Thanks for the laughs Jimmy! This is why brain dead gov’t officials lose credibility with the ppl, change the playbook for Christ sakes. BTW, the soviet communist party called, they want their propaganda back. đ
Daily Archives: June 13, 2020
Organize the White Working Class
By Richard Moser
June 12, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – First in the series: Organize the White Working Class!
â . . . their (the poor âwhitesâ) own position, vis-a-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin privilege system.ââ Theodore W. Allen, Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, 1975*
âThe âwhite raceâ is the historically most general form of âclass collaboration.â–Â Theodore W. Allen, Taped Interview with Chad Pearson, SUNY-Albany, May 13, 2004,*
The time is ripe.
At no time since the â60s has social movement activism created such rich opportunities to oppose racism and engage white people in a struggle over what it means to be white and a worker in America. And that engagement will be most successful in the worldâs best classroom: movement building, organizing, and activism.
Like many times in our past, Americans of African descent have led the way. The new civil rights movement, the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, the BlackLivesMatter movement, and the resistance to Trumpâs reemergent racism, has given birth to an array of new organizations and political projects. Like no other single scholarly work, Michelle Alexanderâs The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness has rallied the troops and identified the enemy.
Over the past few decades, the American people have created a vast militarized penal system that is now the most powerful institutionalized racism in the US. And like the forms of institutionalized racism that preceded it, the penal system functions as an effective form of social control. Discriminatory and militarized policing, on-the-spot executions, slave-like prison labor, mass incarceration, school-to-prison pipeline, restriction of trial by jury, lengthy and mandatory sentencing, predatory fine, fee and debt traps, and its gigantic sweep and size constitutes nothing short of a preemptive war against the most potentially rebellious parts of the population: the young, people of color, the poor. If you favor social change then the vast militarized penal system must be confronted. It controls us all black and brown and white.
The new civil rights movement has challenged white activists to confront white racism at a time of economic and workplace conflict. The never-ending recession of 2008 has intensified wealth inequality across the board with the upward redistribution of wealth falling hardest on Americans of color.1  Good full-time jobs are going and in all likelihood, they are not coming back.
There is a widespread understanding that the economy and political system are rigged.  One of the main rigs is the class line: corporate power now controls the economy and government wielding both great wealth and global political power. Once the insatiable demand for power and profit drive government, representative democracy fails and can no longer deliver significant economic benefits to everyday people. Yet, Occupy and the Sanders campaign, the resistance to Trump and other social movements have revealed the discontent of millions of white people who have the capacity to create progressive social movements and even make history.
But the working class has deep flaws that have until now proven fatal: it is divided. Race, gender, sexuality, age cut us up in many ways. If history is a guide to action we can retell a crucial part of the tale by making a challenge to white supremacy central to our organizing efforts. To do that, white people must combat the system of white privilege that has long been the primary means by which racism has been nurtured and sustained.
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Those white privileges are institutionalized in a complex web of arrangements in housing, education, health care,  law enforcement, election procedures, and voting that further rig the system against people of color. But because white or male privileges have been so deeply entrenched for so long they often appear as seemingly neutral measures of merit, at least to white people.  How do we shine a light on this blindspot?
Resistance and action are the best paths to revelation. Institutionalized racism is historic and collective and cannot be addressed through individual repudiation alone. You canât just give it up, even if you want to, except through joining the social moments for change and organizing at the point of privilege. The purpose of these privileges is to keep us all in line.  White organizers and activists who challenge the system have taken the first crucial step in repudiating privilege.  Many organizing projects await and all of them are difficult and challenging. We can expect no easy victories.
Organize Our Own?
As the â60s revolution came up against the wall of institutionalized and interlocking obstacles, civil rights organizers experimented with Black Power and Womenâs liberation. Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Jo Freedman, Shulamith Firestone, and other authors of âTo the Women of the New Leftâ offered up some hard-won knowledge.2  They told a sometimes bitter but compelling truth: organizers were most effective working within their own communities.
Speaking to the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X put it this way.
Now if white people want to help, they can help. But, they canât join. They can help in the white community, but they canât join. We accept their helpâŚ.They canâŚwork in the white community on white people and change their attitude toward us.3
âOrganizing your ownâ was not a call to white separatism, but a way to lay the basis for coalition movements in which working-class whites saw their own destiny bound up with that of black folks.  In Black Power and White Organizing, Anne Braden, a legendary southern white civil rights organizer, wrote:
Certainly the inherent needs of poor white people are reason enough to organizeâthey, like poor black people, are ill-fed, ill-housed and lacking in opportunities for education, medical care, political expression, and dignity. But I think what we are recognizing is that these white people will never be able to solve these problems unless they find ways to unite with the black movement seeking the same things.
My purpose is not to present false either/or choices. The organizational forms we create are up to the local situation and local actors. White organizers can make contributions in multi-racial groups, coalitions, unions, as well as in community groups among the white working class. But one way or another, we white organizers must reconsider ways of talking and organizing around white supremacy and white privilege.
Luckily for us, we can follow the work of the great white working-class intellectual, Ted Allen, as our north star. Â Next we will look at the strategic implications of his classic work:Â The Invention of the White Race.
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Notes
*Both quotes cited in Jeffrey B. Perry, The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight against White Supremacy p. 2 and p. 5
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter To Black Liberation, 27 and 28.
- See Chapter 8, Sara Evans, Personal Politics. âWomen of the New Leftâ cited by Evans p. 200.
- Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, 58.
Ted Allen and the Invention of the White Race
Second in the series: Organize the White Working Class!
There is no better place to start organizing than with political strategy inspired by Theodore W. Allenâs classic book: The Invention the White Race: Volume I Racial Oppression and Social Control and Volume II: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America.
Before we continue, a word or two about Ted Allen.
Ted Allen was a working-class white man without college training but with a long history of activism and a deep determination to uncover the truth about how racism came to be in America. Allen was a Marxist and used a class-based analysis to guide his study. Jeffrey B. Perry continues Allenâs work today, and you should view his presentations on Allenâs legacy.
The power of Allenâs ideas comes from his unmatched devotion to research. He spent more than 20 years digging deep into the colonial archives of Virginia and mastered what is, arguably, the most extensive body of evidence ever produced on race in early colonial America. Allen contested and bested some of the most acclaimed historians in the field. The working-class reader cannot help but revel in the fact that a worker without a degree kicked Ivy League butt.
But getting class identity jollies aside, Allenâs work is such a useful guide to action because he did what no other historian did. Allen created an argument that might help us discover a truly political strategy to fight racism among whites based on empowerment, class solidarity, community interest, and self-interest, rather than relying on morality, guilt, and shame. In other words, Allen innovated a revolutionary approach to fighting white racism and white privilege.
The Invention of the White Race
What Allen discovered transformed our understanding of race in America and can transform our organizing practice and activism. He shocked readers with a startling finding:
âWhen the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no âwhiteâ people there; nor according to colonial records would there be for another sixty years.â1
Oh, yes, there were English and Irish, but nowhere in the colonial record is there evidence that law or society granted special privileges to people based on European origin.
The white race and white identity were âinvented,â Allen argued, by the ruling elite of Virginia, in order to divide laboring people in the aftermath of Baconâs Rebellion of 1676. The white race was constructed and used as a political instrument to divide and conquer.
How did this come to be?
By 1620 or so, a system of unfree labor became the dominant labor system in Virginia. The system was essentially slavery, some âbond-laborersâ had time-limited contracts, but most servitude was open to interpretation by custom. A majority of these bond-laborers were Europeans.
The archival evidence is clear, as well, that the role of African and African Americans was âindeterminate.â2 Â From 1619 to the years following Baconâs Rebellion, the status of black people was contested in the courts and in the fields. Africans held a variety of social and economic positions: some were limited term slaves, some free, some endured lifetime bondage, while others were property holders, even including a few slave owners.
It was not until after Baconâs Rebellion, or the second phase of Baconâs Rebellion to be precise, that law and society created a new custom of racism, and for that to happen, the white race had to be invented. What was the trigger?
â[I]n Virginia, 128 years before William Lloyd Garrison was born, laboring class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition of slavery. In so doing, they provided the supreme proof that the white race did not then exist.â3
The Rebellion occupied the capital of Jamestown and pointed the way toward freedom for everyone, by contesting the rule of the oligarchs who had grown rich on slave labor and land stolen from the natives.
â[I]t was the striving of the bond-laborers for freedom from chattel servitude that held the key to liberation of the colony from the misery that proceeded from oligarchic ruleâŚ4
After the rebellion was suppressed, law and custom began to shift. Europeans were increasingly designated as âwhiteâ in the historical record, and given privileges that conferred a âpresumption of libertyâ while blacks were increasingly subjected to legal and cultural limits to their freedoms. Whites were encouraged to view blacks with contempt and see their inferior social positions as proof of innate inferiority.
Allen summarized the early system of white privilege as âsimply the right to be free.â
All authorities agreeâŚthat the conditions of the masses of white industrial and agricultural workers, North and South, were abominable in the decades before the Civil War. Still they had their white-skin privileges: The white worker was an actual or potential citizen, with citizenâs rights; the black had no rights. The white, as possessorâif not immediately, then within a definite timeâof his own person, had legal freedom of movement; the black did not own himself. The white, if bound by indenture, debtor apprenticeship, or in some other manner, might still succeed in escaping into the free-moving white world much more easily than the black worker. As possessor of himself, the white workers couldâeven though not always immediatelyâ take a better job, if he could find one; the black had no such chance. The white worker, if opportunity afforded, could learn to read and then study as a means of improving his lot; the black worker was forbidden by law even to learn to read. The white worker could aspire to become a farmer, a merchant or an industrialist; the black had only flight, revolt, revenge to dream of.  At this point, the white skin privilege of the white worker was simply the right to be freeâŚ5
The white race, white supremacy, and black subordination were all products of the same historical period in which the slave system was recreated as a racist system to prevent the threat of united action by the people. Today the new oligarchy still relies on their ability to divide and conquer.
Here is Allenâs legacy and challenge to us: racism is historical, it is the product of human activity. If it was then, it is now. Racism was founded on a system of privileges designed to win working-class white peopleâs support for slavery. And so it is to white privilege that we must look if we want to free ourselves from being the tools and fools of the rich and powerful.
We must be pawns no more.
Notes
- Allen, Invention of the White Race Vol. II p X
- Invention of the White Race Vol. II p 178
- Invention of the White Race Vol. II p 214-21
- Invention of the White Race Vol. II p 212
- Can White s Radicals be Radicalized? p176 in Revolutionary Youth & The New Working Class/Lost writing of the SDS.Â
Continue reading this series of articles at  https://befreedom.co/organize-the-white-working-class/
Russians Stirring Up Trouble: An Obama Retread Sees Moscowâs Hand in Protests
By Philip Giraldi
June 12, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – If one ventures into the vast wasteland of American television it is possible to miss the truly ridiculous content that is promoted as news by the major networks. One particular feature of media-speak in the United States is the tendency of the professional reporting punditry to go seeking for someone to blame every time some development rattles the National Security plus Wall Street bubble that we all unfortunately live in. The talking heads have to such an extent sold the conclusion that China deliberately released a lethal virus to destroy western democracies that no one objects when Beijing is elevated from being a commercial competitor and political adversary to an enemy of the United States. One sometimes even sees that it is all a communist plot. Likewise, the riots taking place all across the U.S. are being milked for what itâs worth by the predominantly liberal media, both to influence this yearâs election and to demonstrate how much the news oligarchs really love black people.
As is often the case, there are a number of inconsistencies in the narrative. If one looks at the numerous photos of the protests in many parts of the country, it is clear that most of the demonstrators are white, not black, which might suggest that even if there are significant pockets of racism in the United States there is also a strong condemnation of that fact by many white people. And this in a country that elected a black man president not once, but twice, and that black president had a cabinet that included a large number of African-Americans.
Also, to further obfuscate any understanding of what might be taking place, the media and chattering class is obsessed with finding white supremacists as instigators of at least some of the actual violence. It would be a convenient explanation for the Social Justice Warriors that proliferate in the media, though it is supported currently by little actual evidence that anyone is exploiting right-wing groups.
Simultaneously, some on the right, to include the president, are blaming legitimately dubbed domestic terrorist group Antifa, which is perhaps more plausible, though again evidence of organized instigation appears to be on the thin side. Still another source of the mayhem apparently consists of some folks getting all excited by the turmoil and breaking windows and tossing Molotov cocktails, as did two upper middle class attorneys in Brooklyn last week.
Nevertheless, the search goes on for a guilty party. Explaining the demonstrations and riots as the result of the horrible killing of a black man by police which has revulsed both black and white Americans would be too simple to satisfy the convoluted yearnings of the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow.
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Which brings us to Russia. How convenient is it to fall back on Russia which, together with the Chinese, is reputedly already reported to be working hard to subvert the November U.S. election. And what better way to do just that than to call on one of the empty-heads of the Barack Obama administration, whose foreign policy achievements included the destruction of a prosperous Libya and the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, the initiation of kinetic hostilities with Syria, the failure to achieve a reset with Russia and the assassinations of American citizens overseas without any due process. But Obama sure did talk nice and seem pleasant unlike the current occupant of the White House.
The predictable Wolf Blitzer had a recent interview with perhaps the emptiest head of all the empowered women who virtually ran the Obama White House. Susan Rice was U.N. Ambassador and later National Security Advisor under Barack Obama. Before that she was a Clinton appointee who served as Undersecretary of State for African Affairs. She is reportedly is currently being considered as a possible running mate for Joe Biden as she has all the necessary qualifications being a woman and black.
While Ambassador and National Security Advisor, Rice had the reputation of being extremely abrasive. She ran into trouble when she failed to be convincing in support of the Obama administration exculpatory narrative regarding what went wrong in Benghazi when the four Americans, to include the U.S. Ambassador, were killed.
In her interview with Blitzer, Rice said: âWe have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that weâre all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists whoâve come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And theyâre probably also, I would bet based on my experience, Iâm not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldnât be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form.â
It should be noted that Rice, a devout Democrat apparatchik, produced no evidence whatsoever that the Russians were or have been involved in âfomentingâ the reactions to the George Floyd demonstrations and riots beyond the fact that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all believe that Moscow is responsible for everything. Clinton in particular hopes that some day someone will actually believe her when she claims that she lost to Trump in 2016 due to Russia. Even Robert Mueller, he of the Russiagate Inquiry, could not come up with any real evidence suggesting that the relatively low intensity meddling in the election by the Kremlin had any real impact. Nor was there any suggestion that Moscow was actually colluding with the Trump campaign, nor with its appointees, to include National Security Advisor designate Michael Flynn.
Fortunately, no one took much notice of Rice based on her âexperience,â or her judgement insofar as she possesses that quality. Glenn Greenwald responded âThis is fuxxing lunacy â conspiratorial madness of the worst kind â but itâs delivered by a Serious Obama Official and a Respected Mainstream Newscaster so itâs all fine⌠This is Infowars-level junk. Should Twitter put a âFalseâ label on this? Or maybe a hammer and sickle emoji?â
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova accurately described the Rice performance as a âperfect example of barefaced propaganda.â She wrote on her Facebook page âAre you trying to play the Russia card again? Youâve been playing too long â come back to realityâ instead of using âdirty methods of information manipulationâ despite âhaving absolutely no facts to prove [the] allegations⌠go out and face your people, look them in the eye and try telling them that they are being controlled by the Russians through YouTube and Facebook. And I will sit back and watch âAmerican exceptionalismâ in action.â
It should be assumed that the Republicans will be coming up with their own candidate for âfomentingâ the riots and demonstrations. It already includes Antifa, of course, but is likely to somehow also involve the Chinese, who will undoubtedly be seen as destroying American democracy through the double whammy of a plague and race riots. Speaking at the White House, National Security Adviser Robert OâBrien warned about foreign incitement, including not only the Chinese, but also Iran and even Zimbabwe. And, oh yes, Russia. One thing is for sure, no matter who is ultimately held accountable, no one in the Congress or White House will be taking the blame for anything.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org. – – “Source“ –
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See also
Manufacturing consent for war on China;Â U.S. Senate panel OKs $6 billion military fund to confront China China & Hong Kong governments blast UKâs âbiasedâ criticism and âinterferenceâ |
I’m still grinning. Nice work.