Those interested in the hard truth about Black Lives Matter would do well to
read Paul Street's Truthdig article from 2017, to which Pepe Escobar links in
his new piece, which I sent out last night.
Funded by the Ford Foundation, BLM is not a revolutionary movement, but a
counter-revolutionary brand, distracting us from making common cause for
real systemic change, and, now, also serving as the vanguard of the faux-
progressive drive to "defund the police," to close municipal police departments,
and replace them with a semi-human apparatus even more repressive, and
wholly unaccountable.
The fact is that the Panthers were wiped out by the US government, with
"our free press" serving as accomplices, by casting them as dangerous
extremists—as the New York Times belatedly admits, that revolutionary
specter having long since been dispelled by force and fraud.
Would any corporate advertiser have extolled the Panthers, and declared
its "solidarity" with that black community? Would any politicians, liberal
or conservative, have spoken in support of those black radicals? The only
Panthers who had any state support were infiltrators working for the FBI.
And while no multi-millionaires supported the Black Panthers, we now have
Jeff Bezos, Bill/Melinda Gates, Jamie Dimon, Mitt Romney, Mark Zuckerberg,
Mark Cuban, Tim Cook, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf, Citibank CEO Mark
Mason and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella all taking a knee, tweeting their
applause of BLM, and/or pledging millions to fight racial injustice, as are
the CEO's of Bayer, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline,
Sanofi and Novartis (as well as Merck, whose CEO is African-American).
Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Apple, Google,
Microsoft, Amazon, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and the NFL are all down with
the black community. It is beyond remarkable that such rapacious players,
whose policies and products have helped end countless black lives, are all
suddenly on board against racism.
We'd better wake up fast. The revolution that we really need "will not be
televised," as Gil Scott-Heron put it.
(As I write, I'm listening to the oceanic roar of chanting multitudes, with helicopters
growling overhead.)
MCM
What Would the Black Panthers Think of Black Lives Matter?
Black Panther Party official Fred Hampton speaking at a Chicago rally for the Chicago 8, activists charged with causing a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In the background is writer-activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. In 1969, police killed Hampton in a raid on his apartment.
(AP)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.
Click on the link for the rest.
