Dr. J.’s BF Commentary No. 140: Ulysses S. Grant, Ronald Reagan, and the $50.00 Bill
The Right is never appeased, never satisfied. And this ludicrous demand to honor Reagan once again is proof of it.
The manufactured infatuation with the hypocritical Ronald Reagan, one of the most nefarious servants of the American empire, is yet one more triumph for the mind managers. Thus we now find this phony’s name on airports, warships, and highways. But our sacred $50 bill? Enough is enough, you bastards!
Dateline Tue, 04/20/2010
Crossposted with http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/190
By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, for BuzzFlash / The Greanville Post [print_link]
* He despised the Southern traitors to the Union (while personally no abolitionist) and eventually became the General who, with Generals Sherman and Sheridan, would lead the Union Army to victory in the Civil War.
* He was a strong supporter of the 15th Amendment, which gave rise to the first Civil Rights Act of 1875 (it was declared unconstitutional in 1883, ironically enough by a Supreme Court peopled in part by Grant appointees).
* He was a vigorous and forceful leader of Reconstruction.
* He was a supporter of Indian Rights (while it was, ironically again, Generals Sherman and Sheridan who pursued the Indian Wars to their bitter end), education reform, and the separation of church and state.
1. Reagan firmly established racism as the center of the modern Republican electoral strategy, confirming that the Nixon “Southern Strategy” of 1968 would be permanently ensconced there. This initiative was symbolized exquisitely when he began his 1980 Presidential campaign at Philadelphia, MS, the site of the Cheney-Goodman-Schwerner civil rights murders of 1964. Reagan, the master of the “wink and the nod” means of communicating, did not have to say anything more.
2. Reagan firmly established anti-choice as the Republican position of choice in the matter of belief as to when life begins. This was something new for mainstream Republicans who up until then had made much about keeping government out of private matters to the extent possible. In fact, Reagan’s choice for Vice-President, George H.W. Bush and his wife had been long-time members of the Board of Directors of the Texas branch of Planned Parenthood. Of course, that highly principled mainstream Republican, and his wife, quickly resigned their positions to take an openly anti-choice stance during the election.
5. Related to point four above, Reaganite electoral strategy built upon the success of the anti-tax Proposition 13 in California in 1978. That strategy succeeded in changing the political discussions about what government should be doing with tax revenues, in other words about government programs, to the amounts of the revenues themselves without reference to what the money was paying for.
6. Related to point five above, Reagan established the modern Republican approach to federal spending: cutting it on everything they possibly can except the military, prisons, and favors for wealthy contributors, while reducing tax revenues to the greatest extent possible with tax cuts for the rich.
7. Reagan established mean-ness, every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, as an acceptable attribute. Did people get it? They sure did. I remember listening to a selection of person-on-the-street interviews in Washington, DC, after the John Hinckley attack on Reagan. In response to the question, “What was wrong with John Hinckley?” a woman said, “He missed.”
8. With Iran/Contra, Reagan established the precedent that (Republican) Presidents can break federal law and they will get away with it. The Iran/Contra scheme directly violated a piece of federal legislation called the “Boland Amendment.” It prohibited any US-government direct or indirect interference with the democratically elected Sandanista government of Nicaragua. The Congressional hearings were a sham. Reagan clearly committed or at least clearly presided over the commission of an impeachable offense. But when it came time to form the Joint Committee to investigate the mess, the then-obscure junior Senator from Massachusetts who had gotten the ball rolling, John Kerry, along with Kennedy, Leahy and any other progressive Democrats in the House and Senate, were kept off it by agreement of the Democratic leadership. “Couldn’t have another impeachment, coming so soon,” they said.
And so, Democrats like then-Congressman Lee Hamilton made sure that the hearings were relatively benign, and, by giving Oliver North immunity from any prosecution based on his testimony, provided him with a nation-wide platform on which to make speeches justifying the whole action (that just happened to violate the law). By the way, that’s the same Lee Hamilton who was the Democratic co-chair of the 9/11 Commission.
9. As to personal attributes, Reagan showed that a not-very-smart, mildly educated, and generally ignorant man can become an Acting President if he is a Right-Winger who command big campaign contributions from corporate special interests, telegenic, speaks well from cue cards, and has the right agents, managers, and promoters. He also showed that a man with a serious mental illness can be maintained in the Presidency if he is a Republican and has the right agents, managers, and promoters.
10. Oh yes, he did win what will someday be called “The 75 Years War (1918-1993) Against the Soviet Union by Western Imperialism,” spending into the ground an arteriosclerotic governmental system that was well on its way to collapse anyway, while creating massive federal deficits at home to do it, deficits that may well eventually overwhelm an increasingly arteriosclerotic nation right here in River City.
Editors’ Note—Problems like these, which in reality have simple solutions, become as tough as advanced cancers when humanity attempts to control them using the rules of the capitalist system, which, incidentally, creates them in the first place. Leaving aside the scandalous question of why we still have cars that yield only 35 mpg average instead of hundreds of gallons, or why the world has not moved to a new energy paradigm away from oil, there should be an immediate embargo on all oil operations in oceans and lakes around the world. Period. In this, the US should be leading the charge instead of being the single most conspicuous violator of ecological prudence. Incidentally, following its by-now typical demagogic course, the Obama administration has declared that “no new drilling will be allowed offshore until a complete study is done on the BP oil spill.” At this stage in the evolution of the administration’s rhetoric, we should instantly recognize what this portends: more talk tough and do nothing. Like Aldous Huxley’s soma, the US political class long ago discovered the power of feeding p.r. to the masses, based on the sorry fact that a misinformed, atomized, and heavily indoctrinated public constantly looking out for their personal affairs is not likely to remember anything of importance beyond a fleeting moment of clarity. Thus when a man-made crisis as the one we witness now on the Gulf Coast strikes, a study is solemnly commissioned to avoid doing what is obvious and immediate, and then another study after that if necessary. In that cynical manner, decades can slip by without effective action. Then, as the fickle media focus moves on, and the public forgets, the malefactors get back to business as usual. And this, folks, is what passes for the best of all possible democracies, one we’re proud enough to export at gunpoint, if necessary.—P. Greanville Dateline: April 28, 2010 [print_link] By Dave Lindorff (with companion bonus piece by Marcus Baram, see below) // All annotated text by the editor in green. President Obama claimed last month that off-shore drilling technology had become so advanced that oil spills and blowouts were a thing of the past. Of course, as he said this, Australia and Indonesia were still assessing the damage from a similar offshore oil platform, the Montana, in the Timor Sea, which blew out and poured millions of gallons of oil into the ocean off Western Australia for over three months before it could be sealed off. Given that this is true, particular of complex technological enterprises, the question that needs to be asked is not, what is the probability of a catastrophic failure of an offshore well, but what is the potential damage in the event of even one such catastrophe for the local environment? But the real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon is what it means for expanded drilling in the Arctic waters north of Alaska. Oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and others, like Goldman traders looking at a tranch of subprime mortgages, are casting covetous eyes on the Arctic Ocean and the oil and gas that studies suggest lie under the virgin sea floor. Their plan is to drill for these hydrocarbons once the summer sea ice vanishes as a result of rising global temperatures (more about this in a future article). Obama, as part of his opening of more coastal areas to drilling, is including areas of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, which are already ice free during summer. Trust him at your own risk. But let’s think about this for a moment. Suppose there were a blowout like the one in the Gulf of Mexico at a rig drilling in the Arctic? Suppose it happened towards the end of the short summer, when the ice was about to return to cover the ocean surface? If it was a blowout that couldn’t be plugged, like the Montana blowout in the Timor Sea, or if the fail-safe system at the wellhead failed, as with the Deepwater Horizon, and if the only solution was, as with the Montana well, to drill new wells to ease the pressure on the blown well, how would this be done, once the ice moved in? So why are we even talking about this? I understand the problem, but it is solvable, by establishing refundable tax credits for low-income people who can document long commuting distances, for example. CROSSPOSTED WITH COMMON DREAMS http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/28-2 •••• By Marcus Baram / Marcus@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting First Posted: 04-29-10 11:00 AM | Updated: 04-29-10 05:00 PM But after the explosion, the scale of the accident required BP to get assistance from the Coast Guard, other federal agencies and other oil companies such as Shell, which is sending half a dozen vessels to help with the clean-up effort. Spokespersons for BP and MMS did not return calls for comment. Since the explosion, during which 11 workers were thrown overboard and are presumed dead, federal officials and members of Congress have launched several investigations into the incident and the role of BP and drilling contractor TransOcean. [In a transparently hypocritical and self-serving gesture, Conservadem ] Sen. Mary Landrieu, a longtime supporter of offshore oil drilling, has called for a full investigation into the incident. In two previous congressional hearings, Landrieu minimized the chance of such a massive accident occurring on an offshore oil rig and also minimized the impact of any oil spill, saying it would hardly fill one-third of the reflecting pool outside of the Capitol. At a hearing last month held by the same committee to discuss drilling, Landrieu repeated her line about the reflecting pool, adding: Mary Landrieu: toxic to both citizens and nature. HuffPost asked Landrieu whether she still stands by her comments and whether she supports new safety regulations proposed by the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling, which are opposed by the oil industry, as first reported by HuffPost on Monday. Senator Landrieu has been very supportive of Secretary Salazar and believes that the MMS and the Coast Guard have generally been good stewards of human safety with respect to the oil and gas industry. The Senator has said repeatedly that what happened in the Gulf last week is a tragedy and should be fully investigated to find out what went wrong and how it can be prevented in the future. But she also firmly believes that this accident should not be used as an excuse to abandon plans to make America more energy secure. Even with the development of alternative energy sources, the United States will still need oil into the foreseeable future. With no offshore domestic production, that oil would be tankered from overseas into the United States. The one thing we do know is that such a policy would do nothing to protect our shores. In fact, the National Academies of Science has found that while drilling and extraction account for less than 1 percent of all the oil that enters the marine environment, tankering accounts for four times that much. [Running to cover her ass] Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a longtime supporter of drilling offshore in her state, will hold a hearing next week on federal Outer Continental Shelf development plans: ••• ALL ANNOTATIONS ARE ADDED BY THE EDITORS OF TGP, AND ARE NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ORIGINAL AUTHORSMurphy’s Law and the Stupidity of Obama’s Drill-Drill-Drill Offshore Oil Policy
The murder of the oceans: chronicle of a death foretold.
Gulf Oil Spill Exceeds BP’s ‘Worst-Case Scenario,’ Drilling Supporters On Defensive
The massive gush of oil spilling from the site of the rig that exploded last week exceeds the worst-case scenario predicted by oil giant BP when it filed its exploration plan with the government. The scale of the disaster is also having political repercussions, putting lawmakers who support offshore drilling on the defensive.
THE BANKSTER SCOURGE
Editor’s Note—The Goldman-Sachs scandal is not about the “excesses” of an “out-of-control” greedy bunch of executives but of system in which chastising one firm—if that were to happen in earnest, which surely won’t—is useless because others will soon take its place. Just like believing that a mere change in personnel at the White House would clean up the crimes of the empire, the idea that a completely bought Congress can restrain the financial oligarchy—which is, after all, the United States’ de facto ruling class— is a suicidal illusion. Until Americans learn to understand politics in terms of class, the dreaded “C” word, little of consequence will be accomplished.
Washington and Wall Street: A ‘Democracy’ in Denial
Some Americans get all bent out of shape when they hear someone label the United States a ‘plutocracy.’ But if we have an honest-to-goodness democracy, where the people really rule, then how can we explain Goldman Sachs?
By Sam Pizzigati Dateline: April 25, 2010 [print_link]
The outsized political role of Goldman Sachs, America’s most powerful bank, has been attracting widespread attention — and flack — ever since the U.S. economy went freefall in 2008. But many defenders of our democratic virtue appear convinced that the Goldman Sachs power trip may soon be ancient history.
Sure, the argument goes, Goldman had a good run. But democracy has caught up with Wall Street profiteering. The stunning new federal SEC fraud case against Goldman, filed just over a week ago, once again “proves” that no group, not even an enormously rich one, can stand above the law.
And the upcoming Senate action on financial reform, the argument continues, shows that lawmakers do have the backbone to take on Wall Street, no matter how much Wall Street spends on lobbyists or campaign contributions.
Feel ready to start cheering? Hit your pause button. The SEC fraud charges and the Senate’s willingness to tackle financial reform both certainly do come as welcome developments. But neither move, held up to the light, qualifies as much of a stake in the heart of Wall Street greed and power.
Goldman, many observers believe [1], may even beat the fraud charges in court.
The SEC complaint [2] is essentially charging, as veteran analyst William Greider explains [3], that Goldman “sold poison to unwitting customers,” mortgage-related “financial instruments deliberately designed to fail.”
But Goldman has a strong defense. Goldman execs, the defense will contend, were merely conducting Wall Street business as usual. And that’s true, as recent news reports have been documenting [4] with convincing detail [5].
Wall Street giants, we’ve learned from these reports, have been brewing and hawking [6] poison all along, exploiting the freedom to “innovate” they gained when the Clinton and Bush administrations wiped away the last of those pesky banking regulations put in place back in the Great Depression. In effect, Wall Street has become [7] a giant gambling den — and bought off the “cops.”
Congress and the White House have yet to acknowledge this reality. They continue to treat financial reform as an exercise in yanking bad apples out of an otherwise A-OK barrel. As President Obama put it last Thursday: “Some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is a family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business, or save for retirement.”
“Some”? Top economic commentators found that characterization bizarre.
“It’s been decades,” retorted [8] Washington Post business analyst Steven Pearlstein, “since the old investment and banking cultures gave way to a trading culture in which the driving principle behind every dollar traded or leveraged is to use whatever advantage you have to ‘rip the face’ off some other trader.”
Wall Street’s original missions — “raising and efficiently allocating capital for businesses and households” — today stand, added Pearlstein, as “mere pretexts for a financial system that is now focused on reaping profits from high-frequency trading and sales of purely speculative instruments.”
The financial reform bill expected to hit the Senate floor this week doesn’t much recognize this new reality. The legislation doesn’t yet cap how big banks can grow or crack down adequately on the trading of shadowy “derivatives” or ensure all consumers of financial products an independent watchdog.
The financial reform we need would do all this — and more. The financial reform we need would start peeling off the tentacles that institutions like Goldman have wrapped around our would-be democracy’s day-to-day business.
In California right now, 3,000 miles from the U.S. Senate, media coverage of billionaire Meg Whitman’s campaign for the GOP gubernatorial nomination is offering still another glimpse at how tightly these tentacles can squeeze.
reporting [9] from the San Francisco Chronicle and California Watch: Whitman, who piled up the bulk of her fortune as the CEO at eBay, joined the Goldman Sachs board in 2001 after steering “millions of dollars of her company’s investment banking business to Goldman.”
Goldman returned the favor by handing Whitman the chance to buy stock — at bargain-basement prices — in companies Goldman was taking public. The favors would keep flowing. As a Goldman board member, Whitman okayed [10] $79 million in bonuses, over two years, for Goldman’s top execs.
Whitman would leave the Goldman board in 2002, after reports surfaced about her Goldman stock deals. But Goldman still manages Whitman’s personal fortune.
Here’s where the plot thickens. Goldman also manages $1.3 billion in retirement funds for California state employees and rakes in even larger fees for underwriting the billions in bonds and revenue anticipation notes California has to issue to pay its bills. Who has the authority [11] to appoint retirement board decision makers and “propose and promote” bond issues? The governor of California.
But California voters, even if they reject Meg Whitman, will still be stuck with a governor entangled with Goldman. Whitman’s GOP primary rival, state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, borrowed a half-million from Goldman for a 2003 legislative run. And the sister of Whitman’s top Democratic challenger, Jerry Brown, just happens to be a Goldman exec in Los Angeles.
Goldman’s California executive corps has spent the last few years touting “solutions” for the state’s massive fiscal crisis that would bring the bank hundreds of millions in new deal-making fees. One of these fixes would privatize the state lottery, another would sell off the state agency that insures student loans.
Goldman Sachs, in other words, isn’t just turning average people’s mortgages “into gambling chips [12]” — and helping billionaires bet against the people. Goldman is actively maneuvering to manipulate everyday government public policy decisions, all simply to refresh and refill the Goldman bonus pool.
We need to be precise here. We’re not talking about a Goldman Sachs conspiracy to run the world. We’re talking about the institutional relationships that allow gangs of extremely wealthy people to bend government to their parochial pecuniary purposes. We’re talking, in a word, about plutocracy.
A century ago, in a Wall Street-dominated era much like own, America’s most public-spirited civic and political leaders feared plutocratic power and waged unrelenting war against it. Never be afraid to take on “predatory plutocracy,” as the great newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer exhorted [13] in 1907.
Over the next half-century, Americans took exhortations like that to heart. They battled, on multiple fronts, to cut America’s plutocracy down to democratic size.
And they succeeded. By the mid 20th century, high taxes on high incomes had drained the political war chests of the wealthy. And laws and regulations, on everything from investment banking to labor rights, limited the political and economic manipulations that had stuffed those war chests in the first place.
Can we, in our new century, repeat this victory? We surely can. But first we have to accept the challenge before us. We’re not confronting bad apples. We’re confronting plutocratic power.
Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online newsletter on excess and inequality published by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies. Too Much appears weekly. Read the current issue [14] or sign up [15] to receive Too Much in your email inbox.
[16]
Article printed from Too Much: http://toomuchonline.org
URL to article: http://toomuchonline.org/washington-and-wall-street-a-democracy-in-denial/
URLs in this post:
[1] believe: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/goldman-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/39255/
[2] SEC complaint: http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2010/comp21489.pdf
[3] explains: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100510/greider
[4] documenting: http://www.propublica.org/feature/merrill-lynch-did-a-deal-precisely-like-goldmans-suit-asserts
[5] convincing detail: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/cdo-market-%e2%80%93-rife-with-collusion-and-manipulation.html
[6] brewing and hawking: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/business/21cdo.html?pagewanted=print
[7] has become: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/21/AR2010042102528_pf.html
[8] retorted: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/22/AR2010042205847_pf.html
[10] okayed: http://www.californiawatch.org/watchblog/whitmans-wall-street-ties-raise-recession-questions
[11] the authority: http://www.californiawatch.org/money-and-politics/whitmans-fortune-entwined-goldman-sachs
[12] into gambling chips: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/goldman_plays_we_pay_20100420/
[13] exhorted: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/help/stories.nsf/aboutus/story/631BE1DE3559389786256EC4004B923F?OpenDocument
[14] the current issue: http://toomuchonline.org/tmweekly.html
[15] sign up: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5725/t/8798/signUp.jsp?key=1638
Gingrich. Billed as a serious champion of "family values", this contemptible hypocrite had no trouble abandoning his wife when she was stricken with cancer, nor running away with his new paramour. ANNALS OF SCUM- Gingrich ascendant, again
Gingrich: Obama Is the ‘Most Radical President’ Ever
FROM Newsmax Thursday, April 8, 2010 10:07 PM [print_link]
Gingrich offered Republicans an antidote to Democratic accusations that GOP leaders do little more than oppose policies — the so-called party of no. He said Republicans should underscore the policies they favor — yes on tax cuts, a lower deficit, fewer regulations, and a sensible energy plan.
Will he say yes to a presidential campaign?
ANNALS OF SCUM: Glenn Beck
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Exposing Glenn Beck as a Dangerous Fraud—
By Bob Cesca [print_link] April 8, 2010  Ruport Murdoch, Fox News' Chief Malefactor, and abettor of Glenn Beck. A cold-blooded spawner of fascism by any standard. So here goes. Beginning with this post, I intend to expose Glenn Beck as a fraud. A dangerous faker who deliberately manipulates his audience by appealing to their basest instincts. As a man who only embraces conservatism and the tea party movement as a means to furthering his significant personal wealth and career as a successful TV goon. My theory is as follows. Glenn Beck is engaged in a carefully orchestrated performance that, if taken to its logical end, can only end up in tragedy — a tragedy, not in the name of some great political or social or religious cause, as too many of his viewers might believe, but rather in the name of pure careerism and greed. A tragedy in the name of Glenn Beck’s personal drive for fame and fortune, not to mention the similar motivations of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Right. I get it. I should probably ignore him. Why should I waste time writing about Glenn Beck again? As hard as it is to believe, most days I intentionally ignore Glenn Beck posts and videos on the blogs. My recurring reaction is generally twofold. One: he’s exhausting to watch because just as I’m wrapping my head around one line of googly-eyed horseshit, he belts out another ridiculous, melodramatic or dangerous line, and before I know it, I’m faced with a log-jam of crazy, forcing me to scramble for either an oxygen mask or a stiff drink. And, two: why pay attention to the television equivalent of an escaped mental patient screaming gibberish on the median strip at a busy intersection? But to underestimate Glenn Beck as just some sort of random extra from Cuckoo’s Nest, as I admittedly have done, is a mistake as it barely scratches the surface of what his scam is all about. A schizoid raving street loon tends to command attention purely for the freak show curiosity of passers by, yet the nonsense is rarely taken seriously. This isn’t the case with Glenn Beck. Several million people every day take his word for it. They’re suckered into buying the ruse. And it’s bad for America. What his regular viewers haven’t grasped yet is that he’s putting on a show. He’s playing a role. He’s tricking his audience. Unlike a left-leaning audience, Beck’s audience is mostly composed of white conservative Christians who pride themselves on taking certain things on faith, and who often act against their own financial interests for the sake of patriotic cheerleading. It’s an audience that embraces gun ownership and tends to be more reactionary and militaristic. (Incidentally, there’s no equivalent to this on the “other side” simply because it’s not in the nature of liberals to be, you know, conservative.) But it’s hard to blame Beck’s audience for being fished in. There’s no wink and nod, so he’s clearly not attempting some sort of obviously satirical character like Stephen Colbert or even a more bizarre character like Andy Kaufman’s Tony Clifton. He performs this role as seamlessly as any decent character actor, but he never tips his hand (we’re generally told when an actor is acting). Just an occasional mention of himself as a “rodeo clown.” There’s no crawl at the end listing “Glenn Beck as ‘Glenn Beck.'” It’s not a fiction program. Glenn Beck is playing a character with a personality and a style that is laser focused at the souls of an intended audience. It doesn’t take many minutes of viewing his television show to see that he’s mashing up the most effective and successful aspects of Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and ’60s Bircher author Cleon Skousen, and filtering it all through the performance techniques of a televangelist. Listen to any random monologue by Glenn Beck and then watch some clips of televangelist Jack Van Impe. Both are master manipulators and (crazy aside) riveting speakers. They each nail their audiences with rapid-fire barrages of nonsense presented as dramatic fact — so twisted and obscured that it begins to seem real and anything that might not seem entirely plausible, just have faith. After all, there are complicated drawings on a blackboard! Oh, and he cries. So he must be serious. (We learned last year that the crying is fake.) This is all stuff that’s been proven to resonate with (and utterly manipulate) certain American audiences who also willingly hand over their cash to obvious flimflam artists claiming to provide salvation. Glenn Beck is just pooling these techniques and applying them to American politics. Instead of asking for donations, by the way, Beck just markets all varieties of crap-on-a-stick to his people. Beck has released seven books since 2007. Seven books in three years! Add to the mix three DVD releases and 26 compact disc releases. There’s his subscription-only “Insider Extreme” website which charges $75 per year. There’s a print magazine called “Fusion” (20 issues for $66). There are the obligatory t-shirts, mugs and other forms of cheap swag. All of this is heaped on top of a multimillion dollar Fox News contract and a syndicated radio deal worth $50 million over five years. Capitalism is one thing, but Beck is manipulating his audience to hand over their cash in exchange for swag that can’t possibly be worth the price, considering the volume of his output (seven books in three years!). As the saying goes: how hard he prays depends on how much you pay.  Beck. Perfect blend of self-interest, cynicism, hypocrisy and malicious politics. One of the reasons why the network news media was generally, in decades past, kept separate from the ratings and profit-motive of entertainment divisions was that to cross these streams, so to speak, would lead to the corruption of the news, forcing it to be driven by what sells, not necessarily by what’s true. And, it goes without saying that such a corruption of the news is inherently damaging to democracy. To that point, Glenn Beck likes to say that he’s the new Howard Beale, the tragic and suicidal anchor from the movie Network. He’s not. In fact, Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay was a prescient warning about the rise of charlatans like Glenn Beck infiltrating the news media — regardless of whether or not they’re presented as “opinion journalists.” Actually, Beck goes far beyond the scope of opinion journalism as well, and has settled in a danger zone where he incites easily-manipulated, often militaristic audiences based on theories and claims that don’t hold up to even the most cursory fact-checking, say nothing of empirical reality. In terms of his impact, Beck isn’t Howard Beale at all. He’s closer to Lee Atwater. In the riveting, must-see documentary, Boogie Man, about the rise and fall of the infamous Republican political operative, it’s revealed that Atwater once considered politics to be nothing more than a game. Professional wrestling. Atwater, we learn, would have been perfectly happy doing what he did for either political party. Republican or Democrat. It didn’t matter to him. After all, it was just a game. A show. And he was really good at producing a hell of a show — no matter how many lives he left in his wake. Yet at the end of his life, Atwater realized that treating politics like a wrestling match was a mistake. In politics, unlike wrestling, the societal damage is real. The lives are real. Bloated and crippled from his cancer treatment, Atwater regretted using the Southern Strategy — exploiting race as a wedge. He regretted making so many enemies, one of which being Ed Rollins who he had double-crossed during the waning years of the Reagan administration. He regretted the creation of his own reality at the expense of empirical reality. While he was very successful in treating national affairs like a cornball burlesque show and throwing all professional ethics aside in the name of winning, the lesson of Lee Atwater is that such behavior is ultimately destructive. The Glenn Beck Show might seem like the political equivalent of professional wrestling, but it’s not even that sincere. At least with wrestling, we’re all most aware that wrestling follows a script even though some of the moves require a high caliber of strength and athleticism (and occasionally resulting in real injuries to the performers). The difference between Beck and wrestling is that with Beck the fakery isn’t common knowledge and the consequences of what he talks about on his show are very real. This week, Beck attacked the president’s deceased mother and grandparents as being Marxists. Which other innocent bystanders will turn up on your commie hit list, Glenn? Who will you attack next with McCarthy-style abandon in the name of bilking your audience, Glenn? And do you honestly expect that your audience will remain passive observers of all of this? And so I intend to expose Beck as the dangerous grifter he really is. He’s committing a nationally televised fraud and, given the sorts of people who are the most susceptible to his trickery, it’s only a matter of time before Beck’s deception takes a tragic turn. Listen to the Bob & Elvis Show Thursdays at 10 a.m. EDT Author’s Website: http://www.campchaos.com Author’s Bio: Bob Cesca is a writer, director, and producer as well as the founder of Camp Chaos Entertainment, an animation studio based near Philadelphia. He’s written and produced literally hundreds of animated shorts as well as music videos for Iron Maiden, Meat Loaf, Everclear, Yes and Motley Crue. Just after 9/11, Bob produced and directed an independent feature film titled The War Effort: a mockumentary satirizing the nation’s knee-jerk patriotism which arose following 9/11. He’s also the creator of the animated sketch show “ILL-ustrated” which aired for two seasons on VH1and MTV2. Bob grew up in Northern Virginia and graduated from Kutztown University with a degree in Political Science. He’s the editor of the RealityBasedNation.com blog. |