BET billionaire founder Robert Johnson did not have enough prostituting black people on his BET TV networks. He wants to ensure none of his billions is ever used to mitigate the harm he caused and the harm his class has caused to middle-class and poor Americans in the aggregate.
Before I get into the article that raised my ire let me first be clear. I do not need a review from any other corporate rag to understand what BET has always been. While it attempts to put a few programs of public interest on, it has always tailored to the lowest common denominator as opposed to the constancy of uplift and empowerment.
That is why I was surprised a few months ago when Robert L. Johnson had the gall to criticize BET since he told his own kids not to watch it. Of course, he made billions selling it to another corporation with continuity of the scourge.
“I don’t watch it. I suggest to my kids that they don’t watch it,” she said. “When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television. We had public affairs programming. We had news… I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up… And then something started happening, and I didn’t like it at all. And I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists…and we had to start showing them. I didn’t like the way women were being portrayed in these videos.”
The Washington Post article “No current Democratic contender can beat Trump, billionaire BET founder says” shows a man completely detached from what afflicts the majority of America, and more so from the group, he emanated from and harmed.
BET founder Robert Johnson, a lifelong Democrat and America’s first black billionaire, has assessed the Democratic contenders in next year’s presidential election. And he doesn’t like what he sees.
“If you take a snapshot today, I don’t think that group is capable of beating Donald Trump, despite what the polls say,” Johnson told CNBC in an interview.
“I think the president has always been in a position where it’s his to lose.”
Despite his politics, Johnson has praised the Trump economy, particularly a rise in African American employment, though it remains lower than white employment rates.
And he has sided with many conservatives, including Trump, in saying Democratic politicians have moved too far left.
He told CNBC he sees a “double effect” of Trump’s incendiary comments and rhetoric that fires up his base. Democrats react strongly, he said, which puts the president’s supporters on defense and adds to his support.
“I do not see anybody in the Democratic primary race today that is enough in the center where I believe most of the voters are, and particularly where most African Americans are,” Johnson told CNBC.
I find it shocking that he was concerned about the “double effect” that would fire up Trump’s base when he gave many of them the raw material for their racist utterances beliefs and misconceptions. I also find it blasphemous that he knows the economic trajectory of President Obama is the employment we are living with now. If he has any economic acumen he must know that Trump’s policies even with low-interest rates and quantitative easing (MMT for the wealthy) have been less than it would have been otherwise.
Who does Johnson or Bloomberg and many others who believe unless we conform to their extractive economy, one is not worth running for the presidency? That is the heights of plutocratic privilege.
Understand what the plutocracy is doing here. They sent out Obama to prostitute himself against what he used to believe in and now Robert Johnson is given exposure again to spout his misguided observations as he has before.
It is important to note the narrative is just to call us progressives leftists or on the fringe. They cannot articulate the policies in specifics we stand for because they know it is good for the masses, the economy, and we can afford it. Dealing with specifics would open the debate to allow Americans to see reality. The degenerate pathology where these guys want to accumulate every increasing huge stash of capital on the backs of most of us is what we must destroy. They will not stop the extraction quietly. And we must not be timid in taking what is ours.
We are all in the boat together. We must all want to help us all. But there is a certain betrayal when one from an aggrieved group has been “chosen” to be a part of the plutocracy and then use that position to harm all and specifically the groups that have so put their hopes in what they believed these new plutocrats stood for or represented.