It is probably not a good idea to give any publicity to this inane plan of Glenn Beck’s to hold a “Restoring Honor” meeting at the Washington Mall but it is an appropriate starting point.
Glenn Beck is probably the most vocal and radical–some, many, say crazy–commentator on the Obama Administration’s policies. He literally has thrown out terms like “Hitler” and “Mussolini” to describe some of the policies of this Liberal and Progressive. The problem is that to any Independent or Moderate Republican, the President is just fine and with many Liberals he is far too far to the Right.
So all this ginning up of idiotic talk about the Obama Administration bringing Fascism or Communism is clearly a coordinated effect by the Neocon Party to conceal their own motives. Ironically, accusing others if doing exactly what you are doing was a hallmark of Hitler’s propaganda machine. It was an essential element of the “big lie” theory of the Nazis.
Accusing Barack Obama, certainly the representative of Black America and Poor America and Unemployed America and now what is left of Middle Class America of being a Nazi or a corporatist, is on its face…ludicrous. The people attacking Obama are from the large corporations. The large corporations were not helping the Communists or the Socialists (forget the name “National Socialist” the Nazis were anything but Socialists. In fact, here is the parallel between Hitler and the American Neocon Right Wing Republicans. See if anything sounds familiar.
“In the early 1930s financial assistance to Hitler began to flow more readily. There took place in Germany a series of meetings, irrefutably documented in several sources, between German industrialists, Hitler himself, and more often Hitler’s representatives Hjalmar Sehaeht and Rudolf Hess. The critical point is that the German industrialists financing Hitler were predominantly directors of cartels with American associations, ownership, participation, or some form of subsidiary connection. The Hitler backers were not, by and large, firms of purely German origin, or representative of German family business. Except for Thyssen and Kirdoff, in most cases they were the German multi-national firms — i.e., I.G. Farben, A.E.G., DAPAG, etc. These multi-nationals had been built up by American loans in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s had American directors and heavy American financial participation.”
Ref: http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_07.htm
International corporations. In the 1930s. We didn’t suddenly discover the international corporation. They have been around for centuries. And our U.S. international corporations, like the oil companies and the pharmaceutical companies now have headquarters here that look like palaces, but have nominal headquarters in the Caribbean simply to avoid paying taxes.
Do you know the best reason to have corporations paying higher taxes again…20% minimums on gross income…forget deductions? It is because when you lower taxes, as we did under every Republican President since Lyndon Johnson…when we had a huge and vibrant U.S. manufacturing sector…they spend all their extra money looking for more tax breaks, like having their nominal headquarters off shore in the Bahamas somewhere.
Restoring honor? Are we restoring our domestic honesty? Like, for example, not spying on U.S. citizens, going through their library and video store records, tapping their phones? Would it be restoring our belief in international treaties…not going to war, destroying a country and 250,000 innocent lives and 4,500 American soldiers’ lives for no good reason? Would that restore our honor? What does a draft dodger and an ex-drunk like Glenn Beck know about the laws of international war or the rules of the Geneva Convention?
Beck was interviewed by Townhall.com, a Right Wing web site. For example, the interviewer asks Beck, what can we do …”other than continuing to do what we’ve already been doing, telling the truth and being loyal to our values…” Townhall.com was one of the most heavily paid wrecking crews trying to disrupt any part of health care reform that would cost their sponsors, the health insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals and the hospital groups money. They were big on the “death panels” message, for example. Instead of Townhall they should be called CemetaryHall.
So Beck starts off his answer by saying that the Liberals are effective because they have “…united under the principle of hate America..” He says:
“Whatever it is, they’ve really come together with a historically anti-American theme. It is an anti-Constitution theme.” But of course he gives no examples. He doesn’t have any but if he wanted to he could just make some up. He knows, like the Lonesome Rhodes of “A Face in the Crowd” that Keith Olbermann oftens uses to describe Beck, that his audience is totally ignorant. Either that or they may have barely enough knowledge to agree with his references but are too lazy to look them up to find out he is lying or distorting the truth into a lie.
Beck talks in circles and never gives a specific but merely says that we must return to “small government,” “God,” and “the Constitution.” He never says who or how we may or may not have strayed from those (because we haven’t.)
It may be easier to simply line up a few people and see who is on whose side. See what kinds of people Beck hangs out with and what they stand for.
Beck refers to the President as “this guy” and a “racist.” President Obama was elected by 54% of Americans as opposed to the roughly 1,000,000 in Becks audience, who might watch whomever was in his time slot anyway, as it is on Fox News, so racists, Republicans and brain-dead rebels will always be watching.
Since January of this year, by the way, despite the strong following of the Fox News Channels by the most ridiculous members of the Right Wing, he has not only lost all his advertisers but has lost about one-third of his audience. He is basically subsidized by Murdoch.
So who else is against the President? We really don’t know much from the polls except that the President is still quite popular. Of course, he is less popular among his own supporters than he was. Many thought that he would come flying in and create jobs and put the economy back to where it should be. The Republicans in the Senate have stopped some of what he has tried to do, but there is a segment of Democrats who think he has not done enough.
So Beck is lined up with arch conservative publisher Steve Forbes, of Forbes Magazine. (He inherited the business only after his dad died. The old man wouldn’t let him touch a pencil to a piece of paper while he was still alive.)
Is Forbes in Beck’s camp? See what you think.
Steve Forbes, Forbes Magazine–
“The truth is that not even the Franklin Roosevelt Administration was as hostile to and ignorant about free enterprise as this Administration. (Forbes is actually located in Wall Street and is one of the biggest Wall Street hucksters.) Almost every action Obama officials take underscores their belief in the stereotype that businesspeople are mostly amoral, corner-cutting, consumer shafting, pollution loving menaces.”
Ok. Let’s hold it a minute. Beck’s friend Forbes refers to “consumer shafting” ( How about: $4.00 a gallon gasoline, $400 billion energy rape of California, 380 million recalled eggs, $8 trillion lost in pensions because of Wall Street speculators, insurance companies that were fined hundreds of millions when they simply refused to pay death benefits and New York state under then Attorney General Elliott Spitzer had to take them to court just to get thousands of regular life insurance death benefits paid!), “pollution-loving” (How about the fact that GE has been fined hundreds of millions for failing to clean up Superfund sites, plus EXXON Valdez, BP Gulf oil spill.) Mssrs. Beck and Forbes forget about Lehman Brothers going broke or ENRON going broke or Global Crossing going broke…or many others looted and going broke, all leaving stockholders broke, destitute, out of luck? No worries there? That’s ok with Forbes but regulation is not?
But Forbes is not through….
“One hestitates to bring up the economics of Benito Mussolini and his ilk because fascism (actually Fascism) means ugly nationalism and racism as well as murder and aggressive war.”
Mussolini and Obama. Preposterous, yes, but Forbes also knows it is ridiculous. He is doing it as propaganda. What the Neocons do is to take exactly what they do and turn it around and accuse the opposition of doing it. Actually Fascism is defined as an alignment of the military power and the industrial power in a country with a strong government to further nationalistic goals.
The Neocon Republicans, Bush and Cheney were aligned with the military and the military industrial complex. (Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, was not only tied to the oil companies and was President of an oil field industrial firm, Halliburton, but he insisted on having Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense.)
Obama said he would end, not start wars. He recently completed the withdrawal of all combat troops and will now draw down the non-combat troops in Iraq. Clearly President Obama is not aligned with the huge international corporations. Health care is 17% of our economy (although it should be only half that.) He took them on in health care reform. They spent $400 million dollars to try to defeat it–and are still trying– because it will cut dramatically into their profits.
Obama’s attack for the people and against the concentrated power of the health care industry prompted more retaliation. The Koch family funded disruptive organizations, like FreedomWorks with former Neocon Washington lobbyists and former congressmen and Citizens for Prosperity, the remnants of the old tobacco lobbying group to attack with so called “tea party” rallies.
These were made up of mostly fundamentalist nuts and racists. Incidentally, the Koch company is the largest privately held oil company in the U.S., worth tens of billions and are the biggest supporters of Right Wing causes, having founded Cato Institute and many others. .
President Obama, hardly working for Wall Street, actually took them on eye-to-eye, and they blinked. Wall Street almost destroyed this country (and the full story is not over.) Mr. Beck and especially Mr. Forbes defends Wall Street and asks that it be left unregulated to do it again. Speaking of Wall Street, Mr. Obama was prompted by the founder of the Blackstone Group, Pete Peterson, a Republican and a multi-billionaire to form a commission to handle the deficit problem A nice thought.
Meanwhile, the co-founder with Peterson and now Chairman and CEO of Blackstone Group, multi-billionaire Steve Schwartzman came out recently and said that the Administration’s relationship with the business community is: “… war. Its like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Why would a man say something like that, especially when it is patently and obviously false? Because Schwartzman is also the manager of a fund and that fund pays very little taxes. It won’t affect business or industry if he begins to pay some reasonable taxes like everyone else, but he, and other equity firms like his, will have to pay reasonable taxes.
For this reason, the fact that he might be forced to pay some taxes on his hundreds of millions of dollars of personal income each year, Schwartzman basically calls President Obama a Nazi. Do you see how it works? Who is the evil person…the one who wants to keep all of his hundreds of millions each year for himself or the President with a country $13 trillion in debt…fully $2 trillion of it caused specifically by Mr.Schwartzman and his Wall Street pals…a President with 15 million unemployed, who is simply trying to keep this country together? And Beck is on Schwartzman’s side.
If not for the huge funds available from the Right Wing, Glenn Beck might still exist as some local kook weather man or some radio personality in Loonytunes, Texas. He would not be making $30,000,000 a year and have access to a national audience of something like a million viewers.
Despite arch-neocon Rupert Murdoch’s best efforts, over 200 sponsors have either left Beck’s show or declined to sponsor it on personal grounds. But Murdoch keeps him though he loses millions each week. Beck is Murdoch’s and every other billionaire industrialist’s mouthpiece.
They want to confuse you so that you will condemn President Obama while they try to slip in new tax breaks. It is all about money, big money. They don’t care that your brother or brother-in-law is out of work for two years. They still want more money. Now. During a Recession. They feel entitled. So they have been obstructing the Progressive agenda to help the Middle Class for all of the Bush Adminstration and almost two years of the Obama Administration.
The Neocon Right Wing corporations own the radio networks and they own the television networks and the cable distribution networks…and the Internet. So we need to fight back with personal effort and through any medium that is available to us. We need to contact our Senators and Congress people. We need to work hard this year to re-elect the Democratic House and Senate majority.
Glenn Beck cannot be the future of this country. If he is, we are close to the literal end of this 300-year-old Democracy.
