taxpayer money laundering" -- ways to divert taxpayer money to corporate friends, who in turn, will give some of it back to the politicians who sent us to those wars. Every decision in our government is an economic calculation.

Everything our government does is about money and profit.

Economic interests (e.g., American arms dealers) will force us to fight a new world war over resources.

Our government will attack and kill anyone who stands in the way of corporate profit.

Information Clearinghouse | The Strange Silencing of Liberal America

Obama's greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US.

July 07, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot's horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant's rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.

Six months later, a PBS official told me: "This wasn't censorship. We're into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry."

In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word "ban" was rarely used, and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.

The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation's website says it is "dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity". Authors, film-makers and poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.

The foundation also awards "grants" to America's liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio programme Democracy Now!. In Britain, it has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Patrick Lannan backed Barack Obama's presidential campaign. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is "devoted" to Obama.

World of not-knowing

On 15 June, I was due in Santa Fe, having been invited to share a platform with the distinguished American journalist David Barsamian. The foundation was also to host the US premiere of my new film, The War You Don't See, which investigates the false image-making of warmakers, especially Obama.I was about to leave for Santa Fe when I received an email from the Lannan Foundation official organising my visit. The tone was incredulous. "Something has come up," she wrote. Patrick Lannan had called her and ordered all my events to be cancelled. "I have no idea what this is all about," she wrote.Baffled, I asked that the premiere of my film be allowed to go ahead, as the US distribution largely depended on it. She repeated that "all" my events were cancelled, "and this includes the screening of your film".

On the Lannan Foundation website, "cancelled" appeared across a picture of me. There was no explanation. None of my phone calls was returned, nor subsequent emails answered. A Kafka world of not-knowing descended.The silence lasted a week until, under pressure from local media, the foundation put out a terse statement that too few tickets had been sold to make my visit "viable", and that "the Foundation regrets that the reason for the cancellation was not explained to Mr Pilger or to the public at the time the decision was made". Doubts were cast by a robust editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The paper, which has long played a prominent role in promoting Lannan Foundation events, disclosed that my visit had been cancelled before the main advertising and previews were published. A full-page interview with me had to be pulled hurriedly. "Pilger and Barsamian could have expected closer to a packed 820-seat Lensic [arts centre]."The manager of The Screen, the Santa Fe cinema that had been rented for the premiere, was called late at night and told to kill all his online promotion for my film. He was given no explanation, but took it on himself to reschedule the film for 23 June. It was a sell-out, with many people turned away. The idea that there was no public interest was demonstrably not true.

Symptom of suppression

Theories? There are many, but nothing is proven. For me, it is all reminiscent of long shadows cast during the cold war. "Something is going to surface," said Barsamian. "They can't keep the lid on this."My 15 June talk was to have been about the collusion of American liberalism in a permanent state of war and in the demise of cherished freedoms, such as the right to call governments to account.

In the US, as in Britain, serious dissent -- free speech -- has been substantially criminalised. Obama the black liberal, the PC exemplar, the marketing dream, is as much a warmonger as George W Bush. His score is six wars. Never in US presidential history has the White House prosecuted so many whistleblowers, yet this truth-telling, this exercise of true citizenship, is at the heart of America's constitutional First Amendment. Obama's greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US, including the anti-war movement.

The reaction to the cancellation has been illuminating. The brave, such as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, were appalled and said so. Similarly, many ordinary Americans called in to radio stations and have written to me, recognising a symptom of far greater suppression. But some exalted liberal voices have been affronted that I dared whisper the word censorship about such a beacon of "cultural freedom". The embarrassment of those who wish to point both ways is palpable. Others have pulled down the shutters and said nothing. Given their patron's ruthless show of power, it is understandable.

For them, the Russian dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote: "When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."

“The War You Don’t See” is available on www.johnpilger.com

General Oliver Otis Howard Was A White Union General And Head Of The Freedmen's Bureau

WSWS  |  New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Instead, Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.

Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.

According to a university press release, the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing.”

The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring racial conflict between blacks and whites.

Hannah-Jones’ lead essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than a garden-variety racist. 

The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site, in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by Hannah-Jones.

Her other writings have descended into outright racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.

America Caught In A Police State Pincer Movement

alt-market  |  The establishment supports social justice violence and unrest, and is cracking down hard on any resistance to medical tyranny. The hypocrisy is evident.

But this brings up some questions; such as why they are so keen to allow the BLM riots to continue? As noted at the beginning of this article, I think the strategy is evident – It's a two pronged attempt, a bait and switch: If the Marxists are successful and meet little resistance from the public then they will tear down the current system, and the elitists institutions that fund them like George Soros's Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation will use the opportunity to build an Orwellian collectivist society from the ashes.

On the other hand, as in Germany in the 1930s, the civil unrest caused by hard left groups could also convince the general public that martial law measures are an acceptable solution and make them willing to sacrifice constitutional protections in order to rid themselves of the threat. There have been examples of this recently when federal agents initiated black bagging of protester in Portland using unmarked vans; all I saw from most conservatives was cheering. This would undoubtedly lead to a long term totalitarian structure that, once again, benefits the elites that inhabit every aspect of government including Trump's White House.

In both cases, the power elites get what they want – a police state.

In terms of the pandemic response, a police state is already being established in many nations, and with most Western people's predominantly disarmed there is little chance they will be able to resist the crackdown that will ensue as they try to protest the restrictions. But what about in America?

This is why it does not surprise me that the BLM riots are being encouraged so openly in the US. Look at it this way: If the elites cannot get us to go along with medical tyranny for fear of sparking an armed uprising from conservatives with actual training and ability, then they figure maybe they can trick us into supporting martial law in the name of defeating the political left.

The only solution is to refuse to support either option. We must repel the establishment of medical tyranny and stand against any overstep of state and federal governments against the constitution when it comes to protests. Riots and looting can be dealt with, and dealt with within the confines of the Bill of Rights. Also, once again I would point out that in almost every place where armed citizens organize and take up security measures in their communities the protests remain peaceful, or they don't happen at all.

There is no legitimate excuse for a police state. There is always another way. Anyone that tells you different has an agenda of their own.

Generally POTUS Don't Do Stunts - But The CIA Guy Thinks This Could Be An Exception....,

covertactionmagazine |  Obama and his handlers effectively covered up the truth about Obama’s family history.

They marketed Obama as a multi-racial candidate whose sensitivity to divergent cultures around the world would help restore America’s international reputation following the Bush years.

In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama presents his mother as a 1960s rebel and beatnik who partook in civil rights protests, opposed the Vietnam War, married outside her race twice, and decided to devote her career to setting up micro-lending projects for poor women in Indonesia and later Pakistan whose language and culture she absorbed.^[16]

Obama claimed that his mother did not know about the countless atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is implausible given her background and the fact that they were reported on by mainstream newspapers at the time—favorably.

Of further significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.^[17]

Regarding his own story, Obama has promoted falsehoods at every step.

In A Promised Land, he neglects to mention that, after graduating Columbia University in 1983, he worked for about a year for Business International Corporation (BIC), a Manhattan-based consulting house to multinational corporations, where his job was to edit newsletters on business conditions in countries around the world.

Headed by a close friend of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Jr., the former Governor of Minnesota who was involved with Humphrey in the purge of suspected communists in the Farmer-Labor Party, BIC had functioned as a CIA front.

Its sub-specialty was in recruiting left-wing organizers to use as assets, and in infiltrating foreign labor unions with the goal of promoting disruptions in targeted economies.

An activist with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) described BIC as the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress (Marshall Plan for Latin America): “They’re the left-wing of the ruling class.”^[18]

Besides underplaying his employment with BIC, Obama in his writings omits the fact that his work as a community organizer was for the Gamaliel Foundation, a satellite of his mother’s old employer the Ford Foundation, whose underlying aim was to prevent class solidarity and the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inter-racial poor people’s movement.^[19]

Obama further leaves out that as an Illinois state senator, he partook in pay-to-play schemes granting favors to political donors like slumlord Tony Rezko who helped him purchase his Hyde Park mansion for below market value, and the CEO of a technology firm, Robert Blacwell Jr., who paid Obama $112,000 in legal fees for work that appears impossible for him to have done.

Obama’s timeline for his life story, meanwhile, is often wrong. In A Promised Land, for example, he claims to have spent three years in New York after transferring from Occidental College to Columbia after his sophomore year; however, it is believed that Obama spent the 1981-1982 school year in Pakistan and only studied at Columbia for one year.^[20]

Gatekeeping and Permitted Discourse Productions The Perils of Philanthropy

CounterPunch |  Much has been said and written over the years about early elite philanthropic interventions into the civil rights movement, but the first book to treat this topic seriously was Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Doubleday, 1969). As Allen noted in the introduction to his timeless treaty on power and resistance:

“In the United States today a program of domestic neo-colonialism is rapidly advancing. It was designed to counter the potentially revolutionary thrust of the recent black rebellions in major cities across the country. This program was formulated by America’s corporate elite – the major owners, managers, and directors of the giant corporations, banks, and foundations which increasingly dominate the economy and society as a whole – because they believe that the urban revolts pose a serious threat to economic and social stability. Led by organizations as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and the National Alliance of Businessmen, the corporatists are attempting with considerable success to co-opt the black power movement. Their strategy is to equate black power with black capitalism.” (pp.17-8)

Allen defined his use of the word co-opt in this way: “to assimilate militant leaders and militant rhetoric while subtly transforming the militants’ program for social change into a program which in essence buttresses the status quo.” (p.17) This co-optive function of philanthropic largesse applied across the board to all manner of progressive movements, as illustrated by Professor Joan Roelofs in her important book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (2003).

We should recall that in February 1965 Malcolm X had been gunned-down in a “factional dispute” which the FBI took credit for having “developed” within the Nation of Islam — a conspiracy elaborated upon within the book The Assassination of Malcolm X. Moreover it turned out that at the time of his murder one of Malcolm’s personal bodyguards, Eugene Roberts, had actually been working for the New York Police Department’s “subversives” unit which itself worked closely with COINTELPRO operatives; while in later years Roberts went on to serve as a infiltrating “charter member” of the New York Chapter of the Black Panther Party.

As an insightful and charismatic leader, Malcolm X was killed precisely because of his rising influence among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Speaking in November 1963, shortly before his break with the National of Islam, he accused white liberals of dressing up the anointed leaders of the civil rights movement to use them as house Negroes. He drew particular attention to the manner why which millionaire elites like Stephen Currier – who before his own early death helped set up the Urban Coalition — has acted to take control of the March on Washington which had taken place in the summer. After outlining these co-optive actions Malcolm famously surmised:

“It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it’ll put you to sleep. This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn’t integrate it; they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.”

After splitting from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm spent the last year of his life planning and strategizing about how to end injustice in ways that departed from his earlier commitment to Black Nationalism.

What Would The Black Panthers Think Of Black Lives Matter?

truthdig  |  The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.—Martin Luther King Jr., 1968

You don’t have to be one of those conspiratorial curmudgeons who reduces every sign of popular protest to “George Soros money” to acknowledge that much of what passes for popular and progressive, grass-roots activism has been co-opted, taken over and/or created by corporate America, the corporate-funded “nonprofit industrial complex,” and Wall Street’s good friend, the Democratic Party, long known to leftists as “the graveyard of social movements.” This “corporatization of activism” (University of British Columbia professor Peter Dauvergne’s term) is ubiquitous across much of what passes for the left in the U.S. today.

What about the racialist group Black Lives Matter, recipient of a mammoth $100 million grant from the Ford Foundation last year? Sparked by the racist security guard and police killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Eric Garner, BLM has achieved uncritical support across the progressive spectrum, where it is almost reflexively cited as an example of noble and radical grass-roots activism in the streets. That is a mistake.

I first started wondering where BLM stood on the AstroTurf versus grass roots scale when I read an essay published three years ago in The Feminist Wire by Alicia Garza, one of BLM’s three black, lesbian and veteran public-interest careerist founders. In her “Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Garza wrote: “Black lives. Not just all lives. Black lives. Please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too. It does, but we need less watered down unity and a more active solidarities with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it.”

Denouncing “hetero-patriarchy,” Garza described the adaptation of her clever online catchphrase (“black lives matter”) by others—“brown lives matter, migrant lives matter, women’s lives matter, and on and on” (Garza’s dismissive words)—as “the Theft of Black Queer Women’s Work.”

“Perhaps,” she added, “if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story.”

From a leftist perspective, this struck me as alarming. Why the prickly, hyperidentity-politicized and proprietary attachment to the “lives matter” phrase? Garza seemed more interested in brand value and narrow identity than social justice. Did she want a licensing fee? Wouldn’t any serious, leftist, people’s activist eagerly give the catchy “lives matter” phrase away to all oppressed people and hope for their wide and inclusive use in a viciously capitalist society that has subjected everything and everyone to the soulless logic of commodity rule, profit and exchange value? Who were these “charismatic Black men many are rallying around” in the fall of 2014?

And how representative were Garza’s slaps at “hetero-patriarchy” and “charismatic Black men” of the black community in whose name she spoke? Would it be too hetero-patriarchal of me, I wondered, to suggest that maybe a black male or two with experience of oppression in the nation’s racist criminal justice system ought to share some space front and center in a movement focused especially on a police and prison state that targets black boys and men above all?

I defended the phrase “black lives matter” against the absurd charge that it is racist, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the left-progressive credentials of anyone who gets upset that others would want to have a “conversation” (as Garza put it) about how their lives matter too. Is there really something wrong with a marginalized Native American laborer or a white and not-so “skin-privileged” former factory worker struggling with sickness and poverty wanting to hear that his or her life matters? For any remotely serious progressive, was there anything mysterious about the fact that many white folks facing foreclosure, job loss, poverty wages and the like might not be doing cartwheels over the phrase “black lives matter” when they experience the harsh daily reality that their lives don’t matter under the profits system?

My concerns about BLM’s potential service to the capitalist elite were reactivated when I heard a talk by Garza’s fellow BLM founder, Patrisse Cullors (another veteran nonprofit careerist). Cullors spoke before hundreds of cheering white liberals and progressives in downtown Iowa City in February. “We are witnessing the erosion of U.S. democracy,” she said, adding that Donald Trump “is building a police state.” Relating that she had gone into a “two-week depression” after Hillary Clinton was defeated by Trump, Cullors said she wondered if BLM had “done enough to educate people about the differences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.” She described Trump as a fascist.

Neoliberal Identitarianism - Race Discouse Displaces Political Economy

nonsite |  Black political debate and action through the early 1960s focused on concrete issues—employment, housing, wages, unionization, discrimination in specific venues and domains— rather than an abstract “racism.” It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, after the legislative victories that defeated southern apartheid and restored black Americans’ full citizenship rights, that “racism” was advanced as the default explanation for inequalities that appear as racial disparities. That view emerged from Black Power politics and its commitment to a race-first communitarian ideology that posited the standpoint of an idealized “black community” as the standard for political judgment, which Bayard Rustin predicted at the time would ensue only in creation of a “new black establishment.” It was ratified as a commonsense piety of racial liberalism by the Report of the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—popularly known as the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—which asserted that “white racism” was the ultimate source of the manifold inequalities the Report catalogued as well as the pattern of civil disturbances the commission had been empaneled to investigate.

Reduction of black politics to a timeless struggle against abstractions like racism and white supremacy or for others like freedom and liberation obscures the extent to which black Americans’ political activity has evolved and been shaped within broader American political currents. That view, which oscillates between heroic and tragic, overlooks the fact that the mundane context out of which racism became a default explanation, or alternative to explanation, for inequality, was a national debate over how to guide anti-poverty policy and the struggle for fair employment practices in the early 1960s. Left-of-center public attention to poverty and persistent unemployment at the beginning of the 1960s divided into two camps. One, represented most visibly by figures like Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, Senators Joseph Clark (D-PA) and Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN), United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, and black labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, argued that both phenomena stemmed from structural inadequacies in the postwar economy, largely the consequence of technological reorganization, especially in manufacturing. From that perspective, effectively addressing those conditions would require direct and large scale federal intervention in labor markets, including substantial investment in public works employment and skills-based, targeted job-training.

The other camp saw poverty and persistent unemployment as residual problems resulting from deficiencies of values, attitudes, and human capital (a notion then only recently popularized) in individuals and groups that hindered them from participating fully in a dynamic labor market rather than from inadequacies in overall economic performance. In that view, addressing poverty and persistent unemployment did not require major intervention in labor markets. A large tax cut intended to stimulate aggregate demand would eliminate unacceptably high rates of unemployment, and anti-poverty policy would center on fixing the deficiencies within residual populations. Job training would focus on teaching “job readiness”—attitudes and values—more than specific skills. Liberals connected to the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw chronic poverty as bound up with inadequate senses of individual and group efficacy rather than economic performance. That interpretation supported a policy response directed to enhancing the sense of efficacy among impoverished individuals and communities, partly through mobilization for civic action. The War on Poverty’s Community Action program gave that approach a militant or populist patina through its commitment to “grassroots” mobilization of poor people on their own behalf. In addition, Community Action Agencies and Model Cities projects facilitated insurgent black and Latino political mobilization in cities around the country, which reinforced a general sense of their radicalism. At the same time, however, those programs reinforced liberals’ tendencies to separate race from class and inequality from political economy and to substitute participation or representation for redistribution.

Both camps assumed that black economic inequality stemmed significantly from current and past discrimination. A consequential difference between them, though, was that those who emphasized the need for robust employment policies contended that much black unemployment resulted from structural economic factors that were beyond the reach of anti- discrimination efforts. To that extent, improving black Americans’ circumstances would require broader social-democratic intervention in the political economy, including significantly expanded social wage policy. As Randolph observed at the 1963 March on Washington, “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education—all forms of education.” The other camp, in line with then Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan’s Negro Family jeremiad, construed black unemployment and poverty as deriving from an ambiguous confluence of current discrimination and cultural pathologies produced by historical racism. For a variety of reasons having to do with both large politics and small, the latter vision won.

Adolph Reed: Elite Ratification Of Managerial "Authoriteh" Over The American Negroe Problem

thebaffler  |  The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.

The striking hostility to such a politics within the higher reaches of antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as black politics today is in fact a class politics: it is not interested in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a spate of recent media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social mobility—which is taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing. It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj Chetty, et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation that “reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.” These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.” That’s pretty thin gruel, warmed over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually redistributive policies at all.

In this context the pronounced animus trained on the figure of the “white savior” emerges as litmus test for the critical role of racial gatekeeper in respectable political discourse. The gatekeeping question has, for more than a century, focused on who speaks for black Americans and determines the “black agenda.” And the status of black leader, spokesperson, or “voice” has always been a direct function of contested class prerogative, dating back a century and more to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Specifically, the gatekeeping function is the obsession of the professional-managerial strata who pursue what Warren has described as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” How do “black leaders” become recognized? The answer is the same now as for Washington in the 1890s; recognition as a legitimate black leader, or “voice,” requires ratification by elite opinion-shaping institutions and individuals.

Gatekeeping hasn’t been the exclusive preoccupation of Bookerite conservatives or liberals like Du Bois. Even militant black nationalists and racial separatists like Marcus Garvey and the leaders of the Nation of Islam have pursued validation as black leaders from dominant white elites to support programs of racial “self-help” or uplift. From Black Power to Black Lives Matter, claimants to speak on behalf of the race have courted recognition from the Ford Foundation and other white-dominated nonprofit philanthropies and NGOs. And the emergence of cable news networks and the blogosphere have exponentially expanded the number and types of entities that can anoint race leaders and representative voices.

This new welter of platforms and voices seeking to promulgate and validate the acceptable terms of black leadership has made the category seem all the more beyond question, as black racial voices pop up all over the place all the time. So, for example, the self-proclaimed black voice Tia Oso was brought front and center in the 2015 Netroots Presidential Town Hall featuring Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, where she proclaimed that “black leadership must be foregrounded and central to progressive strategies.” Likewise, the presumed moral authority of race leadership enabled Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford to prevent Sanders from speaking at a Social Security rally in Seattle—as though the long-term viability of Social Security were not a black issue. The instant recourse to a posture of leadership is how random Black Lives Matter activists and a vast corps of pundits and bloggers are able to issue ex cathedra declarations about which issues are and are not pertinent to black Americans.

 

 

The Cathedral Bought All The Bass In Black Political Voices

Now, I been saying this for a minute. 

From Black Power to Black Studies

How the Ford Foundation Created Multiculturalism

Educating Americans in the Subtle Art of Imperial Domination

How Corporate Power Converted Wealth Into Philanthropy for Social Control

Once seen, the nature of this usurpation cannot be unseen. Black DOS (descendants of slaves) had a singularly potent claim under law against the American government. Some would argue the 2nd amendment to the Constitution, for sure the 14th amendment to the Constitution, Brown vs. Board, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act - are all signifiers of precisely how potent a claim that we Black DOS have had and continue to have - if we properly assert and actively resist efforts to denature our specific priority as claimants with unique standing under law to pursue our claims.

Intersectionality, beginning with;

1. The replacement negroe program under which 70 million immigrants have been brought into America to denature our hard fought political-economic standing
2. The cognitive infiltration of feminism into black politics  which saw white women overwhelmingly supplanting Black DOS as the overwhelming beneficiaries of affirmative action intended principally as an economic redress for legally ostracized Black descendants of slaves (Shockley and the 70's eugenics revival was a concrete specific political backlash against affirmative action) 
3. All the way up to gay marriage and transgender bathrooms 

is the bane and singularly potent antidote for the dilution of our singular legal claims.

Under the Cathedral and its permitted discourse insistence upon "intersectionality" - everybody and their cousin has a more "legitimate" and substantive political economic claim against the American government than Black DOS. Despite the indisputable fact that we comprise an exclusive historical phenomenon driving the evolution of citizen rights in the U.S., we find ourselves profoundly and paradoxically Left Behind the curve of the hard won gains we have made under law, but which we have lost in fact due to political gatekeeping and the complicity of "go along to get along" leadership.

This is where we stand at this particular moment in time. It's not a good look, but the long arc of history is far from complete, and as I've long asserted, As goes Blackness, so goes America. Fist tap MHicks.