Showing posts with label Glenn Beck. Show all posts

Monday, May 9, 2011

How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

Published on Monday, May 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

The ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) are making a comeback, in large part due to Glenn Beck, who has touted the libertarian economist and philosopher's views on his TV show. The essence of Hayek's views -- spelled out in his most well-known book, The Road to Serfdom -- is that government stifles freedom and liberty. With a few exceptions, he viewed almost any governmental intervention in economic affairs as a slippery slope toward totalitarian socialism. No wonder that Beck has been hawking Hayek.

Now comes Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative political scientist, who uses the pages of the New York Times Book Review to hawk his own version of government-bashing. Unfortunately, Fukuyama, who claims to be something of a student of Hayek's ideas, hasn't done his homework.
In his review of the new edition of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, published in the Review on Sunday (May 8), Fukuyama off-handedly comments that three of Hayek's ideas "have become broadly accepted by economists." But it so happens that economists don't agree on these three ideas. Moreover, the policy conclusions that Fukuyama draws happen to be untrue.

First, Fukuyama claims that "labor unions create a privileged labor sector at the expense of the nonunionized." It is true that unionized employees earn better wages and benefits than their nonunion counterparts, even those with comparable experience and education. But economists know that it is also true that unions raise wages and benefits for nonunionized workers. The higher the "density" of union workers in an industry or area, the more likely it is that employers will increase the wages and benefits of nonunion employees in order to stave off a union drive. Thus, unions lift the floor for everyone, not just union members, contrary to Hayek.
Second, Fukuyama claims that economists agree with Hayek that "rent control reduces the supply of housing." Economists differ on the wisdom of price controls in general, but it helps to test economist theories in the real world. There is absolutely no empirical evidence for the statement that rent control -- which some cities use to maintain a supply of affordable housing -- reduces the housing supply in general or even rental housing in particular. Every study of rent control in U.S. cities (except those funded by the real estate industry) -- including those that compare similar cities with and without rent control -- shows that rent control has no impact on either the level of new housing construction or the level of housing abandonment. Local rent control laws exempt new construction and allow landlords to raise rents annually based on expenses. Cities with various forms of rent control are often in "hot" markets in which developers want to build rental and other forms of housing. The evidence is clear that rent control does not dampen private investment.
Finally, Fukuyama claims that economists agree that "agricultural subsidies lower the general welfare and create a bonanza for politicians." Again, there is no evidence for this statement. The impact of farm subsidies depends on who gets them, what they are used for, and the general economic condition of the period. During the Depression, subsidies saved many family farmers from going under, helped stabilize prices, and kept entire farm communities, and the nonfarm jobs that depended on agriculture, alive. Today, the vast majority of federal farm subsidies go to large agribusiness conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill that don't need them rather than small family farmers. President Obama campaigned on a pledge to limit individual farm payments to $250,000 to ensure family farms and not "corporate agribusiness" got the money. This is still a good idea. But food stamps, which are an indirect subsidy to farmers, clearly improve the general welfare by dramatically reducing the incidence of hunger and malnutrition.
Hayek's ideas may be making a comeback, as Fukuyama asserts, but it is not because his economic ideas have been proven correct by empirical research, but because they've been promoted by the likes of Glenn Beck to justify a conservative ideological and political agenda.
If conservatives don't like labor unions, they are entitled to their opinions. But when they attack unions by arguing that they actually hurt working people, they don't have the facts on their side. They are crying wolf.
Echoing Hayek and Beck, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, House Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Darrell Issa, and the Tea Party can fulminate all they want that government policies to make corporations behave more responsibly -- such as the minimum wage, consumer and environmental protection laws, rules to improve workplace safety, regulations to restrain Wall Street abuses, and health care reform -- are "job killers." But repeating this libertarian mantra doesn't make it true.

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Glen Beck Lacks Honor

David Weidner's Writing on the Wall

Aug. 31, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EDT

Glenn and me

Commentary: A Talking Heads moment with the controversial talk show host

By David Weidner, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Glenn Beck welcomed me with a big hello and a goofy grin. I liked him immediately.
It was April Fool's Day 2008, more than two years before his day in the Washington sun this past weekend. Bear Stearns Cos. had just been acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) . The financial industry was spinning, but much of the world was still living in the bubble economy. Housing prices were holding. Oil prices were still north of $100 a barrel.
Earlier that day, I had been invited on his show. It was still on CNN. Beck moved to Fox News later that year. The topic was the price of oil. A producer called for a pre-interview. I had done a lot of reporting and writing on the subject. My take was that Wall Street speculation was largely to blame, not the oil companies. Read 2008 column on oil speculation.

Reuters

TV commentator Glenn Beck waves to supporters at his Restoring Honor rally on the National Mall in Washington.

(Fox is a division of News Corp. (NASDAQ:NWS) , which also owns MarketWatch.)
Beck's producer was smart and asked good questions. I explained to her how Wall Street traders pushed up energy prices in Europe where there were fewer market limits and how Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS) analysts were particularly influential in driving up prices by setting eye-popping price targets. It was a subject that had been under-covered by the media, in my opinion.
She explained to me that Beck wanted to know if oil companies were responsible. I said I didn't think so, and we made arrangements for my visit to the studio.

Made bigger by TV

At the time, I was familiar with Beck, but not a regular viewer. His billboards were ubiquitous on the sides of city buses. His interviews didn't make much of an impression on me, or at least I didn't remember anything if I saw one.
His monologues were the thing that really awed me. I didn't always agree with him -- rarely, actually -- but as someone who writes and talks commentary, I admired his skills. He's a fantastic and persuasive speaker in the way he uses cadence, pauses and nuanced words.
A radio guy at heart, Beck's transition to TV made him even more powerful. He isn't a handsome guy. He looks like your local insurance agent. But the folksy persona matches the message.

News Hub: A once-reliable gauge, P/E loses luster

Benjamin Levisohn discusses the P/E ratio, the once tried and true market measurement that's losing its luster as a way to measure a stock's value.

When I arrived at the studio, I was ushered into the makeup room and that's where I first met Beck. In person, he's not much different than what you get on the tube. He is, perhaps, a little more rumpled. He was wearing Converse sneakers. I've bumped into him a few times here in the News Corp. building. I've never seen him in a suit.

On the show

After giving me his big hello, Beck rushed off to somewhere, probably his stage. I was sent to a dark small booth with a camera pointed at a tall chair. These "remote" studios aren't that unusual. They use them to save space on the main stage, or just create the illusion that someone is beaming in. But for Beck they served a purpose I would soon discover.
There was a monitor so I could watch the show. Beck was doing his monologue. Then, he interviewed someone on a different subject. Finally, he turned to the subject of oil prices.
My memory of what followed may not be perfect. I contacted CNN to get a clip of the show and they didn't respond. It's not on YouTube, which is surprising, since it seems everything is. But my conversation with Beck left a lasting impression.
Beck introduced me. A light on the camera turned red. I smiled. The light went off. Beck didn't begin with a question, but more of a statement. He said he knew that I thought speculation was to blame. He said he knew I thought Wall Street had a role. But wasn't, Beck said, the real problem Congress?
April Fool's Day, indeed. Beck bum-rushed me by dismissing the answers I had given to his producer earlier. He turned a discussion of the causes of high oil prices into a political debate, one I wasn't really interested in or prepared to talk about.
Disoriented, I probably didn't start my reply well, but when I got my wits about me, I argued that his thesis was wrong. I said it wasn't a political issue but a trading issue. My answer probably started to sound hostile.
And here's where Beck had what we all do from time to time, a Talking Heads moment. He stopped making sense.
Beck followed up with a question -- again it was more of a statement -- about how government policy was responsible for higher oil prices. It was a theme he would return to all summer as oil prices inched higher.
Again, I said I didn't see it that way and before I could elaborate, Beck began talking over me, that little red light went off and he turned to another guest in Washington who seemed to agree with him before my audio was turned off.
It was over. Gone in 30 seconds, if that.

'Restoring honor'

I was angry and disappointed. On one level, I understood. This was his show. It was his game. It was entertainment, not a real debate. It happens. Whether CNN, CNBC, MSNBC or Fox, shows are hosted in a way in which guests are brought on to simply break up the monotony.
We're fodder for the stars. Beck wanted a guest who played into his narrative that we shouldn't blame the oil companies for high prices; we should blame the government.
But on another level I was profoundly disturbed that Beck had used a news device -- interviews -- to advance an agenda.
The price of gas is pivotal to our economy. What influences its price is complicated. Yes, there's plenty of room for debate even over whether speculators are fueling the price. But the way Beck dealt with the subject was dishonest. Ours was a mock interview, perhaps designed to be contentious and keep the viewers watching.
What it wasn't, was an intelligent discussion. It wasn't even a discussion. Perhaps I was naive, but I still can't help but feel I was duped and set up. Small consolation: I watched a few of his shows and found I wasn't the only one.
And that's why when I saw my old friend Glenn Beck leading "restoring honor" marches on Washington as he did Saturday, I wondered what kind of "honor" he's talking about. Honoring guests? Honoring ideas? Honoring points of view?
Who knows? But knowing how Beck doesn't like things complicated, I'll make an observation and keep it simple.
Restoring honor? You have to have some to begin with.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

By FRANK RICH

Published: August 28, 2010.

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Glen Beck Sanity In Question

Image by bill.streeter via Flickr

Glenn Beck Gets Progressively More Paranoid
Fox News’ lunatic fringe, now even loonier

By Peter Hart

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck had a surprising 2009 (Extra!, 6/09), becoming a high-profile advocate for the right-wing Tea Party movement and attracting millions of viewers to his late afternoon cable talk show. How does one top that?

By spinning out elaborate theories about the “progressive” assault on the Constitution and the country, hinting that the left’s disenchantment with Barack Obama could very easily manifest itself in violence—that’s how.

Beck’s ruminations make no logical sense, and the proposals he attacks do not bear even the faintest resemblance to the political agenda of the White House or congressional Democrats. But his rants do have the effect of scaring viewers into believing that a radical program to usher the United States into a totalitarian future is well underway. As Beck explained (1/11/10): “We are going to show you what the progressives are doing and how they’re slowly but surely robbing Americans of individual choices and liberties and quite honestly, robbing the bank as well.”

Much of Beck’s rhetoric is garden variety red-baiting. He tells viewers (1/4/10) that “officials in and around this White House” are “routinely praising radical leftists and Communist dictators and the wonders of socialism in spreading the wealth.” On January 11, Beck complained: “Why is it that nobody seems to be paying any attention to the similarities that we’re seeing now between what Hugo Chávez has been doing in Venezuela and what is happening here in America?”

Beck’s campaign against “progressivism” is in the same vein. Generally speaking, the Progressive movements of the early 20th century stressed government regulation and oversight of corporate power, workers’ rights and increased civic participation in local and national politics. In Beck’s case against progressivism, these strands are woven into a thread that ties together socialism, Communism, fascism and the supposedly far-left politics of the Obama administration.

“The enemy to our Constitution is the progressive movement,” Beck explained (2/9/10), which aims “to evolve the United States out of a republic.” On another program (1/20/10), he announced: “Progressives have been patient for decades, creeping their way into the system in the cover of darkness. And this is their opportunity. They’re going to deal a final death blow to the Constitution if they can.”

Progressives “started a 100-year time bomb. They planted it in the early 1900s, mainly with this guy, Woodrow Wilson—one evil SOB, bad dude.” And, naturally, the hundred years are nearly up: “The fundamental transformation of America. The progressive dream that began over 100 years ago. They need the structure to control every aspect of your life and they are just about finishing building it.”

The existential threat to the United States aside, Beck’s definition of progressivism is simple—and damning: They are the people responsible for the income tax, the Federal Reserve, Prohibition and the League of Nations. Because some progressives once supported the pseudo-science of eugenics, progressivism is also indirectly responsible for the Holocaust (1/8/10):

This was a progressive idea. Not the extermination camps, but eugenics, which led to the camps. You see, the progressives in America always thought they were superior. And it was the stupid people that were just slowing us down. Hitler just took that to the next level as did Stalin. The progressive tactics haven’t changed much since then.

Progressivism is “the philosophy that the ends justify the means and the elites can make a better choice than the individual,” Beck explained (1/7/10). Progressives “are the people that brought us the idea that the Constitution is fatally flawed.… They stopped teaching the constitutional law and they started teaching only case law in our universities around 1920.” That might come as a surprise to those who attended law school during the past 90 years.

In the space of a few minutes one night (1/5/10), Beck sought to explain, in great and mind-bending detail, how progressivism has taken over our political system. He started with professors Frances Fox Piven and the late Richard Cloward, “people who you would say are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system.” Cloward and Piven co-authored an article in the Nation (5/2/66) in the 1960s about fighting poverty by getting eligible people onto welfare rolls. That article caused, according to Beck, such a dramatic increase in the number of people on welfare that New York City went bankrupt. That was politically disastrous, so “Cloward and Piven and their devotees figured it out. They needed to be in the system,” rather than fighting it from the outside.

beckBeck then fingered financier George Soros “as a source of funding for many of these radical groups.” Soros and company even “went to one of the poorest sections in New York just recently and gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of your tax dollars—stimulus money, gave it out”—an apparent reference to a $35 million gift Soros from so New York state could get federal matching funds for schools (New York Times, 8/8/09). From there, Beck moved to the Wall Street Temporary Assets Relief Program bailout: “This is not a Democratic Party thing. John McCain is a progressive. You had the Republicans and the Democrats to thank for TARP.”

So, somehow, a 40-year-old article in the Nation led to all manner of seemingly disconnected political events, involving a political alliance that spans from the far left to George W. Bush. Or, as Beck summed up: “So we just gave you the basics of Cloward and Piven. Well, maybe you can find some other rational explanation for what’s going on. I can’t.”

Logically, Beck should consider himself to be a right-wing progressive, since he too supported the TARP bailout—and actually thought it should be bigger (CNN Headline News, 9/22/08):

I thought about it an awful lot this weekend, and while it takes everything in me to say this, I think the bailout is the right thing do. The real story is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.

While his own track record might not be something he wants to talk about, he maintains that revealing the hidden history of progressivism would strike a blow against his political enemies (1/22/10):

Progressives realized victory required changing history. To defeat them, we have to correct that. Progressives know how powerful history is. When these truths get told and the lies get corrected, the game is going to be on. It’s pulling the mask off the monster.

After Republican Scott Brown won a special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, Beck (1/20/10) spotted a new progressive danger, warning of “a revolution or a civil war in the Democratic Party. It’s progressives versus Democrats. It’s blue versus gray. And this is a war that I think could become dangerous—hopefully not.”

He explained: “Doesn’t it feel like now is a time that the Obama regime is in collapse? The most dangerous time in any regime, especially a revolutionary regime, is when it is on the verge of collapse. A regime with revolutionaries in it, it is trouble.” Beck told his audience there was a fundamental difference between them and the progressive enemy:

To you, a fight means educating people. It means mobilizing people to go out and vote. And you fight at the ballot box. But to these people, what does a fight mean to the uber left progressive? All bets are off. They will cheat. They will lie. They will steal. And they have, in the past, blown things up if it helps them win.

Beck declared that the “president is in danger.... He is surrounded by radicals, surrounded by radicals. Here is why the republic is in danger. And the president is in danger first, then the republic.” These radicals “will fight to change it in the cover of darkness. And they will become much more dangerous, as they realize their time to make this move is running out.” As Beck ominously declared: “Please pray for our Secret Service, make sure that they do their job. Dear God, protect our president.”

So a guy who spends several hours a day whipping up viewers and listeners into a frenzy over Barack Obama’s secret plan to destroy the country is worried that leftists might do him harm. It makes perfect sense—if you’re Glenn Beck.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Columnist Daniel A. Brown

Image via Wikipedia

Paranoia strikes deep

Violent words can lead to violent actions

We live in a bubble here in western Massachusetts. While citizens of Franklin County have been submerged in rain, tomato blight and the pros and cons of the proposed bio-mass plant, it seems as if the rest of the nation has gone stark, raving mad. Because we are lucky to reside in a part of the country where people are both educated and intelligent, you’d have to do some serious searching to find local citizens who would support the following actions and beliefs. Armed men intimidating politicians at town hall meetings. A sitting president verbally insulted as he speaks to Congress. Accusations that this same president is a Socialist, a Communist, a Nazi and a Fascist, an illegal alien, a Muslim and, not least of all, the Anti-Christ who will surrender the United States to the New World Order (remember that?).

All this over health care?

Obviously, none of this has anything to do with reforming the American health care system. That would be as nonsensical as an ocean of volcanic hatred generated by reworking your car insurance policy. What is happening now is what historically occurs during times of economic stress when too many people feel frightened and powerless to have any control over their own lives. It explains why the civilized, intelligent and industrious German people could turn into a nation of monsters during the years of the Third Reich. Adolph Hitler was nearly washed up until the Great Depression hit and he was able to ride the subsequent wave of anger and helplessness into power, designating scapegoats while appealing to a malignant form of patriotism. Were he alive today, he’d have his own radio talk show and a page on Facebook.

There is little logic on display here and (after finding out the hard way on the Internet); I’ve learned that there are few venues for rational discussion. Like brainwashed cultists, members of extreme political ideologies divide the world into Traitors and True Believers and facts are mostly an impediment to rants. What is frightening is that people like this are willing to hold contradictions as truths and believe things that a smart 5^th grader would laugh at. You know them by now: “Death Panels” to kill Granny; Obama brainwashing American schoolchildren to become Commies, Obama as Hitler (apparently the Nazis conquered Europe to implement the public option? Who knew?) etc. That this frenzy of lunacy and paranoia is being ignited and exploited by demagogues like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and lesser known radio screamers goes without saying.

And, yes, there is a racist component, carefully expressed in code, which is sparked by the reality of an African-American in the White House. It should not be surprising seeing that right-wing conservative ideology defended racial segregation fifty years ago and a century before that, defended slavery. But I will join my voice to fellow columnists, Gary Sanderson and Jim Culleny, in believing that it’s only a matter of time before a latter-day Timothy McVeigh comes out of the shadows and starts killing Americans in the name of anti-(liberal) government resentment. Beck, Limbaugh and company are having a grand time with all this and raking in the dough. But what they don’t seem to know (or care about) is that their crazy, irrational words are eventually going to lead to crazy, violent actions. They are reaping the whirlwind and might, too late, come to understand that their irresponsible divisiveness will have a negative effect on the country they supposedly love.

They would do well to take into account the example of Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most feared of the leaders of the French Revolution. Marat was not so much a political leader as a journalist at a time when print media was the Internet of its day in terms of its influence and effectiveness in reaching a wide audience. French revolutionary journalism was not only widespread but incendiary in ways that, by comparison, makes Beck and company sound like Grandma Moses. Their writers were out for blood, literally, and Marat’s newspaper, “The Friend of the People”, howled the loudest. And, in a viable warning to today’s hate mongers, they got their wish. Marat’s printed rantings, stoking the fear and paranoia of its contemporary citizenry, led to what was known as the September Massacres whereby mobs murdered thousands of men, women, and children being held in the Parisian prisons for no other crime than being the “Other”.

Marat justified his actions by declaring that he was expressing “The rage of the People”. Rush, Hanitty, Savage, and Beck could claim the same excuse. But Marat was no Joe the Plumber. He was a physician and scientific experimenter who spoke five languages and was once in the service of the royal family. His venom was fueled, not by political concerns, but more by the need for revenge for the years he felt ignored by the scientific establishment. Unable to gain acceptance by the status quo, he decided to turn against it with lethal consequences. One wonders how many of the inflammatory radio ranters are equally motivated by their own human weaknesses.

But what goes around come around. If you spew hatred and fear, those same energies will eventually come back to bite you (a process also known as the law of karma). Marat fell victim to his own passions by being stabbed to death by someone as nihilistically patriotic as himself. His vitriolic peers in the revolutionary news media met similar fates, often being condemned by their former supporters. I’m not wishing for violence to arrive at the doors of the current crop of rage exploiters. Instead, I am asking whether they are bringing out the best or the worst in the American people,

And, if the latter, why are they doing it?

Local Bias

Monday, May 9, 2011

How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?