Friday, July 8, 2016

Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter: the Rich Play Divide and Conquer, The Rest of Us Lose


Why are the black sections of the inner cities becoming so dysfunctional?  The answer is easy.  Because the rich have used race-to-the-bottom trade agreements to ship their jobs overseas, they have opened the floodgates to record amounts of sustained immigration of third world refugees, massively increasing the competition for jobs and driving wages and employment down (it’s called supply and demand), and they have strip-mined the public treasury to bail out the big banks and other corrupt financial scams while gutting the real economy, and public services and benefits.

So your average black man in the inner city can no longer earn enough through honest effort to support a family.  In every culture and every race, this ALWAYS leads to a bad result. NOBODY is immune.

The same thing, of course, is starting to happen to the white working class.  Take away the jobs, take away the money, and things start to rot.

Yes people need to be self reliant and work hard.  But if you cut a man’s legs off with a chainsaw, and then blame their inability to walk on a lack of moral fiber, that’s disgusting.  In this country now the working class has had its legs cut off with a chainsaw: increasingly nobody with average talents (most of us, guaranteed) can make ends meet no matter how strong their work ethic.  So let’s stop blaming the victims here.

But the rich like all their easy profits, and they don’t want the status quo changed.  So they need to deflect people’s attention from the real problems, and redirect their anger onto each other.  Divide and conquer.  It’s an old story.

So in black communities, the problem is not that there are no jobs and no money: no, it’s ‘racism’ and ‘microaggressions’.  And in white communities, the problem is not that there are no jobs and no money: no, it’s that working class whites are stupid and have a redneck culture and they are addicted to oxycontin and they deserve to die.

And while blacks scream about white racism, and whites scream about how stupid and violent blacks are, the oligarchs who run things get richer and richer off of the rest of us  being pushed ever deeper into the mud.

I am not saying that there is a deliberate and organized structure behind all of this (although today nothing would surprise me).  Most likely, it just happens because of people’s vested interests.  The rich have a lot of power, and like people everywhere, they naturally tend to rationalize that things which benefit them personally are an unalloyed good for all. 

Imagine that there are journalists and politicians etc. that are opposed to the policies that are making the rich richer and the rest of us poorer.  And imagine that there are journalists and politicians that – perhaps deliberately, perhaps as useful idiots – blame things that have no bearing on the profits of the rich.  Now, who do you think the rich will bestow their favors on?  Who will get the endowed faculty position, or the spot on the primetime news, or funding for their thinktank, or their political campaign?  And who will not?

Why do you think so much has been made of gay marriage and abortion and transgender rights?  Because the rich don’t care about these things one way or the other, and they are happy when people on both sides of these issues throw rocks at each other.  Because the rich are safely out of the line of fire.

So here we have people like Al Sharpton, and instead of railing against corrupt trade deals and excessive immigration and bank bailouts, instead of trying to bind all working class Americans together into a united team, he makes a big deal of a single white policeman shooting a single black man.  And more often than not, Sharpton’s claims are shown to be false: one wonders if this is not perhaps deliberate.  I mean, if a black man minding his own business was gunned down in cold blood and it was all caught on tape, whites would not be outraged.  You can’t get the masses at each other’s throats that way.  So much better to make a deal of a ‘gentle giant’ black man being gunned down by a white policeman, whip the black community into a fury, then release that this ’gentle giant’ was a violent thug who had attacked the policeman, thus whipping the white community into a fury about how mindless and hateful black people are.  I mean really, in a country of 320 million (and rising rapidly!), even if 99.9% of police are purer than the driven snow there must be the occasional outrage committed by a white officer against a black man that is a clear open-and-shut case.  So why does Sharpton keep selecting ‘outrages’ that are shown to be either fake, or at least, questionable?  And why do the rich keep throwing money at Sharpton?  Because he is ‘shaking them down’?  Or perhaps because, knowingly or not, he is serving their interests?

And this kind of divide and conquer tends to build.  There used to be an old saying amongst explorers, that if you visit a new village, if you assume that the natives are friendly they usually are, and vice-versa.  If you show up relaxed and calm hi there nice to meet you just passing through, that tends to be reciprocated.  If you show up jittery with weapons at the ready screaming SHOW ME YOUR HANDS NOW OR I SHOOT well that’s not going to make friends, I should think.

I don’t deny that there are police who are on a power trip and enjoy throwing their weight around.  I also don’t deny that the police get a lot of latitude in the criminal justice system and they sometimes abuse it.  Nevertheless, right now Americans should count their lucky stars that our police are – mostly – as good and as professional as they are.  Don’t believe me?  Read about the police in Mexico, or Guatemala, or Afghanistan….

So there are police in a poor neighborhood.  Imagine that they get stared at, yelled at, treated with disrespect.  One guy’s buddy gets pelted with rocks, another is shot serving a warrant.  The police will start to behave more as an occupying power than as civilian police.  Now the local citizens see the police as being more brutal, less friendly, less likely to cut them slack – and someone gets gunned down in questionable circumstances.  Combine this with the frustration of not having a job and looking at being evicted form your apartment, and rabble-rousers screaming that the police are declaring open season on blacks, and tensions rise.

And now we have had the deliberate assassination of five (probably honorable) policemen, and you can bet that the police will start to behave in an even more paramilitary way, which, again, will not make the locals like them more.  If things get bad enough we won’t even be able to use police: only the regular army will be able to patrol the streets.  In occupied Afghanistan and Iraq civilian police had a life expectancy of perhaps weeks – and even heavily armed and armored American soldiers had trouble operating there.  And when the occupying force is terrifying and deadly and clearly hates you and is so jumpy that they routinely shoot first and ask questions later, and innocent civilians are routinely killed, the hate amasses, and the locals start to setting up booby-traps and bombs and not providing intelligence… And the military blows up wedding parties hoping to get one bad guy.  And eventually, even the mighty American army had to leave with it’s tail tucked between its legs…

The problem is mostly not racist white cops.  The problem is mostly not anti-white black assassins.  The real problem is a society whose bonds are being deliberately frayed, where different groups are being trolled and set upon each other.  History is littered with the corpses of nations that tore each other apart over things like this.  And it can happen here.