The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    A Message To Dr. Boyce Watkins

    By Wattree on Tue, 02/25/2014 - 9:33am |

    Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

    A Message to Dr. Boyce Watkins
    .

    Dr. Boyce Watkins said the following:
    .

    If You Really Love Your People, Why Not Share
    This Knowledge With Them Over the Internet -
    For Free?

    "One place to start might be with the political neutering of Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a radical freedom fighter who has been reduced to a snippet in a McDonald’s commercial. Dr. Cornel West has taken issue with the morphing of Dr. King and is speaking regularly to resurrect the real Dr. King from the spiritual grave. Despite being hit by propaganda of the worst kind (most of those who try to write off Dr. West as worthless aren’t actually listening to his speeches), Cornel West continues with a kind of persistence that has to be admired. If anything were to undermine the legacy of this extraordinary scholar, it would be that the purity of truth is just too much to digest in a world that is built on hurtful and ugly lies.".
    Dr. Watkins, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
    .
    The Black community wasn’t doing great under Clinton, but we were doing a lot better than we are today. And one of the primary reasons that we find ourselves in the condition that we’re currently in is during the 2000 election Ralph Nader and Cornel West teamed up and got Bush elected.
    .
    Clinton’s vice President, Al Gore, lost the 2000 election to Bush in Florida by 537 votes, and the Nader/West coalition peeled off 97,488 votes from Gore in Florida alone. So, again, West is one of the big reasons that the Black community is in the shape that it’s in today. Under Bush, the country was hemorrhaging 850,000 jobs a month. So by criticizing Obama about the condition of the country, Cornel West is like a guy who walks into a restaurant and shits on the floor, and then calls the Health Department because the owner can’t get it up fast enough. 
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    And please keep this in mind - the worse the Black community is doing, the more money that Tavis and West make talking about it, because Tavis owns a publishing company where he and West write books about it, a production company, where he and West do televisions shows about it, and he owns a speakers bureau, where Cornel West makes $30,000 a speech just to talk about the Black misery that he helped to create.
    .
    It’s easy for West to espouse his intellectually pure, but existentially impractical ideals that divide the people by advocating that we be so demanding of the Bogie Man that we promote the Devil. He doesn’t have to live with the disastrous results. Once he and Ralph Nader helped to get Bush elected in 2000, West simply slithered back into his Ivy League cocoon while the Black community went through eight years of Hell under Bush, and continue to suffer the consequences.
    .
    In addition, Cornel West preaches a better sermon than he’s willing to live. In spite of all of his rhetoric about his love for Black people and the community, he never taught at one Black school, or even a school that the majority of young Black people can even afford to have lunch in without mortgaging their family’s home, in his entire life. If West truly loved Black people like he claims, he’d be teaching third grade in the hood, or at the very least, teaching at one of our great Historically Black Colleges or Universities. But no, that’s not good enough for him. His ego requires that instead of living among the people and teaching Black students, that he don the costume of the resident "Negro radical," and gesticulate at Harvard or Princeton for the entertainment of the children of the very corporate manipulators that he’s railing against. Hypocrisy doesn’t come any more glaring than that. But, believe it or not, it gets worse.
    .
    Isn’t it funny that Tavis and West seems to Talk about everything bad that’s happening to the Black community, EXCEPT, Tavis’ part in the Wells Fargo "Ghetto Loan" scam where Tavis helped to herd over 30,000 Black and Hispanic homeowners into a situation that led to the lost their homes AND their life savings? The Department of Justice said that it was the second largest housing discrimination case on record - and this from two individuals who try to associate themselves with Martin Luther King.
    .
    "On July 12, 2012 Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times that Wells Fargo Bank agreed to pay $175 million to settle the discrimination suit which, according to the Department of Justice, targeted over 30,000 Black and Hispanic borrowers for subprime loans with a higher interest rate than for similarly situated White borrowers between 2004 and 2009."
    ."Smiley was the keynote speaker, and the big draw, according to Boston [host of "Moneywise"] and Keith Corbett, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, who attended two of the seminars. Smiley would charge up the audience — and rattle the Wells Fargo executives in attendance — by launching into a story about how he hated banks, and how they used to refuse to lend him money for his real estate projects in Compton, Calif., and elsewhere... But what appeared on the surface as a way to help black borrowers build wealth was actually just the opposite, according to a little-noticed explanation of the "Wealth Building" seminar strategy, contained in a lawsuit recently filed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan." 
    http://wattree.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-question-for-both-tavis-smiley-and.html
    .
    But in spite of these isues, in response to President Obama's remarks on race in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict, Tavis Smiley tweeted, "Took POTUS almost a week to show up and express mild outrage. And still, it was as weak as pre-sweetened Kool-Aid."
    .
    That was a very curious remark considering the fact that Tavis Smiley and Cornel West traveled all across the country on a bus under the pretext of being so passionately concerned about poverty in America that they just HAD to take a stand - but of course, that was BEFORE the election, and when they had books to sell. But after the election was over, and they didn’t have any new books to sell, they couldn't bring themselves to walk down the street from Tavis' office to support the Black Friday demonstrations taking place all across the country against Wal-Mart - Tavis' major sponsor, a member of ALEC, and the biggest abuser of the working class in America today.
    .
    And not only did they fail to attend ANY of the demonstrations taking place across the country against Wal-Mart, they didn't even issue a comment of support. All we've heard coming from the Smiley/West camp are crickets - and as everyone knows, that's extremely uncharacteristic of Cornel West, who's renown for being willing to trade a kidney for a sound byte. Thus, that just about says it all about those two. All subjective assessments aside, the facts alone suggest that Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are two of the most blatantly self-serving hypocrites that the Black community has ever suffered.
    .
    According to Scott Collins in his article, Tavis Smiley's bumpy 10th anniversary with PBS, in the Los Angeles Times:
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    "Such is the life of a public-television personality. Unlike most TV hosts, who simply do their jobs and collect a paycheck from a network, Smiley has to go out and raise most of the money for his program, which costs between $7 million and $8 million a year to produce. PBS generally contributes about $1 million of that sum. The rest comes from corporate sponsors, which Smiley has to round up himself.
    .
    The sluggish economy and reduced corporate spending have threatened the show's viability. But luckily for Smiley, Wal-Mart, a longtime sponsor, stepped up again, this time with a three-year commitment. (PBS can only offer a maximum of two years on renewals because, as a government-supported entity, it must be periodically authorized by Congress.) But Wal-Mart covers only about a quarter of the costs.
    (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-tavis-smiley-pbs-20131212,0,6312121.story#ixzz2ndW5CAp5).
    .
    And therein lies the problem - and, the reason for the prescription in the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics that "Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know." You cannot serve two masters. In the instance above, Tavis Smiley had to choose between the public's right to know, and his personal self-interest, and the public lost - and it's not the first time the public lost to Smiley's self-interest.
    .
    Now add the following to the mix.  In his article, "My Republican Party has Abandoned Me," Black Republican activist, Raynard Jackson, says the following (http://www.freedomsjournal.net/2012/10/31/my-republican-party-has-abandoned-me/):

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    "For many years, I have approached the party and its supporters about underwriting programs to bring together Blacks who are Republican or lean Republican so we can weave them into every facet of the party structure. The answer is always, no! But, twice this year some of these same people have approached me about funding for some election year tricks that they (White Republicans) have conjured up and simply need a Black face to execute the plan. On these two separate occasions, these funders were willing to spend upwards of $20 million to have me organize a national campaign to identify Blacks who would be critical of President Obama." 
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    Now, you do the math.

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    Eric L. Wattree
     

    Http://wattree.blogspot.com
    [email protected]
    Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
    .
    Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

     

     

    Comments

    Some historical perspective on Gore/Nader/West.

    TL;DR summery - Gore ran an uninspiring campaign for liberals and drove away a ton more voters than Nader stripped away, plus the media trashed him relentlessly with lies for 2 years  - even "liberal" columnists.  (I recall the debate where they asked Gore what message he had for kids and he launched into prescription benefits for seniors. What a letdown from the guy who did help push the modern internet through Congress)

     

    Features

      ABy James Ridgeway Tuesday, Nov 14 2000
    The Empire Strikes Back (Cont.) 

    Darth Nader Despite the ferocious liberal attacks, Nader was no spoiler. "CNN exit polls show that only about 47 percent of the Nader voters would have voted for Gore in a two-way race, while 21 percent would have voted for Bush and 30 percent would have abstained from voting in the presidential contest altogether," writes Tim Wise of Alternet, who puts together the following case for the consumer advocate. In New Hampshire, Bush's margin of victory was about 7500. Nader received 22,000 votes. Based on the exit polling, if Nader had not been in the race, less than half his votes would have gone to Gore. A fifth would have gone to Bush, who would have ended up with a 1500-vote victory. In Oregon, before things tightened over the weekend, people blamed Nader for what appeared to be a Bush victory. Late last week, Bush was leading by 23,000 votes and Nader had 54,000. But suppose Nader hadn't been in the race. Based on exit polls, Bush would still have squeaked by with about an 8000-vote victory. In Florida, the case seems most convincing. There, Wise points out, although Nader got 95,000 votes, Gore lost white women, 52-45. And Nader was no big factor among seniors. "Even more to the point, Bush received the votes of 12 times more Democrats than Nader did, and 5.25 times more self-identified liberals than Nader did . . . indicating that progressive voters and those who might have been seen as a natural lock for Gore, actually were stolen not by the Greens but by the Republicans." Of course, if Gore had won Tennessee, not to mention Clinton's Arkansas, along with the traditional Democratic bastion of West Virginia, Florida would be irrelevant.Party in Limbo 
    Green Stick Fracture The Green Party seems a most unlikely vehicle for the social and cultural anti-globalization movement, of which Ralph Nader is now the most visible leader. Like most social movements, this one will take years to emerge as a coherent force—and its growth as a political party is the least likely avenue. The movement found its voice in the streets in Seattle; it was a force to be reckoned with at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, and again in Prague. As an electoral vehicle, however, it lacks control and discipline. Although Nader has promised to take the lead in shaping the Greens into a watchdog party that will run candidates across the country in 2002, the Greens are basically a small, fractious group of enviro-leftists. It's a little difficult to believe that well-organized urban coalitions will waste much time bickering with them over whether the leadership should be fashioned as some sort of cooperative, revolving-door-type apparatus. In Germany, where the Green Party is part of the ruling coalition, it evidences little real independence and seems more like an adjunct of the Social Democrats. Beyond this, Nader's relationship to the Greens has always been tenuous. His staff has little or nothing to do with them. In fact, Nader himself is not even a member.    Gush and Boredom Forever 
    Tweedledum & Tweedledubya The presidential election probably was so close not because of any great divide among the electorate, but because people have a genuinely hard time telling Gore's New Democrats from Bush's compassionate conservatives. With the vote so close—17 states were won by margins of 5 percent or less—the issue of accurate ballot counts may grow. In addition to Florida, the outcomes in Oregon and New Mexico remain unclear, and questions have been raised about the counts in Iowa, Wisconsin, and even New Hampshire. Moreover, there is another issue in Florida—i.e., whether the ballot itself is illegal. In the House and Senate, results were razor-thin. Five House races—in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey—are subject to recount. The Senate race in Washington is a cliff-hanger, with the incumbent Republican, Slade Gorton, in a seesaw battle with Maria Cantwell. Tom Daschle's call for "power sharing" is likely to go unheeded. Congress will politic as usual, with Republicans trying to recruit blue-dog Democrats into a conservative coalition on social-welfare issues and liberal Democrats seeking accommodation with far-right-wing colleagues in a coalition against free trade. Whatever happens in Florida, the next government is bound to be tied up in legal challenges for weeks. In Congress, where the Republicans scraped by with scant majorities, little can be accomplished, and more of the gridlock that gripped both houses for the past four years is in store. In perhaps the most immediate sense, the election is a bitter defeat for House Democrats. Minority leader Dick Gephardt, hoping to become speaker, had persuaded older Democratic leaders to postpone retirement until the party was back in control. Now Gephardt probably will never be speaker, and with redistricting battles looming, the Democrats have little chance of regaining control in the near future. For conservative Republicans, the strongest intact element is libertarian-style free-market economics. Having junked the New Deal social-welfare programs—with the New Democrats' help—the Republicans now seek to privatize Social Security, with the Democrats dragging their feet, but in the end going along. Neither Bush nor Gore has offered specifics on Medicare, and while both allude vaguely to plans that would make drugs accessible to seniors, neither is likely to allocate more money on this. As has been noted here, Bush has adopted many of the goals of the Christian Right, awarding them growing control over social-welfare programs. In Texas, he let Christer right-wingers run schools and day-care centers, help manage prisons, and administer other aspects of the shredded safety net. Although this sounds dissimilar from Democratic policies, Gore, in an effort to combat Bush during the campaign, made a nearly identical pitch for faith-based social-welfare institutions in Atlanta last spring. Neither party will try to regulate the Internet if it can help it. As for all the rhetoric about sex and violence in entertainment, the Republicans will resist most moves to increase federal regulations, and the Democrats are too dependent on campaign financing from Hollywood. As regards the Supreme Court, selecting any new justices will require bipartisan backing in the Senate, which should lead to the choice of somewhat more moderate nominees. On foreign policy, Bush has some leeway. Although he has promised to curtail American "peacekeeping operations" abroad, he would intercede in this hemisphere. Count on Bush to act in South America and the Caribbean: in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America by jumping into the drug wars; and in Haiti, where Jean-Bertrande Aristide seems certain to regain the presidency in elections later this month (which hopefully will go more smoothly than the U.S. elections), by removing the remaining vestiges of American intervention, thus opening the way for a possible coup. Above all, there will be no redistribution of wealth downward. Any reshuffling of the economy will favor the rich.    Machine Politics "Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats, and therefore can be neither consciously nor unconsciously biased." 
    —James A. Baker III, announcing that the Bush campaign would seek a federal injunction to block manual ballot recounts in Florida Additional reporting: Rouven Gueissaz and Theresa Crapanzano

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 2:13am

    In spite of all of his rhetoric about his love for Black people and the community, he never taught at one Black school, or even a school that the majority of young Black people can even afford to have lunch in without mortgaging their family’s home, in his entire life.If West truly loved Black people like he claims, he’d be teaching third grade in the hood, or at the very least, teaching at one of our great Historically Black Colleges or Universities. But no, that’s not good enough for him. His ego requires that instead of living among the people and teaching Black students, that he don the costume of the resident "Negro radical," and gesticulate at Harvard or Princeton for the entertainment of the children of the very corporate manipulators that he’s railing against. 

    1) Cornel West taught at Princeton, which is where Michelle Obama did her PhD. Should she have gone to a "great...Black University" instead? Obama should have gone to Howard? Are you saying Cornel West is too white?

    2) About 5-8% of Harvard & Priniceton are black - are they just token "Negro radicals" too, for the entertainment and hip-hop tips for the children of the elite?

    3) for the last 3 years, Cornel West now teaches in Harlem/upper west side - Union Theological Seminary - while not completely black, it has a long tradition in the black community - does this count?

    4) Education Week just did a piece on the lack of black males in the classroom - but this isn't for Cornel West to solve, & typically you don't have PhD's of any sort teaching third grade in the hood.

    5) By the way, didn't you just write a piece complaining about how the media talks down about how the black community's doing, but now this piece says the only proper place for a black man is teaching in the hood? I'm getting cognitive dissonance.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 2:32am

    "Getting?" 

    Dude. You ARE cognitive disco-whatever. 

    I'll bet you even wear cognitive disco pants, leftover from the 70's.

     


    by Qnonymous (not verified) on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 2:39am

    What's wrong with DEVO? even have those flashy ray-bans, rave backpack and antennae - spin madly when I bust a move.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 3:42am

    I'm definitely glad to see the return of the mighty Q.


    by Verified Atheist on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 8:00am

    So am I!

    Let us pray!


    by Richard Day on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 4:36pm

    yes


    by Resistance on Thu, 02/27/2014 - 1:55am

    Peracles (sic),

    I’m going to break my silence toward you just long enough to point out that your comments above are exactly why I refuse to waste even one comma responding to you. Your responses are INVARIABLY inane and torturous contortions to reach totally invalid points. On another thread you tried to conflate cheating during a sporting event with treason, and now you’ve dug up an article which states only 47% of the Nader/West 97,488 votes would have gone to Gore in the 2000 election. But that’s still considerably more votes than the 537 votes that Bush won by, isn’t it?


    by Wattree on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 1:27pm

    That's considerably fewer than the millions of votes Gore lost by being boring as fuck, or by assholes like Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd and Jim Lehrer ignoring Bush's lies about Social Security while saying Gore claimed to have invented the internet and didn't show up with the FEMA director, or by any number of bullshit Bill Bradley attacks during the primaries. 97,000 is fewer than Saturday football in Ann Arbor or Columbus - I can get more hits on YouTube by lighting a fart - give Nader and West a break already.

    Re: treason vs. sports, YOU were the one conflating the 2, saying treachery is treachery. I pointed out most people have limits to behavior - someone stealing gum from 7-11 still isn't likely to be robbing banks, much less diverting trillions from the Fed.

    But thanks for coming out for the chat.


    by Anonymous PP (not verified) on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 1:54pm

    You're missing the point, Anonymous. Regardless to how "boring" Gore was, he would have still done well enough to win the election had it not been for the efforts of Nader and West, so I'm not going to give them a break.  There is no excuse that will negate the fact that they gave Bush the election, did more to undermine the agenda  that they "professed" to be promoting that any Republican in America, with the exception of Bush and Cheney themselves, and again, next to Bush himself, they are HUGELY responsible the condition that we find ourselves today.  2000 minus Nader/West equaled Gore - period. Everything else is irrelevant.  And by the way, Anonymous, simple cheating to win a sporting event is not treachery. Treachery is cheating to help the opposing team win against your own for your own self-interest. That's what makes treachery, treachery. There are no degrees to a treacherous act, because regardless to how huge or how miniscule the consequences, it's the lowest form of betrayal and dishonor.


    by Wattree on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 10:16pm

    They didn't *give Bush the election" - they pushed a liberal agenda in that thing called "democratic elections" to get something other than tax cuts for the rich or subsidies to Big Pharma on the ballot. Any sane campaign would have calculated that common little disturbance into its game plan.

    2000 minus X = Gore. Fill in X.

    X = disenfranchising & hassling black voters on the way to the polls 

    X = canceling voter registration for blacks with similar names to out-of-state convicts

    X = a confusing ballot that had people even voting for Pat Buchanan

    X = GOP grandstanding that had Florida counting late military votes (how many were mailed after the election?)

    X = Gore sighing and the press having a field day

    X= Gore choosing a boring VP such as Joe Fucking Lieberman.

    X = the Supreme Court abandoning its role in the worst "don't count this as a precedent, it's 1x only" decision ever

    X = Gore not proposing an exciting tech vision for America

    X = Gore running against his own administration with Clinton

    X = the press not fact checking the debates (e.g. the principle who lied when he said there were places for the kids to sit, Bush's bullshit on Social Security "lock boxes"

    X = Gore's wife not banging him the night before his big speech

    X = Bill Clinton for diddling around and letting the scandal drag out for years

    X = Bradley and the press lying and calling Gore a liar for months (see here and here)

    X = a butterfly flapping in the South Pacific

    X = Gore campaigning Y days in Florida instead of Y + 2

    If Nader had been say a Ross Perot with a huge following, I might follow - but he had a few dirty fucking hippies (tm) that no one wanted anyway. Gore only needed 1800 votes to win - he could have got more than that standing in Starbucks reminding people to vote.

    This accusation that West gave Bush the election by actually lobbying for liberal issues was the same crap where he was supposed to shut up about poverty in 2012 because it might hurt Barry. It's always "Shutup in America" time for liberals while the grownups are preparing for invading Iraq or gutting the Fed to give bankers huge profits.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 02/27/2014 - 6:21am

    And thank you for alerting me that you appear under various screen names. I guess in the future I'll simply have to identify you by the simplicity of your comments - and I'll be able to do it too. Try me - but attempting to make sense to try to fool me is not fair play.


    by Wattree on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 10:23pm

    Huh? I have my logged in name, and my name when I'm too lazy to log in.

    Is that rocket science?


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 02/27/2014 - 12:37am

    Gore lost in Florida by a straw. We could point to any straw and place the blame there. So yes, we could blame Nader for the loss. But by scapegoating Nader we would be ignoring the bigger problem Gore, and our society has. His destruction by our so called liberal media. That was the lion in the room and by placing all the blame on Nader we have given them a pass. Nader is finished as a spoiler but those in the media who did Gore much more damage paid no penalty and are still there to do the same to the next candidate they don't like. Bob Somerby has done a very detailed analysis of how the media destroyed Gore's candidacy.

    http://www.howhegotthere.blogspot.com/

     


    by ocean-kat on Wed, 02/26/2014 - 11:15pm