Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

J. B Reed of Bloomberg News wrote:

Eli Lilly has faced legal problems over evidence that Zyprexa, a top-selling medicine, tends to cause weight gain and diabetes.

The lawyer, Scott Allen, said that memorandums from Lilly executives showed that the company knew of Zyprexa’s dangers soon after the drug was introduced in 1996. But Lilly deliberately played down the side effects, Mr. Allen said, so that sales of Zyprexa would not be hurt.

Lilly’s conduct was “reprehensible,” Mr. Allen said. In the suit, which is being heard in Alaska state court before Judge Mark Rindner, the state is asking Lilly to pay for the medical expenses of Medicaid patients who have contracted diabetes or other diseases after taking Zyprexa.

Of course when I read that the drug was also used on “disruptive” children, you can imagine where my mind went; probably the same place that Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s went.

My oldest daughter, Timothy, a novelist, author of Showing Out , has been suffering from schizophrenia since the age of twenty-eight. Every day for her is a challenge. Her psychiatrist only stopped prescribing Zyprexa for her when I told him to stop, having read about the Zyprexa scandal about a year ago. Now Eli Lilly’s offering her six thousand dollars, her share of a class action suit, a pittance when compared to the complications from type-one diabetes that she contracted as a result of taking this drug. And The New York Times calls me “angry” for taking on the subject of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Also, what am I supposed to make of a report that dangerous anti-psychotic drugs are prescribed to black patients suffering from mental illness while white patients are steered into talk therapy?

Rev. Wright proposes that crack was deliberately brought into the inner city by the government. The CIA admitted to having knowledge that U.S. allies brought drugs into the urban areas. The late Gary Webb was ridiculed by the American press for his Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion yet as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair disclose in their book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press , two years after Webb’s series ran, the CIA’s inspector general confirmed that the agency had in fact been aiding those very same Contra drug-runners (and many more).

Even before the publication of Dark Alliance , in the San Jose Mercury News , Senator John Kerry found that other government agencies knew about their allies’ drug peddling and didn’t do anything to stop it.

Don’t blacks have a right to ask why? These crack operations may not be affecting the neighborhoods of the rich pundits who dismiss Wright as an anti-American nut but they affect mine and probably those served by Rev. Wright. We had our latest shootout on my block on March 17. It took the Oakland police at least twenty minutes before they arrived. In a Playboy article (December 2007), I described my neighbors and me as being among the marooned. We don’t receive the kind of police protection or services that white neighborhoods receive. Rev. Wright knows this. Maureen Dowd doesn’t. She referred to him as a “wackadoodle,” the typical way in which black grievances are treated. We’re angry. Paranoid. Politically correct. We’re wack jobs. Foreign leaders who complain about American foreign policy are routinely described by the in-bed-with press as peculiar or crazy. Jokes are made about them on comedy shows.

Wasn’t Wright conservative when he mentioned just two of the horrendous crimes against humanity committed by the American government? Nagasaki and Hiroshima, attacks that were unique in history because the Japanese are still suffering from the damaging genetic effects of the war. He could have gone all out as Ward Churchill does in his book A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (Paperback). He could have reminded them that the West has been bombing Muslim countries since 1911 (see The History of Bombing by Sven Lindquist). Wright didn’t blame the three thousand casualties at the World Trade Center on the victims (nor did he say that it was an inside job, MSNBC’s Willie Geist’s lie). The fact that people abroad might be enraged by the country’s policies is a difficult message for the American public, which has been kept in a bubble of ignorance by the media and the school curriculums. Three thousand lives were lost as a result of the American invasion of Panama alone. Rick Sanchez of CNN said on March 21, 2008 that some Hispanics warmed to Obama’s speech on race because they remember the invasion of Panama and the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. They might also remember the Reagan administration’s support of Contra death squads. While white commentators and politicians were cynical about Obama’s speech on race another Hispanic, Gov. Bill Richardson, said that he endorsed Obama as a result of the speech. Sanchez also stepped away from his CNN comfort zone by adding that there were few Latinos represented in the media (during this week, “historian” Tom Brokaw called Hispanics, people who’ve been here since the 1500s, “Latin Americans”). He’s right. The few Asian-American, Hispanic, African-American, and Native-American journalists remaining are being bought out or fired according to Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute. And so what we had that week in March 2008 was a white separatist media criticizing a black nationalist preacher. Multi-deferment chicken hawk types criticizing a Marine. All you have to do is pick up a copy of The Washingtonian to see photos of these commentators and Op-Ed writers partying with and smooching up to the people whom they cover.

Air America’s Rachel Maddow seems to be the only MSNBC commentator who views the double standard being applied to Obama and other presidential candidates, when she’s not interrupted bullied and screamed at by Joe Scarborough who has to carry on like a maniac in order not to meet the same fate as Tucker Carlson. His show was cancelled. If two CNN reporters on the show Ballot Bowl surmised that Obama’s association with Rev. Wright hurt him, why doesn’t Hillary Clinton’s association with Billy Graham, her spiritual advisor, hurt her? In a Time interview, Hillary Clinton reported that the evangelist “fulfilled a pastoral role during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and helped the First Lady endure the ordeal. At that time, Clinton said, Graham was ‘incredibly supportive to me personally. And he was very strong in saying, ‘I really understand what you’re doing and I support you.’ He was just very personally there for me.’”

Billy Graham in a conversation with Richard Nixon described the Jews as “satanic” and offered that they owned the media and peddled pornography. If Mrs. Clinton denounced and rejected Billy Graham, of whom the editor of Newsweek Jon Meacham likened to God with his blue eyes, etc., her poll numbers would decline overnight. Jon Meacham was on a Sunday talk show, March 23, 2008, criticizing Rev. Wright and taking some jabs at Obama, part of it laced with sarcasm. He said that now people have found that Obama doesn’t “walk on water,” maybe because for Meacham only Billy Graham can perform such miracles.

And if that weren’t enough, the day before, C-Span’s guest was Donald Lambro, The Washington Times ’ chief political correspondent who joined in the media’s running loop devoted to criticizing Obama’s relationship with his pastor. The Friday before, Diana West, a reporter for the same paper, appearing on the Lou Dobbs show, criticized Michelle Obama and Rev. Wright for their “anti-Americanism,” and quoted Victor Davis Hanson, a far-right columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle . Their boss is Rev. Sun Myung Moon who warns Korean widows that their husbands will go to hell if they don’t give him money. If, for them, Obama should disown Rev. Wright, why are they still working for a religious shakedown artist? Why don’t they step away from Rev. Moon’s anti-Americanism reported by Robert Parry of Consortiumnews :