Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
A Message to Dr. Boyce Watkins
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Dr. Boyce Watkins said the following:.
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| 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."
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Dr. Watkins, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
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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.
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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.
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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 Bogeyman 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 pure Hell under Bush, and continue to suffer the consequences.
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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's never taught at one Black school, or even a school that the majority of young Black people can even afford to attend, or even go to have lunch at 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. Black colleges and universities are good enough to drive by and pickup bloated speaking fees, but beneath his stature when it comes to teaching at one of them. 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 tap dance 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.
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Isn’t it also 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.
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"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."
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"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
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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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A CALL FOR BOYCE WATKINS TO COME OUT OF THE REPUBLICAN CLOSET
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Boyce (Let’s lay the Marcus crap to rest. I know who you are),
.I’m not a shill. I have absolutely nothing to hide. I’m flat-out against the Republican Party, and any Black man who can’t see why is a fool. Only an idiot would condemn the Bogeyman to embrace the Devil.
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But speaking of shills, when are you coming out of the closet as the Republican you are. As long as you don’t, everything you do or say is a fraud. If you profess to be “The People’s Scholar,” the people have a right to know your political persuasion. You might as well come on out with a sense of dignity, because if you don’t, I’m going to put the evidence together and drag you out of your Republican broom closet – in fact, I fired the opening salvo today. (http://wattree.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-message-to-dr-boyce-watkins.html).
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People have been begging me to do it for well over a year now, but I’ve been reluctant to do so, because I don’t believe you’re PURPOSELY trying to deceive the people to feather your own nest like Tavis and West. I think you’re simply deluded in your beliefs, and you don’t have the courage of your convictions.
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And finally, please don’t take this in the wrong way. I know how this sounds, but it is NOT my intent to threaten you in anyway. It’s just my way of giving you a heads-up on what’s on the horizon, because in spite of everything, including the fact that I view you as grossly naïve, I still sorta, kinda, like you.
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So there you have it, something to think about.
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Peace, brother.
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Eric L. Wattree
So there you have it, something to think about.
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Peace, brother.
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Eric L. Wattree
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.