The black Ferguson rioters have legitimate reasons to be angry, but they have been tricked into protesting the wrong thing

Suppose that the blacks rioting in the poor neighborhoods of Ferguson, Missouri, were protesting that the fact that their jobs and livelihoods have been stolen by illegal immigrants, and that Obama’s illegal immigrant amnesty/legal immigration surge is going to crush them into third-world poverty.  Suppose that they were protesting trade deals that ship their jobs overseas.  Suppose that they were protesting the government giving trillions of dollars in bailouts to wealthy financiers while starving the real economy of investment.  Suppose that they were protesting the Obamacare scam that forces people to pay small fortunes in medical insurance while depriving them of real medical care and setting traps to scam people into paying for out-of-network coverage.

Why in that case, the rioters might get some sympathy.  In that case the rest of America’s working class might go, hey, maybe they have a point.  Maybe I should be angry too.  Maybe we should make common cause and work together to fight the corrupt Neoliberal oligarchy.  And maybe the working class in the United States could make some progress.

That, of course, would never do.  So blacks have been trolled and goaded into an incoherent rage over something that makes them look like mindless animals to the rest of the country.  That suits the rich and powerful just fine.  It’s all been scripted.

In a country of over 300 million, statistically there simply must be well-documented cases where a white policeman shot an unarmed black man without reason.  And there simply must be cases where a white man has raped a black woman and the evidence is clear.  And yet, every single time that Al Sharpton and Barack Obama etc. make a big deal out of an alleged injustice against a black person, it turns out to be either an outright fraud or at best seriously ambiguous.  That must be by design.

Why no big-time covered-on-CNN protests over the policeman who without looking threw a flash-bang grenade into a baby's crib and crippled it?  Because most Americans would find that appalling.  It's not a good fit for the script.

I mean, if blacks were protesting a clear case where a white police officer shot an unarmed black man for no reason, the rest of the country would not have a problem with it.  Instead blacks are goaded into being outraged about things that are false, and the rest of the country sees only that blacks want to railroad innocent people and they have double standards and they are stupid ignorant beasts who are part of a culture that worships thuggism and violence.

Not so long ago American blacks were protesting to get the vote, to be able to join labor unions, and to attend good schools.  Perhaps grudgingly, the rest of the country saw the point, and blacks made gains.  Now American blacks are protesting that a person who pretty clearly acted in self defense be lynched, and the rest of the country is unimpressed.

Why do you think that the reverend Al Sharpton gets so much time on CNN etc?  It’s not because some reporter thinks that he has something interesting to say, and it’s not because God has deemed Sharpton to be the Official Spokesperson For All Black People In The United States.  No, it’s because the rich who own the corporate media have decided to write Sharpton into the script.  Because he is useful to them.  And that’s why you don’t hear much from Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or anyone like that: they and many others have plenty more interesting things to say than Sharpton, but the rich don’t want their message to have access to a mass audience.

We also have to be careful: it may well be that many American blacks think this is all stupid, but you won’t hear anything from them on CNN, because that’s not the script.  No, the script is mindless rage that wants revenge even against the innocent, and that’s all you are going to see on TV.  Just remember: what you see on TV is not an unbiased sampling of reality, it’s what the programmers have decided to select.  

Maybe most American blacks aren't this stupid, and all this media frenzy is a setup.  I may have fallen into the same trap that I am warning about...  But how can we know, when the mainstream press is so rigidly controlled and censored?  (IMHO one of the biggest injuries that BIll Clinton did to the United States was allow the consolidation of the media).  Perhaps - just perhaps - American blacks should consider using alternative media outlets.  And maybe the rest of us should tune out of CNN etc., and not believe everything we read in the corporate press.  

And maybe black Americans should run their so-called 'leaders' out of town on a rail.  If shills like Al Sharpton and Barack Obama are routinely booed by blacks every time they show up in public, not even the corporate press could smooth that over.

Managing the rage of the oppressed is a major job of an oligarchy.  In addition, while I do not in any way advocate violence, when a people are being crushed and they have no other options, their only recourse is to threaten to burn the whole place down.

When the communists first took over China, Mao pushed to maximize population growth.  This policy soon drove the average Chinese into such abject poverty that even the totalitarian communists nearly lost control.  So the communists redirected the rage of all those angry and hungry young men onto ‘cultural enemies’, to avoid that anger being directed at the state.  The government also backed off on their policy of maximizing population growth.  Now, while China is far from perfect, significant progress has been made for the average person.

In contrast, in India the elites have been quietly pushing for/allowing to occur a massive population explosion, and there have been no real threats of revolutions or rebellions.  Thus the Indian elites have been free to continue their cheap-labor policies, and the average Indian has a standard of living inferior to late Medieval Europe.

In the United States a hundred years or so ago there were labor riots, some of which involved thousands of armed people and could only be put down by the regular army.  Of course the populace always loses in any confrontation with a regular army (which has discipline and a chain of command), but the army can’t be everywhere at once and you can’t profitably run a mine when it’s been occupied by federal troops.  I suspect that it was the fear of militant labor organizers, communists and anarchists that caused the oligarchy to allow FDR to implement the new deal, not anything so feeble as mere democracy.

When being reasonable fails, the only recourse is to be unreasonable.  That's reasonable, isn't it?

To repeat I am not advocating violence, but history does show that it sometimes yields good results for the working class, at least in the long run.  The Neoliberal oligarchs and their running dogs in the mass media are surely vile, but one must nonetheless admire the skill with which they have manipulated poor blacks in this country, and how masterfully they have controlled the public narrative.  Joseph Goebbels would be jealous.

A little while ago a bunch of white lacrosse players at Duke University were falsely accused of raping a black woman.  The whole black ‘leadership’ piled on, demanding that these whites were guilty even before the evidence was in.   When the lacrosse players were as usual exonerated, they might have been expected to have some anger towards these so-called black leaders who had so unfairly slandered them.  Instead, some of them extended the hand of friendship: they said that they now understood firsthand the problem of prosecutorial abuse, and they could imagine how poor blacks without the legal or other resources of upper-middle class whites, could be crushed by such a system.  They offered to make common cause with blacks on this issue, to build a bridge – and of course, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama etc. spit on them, because it’s not their job to build bridges between Americans and work for a better world.  It’s their job to channel black anger into self-destructive outlets, to make blacks look like dangerous savages, and to help the rich play divide-and-conquer with the American people.

The approved mass-media image is of American blacks as mindless animals.  But if American blacks will allow themselves to be so easily duped into fighting the wrong battles, perhaps there is some small measure of truth to this image after all…  Perhaps American blacks should start thinking for themselves, and question their so-called ‘leaders’, especially when their ‘leaders’ are so obviously on the payroll of the other side…  And if most American blacks are smarter than they are being portrayed on TV, maybe they need to get a new set of leaders that can fix this.  One can dream.