By Scotty Reid – Black Talk Radio Network

Perhaps by now you have heard the racist comments of Jack Burkman a GOP strategist who is the founder and President of Burkman Associates, LLC, which is a private firm based in Washington, DC that works to get Republicans elected. Based on his anti-immigrant and anti-African comments you just heard, it would be safe to assume that he more than likely is working with a few Tea Party candidates. Burkman not only appears regularly on Fox News, a political media outlet run by the famed propagandist Roger Ailes, but he also routinely appears on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and CNBC. Fox News is teaming with racists and produces a lot of objectionable content, so he will more than likely be given more airtime as a reward but It will be interesting to see which of the other networks will continue to give him a platform and employ an out of the closet racist.



Note that the first thing out of Burkman’s mouth when asked what is wrong with the U.S. Postal Service; he immediately attacked alleged Nigerian and Ethiopian postal workers. This means this was a planned racial attack as most people when participating in media panels usually think about what they are going to say once they know what the topic is going to be. Also note that the only thing the host of Fox Business New’s Money Rocks called Burkman out for is his absurd point that we should close down the Postal Service because politicians are naming post offices after themselves while still being alive. It would seem near impossible to name something after yourself when you are dead. The host Eric Boiling seemed perfectly ok with Burkman’s ethnic attacks on African immigrants.

However, there is an underlying political motive for Burkman’s racist attacks on African immigrants and suggestion that President Obama should cease federal funding of the Postal Service which in fact is an independent agency mandated by the Constitution which does not and has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with disabled employees who are mostly military veterans and overseas voters, who again the majority of which are soldiers deployed overseas. Why would Burkman lie about the federal government funding the U.S. Postal Service and specifically blame African immigrants? Well first, he knows the average Fox fanatic is not going to check his facts and two, on a subconscious level it suggests that President Obama who is of African descent and whose birthplace and thereby citizenship has long been questioned by lunatic right wing birther conspiracy theorists, and he along with unions are protecting the jobs of undeserving African immigrants who have come here to rip off the U.S. Taxpayer.



The entire segment is designed to convince voters that we need to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Republicans have an agenda to privatize everything so that the top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans can then buy stock in these companies to create more wealth for them and their families. According to research done by Finance My Money, the “top 1 percent control 83 percent of U.S. stocks. As a share of personal income mortgage debt ate up 19 percent in 1949. In 2003 it went up to 85 percent.” Lets remember that Republicans also want to eliminate Social Security and privatize it so that the same Wall Street banksters who received a bail out they did not have to pay back under Bush, can have access to more taxpayer money that would be readily available to them if Republicans like Senator Jim DeMint have their way and according to Finance My Money, “80 percent of Americans 65 years and older depend on Social Security for half of their income.”

While discussing the profits of Fed Ex and UPS, which by the way are unionized just like the U.S. Postal Service, have themselves been threatened with strikes by union workers at one time or another. The lying racist Burkman advances the myth that the constitutionally mandated U.S. Postal Service has a monopoly on delivering mail which is really puzzling since he just mentioned the billion dollar profits of the two largest private carriers. The only explanation is that liars often get confused and quickly forget previous lies while spinning their webs of deceit or perhaps he thinks that private mail companies should have access to tax payer bought and paid for mailboxes that outnumber the mailboxes provided by private companies. The only thing the U.S. Postal Service has a monopoly on is the delivery of non-urgent mail which has been greatly reduced by the use of email.



Burkman was finally called out for his racism by former Republican New York Senator Al D’Amato who enjoyed bi-partisan support among voters in his district during his long political career who would call Burkman a “nasty racist” and told him to “Shut up, I listened to your racist bullshit”. However, while D’Amato should be commended for doing what any responsible host should have done but Eric Boiling failed to do for whatever reasons, probably because he and panelist S. E. Cupp thought Burkman’s racism was a laughing matter. D’ Amato did agree that the U.S. Postal service should be privatized which would require a Constitutional Amendment which flies in the face of the conservative crowd that believes it should be as the founders framed it.

Some of the silly arguments put forth by panelist S. E. Cupp, a conservative columnist, was that she had not been inside of a post office in five years and then talked about how she also does not need to go inside a bank because she could take a photograph of a check and then email it to her bank. Email is one of the reasons that the U.S. Postal Service has lost business and a person does not necessarily need to go into a post office either as they can purchase stamps online and either stick the letter in their mailbox attached to their house, in front of their homes or go deposit it into the nearest U.S. Postal Service mailbox.

The U.S. Post Master has acknowledged that the independent agency needs to rethink its business model mainly because of lost revenues due to the prevalent use of email instead of what has come to be known as snail mail. It is currently borrowing money from the private and secretive Federal Reserve which also prints U.S. currency and charges the U.S. Taxpayers interest, perhaps a huge reduction in deficits could be achieved by eliminating the Federal Reserve which did not exist when the Postal Service was established in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin authorized by a decree of the Second Continental Congress.

Perhaps the most stupefying claim put forth by the producers of Money Rocks was to compare the number of U.S. Post Offices to the number of McDonalds’ fast food restaurants. Eric Boiling confirmed that Cupp said she had not been in a post office in five years and asked if she had been inside a McDonalds at which she replied yes. Money Rocks producers then put up a on-screen graph as Boiling announced that there were triple the number of post offices as there were McDonalds. The U.S. Postal Service has a Constitutional mandate to provide every citizen of the United States with postal service to include working with the Department of Defense to provide free service to members of the military wherever in the world they are stationed in combat zones and consider that the Republicans under George W. Bush started two unfunded wars with hundreds of thousands of troops needing free postal service to communicate with family and friends back in the United States. McDonalds is not mandated by any law to make sure every citizen has access to a Big Mac whereas consumer demand determines where they build restaurants and if only a small percentage of a community has a taste for their food, McDonalds can make a business decision to close that location. Likewise, McDonalds is not mandated by law to provide every soldier in a combat zone with free apple pies so it is ludicrous and deceitful to even present such a foolish argument.

Considering the amount of harassment and discrimination that has been reported by disabled veterans working for the U.S. Postal Service, perhaps this panel would also recommend firing all the “unskilled” workers as Burkman calls them and why stop with them, why not allow UPS and Fed Ex to contract mail services for combat troops. There is no possibility that they would rip off tax payers like Halliburton and several other private companies doing business with the State Department and the Department of Defense. If they were found to have overcharged for the services provided, some Republican would simply write it off as a loss to the taxpayers and let them keep their ill-gotten profits as was the case with former Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton.

News Corp and its subsidiary Fox News is about one thing, electing Republicans who will privatize everything so that people like News Corp’s owner Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the top 1 percent of the wealthiest people in America can come in and acquire more wealth and “bullshit” Fox watchers with corporate propaganda to help them achieve their goals.

Lastly, pertaining to the Money Rocks panelist suggestion that we privatize Homeland Security, which by the way was mainly a Republican creation during the Bush years, perhaps she missed the Washington Post’s 2010 expose on the huge spy network created shortly after the 911 attacks which among other things revealed that “1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States” and that no one knows for sure just how many people are employeds let alone who they they are and how just how much it is costing the U.S. Taxpayer which is sure to be billions of dollars annually.

Scotty Reid is founder and President of the NC based non-profit Black Talk Media Project which produces, promotes and distributes media that matters to the Black community.