Another School Shooting — Two Dead, Several Wounded: Big Media Already Expressing Sympathy for Shooter's 'Personal Struggles'

"Washington state school shooter Jaylen Fryberg's personal struggles revealed on social media"

Alleged Washington school shooter Jaylen Fryberg

By Jason Sickles
Social media posts penned by the shooter in Friday’s rampage at a Washington state high school portray a head-over-heels teenager who grew more and more tormented when the relationship fell apart.

Authorities have identified the gunman as Jaylen Fryberg. Fryberg’s Facebook page shows him living in Tulalip Bay, nine miles from Marysville-Pilchuck High School where police say two students were killed and at least four others injured in the Friday morning shooting.

“I can't believe I just witnessed a shooting,” Austin Joyner, a student at the school, said on Twitter. “Kid came into the cafeteria and walked over to a table and pulled out the gun and shot 4-6 shots at students sitting down.”

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Role of US Corporate Entertainment in the Social Control Element of Imperialism: Empty Headed Black Celebrities Remain Politically Impotent

Don't expect truth or wisdom from entertainers. They work for monopoly media corporations, not for their adoring publics. With a few exceptions, Black entertainers conform to the dictates of Power and view their own “fans” as lower forms of life. “Jay-Z rejected an invitation to speak to [Harry] Belafonte, calling him a ‘boy’ who needed to understand that the rapper's very presence was 'charity' to the Black community.”


by Danny Haiphong

“While Jay-Z collects millions in profits from shared ownership of the Brooklyn Nets and ‘Rocawear,’ actor Danny Glover has yet to find 'charity' for Toussaint, a film that has been in the works since at least 2008.”

Corporate entertainment, as an appendage of the mass media, has for decades been a staple of the US imperial project. Corporate mass media is completely in the hands of five mega corporations, each with friendly relations with the Zionist entity (Israel) and Washington. Under these conditions, the careers of US entertainers are dictated both by the corporate profit motive and the interests of the states that regulate it. In this period in particular, where capitalism is in perpetual crisis, entertainers are highly valued for their social control function. Capitalists could very well accumulate far more profits from entertainers than they already do. Instead, the capitalist class pays for the lavish lifestyles of corporate entertainers to ensure they willingly present bourgeois ideology as a pleasurable product to the masses.

When the contradictions of US empire reach crisis levels, corporate entertainers are ultimately left with the choice of siding with the oppressed or remaining loyal to the oppressor's social system. History shows that the loyalty of American entertainers to imperialism is not guaranteed. In the mid 20th century, numerous Hollywood entertainers were subjected to FBI surveillance, harassment, and even exile for identifying with global socialist movements abroad and organizing with the Black freedom and communist movements at home. Targets included popular names such as Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Charlie Chaplin.

“Entertainers are highly valued for their social control function.”

But that was a different time. The monopolies of the entertainment industry have greatly expanded their basis of economic and social control for the capitalist ruling class. In this period, corporate entertainers maintain loyalty to US imperialism not only because of the exorbitant salaries they receive from their bosses, but also because of the political influence they are endowed from capital. It is no secret that media monopolies carefully recruit willing soul-sellers in exchange for access to a publicly celebrated bourgeois lifestyle. Still, imperialism's assessment of this period of crisis is that a stronger form of insurance is needed to maintain popular consent to its atrocities. The imperialist exploiters and warlords have found this insurance in the select-few entertainers it promotes to political class membership.

Jay-Z has been in the rap industry for over two decades but only recently ascended into Black political class membership. His inter-bourgeois mobility has come complete with connections to the Obama Administration and profitable business ventures. Last year, the gap between Jay-Z's rise to power and the conditions of the Black community evoked a strong response by Black freedom fighter and entertainer, Harry Belafonte. Belafonte urged Jay-Z to be more socially responsible to Black America, which alongside indigenous Native America, remains the most oppressed people in continental USA. Jay-Z rejected an invitation to speak to Belafonte, calling him a "boy" who needed to understand that the rapper's very presence was "charity" to the Black community.

The "charity" Jay-Z refers to is merely the visibility of a Black political class whose careers are built on the spoils of the white capitalist power structure. While Jay-Z collects millions in profits from shared ownership of the Brooklyn Nets and "Rocawear," actor Danny Glover has yet to find "charity" for Toussaint, a film that has been in the works since at least 2008.

Glover's film planned to tell the story of the Haitian Revolution. In 1804, the victory of this Black revolution freed Haiti from colonial enslavement and forced France to sell what is now half of the United States. But because the film's script possesses no white protagonist, the film has caught little interest from Hollywood execs. Hugo Chavez and the Chavista government agreed to donate 18 million to the film in 2008. The Black political class and its Hollywood reps have yet to donate a dime.

“The corporate entertainment industry produces and reproduces white supremacy, sexism, and bourgeois ideology.”

So when Rihanna and Dwight Howard both deleted tweets expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, it should be understood that such cowardice indicates the dual purpose of US imperialism's entertainment industry. Hollywood, corporate sports, and monopolized record labels are businesses of media profiteers. These institutions are inherently political. The corporate entertainment industry produces and reproduces white supremacy, sexism, and bourgeois ideology. It also produces a political class whose continued prosperity and political connection is dependent upon the plunder of world's people and resources.

It is important for the capitalist ruling class to sustain a political class of corporate entertainers whose intended audience is first and foremost Black America. The fact that most of the corporate celebs apologizing for their position on Israel's genocide are Black representatives in the industry is no coincidence. This development is tied to Jay-Z's insult of Harry Belafonte and Hollywood's hostility to Danny Glover's project on the Haitian revolution. Each scenario is part and parcel of imperialism's assault on Black radical politics and the social control function of corporate entertainment toward this end.

Malcolm X's grandson was on his way to the "International Conference on Hollywoodism" in Iran before being interrupted and arrested by the FBI. Shortly after, he was tragically killed in Mexico. The conference he was supposed to attend is a gathering of scholars, activists, and concerned citizens who come together to discuss Hollywood's role in promoting the interests of US and Western imperialism. As the conference suggests, an anti-imperialist liberation movement in the US must combat the viscous lies of corporate media and do so in this period without the aid of the vast majority of corporate celebs. The revolution will not be televised, nor made into a celebrity affair.
________________

Danny Haiphong is an activist and case manager in the Greater Boston area. You can contact Danny at: wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

By Scapegoating the Black Family — The Psycho-Social Problems of Whites Ignored: The White Family — A Case for National Action

The Cleaver Family: From the TV show, "Leave it to Beaver" (circa
1960). The show depicted what was considered the epitome of the
"perfect American family." (Photo from Wikipedia Commons)

By Sikivu Hutchinson
In the recent swirl of epic violence, mayhem and gun-besotted hysteria that has become the lifeblood of corporate media, no one is asking about the problem of white families.

In 1965, then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a landmark study on the “problem” of the black family. It was the year of the Watts Rebellion and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, two events that shook the core of American apartheid. Drawing from the work of black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Moynihan argued that the structure of black families contributed to the underdevelopment of black communities.

According to Moynihan, “The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening. The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure.” Perhaps more than any other public policy paper, the Moynihan Report, titled “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” indelibly framed the black family as a permanent category of crisis and an object of investigation. For Moynihan, the stabilization of black families was a matter of national importance because their abnormality threatened to undermine U.S. domestic stability.

True to the national stereotype, black women’s outsized role in black families was the culprit. For Moynihan black families exhibited “a tangle of pathology” due to a topsy turvy “matriarchal” structure which emasculated black men by robbing them of their “natural” head of household role. Put bluntly, “Negro children without fathers flounder and fail.” As a result, unemployment, crime, violence, poverty, babies having babies and low education levels all stemmed from the fundamentally aberrant nature of black families. In Moynihan’s world, black dysfunctionality and the insidious effects of chronic poverty could be remedied by allowing blacks equal access to “normal” family structures—i.e., straight, white, middle class and nuclear; the tribe of Dick, Jane, Father, Mother, and Spot which has harbored many of America’s white mass murderers.

Post-Moynihan, the normalcy of the white family, as an invisible standard of racial, gender and national identity, was implicitly understood within the context of the pathological black family. The ghost of the Moynihan Report hovers over every discussion of violent “pathological” out of control black youth. From Cosby, to Obama, to Paul Ryan, to Bill O’Riley, the supposedly criminal inclinations of black youth elicit shrill pro forma condemnations of black parenting, single mothers and absentee fathers.

Predictably, the recent rash of school and public shootings largely committed by white youth of the Millennial generation have not led to any mass appraisal of the state of white families. While the parade of angry “disaffected” white male shooters and mass murderers increases weekly, public policy mavens have not convened to diagnose the failings and afflictions of the white family. In the aftermath of each act of epic carnage, white parents have been called on to reflect on the behavior of their children, often expressing bewilderment over the motivations for Johnny’s rampage while pointing the finger at mental illness, wayward peers or violent video games.

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