Coonin’, on a Sunday Afternoon

By: dwil

Yes they do... both Black and White.

Yes they do... both Black and White.

Paul Mooney said it best in “Why We Laugh: Black comedians on Black comedy”:

“They know what they’re doing…

It takes practice to coon.”

And the practice of cooning occurs across the board in America. Politicians coon -just ask Michael “You aren’t going to blow my high, baby” Steele. Entertainers coon – ask way too many comedians. Businessmen coon – Bob “Black Excrement Television” Johnson. Social leaders coon – Al and Jesse practice equal opportunity tag team cooning. Athletes coon like there’s no tomorrow – and after being told they need to play every second as if there is no tomorrow if they want to make it as pros, perhaps they’re brainwashed. Sportswriters coon – too many of them rush to judge a Black athlete before their White peers, setting the table for the pillorying to come, even if it turns out they have erred in their assessment of the Black athlete they used to make points with their White home boys. Editors coon. They won’t hire a Black writer unless they have a minimum of 10 lawn jockey columns in their resumes; or hire Black writer who are an embarrassment by anyone’s standards to prop up the mediocre White writers they surround.

So you see, cooning is everywhere. From the halls of every HBCU to the halls of Congress.

But cooning is not restricted to Black people.

Cooning is universal.

Since becoming a “Super Bowl Hero” writ large, Drew Brees has turned to cooning. The moment he proclaimed he was going to Disney World he devolved from leader of men to coon. Since he has appeared on all the proper morning and “late night shows, retelling the same stories, repeating the feelings within a game in which there was no thought, only action. And when he donned the Burger King costume Drew Brees transformed himself from NFL quarterback and team leader to Drew Brees, King of Coons.

His opposing team opposite, Peyton Manning, has cooned for so long now, that if his team won Super Bowl XLIV, there would be few more advertisement spots his “team” has not already explored and, most likely, turned down.

The New Orleans Saints victory, by hook or by crook, was a boon to what is now a virtual Madison Avenue. A new coon was needed to resell the products already shoved don our throats by nondescript Black and White men with faces full of shaving cream while their significant – last night booty call – other stares at them longingly in the mirror – still wearing their alcohol-spotted shirt from the night before, of course.

And often when a new coon is needed, professional sporting leagues look to fill those spaces. It is an evil symbiotic relationship that exists between the games and the corporations that sponsor the games.

It is malignant enough that we live in an economic environment in which the currency we use to trade our services and time for goods is a non-entity and that our services feed the wealthy so that we can remain poor. Perhaps the reason we do this is because our financial system is so much a nystery. But it is of the utmost importance to gain grasp this system to grasp why so many people feel it necessary to coon. The way our dollars become valueless is as follows (except all transactions today are done on a computer – there are no physical exchanges; only 3% of our “money” exists in the physical world while the other 97% exists as computer tabulations):

The government requests $10 million, the Federal Reserve says we’ll buy $10 million in government bonds from you to cover the $10 million you want. These are “Treasury Bonds.” The government creates, on paper, “Bond Notes and designates to them a value of $10 million and sends them over to the Fed. The Fed then makes $10 million in Federal Reserve Notes (sound familiar?). After the parties exchange the bonds and notes, the government deposits the money in a bank – one of the United States’ “Central Banks.” Ten billion dollars is added to the U.S. money supply.

Government Bonds are instruments of debt. So, when the Fed buys the Bonds, they buy them, purportedly, with the intent of the money being repaid. So, money created whole cloth is created in debt.

The %10 million becomes part of the Central Bank’s reserves, as do all deposits. Of the $10 million, $1 million is the “required” reserve the bank must hold in its vaults, while the other $9 million is an “excessive reserve” and can be used for new loans. Interestingly, the $9 millon is not coming from the original $10 million deposited but is an additional $9 million on top of the $10 million deposited! This creates a total of $19 million and is how our money supply is expanded (all this is explained in a book by the Fed called “Modern Money Mechanics”).

When the banks make loans, rather than actually paying out money on the loans, they make “Promissory Notes” (or, “contracts”) in exchange for “Notes” (money) to the borrower’s (in this case the government) transaction accounts. The $9 million can come into existence because there is a demand for the it and there is $1 million deposit that satisfies the reserve requirements.

Now, say you walk into a bank and borrow $9 million. When you get your loan, you deposit the money into your bank account.

The process then repeats.

That money becomes part of the bank’s reserves. Ten percent, or $900,000 is a required reserve and the rest is excessive reserve, which means $8.1 million becomes newly-created money ready to be loaned once again. The process can be repeated almost infinitely. In this case, the original $10 million becomes almost $90 million. For every deposit occurring in a bank, nine times the amount of that deposit can be created out of ——— nothing.

What gives this newly-created money value? The previously-existing money. The “new” money steals value from the original money, which creates the phenomenon called “inflation.” Inflation is money created independent of supply or demand of goods in the economy. Inflation is, basically, a tax which is to be repaid by the public. One dollar in 1913 required $21.67 in 2007 to match the 1913 dollar’s value.

Folks, this means, since the Federal Reserve came into existence in 1913, our dollar has been devalued by 96%.

Thought of in another way, money is debt and debt is money.

Each dollar in our wallets was lent by someone and is owed to someone.

There is one additional piece to this equation ——— Interest. Each loan made is made with Interest. Money goes to the Central Banks and then is given to commercial banks which make loans to you and I, only what is known as the “Principal” is created in the money supply.

So, where is the money that is the Interest?

There isn’t any. It does not exist. The amount of money owed to banks (Principal plus Interest) will always exceed the amount of money in existence (Principal). New money is always needed to cover the built-in deficit rigged into this system (called, the Fractional Reserve Policy), which for us means bankruptcy and foreclosure is a perpetual way of life for at least some citizens in America.

Yes, representations of “money” are valueless and since every so-called piece of currency we own can be loaned nine times its original amount, we essentially have no money at all. and yet it is we who have incurred this debt and are charged, through the money we make, to repay the debt. We attempt to repay the debt through the act of employment. But the game is such that we can never repay the debt.

And so, we are slaves ———- all of us.

—————————-

Since we are already slaves, it makes less sense that some of us would seek to curry favor with the powers that be by cooning. Once you are seen as separate there is no inclusion into the club that lives to find more and new ways to indenture its servants. Brees’ present cooning only allows him so much room to err: a losing season next year and the press will call him a fluke, opportunities to eating burgers on cue while making money will disappear. There will be no master of ceremonies float rides and paper bags will once again be the chosen Mardi Gras mask of the locals.

Just Tuesday, as Tiger Woods attempts to come to grips with his psychical problems and repair his relationship with his wife, one of his alleged whores – a porn star, at that – claims he impregnated her twice while his wife was pregnant. It is a dastardly allegation by a nasty woman who is either maleficent enough do concoct her own porn-scorn tale, or has a bevy of shit stormers around her sitting at desks or driving Porsches under the pink-brown Los Angeles afternoon sky with nothing better to do than dream someone’s else’ worst nightmare. That they are rewarded handsomely by their masters is no accident. Mercenary thoughts are part and parcel to their beings and they revel in being surrounded by minions who yearn to be like them but know well they are ultimately subordinates and are happy with the ability to control a microscopic slice of the world.

All this is happening with the backdrop of the mainstream press breathlessly reporting – and cooning for their masters – the story without giving one second of thought to the veracity of the porn woman’s story.

And finally, all this past weekend the state of the NBA was on the minds of many sports fans and may writers in the press. Besides trade talk and collective bargaining discussions, the main topic of conversation was the NBA’s “one and done” rule. It is the most blatantly racist act of governance in America sports today. That a young Black man, save for two of note, must attend one year of college before entering the NBA draft. The rule was instituted by the team owners with their commissioner David Stern as their mouthpiece. Stern swore it was enacted for the player’s good; that the young men needed a year away from home and neighborhood high school chums to grow in maturity, to become imbued in the life of a student-athlete juggling life as well as basketball – to prepare then for life in “The League.”

In actuality the sole reason for the one and done rule was and is to allow NBA scouts a year to assess a player’s talent on a level higher than high school so that they might consult their tea leaves and divine whether or not their performances in college will translate to the pros. Of course, for the men already donning NBA uniforms, the one and done gives veterans and reserves an extra year of NBA life and NBA money.

What was saddest was that to a man, each NBA player with a voice was in favor of the rule. They all spoke of collegiate life and its splendor – how it was the best time of their lives. Those who left early belatedly rued the fact that they left early; those who endured all four years under some not good enough to be a head coach in the NBA, elder tyrant with a silver recruiting tongue swore that given a do-over, they would choose college every time.

They cooned of the “pageantry.” They cooned about the love they had for their coaches. They cooned for March Madness and that added hundreds of millions of dollars made off the backs of 64 teams of 12 players each working their asses off for free. They cooned for the NBA and protected Stern’s “vision” for forcing young men to think about something more than an NBA salary and endorsement money.

They shuffled and buffled, and grinned and gamed. They cooned their asses off for the owners, for Stern, for the NCAA, and every other corporate master they could conjure.

And not one player queried was White. No, this was special cooning – Black-on-Black cooning. These men acted solely to steal the future of many poor, inner-city young Black men who have been told all their lives their special talent was with their bodies. All their experiences all their lives have ended with the same refrain: ‘one day you gonna be in the NBA boy.’ And All-Star weekend they were forced to listen to their the men they aspire to be tell them to look at the conditions in which they live, the squalor and the despair ——— and dream of attending college, never knowing if the same people they left in July will be among the living come late spring. The veteran sportswriters agreed. Most of them, Black and White, pleaded to Stern to seek a 20 and above age limit rule when the players and owners meet to bargain the player’s lives away.

There is a coon for every moment, for every occasion. There is a coon waiting to seek to make coons of us all. Cooning for a slice of american pie that doesn’t even exist.

Yet the fact remains…

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Addendum:
More cooning…
Wednesday morning on the ESPN radio-television simulcast, Mike and Mike in the Morning, co-host Mike Greenberg brought up for discussion Minnesota Vikings linebacker Ray Edwards’ comment that he felt NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s nine million dollar salary is exorbitant. Edwards is one of the many veterans in his fifth year in the league. Because of the circumstances of the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement (uncapped salaries and more), Edwards, who would normally be an unrestricted free agent, is instead a restricted free agent. Because of this quirk in the CBA, Edwards will make at most, three million dollars this season when under normal circumstances he would garner a signing bonus in the area of eight to 10 million dollars, plus a five million dollar annual salary.

Goodell’s salary was a point of contention during the week of Super XLIV, as well. Most analysts and former players felt Goodell’s pay was, if not on the outer edge of exorbitant, far outstripped his duties.

However, when Greenberg broached the subject of Goodell’s salary in the context of Edward’s statement and the general feeling among NFL players, former defensive lineman and now NFL analyst Marcellus Wiley went immediately into coon mode:

“I think he’s [Edwards] in the minority on this one. I think most players will understand the politics in the business in a sense that — in collective bargaining there are two parts that agree for things and two parts that disagree for certain things. And you have to blame the player’s union as much as you have to blame the NFL, the commissioner, the owners just because they struck this deal. So, there are two signatures that’s on the deal that’s in place right now. Obviously there’s gonna be issues — a walk out, or a forced labor issue next year. But what Edwards is doing is pickin’ a fight with the wrong person. When you’re talking about commissioner Goodell and his fair market value of nine million dollars or whatever it may be, that not a direct reflection of what his job is. First of all this is a man in charge of a multi-billion dollar business, the NFL. Second of all, he’s in charge of 32 billionaires. And then he’s also tryin’ to make sure that the labor force, the players, are also respected in this entire process. His salary has nothin’ to do —- there’s enough money in the NFL where he can make nine million dollars and Ray Edwards can make what he’s supposed to make…. some of this is timing, some of this is the stroke of the luck is bad.”

Really Marcellus? Really? This is a Columbia University grad? Beyond the convoluted blather that was obviously a product of Wiley pontificating just to hear his own voice, he actually averred that Roger Goodell is trying to ensure that the players are respected. And to claim that there’s enough money to go around? When owners want to roll back the revenue share from 60%-40% on favor of the players to 50-50? When there’s not enough money, allegedly, for an adequate pension for former players?

Just goes to show, every second of every day, somebody’s out there coonin’.

Also….
Thoughts, best wishes, and more go out to Denver Nuggets head coach George Karl.

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