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.”