An African American college campus sits on top of a hill on the eastside of downtown, spitting distance from the Governor’s Mansion, State Capitol and City Hall. Huston-Tillotson University is a historically-black school and is actually the oldest in the city, founded decades before the world-renowned and fabulously wealthy University of Texas at Austin. Huston-Tillotson is on 7th Street, one block north of the city’s infamous party corridor. This area of the formerly black and Latino eastside has been the most gentrified part of what has been arguably the most-gentrified city in the United States in recent decades, Austin, Texas, aka the World Capital of Live Music, affectionately known as River City like in The Wizard of Oz,because freaky and unnatural shit happens in this Texas city, just like in the movie.
There’s a fence around the campus and at the front gate there is a guard in a guardhouse, even though on the back side of Huston-Tillotson you can sneak in easily enough. “Can I walk around campus and just look?” the guard, who is a middle-aged black woman, unarmed but willing to stand her ground, is asked by a visitor.
“No, you cannot.”
Dr. Richard Reddick is a Harvard-trained African American educator at the University of Texas, who grew up in East Austin and has taken his graduate students to Huston-Tillotson and is now a high-ranking administrator at Forty Acres, as the UT campus across town is called. He warned a few years ago that moving HTU out of East Austin would be the death of the black community in this capital city. Already the African American population has fallen from close to 15% of the city total to 5%.
Latinos, who sometimes seem like a hardier and more successful ethnicity when living near invasive white people, have also begun to decline demographically. A local Tejanapolitician remarked a few years ago that Latinos who were suddenly being offered $200,000 for their modest homes in East or South Austin—which seemed like a lot of money to the homeowners at the time—did not realize that they wouldn’t be able to find housing remotely comparable to their old homes at a similar price anywhere else in the city, and instead would face long commutes to Austin jobs from surrounding counties, if they moved to the suburbs. Many still took the offer. Ditto many local blacks, who mostly moved east. The black community in Austin was already in critical shape at the time Dr. Reddick spoke and is now on life support. The prognosis is just not good. HTU’s location is prime, and by development standards the campus is huge in a town that has already been developed, it seems, to the max. In fact to call the black school’s site merely “prime” is like calling Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos merely “wealthy.” It’s an understatement by a couple of orders of magnitude.
At one time you couldn’t get white people to go to East Austin. Now you can’t get them to leave. At one time for example nice college girls—white UT coeds, sweethearts of Sigma Chi or whatever—wouldn’t go east of Interstate 35, which was the border between the white and black sides of Austin. But their boyfriends did go east, often to rent the charms of the legendary Titty Mama, an African American woman with an existential rack who introduced a generation of University of Texas frat boy to the joys of coitus. Today, standing on the corner of the HTU campus, near where Titty Mama once walked a beat—doing her best to bring the races together through the most fundamental commerce, pleasure—you’re only a block or two from the State Cemetery, final resting place of Governor Ann Richards, the late great black Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Texas empresario Stephen F. Austin, among others. A few blocks beyond the cemetery is the Austin police headquarters, home to los puercos who have shot, beaten and abused generations of African Americans and continue to do so even today.
A few blocks still further, you arrive on Congress Avenue. South is the Colorado River and north is the State Capitol. Between the two, for example, still on Congress Avenue, is the office tower that houses the Texas Tribune which has played its own racist and sullied part in the gentrification of the city. Practically no white institution, especially no part of the media, is blameless, from the New York Times down to the local newspaper. Everyone has had a piece of East Austin or played a part in its cultural realignment, you could say, in recent years. Looking north from HTU’s campus for example, a relatively short commute is Dell Computers, the city’s largest employer, principal workplace of many of the gentrifiers, and home of the gentrifier-in-chief, Michael Dell, the original computer guy in town who made the decision that black people were expendable and their property could be redeveloped to provide housing for new tech employees, Dinks as they are called, for “double-income no kids.” The great man has not shown any remorse.
As Michael Dell told the New Yorker magazine last year, in a story about Austin’s growth and big-city transformation, regarding the breakneck and uneven/unfair nature of development in recent years, "I tend to be more of a pro-change guy, If you're not comfortable with that, you're gonna have a really hard time." Truer words have never been spoken.
The daily Austin American Statesman reported a few months ago for example that the African American population center in Austin is now in another county, displacement has been so great. But the direction of Black Flight in recent years, east, towards Bastrop County and the pineywoods of East Texas, is now also threatened because fleeing minorities run into the world’s most obnoxious/richest man, Elon Musk, whose Tesla carworks and tunnel experiments and God-knows-what-else are taking up land and resources there too, on the border of Travis and Bastrop counties. There’s no modest-income way out, in other words, as more well-paid engineers and techies are still arriving. Gentrification is not, however, a natural disaster, it’s purely man-made and blame can be assigned, which serves a useful purpose. In order to identify and shame the bad guys, who are not all white. Most are, with one prominent exception. Some of the names may surprise you. Asked once, a decade ago, about the likelihood that the black woman who was then president of Huston-Tillotson would acquiesce to white real estate developers’ desires to take over her valuable inner city campus, and agree to move the university farther east to a less convenient location—in exchange for a big wad of cash—a major civil rights figure in Austin said that it wasn’t the president of the school you had to worry about, but the H-T university board. Like other cash-poor land-rich black colleges, HTU relies for support on a wealthy group of sponsors that includes rich white businesspeople. In the past, HTU’s board has included a lot of West Austin faces, ex-mayors and even the First Lady of Texas, Celia Abbott. These people call the shots, not the black academic who runs the day-to-day academic affairs.
Human-made tragedies have human actors and the gentrification of East Austin and the possible selling of the HTU campus would have a handful of prominent players, either directly involved or having laid the groundwork. Michael Dell the computer guy is certainly somewhere at the top of the list. He is apparently not a fan of the colored peoples of the earth, either in Austin, or in Palestine, where he is a rightwing supporter of the State of Israel, a subject that we will return to shortly because it is linked to the views of rich Jewish business interests, just as in East Austin. There is a certain recurring theme in gentrification and in Palestinian disenfranchisement: land. It’s all about real estate.
Indeed, some of the very same money flows that have disemboweled East Austin have also cut the heart out of the West Bank. The same money, and some of the same people. This is not going to be an antisemitic rant. It’s much more of an anti-Zionist wail, not religion so much as identity, greed and corruption in which some American Jewish businessmen are particularly prominent. It’s also about race traitors—Toms in other words—and it’s about whose narratives count, and whose do not.
A big player in this mix is named Kirk Rudy, a business guy—a real estate developer—past leader of the all-powerful Real Estate Council of Austin, and founder of the most politically important development firm in town, Endeavor Real Estate, which is the largest developer in Central and South Texas, actually, a locally-born company now with properties across the country. Another notable in the corruption context is media maven Evan Smith who is former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, where he had the dubious distinction of never hiring or publishing a black person during ten years in the job and is not a fan of the black peeps either. Smith is founder of the Texas Tribune where he kept the lid on reporting about gentrification and is another powerful bad guy in this screenplay. When Smith was interviewing Barack Obama, at the end of his presidency, it was just after Smith had hired his first black staffer at the Tribune, five years into the site’s creation and after hiring dozens of whites and Asians. Barry, the first Black President, came within months of granting an interview to a journalist who regularly discriminated against black people. But being Barry in Austin has been almost solely about Barry, first Black President, not about the less-unique colored peeps. There is of course a cast of thousands when change happens as quickly and on the scale it has happened in Austin in the past quarter-century. In little more than the last decade, for example, the population of the city has increased by sixty percent. As techies and jobseekers have arrived like locusts, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
One person who cannot be blamed, actually, is Elon Musk, not because he’s a humanitarian or has racial equity credentials but because he has probably never even consciously thought of black housing or gentrification, for bad or good, in his life. There’s a powerful argument to be made that you have to be conscious of wrongdoing in order to do wrong. Musk is clueless. People like Kirk Rudy, Evan Smith and Michael Dell are not.
In any case, the number two bad guy, the second heaviest of the heavies in this motion picture, the middleman, or bagman, as you like, facilitator to the elimination of black people in East Austin, is former Mayor Steve Adler, who left office two years ago after pushing development to its limits without regard to who got hurt. A few years ago in the middle of Adler’s term in office, someone—the author is unknown—went to the sidewalks around Zilker Park, which has also been in danger of redevelopment—and using a large rubber stamp like the kind a businessowner might stamp a receipt “PAID” or “OVERDUE”—but larger—stamped instead, “EAT SHIT MAYOR ADLER.” To signal dissatisfaction with city policy. Years before that another anonymous tagger, apparently a foreigner, had done the same thing on Sixth Street during the Bush Presidency’s run up to the Iraq War, with all the false news reports of weapons of mass destruction. That stamp, every dozen yards or so on the sidewalk downtown, read, “YOUR PRESIDENT LIES,” which of course was true. It’s not clear whether Steve Adler actually eats shit or has eaten shit in the past, but while in office his hands were certainly covered with the stinky stuff. And he spread it on everything he touched.
People—even those living far from River City—may know Steve Adler as the mayor who, during the pandemic, made broadcasts asking people to stay at home, to prevent spread of the disease. Only later did it become clear that his videos were coming from his condo in Cabo San Lucas. Even a Jewish columnist at the New York Times—Smith, Dell, Kirk Rudy and Mayor Adler, all the heavies that you can count on the fingers of your hand here, as it were, are Jewish businessmen, a description that has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with reality. Even a Jewish columnist at the Times, which is a publication that is not generally in the business of calling out wrongdoing by Jews, as we’ll see later, wrote that Mayor Adler’s video calls to the public from Cabo “reek[ed] of entitlement and irresponsibility.” That was Mayor Adler’s tenure in office. Watching him at City Hall, where he poured oil on the flames of development, without regard to the consequences for ordinary residents, was like watching a slug or snail move across the sidewalk, except he moved faster. He left a trail.
Mayor Adler was said to have shown an early interest in the redevelopment of the HTU campus while in office. This was at the same time for example that he was persuading a black Baptist minister to move his East Austin congregation farther east, to free up inner city land close to downtown for development, much to the chagrin of the black churchman’s parishioners. The black pastor said that Mayor Adler just started showing up at services one Sunday to talk with him, and not because the mayor intended to convert to hardshell Baptist, either. If one were really paranoid, two names associated recently with Huston-Tillotson would cause immediate unease for the gentrification-wary. For black people, that is, those for example who don’t trust white people as a general rule? The first is the aptly-named Diane Land, who is an Austin developer herself and wife of Steve Adler. She’s now on the HTU board. Enough said. Almost. A frequently-voiced suspicion is that while in office Mayor Adler continued to do development deals, indeed he admitted to—in some cases—participating in City Council votes in which he said he decided not to recuse himself, because of the small size of his holdings. He is also rumored to have used his family as conduit for what his city position would not allow him to do directly. The former mayor has not answered requests in the past to release a full list of his wife’s holdings, btw.
The second name that draws interest is Celia Abbott, First Lady of Texas, who a few months ago returned to the Huston-Tillotson board after a two-year hiatus. It’s noteworthy that the destruction of the black community in Austin has been a heavily Democratic activity, and liberal Democrats at that. The Austin City Council which has voted the zoning and the building codes and tax breaks that have empowered the bulldozers, so to speak, has been almost exclusively Democratic throughout its history, and almost perfectly bleeding-heart liberal in recent decades. Everything bad in the world has been described by Austin City Council members as coming from the evil Republicans who control most of the rest of Texas. But in terms of the public corruption that has gone hand and hand with the city’s development, an odd and horrific alliance has also been seen recently between the “hated Republicans,” which is sometimes all that Austin’s chattering classes can talk about—the evil governor, the evil lieutenant governor, to say nothing of the evil state attorney general. Who have nonetheless begun doing business with the saintly Democrats. Ms. Abbott’s appearance on the HTU board—she comes from a modest and well-regarded Mexican-Texas family and is said to be a wonderful person in her own right—could nonetheless be disconcerting only because there’s so much money potentially involved, and the R’s like money just as much as D’s do. Her husband, for example, has created a number of “opportunity zones” that favor developers, featuring lower taxes, in East Austin. Celia Abbott’s husband is a hard one to figure in this regard.
Governor Abbott is one of the most interesting guys in power in the country. He is doubtless genuinely conservative but becoming and staying leader of the great State of Texas requires him, from time to time, not just to be conservative but to be whackjob conservative, a degree of rightwingedness that is extreme and unnatural but that he can achieve if called upon. Still, the Governor has a disability, that requires him to use a wheelchair, and you can’t help but believe that he knows what it’s like to be different from the majority, to be a minority in fact. You just can’t rely on his sympathy, because his record in office is decidedly mixed.
Recently he ordered state troopers kick ass and take pro-Palestinian protestors’ names at the University of Texas, up the road from Huston Tillotson, but the issue was Israel and, in this country, Israel is usually a special case where rules don’t apply. During the pandemic the governor was not all in on masks or vaccines either, to say the least, but Greg Abbott is leader of a state where a large part of the population was not exactly into pandemic preventatives. In Texas, risk is not often something to be avoided. He was right about chaos on the border before the U.S. government made the call, whether he was right or not about how to fix it. His use of state troopers on the streets of Austin for ordinary police patrols may not have been effective but it is a practice—using state police to supplement local law enforcement—that has been adopted by Democratic governors in New York and in California. Whether he would use his wife’s position on the Huston-Tillotson board, in cooperation with development firms connected to the Democratic establishment, as he has done in the past in Austin, well, it’s not like the Republicans are too picky to do a deal that will lead to money in their coffers. You want to know how they’ll do it, if they do?
There will be an announcement about a big cash infusion for HTU’s ailing finances. There’s going to be more money, the university’s board will announce, for salaries and new programs and buildings. But the university campus will have to leave downtown and move somewhere farther east “in order to have room to grow.” The new campus will be somewhere in B.F.E. although they won’t say B.F.E. The real driving motive will be to free up land for the bulldozers.
How will you know when the deal has actually been sealed?
Have you ever seen a classic movie called The 3 Days of the Condor? Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway and the great Max von Sydow playing a contract CIA assassin.
There’s a wonderful scene where Robert Redford, who is a CIA analyst on the run, asks von Sydow how he, Redford, will know that he’s been betrayed? von Sydow can speak because Robert Redford is not currently on his assassin’s to-do list. And von Sydow considers the question thoughtfully. This is an analogy for how it’ll go down in Austin, too.
Max says it’ll be a spring day and Redford will be out walking and someone will stop in a car, someone Redford knows—even a friend—who will be smiling and offer Robert Redford a ride. Redford will get in the car and he’ll be whacked. How will you know, more precisely, how events will unfold in the World Capital of Live Music? In Austin it’ll be only slightly different.
It’ll be a hot day for example, hot as hell because that’s increasingly what days are like in River City. There will be that press release about a big infusion of cash for the historically black Huston-Tillotson University. The release will say there will be money for new buildings and new faculty and a new campus, somewhere out in the eastern part of the county, maybe in another county altogether. The words “room to grow” will be part of the wording and prominently displayed. The press release may include the names of important members of the board, like the Texas First Lady and the wife of Austin’s former mayor. If a new university president is mentioned to shepherd the university’s new direction, the body of the oldpresident will be found a few days later, floating face down in the Colorado River, her hands tied behind her back. Austin police will rule suicide.
Those 24 acres will get new zoning, courtesy of the Austin City Council, for office towers or, alternatively, “mixed use,” with expensive retail on the bottom floors and high-end condos up top. Just as the construction is completed, the developers—who knows, maybe Endeavor Real Estate? Just as the project is completed the developers will go back to the City Council with bad news. That 25% of the housing in the project that the developer promised would be low-income apartments, a promise made in exchange for the great zoning the Council has voted? The developer will say that “the numbers no longer work,” and there won’t be low-income housing on the site after all, and the City Council members will shake their heads and bemoan the cruelty of Fate but will tell the developers, who may or may not have ties to their Council campaigns, not to worry about it. And that will be the official end of the old African-American community in the Texas capital city, the old East Austin. The real heavy in this scenario, the one man who has told white business interests that it’s okay to destroy minority lives in Austin, Texas, Live Music Capital of the World, is actually a Negro.
He's the black guy who has done arguably the most to wipe out the black community in River City, although he’s had a lot of competition. His name is Barack Hussein Obama II and he was 44th President of the United States, the first black President in fact. Remember how often Barry was here in River City during his time in office? A hint: He wasn’t here for the tacos, bro. He was really here for the money. Barry corrupted the local government, sold out minorities in Austin not once, not twice but three times. And made a lot of money doing it. He’s making money still. Coincidentally, days after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel last year, as the ferocious Israeli offensive took shape, students at Harvard University began protesting a suddenly-cancelled visit to the university by former President Obama.
“Barry, Barry, you can’t hide,” they chanted. “We charge you with genocide.”
The students were right.
A significant part of the suffering of the Palestinian people in recent years, and especially in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis, can be laid at the feet of the Obama Administration, Barry himself and his then-United Nations ambassador and now-head of U.S.A.I.D. for the Biden Administration, the multi-talented Samantha Power, a liberal white chick who, among others, including former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another “liberal,” was an Israelophile in office. Barry and his administration went for the money. Interestingly, and in an intertwined dynamic, the gentrification of minority neighborhoods in Austin can alsobe laid at the feet of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party he led. It’s all about land, just like in the Middle East as in the Live Music Capital of the World, and money, as seen thru the lens of corrupt of government. This will not be a moral or ethical treatise. It’s factual, related to land in Austin, and dollar flows from Texas to D.C., and from Washington to Israel. In both places, in Palestine and in Austin, Barry sold out the colored peeps. Let’s take a look.
First, however, the two names you need to keep in mind. One is of course former Mayor Adler, who was the last mayor of Austin, for eight years, during much of the city’s incredible and unsustainable growth. In an interview with the L.A. Times a few years ago, during his time leading Austin’s City Hall, speaking with a sympathetic journalist who apparently did not check, Adler described his legal specialization as civil rights. He completely forgot to mention the part where he’s actually been a real estate development attorney with a specialty in eminent domain, while doing occasional duty for the Anti Defamation League, representing Jewish not black civil rights. The other person you need to know is the aforementioned Kirk Rudy—a friend of the ex-Mayor and of the ex-President. There is certainly no doubt about his profession. He’s a land developer and the preeminent land guy in Austin, which for the last few years has been the most POC-unfriendly real estate market in the nation. Kirk Rudy is founder of the incredibly successful land development company in the Live Music Capital of the World, Endeavor Real Estate. To set the scene.
So, like, there’s a protest chant for what happened in Austin, too. Maybe not as good as the Harvard students but it’ll do:
Barry, Barry
Please don’t lie!
All you did in Austin
was
Gentrify
Chapter 2 Bad Moon Rising
This town wasn’t built for tragedy, Austin gets bigger but remains shallow, people make a big show and try to sing the blues, they try to be deep and profound but the superficial keeps bubbling up to the surface anywhere within a few miles of the Colorado River or the Entertainment District. The wail of grief always comes out sounding like progressive country or watered-down rock and even when people try to be genuinely bad—speaking as someone who has made the effort—the result is usually timid, unlike the genuine rat-fucking evil you might see in a real metropolis, ancient Rome for example, or New York City or Moscow.
No cultural comment is complete without mention of what music was playing. Back in the day in the World Capital of Live Music the influence was sometimes British, including "Baker Street," and Clapton, or the Stones, but there were also Negroes like Grace Jones’s “Nightclubbing” and George Benson’s “Give Me the Night.” The Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” played in East Austin a lot. Looking back now Austin’s decline has mostly been about intimacy, influenced by music. Austin stayed a small town in the wrong way and lost it in the good way. Sex is a good analogy too, the city lost its cherry—became a ho—which is cool as long as prices are reasonable. Just a few years ago for example life on the eastside was still an affordable and intimate experience, one-on-one, black clubs and mostly black people.
Austin is an artistic town, certainly, but it’s also a political place and at one time President Johnson’s family ruled as far as the eye could see. Then everything became Bushland except in about a five-mile radius around the state capitol where a non-partisan black man could still travel the streets unmolested as long as he didn’t look the White Man in the eye. Looking back 50 years, if the Legislature was in session and you wanted to discuss the state of the State of Texas, Lieutenant Governor Hobby could be found weekday mornings, just before eight, walking to his office in the East Wing of the State Capitol, which technically sits in East Austin, from his condo a few blocks away in West Austin.
Race is the litmus test of equality in the American South and in that respect Austin is no different from any other sector of the historically-Confederate Lone Star State, from the police to the courts to, in another instance, the schools. Wilhemina Telco, first black member of the Austin School Board, said that the only reason she was elected in the first place, in ‘68, to an at-large seat—which means white people voted for her—was because the election took place two days after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead and the white community in West Austin “didn’t want trouble” in East Austin, as was happening elsewhere in other U.S. cities. That is the nature of Hill Country liberalism and is illustrative of its very practical roots. Race aside, the public debate back in the day, lo those many years ago in River City, concerned a single issue played out day after day in the newspaper’s pages—and on radio and on TV. Growth versus no-growth.
The question was whether a small Southern town with some charm and considerable natural resources would become home to hundreds of thousands of new residents: Midwesterners escaping a newly-oxidized Rustbelt, Easterners and Californians tired of their own over-developed seashores and coming to the Third Coast too. The question before the public was whether this would remain a sleepy Southern city with some quaint Old South racial practices, known for a huge state university and live music, or would be redeveloped and re-created. We now know how the debate turned out but at the time the issue was still in doubt. For this town the jump was from innocent to jaded with only a “For Sale” sign in between. The City Council went for the money, an inevitable decision it would seem now, but one that wasn’t expected at the time. Austin was still innocent—still cherry you might say, to continue that useful analogy, sex. Skirt pulled down over bony knees, not exactly blushing but, hmmm, 85% pure, like Ivory soap.
As with most small towns the power structure was well-defined and uncomplicated. Most of the money was in the hands of a few old westside families, a few new land developers and a handful of young drug dealers, most of them living “out on the lake” but somehow still involved in civic affairs. Some of what are today considered old established businesses actually began with marijuana money, the names would surprise you. Nothing wrong with that—the best minds of the generation were either trafficking or getting high. Illicit drugs were the venture capital investment of the age. Smart people made seed money from marijuana seeds and then got out of the trade. There was no widespread high-tech, no real movie or television industry in Texas, not much biotechnology at that time here or practically anywhere else, either. The last really successful mayor in River City had ridden to power as the primary Coca-Cola wholesaler and Coors beer distributor and as owner of the local Ford dealership. Life was so much simpler then. Some of President Johnson’s cronies were still in office, people who had worked directly for the big man or had been assistants to his first-line aides. At the administrative end of the Travis County Courthouse there were five commissioners, including the county’s chief elective officer, and three of them were corrupt, including the county’s chief elective officer. The still rural part of the county that bordered the pineywoods of East Texas where Elon Musk is now headquartered was represented by a redneck, while the wealthy western district, West Austin, which meant then what it still means today—white privilege—was represented by future governor Ann Willis Richards. Ann Richards was not a “power,” not then—or if she was, it was star power.
To describe Ann Richards then, it seems now, is to make use of analogy to another famous liberal politician: Barack Obama. Ann Richards was like President Obama not just in being a counterpoint to the generic white male leader of the day but because, like Obama, she was not going to let anything get in her way. There’s a singlemindedness you find in successful people, especially successful politicians, and which with politicians as with anyone else involves making choices. For Ann Richards, that choice involved corruption. She didn’t want to know about it, she didn’t want to think about it—corruption was there in the Travis County Courthouse but in her mind that didn’t involve her. Richards didn’t take cash-stuffed envelopes but she made no effort to combat the practice, either. That was the D.A.’s job, at the courthouse and at the Capitol. Ann Richards wasn’t elected to clean up local government: originally, she was elected to represent the interests of wealthy white people and she did that well enough. So, too, at the Texas Treasury later, when she was elected to statewide office. She was there to count the state's money and, basically, write checks, not slap hands reaching into the government till. Fair enough. Of course the legislature was still majority Democratic then, back when Ann was making her move, and Democrats are more susceptible to sins of the flesh, that’s what the Republicans told us, while Republicans are more likely to be the ones going for the money, or so Texas Democrats said. That would change too, with Barry and his friends. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
In retrospect of all the politicians who passed through Austin during a prior day Ann Richards was the one who was most a slave to convention. She was a lady. There was a way to do things that she learned growing up in Waco or wherever—whatever small-minded Texas town that produced her, in the great populist wasteland west of Ft. Worth that was once Yellow Dog Democrat and is now diehard Republican. Foremost of what she had learned was courtesy. Ann Richards could be rowdy and she could have a sharp tongue but that mostly came out with Republicans, or after she’d had a few, when she was still drinking. Ann was also a white woman which back in that day and age was unusually important to Negro men, aka the Black Man. White women and black men were supposed to be kindred souls because both wanted to put white guys on ice. They were allies you might say. Especially if the white chick showed her solidarity by giving it up. Not that that’s important here. What Ann did though was make black people doubt their game—and sometimes that’s all a nigger’s got, his game. Only an emerging theory espoused by a black UT professor named Jordan made clear that you don’t always have to play by the white man’s rules. Or the white woman’s. That it don’t always matter what Miss Ann have to say. You don’t have to listen even if she live in the Big House, the Governor’s Mansion, you know? It's all just a load of shit that white people tell you that is self-serving, intended to maintain a system in which they hold power, a system from which they profit most, not to be radical or anything. But fuck them all, you know? Not to go all Malcolm X on you or anything. And fuck the Toms who help them, too.
At that time, fifty years ago, the setting was more important than the actors themselves. The Texas capital city then, lo those many years ago, was what people moving here today think they will find, accessible in every sense of the word. You lived in a small town, a little big city as people liked to say. There were limits, of course, borders you could call them. The Texas capital took its racial demarcations for example very seriously as a Southern town. Nice girls, University of Texas coeds for example, as mentioned before, didn’t drive east of the interstate, because black people and “dirty Mexicans” lived there. It just wasn’t done. So, like, there was like some racial polarization in the city, yes, you could say that. As well as geographic division.
Despite its reputation as progressive, whatever that means, the People’s Republic of Austin was like so many small towns in the South divided by a road, just as the train tracks had been the black-white border before the highway. Blacks lived east of the line. White people generally had to have a very good reason to be on the eastside, often to buy drugs or rent pussy or in the case of the cops to prevent same. So, like, you could talk about who was getting busted or which neighborhoods had the poorest infrastructure or why the kids in the black elementary schools in East Austin wore heavy coats in winter—the boilers were often out of service. But not at the white schools across town where classrooms were warm and toasty. But the best explanation, the most revealing detail in describing the city racially, at the time, involved the criminal justice system—the pigpen in other words, the police, the courts and His Honor the District Attorney.
At night, if you listened to the police scanner in Austin, a common call was an acronym, “B.I.W.A.,” pronounced bee-wah.
That’s all the pig would say, “B.I.W.A.”
Of course he would say he was pulling over a car, maybe give the license number and always the location. But the reason for the stop was just “bee-wah,” and the dispatcher or sergeant listening back at the police station knew exactly what the first pig meant because B.I.W.A. stands for “Black in White Area.” That was the city of Austin at the time. Today it’s more wee-bah, W.I.B.A., that stands for Whites in a Black Area. Which is no crime in Austin, Texas.
That is what this is mostly about. It’s about W.I.B.A. And corruption. And Barry Obama, first black President of the United States.
And his sins.
Chapter 3 All Along the Watchtower
Karma is everything in this town. You can’t inherit it. You can’t smoke it. You can’t find it on the organics aisle at Whole Foods. You have to grow your own, bro, not to sound all Old School or anything.
If your karma is compromised in the World Capital of Live Music, or if you lose it altogether in River City, the outcome will not be pretty. But how do you judge the karma of other people, like Barry? You have to look for a standard. One day, long ago, at the University of Texas an approach to right and wrong was offered up, a measuring stick was created, a way to structure Old Negro Wisdom as a kind of formula or protocol that could be applied in deciding whether a public official was corrupt or not. It still works today. Because corruption and racism are just different sides of the same coin in ATX.
If you’ve never heard the name Barbara Jordan you’re not dumb, you’re just young. Barbara Jordan was Barack Obama back in the day, the difference being that the country was not yet ready for a sister in power or for the righteousness of her rap. Ann Richards was like Barack Obama—but Barbara Jordan was Obama. To set the scene. Barbara Jordan never got the same chance as Barry to sell out but she was honest about the possibility. The former Congresswoman and star of the Watergate hearings was in quasi-retirement late in her career, living in modest surroundings in downtown Austin and teaching at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs next to the LBJ Presidential Library on campus, both institutions sitting on East Austin land, incidentally, that had once been black homes but was seized in eminent domain during “urban renewal,” which blacks called urban removal. To set the scene. It’s always about land, bro, in East Austin and in Palestine both.
A magazine did an issue on all the people who made Austin "special," whatever that meant, and included three prominent profiles. One was a former federal prosecutor who had sent a lot of local drug traffickers to prison, the second was a land developer who was in the process of buying the City Council—and third was Barbara Jordan. She wasn’t from ATX but she was a former member of Congress, the first post-Reconstruction black female member from the South actually, and before that she was member of the Texas Senate where she was the first post-Reconstruction black too. Hers was too large a presence to ignore in such a small town. The magazine didn’t have any other black people in the issue either and that made her a natural choice. Journalism is a business, which is something black people have learned sometimes to our detriment, and you have to think about those things, yeah, even diversity has a price, or appearing to be diverse which even back in the day could add extra value in a faux-liberal town, what can you say? You want to welcome everyone into the shop. Theoretically. Until you don’t.
Professor Jordan’s office on campus was surprisingly unimpressive. There were no heads on the walls even though she was a hunter. The former Congresswoman had helped to slay a giant, but she was a predator by circumstance not by profession. She'd been part of the pack that brought down the rogue Republican elephant Richard Nixon. In her UT office she sat in a big chair behind a modest desk, she was overweight as always and looking as if her health was declining and she was using her time left, as many great people do, to pass on what she had learned to students. To set the scene. Ann Richards was not mentioned specifically but it seemed that Barbara Jordan, who had already forgotten more than most of us will ever know about how the world really works, was a perfect counterpoint to Ann Richards. As if she were intentionally exploring the Richards see-no-evil worldview, the Professor approached a subject she knew better, President Lyndon Johnson, the great Texan who had preceded Nixon in the White House and who made Barbara Jordan's career possible by helping black people to vote.
Lyndon Johnson spent his entire public life enriching himself illicitly in and around Austin and the question to Professor Jordan was how that could be true—whether the two goals were reconcilable: Doing good for yourself and doing good for the people who elected you? Oh yes, the professor said. Everyone is in politics to do for themselves, she said. If you don’t start out that way, it kind of gets thrown at you.
She made clear that she herself had profited from public life. The question, she said, was one of degree. How much featherbedding, how much exploitation of your position? If LBJ had done things to get power and done things for himself and his family after he achieved power, those “things,” even though potentially prosecutable, had to be measured against the good he did, like helping black people and Latinos get the vote. (An archivist at the LBJ Library for example would later claim that the great man kept $10,000 in cash in his desk when he was Senate Majority Leader, in case he needed to buy a colleague’s sudden change of heart.)
Only after LBJ fucked up in Vietnam was there reason to revisit the issue of sleaze, Barbara Jordan said, without saying “fucked up” or the “sleaze” part. This was the theoretical basis for opening the corruption file on Barry later, actually. This was how the boom from gentrification in River City became ethnic cleansing too. Only after it became clear how badly Barry had fucked the Palestinians, when the war started in Gaza, did it become appropriate to look at what he had done to minorities in East Austin. The comment by Professor Jordan was the wisdom of the ages coming from a black person with complete credibility. Fuck Ann Richards’s opinion, in other words. But not fuck Ann, she was just wrong. A Black Warrior—after sitting at the feet of a tribal elder and listening—could choose a different path from that dictated by the white woman, or the white man, or the Uncle Tom, who speak with forked tongue, to quote our Native American brothers and sisters. An African American could take up the spear—against the White Peeps and against Toms and Aunt Jemimas who empower them. And feel good doing it.
The teachings of Professor Jordan made it possible to enter a liberal-free zone where the opinions of even prominent white women like Governor Richards had no more meaning than the opinion of anyone else who you didn’t necessarily trust. What Professor Jordan said could be used to formulate an organized system for evaluating public wrongdoing, a kind of “Jordanometer” of corruption you could say. It was no longer a question of someone being absolutely bad or absolutely good because if you went by those standards you had to prosecute or pursue everybody in public life. It wasn’t a black-and-white issue either with The Man in Black being the good guy, either, because black guys/girls can betray their own peeps and do worse damage than whites do. In Austin no one, not even Barbara Jordan, got to heaven if you were too literal-minded or if you looked at the reasons for doing good rather than just accepting the good. Instead the question was, “How good?”
Or more likely in River City, “How bad?”
The formula for evaluating targets developed into something like this: So, like, the vast majority of average politicians are just average, right? They score around 50%, an equal mix of self-interest and doing good for the public. Anyone who reaches 60% positive—unless the unfortunate 40% involves touching a child inappropriately or practically anything caught on camera or on audiotape—deserves re-election.
Barbara Jordan herself would have scored about 70 or 75%, that’s a back of the envelope estimate. She wasn't a saint. Jordan had served in both the Texas Legislature and U.S. House of Representatives which meant making certain ethical sacrifices from the start. But she also broke color barriers and helped to overthrow a tyrant, President Nixon. Toward the end of her life she was living modestly in bucolic River City and practically the only thing of value to show for her time in office was the respect of the public and her professorship at UT. After her death, Professor Jordan's FBI file—or a redacted version of her FBI file—was released and included her bank statements. She was not a rich woman. Governor Richards on the other hand would have scored about 55 or 60%, that’s another back of the envelope calculation. 65% max. Ann Richards was mostly honest, yes, and she had some good policies but Governor Richards was heavily into self-promotion, the good ol’ girl routine that made her famous but for which her administration suffered. We’re not totally sure about Miss Ann because Barry’s administration refused to release her FBI file after her death.
But no one, not even Jesus of Nazareth scores above 90 percent.
Barbara Jordan knew about the tradeoffs, in other words, and risks, and she knew about corruption because she had seen it up close, at the Watergate hearings. She knew that wrongdoing had to be confronted. But she also knew about accommodation because it was the story of her life.
Professor Jordan had been told in her youth that black people and especially black women were incapable of leadership. She heard that shit growing up in Fifth Ward, or wherever, in Houston, and it was the conventional and accepted rule of the day. If she had listened she would've done both herself and society a disservice. But that’s how they do the Negro even today in Austin, Texas—they try to make us think that our game isn’t tight or we aren’t playing by the rules. A sweet spot could nonetheless be found in civic affairs, after time and considerable thought—after Barbara Jordan’s wise counsel, listening to her and the righteousness of her rap. Balancing pluses and minuses—you want to be a mean nigger but also a fair one, and not do to white people what they did to us, that is, be unjust. Still, you’re looking for a little payback too, yeah, just to help even the score? A fair decision was that anyone who came in with less than 50% was fair game. That’s the guideline for judging Barry too, in fact. It’s totally cool, right? Fifty percent is the definition of fair. Less than fifty means you're ethically challenged, that’s reasonable too, don't you think? A score less than 25%, it seems, requires a trip to the courthouse. Single digits meant calling ahead for a cell. And it’s not racist either, it’s not a black and white issue with black being good.
There’s actually a pretty wide selection of corruption in this town—many politicians to choose from—many shapes and sizes, all colors although the predominant pigment is white. Everyone in this liberal town wants to target the Republican governors—that’s the standard from journalists too. Alternatively, you could go after members of the Texas Legislature, honorable members of the state Senate or of the House of Representatives. But life is too short, you know? How many of these guys and girls were elected precisely because of what they are—horse traders—pig-fuckers, as they might have been called in a prior era? For folks like these, the crucial element of hypocrisy that’s so important in a definition of racism is missing. Texas rednecks were born that way and they admit it but they’re not hypocrites as well, at least not about the Negro which is what’s most important here, in the context of the black man and black woman being sold out by white liberals and Toms. So too, a pertinent question about corruption in Austin: Is it even possible to represent a district of the Texas House of Representatives and be honest? This issue has been much debated. Learned studies are now being conducted at the University of Texas. The evidence is still out, but doesn’t look good.
Local offices at the Travis County Courthouse offered a plethora of targets, especially in the early days, back when Ann was in office. You always like to scrutinize county commissioners because a Southern courthouse is so often backward and/or incestuous, especially in Texas. But in this town it’s actually the City Council that has been most ethically-challenged, for years now, as the members of the council have tried to achieve the political equivalent of being in two places at the same time, which is impossible to do: opening the city to rash development and talking about preserving the “old Austin,” whatever that means, the old town, whatever that might have been. So, like, the original story, from back in the day, growth vs no growth has lived on as the city has grown like a fungus. You may say, well, the City Council, those development bitches, who cares? The mayor is only different by a matter of degree. Every time there has been a debate about the behavior of the pigs for example, His Honor, whoever he has been, has been on the side of more shooting. It’s been in his best interests politically, especially Steve Adler’s. The most powerful lobby at City Hall is the Police Association and the mayor always wants to stay on the good side of the union. So, it’s not even like hypocrisy, or ignorance on his part, it’s pure self-interest that is somehow worse. And he becomes a subject of interest, yeah, a number to be spit out of a Barbara Jordan calculation.
That’s how the feds do it too by the way. They watch for a while, reading/watching the news—most of the FBI files are actually filled with news clippings—until they’ve read enough and heard enough and one day they decide, in legal terms, this motherfucker is sleazy, fundamentally dishonest, and they start to try to make a case. That’s a useful protocol in River City too. If it’s good enough for the FBI it’s good enough for the public in the Live Music Capital of the World. Methods may vary but the ends are the same, civic improvement, the perfection of American democracy you could call it. So, like, Mayor Adler became a bullseye at City Hall. But it’s hard to be critical in a small Southern town like ATX where white people feel so good about themselves. These crackers have never liked to have their motives questioned—but you just got to keep the faith, my brother, as Barbara Jordan preached. That’s the black righteousness motto, you just got to keep looking for the unrighteous to bend over and you’ll get back in the game. You can get back between the Chamber of Commerce hos and their self-love. So, like, with that background you may ask, what is Mayor Adler’s score on the Jordanometer? 23%. Maybe 24% or a good day.
And Barry? 12%. Again, on a good day.
Let’s start with His Honor the Mayor. Before being elected, Steve Adler was a development lawyer, an occupation that led to considerable wealth working eminent domain cases in this arch-typical hot real estate market, especially, although details remain murky, in and around The Domain, a deal which was put together by a real estate company called Endeavor. To set the scene.
Mayor Adler’s eight years in office were marked by a studied lack of critical interest by the press, which was another cause of suspicion. A multimillionaire developer as mayor of a city in the throes of rampant development but the mayor’s business ties were not discussed in print. In the case of the daily Statesman, still shedding jobs as the newspaper attempted to make a profitable transition to the digital age, not wanting to anger business interests which meant the mayor and his erstwhile business partners. In this context at the Statesman practically “all real estate deals are good deals,” a neighborhood association leader moaned at the time. Complicating matters was that the newspaper’s former owners, the Cox family, are major landholders in the city and benefited from a rising real estate market. What this all translated into was no scrutiny in the Wild West that constituted and constitutes Austin’s business/government/tech nexus, a kind of sweetheart relationship for Steve Adler and others in power that Donald Trump couldn’t wish for in D.C., because in Austin it includes coddling by the press. For instance: Mayor Adler’s push for a $720 million bond issue to “fix” roads and traffic was never subjected to the basic due diligence of comparing Adler’s private interests (his 66-page financial disclosure form would have been a good jumping-off point, although the apartment in New York and the condo in Cabo San Lucas could safely be left out) or those of his business partner or former clients, or those of his wife, with what was being proposed. Are bond packages in Austin a fix-all for transportation ills or guides to future development? Whose ox is being gored, in other words? Which is invariably true of big public expenditures.
Instead, the bonds were evaluated only on their alleged merits, at face value—a kind of taking for granted of good intentions that minority officeholders do not often enjoy. The good news, if you’re looking for bad news, is that Steve Adler was so omnipresent in the city's affairs that he left a lot of tracks.
Race and ethnicity, our subject here, actually kicked in first in Adler’s City Hall office, not on the eastside, or upstairs at his crib in the W hotel, and in this instance the mayor’s own ethnicity was at play. Early in his tenure he met at City Hall with representatives of the Israeli government, selling State of Israel bonds. This is a revealing encounter since the bonds are not considered a particularly competitive substitute for their American counterpart: the Middle Eastern version can be purchased only from a representative of the Israeli government, at an interest rate set by the State of Israel, and can only be sold back to Tel Aviv. But Adler is Jewish and he was presumably showing solidarity when he listened to the pitch to buy bonds, which means that his own ethnicity or cultural background should be fair game if those of black leaders is. And it’s here, in this meeting of two fault lines, money and race—money and identity—that the mayor was most vulnerable, not just in regards his relationship with his own community but regarding his relationship with blacks. He was selling niggers out. For example: The once-proposed and then-abandoned OneTwoEast condominium tower, on the east side of Interstate 35 between 11th and 12th streets, spitting distance from the Capitol?
This real estate project was described by black leaders as the gateway to East Austin and would have determined the future of gentrification in the city, the black city council member at the time warned as part of her opposition to the plan. But in the press the project did not receive the attention that white neighborhoods do—or the most important single development dispute-du-jour, Austin Oaks, also in a white neighborhood, was receiving. Large, imposing, and a complete game-changer in terms of what had been built in this black neighborhood up until that point, OneTwoEast was just across the interstate from the Capitol, not to repeat. Mayor Adler was pro this particular growth, and the mayor spoke openly and in support of the developer, a white cat named Haythem Dawlett. Who was the same Haythem Dawlett convicted of drug-trafficking in Massachusetts back in the day, although the press never reported that fact. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. This is Austin—we try not to be judgmental. A lot of people got their stake in River City from running drugs.
Still, contrast Mr. Dawlett's background and narrative with development projects in white neighborhoods where the mayor, City Council and city bureaucracy parse every comma and discuss the developer’s reputation and you understand why blacks feel like second-class citizens. White neighborhoods get the greenbelts and parkland set-asides while blacks get ex-traffickers and arrest records? Another sticking point, not to be picky: The same Haythem Dawlett whom Mayor Adler spoke up for, as the guy to lead off this major redevelopment of East Austin, was the same Haythem Dawlett who had been convicted for solicitation of murder of a witness in his drug trial. But hey, what’s a little solicitation among neighbors? In Austin we do it all the time.
The conviction was overturned by an appellate court after all, not because the guy didn’t try to get the witness whacked, as the federal appeals judges noted wryly in their opinion, but because he was charged and tried under the wrong statute, in other words a technicality. The point is that this revelation was not the result of an awesome display of investigative journalism but by entering the developer’s name into Google search and hitting the button, something that neither the daily newspaper nor the Texas Tribune did. Nor the city’s Planning Commission. How do you miss something like that? You don’t look in the first place—just as the Newspaper of Record, the New York Times, aka the White Lady, declined to follow the most prominent case of gentrification in the country, even after redevelopment of minority neighborhoods had achieved an incredible ethnic-cleansing momentum of its own. There are in-depth updates in the media every time someone proposes pouring a slab in a white neighborhood—but it’s laissez-faire and let-niggers-beware amid an atmosphere of questionable political connections in East Austin.
Actually it says everything that needs to be said about the Texas capital city that one of the most concerned voices about how the eastside became gentrified was the former police chief, Art Acevedo. He noted a couple of years ago that, yes, young blacks had left their homes in traditional minority East Austin, driven away by high rents, lack of a homestead exemption and even his own police force’s overzealous efforts. But Chief Acevedo noted that, while East Austin was no longer African American, on Friday nights and Saturdays the hood became heavily-black once again as young bloods returned from their new homes in the eastern suburbs (which became the relocation centers of preference for those forced out) to visit elderly parents and grandparents who had refused to leave. What the police chief didn’t say: that process was also repeated on Sunday mornings as blacks in other parts of the city and surrounding communities returned to East Austin to go to church. While many African-American homeowners left for blacker land, so to speak, a dozen or so African American churches that once served a thriving East Austin black community still lingered, as minority anchors in this part of the city. As black churches go, so goes the community. And there, once again, it seemed Mayor Adler was busy working to make way for development.
Gaylon Clark, lead pastor of Greater Mount Zion Baptist Church, one of the principal African-American congregations, experienced Steve Adler’s attention up close. “Mayor Adler has reached out to me on a few occasions. While running for office, he visited the church, stayed the entire worship experience, then came into my office and inquired about me and the church,” Rev. Clark wrote once in an email. “His desire to know me and hear my story spoke volumes. No one seeking political office had ever honored me in this way. After winning the election, The Mayor invited me to his office for a personal conversation regarding my thoughts about East Austin and the economic and quality-of-life disparities in our city. I am not a preacher who is constantly looking for political solutions to solve moral and relational deficits in the community. I had very little to share with him from a political perspective. I did however share my concern about the quality of education in [Austin Independent School District], the need for expanded mentorship programs for African-American youth, and the continued inability of Austin to keep and attract African-Americans. I'm sure I was not thinking large enough for what he had in mind. His economic vision for Austin is huge and much more informed than mine. As he shared some of his dreams for our city, it was clear why he was the Mayor.” If you’re thinking that Steve Adler the former developer's lawyer may have had other reasons for reaching out to black pastors than merely sharing his vision, you may be right.
Rev. Clark continued: “He and his wife came to our church in September of this [2016] year. No agenda. He came just to visit. I told him about our November 6 entrance service into our new campus and invited him to join us. Can you believe he was there? I couldn't. He had just visited five or six weeks earlier.” You can believe in the innocent interest of the mayor, as does Rev. Clark, who is not political. But you would also have to believe that Greater Mount Zion’s move from its prime East Austin location on Pennsylvania Avenue was unrelated to the serendipity of the mayor’s sudden appearance at the church doors and that it’s a mere coincidence the old church property was sold—during the same period of the mayor’s vision—to a subsidiary of Eureka Multi-Family of Dallas, a major developer which already owned several properties on Pennsylvania Avenue and was thick in the gentrification mix. Rev. Clark would not comment further because, as he noted, the church’s move was not entirely popular with his congregation. You can believe in the mayor’s big vision—or you can just as easily believe that Mayor Adler took advantage of a black Baptist minister, a man who by his own admission was not politically-attuned, and in the course of meetings and discussions of East Austin’s future—the church moved out of the neighborhood.
On the possible conflict of interest front, by the way, the mayor’s spokesman Jason Stanford said at the time, in response to a question, that neither the mayor nor his wife "ha[d] ever heard" of Eureka Multifamily, even though Eureka had multiple projects before the City Council and KUT public radio was reporting at the time, at length, on the company’s local buying spree. Eureka executives were quoted in the local business press too and Adler and his wife are part of that particular community, real estate developers. Spokesman Stanford continued that Mayor Adler “doesn’t think” he or his wife has ever done business with the company. “Neither he nor Diane,” Stanford wrote, “have [sic] ever heard of that entity and they don’t think they’ve ever had any relationship with it.” That sounded completely believable! It doesn’t end there. Steve Adler also lost points on his Jordanometer calculation for policing.
After an officer’s shooting of a mentally-disturbed black teenager, the officer was fired. The cop filed a Civil Service appeal although Chief Acevedo, who had been an internal affairs guy earlier in his career, noted at the time that his disciplinary decisions had been upheld in the past and he had no fears in this cop's case. As part of the appeal however the officer’s lawyers subpoenaed Mayor Adler to testify, a smart legal move and also a great opportunity for black people in Austin to get some answers under oath from City Hall about African-American fears that inappropriate use of force has not been exclusively attributable to dumb or racist cops. But has also been part of police policy, from B.I.W.A.-to-W.I.B.A., in other words. As the hearing date approached something surprising happened. The City Attorney cut a deal with the killer cop, allowing him to resign and paying him $35,000 go-away money. The outcome of the settlement was that it kept Mayor Adler out of the witness chair. And the City Attorney appealed to Attorney General Paxton to keep the full details of the settlement secret. That’s where Barry enters the scene, actually.
The U.S. Attorney in Austin during the Obama Administration, a pretty decent white guy who is now a federal judge, suggested to Barry’s Attorney General, a Negro, that the Austin police be the subject of a departmental review by the FBI, like what is happening now to the Minneapolis police, after widespread complaints in Austin of police abuse of minorities and of unnecessary police use of force. To set the scene. In fact the minority community in Austin is still asking for the review because it was denied by Barry. In the intervening years, in the last eight years in fact since Chief Acevedo left for Houston, Austin has had five police chiefs, and just got a new white chick from Ohio, as APD remains a racially-challenged train wreck. President Obama’s Department of Education also found that the Austin schools heavily disciplined minority kids, far beyond black and brown numbers in the student body.
Barry’s Office of Civil Rights could have intervened, as many local minority parents wanted the Obama Administration to do, but nothing more came out of Washington. A good explanation, that fits these facts, is that cities whose police forces are under investigation—or where the schools are subjects of federal discrimination complaints—do not draw high tech migrants to town, even Dinks who don’t have kids. Bad municipal reputations choke off new real estate development and developers’ money in the form of political contributions also dries up. That’s the cost even before considering the effects of corruption in local government. To call President Obama’s administration cynical doesn’t even scratch his surface.
The only reason that Barry’s Jordanometer score in Austin even reached double digits is because his administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made a finding that the Austin Fire Department was discriminating against black firefighter applicants. The city got a new fire chief as a consequence, a black man from Atlanta. The numbers of black firefighter haven’t much changed but at least the Obama Administration acted. Actually, it was easy because no potential new homeowner looks at diversity of a fire department before moving. In short, Barry was dirty in Austin.
The First Black President sold out his peep.
Chapter 4 Hey Joe, Where You Going with that Gun in Your Hand?
It’s all about land, bro. In Palestine and in East Austin. “No one is making any more of it,” Texan James A. Baker III told the Times years ago.
Jim Baker who is the only person to hit the White House trifecta—serving as Chief of Staff, Treasury Secretary & Secretary of State for the Reagan/Bush administrations—was responding to a question about why he was buying ranchland (in Uvalde), at an advanced age, well into his golden years of retirement actually. They’re not making any more of it in Austin or Palestine either, which is why land is so valuable, especially with you factor in exploding populations.
The dynamic in the Middle East and in Austin is the same. In the case of the former the Israeli government guarantees a “right of return” to all Jews across the world but doesn’t have the land to house them. Hello! In the latter case, similar to Palestine, Democratic political leaders keep inviting new businesses to move to Austin but don’t have land to house the employees. Unless someone moves out first, which is how you get gentrification. Austin’s growth has mostly been by way of the arrival of white and Asian techies, not to stereotype but because it’s true, and a resulting crowding out/reduction of the resident minority population. White people are like an invasive species in the River City watershed but instead of efforts at control, everything has been done to promote propagation.
Specifically, there was a Gentleman’s Agreement 1 and a Gentleman’s Agreement 2 in Austin, both involving the Negro, the second being a secret pact in the 1990s when liberals, city fathers/mothers and the real estate industry reached a consensus to stop building in the suburbs—out in the hills—because of dangers to the environment and aquifer. Instead, the plan that was to double down on development in East Austin where mere blacks and Latinos lived. It’s all been about land in River City, just as in Gaza and in the West Bank. But instead of settlers’ gunfire, there have been techies’ checkbooks and use of land codes—increasing housing costs because of increasing demand—while simultaneously avoiding any similar change in Tarrytown or the rest of West Austin, or out on the lake where wealthy whites also have their homes. Not to engender class or racial envy but because it’s true. To set the scene.
The difference between the monetary rewards of real estate development in East Austin versus West Austin is not just the number of square feet. If you’re a developer eyeing a project there are two key dynamics present east of I-35 that can bedevil growth in West Austin. (1) Land is historically much much more expensive on the westside and (2) the minute someone wants to do any kind of intensive project in West Austin—this sounds like an exaggeration but is totally true—where Ann Richards was county commissioner, our Hill Country heartland and the beating heart of Lone Star liberalism? There’s suddenly a neighborhood group, lawyered-up, well-financed and well-connected, arriving to make life difficult for the developer. East of Interstate 35 that doesn’t happen. Development rules are enforced in a more laissez-faire manner, you might say, which is how gentrification got started in the first place and why it has moved like a bullet since.
There’s a kind of “consortium” that runs the City of Austin, basically consisting of developers and those who enable developers—the omnipresent Endeavor Real Estate, for example. Drenner Group is another, real estate lawyers, OMG just go ahead and waterboard me. Drenner sounds like the fucking CIA! But Drenner the individual is actually described as having a heart and not a complete fuckhead greed dog like everyone else in the Austin “development community.” Not to stereotype or anything. Anyway, all these land guys together with all the ancillary business interests involved in building Greater Austin, basically, mostly racist fuckheads. Not always acting in concert but all pushing in the same direction, big-time growth,10% per annum would be nice, more if possible. A report a few years ago of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, by the way, about the condition of Barton Creek, estimated that Travis County’s population would increase by 20% over the succeeding couple of years, which didn’t sound very sustainable for the city or the creek, but did mean that there were beaucoup bucks to be made. Only in the last year or two, since pandemic, has the growth rate slowed. Former Mayor Adler and present Mayor Kirk Watson, who preceded Adler as mayor and now has succeeded him—incumbent Mayor Watson who is running for reelection this year? Backed by developers’ money he will have had a decade in office by the time he retires. Which is when Steve Adler apparently plans to run again. These two guys have been the principal cheerleaders and facilitators of the development-dominated approach to city affairs.
It’s like living in an oligarchy, rule by the rich. Crassus who was a famously rich politician in ancient Rome, not to go all historical on you, Crassus made his money by controlling the fire brigade in Rome and letting people’s houses burn for a while and thenarriving to offer to buy them out. Living in Austin you kind of know how the Romans felt. Mayor Watson’s big accomplishment in the Texas Senate, after his first terms as mayor, was helping to get the Travis County Health District founded. You know what lawyers first represented the Health District? Senator Watson’s firm. No one even said anything, in River City, it’s a pretty jaded population, here along the banks of the mighty Colorado. You just get used to the flames of corruption.
Included in the above business alliance are title companies and the lawyer/lobby crowd—two development lawyers, Richard Suttle and his partner David Armbrust for example, if you had to name the two most wired guys in town, at least in recent years. Suttle is said to be the most powerful non-elected person in the Texas capital city. Mayor Watson was/is one of their guys, Kirk Watson’s political career was boosted by Ann Richards but created by David Armbrust basically, if you had to name one person, before Kirk was Mayor the first time when he unveiled “Smart Growth,” which is what we’re living now in case you didn't know. Watson’s career was thanks to Armbrust who was the highest-powered gun in town (“Daddy of Austin Development”) until Armbrust was succeeded by his partner Richard Suttle, who is one of Mayor Watson's BFFs by the way and flew Kirk Watson around, in a private airplane, when Watson ran for attorney general against then Supreme Court Justice Greg Abbott, now governor, what a small world in which we live! And is now the go-to guy for development at City Hall, Richard Suttle is—not Governor Abbott—although the governor has made some land development moves recently, working with Democrats. Suttle was one of the guys in Endeavor’s monster deal that a judge just nixed as illegal, which we’ll get to shortly.
Anyway, this consortium—this community of interests, you could say—land people mostly, together with the construction companies which are actually the least powerful members of the gang, but still influential, that’s the Austin building crew, you could call them.
For example the present Austin school superintendent is a former construction guy whose first job at the school district was deciding what Austin schools to sell off to developers, because with the arrival of so many Dinks, who don’t have kids, Austin needed fewer schools, you know? Families with kids on the eastside have been pushed out of the district, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Everybody in power is involved and everyone else’s life in River City has been touched by development, but some more than others. For the sake of brevity we’re talking about the group of interests represented in spirit or in fact by the super-influential RECA—the Real Estate Council of Austin—which Kirk Rudy was president of. RECA is a big tent and there are some thugs under the canvas. The front man for this group of like-minded interests, as mentioned above, has been former Mayor Adler who never met a developer he didn’t like. The results of the racism inherent in gentrification have been stark. The center of the Austin metropolitan area’s black population is now in another county, per a recent story in the American-Statesman. And Austin was just named the 90th most diverse city in the country, also per the American-Statesman.
Years of arrivals of tech bros like Elon Musk have made the city unaffordable for the average Negro or Latino family, unless they’re tech people too, which is statistically unlikely. Blacks and browns who remain in town remain mostly what they have been, service workers. Nor has the national press been interested in what has happened in River City, where injustice seems to thrive. There’s been a big racial/cultural divide in terms of whose problems get covered. Indeed, harkening back to Biblical times, like his brethren in the West Bank, at one point Mayor Adler even guaranteed a “right of return” to redeveloped areas for displaced black and brown homeowners but the fine print was that you needed to leave first. Whites have not been affected. Rosewood Courts in East Austin for example is the country’s oldest public housing project, originally for African Americans, opened in 1939, a project pushed thru by LBJ when he was in Congress. Which is in the process of being re-vamped. The Austin Housing Authority which owns Rosewood has said that the new “affordable” homes in Rosewood will start north of $300,000. Affordable by whom?
The Times preferred its own narrative in Austin. The White Lady ran a story several years ago about the local housing habits of so-called “Dellionaires,” almost exclusively Caucasians who became rich while working as early employees of Michael Dell, the tech guy. In another story it was him and his old lady’s philanthropy. Unmentioned in print, among Dell’s good deeds, was that it was Michael Dell who has pushed the policy for land redevelopment, the re-purposing of minority East Austin in order to provide housing for arriving tech people, by taking it from the POC living there. Anyway, over the years, after praising Michael Dell, the Times has declined to report in-depth on the single-most prominent and flagrant case of gentrification in the country, not the Dellionaires but instead the Dellion-less and Dell-losers. And there’s a reason for that, which is not journalistic in nature. And it involves Barry, you know, the Barry-Barry-who-cant-hide Barry, who can be charged with gentrification in addition to genocide.
Everybody in Austin has a favorite Barack Obama story, actually, including the President himself, he came so often, you’d see him eating barbecue on the East Side or wherever, South Austin, or just walking downtown. Not to burst anyone’s bubble but he wasn’t here for the Mexican food, bro.
He actually came to hook up with Kirk Rudy of Endeavor Real Estate, who was one of the President’s principal bundlers. A bundler, in case you haven’t heard the term before, collects checks from various contributors who the candidate or officeholder cannot or does not have time to hook up with directly. The bundler is busy collecting checks in between visits by, in this case, the President of the United States. From KEYE News in 2016: “President Obama's final stop in Austin on Friday was a home in the West Austin neighborhood of Tarrytown… President Obama was invited to the home of Kirk and Amy Rudy who are long-time supporters of the president… The Rudy's were invited to a White House state dinner in 2011 and contributed to Obama's presidential campaign. Kirk Rudy is a co-founding and managing principal of a real estate development company that developed The Domain shopping center...” The president’s visit can be brief because how long does it take to hand over a bunch of checks?
A bundler can even be another politician. Congress’s Nancy Pelosi was also said to be a bundler for Barry, if you don’t know how the system works. So, like, you could be a tech guy or girl, from Silicon Valley let’s say, sitting in Ms. Pelosi’s office in San Francisco, writing a check for her, and at the same time you could write a check for Barry, and Nancy would see that he got it. How cool is that? In Austin, however, that check meant something different than it meant in San Francisco. Not all sources of contributions are created equal. Here in bucolic River City, Barry profited from what has basically been the destruction of minority communities, not to be judgmental of a transcendental guy. But his campaign account profited directly from Austin’s whirlwind growth, which not only left minorities out but helped to push them out, too. He also gave the pigs license to kill, not that there’s anything wrong with that. We know based upon the data. Let’s take another look.
Barack Obama’s big sources of contributions in the ATX context during his time in office were three industries: real estate, entertainment, and high tech. Of which Austin was a perfect example of this perfect mix. A 2012 article in the Times lists Kirk Rudy as President Obama’s number 10 biggest bundler in the country. We know, in addition, that this particular combination (real estate, entertainment and high tech) was the contributions trifecta perfected by the President’s fellow Chicagoan, Israeli-American politician Rahm Emmanuel. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which can hardly be described as anti-Semitic, that combination of donors led to Emmanuel’s own political success as Congressman in the Windy City and it was ultimately grafted onto the President’s campaign operation when Emmanuel served as White House Chief of Staff for Obama. To set the scene again.
Rahm’s brother Ari, btw, is a major Hollywood agent who is also, surprise, a major Democratic fundraiser. These are two hard-pecker Israeli-American guys who, like the IDF, don’t take prisoners. The archetypical snapshot of Rahm is from a few years ago, actually, after a Republican cracker Congressman heckled Barack during the State of the Union message and the camera panned to Chief of Staff Emanuel, you remember that scene? Rahm himself was straining to see who shouted “Liar!” at Barry during the State of the Union because someone was going to get their knees broken after the speech. Anyway, Kirk Rudy who was collecting checks in Austin moved up the ladder as Democratic National Committee Deputy Finance Director, and more, while Steve Adler became Rudy’s official sidekick in the money department and Barry’s companion in town. “We talked for a little bit on the tarmac about Austin, about innovation, and then he invited me to catch a lift with him, which I accepted,” Mayor Adler told the cameras about hanging with Barry. “I jumped into the limousine, he called it ‘The Beast’, and I had the opportunity to visit with him while we rode into town.” There’s a campaign publicity picture used by Mayor Adler of a meeting or a dinner at the White House and both our esteemed then-mayor and Kirk Rudy are close enough to Barry to be with him in the same photo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. This is what happens when powerful white people want your land, whether it’s in East Austin or on the West Bank. They use a Negro to get it.
Reportedly there have been some differences over the subject of Israel and the Palestinians between Barack Obama and President Biden, the guy who, the first time he saw Obama, called Barry “a clean-looking black man” and then became his vice president. Which says more about Barry than it does about Joe. While Joe flew straight to Israel after hostilities started Oct. 7th, and had an emotional moment with Bibi on the tarmac, Obama’s relationship with the Israeli premier has been cooler. There’s another photo, this one of Bibi and Barry sitting together, apparently at the White House, and from the body language it’s hard to imagine two guys who less want less to be in each other’s company. Bibi even released a campaign video once that showed him and Barry talking and the voiceover says that Bibi had to “lecture” Barry on which way is up. In other words Bibi punked the President of the United States. A proud slave-descended Black Man wouldn’t have taken that shit and would have called Bibi out right there and kicked a little ass. Imagine how Denzel would have reacted, bro.
But Barry couldn’t afford to do that, because Barry’s continued success required contributions from wealth businesspeople, many of them Jews, and besides he’s made of different stuff anyway. And appearances can be deceiving. Barry is—superficially at least— totally dirty on Palestine and so is Bibi. The difference between the two men is that Barry gets better if you look closer in the Middle East. On Austin, no. He only gets dirtier the closer you look.
On the Palestine betrayal front, Barry followed the path beaten by Bill Clinton in relying inordinately on campaign money from the wealthy Jewish business community, and rewarding the same folks with Cabinet posts and the “big ask” from American Jewry: a permanent place at the White House table for Israel. Which Israel has, in fact the Israelis have been hogging the damn plate. In return, Barry got contributions and a lot of them. The former president said after the Gaza war began (the Hamas attack on southern Israel was an act of liberation by an oppressed peeps, btw, as seen thru a Black Liberation lens) and after the IDF’s genocide started, that while in office he tried to advance the cause of the Palestinians “and I have the scars to prove it.” Kinda, sorta. The evidence is superficially otherwise. But on a deeper level maybe he’s telling the truth.
He visited Israel (another meeting on the tarmac with Bibi), and his lone act of apparent defiance against Israeli interests in the U.S. was an abstention on the Security Council to a UN condemnation—supported by everyone else—regarding Israeli actions in the West Bank. Then it gets worse. Barry’s main guy while in office was a cat named Jacob Lew—who was Obama’s deputy secretary of state, treasury secretary and White House chief of staff after the departure of Rahm. That Jacob Lew who at one time was also both Bill Clinton’s and Barry’s head of the Office of Management and the Budget, and between those gigs was at NYU where, according to Wikipedia, “Lew aided the university in ending graduate students' collective bargaining rights.” That Jacob Lew, who is kind of corrupt. Anyway, the same Jacob Lew, who is Jewish, was appointed as President Biden’s U.S. ambassador to Israel just a few days before the Hamas attacks and, as his first act as U.S. ambassador, Lew apologized to Israel for the Obama abstention years before. Literally. Publicly. You couldn’t make this up. The Times has recently reported on a 10-year arms deal—the report was published eight years too late—that Barry signed with the Israelis, that won’t end until 2026. Barry did what other great powers have done, including Britain and the Turks, and the Arabs themselves on occasion. He sold out the weakest player, in this case the Palestinians. To set the scene.
That’s what the powerful do as often as they protect the weak—they decide who to sell out. Usually it's easier to do with somebody who has already been screwed in the past, because it’s easier to screw somebody a second time than to take on someone who can defend themselves. That’s also what the first Black President of the United States did in East Austin. That’s why all those stories about Barry’s trips to Austin did not include him sitting with black people and listening to what was happening to them in terms of housing. He felt guilty. But not guilty enough not to take developers’ money like everybody else. Barry went to Tarrytown because that’s where the contributions came from. So, like, Endeavor’s Kirk Rudy was eventually named by Barry to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. And the last time we checked, a few weeks ago actually—years after Barry left office—Kirk Rudy’s name was listed as #1 contributor to the new Obama Center in Chicago. So, like, there are still ties. Kirk Rudy and Barry Obama have done well for themselves and so has Endeavor Real Estate, especially when dealing with the City of Austin, actually. Endeavor Real Estate is not to be confused with Endeavor media on the West Coast, btw, of which Ari Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, is CEO.
Our Endeavor in Austin was founded in 1991 and as of last year had a history of over $5 billion in real assets under management. “A variety of real estate properties such as retail properties, office properties, industrial properties, multi family properties, and mixed use properties,” per Bloomberg. “Endeavor Real Estate Group offers services such as tenant representation, project leasing, property management, and move coordination.” Property numero uno for Endeavor was The Domain, which is called Austin’s “second downtown,” and is a former IBM factory that got turned into 700,000 square feet office/retail. With a tax incentive from the city, unprecedented and overpaid (according to a later city audit), and that led to a change in city practices, not to be suspicious or anything. That was prior to Barry’s time in office, but not prior to Steve Adler’s time as a real estate development attorney and it was in the same neighborhood of The Domain that Mayor Adler is said to have made big, big bank, doing eminent domain cases. Can we get a witness? Couple of years later, at least as early as 2008 when Barry first got elected, Kirk Rudy was already an Obama bundler. As the Austin real estate market exploded, leading to the gentrification of the eastside, Barry developed a sure source of campaign funds in the Live Music Capital of the World.
The Endeavor that created the Domain and Southpark Meadows in South Austin, another huge and hugely successful development, has certainly done well politically thru the years. The calculation was that the company would not only get a tax rebate, for creating the enormously profitable The Domain, but the City of Austin was giving Endeavor a tax break for a development that was going to make money nonetheless. The rebate would eventually be overpaid by between $57,000,000 and $65,000,000, according to the audit. Endeavor’s “successes” are legendary at City Hall. Everyone wants to talk about President Trump’s real estate deals but people close to Barry have done well too.
Since then—since the city gave Endeavor what the company wanted in terms of zoning at Southpark Meadows for example—the capital city’s transit district then awarded Endeavor the much-coveted development of Saltillo Plaza downtown. And when Endeavor went back to the City Council, which was responsible for deciding zoning at Saltillo and had given Endeavor a pretty good deal, too, the company said that the low-income housing that Endeavor had promised, in exchange for receiving the zoning was “no longer possible”—the numbers no longer worked, that’s what developers like to come back and tell the Austin City Council to explain why low-income housing won’t be built after all. The City of Austin responded “no problema.” The newest City Council, btw, which took office last year, without debate just gave the okay to another monster Endeavor development in East Austin, southeast of Huston-Tillotson University, in an old milk plant actually, harkening back to East Austin’s once-rural roots. The 1,400 residential units, more than 400,000 square feet of office space will be the tallest structure in East Austin, right on the river. Can you say “mixed development”? On the federal front, Barry was also helpful to the firm that made his principal bundler rich. During the downturn in the economy that Barry inherited from W, Endeavor was awarded a contract to build a shopping center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and a military PX. But it was really Endeavor’s participation in a federal program called TARP, that Senator Bernie Sanders and others questioned as having “poor oversight,” that provided a backstop to the company. In an interview with the daily newspaper an Endeavor executive said in 2012, during the time of Barry’s reelection, that being chosen to participate in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program, which is another way of saying “bailout”) had allowed Endeavor to weather the housing finance storm of the end of the first decade of the century. To set the scene.
There has still been some resistance to Endeavor’s many successes at the public trough. The resistance has been emboldened by good reporting from local news sources—local reporting actually—not the statewide newsroom the Texas Tribune or national sources like the Times or Washington Post that have wanted nothing to do with the case of gentrification in Austin. For business and conflict of interest reasons in the case of the Timesand lack of interest on the part of the Post. If the Washington newspaper, for example, was really interested in the roots of gentrification, first the Post would have to follow the money in D.C.’s own gentrification, no? What’s interesting about the local reporting in Austin is the Chronicle and Statesman didn’t seem to know what they were onto. Again, people were jaded. This is a pretty corrupt town and any politician who wants to be called out has to be as obvious about what he or she is selling as, well, Titty Mama. Who was known for a lot of things, including her bounteous bosom, but not for the subtlety of her offers.
When a member of the City Council challenged the over-generous tax rebate from the city to Endeavor back in the day, to build The Domain, at the Austin Chronicle the great Lauri Apple apparently overheard an exchange at a party between the Council member who led the fight against City Hall’s largesse to the company and the wife of Kirk Rudy. To set the scene. In which Amy Rudy whispered to the Councilman, “Don’t fuck with my husband.” Which was a kind of a threat, right? The Council member, taken aback, asked her to repeat what she had said. “Don’t fuck with my husband,” she repeated.
Amy Rudy didn’t threaten to break the Councilmember’s knees or anything but it was still like something out of Chicago. Which it kind of was because that’s where this way of doing business at Austin City Hall originated, in the Windy City. Anyway, Lauri Apple caught up with Kirk Rudy himself and asked about his wife’s comment and Rudy said of the Councilman, "He's scared of her," Rudy chuckled. "God, I know how he feels." Which was kind of funny and leads credence to the belief which is gaining acceptance in some quarters—including Hollywood—that mob wives, a la The Sopranos, have been supplanted in dramatic fearsomeness by wives of real estate developers. We next see Amy Rudy in a gown a few years later at the White House, at a state dinner for the visiting President of China, courtesy of an invitation from Barry. But we digress.
A further indication that there might be an unusually close relationship between the City of Austin and the company occurred during the administration of Steve Adler as mayor.
At the daily American-Statesman the wonderful Andrea Lim (who is no longer in journalism, having decamped for Stanford Law School) published a story that Kirk Rudy, the man who is founder of the most powerful development company in the city, was working in Mayor Adler’s office, in a position which City Hall described as an "unpaid volunteer.” So, like, let’s get this straight. The founder of the most important and most politically tied-in real estate company in the city, during a time of rampant development in Austin, was working “as a volunteer” in the office of Mayor Adler who is also a developer and a Democratic bigwig and was chair of the City Council? Hmmmm. That sounds perfectly legit! At the same time that Kirk Rudy’s company had business before the City Council and Mayor. What could go wrong?
Even in Chicago, people would be more discreet. And then it got worse, last year.
The most recent objection about favors done by the City of Austin for Endeavor Real Estate was just adjudicated, actually, by a District Judge in the Travis County Courthouse. And dates from Steve Adler’s time in office and also relates to the American-Statesman, actually, the daily newspaper.
Chapter 5 I Left My Heart in San Francisco
Being an Oreo—black on the outside and white on the inside—is a lot easier than being a coconut who is brown on the outside and white inside.
That doesn’t mean that life as a race traitor is any easier in the black community than among Latinos, it just means the bar to being called out is lower. Because of our own explicit Afro-American history in which even now any kind of cooperation with white people has to pass a sniff test, a black being labeled an Uncle Tom is a lot more likely than a Latino being called a coconut or “Tio Taco.”
Among Latinos it seems that working with The Man is presumed to be okay—until proven otherwise. While among black people working too closely with our former slavemasters starts as undue accommodation. This stereotype can be taken a step further. The context to be discussed here is a Southern city and what is the public corruption du jour across America, gentrification, with whole inner-city neighborhoods taken over by young professional Anglos, pushing out the Black Man and Black Woman. And Latinos.
The distinction between how blacks and Hispanics approach civil rights can be dissected in this gentrification context. Blacks view equity as a precursor to wealth, while Latinos view wealth as a precursor to standing in the community, legal and otherwise. Rights come first and money follows in the black perspective, just as Asians and Jews, one might say—this is a gross generalization but generally true—have approached enfranchisement in America first through the education system. Still, it’s two approaches to attaining equality—black versus Latino—that has offered high drama this time around, the preferred means of achieving the American Dream playing out in a familiar setting, the Hill Country’s continuing laboratory for minority disenfranchisement—Austin, Texas—World Capital of Live Music.
Besides blacks and Latinos there’s also been a third population demographic highly involved. They’re called Dinks.
The important thing to know about Dinks is that because they don’t have kids they don’t need schools and because they don’t have kids they also don’t need as much per capita parkland, a concept that’s useful in understanding how public corruption works in ATX. Selling city parkland in Austin requires a public referendum, so former Mayor Adler—who is a principal heavy in this motion picture, not alone in that regard but his appearance anywhere even today does cue some ominous background music—instead tried to transfer park spaces to the school district, where the school board—with only 9 members and thus more easily influenced—could vote to sell the land to developers, instead of requiring a referendum of hundreds of thousands city residents, a la a City of Austin ballot. As for Dinks, these new arrivals have already settled on the eastside. It’s all about land, bro.
The University of Texas’s urban studies people published a paper on the Dink demographic in East Austin a few years ago. Ms. Delco herself, the former state representative, also noted—not using the acronym Dink explicitly—the changing demographic in her own neighborhood which is in the heart of the traditional eastside. Her home is, aptly, just off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. In terms of the schools universe the house she shares with her husband (retired Huston-Tillotson Professor Exalton Delco who is a herpetologist by trade, or something biological like that) is a few blocks from Sims Elementary School whose fate increasingly looks like condos or mixed development. Ms. Delco said privately almost a decade ago that she was seeing a lot of Anglo couples walking by her home in an area where whites were once afraid to tread. She noted the childless aspect of the people she saw from her window, and she added, in a puzzled voice, sitting in a living room adorned by a photo of herself with Barack Hussein Obama II on the wall (Ms. Telco is also originally from Chicago), speaking of the people strolling by outside, “They all have dogs.” But no kids. Those were an earlier wave of Dinks. Now you know.
She also noted that the City of Austin, unprompted, had begun building bike lanes along the roads of East Austin, and she commented at the time, “They’re not building those [bike lanes] for us.” Speaking of black people, that is.
You can’t get your head around development in this town without understanding the inordinate role played by the press. The Austin American-Statesman, until recently, was not much interested in gentrification or the downsides of rapid growth for the simple reason that the newspaper’s then-owners, as the whitening of East Austin began, were Colonel Cox’s descendants—good newspaper people by-and-large but not on this story—major landowners in the city. Anything that raised real estate values in town also benefitted the Cox family, especially during a time of uncertain survival in the newspaper business. To set the scene. With the American-Statesman sold to Gatehouse Media, and premonitions of journalistic doom so far unfulfilled, but unabated, the fruits of this lack of coverage have become clear regarding development of the 19 acres the Cox family owns downtown, surrounding the Statesman’s old offices actually, on Lady Bird Lake a few blocks from the State Capitol. Where the influential Cox family which includes ambassadors in its ranks got an exemption decades ago from a prior City Council to build on the water.
Development attorney Richard Suttle, who is the Darth Vader of local lobbyists, represented the Coxes on the new project as trustee. The Suttle name has not much appeared in the newspaper’s pages, in the context of raw power, despite his historically outsized role in city affairs. The newspaper stories that mentioned him at all have sounded, through the years, as if the City Desk just heard his name for the first time the day before. Anyway, a well-informed source who we’ll call My Land Guy, who knows the real estate market in Austin and knows Suttle as well, says that Dick Suttle only supported an anti-McMansion statute in Austin, for example—one of his few thumbs-down to new construction—because someone was trying to build one near his own surprisingly modestly-valued $1.6 million home in Tarrytown. In the same neighborhood where Barry used to go to pick up his political contributions. My Land Guy also says that the Cox land, along the lakefront, just off Congress Avenue, is potentially worth one billion dollars which seems like a lot of money even in this market. In an email, Suttle once denied everything from McMansions to the land’s value to his relationship with the Coxes: “Your assertions are incorrect,” he wrote, without elaborating how. In earlier comments directly to the newspaper Mr. Suttle promised a “robust debate” on any concerns about the coming development by the water, such as how the land would be used, which is like the devil promising to look into the temperature in Hell. The project also could be a big boon for Barry’s fundraising, btw.
There has not been a united front against City Hall’s coziness with real estate interests or to prevent minorities being screwed in Austin. Latinos have often gone for the money, that’s cool—it is what it is. First term Congressman Greg Casar for example has been super-supportive of the Palestinians during debates in D.C. but before going east he was a complete development whore for years on the Austin City Council. Casar was repeatedly busted by The Austin Bulldog, a wonderful independent news site, for example, for failing to obey ethics rules by documenting his contacts with lobbyists. Delia Garza who is now Travis County Attorney—including duties as local misdemeanor prosecutor—has been cheerfully dismissing cases against pro-Palestinian protestors who got arrested at University of Texas demonstrations on campus, which makes her kind of a saint, but she was just another pro-development vote during her two terms on City Council. The pursuit of green and all, even at the expense of black people, you might say. Not to make anyone feel guilty about betrayal or anything because Latinos have a right to go their own way, even though it may seem short-sighted to a noble black man or black woman. This presumed self-interest has even produced some needed and useful change, by varying gender dynamics in the city.
Of course there’s been construction everywhere in Austin. So, like, in all honesty there’s one good thing about the Hispanic chamber of commerce’s pursuit of business: All these construction workers downtown? Who are putting up hotels and office buildings, or even condos over on the eastside, for the Dinks? Suddenly quite a few of them are chicks, Latinas, who look totally cool. They have toolbelts and nail guns and hard hats, and all, a few of them are pretty hot, actually, not that that’s relevant here. What’s interesting is that, so far, you don’t see any sisters or white chicks—no Asian women—but a few Latinas, yeah, competing with men in construction, maybe competing against their own men which is kind of cool from a liberation standpoint. But we digress. On the other hand, and unfortunately—despite these chicks who are definitely a plus, let us repeat, Austin has always had its share of hot women, you know? Nonetheless the whole building scene has actually been killing off another form of life, the Hill Country Negro, the Silicon Prairie’s only untamed black cat. Through destruction of habitat. Negroes are unable to nest anymore. “People in development here are making so much money,” My Guy at City Hall said, “that they aren’t thinking of the eventual impact of what they’re doing.”
On the corruption front he said that the city has allowed developers to escape payingfor the infrastructure that goes along with housing and office growth—Austin City Hall not charging developers the road construction fees for example that are levied in other towns. Instead, the City Council tacks those costs onto municipal government’s collective bonded indebtedness, so that the public eventually foots the direct bill for development, too. This is, actually, where Barry appears, in the context of the most recent big Endeavor project that politicos wanted the public to pay for. It's kind of raw corruption involving a connected company that has ties to a former President of the United States, actually. Who is not Donald Trump. Which we will discuss shortly. Not to be judgmental.
My Guy at City Hall claimed for instance that the much-vaunted set asides, of a certain percentage of new housing—reserved at lesser rents or at lower purchasing prices for the poor or those of moderate incomes—is a sham. “The city lacks the will to enforce” those very set asides. “What is really important is what’s always been important,” My Guy said, “zoning.” In that regard East Austin is a free-fire zone compared to West Austin where defenses are up and well-patrolled. That was when My Guy first introduced the major player in promoting this way of doing business, the Real Estate Council of Austin, RECA for short, of which Barry’s best friend Kirk Rudy was previously president. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. In fact even now the current chair and vice chair of RECA’s executive committee are both Endeavor guys, what a small world in which we live.
The builders and land people and the real estate-related professionals like lawyers and title people have all made bank, My Guy said, as they have been for the last few decades. Real estate is a huge sugar titty that developers can't stop sucking on in Austin and is, basically, the supply side of the city economy. That is the how of ethnic cleansing. The why involves the three other players whose interests all coincide and constitute the demand side of the local economy: UT, Ascension Health (aka, Seton Healthcare, with like ten hospitals in the Austin area and which the New York Times has gone after but not in the River City context) and the local tech complex represented by Mr. Big himself, Michael Dell. The critical fact is that the high-tech industry needed housing for Dinks and Dinks-to-come. Black East Austin was vulnerable and, as in Palestine, the responsibility of the people in power was to decide who to screw. Whom to screw, actually, as seen thru a grammatical lens. There was a particularly revealing moment on the subject, Dinks, by the way, without using the term Dink itself—which is presumably pejorative—but will continue to be used here with gusto and complete approbation.
This comment was a few years ago at the South by Southwest festival, in an intimate discussion before a studio audience, just like the one Barry had a couple of years before at SXSW with Tribune CEO Evan Smith. (“Well, first of all, I'm here because I like excuses to come to Austin, Texas,” Barry said, followed by applause. “And that's a good enough reason,” Barry began the interview with Smith by telling the studio audience. “And I want to acknowledge your Mayor, Steve Adler, who bought tacos with me.” Applause again.) The following comment came during a conversation between Michael Dell and the UT Dell School of Medicine Dean.
The Dean’s lead-in was about seeing “some vitality, some potential” in Austin as a healthcare-artificial intelligence hub, with Big Pharma coming to town, and all, and Michael Dell responded, “This is kind of what we imagined, the biotech community, [Big] Pharma, the biosciences and the computational sciences coming together. Austin is a great place to do this.” Which raised a few questions. Like, who is we?
Who okayed this strategic direction for the rest of us, with all the attendant costs—much of it on the public’s tab—including increasing rents—spastic traffic—minority displacement, but big, big bucks for guys like Michael Dell and Kirk Rudy and the others who want to be like them. And for Barry. There was no debate, bro.
For example what is it like living in a biotech hub? Was there a discussion of that? The question was never raised publicly. Like, did we need to worry about San Francisco and how well that high tech urban experiment turned out? Big Pharma and A.I., or whatever, the Silicon Valley cocktail that got mixed at Austin City Hall and that the rest of us were told to drink: it’s not just that things happened here the same way they happened in San Francisco. It was a lot of the same people who trashed the Bay Area coming to Austin, like locusts, Elon Musk et al, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Like parasites actually, not the homeless people but the people with money. Most of them good Democratic donors, though, except Elon and Michael Dell who are big time Republicans. But immediately after the camera stopped rolling on the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, production started on The Last Black Man in Austin. Have you seen the movies? Both have pretty much the same cast and the same screenplay.
The conversation about inviting Dinks has taken place almost entirely behind closed doors, or on cell phones, or by email, or over lunch at the University Club where the rest of us were not invited. Or at the Dell Computer campus, to say nothing of at UT. On former UT President Fenves’ old calendars there’s a notation, “Michael Dell will call your phone.” Who called the rest of us? Was what Dell wanted to talk about something that the rest of us might’ve wanted to hear? The rest of us are in the dark because Michael Dell has a history of killing stories about himself if he doesn’t control the narrative. At the Texas Observer a few years ago a story about Dell killing stories got killed too. But we digress.
Like, if you look at Steve Adler’s calendars just after he became mayor, there’s a notation in the margin, on a certain evening, “Michael Dell will call your cell phone.”
There’s a protocol in dealing with people of great power, they have your number but you may not have theirs. You don’t call them because you don’t know their cell. Did any of these calls answer that pesky question: Where are the newcomers going to live? That was actually something we didn’t know in the beginning but soon learned: East Austin, preferably as close to the university as possible and as close to the central-city tech core as possible because the one thing we know about Dinks is that they don’t want to be in the suburbs. In fact we’ve developing quite a profile of the interlopers: no kids, a dog, he or she probably works in tech or entrepreneurial medicine, wants to live close to downtown or close to the University of Texas campus and is willing to pay a half million dollars to buy—or a couple of thousand dollars a month to rent—a relatively small space in East Austin and bike to work.
This hypothetical Dink may be coming from San Francisco actually, not to repeat the obvious. Gifted or thinks they’re gifted, generally-speaking interesting and accomplished folks. Well-educated. Can you say “entitled?” They are usually Democrats who voted for Barry. The only difficulty is that the place they were planning to live in, in East Austin? Black people and Latinos were already living there.
What was also pertinent was who was paying for the city’s high-tech transformation. In that respect the general public got bent over too, not just Afro-Texans and Latinos. Austin is beginning to look like a lot of played-out former Sun Belt growth towns that people no longer want to move to and that cannot annex more outlying communities to increase tax revenue growth, which the Republican legislature has put a stop to, btw, and have municipal budgets that are beginning to slip into dangerous deficit. Schools play a part in an ugly equation too, taxes going up, yet there are shrinking enrollments because, as noted before, Dinks don’t have kids. The tech company Oracle for example made a big splash bringing its headquarters to Austin during the tenure of Mayor Adler and just a made a quieter splash announcing the company is leaving only four years later for Nashville where taxes are less and housing costs, surprise, are lower. The Austin Independent School District, btw, AISD for short, is a fountain of transparency compared to the folks at City Hall. The school district has kind of admitted it’s screwed. Mayor Adler’s City Attorney said, on the other hand, continuing to try to cover developer’s tracks, that it’s impossible to compile a list of municipal properties that have been sold off in recent years. As in, sold for development. You may not really want to know.
My Guy at the School Board described Mayor Adler as merely the face of development interests that control the city, it’s like a cartel except these guys and girls deal land not coke. Former Mayor Adler thinks he’s in charge of an apparatus that just as likely controls him. The mayor pushed an amazing dynamic in which the public was told, by turns, (1) there’s not enough housing to ensure affordability or (2) even to assure access to housing, which requires (3) relaxed zoning and more building, followed by (4) the invitation to yet more out-of-town businesses to relocate here and (5) the cycle repeats. In return, development interests paid for His Honor’s campaigns. And helped pay for Barry’s. That’s an oversimplification of course, not about Barry but about Steve. Steve Adler before and incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson now got/get money from a lot of people and do a lot of favors in return, as do most politicos—but basically that’s how gentrification has worked in Austin, Texas. An established system of favors but one that has reached a certain level of refinement in River City. A kind of pyramid, you could call it, in which the economic ecosystem prospers by continuously attracting the next wave of newcomers, who continue to bid up housing prices, putting more money in developers’ pockets, and in Barry’s, at the same time increasing the city’s indebtedness and displacing the poor. Until another town, like Nashville, becomes more popular. Can you say “bubble?”
Mayor Adler once described the moment in our municipal history as “golden,” that’s the word he used in a speech, literally, golden. The only question was golden for whom?
It’s the opinion of My Guy at City Hall, speaking of the development environment enjoyed by the mayor’s friends, at RECA for example, that His Honor himself the mayor, before Adler and now Watson, is not a major player except as a talking head for growth. If you actually had to attach one face to what has happened in the city—the inordinate, unnatural and unsustainable growth—displacement of the poor and gentrification—the use of the general public as milk cow for business interests, in tech and in real estate, and in the business of healthcare—that would be Michael Dell, actually. The computer guy. The following anecdote is pretty descriptive of Mr. Big:
Dell’s brother who is an M.D. by the way, here in town, or was—the word from his bro to a patient who asked once was that Michael Dell is a troglodyte politically, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The actual word used was “Neanderthal,” as in, “He’s a Neanderthal politically,” Michael Dell is, his brother said, like two steps to the right of Ronald Reagan’s dead grandmother on the political spectrum we all know and love. But repeating the remark here it’s better to say troglodyte because it’s more evocative, more descriptive, you know? This is a pretty highbrow town but it's still Texas and a lot of people in the Lone Star State don't know what a Neanderthal is even if they're one themselves. But everybody in Texas knows a trog, or two, and what’s the difference between a trog and a Neanderthal, really, like, is either going to complain?
The point is that Michael Dell doesn’t give a shit about the social impact of redevelopment in East Austin or anywhere else. He has world-wide business concerns, from his seat of power and influence north of town. He just needed housing for a growing tech sector. To house Dinks. His private dealmaking company MSD (for Michael S. Dell) also make make bank trough business development. The eastside has been a detail, in other words, another pinpoint on the map that just happens to be a few miles from his office. East Austin actually lies near Dell’s complex which is just next door in Williamson County. Surprise yet again. Before, minority displacement meant Dell and soon it’ll mean Elon Musk, in Bastrop County, actually. East Austin also sits adjacent to the University of Texas, basically between Dell and downtown’s technology nexus where Mr. Big does business and wants to do more. Instead of going after a market Michael Dell brought one to him, you might say. In that respect he became an ally of Barry. Even though the two men have, it would seem, nothing in common politically, but that’s not exactly true, is it? There is, after all, money from high tech and unquestioning support of the State of Israel. Dell has had a brilliant career, actually, as an entrepreneur and a visionary, but his credentials are not in international affairs or urban planning. Civil rights is not his brand, bro.
Michael Dell has controlled the city through his wallet and through political connections and by the work of his foundation which is senior partner in half of healthcare in the city—his power built upon tax breaks, as well as his own cash. He’s a modern-day robber baron which doesn't mean he hasn't been a great innovator. But he never put his social plans to a vote. Everything has been done behind the scenes which is where Mr. Big prefers to operate, by pulling strings. In this context his market has been land, not personal computers. My Guys at City Hall and the School Board didn’t say that. The Big Guy himself did. After giving a UT commencement address a few years ago—Dell is Longhorn although he famously did not graduate.
In an interview with the daily newspaper Dell described a growing Technopolis in the Hill Country, producing thousands of graduates yearly to feed growing tech enterprises, including his own. “This is where we started, and it’s always been a great place to attract talent. People who went to school here want to stay here. People that didn’t go to school here want to come here,” he said, using the royal “we” and without mentioning that means making room for the newcomers. “If you want to find a great company, I can guarantee you there’s a great university right nearby,” he told the American-Statesman. “It doesn’t exist anywhere in the world there’s a great company and there’s no great university right nearby. Also, if you widen the circle out—let’s say 100-mile radius—the student population grows to 150,000 or something like that with all the universities in the area. That’s kind of the foundation of what allows us to attract and retain great talent and drive innovation.” Asked if Dell Computers itself is the center of the Silicon Prairie, he said with uncharacteristic modesty, “We’ll let other people decide that. There’s a lot of great companies here, and I’m sure that there will be many more created. It’s a wonderful place to live and have our headquarters.”
This is the same Michael Dell who was one of George W. Bush’s primary money guys, by the way, back in the day, and who W said used to come over to the Governor's Mansion when Bush was having trouble operating his desktop and help out. Dell was also a proponent of the Iraq War. But we digress. For Michael Dell, black flight from East Austin is a detail, just as Palestinian civilians are a detail to an IDF guy loading a white phosphorus round into the cannon on his tank.
A bigger objective is involved, you could say.
Chapter 6 The Spy who Loved Me
You may ask, well, what does Palestine have to do with Austin, Texas, the Live Music Capital of the World? It’s a fair question. The answer is more than the mere fact that Barry was taking money from rich business guys like Kirk Rudy and the members of the Real Estate Council of Austin, RECA, the head of the development beast that slithers around town. Because it’s hardly news that there are a lot of wealthy businesspeople serving as donors, mostly to the Democratic Party. Nor is this a screed on powerful Jews, in business or in government. Instead it’s a screed on opaque networking and use of power. Those people! So many Caucasians simply lack the moral center that slave-descended black people have, frankly. And nowhere is that truer than in the case of Palestine. And now ATX, our own River City, where Barry came every so often to pick up his checks. Indeed, there’s a new theory in the social sciences that Austin, Texas has been the center of the known universe in recent years. The theory—called Austinology, or austinetics—has only begun to be studied but preliminary evidence is encouraging.
The arts, tech, business, the reason for River City’s prevalence is that everyone seems to have passed through town, in part because the Austin Chamber of Commerce and other business interests have been so welcoming, by pushing out minorities to make room for newly-arrived white people and Asians. The Third Coast at times has even seemed to surpass the eastern and western coasts in importance in certain fields. One area where that importance has been paramount is the media, with the founding both of Texas Monthly and the successful startup Texas Tribune. Both publications have not just changed the media landscape but have been influenced by the Texas capital city and some of its more quaint Old South racial practices. So, too, if you look at the pages of the New York Times—the so-called White Lady, aka the Newspaper of Record—other names with ties to River City also pop up.
For example the head of the Times’ New York City bureau and principal inquisitor of Big Apple black Mayor Eric Adams is Emma Fitzsimmons, who is a Longhorn by education. Interestingly, without ever having worked at the Tribune or Monthly she adopted both publications’ preferred playbook. Despite being white “liberal” journalists, when it comes time to earn investigative spurs in Austin, in New York and in D.C. at the Washington Post, it’s standard practice to pick a black target, you know? Like a bullseye. Only Barry has been immune.
Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, was previously editor-in-chief of the Monthly in Austin, Silverstein was picked by Evan Smith as Smith’s successor. Silverstein, who like Smith is Jewish, made headlines himself early in the Gaza War by forcing out one of his staff writers, a black woman who had the temerity to sign an online petition calling for a ceasefire. Those people! Of course Silverstein’s intolerance was not quite so shocking if one considers his racial record in River City where in six years at the helm of the Texas magazine he never hired or published a black writer, and refused to question the actions of Texas police, including the Austin puercos, as they shot an extraordinary number of minorities. Much less did his publication comment upon the gentrification happening a mile away from the magazine’s office, in East Austin. But Silverstein did run a piece in Austin, by a Jewish writer, in which the local police where dinged, not for shooting black people, but for having arrested a short blonde woman on a street corner near Forty Acres for a disorderly conduct-like charge, whom the magazine described as de facto—because of her size, hair color and race—the “least threatening” person possible in the River City community. But we digress.
Yet another prominent journalist who passed through Austin is of particular interest because of the recent tempest generated over the British invasion at the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos—who is also owner of Austin’s very own Whole Foods—imported an editor and publisher from Britain’s conservative and Tory stalwart Daily Telegraph. To set the scene.
Interestingly, Bezos’ ownership of Whole Foods has changed the racial dynamic in Austin, in a good way, where W.F. was long considered unofficially off-limits to people of color. It wasn’t just high prices, which can discourage the typically less affluent Negro or Latino, but also because of the lack of minority staff and Whole Foods security’s propensity back in the day for following black shoppers through the store. Today at Whole Foods, under Bezos, the prices are still in the ozone but for the new management it’s just about one color, green. That is capitalism at its best, it’s just about the money. Unfortunately the new ownership at the Post has not been as successful ending a segregationist dynamic at the newspaper, in a city, D.C., that is 40% black but where the publication is mostly white, a fact that we’ll come back to shortly. Anyway, a certain British journalist, now at the Telegraph in London—whence the Post’s new leadership came—was also an Austin guy like so many others. His name is Ambrose Evans Pritchard, which is a mouthful, and he’s the Telegraph’s flamboyant rightwing international economics editor. This isn’t about race directly, it’s about, well, spies, and how there are people in journalism, in Britain and in this country, who are reporters but have an agenda that may not be limited to writing good stories. It’s all about land, bro, just like in Austin and in the Middle East.
So, like, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard washed dishes in restaurants on Sixth Street in the World Capital of Live Music after graduating Cambridge University. Don’t ask how he arrived in Texas, it’s a long story, but like so many people through the years, Ambrose ended up working in Austin for quite a while. While here he was actually bonking a black woman, which being conservative does not prohibit, apparently—miscegenation or race-mixing—the black chick in question also worked in the restaurant that employed Ambrose. Which African American men don’t like to see, frankly, our fine black women being disloyal to the race and going out with white guys, especially white guys from old colonial powers like Great Britain that have had a role in the oppression of the black peep, frankly. While we, black men, are laying our lives on the line to free black women. But we digress again. While in Austin, Ambrose started his journalism career, in fact he got some of his first clips by writing for UT’s student newspaper the Daily Texan. Some pretty rightwing shit, actually, because Ambrose is a cigar-smoking port-wine-drinking Britannica-rules-the-waves retrograde imperialist whack job, two steps to the right of Queen Victoria. Not that there’s anything wrong with that because on an individual basis he’s not a bad guy. And there was something commendable about his time in Texas, he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, literally. But philosophically he was a nutjob, as mentioned above, and still is.
Once, this is a true anecdote, while in Austin a black liberation thought leader pulled Ambrose’s chain, by quoting President Jimmy Carter’s United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young? The same Andrew Young who previously marched with MLK and would later be mayor of Atlanta. The noble Negro in Austin said intentionally—in order to get a reaction—that “the British invented racism,” which is a belief with which the Kenyans, the Indians, the Malaysians and the Palestinians would probably all agree. Mau mau, you feel me? Do you know your liberation history? But not the Brits would not agree, suffice it to say.
This quote from Ambassador Young—quoting the Atlanta brother to Ambrose was pure provocation and it worked because Ambrose had to be scraped off the ceiling. How cool is that?
So, like, Ambrose’s career at the Daily Texan lasted until the editors found out that he wasn’t actually a student at the University of Texas but by then he had some clips and was good to go. Years later he was even the Telegraph’s controversial Washington Bureau guy where he wrote the totally-whackjob book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, and it’s said that Clinton Administration could not wait to see Ambrose board a Concorde jetliner back to his home island. But apparently while off the payroll between those two gigs, the Daily Texanand the Daily Telegraph, the period of time that is our interest here, Ambrose showed how journalists can have more than one master and in the process may mix their loyalties, for example to blacks in east Austin and Palestinians in the Holy Land. First, a question: What do you know about Guatemala’s borders? Because this is about spying.
So, like, Guatemala’s northern border is Belize, a former British colony and member of the Commonwealth that the Guatemalan government claims is actually their own. To set the scene. Think the Falklands Islands dispute between GB and Argentina of years past. Historically, in order to discourage Guatemalan interest in a quick land grab—remember first, it’s always about land, bro.
Historically Great Britain has kept an army regiment stationed in Belize, so that the Guatemalans understood that if they invaded, the lone British regiment was a tripwire that might not stop the invasion but would insure a British military response. The former Sixth Street dishwasher and Cambridge graduate Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was also a tripwire, for British intelligence. After his stay in Austin he spent quite a bit of time in Guatemala, “writing a novel” and living in an out of the way place near the contested border of Belize and apparently reporting back to British intelligence about any, for example, troop movements or mobilizations that might be happening on the Guatemalan side? This was while freelancing as a reporter, and while the Guatemalans had not yet transitioned from a military government, trained and armed by the Israelis, btw, although that’s not where this is headed.
One day, per confidential report, Ambrose had visitors from the Guatemalan government, who were not as dumb as the Brits apparently believed, and who, not entirely believing the journalism cover, these Guatemalan security guys made clear to Ambrose that it was time for him to move on. The point is that there are a lot of people in journalism doing things other than journalism. In Austin, in Guatemala, and in Jerusalem.
And maybe in Moscow. Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal may be innocent of the espionage charges that he was just convicted of in Russia, but there’s no prima facia case to be made that because he’s a journalist he can’t be a spy or do favors for spy agencies. Quite the opposite. Just because it’s illegal in the United States doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, especially elsewhere and for people other than the CIA. And there’s nowhere more likely than at the newspaper of record and its troubled bureau in Jerusalem. To set the scene again.
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel after last year’s Hamas attacks, the first words out of Secretary Blinken’s mouth—he is the descendant of Holocaust survivors—were, “I come to you as a Jew.” What about all those Jewish reporters for the New York Times in Israel over the years? Where has their allegiance been when they’ve missed all these stories about the West Bank? It’s a small country, bro. How do you not know about thousands of Palestinian detainees? Has the Mossad, or Israel’s domestic security people at Shin Beit, never gone up to Times’ journalists and, intoning “I come to you as a Jew,” like Secretary Blinken said in Israel after the Gaza War began, asked that reporting be suppressed or that stories be killed? No Israeli official has gone to the Times people and said, “I come to you as a Jew”? Please. As in East Austin, you have a group of people with certain interests, and stories don’t run if they are inconvenient to those interests. Favors are done.
A good argument can be made that Times coverage of the Gaza War has actually been better than the newspaper has been given credit for, despite a certain cat named Gettleman, who won the Pulitzer Prize a few months ago together with a former Israeli military intelligence lady and her nephew, all Jewish, for false reporting on the Hamas attacks. But the White Lady’s prior coverage has been a lot worse than you could have imagined. It wasn’t because of the fog of war, either. The source of the rot has been the White Lady’s Jerusalem bureau, not to point fingers.
Let’s start with the premise that the correspondents sent by the Times to Jerusalem have been Jewish, at least in the era of the present publishers and back a few decades. And many of those reporters who covered Israel are some of the hottest of the hotshots of American journalism today. The Times is also known, under its first black executive editor, to have blacklisted reporters who have questioned the Israeli narrative. But the real blacklist includes many of the hos who have passed through Jerusalem with a reporter’s notebook in hand. The practices of these guys and girls would make even Titty Mama blush.
A few names of correspondents and editors:
· Peter Baker, chief Washington correspondent for the Times.
· David Halbfinger, present political editor.
· Steven Erlanger, now the newspaper’s chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe.
· Serge Scheman, now a big shot on the Times editorial board.
· Jodi Rugoren, current editor of the Jewish publication The Forward.
· Thomas Friedman, the Times’ chief thumbsucker and deep thinker on the Middle East.
· Roger Cohen, the White Lady’s Paris guy and frequent thumbsucker on weighty issues.
· Ethan Bronner, now a big shot at Bloomberg, owned by New York’s former Mayor Bloomberg.
The Times is not alone. At the Washington Post there have also been any number of hacks pushing the Israeli narrative, David Ignatius being one, and still at it, and Shira Rubin who is the Post’s Israel and Occupied Territories correspondent after working at the Times of Israel. Rubin seems to be either clueless or corrupt, it’s hard to tell which, bro.
At National Public Radio there’s Greg Myre, who is a former Times guy, and while he was in Jerusalem his wife was correspondent for Fox News. Both are clueless and journalistically corrupt, they might as well have been taking envelopes from the Mossad. The mother of all biased Middle East reporters was actually at NPR too, a chick named Linda Gradstein, now at Voice of America, who spent twenty years at NPR and never met an IDF incursion that she didn’t like. It’s a long list of important people, none of whom had much use for the Palestinian perspective while they were in Jerusalem.
A less charitable observer might find it a HIGHLY UNLIKELY coincidence that so many of the former members of the Times bureau in Jerusalem, for example, had such great success after returning to Manhattan, after seeing no evil in Israel. Thomas Friedman, OMG, is kind of a ho of hos (there is no “e” in the plural of ho, btw, despite widespread usage it’s not hoes; hoes are instead garden implements) who has made a career of “critical insights” about the Middle East conflict—a conflict the solution of which would put him out of job and end his speaking fees and book contracts. He was also wrong about Saddam Hussein and Weapons of Mass Destruction, during W’s tenure, not that there’s anything wrong with that because so were all the big American media players, and he pushed the false narrative that led to the American invasion of Iraq like almost everyone else in the American media did too. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either.
Times reporters in Jerusalem have been busted by media critics for having relatives in the IDF and still claiming to be impartial. A wonderful story from years ago in the Columbia Journalism Review, written by former Times staffer Neil A. Lewis, who is apparently not Jewish, says the Times bureau in Jerusalem has been more important for the Israeli government to please than the American Embassy. And people who do not defer to the Israeli way of thinking in their reporting do not do as well when they get home to New York, it is said. Deborah Sonntag who is Jewish and worked for the Times in Jerusalem, according to the Columbia Journalism Review report, was the first of the White Lady’s reporters to reach the conclusion that it is the Israelis—not the Palestinians—who do not really want peace. She was kind of, what would you call it, shunned? And works now as a journalism professor. Ms. Sonntag refuses comment.
Everything that the Times is claiming to discover now about the true intentions of the Israelis has in fact long been part of the institutional memory of the newspaper of record. The real question has always been—not what the Times knows—but what it’s willing to print.
In 1991 James Baker, the Texas land expert, while serving as Secretary of State for the first Bush White House, banned Bibi—who was Israel’s deputy foreign minister at the time—from the State Department building and announced he would no longer take Netanyahu’s telephone calls. That’s more than thirty years ago, bro. For Old School Republicans, not including W, who also passed through Austin, btw, the goal was actually reaching an agreement in the Middle East. Not just lip service. Until Clinton, the State Department recommendation to the President was to appoint only non-Jews as emissaries to Israel in order to escape mixed (“I come to you as a Jew”) loyalties. For President Biden, on the other hand, his Secretary of State is Jewish, the Deputy Secretary is Jewish, as was the assistant secretary of state over the Middle East and the President’s personal envoy to Hezbollah, who is ex-IDF. Gee, the appointment of an ex-IDFer as the U.S. negotiator between the Israelis and Hezbollah really seems to be working, Mr. President! The incumbent American ambassador to Jordan is a Jewish woman, fyi.
What this breeds is mixed loyalties, just as at the Jerusalem bureau of the Newspaper of Record. Nor is there any semblance of balance or equity. At the Times the questions about how the newspaper missed thousands of non-judicial detentions of Palestinians long before the Gaza attacks should be: Who didn’t know what, and when didn’t they know it? Israel has recently been discovered to have imprisoned thousands of Muslims without trial but no one at the Times knew about that? We’re all concerned about human rights in the Muslim world but not in Israel? It’s a small country, bro, Israel is tiny, one-fifth the size of Guatemala which is itself a speck on the map. It’s hard to hide practices like mass imprisonment without trial. Nor is the Times alone. Shira Rubin, who is Jewish and is the Post’s Jerusalem girl, as mentioned above, appointed by managing editor Matea Gold, who is also Jewish, has had her thumb up her butt for a couple of years now. The question is if that thumb was strategically placed by the Mossad? Like, did she have some kind of clandestine surgery to get it so far up there? Not to get all conspiratorial.
The newspaper of record has also been uninterested in the flow of US aid to Israel, a percentage of which, activists believe, returns to the United States as political contributions. Since Israel’s founding US aid has totaled some $150 billion in yesterday dollars and $300 billion in today’s dollars. The Times has never brought its significant research chops to that investigation, or looked at the Big Daddy of Israeli support in the US, the senior Senator from New York, who is Jewish, like the Times ownership.
Instead the White Lady pushed an investigation that started with the question if New York City’s black mayor intervened with building inspection of the new Turkish consulate. It’s a legitimate story but there are a lot of legitimate stories out there, and a much bigger one than building inspectors involves special treatment for the Israeli government, bro. That doesn’t mean that Mayor Adams is blameless—he’s a former cop which means he should be automatically suspect, not just through a racial justice lens. But he’s a much more defenseless target that Mayor Bloomberg (whom the press accused of sexual harassment only after he left office) who is a powerful media figure. Instead the Newspaper of Record prefers to go after blacks and Latino politicians, as does ProPublica.
For instance: The White Lady just ran a long piece about corruption at Los Angeles City Hall, which has sent three council members to prison recently—one black, one Jew and one Latino. To set the scene. The black guy has already been the subject of a White Lady story. The Jewish council member, who was taking money from developers, was mentioned in one sentence of NYT reportage, and never identified as Jewish. The Latino was the subject of most of the recent long story, how he had immigrant roots, and all, the whole “cautionary tale” treatment that the Times loves to give POC who fuck up. The end of the piece quotes the U.S. Attorney in L.A., who is the prosecutor, and is Latino, saying how the Latino councilmember-crook was offensive to him personally, for betraying his peeps, but the Jewish guy copped a walk. That’s the White Lady at work. Story choice is very selective.
In the case of the ethically-challenged black Supreme Court Justice Thomas. it’s interesting that ProPublica, like the Times and the Washington Post, and the Texas Tribune, rarely if ever choose Jews as targets despite the high powered profile of American Jewry. It’s always us. Is that because Jewish officials are more ethical than blacks? The fact is that writing investigative pieces about black people is a lot easier than grilling powerful Jewish pols. Like Rahm Emanuel. This bias is particularly true on the Left Coast. Like the see-no-evil attitude of the Time/Tribune in East Austin, in San Francisco the new Times bureau chief promised to leave no stone unturned in pursuing the powerful but her first piece of aggressive reporting was directed against a black woman, Mayor London Breed. Who may be a poor mayor, but why her? San Francisco has been home to most of the big lights of the modern Democratic Party in recent years: Governor Gavin Newsome is a former mayor. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was and is the local Congressman. The late Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was Jewish, was famously once mayor of San Francisco, and her husband was chairman of the University of California Board of Regents, an incredibly powerful post, and her daughter was presiding judge of the San Francisco County Superior Court. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank before becoming Treasury Secretary. Kamala was D.A., but like Barry, has been off limits. The only person in that group who the Times has shown any interest in pursuing through recent years is the black woman at City Hall now. Everybody else was clean. Or they never got looked at? They call S.F Baghdad by the Bay for a reason and the reason is not clean government, bro.
Interestingly, both the online news site Semafor—in a piece written by editor Ben Smith, who is former chief media critic of the Times? And at National Public Radio, in a piece by their media critic David Folkenflik? Both these guys subliminally raised the issue that no one wants to talk about in American journalism and had a lot to do with the gentrification of East Austin and settlers’ land theft on the West Bank. Both Smith and NPR’s Folkenflik are Jewish, btw. To set the scene.
So, like, both guys were critical of the NYT for its reportage involving the Israeli intelligence lady and Jeffrey Gettleman, at the time of the beginning attacks of the Gaza War. And rightfully so, although the Times was recently delivered absolution by the Pulitzer committee under Columbia School of Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb, who is a brother and should be ashamed of himself for selling out to the White Lady. Anyway, Smith laid the blame on the foreign correspondent corps, or whoever, which he described as being detached from reality, and that may indeed be true. Folkenflik seemed at a loss to say what the underlying reasons are why the Times messed up. Can we make a suggestion that Smith and Folkenflik never made and can’t bring themselves to say? Neither man could bring himself to raise the question that everyone has long asked about the Middle East. Have Jewish members of the press, like Jewish members of American government, confused their own identities with their jobs, aka, “I come to you as a Jew” and all that? Clearly, the answer is yes. The only question is how much? In Austin, ditto.
Looking at gentrification and corruption in the World Capital of Live Music would mean looking at Steve Adler who is a powerful Democrat in a Democratic town and Barry’s BFF. Among Adler’s attempts at redevelopment in East Austin for example, as mentioned, was promoting a multistory project by a convicted former drug dealer who had tried to have a witness killed, and had been in federal prison before relocating to our bucolic River City. And the press has been unmoved. Adler is, of course, one of the founders of the Texas Tribune. Which has a business relationship with the NYT, being the Times’ local partner in Texas. Kirk Rudy has been a big contributor to the Texas news outlet too, a lot of the people giving money to Barry have given money to the Tribune, actually. The Times used to print a copy of the Tribune as an insert into the White Lady, even at a time when TT was refusing to hire black journalists. Just a year or two ago the Times placed a reporting fellow in the TTnewsroom, a white chick whose sole responsibility was to write about housing, and with the most prominent case of gentrification in the country taking place a half-mile from the Tribune’s office, over an entire year she never wrote a single word about what had happened in East Austin. Corruption in American journalism is as much about the stories that don’t run as the stories that are printed. Interestingly, the current TT editor in chief, who is not Jewish, is a former international editor at the Times during one of the most recent periods of lax coverage of realities in Palestine, which is basically the Times history before the Gaza War?
The temptation is to paint Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan as another Times pro-Israel ho, who allowed IDF to get away with murder, literally. He was certainly a powerful figure in the White Lady’s newsroom (and has already resigned TT, actually, and will head east, shortly, to run the Columbia Journalism Review for Dean Cobb.) Anyway, Chan actually wrote a wonderful piece a few years ago about the Palestinian movement, in 2017 as an obituary of an Eastern Orthodox prelate who had been jailed by the Israelis for running guns to the West Bank. To set the scene. In which Sewell Chan basically poked a finger in the eye of the Israelis, not that there’s anything wrong with that, by not making the Palestinians or their supporters into stick-figure terrorists, and by showing that there was a loyal opposition to Times coverage, and some—not much—tolerance of dissent at the newspaper itself, rare though it may be.
A former Times public editor/watchdog, Dan Okrent, btw, who is Jewish, btw, and is also a former Austin guy, btw, at Texas Monthly, has said that most of the shit that has flown in the NYT newsroom in recent decades has been about Palestinian coverage, actually. Most unexpected of all, a longtime member of the Jerusalem bureau and perhaps the single most pro-Israel reporter on the Times staff, which is saying a lot? That would be Isabel Kershner, have you read her shit? May she one day reside in journalism hell where all biased reporters eventually go, but only after they are promoted in the Times newsroom.
Nonetheless this woman who writes as if she’s on Bibi’s personal staff wrote a seminal piece the same year as Chan’s story about the gunrunning priest. Kershner’s story was about an IDF’er who walked up to a wounded Palestinian suspect in Jerusalem, who was lying on the ground, and shot him dead. All on camera. To set the scene. The shooter was an Israeli medic, actually, so you can imagine what the regular IDF guys are like. But we digress. That piece of reportage paid later benefits for the Palestinians, actually, in the Gaza War, where Israeli soldiers also shot dead three Israeli hostages lying on the ground with their hands up. Who the IDF mistook for members of Hamas. For years Palestinians have claimed that the Israelis have had a shoot-to-kill policy on wounded suspectss, executing them on the scene. Stories inevitably ended with a Palestinian freedom-fighter being whacked by security forces, even if the Pali was already wounded or out of the fight.
Then, shortly after killing their own guys in Gaza, lying on the ground with their hands up, there was a “terror” incident in Israel, after which the Palestinian was taken prisoner. Surprise. Like, there’s always a first time, no? Because the Israelis had been called out on murder by, of all people, Isabel Kill-‘em-all-and-let-Yahweh-sort-them-out Kershner.
It says everything about the White Lady that in order to criticize the Times you have to refer to the Times, because no one else comes close. No one else is as authoritative or has the staff to devote to a project. Unfortunately in Austin, there’s been no similar revelation by the Times or Tribune, despite bodies on the ground.
Chapter 7 White Rabbit
Dean Baquet, former executive editor of the Times, is a Tom. As in, Uncle Tom. He betrayed blacks in Austin, he betrayed Muslims in the Middle East and he betrayed his readers as well as POC in the Times newsroom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
He’s the Negro you see in the movie She Said, btw, about the #metoo investigation, coverage that he managed well enough. He also empowered a different black narrative with the 1619 Project by the excellent Ms. Hannah-Jones. He did okay with the George Floyd protests although, as is usual with the White Lady coverage of race, it was white people reporting on something they knew nothing about until it already happened, because the Times is a Caucasian newspaper. Other than that, he was pretty much a ho—a race traitor—doing what the white man and white woman and specifically white leadership at the NYT wanted done, as seen through a Black Revolutionary lens. Previously Baquet liked to be called “Creole”—not black—in deference to his Louisiana roots, but being black offered more professional traction. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either.
A black girl or black guy like him is chosen as window-dressing for a big appointment, like at the Times, so that people will think he’s going to bring big balls and righteousness to the table, like a Black Man or Black Woman usually would, but instead he’s there for the salary, the prestige and the perks. The power. It’s like, have you ever seen a police press conference after a white cop wrongly shoots an innocent Negro? There’s usually a high-ranking black officer standing behind the white mayor when the mayor starts lying about what really happened. What’s most important to the Negro standing behind the white guy/girl in charge is what he takes away from the table, often a pension that’s had a few good bumps. Not to sound judgmental but that was/is Dean Baquet, Tom of Toms, or in the context of the White Lady, Tom-in-Chief.
Who is a Tom and who is not is particularly important today, as the war in Gaza rages. Powerful black American have screwed Muslims in the Middle East on a few occasions in the past, exchanging righteousness for blind power, selling out the Palis, like the incumbent United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield who is also a Louisiana Negro, like Uncle Dean, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Although she did look good casting the Biden Administration’s lone abstention on a vote critical of Israel. She looked a lot more believable, for example, than Samantha Power who was one of Barry’s UN ambassadors and cast his administration’s lone abstention on a vote condemning Israel—about settlers’ land theft in the West Bank, stop me if you’ve heard that before—that everybody talks about now like Barry put on a kaffiyeh, picked up an AK-47 and parted the Red Sea. President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, another alleged black man, has been Israel’s friend and a key part of the Israeli-American military complex, a Tom in other words, and would be smoking his last cigarette after any kind of real revolutionary justice. In a prior generation there’s Barry himself, for East Austin and for Palestine, going for the money although he still has a chance to resurrect his reputation as Presidential Plenipotentiary for Palestine, a role that will be described shortly but can be summarized now as merely P-Cube, if he were to adopt a rap moniker.
Barack’s attorney generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch who refused to get to the bottom of the Austin police, or political corruption in River City, because it would have been bad for Barry’s fundraising—those two-hour stopovers in Austin, you know, maybe eat a few tacos with Mayor Adler and pick up a stack of checks? Eric and Loretta are Toms too.
As for local Toms, in the City of Austin context, there was the recent acting police chief who is a sister named Robin and who wrote a letter asking clemency for a white guy who went to a George Floyd protest looking to whack a protestor, and committed murder. There’s also the incumbent black member of the City Council, a chick named Natasha who likes to talk big about police reform but keeps her nose in close proximity to developers’ asses. Barry’s administration did throw the minority community a consolation prize, an investigation of the Austin fire department’s lack of hiring of blacks, but that was in lieu of investigating the police department for killing us. Let’s see. In a prior generation—also falling into the race traitor category—there is W’s national security adviser/Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for selling bad intelligence, and General Colin Powell for buying it. Although in the case of Condi there was one great incident that played out during her time, related to Israeli influence in the U.S. government, now lost to history, from Condi’s stay in the White House. It was reported at the time, perhaps even by the Times, actually. To set the scene.
So, like, Condi is heading a meeting of her own staff, apparently. And she’s going around the table asking people’s opinions on some question involving the Middle East?
And this one member of her staff or whoever, this cat gives his reply, speaking as if he’s offering his own thoughts. And Condi says, drolly, because she was not unknown for humor, even as thousands were dying, “Thank you for the view of the Israeli ambassador.” Those words—more or less—alluding to the entrenchment of pro-Israeli officials in the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishment. The guy who spoke was pushing the Israeli Solution, in other words. Which we’re seeing now in Gaza. Overall, however, probably the biggest ho in recent years has been Dean Baquet, Tom of Toms, Tom-in-Chief because of the wide reach of the newspaper he led, the White Lady.
That’s why betrayal of people of color in a newsroom like the Texas Tribune or an editorial department like Texas Monthly can be so disturbing. In Baquet’s case he declined to desegregate the Jerusalem bureau—and the Washington bureau and the newsroom for that matter. Not just at NYT but everyone who covered Barry for the big media operations was white, Anglos like David Remnick at The New Yorker and Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic(who is a former Israeli prison guard actually, no lie, who got a lot of quality time with Barry in the Oval Office.) Everyone wanted a piece of the First Black President story and pieces of Barry were definitely for sale. Instead of sending actual black people to talk to the black President, because blacks might have asked more difficult questions that Barry didn’t want to answer. Which Barry played along with obviously because the art of being Barry is appealing to white people, especially white chicks, who he shared tacos with in Austin, while taking black people for granted. Just as the art of being executive editor at the Times for Dean Baquet—who was described in the newsroom as being “edgy,” like he’s cool because he wore a hoody? Oh please. He was just another black man who made a living appealing to whites.
Toward the end of Baquet’s tenure, NPR published a devastating story about the Times, actually, releasing a study by the newspaper union that found that Times’ employees of color during Baquet’s tenure were routinely being evaluated by superiors more critically than whites, even under this black executive editor. This wasn’t something happening in 1965, btw, it was two years ago, coming from the same publication that gets on everyone else’s case about race. Uncle Dean also refused to follow up on gentrification in Austin because the White Lady had a business relationship with the Tribune, Evan Smith described Dean Baquet as his good friend, which meant he was Smith’s supporter at the Tribune, whose financial backers included a lot of the people involved in developing River City. But Baquet’s greatest sin was backing the play of the publisher, AG Sulzberger, in that critical year 2017, to rid the newspaper of its Public Editor position.
Historically, the public editor has been critical of the newspaper’s own coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and was indeed the authority responsible for questioning the White Lady’s coverage of the Palis. To set the scene. Tiring of the grief—and not wanting to be held accountable—Baquet and Sulzberger just got rid of the position. That’s one way to solve a problem, bro. Let’s see. What else to say about the Times?
First, how great a publication it is. You have to give the devil his due.
The New York Times is the Bible, Old Testament of course, and reading the newspaper is what got many people interested in journalism in the first place. But there is no publication in the world that needs a public editor more, you know? Times reporting on the Middle East is simply not to be trusted, Pulitzer Prizes notwithstanding. Jewish reporters don’t give a fair rendering of a conflict that Jews are a party to, bro, hate to tell you that, just as Jewish reporters shy away from business stories, like gentrification in ATX, where Jewish businesspeople are making bank. Once you say that, a lot of the NYT façade starts to crumble. It’s also not to be trusted on stories involving important Jewish officials in the U.S. government, because the Times reporters have “deep sources” there too, which translates into conflicting relationships, and no one is looking to burn other Jews, or no one sees the faults that they themselves have, not in a culture where relationships and networking are everything. This has become even clearer with the coverage of the campus pro-Palestine protests, in the wake of the Gaza War For Liberation. Let’s start there.
When things began to turn ugly at USC, after the president of the university cancelled the Muslim valedictorian who was chosen by students to speak at commencement, not that there’s anything wrong with that, a Jewish reporter wrote a backgrounder for the Times about USC without ever mentioning that the hard-nosed president of the University of Southern California is Jewish, which you would think would be useful background in the piece, no? Try a little thought-experiment, like Einstein—who was also Jewish—used to do.
If the demonstrations were about black people, about civil rights for example, and the president of the university making the decisions about use of force were African American, what do you think the chances are that the Times reporter would not mention the university president’s ethnicity in the story? Nada. None. Nil.
Next the shit hit the proverbial fan at UCLA, where both the police and pro-Jewish protestors kicked a little pro-Palestinian ass and where, surprise, the chancellor, Gene Block, was also Jewish. Descendant of Holocaust survivors, don’t you know? Which was not mentioned in the Times coverage either at the time. Indeed, in California, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, Caltech and now Stanford all have Jewish leadership, in addition to USC and the new guy who replaced Gene Block at UCLA. What a small world, certainly attributable to merit not pressure from rich Jewish donors. You would think that a good reporter might ask him or herself whether Jews in the administration might have a hard-on for pro-Palestinian protestors? Not at the New York Times, bro.
Just like a black college president might be a tad late calling for state troopers if the Klan, protesting on campus, is taking a beating, you know? Thinking like a reporter, and all. Not the White Lady, she don’t think that way. Because the newspaper of record does not customarily identify people in news stories as Jewish, unless it’s an example of brilliant Jews, of which there are many, while for the rest of us it’s a different story altogether. We are identified by race or affiliation, if only in photos, and get the “cautionary tale” treatment by the NYT after we screw up. But we digress.
The pro-Palestinian shit also hit the fan in Austin at the University of Texas, where the president and Regents are not Jewish. But there are some more interesting coincidences in River City. The prior president of UT, Greg Fenves, who was fired for failing to protect women’s rights on campus, is now president of Emory University where the police were called in on pro-Palestinian protestors PDQ, which is an Old School acronym for “pretty damn quick.” Fenves is a descendant of Holocaust survivors too. Another heavy response by police early on was from President Jay Bernhardt at Emerson College in Boston, who is also Jewish. Indeed Bernhardt—and a totally sleazy piece of work Jay is, btw, but we won’t get into that here—was Dean of Communications at UT Austin and supervised the unusually non-diverse Journalism School under Gregory Fenves until last year. Again, what a small world in which we live. You can see guys like this as just so many nodes on the same network. Which is cool that Jews do that, while blacks much prefer the “First Negro” narrative where the individual black person relishes in his uniqueness, a la Barry and Dean Baquet.
In fact, the presidents of MIT, Northwestern, Harvard, Brown and the immediate past president of Yale are all Jewish which might raise questions if one did not completely believe “the meritocracy” is at work. Btw again, the new President of Yale, Maurie McInnis, is not Jewish, but she was Provost in Austin under President Fenves until they both got shown the door. That points once again to Austin as the real power center of the United States and adds validity to Austinology as a legitimate academic field, or austinetics if one wishes to use mathematical methods.
In federal court in Austin last year, btw, during a civil rights trial involving discrimination against a pregnant University of Texas professor, the question was asked if women can actually discriminate against other women in hiring/promotions? Yeah bro, black people do it all the time. The First Black Whatever, whether he’s POTUS or Tom-in-Chief, wants to be unique. That’s the source of his or her power, not a network, unless he/she becomes a node for someone else, like Jews. The White Lady today, under a Jewish executive editor, Joe Kahn, is doing a better job of desegregating the newsroom than did Uncle Dean, who had almost a decade in the top chair, for the very reason that Joe Kahn can’t hide behind his skin color. Actually, btw, new Yale President McInnis is an expert on slavery, but isn’t that, like, every white academic? So many white PhDs have made a living from explaining what has happened to black people in this country! It’s like the British Museum in London has more African art than a lot of African countries, bro, because white people stole it. In the U.S., it’s the narrative that has been lifted. But we digress again.
Speaking of UT, its sovereign wealth fund, the biggest university endowment in the country, called UTIMCO? Created by W back when he was governor, in order to have all of his campaign contributors together in one place? The head of risk management for UTIMCO is a former Israel Defense Forces major named Uzi Yoeli, who is the guy who would have to review UT investments to see if they should be divested of Israeli businesses. Good luck with that, bro, tell the pro-Palestinian protesters not to hold their breath. And it occurs to no one at the newspaper of record that Jews in high positions at American universities might not have a totally fair response to anti-Israel protestors?
Not just the Times, but the Washington Post too. The Post ran a piece in which a couple of the authors were Jewish, including Hannah Natanson (it’s said that the Post has more Jewish journalists than any other ethnicity, in a city where Jews are 6% of the population and blacks are 40% but blacks have 9% of the newsroom jobs), at the height of the protests on campus, about the feasibility of divestment from Israel. To set the scene. In which an economist at George Mason University or George Washington University or somewhere like that was quoted at length saying that divestment would not work for a number of reasons. If you look the guy up, he’s Israeli, not that there’s anything wrong with that, which somehow was never mentioned in the story when he’s giving an opinion about divestment from Israeli firms. If these were all black university leaders, or God forbid Muslims, you can bet that conflicts of interest would be raised and the question would be asked in print and we might even get one of those “cautionary tale” stories that the Timesloves about POC. But here it’s not conflict, the influence is being intentionally used surreptitiously. It’s not The Matrix, bro, it’s The Network.
Recently the NYT went completely over the top on double standards with a story by Nicholas Fandos, a reporter on the Zion Desk at the newspaper of record. The staff of the Zion Desk seems to vary from day to day, but some are regulars like Katie Glueck and Isabel Kershner, Stephanie Saul and Michael Grynbaum and even non-Jews like Heather Knight in San Francisco, who just wants to curry favor with Jewish management. Nick Fandos is certainly a regular contributor on the beat. So, like, the Times pro-Israel reporters were struggling mightily against the Palestinian surge, you could call it, as the Gaza War progressed, especially in their reporting on the campus demonstrations. The theme of Fandos’ story was that the pro-Palestinian protestors on campus at Columbia or wherever had stepped over a line by hiding their faces, even if the reason for masks or bandanas was fear of retaliation or punishment by their university administration or powerful alumni. Or for fear they would be blacklisted in an employment search. The experts interviewed, who were Jewish, were mostly of a mind that hiding one’s identity made the pro-Palestinian faction out to be outlaws. Then legislation was even passed about masks. Was this actually meant to be a joke? Jews across America and in the pages of the New York Times are rarely identified as Jews—unless it’s to mark the exceptionalism of Judaism—in theory to spare them bias and intimidation. Why should one peep alone have the right to anonymity? One of the bases of Jewish power is anonymity.
The point is that universities are fertile ground today for inquiry and investigation because there seems to be an equality disconnect. A Jewish conservative activist was responsible for the lawsuit that led to the dismantling of affirmative action by the Supreme Court. He began his quest in Austin, actually, at UT like everybody else. Yet stats revealed during the trial of his suit in Boston against Harvard showed that fifty percent of all graduate students at Harvard are Jewish, in a country where Jews are less than 3%. Is that the meritocracy again, or the effects of legacy admissions, which have played a large part in the educations of many Times’ staffers as well, according to Harvard’s own and influential Nieman Lab that studies the media. The White Lady was all over the debate on affirmative action that benefits blacks and Latinos but has been less interested in legacy admissions that benefit whites, including people in the Times newsroom and their kids. One really good story, with millions of potential readers—if it can be done, it’s totally illegal—is to get Bibi’s grades from MIT, back in the day. Somebody got W’s grades from Yale when he was running for president. Another good story might be how so many Israelis have ended up on upper rank American campuses in the first place. Is this “the meritocracy” at work again, or networking, with one node being a Jewish admissions officer or a big Jewish donor exerting pressure. Donor admissions, anyone? Or was the admission thru a back door, God forbid. Of course that can’t be true, because only blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are admitted for reasons other than merit.
And the big donors who are withdrawing support over alleged antisemitism, Austin could be a good example of what’s really happening there, including big pro-Israel money, although in River City it’s mostly generic rich white guys and white girls. So, like, at the University of Texas where many of the donors are oil people—the university itself is in the oil business, bro. But at Texas public schools you can never find out what’s really going on with donors because state law prohibits open records disclosure of anything about donations. Those are the Republicans at work, frightened of oil-related connections being discovered during an anti-Big Oil era. On the Democratic front, a good tell may be the University of California and specifically the San Francisco campus, which is a huge medical care and research facility and receives billions in federal grants/contracts annually, and is, indeed, the largest public recipient of National Institutes of Health funding in the country.
Has UCSF been lucky to have Nancy Pelosi as the school’s congressional representative and the late Dianne Feinstein, whose father was a UCSF doctor, as U.S. Senator? You tell me, bro. What’s super interesting is that UCSF has its own bundler on campus. Let’s propose a mechanism for Democratic Party corruption, not unlike U.S. aid dollars going to Israel and coming back as Democratic contributions.
Democratic politicians push for grants for UC research or federal contracts to the university and some of that money finds its way back to the politicians as political contributions taken from research funds by the researchers themselves? It’s just a thought. The Democratic bundler on campus in recent years is just like Barry’s bundlers in Austin. Because here in River City, at the World Capital of Live Music, it’s about higher education too, but this time not UT, it’s Huston-Tillotson University, the city’s HBCU.
Huston-Tillotson, like many black colleges in the South, is land-rich but cash-poor. Oh wow. Could developers be trying to take advantage of that dynamic? The black school’s campus is just a hop, skip and jump from City Hall, and Steve Adler has already developed a template for getting rid of black institutions, you might call it, to move them farther east, towards the country, which is where blacks were coming from in the first place, the pineywoods of East Texas, after freedom from slavery. That’s how they do a Black Man, btw. That’s how they keep the Black Man down. It’s land, bro, just like in Palestine. To quote Jim Baker, nobody is making any more of it.
Huston-Tillotson is the last big piece of choice real estate downtown and Mayor Adler’s old lady, who is also a developer, is conveniently on the board. As well as the Governor’s wife. Stay tuned. If the school is sold, you can blame a lot of people, and one of them is Barry. He’s kind of a thug, you know, in good ways and bad.
It’s the Chicago influence, actually.
Chapter 8 Judy in Disguise
The most recent enrichment of Barry’s friends began to take shape in the form of that big piece of land downtown, south of the river, that contains the Cox parcel, the development of which using city tax money, a judge just said no to. State District Judge Mangrum didn’t even dignify the City Council’s effort with a written opinion, just a Summary Judgment saying “no.”
Back in the day, the 1980s or whenever, Cox Newspapers bought that beautiful parcel on what was then called Town Lake and received a special dispensation from the City Council to build its newsroom and print presses on it. To set the scene. Even though city ordinances did not allow businesses to locate directly on the water. It was a special deal for the Cox family and since it included rights to build on the water, the property became enormously valuable. Decades passed. The Cox family sold the newspaper and it was being printed elsewhere. But the Coxes still owned this incredibly valuable piece of land in a fast-growing Austin being inundated by Dinks and proto-Dinks and high-tech companies. Endeavor was chosen to develop the site right on the water’s edge.
As part of yet another special deal for the real estate firm, Mayor Adler and the City Council arranged to apply a law for developing “blighted land,” where deals would not progress without public assistance, to this new Endeavor luxury project—kind of like Endeavor’s prior Domain development in that respect, public subsidy of private business. This project being put together by Richard Suttle, aka Darth Vader, on a site that included the Cox property. To set the scene again.
“No one is saying that this area wouldn’t develop if we didn’t do this,” Adler said two years ago of an almost $400 million subsidy to Endeavor’s new plan, per the Statesmanwhich has gotten more interested in real estate shenanigans after the Coxes sold the newspaper. “It’s just not going to develop the way that we would want it to develop,” the mayor explained. Which is not what state law permitted.
Also per the Statesman’s excellent Bridget Grumet: “’Frankly, this is the only way that we're going to be able to get the massive parks we want,’ Adler said in 2022, as the City Council agreed with the plan. ‘It’s the only way we have any shot at getting the affordable housing that we want, the number of people we want, living close enough to make good use of the light rail line planned to run through the area.” This was Steve “Sleaze” Adler pulling out all the stops, including invoking affordable housing and public transit at a development for rich people you were unlikely to hop a bus anytime soon. That’s all you need to know except that the Endeavor/Adler strategy would have made this incredibly profitable development even more profitable by applying tax moneys to its realization, by allowing city revenues from other Austin neighborhoods to be used to pay for Endeavor’s business plan. Which Judge Mangrum just struck down as a violation of state law, may Judge Mangrum cruise to reelection. She is the first public official to say no to the developers’ gravy train.
A former Travis County chief executive had previously publicly described the project’s financing as a “kickback.” It’s actually just another day drinking deep at the public well for a company tied to an ex-President of the United States who is not Donald Trump. Liberals like to bitch about shady real estate deals benefitting The Donald and his friends/relatives. What about shady real estate deals benefitting Barry’s friends and donors? There’s been a lot less interest. Historically, Chicago is the U.S. national capital of corruption, actually, beating out even New York and San Francisco in the scope and reach of public wrongdoing, although it’s been a hard-fought competition between the metropolises. Barry has his political roots in the Windy City ‘hood.
In fact a federal corruption trial just wrapped up in Chicago and the quote that made the rounds in the press was caught by a guy wearing a wire, a long-time City Alderman saying that in matters of malfeasance, “Everybody knows that Jews like to do business with other Jews.” But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in an astounding story about the origins of Rahm Emanuel’s fundraising prowess and his political machine in Chicago, where he served as Congressman for six years before becoming Barry’s White House chief of staff, reported that for Rahm it all began with the Lolapalooza music festival. Which is kind of a coincidence because music is a big deal in Austin too, and Lolapalooza involves some of the same people as in our very own River City. Let’s take a look.
Remember what has been the core of Barry’s donor base, real estate developers, high tech and the entertainment industry? Lolapalooza is put on by Austin-born C3 presents. C3 was also the Obama administration’s preferred event-staging company—everything from Barry’s announcement that he was running for the nation’s highest office—to Easter egg hunts on the White House lawn. Everything related to staging spectacles, basically, which includes Las Vegas shows but also politics. What’s interesting is that the company was bought out by Live Nation which previously merged with Ticketmaster and it was the Obama administration that allowed Live Nation to take over C3, despite antitrust fears. And which has turned out to be correct—the antitrust fears—because the monopolistic failures of Live Nation are the reason today for poor performance and outrageous prices in the live music world. A recent antitrust suit filed by the Biden Administration now aims to break up the company years after Barry wrongly approved the merger. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Yet there’s more. Live Nation’s former chairman is music mogul Irving Azoff, the former manager of The Eagles. Azoff, who is Jewish and a well-known pro-Israel activist, not that there’s anything wrong with that, is also former CEO of Ticketmaster, and is founder, together with Tim Leiweke, former CEO of AEG—the largest sports promoter in the world—of “Oak View Group” which together with Live Nation got a $338 million contract to build and manage the new Moody Center in Austin to replace the old University of Texas Special Events Center. Which is where it gets interesting again. C3 Presents also has the contract for the Moody Amphitheater in the River City’s newly renovated Waterloo Park, smack center of downtown Austin, a couple of blocks from Irving Azoff’s new special events center on campus and a stone’s throw from the State Capitol and Greg Abbott’s crib. If the governor opens his windows he can probably hear the music.
Interesting that these deals, which have led to Mr. Azoff becoming the single most important guy in music in Austin, in a very short time, through public-private partnerships, including an Austin company called C3 with close ties to the Obama Administration, were done without apparent bidding or public scrutiny. And not content with the Moody Center deal that profited a company with close ties to the first black president, the Austin City Council arranged for C3 to manage, without the benefit of public bid, the newly redesigned Waterloo Park downtown, as mentioned above, which is now a concert venue too. Among those on the board of the Waterloo project were Evan Smith, CEO of the Texas Tribune, and Barry’s other big Austin bundler beside Kirk Rudy, named Tom Meredith, whose day job was as Dell Computer’s chief financial officer. What a small world in which we live. A development deal brought together Republicans, in the form of Michael Dell, and Democratic monied interests, just like at the University of Texas’s Moody Center where the Republican governor had to sign off, thru the UT Board of Regents. Accomplished in a highly less than a transparent way, the City of Austin and the Waterloo board, without public debate, awarded the contract to C3 without calling for bids or answering pesky open records requests.
As mayor, Steve Adler declined requests to explain what the public got out of all these music industry machinations. And City Hall would not accept open records requests because the City of Austin granted management of the park to a non-profit which gave the contract to C3. Awarding the contract to C3 was not done directly by the city but by the non-profit that the city made manager of the park, so City Hall claims there’s no documentation in City Hall’s files. Pretty neat, huh? It’s like the privatization scandals of a prior Republican era, except instead of prisons it’s music. This template (creation of a new music venue at one of the city’s public parks, and handing over management of the venue to a non-profit that does not have to explain or answer information requests) was next being applied to Zilker Park, last year. (Except, in all fairness, “Eat Shit Mayor Adler” that was previously stamped on the sidewalks around the park actually preceded this particular shit-eating episode.) Anyway, that is corruption City of Austin style. It involves music and real estate. The UT deal for Moody Center was brought to life, btw, by former university President Greg Fenves, in consultation with Mayor Adler, among others.
However everything shakes out, there have been some big paydays and another increase in power for Irving Azoff who is a legend in the music business and who has also been accused of a monopoly-like control in the industry in the past, long before the feds decided to break up his company. And it got worse, as mentioned above. Just last year, this other off-the-books concert venue deal.
The new Austin City Council, sworn in last year, featuring the same people who wanted to use tax money for Endeavor Real Estate’s Cox family-related development endeavors, started right off with a plan to build a music venue with a big parking lot in the city’s treasured Zilker Park, completely out of the blue, spitting distance from Barton Springs, to be managed—you guessed it—by a non-profit that would award the contract for music management. The Austin Chronicle called the idea another “cash cow for C3,” which was only shelved when neighborhood interests objected to the commercialization of the city’s most beloved greenspace. The City Council led by Mayor Watson backed down. It was amazing that the idea had gotten that far. Without any public debate, or public prompting, the City Council had decided to create a new music venue on public land. It wasn’t suspicious at all, just another coincidence, of which there are so many in ATX. But it kind of makes C3 look like the musical version of Endeavor Real Estate, no? Two companies with successful businesses interests in Austin, fueled by government support/contacts, and very close ties to a former President of the United States. Who is not Donald Trump.
Besides Chicago, a corruption investigation in Los Angeles by the U.S. Justice Department has just wrapped up—involving City Hall and developers. It has some similarities to Austin too. L.A. was going thru a big development boom for a while there, and the subsequent corruption trials have led three council members and a deputy mayor to relocate to federal prison. To set the scene. What’s unlike Austin is that development companies were viewed by the feds as almost victims in L.A., no lie, who the Justice Department at first declined in news releases to identify, because they had so obviously been squeezed by city officials. One of the guilty council members, a cat named Englander, who is Jewish, left office and went into the private sector after the investigation started to gather steam. Do you know what company he worked for while he waited for the FBI to come and put him in cuffs? Oak View Group—in other words, Irving Azoff and Tim Leiwicke’s firm—that manages the Moody Center in Austin. What a small world in which we live, even in California!
Austin is especially small in terms of power relationships, a small town actually, even with the heavy presence of the State of Texas, which may be why there are no corruption prosecutions in River City. The Travis County district attorney is nephew of the longtime Austin city manager, for one, who just left office for the second time last year. In between gigs as city manager, the guy was CEO of Seton Health and a member of the Waterloo board that eventually awarded that contract to C3, not that there’s anything wrong with that. River City likes to recycle leaders who already know the way business is conducted in the Live Music Capital of the World.
Our current mayor is our former mayor and former president of the Chamber of Commerce and is also our former state senator, and is the father of the official policy of developing the eastside in preference to white neighborhoods. For which he has apologized but is nonetheless running for mayor again. Michael Dell may be a Republican whackjob but he is Jewish in a heavily-Jewish development world, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agencymentioned, and he participated in the development of Moody Center at UT too. He was one of deal’s participants with Oak View Group and there’s now a “Dell Pavilion” at Moody Center. But what do Michael Dell and Barry have in common, why such strange bedfellows? Money is a common denominator, and they both have been big supporters of the IDF too. A new city council member, btw, who is another Jewish business/politics guy, has just been caught by the wonderful Austin Bulldog, which has served as de facto public prosecutor for the last few years, because the Bulldog’s editor/publisher ex-Marine Ken Martin has been the only media guy in the city who does not have a conflict of interest. Anyway, the Bulldog caught the above council member trying to make a quick killing with his sister in East Austin real estate. Everybody in power in this town is in bed with everyone else and has profited from the explosive real estate market, including Barry. But there are no consequences and no investigations of shady practices, of real estate “victims,” like the feds called developers in L.A., believe that if you will, or of political perps.
The current U.S. Attorney covering Austin is the former longtime D.A. in El Paso, Jaime Esparza, who was known for one thing in West Texas, during his three decades in office as prosecutor in E.P. Whenever he ran for reelection, his opponents always leveled the same charge against him. He never prosecuted public corruption cases. It makes you wonder how he was chosen for the job of chief federal prosecutor in the Western District of Texas which includes Austin. It was probably just another coincidence.
The head FBI agent in recent years in Austin has been a terrorism guy, with no real chops investigating public integrity. Austin is viewed by the feds as a big-time terrorism target, and perhaps rightly so, but not a corruption target which may be a big mistake in judgment, bro. Except maybe a looming indictment for everybody’s favorite thug, Attorney General Ken Paxton (Pax Daddy being his gang appellation.) You may ask, well, if that’s true, why didn’t the Republicans make a move to prosecute in Austin when it was Trump’s U.S. Attorney in charge? Because the wife of the Republican U.S. Attorney in River City when Trump was president, a cat named Bash, was a high-level aide to Attorney General Paxton. Prosecutors who work in glass offices don’t throw stones. Bash’s old lady worked for the Notorious Pax Daddy.
One of Mayor Adler’s former aides, a Latino guy, just pleaded guilty in federal court to steering public funds to himself but it was small beans and involved healthcare monies, not land. Anyway, the worst thing you can say about Barry in this context is that he betrayed his peeps. The U.S. Attorney in Austin early in Barry’s administration, who is now a federal judge, recommended that the Justice Department begin a big civil rights review of the Austin police, who had and still have a reputation for racial profiling and worse. The recommendation died in the Obama White House. A city whose police force is being investigated for unwarranted killings of blacks and Latinos is not a big draw for Dinks thinking of moving there. Profiting from gentrification is pretty corrupt and Barack actually has a bad history in real estate, bro. When he was a U.S. senator from Illinois, he was busted by a local TV station in Chicago for getting a much better mortgage rate than any of his neighbors. Barry likes a nice crib. He’s living in one now in D.C. Like Barbara Jordan said, it’s not a question of if, but how much?
There are a lot of people to blame, both for corrupt government in Austin that has targeted the minority community, and for corrupt government in Washington that has targeted the Palestinians. Locally you can lay the lack of prosecution at the foot of the Travis County District Attorney, good luck with that, or nationally at the feet of the Attorney General who is supposed to be doing the job. But the present administration in Washington much prefers to prosecute minorities, even Democrats, especially if they are too friendly with Muslim-led nations. Like Congressman Henry Cuellar from down the road in Laredo who just got charged, along with his old lady, for something involving Azerbaijan. There’s another reason as well, the press. Back in the day, when the FBI’s dossiers were still paper, the corruption files were full of newspaper clippings. That was how the Fibbies got their ideas and presumably still do, thru the media. The former aide to Mayor Adler who just pleaded guilty to corruption was busted based upon an American-Statesman story, actually. There are a lot of bad stories to be written about gentrification too, but don’t get published, because the Tribuneand the White Lady don’t go after them. We’re talking here about the Newspaper of Record. It’s clubbiness more than anything else, used to be WASPs and is now Jewish peeps in power. This is not about “evil Jews,” like racists say, however, it's about Jewish networkingand a lack of transparency about interactions and ties, that the press, which is part of the network, has no interest in reporting. Because it’s them. And it’s not just in River City, bro.
So, like, in the Biden Administration the Secretary of State is famously Jewish. As is the Attorney General, who was previously Barry’s unsuccessful candidate for the Supreme Court. And the Secretary of the Treasury, as well as the incumbent and prior WH Chiefs of Staff. So is the head of the IRS and of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the head of the FDIC that regulates banks.
Let’s see: This cat Mayorkas, who is Secretary of Homeland Security and who the Republicans already impeached unsuccessfully, is a Cuban-born Jew. From the start of the Mayorkas impeachment the Times’ attitude in its coverage was that the charges against the secretary were political, which they may well have been, but seen from Texas, which has a long international border, incompetence was also a possibility.
The Director of National Intelligence, who is over the CIA, and the head of the Council of Economic Advisors, each a cabinet position, are Jewish. The majority of the White House’s National Security Council is Jewish, actually, which is an odd commentary on “the meritocracy” that Democrats like to talk about so much, but we won’t get into that here. Suffice it to say that “merit” in appointive politics is in the eye of the person doing the appointing and you like to assume no President knowingly chooses people who are incompetent. But Jews aren’t the only competent peep in the room, bro, they don’t have special genes either. Or special rights to power, or a special overriding narrative, unlike what Jewish friends may try to convince you even in Texas—the special Jewish narrative—even in the face of such imposing Latino history and culture, and to say nothing of the narrative of slavery in the South. Never mind what has happened to Native Americans either, we are told by Jews that the Holocaust is of primary importance even in U.S. history. This comes from a peep that is a very small part of the U.S. population but holds inordinate power in Washington and in Austin. The head of the Austin Housing Authority that controls the Rosewood Courts projects is Jewish, for example, to go along with all the Jewish guys and girls in private real estate in town, but can we get a show of hands of how many public housing residents in River City are actually Jewish?
The head of the FDIC is Jewish, has been outed for bad behavior, and is being replaced by a woman who is also Jewish. Is that how diversity works? The president’s de facto special envoy to the Middle East Amos Hochstein is Jewish and ex-IDF. Not to complain or anything but the White Lady ran a big blowjob profile of Hochstein not long ago without ever questioning the wisdom of the US sending an ex-IDF guy to the Middle East to negotiate with Hezbollah. And it is an eminently fair question, actually, who is Jewish and who is not, that the Times won’t answer for itself.
When the attacks of Oct. 7th took place in southern Israel, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken headed straight to Jerusalem and announced, speaking to the Israelis, “I come to you as a Jew.” Really? Many Americans might have assumed that he went to Israel as the chief American diplomat. Not so. But this was not even remarked upon by the Times Jerusalem bureau. There are some stories that you will never read in the White Lady and not because they are not factual or of grave public interest. The newspaper of record, with its huge Washington bureau and presumably the largest newsroom in the world, has had little negative to say about Israel, even during a period of growing global criticism of the Israelis, who are a remarkable people and have a remarkably thuggish foreign and domestic policy, actually, especially recently. The White Lady has traditionally had nada to say, especially about all that aid—those billions and billions of dollars—that pass from Washington to the State of Israel every year. Follow the money, bro, even to Tel Aviv.
Part of the reason appears to be cultural. Jews in the press don’t recognize Israel’s excesses because they are too close to the conflict. And they may knowingly or unknowingly push the Israel narrative, facts notwithstanding. In fact in the most recent case of the Timesbeing seen as biased against the Palestinians—in reportage by Gettleman et al about rapes committed by Hamas—that just won a Pulitzer? There are two details of note. One is that of three reporters involved, a prominent Times stringer—a cat named Rasgon—brought his aunt onto the project even though she had no journalism credentials. That’s a network at work, bro, and in this case it was not the meritocracy at work. And two, this aunt, who previously served in Israeli military intelligence, has been quoted in an email saying that it was important to push the Israeli narrative. You couldn’t make this up. And it’s not the first time that illicit influence has been a theme and a complaint about the world’s most prominent newspaper. The Times itself is part of the network. If you look at its job site regularly, there is a disquieting theme. The description of the successful applicant to a reporting position at the Times as someone who has “deep sources” or a “big Rolodex,” words to that effect. It’s all about relationships and identity. The problem is actually that reporters bring those relationships to the reporting. They bring that baggage. Or the result is stories that don’t get done, like in Austin, where Steve Adler was a founder of the Texas Tribune. Jodi Rudoren, present editor-in-chief of the Jewish publication The Forward, who was the Times bureau chief in Jerusalem for four years and left in 2017, when asked what she regretted about her time in Israel, said that she wished she had learned better Arabic. But she said that she already knew pretty good Hebrew from going to camp when she was a kid growing up in the U.S. You couldn’t make this up, bro. A good guess is that the Palestinians wished she had better Arabic too.
A non-Middle Eastern example of influence-peddling or influence trading at the Timesinvolves the correspondent covering the book industry, this is kind of cool actually, as a White Lady anecdote, because it involves a real white lady! So, like, publishing is bedeviled by a lack of diversity. To set the scene.
So, like, the white NYT lady, Elizabeth A. Harris, responsible for covering the publishing industry has her first novel being published by one of the companies she is supposed to be reporting on about lack of diversity. How convenient, did she interview herself? This is how the newspaper of record operates. Its people are nodes in a network. It’s not a cabal: instead it’s a bunch of smart, educated and connected mostly American Jews, many of them descendants of Holocaust survivors, that join the New York Times to do good journalism, which the Times does do, but who also looking for connections. It’s not about a “Jewish plot,” as a lot of Republicans have complained, before they started to see things more the Israeli way. It’s about Jewish networking which is not transparent and leaves others un-informed about why certain decisions are made. To say nothing of why certain people get hired. A lack of transparency, in other words, is that possible?
What the newspaper is always looking for among potential journalists is someone already in the mix, in Washington, so to speak, or wherever, a reporter who has established sources, or established relationships, which is, btw, highly unlikely to include Palestinians or Muslims or black people/Latinos but very likely to include Jews. That’s how we as American taxpayers came to support “the world’s most moral army,” the IDF, to quote Bibi, and Endeavor in real estate development in River City. It’s a way of reporting that has already burned the newspaper of record and the nation before, in the Judith Miller scandal, also at the Times, as others have already noted. But let’s take a quick look again anyway.
Judith Miller, you may remember the name, was a NYT correspondent who identifies as Jewish and who pushed the “weapons of mass destruction” narrative that led the US to invade Iraq on bad intelligence. Remember that? She helped another ex-Austinite, W, do evil and commit mass murder in the Middle East. The case was just like the news clippings in the FBI files? Except what was reported in the Times stories was false.
The White Lady’s correspondents in the Middle East are almost exclusively Jewish and may have a history of reporting for Israeli media, like Clueless Shira—Shira Rubin of the Washington Post—formerly of the Times of Israel, who was suddenly expected to drop her allegiance to the Jewish State and impartially report to American audiences on the Palestinian conflict. She a ho, actually, bro, except unlike Titty Mama, apparently Shira doesn’t know what it means to be for sale. Also pushing that false narrative in the American government during the Iraq War were prominent Jewish businessmen like Michael Dell and bureaucrats like Paul Wolfowitz. According to Wikipedia, Wolfowitz was investigated by the FBI as far back as 1978 for giving intelligence to Israeli operatives but nonetheless rose to power in W’s administration, as #2 at the Defense Department during the lead-up and execution of the invasion of Iraq. And Doug Feith who was undersecretary for policy at Defense at the same time. Both Jewish guys who were pro-Israel whackjobs, like Judy Miller, for that matter.
As part of its mea culpa for publishing disinformation that helped to provoke a war, the White Lady produced a white paper explaining that the newspaper had paid too much attention to sources, and promised better practices and in some sense the practices are better. Except not in the case of Palestinian coverage, until the Gaza War began and a closer look at the Israeli government became inevitable. But anyone else, like the Iranians, who are in Israeli sights, is on their own. The Times back-slided in other words, big time, going back to the bad ways, carrying water for people based upon cultural ties to the newspaper and its business interests. Like the NYT is really going to criticize Michael Dell’s vision, in Palestine or in East Austin?
Get real, bro.
Chapter 9 Everyday is a Winding Road
The development of the Cox property and its adjacent lands, led by Endeavor, that the City of Austin tried to subsidize but that was struck down by a state judge as illegal, was opposed by a coalition of neighborhood activists and good government types who proclaimed they were tired of giveaways to developers. One of the plaintiffs being Susana Almanza, whose brother was one of members of the Austin City Council who have been so friendly to Endeavor. Ms. Almanza actually ran against her developmentally-friendly bro for office, which must have made for interesting conversation at the family’s Christmas dinner table.
There was a hint of corruption early on in the riverfront project in which the Cox land is part. One member of the development consortium that the city wanted to subsidize is an investor named Nate Paul who was indicted by the feds last year on eight counts for lying to financial institutions in order to obtain loans. Paul was also at the center of activities that led to the unsuccessful impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last year. Paxton is a Republican and any distrust of government regarding development in River City usually traces back entirely to D’s not R’s. But remember, local Democrats and the Republican state leadership have some common ground, in real estate and in support of Israel. It’s the Michael Dell effect, the guy who straddles the partisan divide in River City. Because he’s so rich and has so much power locally. Anyway, the problem for Endeavor has not just been deep and abiding suspicion of influence at City Hall but racism too. We’re not just talking the racism of gentrification, that has almost wiped out the black and Latinos communities on the eastside. Let’s take a closer look west. Endeavor’s signature project was its first, The Domain.
Actually, you have to choose your Domain because there are three of them.
The original Domain: Included Neiman Marcus, Tiffany’s and Louis Vuitton. That is The Domain that received a subsidy from the City of Austin back in the day for, basically, promoting luxury living, not that there’s anything wrong with that, and was eventually sold to Endeavor’s partner in the project, the huge Simon Properties, owned by a Jewish family that includes big Democratic donors. The subsidy by the City Council continued after the sale btw, and increased, even though a lawsuit a few years ago led to a ruling that the City of Austin did not have to continue giving the developer money, yet the City Council chose to, anyway. The second Domain is where race directly entered the picture. A Domain II brochure, according to opponents of the Cox project subsidy, revealed the “’quintessential Domain Northside shopper’’—that’s what the Endeavor brochure described— “that Endeavor wanted [to attract]: a ‘classy,’ ‘well-heeled woman,’ who carries a ‘Givenchy handbag,’ ‘drives a BMW Series 6 [costing up to $100,000]… at night, and by day drives a Range Rover Sport [costing up to $130,000]’, and ‘is most likely to describe her ethnicity as Anglo, Jewish, or Asian.’” Hmmm. That was the Endeavor brochure.
The company apologized, according to news reports of the time, “but the brochure’s intent could not be whitewashed away,’” said Taxpayers against Government Giveaways. As the good government group is prosaically named.
Endeavor was accused, when the brochure became public, of much the same creation of a hostile atmosphere for minorities as Whole Foods, prior to the store’s purchase by Jeff Bezos. Sensitivity training for Endeavor employees was promised by the company. The City Council member representing the Domain area said that she was aghast. She threatened to crack down on the company by withholding funds but that did not occur. (Another Austin development company, btw, described the Latino part of East Austin as “Tortilla Canyon,” which means that Endeavor has not been the only racially-challenged white developers in the city.) What did happen was the City of Austin tried to give Endeavor more money, for the Cox-related project, which the judge just struck down. The timing of Endeavor’s racist marketing, in case you’re wondering, was long after Kirk Rudy’s relationship with Barry began. The company couldn’t claim ignorance in other words, this wasn’t 1965, it was five years ago. In fact two years earlier, President Obama’s last year in office, 2016, the president chose a fundraiser by Kirk Rudy here in River City to tell national donors that it was time to cut Senator Bernie Sanders loose and get behind Hillary Clinton, even though she was viewed by many Democrats as “inauthentic,” Barry noted to his guests in Austin. The New York Times was there, or arrived shortly thereafter.
The report on this Tarrytown meeting was based upon three sources, according to the White Lady: “Mr. Obama said that he understood the appeal to voters of a candidate who is authentic, [an] official said. But he also reminded the Texas donors in the room that Mr. Bush was considered authentic when he was running for president, suggesting that being authentic did not necessarily translate into being a good president, in his view. Mr. Trump’s admirers have often praised [Trump] for his authenticity and blunt style, contrasting it with Mrs. Clinton’s more cautious approach,” the Times continued. “The Austin event was hosted by Kirk Rudy, a real estate executive, and raised money for the Democratic National Committee. Attendees paid as much as $33,400 a ticket.” And it’s not like the President of the United States didn’t know how one of his chief fundraisers made money in Austin, or Barry was somehow uncomfortable with Kirk Rudy or what had happened to the black/brown community in town. While still taking the check. Barry was in Austin precisely for the money. The relationship with Rudy continues.
That’s the racial/financial end of a company that has helped to gentrify East Austin, and put a lot of dollars in Barry’s account, through donations. Endeavor is currently developing another project btw, in East Austin a couple of miles north of Huston-Tillotson, called Solomon, like from the Bible? 369 apartments, now renting if you’re looking for a crib, it’s huge and it’ll be interesting to see how the zoning given by the City Council plays out. “Monthly rent ranging from $2,000 for a studio to $3,587 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit,” per the company.
Political influence is a more subtle matter to discern. But there’s one mechanism, common in Republican circles in Texas, that makes for an interesting dynamic here in Democratic River City too, in this liberal bastion that is said to be untouched by the mischief of political wrongdoing, unlike the evil Republicans in the rest of the State of Texas. Suppose there is a company—this is purely HYPOTHETICAL—but suppose there’s a company that has business before, say, just for instance, the Austin City Council? And this hypothetical company has a history of doing very well with the city bureaucracy and on City Council votes. Very well, indeed. By receiving subsidies for example, or tax rebates, or particularly sweet zoning. Or by having the City Council waive, after the fact, formerly-agreed-to requirements for set-asides of low-income housing, so that the company makes mucho dinero? Suppose that’s the case here, just for example.
And suppose that this hypothetical company makes even more money than it would ordinarily make in Austin’s super-hot real estate market? And suppose that one of the reasons that the DEMOCRATIC City Council—again this is purely hypothetical—is so agreeable to the company’s requests is because the company is very very very close to a President or former President of the United States who is also a Democrat. And a lot of money flowed and still flows from the founder of that company as contributions, first to the President’s election campaigns and then to the former President’s Presidential Center, which is located—this purely hypothetical—in Chicago, Illinois, on the South Side of the city.
You know what someone might conclude, hypothetically?
He wasn’t here for the tacos, bro.
The story about the Obama announcement was written by a couple of members of the Times A-team, one of them Maggie Haberman who would soon turn into President Trump’s main inquisitor. What’s interesting is that publications like the White Lady that have been so interested in Donald Trump’s business connections showed so little interest in President Obama’s. If Kirk Rudy had been one of President Trump’s main money guys, Kirk and Amy Rudy would have gotten his and hers cavity searches in the pages of the New York Times, which loved going into The Donald’s real estate connections. Barry chose Austin, in the middle of a red state that the Democrats had no chance of winning, to make a pronouncement to major donors about the presidential race, which would lead most people to wonder why, and also to want to know more about the host in Tarrytown, in white West Austin. To set the scene.
Donald Trump has alleged that he got undue attention from the press, and eventually from prosecutors, and that certainly seems to be the case, bro. Why would Barry choose an unknown real estate executive in a mid-sized city—even the World Capital of Live Music—to be his main money guy unless there was a lot of money involved? That’s a story you didn’t read, not in the White Lady nor in the Tribune. Kirk Rudy has profited from gentrification. Which means so has Barry. That’s the nature of American journalism. The problem is not some made up, fictionalized account of real events—although that happens too. Much more often it’s the real event or real connection that simply never gets published, the Times self-censors in Austin and in Palestine where the full extent of the land grabs by settlers in the West Bank—or the thousands of Palestinian prisoners who were being held for years without trial—didn’t get into the newspaper until the issues became impossible to ignore, during the Gaza War. Like the story about who was pushing and profiting by gentrification in East Austin—a dynamic which largely involves Democrats—this is a Democratic town, bro. These are some of the articles that don’t see light of day. Most often the non-published pieces have something to do with insiders, many of them Jewish business guys or powerbrokers. It’s not a conspiracy, bro, it’s protection of a network in which the journalists and the newspaper itself are nodes. For instance not long ago a couple of pieces appeared in the Times regarding what was believed to be Google’s looming acquisition of a cybersecurity firm called Wiz. To set the scene again.
The huge deal ($23 billion) eventually fell through but what was curious about the coverage was that the Times said nothing about Wiz except that the company is involved in Internet security and “based in New York.” The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, said in its headline regarding the proposed transaction that Wiz had been founded by ex-IDF officers. Indeed a big part of the cybersecurity industry, mostly headquartered in Silicon Valley—although some companies have moved to Austin—has IDF roots. Some of those worm attacks on Iran that we read about are actually a way of checking the software, bro. That’s another Times story that doesn’t get written—we’re all on the same team with the Israelis, right? Through that lens, only Chinese and Russian and Iranian technologies are dangerous and newsworthy. Of course the origins of Wiz may have just been an oversight by the reporter but another Times story, out of Austin, is a better example of the newspaper’s selective attention disorder. It involves black people.
Liberals were outraged a few months ago when Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned a murderer who, working as an Uber driver, had gone to a Black Lives Matter march in downtown Austin during the George Floyd uprising and shot a white anti-police protestor who was armed but non-threatening. To set the scene.
Messages revealed during the trial showed that the killer planned to look for someone to shoot so that he could later claim “stand your ground” protections, which is exactly what he did. Sort of a Trayvon Martin setup, if you remember that Florida case, but for white people. The shooter was convicted nonetheless of first-degree murder, sentenced to life, and then ordered released by Governor Abbott, to liberal howls. The Times story on the pardon was written by the newspaper’s longtime stringer in Austin, David Montgomery, with help by the newspaper’s Houston bureau chief, David Goodman. Both guys are Jewish and in their story about the shooter being pardoned, the only mention of race/ethnicity was that both the murderer and his victim were described as Caucasian: “Mr. Foster — who, like Mr. Perry, was white…” But the shooter is Jewish, a fact that had been reported locally and that the Newspaper of Record would have been aware of. Somehow that fact never made it into the Times story. Of course it may have been another oversight, but you could also be forgiven for believing that in the present environment, with the White Lady running all kinds of stories, almost daily, about antisemitism in America, and also about the “special relationship” between blacks and Jews, a news story featuring a Jew who set out to murder a BLM protestor—at a George Floyd march no less—well, a racially-motivated Jewish killer does not fit into the White Lady’s preferred narrative.
There are a lot of moving parts at the Times and at the Post and Wall Street Journal too. At NPR, CNN, WSJ, shit gets missed. The former Tom-in-Chief at the Times Dean Baquet said in an interview recently that the newspaper produces “thousands” of stories every week which sounds a tad exaggerated, it’s probably more like several hundred. A lot of words, nonetheless. In this respect a news outlet resembles another 24-7 business, a hospital. There are no days off—patients are always present—any changes in management or management procedures must be made on the go, without closing shop to re-tool or taking a day off to reconsider. So, too, in this respect, institutional memory in the media is not perfect. Things get forgotten. What a news site knew 20 years ago may not be remembered today. The true nature of Benjamin Netanyahu’s character for example may have been forgotten, just as easily as it could have been swept under the rug. But the risks are greater in today’s journalism because everyone is wired to everyone else among the elites. Did something get swept under the rug or did new staff really not know? The Times, ever conscious of other media outlets’ conflicts of interest, just carried a piece on the next presidential debate and a potential problem for ABC News. For example, again.
Forget for the moment recent problems with the presidential debates, let’s invoke a little selective memory here too. In the debate between Trump and Biden a short while ago, both moderators (Dana Bash and Jake Tapper) were Jewish and both somehow seemed to mostly ignore the Palestinian issue that has arguably been the biggest point of contention in American politics for the past year. But that was merely an oversight. So, like, instead, we look at a potential ethical problem for ABC in the coming Harris-Trump debate, as reported recently by the White Lady.
“On paper,” the Times analysis read, “the potential for a conflict of interest seems obvious: ABC News, the host of next month’s high-stakes presidential debate, falls under the purview of a top corporate executive at Disney who happens to be longtime friends with the Democratic nominee. The executive, Dana Walden, first met Kamala Harris in 1994. Their husbands, Matt Walden and Doug Emhoff, have known each other since the 1980s. The Waldens — ‘extraordinary friends,’ per the vice president — have donated money to Ms. Harris’s political campaigns since at least 2003, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco. ‘In many ways, Dana and Matt are responsible for my marriage,’ Ms. Harris joked at a fund-raiser in April 2022 at the Waldens’ home in Brentwood, a wealthy Los Angeles enclave where Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff also own a residence.”
ABC explained in its own defense that although Ms. Walden’s portfolio includes ABC News, she isn’t involved in day-to-day news operations and could not favor Kamala. This is similar to what you hear at the Post where managing editor Matea Gold is married to the chief of staff of the FBI. The couple is Jewish like the Waldens above, elites-connected, both husband and wife. The Post has promised that Matea Gold will not be involved in any stories about the Federal Bureau of Investigation but what’s much more likely is that no ugly investigative pieces will run about the Bureau while Matea is in charge of news. That’s what networking means, bro. Ditto, Kamala Harries will get an easy ride at ABC, without serious stories themselves being influenced, they just won’t be reported in the first place because staff knows who is friends with Kamala. That’s how the real world works, including the journalism world.
The FBI has almost 40,000 employees nationwide, more than 10,000 agents across the country, and has a lot of issues, including race. Have you ever noticed in news photos/video when agents are standing around crime scenes wearing FBI parkas (which urgently need a fashion makeover, btw) that they are almost always white people? In fact Barbara Jordan, former Congresswoman, late of Austin, Texas, was once appointed a special master, back in the day, to try to get to the bottom of race issues in the Bureau, which apparently still exist. After the White Lady, in all fairness, raised the issues of race in the FBI. At the Post there are pieces that are required to be run about the FBI, like reports from the Department of Justice Inspector General or whatever. But no enterprise reporting. The FBI gets a walk, in other words.
Part of the problem of modern conflicts of interest, interestingly, can be attributed to the liberation of women. Both husband and wife now can be in high-powered positions. But it’s not purely accidental. Some people want to be in power couples. President Biden’s National Security Director is Jake Sullivan, and his wife is running for Congress, and that decision merited a story in both the Post and the Times. Your spouse becomes your partner, literally, in influence in D.C. But whether it ends up as information in the public domain, in other words a news story, is a different matter. Also in the Biden White House, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s wife is President Biden’s Cabinet Secretary, a high-powered position which means she is the liaison between all the secretaries in Biden’s cabinet, including her husband, and the President. Somehow that piece has not made it into the mainstream press. Of course if it did, the reporter or news site that published it would run the risk of pissing off the White House or Secretary Blinken. Deep sources, that the White Lady likes so much, would dry up.
Or it’s not a marriage partner, but a friend. Mayor Steve Adler was a founder of the Texas Tribune together with Evan Smith. What do you think the chances are that the Tribuneis going to start looking into the development racket that has controlled the Texas capital city for decades and funneled millions to a certain former Democratic president? Also interestingly, the Tribune’s biggest political corruption investigation in the news site’s history targeted a black female legislator, Dawnna Dukes, who represented East Austin as a voice of black rights, actually, following the retirement of Ms. Delco. The Tribune accused Representative Dukes of numerous crimes, she was indicted by the Travis County district attorney and arrested. Then it turned out, as her colleagues spoke up for her, and the state police investigated, and another website did the reporting that the Tribune had not bothered to do, it turned out that she had done nothing illegal and that she had done nothing that her colleagues were not doing, except that she was doing it with black skin. The indictments were dropped but it was too late for her career. She was beat in the next election cycle by a former member of the Austin City Council who was a pro-growth Tom. Actually, a pro-growth Aunt Jemima, since female Toms are technically called “Aunt Jemimas.” Evan Smith neither apologized not corrected the TT stories. But we digress. The index case of the kind of journalistic corruption, in which relationships do matter, actually comes from National Public Radio and their longtime Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, who is Jewish.
At NPR, Totenberg spent years praising Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who is also Jewish. Indeed Totenberg made Ginsberg seem like the patron saint of the courts. Only after Ginsburg’s death, when Totenberg wrote a book about her relationship with the late justice, did we learn that the two women were BFF, an admission that never made it directly into Totenberg’s reporting. In fact it’s worse than it looks, because Totenberg says she routinely alerted Ginsberg to topics that NPR intended to cover, in order to give her friend a heads up, in violation of NPR’s own rules. That’s called networking too. Totenberg’s conflict even relates to racism in journalism, like at the Tribune with Representative Dukes, or the Times’ relentless pursuit of Mayor Adams, while former Mayor Bloomberg, who was not exactly Mary Poppins in office, but is a wealthy Jewish media mogul by profession, got a walk.
Justice Ginsberg’s popularity as a public speaker and a writer, in part fueled by Totenberg’s complimentary reportage, made Ruth Ginsburg a lot of money in book sales/fees in addition to her salary as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Now look at her former colleague, incumbent Justice Clarence Thomas, much a target of the press, especially reporters at ProPublica and the Post and White Lady. Clarence Thomas is a Tom—no doubt—and unethical, but it’s interesting that he is the national figure in D.C. who has been most called out. Have the travel habits of all the justices been equally vetted? Why stop there? Half the major figures in the Biden administration are Jewish and we’ve seen stories in the national press on Secretary Blinken’s guitar-playing, Secretary Yellen’s mastery of chopsticks in Beijing, and Attorney General Garland’s comic book trading back in the day. There’s really nothing more meaty for the Times or Post or ProPublica to report on these officials, except their selfless dedication?
Or is it at all about throwing softballs at people who look like you?
A white savior is a white person, male or female, who goes around freeing people of color from injustice and who consequently becomes a raceless antihero, but usually only in his or her own mind.
A Black Savior on the other hand is a black person who goes around righting wrongs committed by the White Man or White Woman. In the Austin context, Barry has already profited from the elimination of the minority population in the Texas capital city and apparently still is making bank, courtesy of people like Kirk Rudy and the tenure of Steve Adler, two guys who have profited by the conversion of Austin into a white high-tech metropolis, through decimation of blacks and by giving Latinos a pretty good working over too. Although many Latino leaders have gone for the money—that’s their choice—it’s not the role of the noble Black Man to criticize Latinos and Latinas, especially if the Latina is fine. In the context of Palestine however—arms sales to Israel notwithstanding, despite the big money he has taken from American Jewish business interests who share the blame for Gaza and the settler-driven killings in the West Bank? Barack Obama may actually have done some heavy lifting for the Palestinian cause and may be in a position to do more.
Words are important.
That speech in Cairo after he received the Nobel Prize he hadn’t earned? That was why he received the prize in the first place, although the usual order was reversed, getting the prize before he deserved it, in a very clever maneuver by the Nobel Committee to hold Barry’s feet to the fire.
In his speech at Cairo University, President Obama kicked the legs out from under the muscular modern Jewish identity when he said that everyone has a narrative. Up until that point, Jews in the U.S. and in Israel had been pushing the supremacy of their own story, of the Jewish peep, with certain embellishments. That we hear relentlessly, even in Texas, some Texas Jews even claiming for example that the Holocaust is the most important event in human history and renders slavery in the U.S. somehow less crucial, yes, even in the American South—here in the Lone Star State. And that the Jewish narrative justifies killing Palestinians and taking their land today. Because Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The phrase “descendant of Holocaust survivor” should stop all traffic, in other words, and the Palestinian story is somehow less important. That’s what all those protests on American university campuses have been about recently, actually. Narratives. Words, in other words, and that means Barack was right.
In a journalism context, at the Times, the Washington Post and NPR, a lot of Jewish reporters have pushed the Jewish story to the exclusion of others for decades. At CNN. And MSNBC. And that narrative has been served by ignoring the Palestinians, which is what was mostly being done, until Gaza. Which means that Oct. 7th was an act of communication as well as an attack.
After the fashion of Thomas Friedman of the Times, and the deep thinkers at the Post, most of whom are also Jewish, working under the auspices of editorial page editor David Shipley who is also Jewish, or managing editor Matea Gold, the Post is just as heavily Jewish a publication as the White Lady, if not more. In a heavily black town, D.C., not to repeat oneself. Anyway, after the fashion of most thumbsuckers in the American press, can we suggest how Barack might do more? Consider this as a think piece that you won’t read on the Times or Post opinion page. We can take advantage of the fact that Barry feels guilty about the Palestinians. To set the scene. He should feel guilty. He fucked the Palis, royally, just like everybody else did, there’s no other way to put it.
Suppose however President Biden were to appoint Barack Obama as “Presidential Plenipotentiary for Palestine”—PPP for short. He would be known as P-Cube on the street when black people sit down to talk about Barry and the Middle East.
“P-Cube,” what do you think? Like Ice Cube, but with more gravitas.
Barry probably would have been a revolutionary in any case, no matter how well his administration turned out, and his administration generally turned out well, with the exception of his handling of East Austin and the Middle East. Other than drone strikes and cancelling Osama’s ticket, you know, he did nothing but propagate the pro-Israel status quo abroad. But he was POC in charge, which is new. Maybe he took a few steps towards righting relations with Iran, too, but overall very little new, because the Israeli government doesn’t want peace at any cost, or apparently at all. Israel needs land for new arrivals and the only way to get it is to steal it or force the Palestinians to leave. There’s method, in other words, in Bibi’s evil.
In any case, working as P-Cube, Barry would have the power to negotiate for the U.S. in the region. The Israelis would have to accept the appointment because Obama as president did not stop the flow of arms, or the settlements, while he was in office. Jews know they can trust him because he has done what they wanted, here and abroad. He released and gave Israel back the super-spy Jonathan Pollard, who is Jewish, btw, and who betrayed the United States for Israel and endangered our military. As has been noted by others, it’s hard for the U.S. to negotiate with Israel only because anything the Israelis have asked for in the past they has always been given, including recently the spy Pollard, even back to Bill Clinton’s tenure.
The sticky problem with accepting Barry’s good offices in the Middle East today would be the Palestinians, who have lost tens of thousands of dead to weapons that Barry passed on to Tel Aviv. Palestinian leadership in the midst of the war, having been sold out so often, has shown even some hostility towards prosecutors from the International Criminal Court, who are investigating war crimes. But it may also be because some of the Hamas leaders are in legal jeopardy too, just like Bibi and the IDF’ers. Even though the Hamas guys are actually freedom fighters, like the Black Panthers back in the day? Some of the Panthers went to prison too, as unjust as that may seem. In any case, if it’s no go with Barry, there is still one member of the Obama Clan that everybody can work with. Michelle. Or ‘Chelleactually, as we in in the Michelle Obama Fan Club call her. After leaving the White House the Obamas have gotten into the narrative business, moviemaking, and there’s no greater story to be told than about the Palestinian people. The Palis have been screwed by everyone who has gotten close and they are in the process of screwing themselves, with massive population growth. Like Israel, which has grown just as much, but by immigration, and the policy of right of return. Population is an important story that is just beginning to be told. It’s all about land, bro, just like here in River City. As the population rises you need more land. Documentaries on subjects like these can be just as powerful as movies, after all, and Michelle Obama’s Palestine has a ring to it.
The Obama girls are already said to be writing for the family enterprise and can add a non-sclerosed view of the Palis too, in the liberation context. Malia and Sasha are out of university and have a lot of knowledge and experience under their belts. Much of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is based upon misinformation, actually. For instance there is a widespread erroneous belief among Jews that they are a superior people, the “chosen people” in fact. That claim is based upon false reading of history, to be brutally honest.
Jews are merely tied for the 9th most important culture in human history. Let’s do the math.
So, like, #1 are the Black Peeps—obviously—since the first humans arose in Africa. The so-called Primordial Nut that got busted on the African continent back in the prehistoric day and brought us all into existence? If it weren’t for an ancient antediluvian Brother, just standing upright for the first time and wanting to get him some—from a hot cave-dwelling chick? If not for that First Negro, the anonymous black Him—father of the human race—none of us would be here now to have this discussion. Upon a little careful reflection, therefore, we can probably all agree upon whose culture is at the top of the list of the human hit parade. Black people. Thank you very much.
Next, tied for #2 and #3—again, based upon a careful reading of history? The Egyptians, which would include the Palestinians today, and then the Chinese. Tied for #4 and #5 are the Greeks and Romans, which means that the Jewish peep doesn’t even break into the Top Five. Hello!
#6 and #7, respectively, are the Germanic peoples, all the tribes who polished off the Romans, basically, and the Aztecs who were polished off by the Spanish. Coming in at #8 are the Persians, all the way back to the Parthians, who stopped Roman gentrification actually, that had been led by the big money real estate guy of Rome, Crassus. The Parthians poured molten gold down Crassus’s greedy throat, btw, wish we could do that to a few developers in Austin. Which leaves Jews at the respectable but hardly earth-shattering #9 Most Important Culture in Human History, tied with the Tartars and the Turks.
Ahead of Attila & his Huns, maybe, that much can be said.
Chapter 10 Still Waters Run Deep
So, like, this was back in the day, maybe ten years ago when Kirk Watson who is now mayor was State Senator Watson? To set the scene.
There are two political Starbucks in town where the powerful drink their lattes alongside ordinary citizens, one a block or two from City Hall and the other a few blocks from the State Capitol. In the former, you see City Council members, the city manager, the police chief waiting out a council meeting for his chance to speak. At the latter, west of the Capitol, it’s more the courthouse crowd, the odd member of the Bush family, the D.A. & district judges, state reps and sometimes a Texas state official. You might have seen Evan Smith, btw, who has also been a player in the gentrification game, as he went around shaking hands and getting contributions for the Tribune, just like a pol. Anyway, that day, eight or ten years ago, it was State Senator Watson. To set the scene again. This is going to be pretty funny. Or not.
So, like, Kirk Watson comes in. He takes one of those high round tables? Where you're sitting up on, like, bar chairs? There’s just enough room at the table for two people. The senator sits down. He looks a little rough, frankly, like it's been a tough night or whatever. And a series of people start coming over one at a time to the table to kiss his ring, you know?
Senator Watson looked like a Chicago union official, or a mobster, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Watching him you kept waiting for someone to slip him an envelope or for him to reach under his jacket and hand an envelope to one of the people coming to see him. Maybe you had to be there, huh? But it’s fun to watch public officials in the Live Music Capital of the World, who you see a lot because downtown Austin is like a small town. And being in Starbucks watching people can be informative too. That day you learned what you needed to know about Kirk Watson. He’s a thug at heart, or has become one. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. For example last year the local public radio station reported that Mayor Watson was his using his private email address to conduct city business, which is very often a way to avoid open records disclosure, even though State Senator Watson himself was sponsor of legislation contradicting that very practice. Oh well. Kirk Watson is in office to trade on his power although he may not have started that way.
Someone mentioned a while ago about Watson telling Governor Richards back in the day—this was before Kirk had run for office—how he admired her and that he had been bitten by the politics bug and wanted to get into public life and all that. Well, he did. She appointed him to head her environmental commission. And somehow one day he ended up as the guy on the bar stool, having his ring kissed and maybe his knob polished too, you know? The transition can be pretty quick in Austin. This town, what can you say?
The Times has done three stories about Austin’s growth in the past quarter-century more or less. Just before Y2000, the first time Watson was mayor, he gave an interview to the White Lady, actually. The Times was doing one of those let’s-gush-on-Austin stories, what a great town it is, the music and all, but it’s growing fast and there are traffic problems and all, the growth is due to tech development, have you read that one before? So, like, that story was the beginning of the Newspaper of Record’s very limited interest in River City’s gentrification, although the word gentrify was never used. So far, so good. Michael Dell was mentioned in the piece as a genius. Dell got a lot of blowjobs from Times reporters, Dell is rich, Jewish and high tech, what’s not to like?
Anyway, Mayor Watson said in his interview with the Times, at that time, just before Y2k, that the growth was going to continue, and the plan was to manage it. To set the scene. Those were his exact words. He promised to “manage” growth.
From about that same time there’s an interesting anecdote that did not get printed in the White Lady, during Mayor Watson’s first pass in City Hall. It’s told by a woman named Susana Almanza, mentioned earlier, the lady who ran against her own brother, she’s a good person who has tried to defend average people in East Austin, and was one of the named plaintiffs in the good government suit against the giveaway to Endeavor on the Cox development project. She isn’t quoted in the first Times story but she was quoted in the next one, a few years later, in 2006, about the gentrification of East Austin, in which she pushed back on the White Lady’s belief that gentrification was turning the eastside into—these were the Times reporter’s words—a “racially harmonized small town like Mayberry.” Mayberry being the fictionalized small town from The Andy Griffith Show, and also a second TV show about idyllic small-town white America called Mayberry RFD, back in the day? Which actually didn’t have any black people or Latinos living in it. Anyway, back to the Times first story when Almanza was not quoted. Susana Almanza’s original advocacy focused on environmental racism. Before East Austin got cleaned up, because white people were moving in, it was a toxic dumping ground for pollutants because only blacks and Latinos lived there, which is how Austin’s liberalism worked, bad shit was relegated to the eastside. Until white people started moving in.
So, like, one day during Mayor Watson’s first tenure, Y2K or thereabouts, Ms. Almanza had a meeting scheduled in City Hall regarding her dumping concerns. So, like, she and a couple of her associates were in the building looking for the room where the meeting was going to take place, and they walked into the wrong room. This is how history is sometimes written, by someone walking into the wrong place at the wrong time. In that empty meeting room there was a map on the wall showing how city government intended to divide up East Austin for redevelopment. And Ms. Almanza and her colleagues were surprised because no one had talked to the people on the eastside about City Hall’s plans. Seeing Mayor Watson’s map was the first hint, and a big one, that Ms. Almanza and her friends had that the people of East Austin were about to be fucked. She and her friends were going to have a lot of new neighbors, property values were about to rise along with taxes, to say nothing of rents. The only way to survive for many folks would be to sell their homes and move away. Which is what eventually happened. To set the scene. Everything that doesn’t happen to white people in West Austin was soon to happen to blacks and Latinos in East Austin. That anecdote, although it was well known, did not make it into the Times or the Tribune or the Austin American-Statesman.
The second Times story, written by a Jewish chick who specialized in real estate reporting, about East Austin being a racially harmonious Mayberry? It was noteworthy for all the wrong reasons. The city official quoted in the piece as being responsible for alleviating the effects of gentrification would, a few years after publication, bail out and go to work as CEO of the Austin Board of Realtors. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Also in that second Times story published in 2006, the one about Mayberry, the average home price in East Austin was mentioned as having gone from $91,000 to $150,000 in just the prior five or so years. Bad enough, huh? But the third story in the Times actually underlined the worst change, by reporting fifteen years later, in the Times’ belated followup, by the White Lady’s excellent Texas correspondent Edgar Sandoval, that Austin had achieved the ranking as #1 least affordable city in the United States, beating out New York and Boston and wherever. So much for managing growth, huh, like Mayor Watson promised. Today, lest you forget, the Rosewood Courts projects, low-incoming public housing will soon be available in East Austin for $300,000.
There’s no doubt about this narrative and who is to blame, btw. Last year Mayor Watson gave an interview to the local public radio station, which actually did some of the in-depth reporting that the Times and the Tribune have declined to do. The radio people asked the hard questions and held Kirk Watson’s feet to the fire. Also, apparently, there was some bamboo under his fingernails.
Mayor Watson admitted in the interview that the first time he was mayor he never spoke to anyone in the community that he planned to redevelop. A deal was cut between white westside environmentalists who, rightly, didn’t want suburban sprawl over the aquifer, and the Real Estate Council of Austin—the slime-beast RECA that has driven gentrification and that Kirk Rudy would eventually lead—and the Austin Chamber of Commerce of which Kirk Watson was president before being elected mayor the first time. There were no Negroes present for the negotiation, btw. Per KUT, “[Mayor Watson] did acknowledge he did not have conversations about how to protect current residents from rising home prices. ‘One of the things that’s always been troubling is that the people that fought so hard to make life better [in East Austin], they haven't all had the opportunity to enjoy the benefit of it,’ [Watson] told KUT.” This town? The point is that everybody is for sale. There’s so much profitable business to be done. Liberal whites sell out minorities and there are Toms for sale to help whites make the sale.
And Mayor Watson, after admitting his role in destruction of the minority community, do you think he took responsibility and resigned? He announced his reelection campaign instead and has the support of practically every local public official, the whole Travis County Democratic Party establishment basically.
What’s sad is that his main competitor in the mayor’s race is a former City Council member—a white chick named Kathie Tovo—beware white women with diminutive names like Kathie or Susie, they’re all just as bad as guys named Kirk and Steve. Anyway, Kathie is a development whore too, no disrespect intended to real whores like Titty Mama, who was honest about what she was selling. Everybody is looking to make a buck in East Austin, some walking the sidewalk, some in City Hall, some without ever setting foot in the ‘hood, like Barry. A Times story in 2012 listed Barry’s major bundlers and Kirk Rudy was at over $2 million in the prior two years, half the amount of the number one Obama bundler at the time, a businesswoman in Miami. $2 million is nothing by today’s standards but was still a lot of money back in an age when elections cost less. And since then of course Kirk Rudy has also been sending money to the Obama Center. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Barack Obama is not slave-descended, at least not in this country, although that dynamic may have existed among his father’s forbearers in Kenya because some African tribes did hold slaves. As for experiencing Jim Crow, no doubt, in some form or another Barack did have to deal with race. Luckily he’s just young enough to have missed the era of segregated schooling in the U.S., which is a good thing, missing something bad. But being a descendant of slaves in the U.S. does have a benefit. You know instinctively that there are some things you don’t do to other black people. You know the rules, so to speak, of being black in America, whether you choose to obey them or not. If you choose to sell out your peep, you’re a Tom, it’s that simple.
What Barry participated in, in East Austin—acts of commission or acts of omission—turning a blind eye to the destruction of minority communities—taking the money and running, in effect—P-Cube or not, a slave-descendant African American would have known better.
Barry conspired with The White Man against his own people, there’s just no other way to say it. Barry never went for a walk in East Austin either, although he did walk on the westside of town. He said that he liked Austin but didn’t like people coming up to him or interrupting his stroll or whatever: “Everybody knows I love Austin, Texas. Every time I come here, I tell you how much I love you. I love Austin. I love the people. I love BBQ, which I will get right after this. I like the music. I’ve got good memories here, I’ve got good friends. I was telling someone, the last time I walked a real walk, where I was left alone, was in Austin, Texas, right before the debate here during the primary in 2007, 2008? It must have been 2008. I was walking along the river. Nobody noticed me, and it felt great. Then, on the way back, somebody did notice me and Secret Service started coming around. But that, uh, that first walk was really good. So, let’s face it: I just love Austin.” Well, it’s not every day you see a candidate for the Presidency of the United States on the hike-n-bike trail, or wherever, you know? The point is that Barry doesn’t have the necessary chip. It’s not part of his software. He didn’t feel empathy for or worry about black people on the eastside while he hobnobbed later in Tarrytown.
He didn’t suspect the white people he was taking money from, even though that’s what a lot of African Americans in the South still spend part of their day doing—suspecting white folk. Until we have a reason not to. Barry took black support for granted. And we know this because we know how his relationship with the white business community, in the person of his bundlers, evolved. Like Ann Richards, he was single-minded. He came to Austin for the money and that’s what he got.
There’s an anecdote about Ann Richards in her last election that is revealing of Barry too. During her reelection campaign for governor, as it became clear that George W. Bush would be a more formidable opponent than she had originally believed—Ann sped up the executions, and she did a photo op at an FBI pistol range, to give her pistol-packing mama credentials, even as a liberal Democrat. She did what she thought was required. It just didn’t turn out to be enough. That was Barry too, he did what he had to do, although what he did turned out to be more successful than what Ann did. That’s why, btw, people who didn’t necessarily like Barry, or trust in his First Black President theatrics—usually sitting down with a starstruck, wide-eyed white chick at the barbecue place on the eastside? Those same people who wouldn’t trust Barry, would trust Michelle implicitly. And Kamala Harris for that matter. Harris’ father is Jamaican and at one time Jamaica’s economy was based upon sugar plantations, did you know thar? There was a bloody slave revolt in Jamaica and then the British read the writing on the wall and freed the slaves. Kamala has the chip that Barry lacks, in other words. It was passed down to her from her dad.
If Kamala was hard on black men as D.A. in San Francisco, which she apparently was, the harsh prosecutions can be seen through a male-female lens just as easily as part of the Uncle Tom-Aunt Jemimah narrative. A lot of sisters have hostility towards black guys, enough said—even though brothers have laid our lives on the line, freeing the race, you know? Not to make Kamala feel guilty or anything. Shame on Kamala, maybe, but not necessarily. And the Jewish dynamic, which is such a big part of black lives in this country, is no more complicated than the slave non-slave-descended dynamic, just different. All these Jewish business guys who latched onto Barry and who Barry latched onto in return? To understand Jewish culture as an outsider—the same way that American Jews are always telling black people that they understand and empathize with our condition and/or history? You have to lay down some ground rules first.
First and foremost there are some borders that people shouldn’t step over, territory you can’t step into, not because the territory is off limits to outsiders but because you’ll never get out again. One being all that Biblical shit that Jews are the chosen people, and all, the Talmud and what the Mufti of Jerusalem said in 1633? None of that is any more enlightening today than any other peeps’ historical/religious declarations from back, back in the day, whenever the day may have been. We’re all rowing in the same boat now, bro, and no one is designated hereditary captain. No one is above scrutiny. The Bible and Koran are spiritual documents, not historical texts. You have to be respectful of other people’s beliefs, but not necessarily obedient to them, you feel me?
And when American Jews start wrapping themselves in the Black Civil Rights Movement, and claiming to be responsible for black freedoms, you just have to roll your eyes and move on. Or, if you have the time to school them, remind American Jewry of the nearly one thousand African American servicemen who died in combat during the Second World War, like those Tuskegee airmen who were shot down while freeing Jews? Compared to the two Jewish Freedom Riders who died in the South we hear so much about. A lot of “history” is just long-form selective reporting by the New York Times and the Washington Post and we know how that plays out. Some stories get played up, some never see light of day. It depends who’s doing the writing and who the publisher is, in the United States it’ll very likely be a Caucasian and often a Jewish editor, especially at the White Lady or at the Post. Money contributed by Jewish donors to black colleges for example is important—former New York Mayor Bloomberg just gave a big wad of cash. But blood still takes precedence. That’s why what Barack said in Cairo is so important. That’s what makes Barack a soul brother despite some errors in judgment on his part, in Palestine and in East Austin.
What he said in Cairo transcends all that. What he said that is so important: Everybody has a narrative.
Jews aren’t alone with a history to tell, descendants of Holocaust survivors notwithstanding. You can’t purchase historical precedence, in other words, you can’t buy your way to the head of the line of humanity. A lot of whites for example don’t care to hear about slavery, or don’t believe the subject has any bearing on today, and that’s their right. Luckily for Jewish culture, Jews have mostly been masters of their own narrative. That’s in contrast to African Americans for example who are usually at the mercy of white historians and white social scientists—to say nothing of white journalists at the New Yorker Magazine andNational Public Radio. Very often for example it’s white academics or reporters writing about drugs or violence or one-parent households in the black community, all of which may be true but one would still like to hear a little more frequently from our own people about our own peep. Earlier this year, on June 18th in fact, the Post’s South Asia correspondent, who is a South Asian woman, did an explainer piece about the new federal holiday Juneteenth, which falls on June 19th and celebrates the freedom of the slaves, and the next day three white Post reporters did a long video on Juneteenth’s meaning. Because whites and now Asian-Americans believe they are masters of the black narrative in this country.
A few years ago, under the Times then-Tom-in-Chief, the newspaper hired a white woman from Germany as a video correspondent and her first big piece for the White Lady was a history of anti-black racism in the United States. She was explaining it all to us, she promised, from slavery to Jim Crow through to the civil rights era and beyond. The only question was who explained it to her?
During most of the postwar decades of social science, for instance, the writing about black people in this country has been done by Jewish academics who believe themselves to be experts on black people. But guess what? Black people, through our much-reported close association with the Jewish community, and all, are now pretty authoritative sources on American Jewry. We’ve just been freed—intellectually liberated, you could call it—and black people can start our new empowered status by helping our Jewish brothers and sisters to understand their own culture, in the same way that they have helped us. It’s time for some tough love, you know?
This opening for us to assist our Jewish brothers and sisters to understand their own history and culture—assisting the same people who have helped us so much—this freedom to stage an intervention comes, in fact, from the White Lady herself, the Newspaper of Record. Black people have been called to preach, you could say. In a secular way. By the New York Times.
So, like, not long ago the Times ran a review of a biography of Harriet Tubman, the black freedom fighter of Underground Railroad fame? To set the scene. What was different about this Tubman biography, in contrast to so much African American history that had been published before—unlike for example the two Pulitzer Prize awarded earlier this year for nonfiction, one to the Jewish former sportswriter from Dallas, Jonathan Eig, who is now the most cited expert on MLK and on black civil rights, and the other to an Asian-American woman for writing about black slavery? Some people might call it cultural appropriation or even cultural theft that was rubber-stamped by the Pulitzer Committee, you know? But no way, bro, they were merely helping black people to understand our own culture.
Anyway, about the review of this Tubman biography, the big difference was that this book about Harriet Tubman being reviewed by the White Lady was actually written by a black person. And that was a big change. Hallelujah! But the reviewer, like so many Times critics, was white, a chick named Jennifer Szalai. So, like, in the review Jen Szalai—someone at the New Yorker recently called her Jen, and taking the same liberty here, feeling it’s all right to hang with the white chick, considering the special relationship between blacks and Jews that the newspaper of record is always talking about, and all? Writing in her review of the Tubman book, Jen generally gave the book good marks. But she took issue with one aspect of the Tubman history.
Apparently, the black woman author, Tiya Miles, had the temerity to disrespect “as-told-to biographies” of black people written by whites. Is that right? Per Jen’s review, Tiya Miles had stepped over a line when Miles called a foul on a lot of white-written history of black America, “explaining that the white women who wrote [as-told to biographies] despite their good intentions,” this is Tiya’s rap basically, “‘could not have told Tubman’s story with the fullness, clarity and philosophical depth that Tubman would have, had she written it herself.’” That was Tiya Miles’ mistake, apparently. Szalai said that Miles’ claim was unproven and “banal,” Tiya Miles’ claim being, of course, that blacks might do black history better than whites do, God forbid. But what’s banal for the goose is banal for the gander, too, right? There’s no reason therefore to believe that you have to be Jewish to comment on Jewish history and culture. Let’s give it a shot here, in the same heartfelt spirit of helping Jews to understand themselves that they have shown by helping black people to understand ourselves. To start, this is a very insecure peep. That’s strong medicine but it’s given with love. It’s tough love but that’s the most useful kind, no?
Whether you agree that Jews have been subjects of colossal antisemitism in this country recently, or not, whether you think that Jews are too powerful in the U.S., or alternatively they are not getting due credit for their contributions. Whatever the case may be—whether you think Hollywood is part of a Jewish plot to control the media, or not—it’s not, btw, but Hollywood is a heavily-Jewish network, just like the real estate development huskiness in River City. It doesn’t matter so much where anyone’s opinions fall on a yes-no spectrum, when answering questions like these. What matters, said a German-Jewish cat named Boerne, recently quoted in the New Yorker, is that you’re thinking about it or talking about it or arguing the point. Per Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.” Judaism is an almost perfectly self-absorbed culture that often expects everyone else to be equally absorbed by Judaism. That’s why, whatever happens in Gaza or in the West Bank, there may well be something new a year or two years from now to make Jewry the center of our national/international attention again. Blacks and Palestinians are fighting for equality while the Jewish narrative is all about superiority and being the center of humanity’s story, a place that actually belongs to Black people, as previously proven. Ipso facto.
It is, nonetheless, important to recognize the increasing role in society of networking. Which is a powerful tool. Let’s put it this way, it’s not a “plot,” bro, like some trogs say. It’s completely cool—and more people ought to do it—including more black people. But the networks need to be transparent, for everyone’s sake. Networking in the Jewish community is in fact the complete opposite of the “First Negro” narrative that Barry and others, like Dean Baquet at the Times, liked so much, because the First Negro enshrines exceptionality, the individual First Black whatever, when what we really want to do is encourage maximum participation. And maximum transparency.
One might add, in the East Austin context, that greed is not healthy, unlike what the late Ivan Boesky, the American swindler who happened to be Jewish—who passed away a few months ago—liked to say, as mentioned in the Times. Greed is unhealthy for the greedy and for their victims. Madoff, Milliken, Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, what were these Jewish parents teaching their children? Was there sufficient supervision in the household during early, formative years? That’s asked thru psycho-social lens. What belongs to others, belongs to others unless you want to take it, was that the message to those children? It’s ignorance, bro. And that includes cultural appropriation. If Jewish friends tell you, for example, that all the great films have been made by Jews, the question to ask is how many non-Jews have been making films in Hollywood? If you hear that all the great history of the American civil rights movement has been written by Jews, the question to ask is how many black people got book contracts to write about our own history?
Let’s go back to Austin. All roads lead to or begin in River City, after all.
The secret FBI documents and transcripts on Martin Luther King that were released a few years ago by the LBJ Library in Austin to the excellent Mr. Eig, who won the Pulitzer earlier this year for his book on MLK, were denied to a black reporter previously, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The head of the Freedom of Information Act section of the FBI is Jewish and he has refused to release any correspondence on how Jonathan Eig, who is also Jewish, was given the files, not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. If you get the access, bro, you’re in the driver’s seat. That’s called networking, but it’s not called transparency. Ditto the stories that don’t get written. That’s networking too.
If gentrification was not covered in East Austin, it’s not because it didn’t happen, it’s because it was inconvenient history to the people doing the writing. It fucks with their chosen narrative. That’s why there especially needs to be more diversity in journalism, and diversity does not merely mean two Jewish writers with differing opinions, as it so often does for example at the Post.
On the positive side of the ledger, not to be a complete downer, members of the Jewish community are very smart, have great respect for learning, a good sense of humor, and a lot of Jewish chicks are hot and will give it up to a brother, which is important if one is looking at equality through a sexual gratification lens. As brothers often do. See how it works when you’re the one focusing the lens instead of the one under the microscope? That’s diversity, bro.
Black guys and girls, for example, have just as much to say about Jews as Jews have to say about black people. We just don’t get the chance to speak. Not to be overly judgmental of our Jewish brothers and sisters, but not to be banal either. Let’s not mistake arrogance for competence, either. We saw a certain arrogance among the developers in River City who were competing with each other to make bank and showing no interest whatsoever in the people who they were fucking. This is in sharp contrast to African Americans, who are humble by nature, not just by circumstance. In normal circumstances practically the only time you’re likely to hear a brother being arrogant is when he’s discussing his skills in the boudoir, and then it ain’t bragging. It’s more advertising, you know?
Speaking of people who brag, President Trump might be—as he claims—a better dealmaker in the Middle East than Democrats have been, if we look through a Palestinian justice lens. He certainly can’t be any worse. He’s a transactional guy and in the right circumstances that can be a good thing. The Donald sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a deal to be made, while Democrats see Israel’s defense as a cash cow to be milked year after year, military aid appropriation after military aid appropriation, political contribution after political contribution.
Others have noted the likelihood that some percentage of the billions of dollars in U.S. aid that goes to Israel somehow comes back as campaign contributions. It ought to be investigated but that’s another one of those stories that the Times is not interested in, nor the Justice Department either. The best prospect for a bag man in that scenario is Senator Schumer of New York, btw, who is a money guy and has tied his coattails to making the Israelis happy. All those hundreds of billions of dollars through the years and there’s never been anything for prosecutors to question? Oh please. That’s total believable! The only foreign government in the Middle East that the U.S. Justice Department has been interested in, for undue influence, is Egypt, or Turkey, really? Everything involving Israel is totally kosher, sure, bro. What follows comes from Marty Barron who is Jewish and was executive editor of the Washington Post, before he got busted for anti-black racism. Marty said after he left the Post the biggest failure of his tenure was not addressing diversity at the newspaper, btw. But we digress.
So, like, Marty writes in his recent memoir about the newspaper, about Jeff Bezos and the Trumpster : “In a book by Barak Ravid, released almost a year after he left the White House, President [Trump] said he was surprised to find that the Palestinians want a peace deal more than the Israelis. Fresh from visiting several weeks earlier with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Trump took note of the billions of dollars in aid the United States provided Israel and acknowledged asking early on whether it couldn’t be leveraged to pressure Israel to make peace. ‘I was told, ‘There’s no connection,’” [Trump] said. He was incredulous. ‘No connection?’” he asked. It’s kind of the same story in East Austin, actually. There was no connection between all that money Barry took and the destruction of the Black Homeland in River City? Oh please. Now look around the ‘hood, as you walk down 11thStreet for example, taking that stroll that Barry never did on the eastside. Even the legendary Titty Momma is gone.
That woman could love a man up and down, from one end of his body to the other—it was hard even to stand up after all that good loving. And when the white frat boys came over to East Austin, in exchange for moderate professional fees, Titty Momma practiced various acts of a sexual nature that—although her actions might have seemed extreme and depraved at the time—in the dispassionate view of history, she actually increased understanding between the races. At least Titty Mama knew what business she was in, as opposed to a lot of Toms today. She was selling herself, just like they do, but for a better cause.
That was the old eastside, B.G., before gentrification. The town just isn't the same anymore. You can blame a lot of people, including the first Black President. There’s always a connection to money, bro. It’s always about land too. That’s the real narrative.
Barry was not here just for the tacos.
© 2024
