Turn Out The Lights On Glenn!

As you may know, right-wing talk show hosts have been bringing race-based fear mongering into the mainstream, but FOX’s Glenn Beck just took it to another level. On Tuesday, Beck said:

This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people… this guy is, I believe, a racist.

It’s part of a larger argument Beck has been making: that President Obama wants to serve the needs of Black communities at White people’s expense. This kind of talk stirs up fear, hate, and it can lead to violence.

I’ve joined ColorOfChange.org’s effort to stop Glenn Beck. ColorOfChange is already putting calls into Beck’s advertisers, asking them if they want to be associated with this kind of racist hate and fear-mongering. When the advertisers see that tens of thousands of us are behind that question, I believe they’ll move their advertising dollars elsewhere, and his show and platform will be history.

Will you take a stand and be counted, and invite your friends and family to do the same? It takes just a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/?id=2273-577706

Glenn Beck is appealing to the worst in America. Of course, some Americans refuse to accept the fact that our president is Black or the idea that he could truly serve all Americans. But the only way these views fade away is if they’re not reinforced by mainstream society. Instead, folks like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh are exploiting racism and race-based fear to bump their ratings, stirring up racial discord in the process.

The dangers of these tactics are real. We saw the same dynamic during the presidential race: By the end, the McCain/Palin campaign was unable to control the violent energy whipped up by their race-baiting. It resulted in an unprecedented number of threats on Obama’s life, a rise in the number of hate groups, and an increase in the number of threats and crimes against immigrants and Black people.

FOX has a horrible track record on pushing racist propaganda, but Glenn Beck appears to be taking the network to an even lower standard. He’s trying to divide and distract America when we should be coming together and talking about issues that really matter–like health care and the economy.

The good news is that we have the power to stop this. All major media is funded by advertising. And advertisers care more than anything what consumers think. If we want to change what’s happening and put an end to folks like Glenn Beck having a platform, we can do it.

It’s up to us, and it can start now. Please join me:

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/?id=2273-577706

Thanks.

Here are some links to more info:

“Beck: Obama has ‘exposed himself as a guy’ with ‘a deep seated hatred for white people’”
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907280008

“Glenn Beck: Obama agenda driven by ‘reparations’ and desire to ‘settle old racial scores’”
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907230040

“MSNBC’s Deutsch encourages viewers to demand advertisers on Beck’s show spend money elsewhere”
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907290037

“On Television and Radio, Talk of Obama’s Citizenship”
http://tinyurl.com/mb467j

The Fantasy of the Free Market

Every child, at the age of six, should be forced to acquire their own food.  From ages four to six, they should shadow adults, raising livestock, growing edible plants, hunting, trapping, fishing and participating directly in the circle of life.  The adults around them provide food and shelter until the age of six.  At six, they need to begin providing for themselves.  Then the true lessons of supply and demand, of a real economy with necessity of resources determining behaviors and attitudes would be starkly displayed, and inherently understood.  As those children grow, they will know what Americans and others around the world have forgotten: Economics is all about what people need.

Making it about what people want is like writing a good book that everyone believes is true.  The stock market was created so that men (and women) could bet what they have against what they think other men and women will want.  If that sentence didn’t make any sense, it’s because it accurately describes the economic manipulation of “the free market” and is the truth behind the myth that the market isn’t or shouldn’t be regulated.

Our current economic crisis, both the credit crunch and the woes of Wall Street, is artificial.  Don’t misunderstand . . . people are really losing their jobs, losing their homes, truly lacking in the trade goods we call currency to acquire the basic necessities to assure their survival.  But the discussion of The Market as an organism, which lives and breathes and exists independent of human manipulation, that somehow it is going to “right itself if left unregulated” is an attempt by those who understand the lie we’re all being told, and are attempting to continue that lie for their own benefit.

The President, on the other hand, appears to understand the fantasy of the free market, and is willing to burst that bubble just like the dotcom and housing bubbles burst when people stopped believing in them.  He is willing to engage enough to support the shared belief, to encourage it with modification, because to totally get out of the Matrix will allow it to crash, and the political system within which he has acquired authority and within which we all find definite measures of security would cease to exist as we all began to acquire the material resources that we actually need regardless of the consequences to others or the manner of our acquisition.

People who advocate a free market are walking, talking oxymorons.  People who advocate a market economy with some regulation simply disagree with the President and those of us who call for increased regulation on the degree.  But economic darwisnism, the fantasy of a free market that simply rewards the innovative and the ruthless people willing to use and manipulate others without regard for their outcome, too,  lowers the bar, and speaks to the lower registers of human nature.

The free market isn’t free. It costs a lot in lives.  And that isn’t a fantasy.

It’s a nightmare.

I.O.U. Who?

Green jobs grow slowly in Philadelphia

‘Era of big government’ back, Republican says

Throwing Stones

“Flinger of pebbles against a fortress, his impunity was the measure of his impotence.”

-Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace, p. 190

Much is being made of the Republican (and conservative Democratic) objections to the current stimulus package.  There are allegedly alternatives being proposed and denied, committees being formed to “scrub” the proposed package of “un-stimulative aspects,” and talking heads and elected officials on television decrying the culture of Washington and the nature of “pork-barrel” spending.

They are all flinging pebbles.

The new talking point parroted on “fiscal conservative television and radio” is attempting to portray the stimulus package as a spending bill.  These people have missed the point.  As President Obama alluded to on Thursday, It Is A Spending Bill!

“In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive. I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”

That’s the goal, to spend some of the money taken in by the government (or on the government’s credit) and spend it in ways that put people back to work, rebuild the infrastructure of the United States, puts money back in people’s pockets, and hence into circulation.  Now I’ve been working on my economic game, because I’m more of a political analyst who dips into the societal and sociological ramifications of race, history and power in the United States.  I’ve never claimed to be an expert on economic theory, though I’m working on my bona fides in that area.

It seems to me, though, that the “failed philosophies of the free market” are what got us as a country into this mess.  I’ve been called partisan, because I pointed out that Phil Gramm authored the legislation that allowed for the bundling of mortgages in 2000, and I said it was President Bush’s fault.  My bad.  President Clinton was still in charge.  But the point of that admission is this:  for the last eight years, the trickle-down experiment has come to its full fruition, and we are reaping the whirlwind because of it.

Senator Boxer was right to chastise Senator Lindsey Graham yesterday, when he was trying to pontificate about the current proposal, and hiding behind his right to speak.  He needs to, as does Representative Boehner and the whole host of opponents of the stimulus package, exercise his right to think.  Being in opposition to the package, as opposed to wanting to draft or change provisions in the package is a problem in and of itself.

The more I am familiarizing myself with the economic issues facing our nation today, the more surprised I am to hear the call for tax cuts as a means out of this mess.  It seems that the tax cuts that we’ve been enduring haven’t worked all that well. And in the end, I don’t believe that those opponents matter.  It’s sad, with the opportunity to actually act on behalf of the people of the United States, that so many of our representatives are clinging to their ideology in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

They are flinging pebbles.  They are throwing stones.  The spending bill will pass.  The stimulus package will put people back to work, money in the economy, and begin to rebuild our infrastructure.  So let them throw.

Obama fires up House Democrats to help push through stimulus bill

Republican Senator on Stimulus: We’re Close

Polls show support for stimulus has slipped

Stimulus Showdown

White House Reacts to Jobs Report

Swimming With Sharks

We’re all treading water, just hanging out on the surface, dealing with the shallows, ignorant of the powerful currents roiling beneath our kicking feet.  John McCain is a distraction.  He’s not even a real candidate.  He’s Uncle Fester with a comb-over.  As we swim in this ocean of verbal contortion, misapprehension, lies, silly laughs, and “investigations”, there are monsters lurking below.  Shock Doctrine, Chicago Boys, Reaganites, Milton Friedman disciples, American torturers, people who think that the market is the nirvana, and government is (never thought I’d say this) to quote the other distraction, “the problem.”

My mother-in-law is from Chile.  She came to this country because her husband was tortured and exiled, bringing with her her two children and a socialist ideology that from time to time I argue with to gain more information from someone who actually lived it.  It never dawned on me, though, the connection between her arrival and the shock and awe campaign espoused by John McCain and inflicted on the citizens of Iraq.  Even her posts in response to some blog pieces didn’t enlighten me.  But listening to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, it becomes clearer and clearer why people are screaming about Barack Obama at John McCain rallies – it’s the theatre of the absurd writ large.  It’s Caesar’s “bread and a circus” to keep the rabble distracted while the wolves raid the chicken coop.

Meanwhile, the same people who engineered the overthrow of the government in Chile; who chopped up the public school system in New Orleans after the US government’s failure to act in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; who used the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 to wage an invasion in Iraq and are now lining up Iran in their crosshairs; these same people are waving McCain Palin in our collective face (and if you don’t understand that she is a distraction, stop reading now) in order to keep us from asking what the other hand is doing.

How else to explain the Republican candidates’ continued lies running unchecked?  How else to explain “the Maverick” being the presidential nominee for the Gallant Old Party and hiring the people who ran him out of the primaries eight years ago?  How else to explain a hugely under-qualified sparkly vice-presidential nominee?  How else to explain the privatization of war (Blackwater), education (New Orleans), social security (oops!  That one didn’t go through), healthcare (Senator McCain?)?

This transfer of public money into private hands ($840 billion last week, neh!?) is not accidental.  The same rush to judgment that led to the invasion of a country who had not attacked the United States and to “the rescue plan” is driving McCain supporters to cry in terror over an Obama presidency, and Obama supporters to shiver at the thought of more Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamos and Taxis to the Darkside.  Why is there an army division being deployed inside the United States?

This distraction called John Sydney McCain III is serving a purpose once again – but he’s not serving his country.  Blinded by his own ambition, he’s the clown, the jester, lurching from rally to rally, unsure of what to say or how to say it.  And we are all continuing to tread water, watching his antics, worrying about feloniously ridiculous “character attacks”, battling the flies while the vultures are eating the carcass.  And the powers that be are already setting up the next Allende, with building blocks like the fake ACORN-voter fraud accusations, setting up a question of legitimacy before Senator Obama gets elected.

We need to dive below the surface, realize that supporting hope and change means reading between the attack lines, looking for the undercurrents (like Representative John Lewis) below the rhetoric.  Otherwise, just as we believe we’ve made it to shore, we’ll hear that famous music, and feel the flash of teeth devouring our lower extremities, as we get bitten in the butt.  Just like the invasion of Iraq and Blackwater and Haliburton and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and post-Katrina and (McCain wants to battle Russia?) and the sub-prime mortgage crisis credit crunch $700 billion plus earmarks bailout.  And those same nefarious power brokers will be setting up an Obama presidency to take the fall, or to just fall.

The sharks are swimming below all of us . . .

CIA Tactics Endorsed in Memos

Make-believe Maverick

Biden Says Reaction at Some McCain Rallies ‘Scary’

Charter School’s Big Experiment

The McCain-Palin Lies and the Neil Armstrong Principle

Conservatives against Sarah Palin:  The List is Growing

Brigade Homeland Tour Starts Oct. 1

How McCain Will Steal the Election from Obama (Sort of)

John Lewis Warns McCain: You’re “Sowing the Seeds of Hatred and Division”

Cross-posted at Will Rhodes Portmanteau on October 14, 2008