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.

from black power to black studies...,

The black power movement helped redefine African Americans' identity and establish a new racial consciousness in the 1960s. As an influential political force, this movement in turn spawned the academic discipline known as Black Studies. Today there are more than a hundred Black Studies degree programs in the United States, many of them located in America's elite research institutions. In From Black Power to Black Studies, Fabio Rojas explores how this radical social movement evolved into a recognized academic discipline.

Rojas traces the evolution of Black Studies over more than three decades, beginning with its origins in black nationalist politics. His account includes the 1968 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College, the Ford Foundation's attempts to shape the field, and a description of Black Studies programs at various American universities. His statistical analyses of protest data illuminate how violent and nonviolent protests influenced the establishment of Black Studies programs. Integrating personal interviews and newly discovered archival material, Rojas documents how social activism can bring about organizational change.

Shedding light on the black power movement, Black Studies programs, and American higher education, this historical analysis reveals how radical politics are assimilated into the university system.

Wikipedia | One of the major setbacks with Black Studies/African American Studies Programs or departments is that there is a lack of financial resources available to student and faculty. Many universities and colleges around the country provided Black Studies programs with small budgets and therefore it is difficult for the department to purchase materials and staff. Because the budget allocated to Black Studies is limited some faculty are jointly appointed therefore, which causes faculty to leave their home disciplines to teach a discipline of which they may not familiar. Budgetary issues make it difficult for Black Studies Programs and departments to function, and promote themselves.

Racism perpetrated by many administrators hinders the institutionalization of Black Studies at major university. As with the case of UC Berkeley most of the Black Studies programs across the country were instituted because of the urging and demanding of black students to create the program. In many instances black students also called for the increased enrollment of black students and offer financial assistance to these students. Also seen in the case of UC Berkeley is the constant demand to have such a program, but place the power of control in the hands of black people. The idea was that black studies could not be “realistic” if it was not taught by someone who was not accustomed to the black experience. On many campuses directors of black studies have little to no autonomy—they do not have the power to hire or grant tenure to faculty. On many campuses an overall lack of respect for the discipline has caused instability for the students and for the program.

In the past thirty years there has been a steady decline of black scholars.

community forrestry in mexico

NYTimes | As an unforgiving midday sun bore down on the pine-forested mountains here, a half-dozen men perched across a steep hillside wrestled back mounds of weeds to uncover wisps of knee-high seedlings.

Freeing the tiny pines that were planted last year is only one step of many the town takes to nurture the trees until they grow tall, ready for harvesting in half a century. But the people of Ixtlán take the long view.

“We’re the owners of this land and we have tried to conserve this forest for our children, for our descendants,” Alejandro Vargas said, leaning on his machete as he took a break. “Because we have lived from this for many years.”

Three decades ago the Zapotec Indians here in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico fought for and won the right to communally manage the forest. Before that, state-owned companies had exploited it as they pleased under federal government concessions.

They slowly built their own lumber business and, at the same time, began studying how to protect the forest. Now, the town’s enterprises employ 300 people who harvest timber, produce wooden furniture and care for the woodlands, and Ixtlán has grown to become the gold standard of community forest ownership and management, international forestry experts say.

Mexico’s community forest enterprises now range from the mahogany forests of the Yucatán Peninsula to the pine-oak forests of the western Sierra Madre. About 60 businesses, including Ixtlán, are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council in Germany, which evaluates sustainable forestry practices. Between 60 and 80 percent of Mexico’s remaining forests are under community control, according to Sergio Madrid of the Mexican Civic Council for Sustainable Forestry.

“It’s astounding what’s going on in Mexico,” said David Barton Bray, an expert on community forestry at Florida International University who has studied Ixtlán.

The Mexican government plans to showcase its success in community forestry at the global climate talks in Cancún next week. Despite fractious negotiations over reducing carbon emissions, talks on paying developing countries to protect their forests have moved further ahead than most other issues.

In developing countries, where the rule of law is weak and enforcement spotty, simply declaring a forest off-limits does little to prevent illegal logging or clearing land for agriculture or development. “Unless local communities are committed to conserving and protecting forests it’s not going to happen,” said David Kaimowitz, a former director of the Center for International Forestry Research, or Cifor, who is now at the Ford Foundation. “Government can’t do it for them.”

A recent Cifor study reported that more than a quarter of the forests in developing countries are now being managed by local communities. The trend is worldwide — from China to Brazil.

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]

wikilieaks calls for panama papeles to be released in full

belfasttelegraph |  Mr Hrafnsson, who worked on the ‘Cablegate’ leak of diplomatic documents in 2010, suggested the withholding of documents is understandable to maximise the impact, but said that in the end the papers should be published in full for the public to access.

He told RT's Afshin Rattansi on Going Underground: "When they are saying this is responsible journalism, I totally disagree with the overall tone of that.

"I do have a sympathy to stalled releases, we certainly did that in WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011 with the Diplomatic Cables… but in the end the entire cache was put online in a searchable database.

"That is what I’d want to see with these Panama Papers, they should be available to the general public in such a manner so everybody, not just the group of journalists working on the data, can search it."

The reports are from a global group of news organisations working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

The consortium have been processing the legal records from the Mossack Fonseca law firm that were first leaked to the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

Shell companies are not necessarily illegal. People or companies might use them to reduce their tax bill legally, by benefiting from low tax rates in countries like Panama, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

But the practice is frowned upon, particularly when used by politicians, who then face criticism for not contributing to their own countries' economies.

Because offshore accounts and companies also hide the names of the ultimate owners of investments, they are often used to illegally evade taxes or launder money.

Presenter Rattansi mentions that the ICIJ is funded by the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment think tank, the Rockefellers and George Soros.

CIA Ford Foundation Architect of Multiculturalism

salon |  Identity politics was conceived and executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that must not invalidate the American version of identity politics. 

For example, because all identities are equally sacrosanct, we must not critique other cultures from an Enlightenment perspective; to each his own, and race is destiny, etc. (Which certainly validates the “alt-right,” doesn’t it?) This failure was noted by neoconservatives some decades ago, a breach into which they stepped with a vigorous assertion of nationalism that should have had no place in our polity after the reconsiderations brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. But it happened, just as a perverted form of white patriotism arose to fulfill the vacuum left by liberal rationality because of the constraints of identity politics. 

To conclude, identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic, primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of community across differences (which is the most ironic yet predictable result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman abstraction. 

This depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests, for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) — seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything, resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam. Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity politics for the duration of the imperial game.

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.

a new book release from the people who brought you the Obamamandian Candidate....,

brookings | On May 20, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings will host an event marking the release of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, co-authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube. They, along with some of the nation’s leading anti-poverty experts, including Luis Ubiñas, president of the Ford Foundation, and Bill Shore, founder and CEO of Share our Strength, will join leading local innovators from across the country to discuss a new metropolitan opportunity agenda for addressing suburban poverty, how federal and state policymakers can deploy limited resources to address a growing challenge, and why building on local solutions holds great promise.

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Synopsis:

It has been nearly a half century since President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty, setting in motion development of America’s modern safety net. Back in the 1960s, tackling poverty “in place” meant focusing resources in the inner city and in isolated rural areas. The suburbs were home to middle- and upper-class families—affluent commuters and homeowners who did not want to raise kids in the city. But the America of 2012 is a very different place. Poverty is no longer just an urban or rural problem but increasingly a suburban one as well.

In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. For decades, suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, so that suburbia is now home to more poor residents than central cities, composing over a third of the nation’s total poor population. Unfortunately, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. The solution no longer fits the problem. Kneebone and Berube explain the source and impact of these important developments; moreover, they present innovative ideas on addressing them.

The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including job sprawl, shifts in affordable housing, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. As the authors explain in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, it raises a number of daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they better reflect and address new demands. This book embraces that opportunity.

The authors put forward a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize poverty alleviation and community development strategies and connect residents with economic opportunity. They describe and evaluate ongoing efforts in metro areas where local leaders are learning how to do more with less and adjusting their approaches to address the metropolitan scale of poverty—for example, collaborating across sectors and jurisdictions, using data and technology in innovative ways, and integrating services and service delivery. Kneebone and Berube combine clear prose, original thinking, and illustrative graphics in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America to paint a new picture of poverty in America as well as the best ways to combat it.

Perverted Alfred Kinsey's Junk "Science" Normalized and Legitimized Degeneracy...,

NYTimes |  MORE than half a century after the publication of his landmark study, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," Alfred C. Kinsey remains one of the most influential figures in American intellectual history. He's certainly the only entomologist ever to be immortalized in a Cole Porter song. Thanks to him, it's now common knowledge that almost all men masturbate, that women peak sexually in their mid-30's and that homosexuality is not some one-in-a-million anomaly. His studies helped bring sex -- all kinds of sex, not just the stork-summoning kind -- out of the closet and into the bright light of day.

But not everyone applauds that accomplishment. Though some hail him for liberating the nation from sexual puritanism, others revile him as a fraud whose "junk science" legitimized degeneracy. Even among scholars sympathetic to Kinsey there's disagreement. Both his biographers regard him as a brave pioneer and reformer, but differ sharply about almost everything else. One independent scholar has even accused him of sexual crimes.

SanityandSocialJustice |   If you ever wondered how criminal penalties in the US for pedophilia transitioned for a time from extreme sentences to relatively short sentences, and how pedophiles from the late 1950s up until recent years were given revolving-door sentences only to target children again, you might wonder whose work guided those who drafted the Model Penal Code in 1955 that advanced the reduction of prison sentences for pedophiles and other sexual criminals.

If you guessed that it was the bishops of the Catholic Church, you guessed wrong. The recommendation to reduce sentences for pedophiles and other sexual criminals was made along with civil libertarians by an atheist and an Indiana University scientist, Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956), the same Kinsey lionized in the eponymous 2004 film produced by Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Bill Condon, and starring Liam Neeson, the same Kinsey funded for years by the Rockefeller Foundation and by Hugh Hefner, the same Kinsey with a 1953 Time Magazine cover picture, the same Kinsey whose faulty science has been cited for decades by uncritical jurists in numerous major court, including US Supreme Court, decisions.

The Kinsey film in 2004 marked the zenith of Kinsey’s reputation. It has since fallen:

• Recent scholarship revealing Kinsey’s role in shielding pedophiles who carefully reported to Kinsey hundreds of victims,
• a growing scientific consensus reaffirming the noted humanistic psychologist Abraham H. Maslow’s original 1952 criticism of “volunteer bias” in Kinsey’s studies,
• the development of federal and professional ethical regulation, policies, and practices for research with “vulnerable populations” such as children and prisoners, along with “mandated reporting” of pedophilia in many states–especially in Indiana–which have provided a modern contrast to Kinsey’s unethical scientific practice,
• and in addition the compilation of biographic information on Kinsey that indicated his personal depravity involving his sexual harassment/coercion of members of his circle to participate in sexual film-making in his attic, and his particular topical interest in adult sex with children,

–have all served to permanently undermine the standing of Kinsey’s personal character and scientific work among those whose knowledge extends beyond watching films and comedy skits or flipping past the “redeeming social content” citations of Kinsey in pornographic magazines, to scholarly reading and to scientific inquiry.

To some among the community of civil libertarians, with whom Kinsey worked closely on the revision of the 1955 Model Penal Code, Kinsey has been propped up for years, as “too big to fail.” But, as the tide has turned world-wide against pedophilia, so too has Kinsey’s reputation been irreparably tarnished.

The change in perspective on Kinsey has been slow in coming, but has been aided first by the globalization of media, and then by the visualizing power of the Internet.