Ruchir,
Pray do not insult my intelligence. The point is not who Beck is bashing. The point is that he talks drivel, whichever direction he is going. He is the patron saint of a white trash, uneducated, insular, racist, fundamentalist Christian constituency who have a visceral hatred for them "educated elites" of the North. These people revel in paranoia and conspiracy theories to cover up for their own short comings. I feel like laughing when Beck looks at the screen and tells his audience: "They think they know better than you." Well yes, as a matter of fact they do! The pick up truck driving, beer guzzling, mullet sporting hobos of the mid west and the south (who largely make Beck's audience) would not be able to run this country or this economy for even 24 hours if the coastal elites, granola bar eating liberals, and the multicultural professional class went away. They know it. What Beck feeds is a deep seated, impotent resentment.
Take a look at the latest reports and videos of the Texas Board of Education meetings and you will know what will happen if Beck and his ilk inherit the earth.
And please do not talk about the current Republican Party. It now caters to the absolute dregs of their base in a most cynical manner. The GOP has taken mendacity, hypocrisy and cynicism to the level of fine art. I feel sick when they cry themselves hoarse about financial responsibility when the CBO gave the current Health Bill a clean chit. The CBO might be wrong, but it did predict that Bush tax cut 1 would add 1 trillion to the deficit, Medicare D would notch up 350 million, and Bush Tax cut part deux another 394 million or thereabouts. Where was financial responsibility then? This I say leaving the Iraq war out of the picture. Remember, as Dick Cheney repeatedly reminded us back then, it was Reagan who said that deficits do not matter.
It sounds comical when people say that less than 40 percent income tax for the super rich is socialism. It was north of seventy percent between the 50s and early seventies. Those, BTW, are widely accounted for my even conservative economists as the most prosperous years in the United States. By current GOP rhetoric, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon would be commies two times over. America did not have Progressive Income Tax till 1912. That created the gilded age. We know what followed thereafter. There is also talk about socialism when there is talk about financial regulation. Here is what Paul Krugman (who knows a thing or two more about economics than Beck or Palin) has had to say recently:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/jamie-dimon-was-right/"Jamie Dimon was right.
About the 19th century, that is.
Dimon was castigated by many people, me included, for saying that a financial crisis is “the type of thing that happens every five, ten, seven, years.” Hey, no big deal.
But that is the way banking worked once upon a time. I’m reading Gary Gorton’s Slapped by the Invisible Hand, which tells us that there were bank panics — systemic crises — in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1896, 1907, and 1914.
On the other hand, there were no systemic crises from 1934 to 2007.
The problem, as Gorton makes clear, is that the Quiet Period reflected a combination of deposit insurance and strong regulation — undermined by the rise of shadow banking. So we have a choice: restore effective regulation or go back to the bad old days.
Lately, Beck the idiot has been calling on his Christian brotherhood to leave any Church that talks about Social Justice. He of course does not understand that that would leave his flock with very few options. The Roman Catholic Church (first modern social and cyclical written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 -
rerun novarum updated on the 40th, 80th, and 100th anniversary by Pius XI, Paul VI, and John Paul II) always talked about social justice. John the 23's
Pacheminterris (Peace on Earth) in the early sixties was basically a new deal document. The US Conference of Bishops, in the 1970s issued a Pastoral Letter called "Economic Justice for All." Social justice has been a major concern among mainline and liberal, and also certain branches of Evangelical Protestantism for the last two centuries. The Abolitionist movement caused the rift between the Northern Baptist and the Southern Baptist Churches. I will not even bring up Liberation Theologies in both Americas, both of Catholic and Protestant moorings. With those major Christian traditions out of the way, what are we left with?
Ayatollah Beck has been going after Rooseveltian 'Progressivism" (begins with Teddy, not FDR) in recent times. He has had the temerity to say that Progressivism leads to fascism. Oh wonderful! Perhaps America should have remained exactly as it was once the constitution was written. 'Progressivism' across the centuries yielded these 'fascistic' things: slavery ended, women got the vote, segregation was done away with, Civil rights, basic minimum wage, work day, laborer rights, worker benefits, abortion rights, gay rights, and a hundred other things. I challenge Beck to declare to his own constituency that they should forfeit their social security, medicare, and medicaid. They are all 'doles' of the Welfare State that were decried as socialist when they were launched and are now universally popular. Ronald Reagan ran ads against Medicare, calling it a socialist plot to take over the medical sector.
The hypocrisy of these people know no boundaries. The Republican Party (actually a good bit of the Democratic Party too) are controlled by a bunch of mean spirited, super rich Plutocrats who are in the game only to line their own pockets and those of their friends. For that they are willing to spend billions of public funds to bomb and kill thousands across the globe. They come from the class that gives itself golden parachutes when companies fail and thousands lose their jobs. They come from the class that takes an undeserved cut of the winnings (average CEO pay was fifty times that of the average worker during the seventies; now it has gone up by several hundred percent; the CEOs have suddenly become brilliant and the average worker has become lazy) and wants their losses to be socialized through doles. And yet, speak a word against them, it will be unpatriotic and communistic. However, when it comes to a few dollars to give kids from poor, struggling humanity a head start in life, or to take care of the old and the sick, these people are crude and blathering obstructionists. Oliver Wendel Holmes once said that taxes are paid as price for civilization. It is civilization that Beck and his gang do not believe in.
AuthorTopic: Glenn Beck on India (Read 1559 times)
