Why Corporations Support Black Lives Matter When They Didn't Support Occupy Wall Street

Why Corporations Support Black Lives Matter When They Didn’t Support Occupy Wall Street

Western corporations are falling over themselves to show their support for Black Lives Matter. Professional sportsmen proudly display BLM logos on their shirts, television shows hold moments of silence for George Floyd, and the FaceBook and Twitter accounts of countless large entities have paid their respects. But no corporation did anything like this for Occupy Wall Street. This essay explains why.

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011 with a campout protest at New York’s Zuccotti Park. The protest was sparked by rising inequality in America, something that had increased sharply after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. Bank bailouts had ensured that the wealthy avoided any of the suffering from the crisis, and that the poor took the entire burden.

OWS’s most famous chant was “We are the 99%”. This referred to OWS’s belief that the top 1% of Americans were hoarding a grossly disproportionate amount of resources and power. Their fundamental motivation was to express outrage at this state of affairs in the hope of forcing change to a more equitable system. They made demands such as getting corporations and corporate lobbyists out of politics, granting the working class a greater share of production and reforming the banking system to restrict speculation.

The movement appealed to an entire generation of young people, who were just then beginning to understand that they were going to have a lower standard of living than their parents did. These young people saw in OWS the potential to arrest the relentless decline of their living standards by enabling them to come together to assert their collective interests.

This terrified the American Establishment.

If there’s any one single thing that the Establishment fears, it’s poor people coming together on the basis of class. Class solidarity is the only way that the people can form a broad enough front to work against inequality without being divided and conquered into impotence. The formation and expression of class solidarity, then, is a direct threat to the interests of the ruling class.

In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the 1% came together and decided upon a strategy to prevent this from happening again. They realised that they had to pre-emptively divide and conquer the people because, left to their own devices, the people would inevitably organise and demand their right to an equitable share of production.

The greatest fear of the Establishment was the coalescence of the 99% under one banner. Having previously observed the degree of animosity that existed on account of racial tension, a plan became apparent: to divide the 99% up along racial lines. This was primarily to be achieved by pushing a racial oppression narrative that claimed that white people owed blacks reparations for past injustices.

Because the 1% owns the mainstream media, they simply directed their employees in the media to start pushing that narrative. And they did. The mainstream media everywhere stopped reporting on class issues entirely, and started reporting only on racial ones. Any case of racial injustice was blown up to seem an atrocity, and overcoming it a pressing issue, while class inequality was ignored completely.

After some years of this, OWS’s narrative of the 99% versus the 1% was overwhelmed by the Establishment’s narrative of black versus white. People stopped thinking in terms of class solidarity, and started thinking in terms of race. This was all by design.

Thinking in terms of race can never, ever lead to justice for the simple reason that many blacks and browns are middle-class while many whites are working-class. Fighting to improve the position of middle-class blacks and browns instead of that of poor people is unjust, and fighting to worsen the position of working-class whites instead of that of rich people is unjust. This fact is understood deeply by intelligent people.

So all attempts to increase racial consciousness must be treated with the deepest suspicion, as suspected attempts to destroy class consciousness. Every time someone pushes race conflict or a racial issue, the astute observer ought to ask if this is an attempt to distract from class issues. In the vast majority of cases, any racial issue being pushed will not really be worth attention.

This divide and conquer has now been ramped up to such a degree that the mainstream media now acts as if each person is their race first and foremost. If you are white, you’re on team Bad Guy and have to pay compensation. If you are black, you’re on team Good Guy and get to claim compensation. Your skin is your uniform, and your moral standing is dictated at birth by that skin’s melanin content.

The 1% more or less succeeded in their scheme to destroy class consciousness after Occupy Wall Street. Today, more people are concerned about what happened to George Floyd than by the unaffordability of housing (which is now out of control). Thanks to the mainstream media, most people can tell you about Black Lives Matter but few know how far their house-buying power has fallen in recent decades.

This is the reason why all of the big corporations support Black Lives Matter when they didn’t support Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter pushes a narrative of racial division, of Team Black against Team White, and in doing so it splits the 99% down the centre, leaving them powerless against the predations of the 1%. Anyone who decries this racial narrative in favour of a class one is accused of not paying full respect to the oppression of blacks and browns, and is smeared as a racist.

It’s a perfect recipe for rendering the working class incapable of taking collective action against their rulers.

The basic rule is that any future movement seeking to bring the lower classes together against the Establishment will be opposed, and any future movement seeking to set the lower classes against each other will be supported. It can be predicted that any future movement promoting racial grievances, gender grievances or grievances relating to sexual orientation will be promoted widely by the mainstream media and supported by major corporations.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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If You Thought Race-Baiting Was Bad In New Zealand Now, You’re Not Ready For What’s Coming

Many Kiwis have never seen serious race-baiting in the mainstream media, and so they have been appalled by the levels it has reached in recent weeks. Maori Party co-leader John Tamihere has been featured, claiming that all non-Maoris are racists. The sad and bitter truth is that race-baiting in the media is about to get worse over the next three months. A great deal worse.

If you thought to yourself, upon hearing Tamihere’s outburst, that there’s no way the mainstream media would platform a white person making a blanket insult about Maoris, you might be in for an inkling of what’s coming.

The example has been set by America, where any accusation of racism is held up by the mainstream media as if it were major news. In America, anyone can get 15 minutes of fame simply by making a big enough fuss about how something is racist. That thing doesn’t have to actually be racist – it’s only necessary to get some hysteria about it started and the mainstream media will throw itself in behind you.

America has fallen into such an advanced state of race neurosis that a mere accusation of racism is enough to cause paroxysms of guilt, fear and rage. These powerful emotional reactions prime a person to respond to advertising suggestions. So the profitability of race-baiting has led to a spate of it – and now it’s coming to New Zealand.

The race-baiting in America is more sophisticated than simply letting two sides throw excrement at each other. The 21st Century way to do it is to let one side throw excrement while excoriating the other side for defending itself. The old way had a tendency to lead to both sides becoming friends, in the manner of drunks after a fistfight. The new way guarantees lasting and bitter hatred.

New Zealand, as ever, is following America’s lead here. In America, it has been proven that shameless race-baiting is a successful method for getting media attention. If a talking head on the television says that the existence of some law, policy or monument is racist, then a shitfight will begin.

The Maori Party, noting the example set by American race-baiters, are going full steam ahead in imitation. John Tamihere seems eager to complete the negrification of the New Zealand Maori, adopting wholesale the slavery-and-struggle narrative of the American blacks. Not for him the narrative that white people and Maoris struggled together for over a century, from New Zealand to Northern Africa, and won a great peace for each other.

The Maori Party narrative is that Maoris and non-Maoris are enemies.

They have now abandoned any pretence of impartiality. “Upsetting the rednecks” is their now stated aim. The race-baiter’s narrative is that a state of war exists between Maoris and non-Maoris, and that any defeat for the latter is a win for the former. The angrier a given policy proposal makes non-Maoris, the better it is.

The claim that a state of war exists between two groups who share the same public space is obviously not a peaceful one. As can be seen from the state of affairs in America, adopting a racial conflict narrative will lead to a worse time for everyone, with more paranoia, hate and violence all round.

The problem is that the Maori Party’s main goal, of dividing the New Zealand people in order to claim a chunk for themselves, coincides perfectly with the mainstream media’s goal of dividing the New Zealand people so that they cannot resist the Establishment. As such, the media will be more than happy, over the next three months, to give attention to any and all race-baiting efforts made by the Maori Party.

Because the Maori Party is more than willing to supply the mainstream media with race-baiting content, the mainstream media never has a shortage of it. Consequently, we can expect a barrage of it between now and the General Election (and beyond). It will be wall-to-wall racial grievance mongering.

We can expect Tamihere and co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer to come out and say all kinds of ridiculous shit over the next three months. Expect to hear calls for every city and street to be renamed, for every Government and council agency to make a grovelling apology and for Maori quotas in everything, from Parliament down to Parent Teacher Associations.

No matter how ridiculous, the maintream media will broadcast it all into the homes of every Kiwi, alongside the implication that anyone objecting to any of it is a filthy racist who effectively stands with Hitler a traitor to the nation.

It can be expected, also, that Tamihere and Ngarewa-Packer will avoid making an effort to solve real problems facing Maori people. They will avoid mentioning the benefits to Maori of cannabis law reform, just as the gutless Tamihere shied away from the issue while a Labour MP. This is despite the fact that the imposition of cannabis prohibition onto the Maori people was one of the greatest crimes the New Zealand Government ever committed.

Genuine issues don’t concern the race-baiters, because they win not by alleviating the suffering of their people but by stirring up racial animosity. This animosity gives them more attention and, so they hope, more votes. Over the next three months, it can confidently be predicted that the race-baiting in the media will increase, the quality of public discourse will decrease, the New Zealand people will lose, and our enemies and our exploiters will win.

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Should The Mainstream Media Abandon Kayfabe?

‘Kayfabe’ is a professional wrestling term which means acting like what you are doing is real, although it isn’t. The professional wrestlers have since abandoned kayfabe, choosing now to present themselves as sports entertainment instead of as serious competitors. This essay asks: should our mainstream media follow suit?

In the early days of professional wrestling, people took things a lot more seriously than they do nowadays. Life was much more brutal a century ago, and people were far less given to flights of fancy. As such, the vast majority of people wanted to watch real wrestling matches between two fit, determined men out to triumph over the other. Although professional wrestling was fake, this couldn’t be admitted.

By the 1990s, when life had become easy, people had come to take things less seriously. It no longer seemed important to pretend that the matches were real and that the outcomes were not fixed. The definitive moment came in 1996 when superstars Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Shaun Michaels and Triple H all embraced in the middle of the ring after a match, when, according to the WWF coverage, they all hated each other (see image above).

In professional wrestling, where the wrestlers are playing characters, the actual wrestlers are usually great friends. After all, they have to trust each other very closely in performing their dangerous physical stunts, and this combined with the inherent danger of the job leads to a strong sense of camaraderie. Their feuding and battling is just an act, one that is now admitted to. Kayfabe has now been abandoned.

A convincing argument can be made that it’s time for the mainstream media to follow suit, and to admit that what they say does not reflect reality. Should they come out and admit that the product they sell is not information, but dramatic entertainment portrayed as political conflict? Is it time for the mainstream media to abandon kayfabe?

In professional wrestling, it’s understood by all that Vince McMahon runs the company, and his primary interest is making money by producing a quality entertainment product. So no-one pretends the matches are real anymore, they just go along with it as if it were pantomime. The sporting media reports on it as if it were entertainment, and it’s understood as such.

When two politicians clash, however, the mainstream media portrays it as if they genuinely hated each other. Election debates are presented to the populace as if they were heavyweight title fights, with two sides going head-to-head for an accolade that only one of them can possess. The television journalists describe mere insults as if politicians were ripping into each other like pit fighting dogs.

The story we’re sold is that all sides are ready to beat each other’s brains out. In reality, every single politician has a mutual interest in keeping the gravy train going, and this sentiment is shared with the owners of the mainstream media. For the political class, it’s very much them against the people whose taxes keep them in luxury. They will choose to put each other first before the plebs, anywhere and always.

Evidence for this assertion comes from how closely members of the political class interact with each other when the cameras aren’t rolling. They populate think tanks together, they party with each other, they marry each other. Politicians might ostensibly represent interests that are implacably opposed to each other, but the reality is that almost all of them come from the ruling class, and represent the interests of that class above any other.

This is why New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, of the Labour Party, can have a cousin named Shane Ardern, who is a Member of Parliament for the National Party. It’s no contradiction that one family can produce MPs for both sides of the fence, because Parliament is a ruling class institution, and the Arderns are a ruling class family.

The average man in the street had figured out 20 years ago that professional wrestling was fake, but is only just figuring out today that the mainstream media is equally as fake. Yes, the mainstream media is just as scripted, dishonest and utterly unreal as any professional wrestling show. Now that this is widely recognised, it’s time to admit it.

It should be openly accepted by the mainstream media that they are the employees of their owners, the international finance and banking interests. As such, they are presenting a program that serves the interests of those owners. Their product is drama, in particular drama between different political actors and/or factions. They aren’t selling objective information, or an objective overview of what’s going on in the nation and in the world.

The WWF, its acronym redolent of the Olympic wrestling federations, rebranded as the WWE and started calling itself “sports entertainment”. It’s time for our mainstream media to do something similar – to stop pretending that their role is to inform or to hold power to account, and to start calling itself “journalistic entertainment”.

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Understanding The New Definition Of “Crime”

Most of us are still getting our heads around the bizarre attempt to redefine racism as “prejudice plus power”. Well, hold on to your pants, because there’s about to be another effort to redefine a simple word to suit a political agenda. This essay has the details.

If you’re in Generation X, the definition of racism is simple enough. If you dislike someone because of their race, and not because of personal characteristics that are worthy of hate, then you are a racist. You have judged a person prematurely on account of your bigotry, which is prejudice. Prejudice is bad because it doesn’t give other people a fair deal.

We had just gotten our heads around how racism was a bad thing when the definition changed.

Now, or so we’re aggressively told, racism is defined as prejudice plus power. This new definition asserts that only structural and institutional racism counts as actual racism, and that racism that isn’t backed by institutional power is merely prejudice. In practice, this means that non-white people can’t be racist because their racism isn’t “backed by institutional power”.

This is clearly bullshit, but enough morons have fallen for it to make it possible for the next move to be made.

In recent months, keen observers have noticed another attempt at redefining language, this time relating to crime. Some criminal actions are made out to be horrific atrocities, whereas other criminal actions, much worse than in the first group, are made out to be perfectly and understandable courses of action that no reasonable person would complain about.

For instance, 472 people have been shot and killed by American Police officers in 2020 so far. At that rate, some 30 have been killed between the death of George Floyd and the writing of this article. The crucial difference between the death of Floyd and the hundreds of others is simple: Floyd was a black man killed by a white one. As such, the severity of the crime is much greater than if it had been different.

The new logic is that a criminal act isn’t really a criminal act unless it’s coming from a place of power. In the same way that racism isn’t real racism unless it’s committed by those deemed to have power, now crime isn’t really crime unless it’s committed by those deemed to have power.

This is why no-one cares about the fact that American blacks kill 4,000 other American blacks every year. These might be killings, but they’re not really murders because they’re not coming from a place of institutional power. As such, they’re not worthy of any outrage.

It’s also why no-one cares about children getting beaten to death. Children are almost always the same race as their parents, and consequently there is seldom a racial power differential between parent and child. Absent such a differential, crimes aren’t considered severe enough to warrant attention. No-one knows who Sofia Taueki-Jackson is, and no-one cares.

In the new paradigm, not having power means that you can basically do whatever the fuck you like for whatever reason. Someone else is always to blame. No matter how wretchedly unenlightened your conduct, someone else is always to blame. There will always be a chorus of slaves willing to make excuses.

The morality can be summed up thusly: to have power is to be immoral, to be powerless is to be moral.

This morality explains why the authorities of the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone have been filmed taking action to enforce the zone’s borders and immigration policy. The authorities of CHAZ are powerless, therefore they get to enforce immigration laws (in any case, if they are not weak then they represent those who are). This is why it’s moral for them to enforce borders but not moral for America to do it.

Enforcing immigration laws is only a bad thing if you have power. If you don’t have power, then it’s fair for you to violate other people’s boundaries. This is (of course) never explicitly stated, but it’s implied. Only the strong are obliged to hold to moral laws. The weak can do what they like, and all blame can be safely deflected onto the structure of society.

This logic is self-contradictory, because such a system does nothing to abolish hierarchies or power differentials – it merely grants ultimate authority to those who decide what power is. If power is defined as wealth, then the powerless are the poor. If power is defined as white privilege, then the powerless are the non-whites. If power is defined as social status, then the powerless are the degenerate and the outcast.

In reality, under such a system, all power lies in the hands of those who can most effectively claim to represent the powerless. And those people will be those who were powerful in the beginning, and who are powerful in all times and places: members of the ruling class who are able to persuade others to follow and obey them.

Understanding the new definition of crime requires the recognition that the Western World is now fully in the grips of slave mentality. We have given up on the concept of self-mastery entirely, and now indulge baser instincts in a manner little different from animals. This won’t change until the world goes through a revolution that reasserts master morality and an honour culture.

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