[RWWATCH] Black Entertaiment Television Serving Bush Agenda

[Rich Cowan]

RWWATCH -- September 5, 2001   (please forward)

[Thanks to Douglas Schwegler for passing this on!   -r]


Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 23:35:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Patrick L Mason <pmason@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>
Subject:  Robert L. Johnson: Painted Black

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/082701/chait082701.html

The New Republic   August 27, 2001

Robert Johnson, W.'s favorite race baiter

Painted Black   By Jonathan Chait

Robert L. Johnson came to the Bush administration's
attention when it needed him most. The cause of the White
House's duress was an annoyingly munificent collection of
millionaires, headed by Bill Gates Sr., who had banded
together to oppose President Bush's plan to abolish the
estate tax. In newspaper ads and press conferences, they
held forth on the obligation of the wealthy to give back to
society. So effectively did they seize the moral high ground
that even the most fervent opponents of the estate tax
resigned themselves to it. "[I]t is looking increasingly
doubtful," reported The Wall Street Journal a week later,
"that large estates will escape federal taxation
altogether."

Evidently this didn't sit well with Johnson, the billionaire
founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), whose
family stood to gain millions if Bush succeeded. Johnson is
not a man with a deep sense of social obligation. Not long
ago, when an interviewer prodded him for his views on
philanthropy, Johnson scoffed, "[B]eing a very wealthy
person is not something that I wake up in the morning and
say, `Gee, I got all this money. How do I give it away?'"
There is, however, an important exception to this
every-man-for-himself ethos: society's duty to aid extremely
wealthy African Americans. This social obligation Johnson
takes very seriously.

So Johnson did what he often does when his interests are at
stake: He played the race card. Johnson gathered a
collection of black business leaders and demanded an end to
the estate tax. Taking out newspaper ads of their own,
Johnson's group attacked the tax for draining wealth from
the black community. Unlike "very wealthy white Americans"
who supported the tax, he declared, "We as African Americans
have come to our wealth on a different path, a different
road than they have." Gates and his friends, Johnson
implied, were not really promoting the common good; they
were trying to keep the black man down. All of a sudden, it
was not so clear who held the moral high ground.

Estate tax repeal had become a civil rights issue.

Almost no one -- not even the White House -- had thought to
frame the issue this way. And for good reason: It is a
bizarre inversion of the truth. "Elimination of the Estate
Tax," Johnson's ad argued, using extraneous capitalizations
for emphasis, "will help close the wealth gap in this nation
between African American families and White families." But
the estate tax is paid only by people who inherit large
fortunes, and black people, as one might suspect, are far
less likely than white people to do so. (Blacks make up
about 12 percent of the population, but less than one-half
of 1 percent of estate tax payers.) And the revenues from
the tax, obviously, fund government programs, which tend to
help those with low incomes, who are disproportionately
black. Repealing the estate tax, therefore, would
dramatically widen the wealth gap.

But Johnson gave Bush the cover he needed to once again cast
himself as a champion of minority interests. "As Robert
Johnson of Black Entertainment Television argues, the death
tax and double taxation weighs heavily on minorities," said
Bush, who added that his plan would allow people to transfer
wealth "from one generation to the next, regardless of a
person's race."

Fortunately for Johnson, and even more fortunately for his
heirs, estate tax repeal subsequently passed into law. But
Johnson's campaign to abolish the estate tax was more than
just a way to save a few million bucks. It was the beginning
of a political partnership between the CEO of BET and the
president of the United States, one that has now turned its
attention to an even grander cause: the privatization of
Social Security. On May 2, Bush appointed Johnson to his
commission charged with transforming the popular program.
Once again, Johnson has racialized a long- standing
conservative crusade. We must turn Social Security into a
system with individual investment accounts, he argues,
because the existing program unfairly shortchanges blacks.
Social Security overhaul is Bush's most radical -- and most
politically perilous -- aspiration. That the administration
has entrusted Johnson with this task, despite his lack of
expertise (and, indeed, his lack of any history of public
interest in the issue), is a measure of the ideological
reliability with which it now regards him. Johnson,
according to one analyst, "is trying to position himself as
Bush's go-to guy in the African American community." And it
looks like he's succeeding.

At first blush, there is something peculiar about this
burgeoning partnership. Before Bush took office, Johnson cut
the standard political profile of a member of the black
bourgeoisie -- his strongest political connections were with
the civil rights establishment, and he donated hundreds of
thousands of dollars to Democrats. And yet his alliance with
the president is not as strange as it may appear. Johnson
has spent his career converting the moral capital of the
black struggle for equality to his own personal economic
advantage. One of Bush's central innovations has been to
cloak an economic agenda radically geared to the interests
of the wealthy in multicultural imagery. In a sense, the
business strategy of Robert Johnson and the political
strategy of George W. Bush were destined for each other.
Johnson presents himself as the very opposite of a shrewd
manipulator of racial politics.

His preferred self-image is that of a bottom-line
businessman who does his best to disregard racial barriers.
A New York Times profile last year began with Johnson
recounting how, early in his career, he swallowed his anger
while a white colleague told a racist joke at a bar.
(Profiles of Johnson often feature him recounting racial
slights, always to make the point that he is not bothered by
them.) The Times summed up Johnson's ethos this way: "That
philosophy -- keep emotions in check, don't let issues of
race get in the way of the deal -- has helped Mr. Johnson,
54, become one of the country's most successful black
entrepreneurs."

But while Johnson's talent as a businessman is undeniable --
he has, after all, earned more than $1 billion from scratch
-- he didn't come by his fortune through the classic
build-a-better-mousetrap method of American capitalism.
Rather, his genius lies in finding certain corners of the
economy where he can guarantee himself a steady stream of
risk-free profit without having to provide goods or services
of any special value. He does so by making himself
politically indispensable to his business partners.

Johnson's career has less in common with Henry Ford than
with, say, the Soviet gas monopoly.

And to acquire such franchises, he offers not baksheesh but
racial absolution. Johnson first demonstrated this ability
in 1979, when, as a cable TV lobbyist, he came up with the
one true innovation in his business career: a cable TV
station targeted to black viewers. At the time, cities
represented cable's only remaining untapped market.

And cable companies that could claim to support black
culture enjoyed a political advantage in the race to wire
them. All of which set the stage for Johnson's sweetheart
deal. A Denver-based cable giant called TCI put up half a
million dollars to acquire a minority share of Johnson's new
network, which he called Black Entertainment Television.
Johnson got the majority stake -- after putting up just
$15,000 of his own money. The benefit to TCI was clear: It
could tell the mayors and city councils in charge of doling
out contracts that it carried and financed a black-owned,
black-themed station. "Under traditional investment
standards, the return on investment has not been what one
would look for," a TCI official told The Washington Post ten
years later. But that, he added, doesn't account for "how
much goodwill we get from making a major attempt to provide
programming of interest to the minority community." Johnson,
meanwhile, reaped a windfall.

Of course, now that Johnson had a cable station, he had to
put content on the air. But this turned out to be pretty
simple, too. Since BET's main purpose was to score political
points for Johnson's financial patron, the actual
programming hardly mattered.

As Johnson liked to tell his staff, "We don't have to
reinvent the wheel. We just have to paint it black." During
its first couple of years, BET broadcast only two hours per
week -- an old movie on Friday nights. It took four years to
expand to 24-hour broadcasting, and its main criterion still
seems to be finding ways to fill airtime at no cost. The
network devotes hour after hour to infomercials -- "Black
Entertainment Television," goes one joke, "is neither black
nor entertainment." And it relies heavily on music videos,
which studios provide to the network for free in order to
promote their albums and which, as of two years ago,
accounted for more than half of BET's content.

Unfortunately, the videos tend to feature the least edifying
elements of African American culture -- gangsta rappers and
booty-shaking dancers. That's one reason Johnson and BET
have for years come under withering criticism within the
African American community. One BET executive confessed at a
music conference in June 1996 that she doesn't permit her
daughter to watch the station. Aaron McGruder, who authors
an edgy cartoon about black life, has made a living
disparaging Johnson. In one strip, a character asserts that
he "used to be a firm believer" that "powerful black
business people would then act in the best interests of
black America." But then "BET shot a few holes in that
theory."

Johnson has also endured criticism for serving as a front
man for TCI -- a role he reprised in 1984 when he acquired
the rights to provide cable television to Washington, D.C.
Like many other local governments, Washington's city council
put great emphasis on finding a locally owned, minority
contractor. Even though the council's cable committee
recommended another firm, Johnson's group won the bid, in
large part -- as the Post suggested at the time -- because
its shareholders included a number of cronies and financial
donors of then-Mayor Marion Barry.

Johnson promised that his company "would not be back seeking
relief from promises we could not keep." But, within a few
months, Johnson acknowledged (as did cable contractors in
other cities) that he could not keep his commitment without
millions of dollars in concessions from the city. Johnson
also obtained tens of millions in additional financing from
TCI, giving it financial control of the operation. With
Johnson and his local, minority partners reduced to
figureheads, a Post columnist observed, "Would the D.C. City
Council have given the cable franchise in the first place to
a white company from Denver with local black managers? I
doubt it."

Johnson has a blunt reply to such detractors. "There are
thousands of white businessmen who never get asked, `Are you
a hero?' and never are asked what they have given back to
the white community," he told C-SPAN in 1992, "What are my
responsibilities to black people at large? If I help my
family get over and deal with the problems they might
confront, then I have achieved that one goal that is my
responsibility to society at large."

As Johnson tells it, he asks only to be treated like any
other entrepreneur, black or white. But he applies his
disregard for race selectively. When he's asked to help the
black community, he's just a businessman. On the other hand,
when Johnson's own interests are at stake, he portrays
himself as a stand-in for black America.

Race is his catchall justification for all sorts of socially
and economically noxious behavior. He has turned the racial
mau-mau into a business plan.

For example, Johnson has a long record of quashing efforts
by his underpaid employees to unionize. On one occasion he
laid off or reduced the hours of BET workers who joined an
electricians' union, an action that a federal judge
subsequently ruled illegal.

He justifies such behavior by accusing the unions of racial
bias for trying to organize a black-owned network. "I don't
see them taking part in the [naacp's threatened network]
boycott. I don't see them writing open letters to the
networks about their lack of black representation. Why do
they pick on BET? Why not ABC or NBC or Fox?"

In 1994 Johnson brought his tactics to the world of
professional sports when he decided he wanted to purchase
Washington's NBA franchise, the Bullets. When the team's
owner, Abe Pollin, turned down his entreaties, Johnson tried
another tack. "I told him, `Abe, you're from the suburbs,
I'm from the city,'" he recounted to the Post, "`You're
white, I'm black. The city is mostly black, and the players
are too.'" When Pollin resisted this line of reasoning,
Johnson declared that he wanted to bring a second NBA
franchise to the area. The league, he acknowledged,
traditionally discourages the establishment of a new
franchise in such close proximity to an existing one. But,
he mused, it might not want to oppose a prospective black
owner. That plan failed, too, but only after Johnson waged a
protracted fight against Pollin's effort to build a new
arena in downtown Washington -- just the sort of economic
development most boosters of the majority-black city
encourage.

But the quintessential Robert Johnson business deal was
unveiled last spring, when United Airlines announced its
intention to purchase its main rival, US Airways. The merger
was politically perilous, since the Clinton Justice
Department did not seem favorably disposed toward another
merger in such a heavily consolidated industry. The airlines
tried to solve this problem by cutting Johnson in on the
deal. Under the proposed arrangement, Johnson would create a
new airline, DC Air. DC Air would lease its planes and
runway spots from United, with which -- in theory -- it
would also compete.

It was yet another no-lose proposition for Johnson. He would
get a pre-fab airline -- complete with planes, parts, and
the people to make it work -- for well below market value.
(Continental Airlines subsequently offered to pay 50 percent
more than Johnson for the same assets.) In return, Johnson
provided United essentially the same thing Virgil "the Turk"
Sollozzo wanted from Don Corleone: police and political
protection.

Johnson enjoyed a close relationship with President Clinton,
having donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to
Democratic campaigns. Airline analysts speculated -- but, of
course, could not prove -- that United believed Johnson's
influence could help make antitrust concerns disappear.

Johnson quickly went about using race to demonize the
merger's opponents. In a hearing on June 15 of last year,
James Oberstar, the top-ranking Democrat on the House
Transportation Committee, pointed out that DC Air would be
dependent on its supposed rival, United. "That's not a real
competitive environment," Oberstar noted. At that point he
slipped in an unfortunate phrase: "That's a plantation."
Oberstar later explained that he was trying to draw an
analogy to the serf-like status of the District of Columbia,
which is sometimes called "the last plantation." But US
Airways Chairman Stephen Wolf saw the remark on C-SPAN, and
-- no doubt sensing an opportunity -- phoned Johnson, who
pounced. Calling Oberstar's remark "blatant racism," he
demanded that the congressman apologize and recuse himself
from the issue. Oberstar dutifully apologized, but Johnson
played the race card again the following January, accusing
New York Senator Charles E. Schumer, a merger critic, of
favoring DC Air's rivals "because they are white
businesspersons."

Despite Johnson's best efforts, the Justice Department
delayed the merger. In fact, its review dragged on past the
end of the year (before being officially nixed at the end of
July). But, even before the deal fell through, something
happened that completely overturned its political calculus:
Bush took office. All at once, Johnson's connections with
Clinton were useless. "I think with [Johnson's] issue on the
airlines," speculates Harry Alford, a fellow black
anti-estate-tax activist, "he saw he had to get both sides
of the aisle."

As Alford implies, it is highly unlikely that Johnson would
have undergone such a rapid political metamorphosis had his
business dealings not demanded it. Yet his newfound
conservatism is not entirely philosophically incoherent. The
premise of Johnson's special pleading has always been that
his business interests are the only legitimate civil rights
issue. His right to amass more wealth trumps his employees'
interest in higher wages, the community's interest in
non-debasing black entertainment, and travelers' interest in
affordable airfares. The fact that many of the people on the
other side of the equation are black does not enter into
Johnson's accounting. And, in recent months, he seems to
have discovered that the moral logic that propelled his
spectacular business career has an application in the world
of public policy as well.

Johnson's interest in the estate tax is, of course, a direct
consequence of his financial interests. His membership on
the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, on
the other hand, came about by accident. In mid-March,
Johnson delivered a speech at Brown University about his
life. By happenstance, Sam Beard was in the audience.

Beard is a full-time evangelist for Social Security
privatization. He is particularly intent on sharing the
gospel with nonconservatives -- he treated me to a soliloquy
in the course of telling this story -- and can explain the
idea so it sounds not like the product of right-wing think
tanks but like the natural outgrowth of the Great Society.
Beard saw in Johnson an ideal convert. "His whole
presentation is about wealth," recounts Beard, meaning this
as a compliment. Beard struck up a conversation with Johnson
and, finding him receptive, asked whether he would like to
serve on a presidential commission on the topic if invited
to. Johnson said yes.

Chuck Blahous, the White House staffer in charge of Social
Security reform, does not recall the precise genesis of
Johnson's involvement. "We were looking for diversity of
background," he explains. In fact, there is nothing in the
public record to suggest that Johnson had any previous
interest in the topic. And that may have worked in his
favor.

Johnson's obvious role on the commission is to argue that
Social Security privatization will help blacks, who, he
claims, are treated unfairly by the current system.
Pro-privatization think tanks, such as the Heritage
Foundation and the Cato Institute, have argued that for
years, pumping out position papers and targeting the black
media. But the idea never received much mainstream attention
until Bush anointed Johnson to take it up. Johnson well
understands his role -- he brings up the racial angle at
every turn, generally leaving to others the broader case for
personal accounts. He doesn't have to reinvent the case for
privatization. He just has to paint it black.

Johnson's argument is rooted in a simple misunderstanding.
"African Americans who contribute to the Social Security
system and payroll taxes," he says, "also have one of the
highest mortality rates, so in the end, they may not receive
the full benefits of what they put in Social Security." And
it's true that blacks, on average, die younger than whites.
Social Security pays its retirement benefits only as long as
a worker is alive.

Therefore, privatizers conclude, blacks would particularly
benefit from individual retirement accounts. That way, those
who die early won't get less benefits -- extra money in
their account will be passed on to their heirs.

There are two reasons this conclusion is false. First,
Social Security does more than pay benefits to retirees. It
also gives benefits to the families of workers who die or
are disabled at a young age. Since black workers are more
likely to suffer workplace injuries, they benefit
disproportionately from this part of the program. And the
more Social Security tax dollars are drained away into
private accounts -- as Bush proposes to do -- the less that
is available for survivors' benefits.

Second, Social Security's retirement benefits are
progressive: They offer a higher rate of return to
lower-paid workers. Since black workers, on average, earn
less than the population at large, they benefit from this
redistribution. This more than makes up for any loss they
suffer from dying younger. On the whole, then, Social
Security redistributes money from whites to blacks. Most
plans for private accounts do not. As with the estate tax,
Johnson has his racial analysis backward.

But Johnson's argument is more than untrue; it is deeply
revealing. Before Social Security, retirees couldn't know
how much of a pension to allot themselves out of their
savings, if they had any, because they didn't know how long
they would live. If they spent too much, they might outlive
their savings. Social Security fixed that problem by giving
retired workers a guaranteed income for as long as they
lived. Johnson, and Bush's commission, now argue that it
would make more sense to give each retiree an individual
account. It's true that this one feature, by itself, would
tend to benefit those who die younger. But, of course,
nobody can be certain that he or she will die young.

Suppose we were to discover that, say, Italian-Americans are
somewhat less likely than other Americans to lose their
homes from natural disasters. One could then make the case
that federal disaster relief constitutes a net transfer of
wealth out of their community, and that they should oppose
it. The important point here is not even that blacks
wouldn't benefit from Social Security privatization. It's
that Johnson implicitly rejects the very idea that politics
is about the common good.

Conservatives used to vehemently -- sometimes even
eloquently -- oppose this kind of thinking. Color-blindness,
they once insisted, was the only moral basis for decent
public policy. But the Bush administration has changed that.
It boasts incessantly about its racial, ethnic, and gender
diversity and has hatched a slew of initiatives targeted at
specific constituencies. For women, the White House is
pushing the "Winning Women" campaign. For Catholics, Bush
appropriates the language of the Church. For
Mexican-Americans, Bush last month floated an amnesty
program that wouldn't apply to all immigrants -- just this
one, politically important immigrant group. Bush, of course,
did not invent identity politics; his contribution has been
to tether it to policies geared toward the interests of
accumulated wealth.

In short, Bushism and Johnsonism are made for each other;
their nascent alliance represents a historic synthesis of
the racial separatism of the left and the libertarianism of
the right. Johnson, even more than Bush, seemed to recognize
this commonality from the beginning. "If he's smart," the
businessman said of the president last April, "he'd take the
opportunity to reach out to these African American business
leaders and say, `We agree on at least one thing. What else
can we talk about?'" The answer, alas, is plenty.

--

Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.

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