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

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.