27 August 2014 — Black Agenda Report
To Zombie Civil Rights Organizations: Don’t Like Being Called Sellouts? Then Don’t Sell Out
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
An August 11 letter published by Rev. Jesse L. Jackson in the newsletter of MMTC, a notorious mouthpiece of corporate telecoms protests that this and other publications, and a growing number of activists have called our traditional civil rights organizations “shills” and “sellouts” for consistently backing the interests of their corporate funders over those of the public they supposedly represent. Is it incivility? Or is it the truth?
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The movement in Ferguson has, once again, showed that the Black Misleadership Class acts as the “soft power” for the Mass Black Incarceration State, complimenting the “hard power” of the “world’s most formidable police and prison system.” This perfidious class “rushes to tamp down emotions in places like Ferguson and prevent Blacks from attempting to ‘occupy’ their own communities through genuine civil disobedience or other means.”
U.S. corporate media have made it easy to identify Black “leaders” and “spokespersons” to call on at times of racial crisis. They simply hire them. Van Jones and Charles Blow are part of well paid cadre of Blacks whose main talent is telling white people what they want to hear. “In the glare of black anger they make it clear that they are on the side of the well paying gig which means they are the enemies of the people they are alleged to represent.”
Spontaneous demonstrations against police murder and violence are happening every day, often pulled together with social media. Is this a movement? Not really, because corporate social media networks and lists are private property. Real organizers know that whenever you get 4, 14, 40 or 400 people to come out you get their digits so you can recontact them independently of Twitter, Facebook, or the radio. It’s Organizing 101.
“If Obama was serious about wanting to crush ISIS, the best and most logical ally would be Syrian President Assad, whose army has so far prevailed against every flavor of jihadist the U.S. has been able to throw at it.” But the U.S. remains intent on overthrowing Assad, and will conjure up a pretext to attack Syria under cover of fighting ISIS.
A 1994 law requires the Justice Dept to gather national status on excessive violence by police. So why have Attorneys General under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations refused to gather the info? Why does the Obama Justice Department ignore this law while it resurrects a century-old espionage statute to prosecute truth telling whistleblowers and reporters? The president and attorney general know what side they’re on. Do we?
A host of organizations will gather in front of the U.S. Justice Department building, in Washington, to tell Attorney General Eric Holder “the militarized presence in Ferguson must be withdrawn immediately. Further, the national militarization of police forces must be dismantled.” The U.S. criminal justice system behaves as if it’s 1857. “Dred Scott’s core values—the very DNA of racism—remain largely the same today.”
Working people of Ferguson are still standing tall against
There’s a simple reason why the police that brutalize Blacks on the streets of the America look and behave much like U.S. occupation troops abroad: it’s all part of the same global imperial mission. The so-called “’War on Drugs’ was a dual war on the Black community and the oppressed peoples of the world.“
Veteran journalist Chris Hedges explores the “ebb and flow” of the Black liberation movement with veteran organizer Larry Hamm, of Newark, New Jersey’s People’s Organization for Progress. Newly Black towns like Ferguson, Missouri, may become the focus of Black revolt. “Because of demographic changes these rebellions will occur in places that did not rebel previously.”
Today’s silence by black leaders in the face of Israeli aggression against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip stands in stark contrast to the historic support of the Palestinians by African and African-American leaders.
The logic of Black rebellion is lost on much of the privileged white population and the corporate media, which perceive Black rage as irrational. However, the Black response to white supremacy “is not ‘senseless’ or ‘visceral’; it is the product of a life full of experiences that have tried to beat them down to their knees.”
No matter how you slice and dice the deliberately sparse data, the conclusion is inescapable: “Poor people of color are the enemy that white law enforcement officials must neutralize.”
The father who raised two of the greatest tennis players in history was himself the product of southern fried violence and hyper-racism. Richard Williams’ “episode with the Klan alone is worth the price of his autobiography.”
The growing U.S. bombing campaign against the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria serves no one but war profiteers, said veteran anti-war activist David Swanson. “I know that ISIS had to be aware that slitting throats on camera would result in more bombing, just as President Obama had to be aware that blowing men, women and children up with 500-pound bombs would result in slitting throats,” said Swanson, publisher of the influential web site 
The New Dark Age 