Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (20 page)

Under the headline: “Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention,” John L. Perry wrote:

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

A poll of New Jersey voters revealed that twelve percent believed that Obama was the anti-Christ, and a large percentage of Republicans still maintained that he was born in Kenya.

As usual, the corporate media was designing an America that was markedly different from the one that was reflected by the polls. Appearing on
Morning Joe
, a reporter from
Rolling Stone,
who unmasked the influence upon the town halls of the insurance companies, which spent three hundred and eighty million dollars in their effort to derail the health plan's public option, was challenged by Pat Buchanan, who still maintains that his boss Richard Nixon was wronged, and Canadian-born millionaire, Mort Zukerman. Buchanan and Zukerman insisted that the corporate-manipulated town hall meetings and the 9/12 Washington demonstrations organized by tea baggers were genuine and reflected the mood of the country, which was anti big government. However, Max Blumenthal, a
Nation
contributor, interviewed some of the marchers. He discovered that they were ignorant of the issues and many didn't know why they were there.

Zukerman, who has been very critical of Obama, turned up later on Lou Dobbs' show on CNN to criticize Obama for his attempt to have the Olympic Games in Chicago. His black employee, Errol Louis of
The Daily News
, who survived the purge of black reporters that occurred when Zukerman took over, agreed with his boss. Amazingly, Lewis poses as a progressive on Air America affiliate WWRL 1600.

So insistent on Obama's failure, the staff at Murdoch's
The Weekly Standard
erupted into cheers when it was announced that the Olympics would not be held in the United States.
The Weekly Standard
had been recently purchased by a Christian fundamentalist billionaire named Phil Anschutz who makes his money in oil and real estate. When Obama received the Nobel Peace prize, NPR, in the midst of firing some of its black personnel, brought on a
Weekly Standard
contributor to denounce the Nobel Prize committee for awarding Obama the prize, lending credence to Kofi Natambu's lack of confidence in NPR. So dire was the firing of blacks at NPR, which receives public funds, that the National Association of Black Journalists sent a letter. If Obama or members of his family are harmed, the same media that encouraged and in the case of Fox News, helped to organize the tea-baggers, will argue that with his policies he brought it on himself. As I predicted when asked to comment on his election by
The Oakland Tribune
, Obama is a centrist and to the right on some issues, but the infotainment media have cast him as a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, and a Muslim who was born in Kenya. The majority, forty-seven economists, polled by
The Wall Street Journal
, agreed that a recovery is underway and even Paul Krugman, who had been appointed the president's rival, appearing on
This Week
in October gave the president some faint praise, and while doing so revealed his fellow panelists' ignorance about the subject of economics. They were Peggy Noonan and George Will. On October 13, 2009,
The Oakland Tribune
reported a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics that “Eighty percent of economists believe that the recession is over and an expansion had begun, but they expect the recovery will be slow as worries over unemployment and high federal debt persist.” By October 30, Barack Obama and his team had saved the country from a depression yet so pathological is white supremacy that the threats against his life have increased by four hundred percent. If any harm comes to him, the same media that are creating an atmosphere where such a deed is possible will blame the president. They'll give him some of the tough love that he and his fellow Harvard elite deal to blacks. They'll say that because of his Marxist leanings, he brought it on himself.

Blaming the victim is nothing new in American history. Francis Parkman, who has been called the greatest of American historians, blamed the seizure of Indian lands and the extermination of some Indian tribes on the Indians. He said “the Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence.” Sound familiar? The cynical minds who serve the shareholders of NBC, CNN and Fox have used this explanation to make big bucks with little investment on their part, only the Indians have become blacks and Latinos. Noticing that CNN got high ratings from its blame-the-victim stunt,
Black In America
, MSNBC teamed Bill Cosby up with Michelle Bernard, a hired black mouth for the far right, who, following the neo-con line, and prompted by her funders, says that personal responsibility is a problem peculiar to black men. She's also a global-warming denier, and believes that we should go easy on the rich because after all they are creating all of the wealth, according to her. She is one of those who are spreading lies about Obama's health proposals. Bernard, president and CEO of the far- right funded Independent Women's Forum, has written:

More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama's nationalized healthcare onslaught.

According to the site
SmackDown
:

The Independent Women's Forum is the organization that has been running a malicious ad that focuses on scaring breast cancer victims into rejecting any of President Obama's reform initiatives. The Independent Women's Forum shares its premises and resources with Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity is the organization that created Patients First and Patients United Now, groups that have been critical to disrupting the health care debate in an effort to sidetrack the entire process.

She is a black Tokyo Rose making broadcasts on behalf of the enemy, without even using big band swing music as part of her appeal. That Cosby would enter into an alliance with this woman is another example of how the once-brilliant and trail-blazing comedian is spending his twilight years as a sad clown.

MSNBC's version of
Black In America
was something called
About Our Children
, an entertainment which featured some lines from Cosby aimed at getting laughs from the audience. He revived his Jello act in a discussion with some children. The Latino community was also represented by a comedian, Paul Rodriguez, who got on not only to entertain, but because he opposes bilingual education. Cosby and Rodriguez couldn't probe too deeply into the causes of American poverty because the entertainment was sponsored by one of the largest criminal operations in the country, the Bank of America. Also Wells Fargo, which is being sued by the city of Baltimore for aiming toxic loans at black neighborhoods. As
The Washington Independent
noted, “lawsuits over racial discrimination in sub prime lending are winding their way through the court system. Some of the allegations are nothing short of shocking; in one suit recently classified as a class action case, Wells Fargo is accused of using loan software with discounts on rates and fees in white communities, but forbidding loan officers in minority communities from access to it.” Wells Fargo received billions of dollars in taxpayers' bailout and in October of 2009, announced a three billion dollar profit, yet the crime that the corporate-owned media concentrate on is street crime. Wonder why? Host Tavis Smiley is under attack for aiding Wells Fargo in peddling these loans that have cost black homeowners billions in lost equity.

Now, Cosby lends his name to this operation by appearing on a show that is sponsored by Wells Fargo. If Bernard accused Wells Fargo and Bank of America both, technically, individuals, of lacking personal responsibility her face would disappear from the tube forever. Obviously, Michelle Bernard, who, following her backers' script, is trying to blame black men for the country's social ills, isn't too choosey about who sponsors her, but Cosby ought to know better. Cosby wrote
CounterPunch
expressing annoyance with me after I wrote that he and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. were viewing the underclass from first class.

I live in the ghetto and I can assure you that the rich Negroes who get on television don't know the half of it. Many of them are professors who live all of their lives in college towns and when they travel, it's usually to visit another college town.

I invited Bill Cosby to come to Oakland and sit in on one of our neighborhood meetings. We finally got a period of peace on our block because one of the gang members who were terrorizing our neighbors for at least four years was murdered around the corner and his brother seriously wounded.

They were Asian Americans, but I doubt whether CNN or MSNBC will do
South Asian in America
, a show devoted to the social pathologies of this growing community. Asian Americans must be cast as the model minority.

The purpose of this, according to the great Chinese-American writer, Frank Chin, is to embarrass blacks. But a toxic house, a criminal operation still flourishes in the neighborhood because of the power of a landlord, an absentee landlord, who has defied the city's attempt to shut down her property. The police tell us that because of the power of landlords who rent their property or allow their abandoned property to fester with criminal operations, they are helpless to do anything about the problem. Skip and Coz. These landlords who are aiding and abetting criminal operations in neighborhoods like mine are probably from two-parent households and won't be covered by The Discovery Channel's upcoming smear of the city. An entertainment all about Oakland's gang violence without acknowledging that under Ron Dellums, a black mayor and a new black police chief, crime is down.

The Cosby-Bernard show included a “town hall,” a cheap way to get ratings; a device which relies on panelists and audience members competing with each other over who can come up with the best applause lines. These verbal shootouts are guaranteed to raise the revenue of CNN and MSNBC, but I doubt whether the panelists get paid. They do it for free like in the old plantation days. It's all about entertainment. Advertising to promote CNN's second
Black In America
, Soledad O'Brien, in a carnival tone, like one of the guys whose job it is to stand outside of strip clubs on North Beach in San Francisco, attempting to lure tourists to sex shows, promised the viewers, “You won't be able to tear yourself away from this one.”

On the morning of September 14, I was watching CNN's
Headline News
version of attracting ratings near the AA gate at JFK airport in New York. In succession there were stories about Serena Williams' tantrum at the US Open, Kanye West going off on Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony, and your obligatory black sexual predator, the usual sideshow manner by which blacks are shown on the tube. It's fitting that white pundits and other writers consult comedians like Bill Cosby and Chris Rock for their insights about black culture because, traditionally, the media have treated blacks as comic relief. Hollywood, which in November presented blacks with yet another neo-Nazi incest film called
Precious
, has been in this business for over one hundred years. You would think that white American novelists and playwrights would oppose the current atmosphere that has raised fears that President Obama will meet the same fate as JFK, the details of whose murder are still being held a secret by the CIA. Instead, novelists like Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth promote images of blacks in their works that are no different from those promoted against minority men in Nazi Germany's media and worse than that from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Both Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have depicted black men as flashers, which was the common manner by which Jewish men in the Nazi press were shown.

David Mamet lent his name to a repellent racist movie called
Edmund
, in which two black sexual predators appear (the sexual predator being the typical manner by which the Nazi publications like
Der Angriff
portrayed minority males). His predators, one is a pimp, the other a rapist, are even worse than the ones served up by D.W. Griffith. (Whether Mamet knows it, in the late Andrew MacDonald's
The Turner Diaries
, the ultra-right's bible and the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma Federal building, Jewish men are the pimps, black men are the rapists. Another reader was Richard Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh policemen last April 4, 2008.)

While cable uses Bill Cosby and Paul Rodriguez to comment on black and Hispanic issues, comedian Chris Rock is Mamet's guide to black America and he quoted Chris Rock in his vapid self-serving
Times
' Op- Ed, an advertisement for his forthcoming play called
Race
. I've never seen an Op-Ed in the
Times
written by the great living black playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. In his Op-Ed, Mamet quoted Chris Rock's comment on Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He said “You cannot find a seventy-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.” If Rock said that, he is ignorant and is susceptible to the cartoonish view of Rev. Jeremiah Wright offered by the media. Do you think that Rev. Wright hated the white members of his congregation? Of Rock's silly observation, Mamet wrote, “This made sense to me.”

It only made sense to Mamet because he wanted it to make sense. Even given the hard time that whites have been giving the Jews since ancient times, does Mamet believe that all Jewish seventy-year-old men hate Gentiles? Or is it just seventy-year-old black men who hate whites, uniformly? Who all think the same way?