Home OP-ED The Tavis/West Poverty Pimp Tour

The Tavis/West Poverty Pimp Tour

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[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]The primary reason our government doesn't work, and the institutions that are supposed to be protecting our rights have become monuments to the maintenance of the status quo, is because We the People have allowed ourselves to become so distracted by the corporate promotion of social hedonism that the most ruthless among us have taken control of government. . As I point out in a message to the group, CARMA, Citizens Against Reckless Middle Class Abuse, the poor and middle class never will be secure in their homes, their standard of living or their jobs until they ensure that their politicians, unions and all other representatives of the people are insecure in theirs. . While Tavis Smiley and Prof. Cornel West have the right idea in terms of the need to confront power, it’s their motives and the hypocrisy of their agenda that I have a problem with. They’re clearly being self-serving and purposely divisive, which plays right into the hands of those who continue to subjugate us.

Working for the Wrong Guys

Keeping the people divided is the coin of the corporatist realm. I suspect that Tavis is working in concert with the corporations that he continues to shill for, Wal-Mart, Exxon, Nationwide, Wells Fargo.

As for West, if he were even close to as intelligent as the corporate media would have us believe, he’d surely recognize the relevance of the Abraham Lincoln maxim that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

West either is working in collusion with Tavis’s turncoat agenda or he is stupid for failing to recognize that social manipulators have been keeping the people under thumb with the tactic of social division for centuries.

The fact is, the people need to take a lesson from the Tea Party.

We need to strictly control those we allow in office and make them immediately accountable for their behavior. The government is supposed to be us. We have shirked our responsibility.

We have allowed ourselves to become more interested in Kobe’s jump shot than the education of our children, the well-being of our families, even the survival of the nation.

They Are Stirring Us up

We also have permitted corporate instigators to create so much animosity among the people that we are more interested in hating one another than in coming together to protect our common interests.

We do need to get President Obama’s attention. Our approach should be through educating the people, not by antagonizing half of the population against the other, which is counterproductive and counterrevolutionary.

The turmoil here, in the Middle East and now in the United Kingdom attests to the fact we are in the midst of a global class revolution.

Tavis and West are advocating that the people live in a fantasy. The problem is, in a fantasy you are forced to view reality as a myth. They’re engaging in the very same kind of hysterically flawed, self-serving, demagogic behavior Ralph Nader did during the 2000 election. This led to the misery of the Bush Era and ultimately to the present situation.

Those of us who are students of political history have seen this Tavis/West demagoguery before. They are following the example of Ralph Nader, one of the worst turncoats in American history.

Nader should have pushed his agenda during the Democratic primaries. When his position was rejected, he should have fallen in line and supported the Democratic candidate. Instead , he took rejection personally and reacted like a petulant child. He ignored the greater good and purposely sabotaged the Democratic agenda along with the causes he was supposed to be passionate about all of his life. He took his ball (and votes) and went home.

By doing so, Nader negated everything he ever accomplished. He showed his accomplishments were for self-promotion, not for the public good, as we had previously assumed. His miserable act of treachery during the 2000 election was purposely designed to help George W. Bush to win that election to deny the Democrats after rejecting him as a candidate.

That makes him just as culpable as Bush and Cheney for the death of over a million Iraqi citizens, the maiming and death of thousands of American troops, and even the nation’s current economic condition, a result of the Bush administration’s purposeful plundering of the United States treasury. Nader supporters would say that he stood on principles, but his “principles” led to the death and misery of millions.

Thus, Ralph Nader should be remembered as one of the most self-serving snakes in U. S. history.

Tavis and West are engaged in the same treachery, and it may lead to the same result. Because this time we will be left with a fascist state. Look around. The GOP has already turned the state of Michigan into Michighanistan. What are we going to do, not vote for Obama? It sounds like that is what Tavis and West are advocating.

This brings me to yet another reason why the activities of Tavis and West send up a red flag for me. Notice that nearly all of their hostility is directed toward Barack Obama. They say little about the GOP, who are directly engaged in undermining the poor and middle class. I ask a simple question: Why are they focusing their energy and resources toward attacking a sleeping sentry while ignoring the invading hordes?

Something is wrong or at least tactically inept.


Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”

Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com

Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.