downwithtyranny |Wokeness, “a term referring to awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial equality,” is everywhere these days. What is going on? The CIA going woke? The Pinkertons, long-time nemesis of labor unions, flying the Rainbow Pride flag? Raytheon pushing critical race theory? Has the U.S. Left finally triumphed over their foes? No, in fact, progressives are circling the drain (Medicare for All is going nowhere, the minimum wage remains $7.25/hr, unions are on the verge of extinction, impotent Twitter protestations by Bernie notwithstanding) but so are their woke-boosting corporate foes. Why and how is this so? The explanation has its roots in 1) the state-sponsored battle against civil unrest U.S that began in the 1960s. and 2) intellectual concepts discovered by polymath thinker Gregory Bateson.
The U.S. during the 1960’s suffered an eruption of domestic rebellion, ranging from the civil rights movement and the feminist revolution to organized labor and the anti-war movement. Strangely enough, most of the leaders in these movements were assassinated (RFK, MLK, Malcolm X) or died under mysterious circumstances (Walter Reuther). Was it enough for the ruling elite that the leaders of these movements were dead (neutralized)? I contend that it was not and that the elites embarked on an additional strategy: capture of the movements to 1) prevent a resurgence of rebellion against the ruling elites and 2) prevent cross alliances between the various rebel factions, a reason theorized by some to explain the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, who was trying to unite the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the organized labor movement at the time of his death. From feminism, where a movement leader (Gloria Steinem) has been revealed to have worked for the CIA, to civil rights, where Black Lives Matters is subsidized by the Ford Foundation to the tune of $100 million, to organized labor, where the AFL-CIO provided assistance to various U.S. government regime change efforts, these movements are infested with corporate and state actors. Meanwhile, concrete measures of material progress, such as increased wages for the working class, universal healthcare, and support for organized labor remain curiously out of reach.
There is a name for this highly effective signal jamming by government and corporate elites: maintaining the schismogenesis.
Schismogenesis means the beginning of the breakdown of a relationship or a system. Gregory Bateson, a scientific polymath, actively conducting research from the 1930s throughout the 1970s, in a wide array of fields including anthropology, semiotics, cybernetics, linguistics, and biology, first developed it while observing the social interactions of a New Guinean tribe called the Iatmul. Interestingly enough, Bateson later weaponized the idea of schismogenesis and deliberately sowed divisions while working for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. This perpetuation of division, schismogenesis, is what I contend all of these woke corporations and government agencies are actively engaged in.
The explosion in wokeness launched in the years immediately following the Occupy rebellion of the Left and the Tea Party rebellion of the Right. Very curious timing indeed. Absent in all of these modern woke campaigns, of course, are the aforementioned measures that actually represent material improvements for the working class nor any mention of the menace of war and imperialism Even now, divisive and unpopular concepts like Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, launched from academia by upper class elites, are being touted by woke corporations and labor unions. Against this goliath force, it looks like progressives are doomed. Ironically, it looks like the woke propagators may have created a tool that will also insure their own demise. Why? This explanation relies on another of Gregory Bateson’s concepts: the double bind.
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’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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The replacement negroe program under which 70 million immigrants have been brought into America to denature our hard fought political-economic standing
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
Racism is an element, a large element of the system of elite control. Racism’s connections to the Power Elite (i.e. economic oppression, ‘divide and conquer’ strategy) should be revealed in order to better understand how folks who fervently believe themselves not racist, may be unconsciously abetting the functions of racism as it serves the Elite. The original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was not racist, which in part made their philosophy and community services and actions so powerful and dangerous to the Elite’s establishment that rested largely on racism’s effects on individuals’ (of all races) consciousness.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal secuics, Hoover hoped to diminish the Party's threat to the general power structure of the U.S., or evrity of the country",[10] and he supervised an extensive program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and many other tactics designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members, and drain the organization of resources and manpower. Through these tacten maintain its influence as a strong undercurrent.
After the Panthers were killed, a huge gap was felt in the communities where they lived, and in a short time, the Elite’s approved purveyor of Black Power, The Nation of Islam, moved in and set up programs and local shops like bakeries and grocers. But the Nation of Islam was nothing like the Black Panthers. They brought hatred with them and the tenor of community race relations where they operated changed drastically. In addition, the Ford Foundation funded race studies programs began at colleges and universities nationwide. On the street, the NOI and in the universities the Cathedral. The street and the academy had been most effectively and inexpensively divided and conquered. These are living memory political realities. They are real examples of the control exerted by the Elite on what folks think, how they think, how they're perceived and how interacted with.
The bottom-up, communitarian socialism practiced by the Black Panther party and boldly demonstrated for all to see was their crime – empowering the community at the local level - will always be perceived by the power elite as a crime.
The Elite benefit from top-down socialism where they, via corporations and government, control the means of production and the GDP, and fulfill every need of every human to the Elite’s own profit advantage. The Left has been convinced by manufactured consent that top-down socialism is an ideal worth striving for. Bit by bit, the make-believe Left has abetted Elite plans for total control to be brought to fruition.
One of the tactical cornerstones of the consolidating elite is “divide and conquer.” This applies in particular to the psychological capture of individuals and hence whole populations through organized religions, and political “party” maneuvering of governments. People or groups that would rise in dissent to oppose the rulers are effectively stymied by their inability to effectively organize collective bottom-up resistance. This is a very effective tactic because all factions or groups are then pitted against one another to argue about secondary issues like religion or politics, rather than attacking the economic control and ownership of the groups – which of course - is identical across all political and religious factions. The “good guys” and “bad guys” are both economic slaves to the consolidating elite.
We the People should be aware of this singular economic control mechanism regardless of personal religious or political preferences.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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