[Peace-discuss] Black Lives Matters: Glenn Greenwald interview of Andray Domise vs. BlackAgendaReport.com's assessment

[J.B. Nicholson]

Brussel, Morton K wrote:
> The BLM “movement", which arouses such fervent antagonism by David, has had worthy
> manifestations throughout the country, and elsewhere. I have not seen the evidence
> that they were financed/supported by Soros and/or specific groups. There were all
> kinds of participants in the protests, aroused by the killing of George Floyd.
> David seems to relegate the protests to a false issue; i.e., by ignoring willfully
> the crucial class and revolutionary issues. It’s as if the mass protests were bad,
> i.e., counterproductive. But they did reveal the pernicious actions of the present
> system and the Trump government, viz Portland.

Reading a recent article by Glen Ford (from BlackAgendaReport.com) I think that David 
Green's assessment is looking more correct; check out Ford's informative and 
right-minded assessment of BLM's most tangible and specific achievement to date that 
I know of: ostensibly working on actual police reform in 
https://www.blackagendareport.com/reneging-george-floyd-promises-minneapolis-police-name-change-con 
. It's early days still and Ford writes that there isn't agreement across BLM that 
this is the right path to pursue:
> Although some of the 14 Black Lives Matter chapters in the U.S. have refused to
> endorse community control, the Chicago chapter is active in the campaign for CPAC
> and the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter chapter favors community control of social
> services, land and all other community resources, including the police.

This article doesn't specifically address the same issues David raised, but Ford's 
article does cause one to wonder whose interests are served by BLM (and this is the 
aspect that struck me as being in agreement with David's advice on BLM).

 From Ford's article:
> At the height of the Minneapolis rebellion a majority of the city council
> announced they would move towards “disbanding” their police force, in response to
> Black Lives Matter “abolition” demands. It turned out that what the councilpersons
> were actually proposing was a name change, retaining a force of armed cops in a
> new “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention” with a “holistic,
> public health-oriented” mission. But even this palliative was too much for the
> Minneapolis Charter Commission, which voted to delay putting the police
> reorganization question on the November ballot, effectively killing the measure.
> The city is currently required to maintain a set ratio in the number of cops per
> resident.

That Ford piece tells us more about what's going on than Glenn Greenwald's 1-hour+ 
interview (https://youtube.com/watch?v=I_2CVBN4mlo) with Andray Domise. Ford gets to 
important issues of actionable policy in far less time than Greenwald's meandering 
Domise interview. Greenwald never comes to terms with the huge gap between what the 
relatively radical things Domise (eventually) says he wants from BLM versus what BLM 
seems to stand for (vague sloganeering).

Consider these goals from Ford's article:
> The Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar (TCC4J)[1], which was formed in
> the wake of the police killing of Jamar Clark in 2015, never bought into the city
> council’s name-change game. “The proposed charter amendment was at best a symbolic
> gesture and at worst lessened police accountability for past and future crimes,”
> the TCC4J’s Jae Yates told a press conference[2]. “In opposition to the charter
> amendment, TCC4J instead demands community control of police [CPAC], which will
> meaningfully curtail the as of yet unchecked power of the MPD to terrorize Black,
> brown and low income communities. The CPAC legislation puts all oversight of
> police misconduct back into the hands of the communities that are being policed
> and provides continuous engagement for community members to address grievances.
> CPAC consists of a directly-elected all-civilian council, and has final authority
> over discipline, up to and including subpoena power and the convening of grand
> juries. In short, the CPAC legislation has all of the details that the city
> council’s proposal lacked.”

[1] https://northsideawesome.org/project/twin-cities-coalition-for-justice-for-jamar/
[2] 
https://www.fightbacknews.org/2020/8/11/minneapolis-proposed-charter-amendment-police-won-t-be-november-ballot

And concluding that calls for "defunding the police" and "abolishing the police" 
actually serve the establishment's interests because they are being bent to the 
establishment's definition:
> Unless Black community activists spell out precisely how security for communities
> will be maintained, and to whom those forces will be accountable, the demand to
> “defund” the police -- like “abolition” -- is an invitation for officials to
> engage in word games, obfuscation and lies. As we wrote in the July 1 issue of
> BAR:[1]
> 
> “Cuts in police budgets may rightly count as victories for the protesters that
> demanded cuts (or, it may actually be the result of across-the-board cutbacks due
> to collapse of tax revenues in the Great Depression Two). But diminished budgets
> do not make the police accountable to the people or allow the people to reinvent
> policing (or whatever folks choose to call the mechanisms of their security).
> Transfer of duties previously (mis)handled by cops to more competent agencies is a
> good thing, but will not result in People’s Power unless those agencies are
> brought under community control, along with the police[2].”
> 
> Thus, not only must we demand community control of the police, but also community
> control of those social service agencies that purport to serve the community, and
> to whom police funds would supposedly be transferred under a “defund the police”
> policy.
> 
> As Frederik Douglass famously said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
> Power will also use every opportunity to reshape people’s “demands” that are vague
> or open-ended – such as “abolition” and “defunding” of the police. Angela Davis,
> the prison and police abolition scholar most often cited by Black Lives Matter
> activists, was on hand for the relaunching of the National Alliance Against Racist
> and Political Repression last year in Chicago, and is 100 percent behind its
> community control of police campaign.

[1] https://blackagendareport.com/protest-and-power
[2] 
https://www.blackagendareport.com/yes-defund-cops-and-put-them-under-community-control

Perhaps there is more internal fighting inside BLM than I'm aware of, but from the 
looks of BLM's website and what I see covered in BLM street protests and on BLM's 
website, I am compelled to conclude that BLM is indistinguishable from a 
purposefully-vague establishment shill. This does not help the public because BLM 
backs (as BlackAgendaReport.com published in 
https://blackagendareport.com/protest-and-power and quotes again in Ford's latest 
article):
> “’Reforms’ that leave power in the hands of the oppressor and his flunkies succeed
> mainly in making the enemy look good. It buys the oppressor more time to harm the
> people – which is what the Democrats were seeking when they adopted the vocabulary
> of protest and embraced ‘reforms’ they had previously rejected in the face of a
> Black-led popular insurgency. Movement organizers must avoid providing
> opportunities for scoundrels, sell-out artists and Democratic Party operatives to
> pose as friends of ‘the community.’