@CharlieMBrownX “Armed pigs paid #SpikeLee $200,000 to calm Black people down at the same damn time he was supposedly speaking out against their corruption & brutality.” #Copaganda
His tweet links to the nypost.com’s Aug. 16 ‘NYPD paid Spike Lee $200K for work on ad campaign’
“The department tapped the “Do the Right Thing” director in 2016 as a consultant for the campaign, a spokesman for the department’s nonprofit New York City Police Foundation confirmed Thursday.
The contract with Lee’s advertising firm, Spike DDB, was for $219,113 — which was paid for by the Police Foundation.
“The Foundation approached and consulted several creative teams including the Spike DDB agency to help develop a public awareness campaign that would aim to strengthen the partnership between the NYPD and the communities it serves,” said spokesman Brady Littlefield. “We received tremendous input and ideas, and that process ultimately resulted in last spring’s neighborhood policing ad campaign.”
The partnership was revealed in the Police Foundation’s most recent tax filing covering some of 2016 and 2017.”
Whoever did the diggin’, nice catch! (if depressing)
“In 2014, Lee — a frequent fixture at Black Lives Matter rallies — created a mashup of clips from his critically acclaimed movie “Do the Right Thing” and footage from Eric Garner’s chokehold death.
In the 1989 movie, Lee’s character Radio Raheem, a black man, is choked to death by NYPD officers, inciting race riots.
“Radio Raheem And The Gentle Giant,” Lee captioned a screenshot of his video, which he linked to from his Instagram account.”
This one’s easier to see:
#Copaganda on Twitter also featured
“Ice Cube and Ice T performing frequently as “good” cops in movies and tv is definitely worth examining as crucial #Copaganda, given their key associations with “Fuck the Police” and “Cop Killer” respectively. It’s like the apotheosis of the media practice.”
In his August 17, 2018 review of Spike’s latest film, Blackkklansman: Spike Lee Delivers a Masterpiece’ Andrew Stewart at CP.
His final paragraph is:
“As a response to this film Boots Riley has come out with a critique of the picture, which he says [is] a defending the police-industrial complex. I would disagree with him. I think the film ends in a way that demonstrates, despite attempted reforms by “good cops” like Stallworth, there’s no hope for such efforts. I could be wrong and I respect Riley as an artist enough to respect his opinion. But I would also suggest the film merits watching to allow the viewer to decide.”
Also see Café coverage of commie hip-hop rapper Boots Riley’s new film ‘Sorry to bother you’.
And yes, Boots on Twitter: ‘Ok. Here are some thoughts on #Blackkklansman. Contains spoilers, so don’t read it if you haven’t seen it and you don’t wanna spoil it.’
I can’t read it, but he’d advised ‘downloading it’ (perhaps clicking it to make it stand alone?) or using zoom (control+, I reckon) to read when peeps asked him below his Tweet. other examples:
francis fukushima @iphoneavocado Aug 17:
“#copaganda reverses “innocent until proven guilty” by reinforcing the conditioned bias that cops are the good guys, and so their account starts out as the truth, and has to be disproved in order for an accused person to be seen as innocent”
OLAASM on Twitter has a whole lot more.
(cross-posted at c99percent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
“Outside of wearing this uniform, I’m a person, too.”
And interesting take from a NYC copper that invites multiple interpretations, some worthy of the PR label it unapologetically sports, some unintentionally revealing.
Capital is king of controlled opposition, whether with working class wages of the badge sporting minority “making good” in the institution, or the width of the window of opposition afforded a well-to-do mainstream media personality that allows him to keep his indy brand and remain mainstream.
The threat is your livelihood, the cost is your soul.
your capsule analysis is superb, thanks for it and the ridiculous ad. i’d run into it at the gothamist, and groaned. no, po-po are NOT just like us given the insane power differential fer crissake. esp. if one is poor, black, brown, unable to ‘obey orders’, or obey them fast enough, or gawd’s blood: resist them as eric garner or millions of others.
whoosh, i hadn’t a clue that boots’ critique had caused such a tempest, but there’s even a # on twitter for it and thee goofy theme: ‘of course you can reform the police from the inside!’ no, just make the po-po stop killing us, tormenting us, etc. i’ve been collecting bits of his critique of Blackkklansman, i can enter them later if anyone wants…but this is also key to me:
Riley also takes issue with Lee’s 2015 film Chi-Raq, which he says “plays into that myth” of black-on-black violence and “how that myth is used against movements for social justice.” Citing a 2016 essay he wrote in the Guardian, Riley writes “In the context of the political debate happening around the police’s role in racist attacks, this new film is a political brother of Chi-Raq.”
you may remember boots’ off guardian essay from april 2016: ‘Black culture isn’t the problem – systemic inequality is; Bill Clinton isn’t the first person to blame ‘black-on-black crime’ for higher poverty and prison rates among black Americans’
and of course capitalism’s children poverty and inequality are crucial, as are the psyop histories he brings to bear…as it still is today.
took a look at more police foundation videos: way to be a comprador, spike!
NYCPF Safe & Fair (narrated by tom selleck, lol)
and i found the entire transcript of boots’ critique of spike’s blackkkkkkklansman at the hollywood reporter; page 3 is best, imo.
but since i’m here, i just gotta embed this from my favorite tankie on twitter:
(zizek’s been on cloud 9 over ocasio2018: ‘socialism has come to amerikkka’, as has been lord help up: deena stryker at NEO. sigh.
spike lee’s the kind of rad who’s safe to brand w/the Nike Swoosh & be seen regularly front row midcourt at NBA Knick’s games. this may be a new low, I don’t know enough about him, but to corporate Murka he’s definitely “safe hands.” does make one wonder how it’s even legal for the gov’t or gov’t entities to hire g.d. PR firms.
lo-bleeping-l. someone on the gothamist thread had said he’d been sellin’ high tone gin or vodka or some such.
funny they hadn’t re-branded it ‘spike’s gin’ as they had ‘novichok vodka’.what.a.comprador. but the conversation over yonder considering i doubt whether many of the peeps had ever heard of either spike of commie boots riley.
stay well, j of 9.
i did take your great comments over yonder; thank you both. turns out at the end of the film spike used footage from the charleston anti protests w/ heather heyer, w/ a voice over of trumps’s sick conflation of ‘both groups are to blame…’ i got to wonderin’ how big a D-bot, O-bot spike is and found:
“Oh, yeah. He was the savior, black Jesus.” “I don’t care who it was,” he continued. “Expectations were way too high for what somebody can deliver, knowing how politics works and knowing that you have to deal with the Congress.” Lee then went on to criticize the Republican-led House as solidified in “Whatever you do, we’re blocking it. Every breath we take, we’re going to do what we can that you don’t get a second term. Bottom line. If it hurts America in the process, tough business.” [boilerplate excuses, no?]
but spike’s the one who’d told obomba about the charlottesville protest debacle…on the golf course at martha’s vineyard. barack had been out on spike’s boat, but ‘he doesn’t have my number’.
from the boston globe:
““I said, Mr. President, did you hear what happened in Charlottesville? He hadn’t,” Lee told Time. “I could see on his face — that shock. It was Aug. 12, year of our Lord, 2017.”
Time wrote that a spokesperson for Obama declined to comment.
The death of Heyer stayed in Lee’s mind, so much so that he called her mother, Susan Bro, to ask permission to use footage of Heyer’s death in his newest film, “BlacKkKlansman,” which opened nationwide Thursday. The film chronicles the true story of a black police detective who infiltrated the KKK while the organization was making efforts to moderate its message in order to appeal to a broader swath of Americans.
Lee told Time that Heyer’s death was a “horrific act of homegrown, red, white and blue, cherry-pie terrorism.” He said he was unswayed by criticism that Heyer’s death only drew attention because of her white skin color.”
but fukkit, look at this thread on twitter:
@BootsRiley
The tweet I’m quoting shows as unavailable, but one of the writers of Blackkklansman said, in defense of Stallworth, that he infiltrated an org that I was part of because we used “violent tactics”. Those violent tactics only having been known to be used against the Klan.
charlie wachtel replying to boots:
“in real life he also infiltrated the progressive labor party, a group known for their extremist beliefs and violent tactics…etc.”
@BootsRiley Aug 17
Boots Riley Retweeted
I was IN the Progressive Labor Party and my parents were before me. Fuck Ron Stallworth even a little bit more then. PLP was only violent when fighting the Klan, so I see why he and the CPD would be worried and want to infiltrate. https://t.co/RW5epRAIS4
but j of 9 in oly: this is exactly what you’d noted: (from the guardian reporting on ‘boots riley’s attack on poor spike’
““Sorry to Bother You, which has been lauded for its inventive take on capitalism, the gig economy and race relations, has earned $15.5m (£12.1m) at the US box office since its release in July. BlacKkKlansman has earned $11.2m after 10 days.” get it now?
he was the safe hands to make *the* Malcolm X movie. success within the system guarantees a conformist outlook since it’s a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for such success. the guy making Nike ads makes the M. X movie? wtf? spike is to movies as who is to office of potus? do he & B.Ho sit around & console each other at the Vineyard w/these fairy tales about a recalcitrant Congress during Black Jesus’ presidency?
the manufacture of street cred & authenticity around “hot button” issues (like #MeToo) is the trick of success, as it is w/more substantive fare, a la Kathryn Bilderberger, I mean Big&Low, and that Detroit race riot movie (that seems, mercifully, to have flopped? what was it called again? something totally clever like, oh, Detroit?). part of the problem is the nature of capitalism: big movies are big investments, ergo mediocrity reigns supreme, contrary to all the blather otherwise about capitalist innovation & risk-taking. and obfuscation of any subject threatening capitalist ideology, like Detroit race riots, is part of the job-description.
i suspect you’re right about malcolm x being in safe hands w/ teh spike. mainly what i remember was denzel (?) as a pimp in awesome threads and hats. that part of the con/diss? ooof, it’s been a lotta years ago.
yeah, i’ll bet spike and barack have one another on speed dial, they’re such fans of one another. BFFs. “the look on his face was Shock, i tell you, Shock!’
had to look up ‘detroit’: kathryn bigelow>hurt locker:, zero dark thirty: the hunt for bin laden > operation geronimo. seems to be a theme there. but big box office, lottsa awards.
but glorifying an asshole who claims he’d also infiltrated the progressive labor party cuz: violent tactics…no wonder boots said fuck you.
wordpress had deleted jay’s analysis on aug.4, but it’s up again; he doesn’t seem to know it (on twitter) RT had featured some video of hm, maybe on some aspect of russiagate, but he was dissin’ trans folks, meh.
The reason it’s so advisable not to have heroes goes beyond the cringe-worthy commentary on YooToob where sycophant fan-boyz, predominantly boys, that is, will maintain… do maintain that the object of their worship is the most brilliant — and lament why oh why can’t everyone be so brilliant or recognize the flawlessness of their figure… and they’ll die on that hill before ever criticizing anything they’ve ever uttered.
Contrarily, not having heroes at least affords one the ability take a person’s work or philosophical or political or social argument or commentary at face value — unless of course they are just too poisonous to name-drop, in which case the argument nevertheless stands and should, in that context or not.
Spike’s inchoate rehabilitation of X meshes well with the director’s overall image as somebody liberals can embrace without reservation. I hasten to point out — not that it changes much — that his Black Jesus comment is in the context of just how that absurd level of enthusiasm came to a hero worship that prevented his worshippers from criticizing him. Of course the rest of the commentary is boilerplate B.S.
Mars Blackmon became what should be instructive to anyone interested in seeing how control by the powerful works with the cooperation of those under control. I just don’t think he can see past the paycheck enough to understand it really.
Back to X: the “Malcolm X”, edited by Joe Wood has the definitive analysis, in my opinion, by Adolph Reed, who, as we may recall, more recently made little bones about his (Reed’s) transformation into a lesser-evilist. So I guess the thesis of this comment is that his chapter in the X book is still the best thing on the subject I’ve read in spite of whatever he might have to say right now.
it’s so excellent how you and j of 9 cause me so often to take wee crash courses into books, films, and historical social politics, including those with electoral politics as the eventually most defining moments that act to enable misrule that still is exalted on high. for instance: angela davis had a chapter in that book, and i bingled for examples, dinnae want to go to DN!, so:
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | March 27, 2012
The “delusional effect” that swept Black America with the advent of the First Black President has warped and weakened the mental powers of some of our most revered icons – and it has been painful to behold. Earlier this month, Angela Davis diminished herself as a scholar and thinker in a gush of nonsense about the corporate executive in the White House. The occasion was a conference on Empowering Women of Color, in Berkeley, California. Davis shared the stage with Grace Lee Boggs, the 96-year-old activist from Detroit. The subject was social transformation, but Davis suddenly launched into how wonderful it felt to see people “dancing in the streets” when Barack Obama was elected. She called that campaign a “victory, not of an individual, but of…people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.”
and yes to the adolph reed jacobinesque, rebecca solnitesque stuff, yeppers. but aha! bingling i found this at the crimson:
“A few pages away, historian Adolph Reed, Jr. criticizes the same artists for “spew[ing] garbled compounds of half-truth, distortion, Afrocentric drivel, and crackerbarrel wisdom.” Amiri Baraka, in his uneven but driving essay, inveighs against Spike Lee’s forthcoming film, calling it part of the “black bourgeoisie’s attack on Malcolm X.” Marlon Riggs later labels Baraka’s approach mere “rhetoric.”
and later, this whole page on the book…and esp. adolph reed’s portion…with three great comments by…mein herr von davidly! the rev. al inscription was icing on the cake.
Ms Davis is all over the place. As to Rev Al, as I wondered over there, somebody mighta writ that in there to move it at a higher price from they used bookstore. Who knows? Though the rev himself is hardly as mysterious as how Angela could wax such re. Bo Rama’s identity and also one day do an obscure interview wherein she does the same re. David Icke’s general philosophy.
sure and rev al’s signature couldda been faked, but if t’were authentic, the seller should have known (not hard to check i hear) and priced it accordingly, filed under: sharptonibilia, w/ provenance, of course. ;-)
you won’t be surprised to hear i’d had to wiki david ickes: ‘professional conspiracy theorist’ sounds about right. but it seems there must be a market for his…his…visions (?).
i can’t remember in what venue, forum…i’d actually watched to hear angela, and oh, was i disappointed. but she’s another case for radical leftist social movements getting coopted into the D party.
but all that makes me think about the claims of the rev barber movement, as well, and the coming ‘womens peace march on deecee’ in nov. and of course: ‘socialism has come to amerikkka’. well, er…not really. ach, back to iran and arranging flowers i go….
worst. air quality. in the. nation. as the commies at the Murdoch press known in Seattle as KFOX said of Seattle’s air, “worse than Beijing.” an hour and a half south it is not as bad, but fudge….I said to somebody today that, despite all the hand-wringing & mud-slinging about Trump’s denial of climate change, all the other politicos & most of the rest of society in fact agree with Trump, b/c they sure as hell aren’t doing anything about it. I might as well as have cut a loud one during him saying his wedding vows w/that comment. b/c it’s soooooo important that Trump mouth the same words that Clinton & Obama did. that’s the main thing.
who voted it worse air than beijing, and why? but no,no, ya got it wrong! barack’s a believer, and went to the cop conferences, and made (unenforceable) pledges! srsly, i get so tired of What a Great Man he is; a human rights award *and* a nobel peace prize.
tell that to all the folks around the world he sent into diaspora and killed outright, and those that He kept in cages. but he did it oh, so, silently while he smiled…oh, yeah, and the sip: the dream act. more wage slaves and taxes for amerika.
i know you keep up w/ hunziker, and his last two seemed pretty much just so, as he took apart some of the ‘comforting and balancing feedback loups’ or some such new reports that are soothing so many now.
me, what i’d worry most about in the far NW is radioactivity in everything: air, water, fish, sea shores…an the sea.
going to conferences & signing pledges are important! kind of like people’s opinions, generally. since most of us lie most of the time, imho, about what we “really believe,” how much easier it is to do that when sitting on piles of money provided via the attaboys from friends at GSax & Lockheed (or MGM or whoever in Spike’s case)? it feels good to be concerned about things & have opinions. sure as hell beats doing something about anything.
but thanks for the pro-tip on the radiation. down w/sperm! up w/cancer!
that people lie about what they believe: yes: including in polls. or in virtue signaling, but having opinions, doing nothing reminds me of chomsky, often chris hedges.
and up w/ glow in the dark skin! i used to be rather close to jerry casale ‘for me, not you’ on the video screen. kent, ohio, yes, when i was 15, he was 18, made for a hella fraught situation.
he then turned into jihad jerry; but he was initially radicalized by the kent state murders.