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

Despite the ugly racist mood of the crowd that came to Washington on September 12, 2009, some of them displaying signs that depicted Obama as a communist, a witch doctor with a bone in his nose, designed by Fox news expert Dr. David McKalip, or as someone who belongs in a zoo, as a monkey or as someone who should be killed, David Brooks said that the demonstration had nothing to do with race, yet they’re always criticizing Iranians for ignoring facts. Here’s a man who gets quoted as though he is Solomon. He wasn’t the only one. A steady stream of white politicians, pundits and their African-American tokens like Zambia-born Amy Holmes denied that race had anything to do with the ugly display against President Obama during the Fox and insurance industry sponsored 9/12 march on Washington. Neo-con David Brooks doesn’t understand why many blacks won’t assimilate, a process that has worked for him. His mentor is the late Irving Kristol who rose to power by scapegoating blacks for all of the country’s social ills and associating them with welfare, the Great Society programs, and affirmative action when the largest group to receive the advantages of these programs have been whites.

Kristol became a consultant for the Bradley Foundation, one of those think tanks that finances quack studies about black inferiority. He even got all cozy with backwoods Christian fundamentalists, even though they believe that the Jews must convert before Jesus comes down from out of the sky. His friend Norman Podhoretz also used this formula to make it. Criticizing black family values. A hypocrite. According to Theodore Solotaroff, Podhoretz’s colleague at Commentary , Podhoretz was a real party animal: “He was no longer the spokesman of our sober, mature look, whose wistful suggestion for acting up was a midnight plunge in the Plaza Hotel fountain. No, that Norman was history. In the past year or two he had teamed up with Norman Mailer, the lead rebel, iconoclast and sensualist of the New York scene. The result was a hard-drinking, sexually liberated Norman who didn’t seem to spend many evenings at home.” Solotaroff says that Podhoretz’s wife Midge Decter, a woman who has spent years making a career of criticizing unmarried black mothers, made a pass at him. Like Michelle Bernard chastising black males instead of some of the corporate malefactors who sponsor her shows, the neo-con operation founded by Podhoretz and others served the purpose of redirecting attention from the criminal behavior of corporations, the money behind the neo-cons, to the bad habits of the so-called black underclass. The corporate-owned media use the same strategy.

The news media spent a week running footage showing a black student beating up a white student on a school bus, but three recent cases where white thugs murdered Hispanics and got off were virtually ignored. During the same period the police, and the media, which always take their side, accused some black and Hispanic youth of a gang rape. Later it was discovered that the rape victim had lied and that the police had jumped the gun, which is typical of how the police treat black and brown suspects. In the same week a white man suspected of killing an Asian- American woman at Yale was permitted to go home and after he was arrested the media showed pictures of him behaving like an altar boy and brought on friends of his who vouched for his character.

Howard Kurtz, a so called media critic, and an Imus Alumni, who has had it in for Obama ever since he announced his candidacy, spent Sunday, September 20 on Serena and Kanye for laughs, but hasn’t commented about the media silence regarding the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer “which agreed to pay 2.3 billion dollars to settle civil and criminal allegations that it had illegally marketed its painkiller Bextra, which has been withdrawn.” It was the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever. So restrictive is the latitude accorded David Gregory by his corporate bosses that when Senator Joseph Lieberman appeared on Meet The Press , November 22, he failed to point out that Lieberman, who was on the show to oppose the health bill, receives millions from the insurance industry.

Nor did he utter a word about Bank of America, another criminal operation and sponsor of Bill Cosby and Michelle Bernard’s entertainment, “that covered up 3.6 billion dollars paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch.” Unbridled capitalism and their media hirelings make chumps of millions of whites by entertaining them with the antics of O.J., Serena, Kanye West and Chris Brown, (the sole U.S. domestic abuser), and Michael Vick so as to divert attention from their crimes. Big business ought to put O.J. and them on salary. MSNBC’s criticism of Obama’s mild health reforms makes sense when you realize that General Electric, which owns NBC, sells health insurance and Joe Scarborough, one of Obama’s harshest critics, is just another salesman to them. During the same period that corporate criminality was unveiled, the media jumped on ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations of Reform Now, an organization that serves the poor and registers black and Hispanic voters to the consternation of the Republican Party and its media allies. ACORN warned of the foreclosure crisis.

I listened to some ignorant poor and middle class whites call The Washington Journal to complain about ACORN, a few of whose workers were entrapped by a conservative sting operation. The employees who fell for this sting should have been fired for falling for the idea that a conservative nerd was a pimp. In the case of the woman, I would also have been duped. She carried on like someone who had been turning tricks for years, bringing to her role the kind of zeal we’ve come to expect from wingnuts. (I guess that Ann Coulter wasn’t available). The fact that ACORN lost over fifty million dollars as result of her performance makes her the most expensive play-acting whore in history.

These whites complain about big government but toady for big business that treats them like dirt. Poisons their food, overmedicates their children, hypnotizes them with the Bernay’s principle so that they buy things that they don’t need, and sends their jobs abroad. Instead of fighting those who view them as serfs, they travel all the way to Washington from places like South Carolina to call Barack Obama a monkey. (If South Carolina secedes again, which it’s always threatening to do, would the country fight another war to persuade a state that still thinks of itself as Scotland to return to the fold? I don’t think so.) The Times ’ ombudsman wrote a piece about how the liberal news media and his own newspaper were tardy in picking up on the ACORN scandal, which was uncovered by the vast right-wing media conspiracy, which was on ACORN like a bloodhound.[14]

I’d like to see the ombudsman report on why the media both liberal and conservative almost hid another of Bank of America’s scandals. In December 2008, a federal jury in Manhattan found Bank of America liable in a securities fraud trial that centered on the sales of asset-backed securities and involved some of the biggest names on Wall Street.

In a verdict delivered late Thursday after nearly six weeks of trial, the jury ordered Bank of America to pay more than 141 million dollars to a dozen institutional plaintiffs, including the American International Group, Allstate, Société Générale, Travelers, Bank Leumi, Bayerische Landesbank and the International Finance Corporation. The money includes interest that Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank, is obligated by law to pay on the 101 million dollar award, which did not include punitive damages.

On September 29, 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Bank of America suspended its work with the ACORN group. Bank of America and ACORN had been working together on mortgage foreclosure issues. Bank of America severed ties with the group after GOP Reps. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, Darrell Issa of California and Lamar Smith of Texas sent a letter to fourteen banks requesting disclosure to the House Financial Services Committee of all financial arrangements with ACORN and its subsidiaries or affiliates.