Rockefeller Foundation Declares Support for Black Riots

3,811 words

It is fashionable, even among Rightist intelligentsia, to dismiss “conspiracy theories.” In doing so, one overlooks the covert forces that are funding — and always have funded — the forces of pseudo-revolt. These oligarchic sponsors are not fools or dupes, whose funds have been “taken over” by their anti-capitalist enemies, as was once assumed by conservatives during the Cold War. Since the establishment of the tax-exempt foundations over a century ago, the aims have been to promote what is now called a globalized “inclusive economy.” As even Noam Chomsky has stated, concepts of race and ethnicity are boundaries to such a world economy:

Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. . . . so therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance. [1]

Unfortunately, none of the Left, Antifa, or Black Lives Matter crowds are capable of understanding this, any more than their frenetic predecessors circa 1968; any more than the legions of the half-witted who marched against the Afrikaners understood it or even now understand, despite the privatization and globalization of South Africa’s economy being plain to see, while the masses, black and white, have achieved the predictable equality of destitution. Even Harry Oppenheimer said it was the aim.

Whether one calls it a “conspiracy,” “corporate planning and strategy,” or taking advantage of organically-unfolding circumstances, it amounts to the same end.

The misinformation that is being published by the Establishment news media, which seems uniformly to have been on the side of the rioters, have the groundwork prepared by think tanks who rationalize the rioting. For example, the Sentencing Project, which focuses on “racism” among police and justice departments, is funded by the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the David Rockefeller Fund, among others. [2] One might think that there are those among the far-Left, who imagine the revolution is at hand, who would give pause to think as to why the aforementioned Establishment media are so unanimously in favor of the rioters if it is an anti-Establishment revolt? However, that would necessitate the existence of critical faculties that have long since been etiolated by that media, along with the education system and entertainment industry. The production line zombie-Left is the result.

Rockefeller Foundation President Issues Inflammatory Statement

Amidst the current wholesale rioting, looting, and burning, the Rockefeller Foundation has publicly declared its support. The Rockefeller Foundation is as connected with international capitalism as it ever was. The Chairman of the Board is Richard D. Parsons, Senior Advisor of Providence Equity Partners LLC. Historically, Rockefeller trusts have always had among their boards those who have come up through Rockefeller enterprises. Parsons has been Chairman of Citigroup. Prior to that, CEO of Time Warner. “Prior to that, he held various positions in state and federal government, as counsel for Nelson Rockefeller [when New York Governor, and when Vice President] and as a senior White House aide under President Gerald Ford.” He is also a Board member for Lazard, and others. [3] Other Board members are from Morgan Stanley, Solomon Bros., GIC Singapore, African Development Bank, Man Group China, International Chamber of Commerce, The Carlyle Group, et al. The Rockefeller family is represented by Sharon Percy Rockefeller, formerly a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group. Hence when the president of the Board, Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, issues a public statement on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, one can assume that it has the endorsement of a cabal representing the top echelons of global capitalism. Shah was the director of USAID during the Obama Administration. USAID is a vanguard for American globalization. He also served on the National Security Council and other government departments. He was the founder of Latitude Capital, an international investment firm.

The tone of Shah’s statement [4] is, I suggest, inflammatory:

Dear Foundation Friends and Colleagues,

The past eight days have been a time of extreme pain, heartbreak, and reflection for our country.

My wife and I are both children of immigrants from India, and like every person of color, we each know the exact moment when we first realized we weren’t like everyone else. And even though we have both experienced racism and discrimination in different forms, the systemic racism and extraordinary violence African-Americans have lived with and continue to experience is unique in its history and depth.

The allegation that “every person of color” has “experienced racism and discrimination” and recalls the “exact moment” is intended as a swipe at every White American. Shah has lived a life of privilege, as have few Americans, and so have other “persons of color” on the Rockefeller Foundation Board. Eight of the thirteen Board members are “persons of color,” most of whom are high in the echelons of global capitalism.

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As I said earlier this week, [5] the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, and Breonna Taylor leave me angry and heartbroken. These acts of violence and police brutality are despicable. Yet again, innocent men and women were killed for no other reason than the color of their skin.

Shah repeats the Big Lie that blacks are disproportionately represented in police brutality. Pointing out that whites are victims, too — and disproportionately so — does not serve any oligarchic interest for the restructuring of the USA. Hence when Shah and others intone the names of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, and Breonna Taylor as the martyrs in the service of pseudo-revolt, they will never be heard with the names of Justine Damond, or Tony Timpa, both killed by police after making 911 calls, or the savage, prolonged beatings of Robert Leone (one of whose police assailants broke his wrist while punching Leone’s head, for which Leone was prosecuted!?); or college student James King, mugged and beaten by two plainclothed police thugs.

This year so far, there have been 172 whites, 88 blacks, and 57 Hispanics shot by police. [6] While it is stated that the number of deaths is disproportionate among blacks in terms of the American population, this is a skewered way of looking at statistics: the amount of criminal behavior committed by blacks is far ahead of that of whites, proportionately. Hence the number of black deaths is underrepresented in comparison to whites. Yet white victims, regardless of how one interprets statistics, are non-persons.

Enough is enough. How many more African-American men and women, boys and girls will die before we finally stamp out the racism, bigotry, and hatred that plagues our society? It’s time for this to end. And yet I know we’ve said “Enough is enough” and “it’s time for this to end” so many times before. We said it after Philando Castile, after Sandra Bland, after Tamir Rice, after Michael Brown, after Eric Garner, after Trayvon Martin, and many more. We’ve been saying it years. For decades. For centuries.

The rhetoric of Shah, one of the privileged oligarchy, is no different from that of a histrionic ghetto Black about to loot a shop. Shah proceeds to allude to discussions about the current situation among the “Rockefeller team.”

I’m grateful to our entire team at the Rockefeller Foundation for their thoughtful engagement in multiple dialogues we’ve had over the last week. Our team — global, diverse, and driven by the fundamental desire to serve others and particularly the most vulnerable amongst us — understands this is a moment when we can say “enough is enough” and through our actions help make that statement real.

This last allusion indicates that, as has been assumed, oligarchic funding and direction will be applied to the rioting. Rationalizing the posturing expressions of camaraderie of these privileged “persons of color” on the Board of RF and other institutions of global capitalism, with the average ghetto black, this is explained as a matter of racial solidarity:

It’s painful that our African-American colleagues have to relive the trauma of watching someone who looks like them be killed, and once again feel the incomprehensible worry about whether they or someone they love might be next.

Sheer demagogic cant. Excuse me, but I, as a Whitey, just cannot see any identity between the rioting and looting Soul Brothers and Sisters with Mellody Hobson or Niddi Nwuneli on the RF Board. Of course, there are those who are blacker on the Board, and perhaps they are placed there to justify this great alliance between the oppressed and the oppressors? But trying to establish some type of race-bond between the RF trustees and ghetto blacks, rather than the money nexus that exists between those on the Board regardless of race, is a cynical attempt at oligarchic manipulation. The Board, like that of every Board of global capital, forms its own ethnos; what the financial journalist G. Pascal Zachary lauded as the “Global Me” in his book of that name, [7] or what Joseph Stalin referred to as “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Shah attempts to create an image of the Rockefeller eminences being neighbors to the rioting ghetto blacks:

It’s painful to see police vehicles charging into groups of unarmed protestors in broad daylight just a few minutes’ walk from the homes and neighborhoods where our colleagues live and raise their families.

I had wondered myself about the manner by which police are driving into protesters. When James Fields accidentally killed Heather Heyer while he was trying to get away from a crazed, violent mob, he was sentenced to jail with life plus 149 years. Where was the justice for Fields? Did Rockefeller assist with young Fields’ defense, on the basis of color-blind justice? What of the lunatic manner by which the police attacked the lawful and law-abiding United the Right Rally at Charlottesville in 2017? Conversely to the universal media praise for the present savagery, the victims in 2017, because they were white, were/are portrayed as the villains.

Black Riots in Rockefeller’s New York

When Nelson Rockefeller, as Governor of New York, ordered the State troopers to occupy Attica Prison in 1971, killing 29 inmates and 10 hostages, he remarked to Nixon that it was a “beautiful job.” “You can’t have sharpshooters picking off the prisoners when the hostages are there with them, at a distance with tear gas, without maybe having a few accidents.” [8] Between 2000 and 2005, families of those shot received State settlements. It was 1971 that Richard Parsons began as legal counsel for Nelson Rockefeller.

In 1964, in Rochester, New York, weeks of rioting after a police altercation with youths at a street dance were quelled when Rockefeller called out the National Guard.

So it is nothing but a hypocritical façade for the RF to present the Rockefellers as paragons of liberalism, even though Nelson Rockefeller carved his political career out of being a liberal, especially when going against Goldwater — portrayed as a new Hitler — for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Not enough can ever be said of the unique pain, suffering, and injustice. . .” states Shah. This implies that the collective guilt complex against Whites should be maintained in perpetuity. But if this is “unique pain,” is it “relativizing the Holocaust,” another phrase apparently coined by Deborah Lipstadt, which from a scholarly point of view means exactly nothing? It is certainly something for the ADL and SPLC to consider.

Thank you, Massa

The second part of Shah’s appeal for support to the Black rioters and looters outlines the wonderful Rockefeller legacy to blacks over a hundred years.

For more than 100 years, The Rockefeller Foundation has worked to advance racial equality in America because it is core to our values. We are proud to have stood for and fought for racial justice for decades, and we’re proud of our team members, grantees, and partners that are on the front lines today. Many have been in this fight for a long time.

Note that the oligarchy fund regards the matter as a “fight,” with allusions to “front lines.” The terminology is inflammatory.

Going back more than a century our organization has been an imperfect yet consistent supporter of the cause. In fact, the Rockefeller tradition of supporting racial equity started before this Foundation existed. Our founder, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. supported historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) when they were one of the only avenues for young African American women and men to pursue higher learning; Spelman College is named after his wife Laura Spelman and her parents, who were among its earliest benefactors in the 1880s. And The Rockefeller Foundation has carried forward this banner from its earliest decades.

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Up until a few decades before, the Southern plantation owners were housing and feeding blacks who had been sold by other blacks from amidst wretched conditions in Africa. As two liberal academics showed by studying plantation records, much to their amazement, many of the myths surrounding plantation slavery in the South are precisely that — myths, on which perpetual hatred can feed. [9] The situation was hardly ideal for the Southern white workers, whose labor was pitted against Black slaves. In such an oligarchy, there was no concept of racial kinship, no generalized “white privilege” from which subsequent generations of whites, to the present, supposedly profit from at the expense of the black. As Hinton Rowan Helper showed with extensive documentation, the Southern white laborers lived in abject poverty, but did not have any influential zealots of the Abolitionist type to speak for them. [10] In Britain, the condition of the working class was far below that of black slavery. The preoccupation of white liberals with blacks so embittered the Chartists in England that they broke up Abolitionist meetings, while William Cobbett was scathing of Wilberforce’s preoccupations while the British worker was left to rot. [11]

Friedrich Engels published a detailed study on the conditions of laborers in Britain, during the epoch in which our forefathers were supposedly the beneficiaries of “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” [12] As one should expect, the Left has long since put such history down the Memory Hole in their quest to ingratiate themselves to non-whites, due to their utter failure to recruit the proletariat. Besides which, such white working-class misery is an important part of the process of dialectical materialism, and efforts at amelioration are a “reactionist” spanner in the “wheel of history,” according to Marxism. Shah continues:

When modern medicine was in its infancy in the early 20th century, and schools refused to admit African-Americans, we helped create medical schools at HBCUs to train generations of African-American doctors and nurses. They had early insights into what we now know to be true: that HBCUs have been essential to creating upward mobility for low-income students of color.

When Jim Crow prevented 7-in-10 African-Americans in the South from voting in the 1960s, we supported the Southern Regional Council to create the groundbreaking Voter Education Project, led at the time by civil rights icon (now-Congressman) John Lewis. It helped register more than 300,000 new voters, who regained their right to participate in our democracy’s most sacred practice. And we helped the NAACP Legal Defense Fund expand beyond litigation to develop a division that supports the basic rights of the poor and victims of discrimination.

When black mothers who relied on America’s social safety net came under attack in the early 1980s, we partnered with community-based organizations to help provide job training, placement, and childcare support to thousands of low-income single mothers. More than 95% were women of color. And building on that work in the early 1990s, we helped launch Living Cities, a partnership of foundations and financial institutions originally focused on affordable housing, and now focuses on community and economic mobility for people of color in 30 cities.

Since all whites intrinsically benefit from the historical legacy of “white privilege,” and “white supremacy,” white poverty cannot be acknowledged to exist, but it does.

A fact sheet released today by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) shows that, contrary to some common stereotypes about America’s poor, at least one-third of the 13 million children living in poverty are white.

“Poverty affects children of all colors, contrary to stereotypes. The notion held by many Americans that poverty is not a white problem is simply false,” says Jane Knitzer, EdD, director of NCCP, a research center at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “The sooner all Americans realize these facts about poverty, the better chance we have of eradicating it.”

The NCCP fact sheet shows that among America’s poor children, 4.2 million are white, 4 million are Latino, 3.6 million are African American, 400,000 are Asian, and 200,000 are American Indian. [13]

Interestingly, the RF was “quiet” in its support for the destruction of Southern monuments in 2017, and attacks on other elements of the Southern heritage.

Because we know this work is still unfinished, we’ve continued to stand against racism and hatred in our current era: When the city of New Orleans needed a financial guarantor so it could take down Confederate statues in 2017, we quietly stepped forward to help them remove those reprehensible symbols that glorified violence against African Americans.

Shah heralds the role oligarchic wealth can take in funding, organizing, and directing what amounts to a pseudo-revolt reminiscent of the New Left during the 1960s, when that also was promoted by the same interests.

Our actions speak to the unique role philanthropy can play in driving social change. . . . And we can bring together different parts of society — serving as a bridge between public and private, between non-profits and investors, between communities and government officials, bringing everyone to the table to help solve some of the biggest problems we face — to create plans, programs, and innovations that others can follow.

Now is unquestionably a time when we must all join together to say “enough” — but would an end to racist violence be enough?

Shah proceeds with the usual litany of black poverty and discrimination. The premise is that all this can only be ended when there is an “inclusive economy;” not the overthrow of plutocracy, but its extension so that all sections within a common landmass can become integral parts of the production and consumption process, united through the money nexus.

The declared goal of RF is “promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world,” by a “specific goal of promoting inclusive economies.” A specific example of the need and manner of change is given as that of South Africa, where apartheid was an obstacle to this “inclusive economy,” and change was attained “through conflict and bargaining,” via the “anti-apartheid movement.” [14] The key to understanding such movements as feminism, transgenderism, and racial integration is to think in terms of an “inclusive economy,” where women, for example, are not held back from full integration into the production process through the ties of home and children. Hence why feminism is as assiduously promoted by RF, Soros, Ford, and a multitude of others along with the array of causes now called “identity politics.”

This is what Shah refers to as “the American Dream of equal opportunity.” An actual revolt would be one that repudiates and transcends “the American Dream,” but the Left from Marx onwards is implicitly incapable of doing so, which is why it has historically been readily used by plutocracy, as Spengler pointed out a century ago.

No declaration of this type would be complete without referring to Martin Luther King:

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech titled “Where do we go from here?” — a question that many of us are asking today. He described the structural foundations of racism, poverty, and inequality — rooted in “a system that still oppresses” today as it did then, a system still in dire need of reform. He declared the need to massively assert “dignity and worth,” with the ultimate objective of “restructuring the whole of American society.”

Martin Luther King was a good house nigra. He was backed by the oligarchs, as were from the start the NAACP and Urban League, to thwart black separatism. Even militant blacks during the Civil Rights era were often paid off with good jobs and funding. King was particularly close to Nelson Rockefeller, who had been giving the Southern Christian Leadership Conference checks since 1961. [15]

Why do individuals who have been on the boards of Citigroup, Lazard, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Bros., GIC Singapore, Man Group, the International Chamber of Commerce, The Carlyle Group, et al declare themselves for the “restructuring the whole of American society”? Are they mental retards or psychotics? Do they really not understand what they are doing? This is not a sudden radical and transformative realization from wealthy people with a social conscience. It is part of a long-term process. Shah writes:

We go forward. We stay focused. We stand tall, together. We listen, and learn, and help our family and friends do the same. We rededicate ourselves to fighting racism, bigotry, and hatred everywhere it exists — using our voice and our privilege and our resources and our capacity to be moral leaders, both personally and professionally.

“Our privilege,” Shah states.

It is the privilege of oligarchs, the real privilege of exploitation that hides behind demagogic rhetoric about “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” deflecting responsibility from their system to those who are subjected to it.

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Notes

[1] Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (New York: The New Press, 21002), 88-89.

[2] See The Sentencing Project; K. R. Bolton, Babel Inc. (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), passim.

[3] From Parsons’ Rockefeller Foundation profile.

[4] The complete statement, “Reflecting on Violence Against Black Americans,” can be read here.

[5] Rajiv J. Shah, “Statement on Violence Against Black Americans.”

[6] Statista, “Number of People Shot to Death by Police.”

[7] Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000).

[8] Sam Roberts, “Rockefeller on the Attica Raid, From Boastful to Subdued,” New York Times, September 12, 2011.

[9] Robert William Fogel & Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974).

[10] Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). Available online here.

[11] Geoffrey Russell Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 65.

[12] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Available online here.

[13] National Center for Children in Poverty, “Poverty by the Numbers: By Race, White Children Make Up the Biggest Percentage of America’s Poor.”

[14] Chris Bennor & Manuel Pastor, Inclusive Economy Indicators, Rockefeller Foundation, December 2016, 30.

[15] Douglas Brinkley, “The Man Who Kept King’s Secrets,” Vanity Fair, January 19, 2014.