Puff ~N~ Stuff

Professor Windbag, 


On to your puffing! lol: You are right when you say that the truth is in the balance, which is discouraging when so much of what we see is becoming ever more unbalanced. That necessary tension between the individual and the community so off center now that "community" became a dirty word in the last presidential election.

Our founders used phrases like "common good" more readily because that's the world they lived in. Few people were (or are) entirely self sufficient. It was necessary to be part of a community in order get the help of people with skills one needed or goods one couldn't produce alone. Those responsibilities to the community came with. You are correct when you point out our "excessive individualism" that has come at such a high price.  And what/who has replaced friends, neighbors, the local shopkeeper? Not the government that worries Beck so, but the corporations that worry you. It's hard to instill in people a sense of community when they move so often from place to place, spend most of the time alone (or alone with their own families) at home, and when they venture out to do shopping, or run errands are likely not to see a single person they know. We rely on internet sites where people rate and review, trusting the advice of people we don't know about other people we don't know who provide services we need. The fractured connections breed distrust.

And guns and ammunition sales may very well be a “trust indicator,” as he says. Yet it is not only about the government. When people trust BOTH their government AND their fellow people, then gun and ammunition sales will go down.  Good point.  Again, trust (or the lack of it) is the underlying problem isn't it?

The militia (for several years now a dirty word on the other "side") idea would perhaps have gone a long way in helping to diminish the isolation that men in our culture feel. In Israel long after the service requirement has been met large numbers of men continue to serve in reserves with the same group for many years. It serves as a vehicle for male bonding, something as we've discussed before, is sorely needed here.

I don't know that Beck "hates nuance" and "complicated realities" as much as he just doesn't see them. He seems to see things as one way or another with very little gray where things merge and mesh.  You are correct when you say he takes things out of context, not only in the book but often on his show where something a politician says sounds undeniably damning (especially when played over and over), but when you see the entire speech or the comment as a whole the meaning is often less frightening, more understandable. There is plenty to be concerned about without whipping up fear unnecessarily which I think he sometimes does.

While I agree with a good bit of what he says some of the things he chooses to focus on make it hard to not question his thinking. His comments on Teddy Roosevelt and the National Parks for instance. It's hard to believe he doesn't think there is anything that should be protected and preserved so that it can be enjoyed by everyone.

The Japanese Americans whisked off to internment camps must have wondered why their friends and neighbors didn't rise up in their defense. I'm only aware of one official in Hawaii refusing to participate, yet hadn't everyone involved in making internment possible taken an oath to defend the Constitution? Fear and prejudice, so often the enemies of liberty.  Speaking of which, it is a failure on Beck's part not to have held the Patriot Act to the same standard as the actions he points out that took place post Katrina.

You covered the problems with education beautifully. I've been to a standing room only PTA meeting with parents lining the walls of a large lunchroom and spilling out into the corridor where a teacher got up and tearfully thanked parents for coming, explaining that she'd come from another school where even if the teachers pooled their money and provided a free dinner they were lucky to have 5 parents attend. We often see teachers begging for parental involvement.  There is (as you point out) plenty of blame to go around.

I have a problem with the "one size fits all" approach of the public system which I think starts far too young especially for males. I found (for us anyway) that combining home schooling, especially when they are young and you want to spark a lifelong love of learning, then a more traditional high school approach worked well. By the time they finished middle school I was more than happy to partner with and back up their teachers! :)

I agree with GB to some extent that the government is too invasive though not always because it's pressing to be but often because citizens acquiesce too readily our rights and responsibilities.  Some parents do hope to partner with teachers in the ongoing process of education but many others, either because they have had negative experiences themselves or are just overwhelmed with their own lives, yield to the experts control of a child's education. I think we see the same thing happen with feeling any sort of obligation to those less fortunate in our communities. The attitude becomes "Isn't there a government program for that?" When it should more often be "What can I do to help?" We are feeling less responsible for and to each other all the time.

The creaking is produced by my constantly having to rethink and examine my premises. Let's see...who would have liked that? Ah yes, Ms. Rand. :)

Can We Make a U-Turn on The Roman Road?

Professor J, 

Let us imagine for a moment the illustrious English historian, Edward Gibbon, sitting down to read the musings of a certain professor and housewife. What would he find us discussing? The pleasure seeking selfish society in which we live, and admittedly are not immune to. The ever increasing distrust among people. The shallowness and distracted nature of the culture. Education. Freedom. Politics. Power. How thoroughly he would be familiar with all this, having spent much of his life shining light on those very topics with a distant historical glow as he studied the demise of a republic and then an empire while writing his magnum opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  With his full chin resting on a pudgy hand he might wonder if we've learned nothing from the past. But let's let him speak to us across time in his own words:

"...the uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret weapon into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished..." Chapter 2

"The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste." Chapter 2

"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom." Chapter 3

Mightn't we substitute your corporate masters or Beck's over reaching government, or some combination of the two there in place of Augustus?

"Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity."
Chapter 4

Selfish ambition, greed, individualism, and lack of community spirit? 

"... in the enjoyment of plenty, the Romans should lose the memory of freedom."  Chapter 17

"...their profuse luxury must have been the result of that indolent despair that enjoys the present hour and declines the thoughts of futurity." Chapter 27

Strapping future generations with crushing debt so we can keep up our adopted standard of comfort? I find it so interesting that he connects this behavior to despair, which I think is rampant in our own day. We are losing the "Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition" that he speaks of early on.

"The dangerous secret of wealth and weakness of the empire had been revealed to the world." Chapter 10

Debt to other countries, a struggling economy and weakened currency, perhaps? Or as you put it: 

...the day is coming for our comeuppance. As we make ourselves weaker and weaker, and as we arrogantly and utterly selfishly trample or exploit others overseas, as we demand rules of others but hypocritically refuse to abide by them ourselves, we breed seething resentment that will blowback one day on us in continuous cascade, instead of just the occasional blowback as happens now.


I've no doubt that our readers can make many more astute observations of the unfortunate and often chilling similarities between the two. I've only skimmed the surface here, and poorly, I fear.

While you seem to have finished off the horse of corporate vs. government responsibility, I'm going to take one last whack at him (unless you'd like to have the last word while claiming your aren't). :) I don't disagree with anything you've said but still disagree with that overall view. I think time is the problem.  We haven't suddenly arrived here (in which case I would agree with you wholeheartedly) but over many decades. This flood of corporate power hasn't burst upon us out of nowhere but is instead the result of countless tiny little cracks of corruption, selfishness (perhaps mostly unnoticed), and greed in the dam that was supposed to be protecting us.

Every politician who's ever taken a bribe, every public servant who has overlooked wrongdoing, every elected official at every level who has thought about how he can profit by his vote, these are the people I hold accountable. It probably isn't even the waves of corruption and short sightedness combined with a lack of vision we see on the surface as much as it is the tide of greed and self-interest, that has been rising for many years. 

If power equals strength over time, what does weakness over time come to? Or has Gibbon laid it out clearly for us?


More to follow on your puffing and a few other things.

Continuing CDB (Or, Windbag puffs, and puffs, and puffs...)

Beck says all these head-nodding things. Then we get to the not-so-much or even the uhm, no, parts. Although somewhat less so (because he tries to be more inclusive, presumably), the same can often be said about Obama’s writing.

Beck is inflammatory with statements like, “Now our government, the instigator of our problems…”

Beck is right that people shouldn’t be punished for prudence, planning, sacrifice, and hard work, while those who do the opposite get compensated. For indeed, where’s the lesson in that? Except perhaps a perverse one?

Beck’s warnings that we should rage against the idea that the state grants us our rights are correct. Whenever, we, in our ignorance, speak things like “The government lets me…” or “The government says I can…” or “The government gave me the right to…” a hundred ghostly voices shout if we could only hear them. They are the voices of our Framers, and of John Locke. And their ghostly voices silently scream to us: “The government doesn’t GIVE you ANYTHING! YOU give the government everything that it has, everything that it is. ALL rights are yours, and you decide which ones to give to YOUR creature, YOUR creation, the government, so it can operate!” And across wide lands they extend their ghostly hands through their graves, and extend their middle fingers in defiance and rage that we could so easily forget and not care that rights come from the people up, not the government down.

Beck trumpets the individual, and decries the communal that he sees as enforced. The truth awaits, as it usually does, in the balance. Excessive individualism has cost this country, this society, this civilization, a great deal. Excessive communalism, whether corrupted or not, has also cost a great deal. Our Framers properly recognized that the freedoms of the individual should be high on the list of priorities. And yet they, even as unenlightened as they were in comparison to the native Americans on the issue, still recognized that there are responsibilities to the community, even the larger state and national community. They used terms like “the common good,” that have become out of vogue in many circles today.

Beck also, deliberately or not, conflates several issues concerning bearing arms. First, many scholars feel that the Framers largely expected that the majority of adult males of prime fit age (15-45) would be in the militia, whether it be in the regular drilling militia or in the infrequently drilling muster militia, and that militia members would keep them in their homes. We don’t have this militia participation today, although perhaps we should.

Second, Beck implies that ANY weapon is just as proper to possess as another. A little thought will see the illogic of that position. Comparisons to Canada have some benefit, but are often limited, given that Canada has large territory (larger than the U.S.) but relatively sparse population (only slight more than 1/10th of the U.S.’s).

The lack of both community and sense of collective good, both of which were valuable to the Framers, magnifies dangers in individual weapon possession and use. The maddening and often idiotically clumsy attempts by state and local governments to deal with this by procedures is often a failure, however. And guns and ammunition sales may very well be a “trust indicator,” as he says. Yet it is not only about the government. When people trust BOTH their government AND their fellow people, then gun and ammunition sales will go down. Infringing on 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms is wrongheaded and needlessly antagonistic. It’s endpipe focused instead of beginning at the beginning.

Beck is smart-bomb accurate in pointing out the internment of Japanese-Americans, although it is a bit conflated with the gun argument he is making. The internment is such a black stain, one brought on by excessive and irrational fear, and what’s worse, its lessons have still not sunk in all that well. And Beck is right that we need to remember that the Constitution is just a piece of paper unless we the people know it, value it, and demand its adherence. Whenever we let our fear (which usually turns out to be unfounded, at least in degree) get the best of us, we dilute and pollute our supposed values, and diminish ourselves in the process.

Beck is also dead-on right in pointing out the Supreme Court’s absurdly ruinous decision about eminent domain used for private interests, which to constitutional scholars clearly goes against the constitution. Yet he turns this into a tirade against government itself, instead of the big business interests that are being served. He also does not mention the equally ruinous decision to grant free speech to corporations, and their ruling that money is a form of free speech, which also served big business interests. But Beck can be given a pass because the decision may not have been finalized before his book went to press.

Beck rightly portrays John Adams’s comments on private property. He misleads a bit on Karl Marx’s. While Marx certainly believed in communal ownership, the contextual and period circumstances that spurred him to believe that deserve mention. He was front-row seat to some of the worst exploitation by Robber-Capitalism and how “private ownership” became a vehicle for its own version of twisted and selfish oppression.

Beck has agreement from me on mandatory blood screening tests. Unless someone can point it out to me, I don’t see the imperative. I see the logic in getting the state to convince parents of the need, but see no reason for mandating.

Beck gets his own hypocrisy banner for not condemning warrantless wire-tapping of Americans. While I agree that there is too much monitoring of the kind he condemns, the need always magnified because we have become a very un-communal society, he needs to speak out against that done previously.

Similarly, rightfully pointing out the excesses of the state in New Orleans, and that “Progressives” justify things because they feel they work for a higher authority than the public or the Constitution: he needs to condemn just as strongly when the same justification was used in the aftermath of 9/11.

Beck says that the people will “have the back” of any politician who tells the truth. What does that mean? How can the people have the pol’s back when big business controls the media and what is said, what is manipulated? An honest politician often gets little media-time if the big business group dislike him or her. Indeed, if the politician threatens the consortium in any meaningful way, that politician is targeted for removal.

Beck dismisses too freely controlling interests. While railing against government, he pooh-poohs that controlling interests could actually be manipulating that government. Except, of course, for what he terms “the Progressives.”

Beck seems to hate nuance, which means he hates complicated realities. The maddening Nanny State agenda exists, and so does the equally maddening Corporatocracy. Sometimes they fuse, sometimes they diverge, sometimes they are merely irrelevant to each other.

I am in deep sympathy with Beck about our wildly off-focus (mis)education system. But once again he takes a quote out of context to make his point. When Woodrow Wilson said that education should make students unlike their fathers, he was referring to stepping up many levels from basic education or even no education, and expanding consciousness and awareness. He wasn’t talking about some mind-bending reprogramming, the fear of which has become a staple in too many pundit circles.

Beck correctly points out the ruinous foolishness of learning primarily based on children’s own experiences and feelings and of being “equal participants” with their teachers. But it’s a bit non-sequitir to then pick out some particularly weak urban school systems’ high school diploma rates and prove…what? Even the school systems with high diploma rates often fail in having that mean anything—their students are often no better in most of the relevant skills of critical thinking, comprehension, and preparation for a college education.

Beck also says that Progressives “don’t view parents as partners in the learning cycle.” That is only at most partly true. Many school systems want parental involvement—indeed, they often require far more parental involvement than was the case 50 years ago when there was greater community and more confidence and respect across the board in all areas. But the systems sometimes struggle in getting the parental involvement—parents are that overburdened. And Beck says that parents focus on test scores and report cards. Yes, they do, and often to the detriment of learning, which often has nothing to do with statistics. In our disconnected society, where the nuclear family feels semi-isolated and under siege, parents, often backed by lawyers, don’t respect educators but instead make DEMANDS on teachers and school systems, and often assume the teachers and systems are against their child. They rescue their children from both reality and consequences, and so grade inflation is propelled forward to the deep detriment of learning and merit.

Beck likes to trumpet that the all-powerful and invasive state is taking away parental control and transferring it to the state. Yet that flies in the face of the actual evidence, which is actually incredibly mixed. Some parental control IS degraded (how many parents alter their desired decisions and actions because of fear of DFS or something else? Probably too many.) Yet helicopter parents are often SO involved/directing in their children’s lives, it is often the reason that the children stay child-like long past the age when they should have begun transitioning or even have transitioned to adulthood.

It is the overreaching that tarnishes Beck. I can agree with part of what he says about indoctrination of kids. I think that children have been indoctrinated by the educational and social systems into, among, other things, excessive and irrational fear of adult males, disrespect for adults in general, stultification of critical thinking, dysfunction about the nature of males, disconnection from cause and effect, and excessive focus on job preparation at the expense of citizenship. But this excessive political correctness is more abysmal than sinister, more the kind of frustrating bureaucratic group-think than Nazi-like doctrine. But there are instances, and they deserve our deep derision.

Yet to suggest that “it takes a village to raise a child” means the community will decide what the child is taught is or how he or she is raised, is either overreaching or purposely impugning the worst. Assisting does not mean deciding. This African saying merely recognizes that there is a communal responsibility to look after children and assist with their formation, rather than just ignore and let the nuclear family struggle. It means that when parents aren’t around, there is respect for and knowledge and interconnection concerning the adults of the community, to REINFORCE the teachings of the parents. Beck’s obvious disgust with Hillary Clinton (and all liberals or “progressives”) frequently blinds him to any good qualities those may have, and furthermore, causes him to assume the worst or even invent the worst possible explanation to anything that comes from them.

Beck correctly derides this facet of treating students as “friends” (a phenomenon that morphed to the home as well). And he is correct that it has had a deleterious effect on the workplace when the competitiveness and hard work often needed is lacking. The beneficial cooperative aspects that might balance this are often overshadowed by the selfishness and disconnection too often prevalent.

Beck and others like to imagine that return of local control of education would be a panacea. It would both help—and not. The poor state of lowest-denominator, blankly uncontroversial and utterly boring textbooks arises from stifling local control, not the opposite. And much perpetual inequity and ignorance has been perpetuated by stifling local control. But he is right that state and federal interference has also often been detrimental.

The maddening reality of extreme and excessive complication is what makes both Beck and the “Progressives” who criticize him right at the same time. We get the worst of all worlds because we are both hamstrung and our own worst enemies. We perpetuate systems we don’t like and that don’t serve us well. We have too much parental control—and too little. We have too much bureaucratic interference and even control—and too little control by teachers. We have bad apples that never get booted. We have good apples that never get unfrustrated. We have too much demanded of students—and too little. We have too many resources expended—and too little.

This phenomenon can be extended to much of the whole polarizing show: both “liberals” and “conservatives” can point to valid criticisms of the same system. Their errors come in failing to see complexity, but instead bleating out platitudes and simplistic overreaching notions that blame EVERYTHING on the other “side.”

Excessive fear of being part of a larger community, including a world community, can also blind one to possibilities. Beck criticizes the rights of children to “education and health care; programs that develop their personalities and talents, and the opportunity to grow and develop in an atmosphere of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality, and solidarity. “(93) He lauds that the US has joined the failed state Somalia as the only two nations NOT ratifying the U.N. Convention that supports the quoted above principles. In a world where children are often an exploited or neglected commodity, one might think that paying at least lip service to the principles would be laudatory, but Beck sees only sinister “control” by outside entities or that it is all “nothing more than an effort to break down the cohesion and structure of the parent/child relationship while also migrating power to a national or global entity.” (93)

This is part of a larger pattern in the American psyche: while Americans think it proper that international standards, Geneva Conventions, international war crimes tribunals, trade agreements, laws of the high seas, voting procedures, etc. be enforced or at least observed, all that melts away when it is the American government or system that might be out of line. We think nothing of demanding that the international community emplace observers (including Americans) in foreign elections to determine and ensure fairness, for example, but to suggest that foreigners be allowed to observe American elections is hypocritically denied categorically (and raises suspicion that we might have something to hide as well). We think nothing of American troops, officials, contractors, corporations, etc. going anywhere they want, even setting up residency in disregard of sovereignty or culture. Yet to intimate even a token of that in reverse is rejected immediately as infringement on our sovereignty, with the cry going up that we are trying to be dictated to by foreign entities.

What is ironic about all that is that the day is coming for our comeuppance. As we make ourselves weaker and weaker, and as we arrogantly and utterly selfishly trample or exploit others overseas, as we demand rules of others but hypocritically refuse to abide by them ourselves, we breed seething resentment that will blowback one day on us in continuous cascade, instead of just the occasional blowback as happens now.

The assumption is always that the entire international community is wrong when it dares to criticize the US or point out our hypocrisy. Yes, sometimes the international community IS wrong on some point or points, but to think that it’s all just the sort of mindless bloc voting that characterized much of the 1970s, is to be stuck in a past that bears little resemblance to present reality.

Beck points to the Kyoto Treaty, which we didn’t ratify under Bush, as an example of something we should be proud we didn’t do. The Kyoto Treaty was a flawed instrument, yes. It demanded too little of China and India. Yet that is smokescreen for why we didn’t ratify it. We didn’t ratify it because it demanded much of us, the consumer of one-fourth of the world’s energy. To the international community, it merely looked as if the hypocrite didn’t want to face up to the reality of being the biggest consumer with the biggest responsibility.

We spout off about advancing “justice” in the world, but we ourselves could not, would not, submit to the justice of the world, rightly fearing a karmic verdict. Any impartial alien observer would say we have rigged the rules in our and our trade system partners’ favor. Not the whole of us, perhaps, but certainly our multinationals.

To Attend to Madame's Answer

Madame M:

Excuse, if you will, the tardiness of my reply!

Do tell our readers how Gibbon would recognize much of our discussion! More light-shedding!

Merely organizations? Au contraire, Madame, these are the kings and the viziers behind the throne! While I may from time to time over-ascribe, and I may need to be en garde against such, as you say, and welcome countervailing evidence, there seems a relative paucity of that countervailing these days. And, not to preview upcoming discussions (), but inverted control structures often need only loose collectives, but as well, often do not fear enough to even hide (or at least, they hide in the open). I am all for individual responsibility, but how to exact that when there is little effective power to hold such accountable? Those in government are rarer to stay there anymore and remain part of the true elite controllers. Therefore, that infers strongly that the government does not do the controlling, or even that it is an equal partner. It is a servant, not of the people, but of a corporate elite and their familiars. And not all or even majority of corporate America belongs to this elite. It is a rather exclusive club, and one can see it for where the money is, where the money stays, and where the money is going.

Trying to hold those in government accountable rarely works if the corporate elites oppose it, and even when it does work, those rarely suffer punishment, but merely go on to the happy hunting grounds they were bound for anyway (in Lobbyville and Corporate America).

Corporations are a far cry from the brief period (the approximately 50 -75 year bubble after the Revolution) when protection of the public interest held sway in the matter of corporations (and why, perhaps the Framers did not focus on this issue). Those corporations have now become legally protected collectivist (and partially anonymous) plutocracies that form one loose huge plutocracy. Control is not complete, but complete control is neither desired nor necessary.

And as for corporations’ purpose or existence: leaving aside for the moment how twisted even that has become—it has gone from serving stockholders in general and the long-run, to institutional stockholders and corporate management and directors in the near toto main, and even then by the quarter primarily—they are chartered by government, and theoretically then by the public. Therefore, unless it is a form inherently corrupt by design and only for their benefit (as some have said), there must be some perceived public good, or at least public control. And there comes the crux: why primarily do we oppose and prosecute organized crime and criminal gangs? Because they are a threat to the general society, and because they injure and undermine both democracy and basic capitalism (legislators, police, judges, witnesses, and juries bought off or intimidated, shopkeepers extorted or even driven from business, etc.). Although the comparison can sometimes be taken too far, there are discomfiting similarities there to the behavior of many corporations and their cooperative elites.

And when government fails to do what our defining documents outline, if the reason is because they are being controlled by corporate powers, who are you holding accountable? I do not think we want to be so willfully excusing as to say to government servant A that we are punishing him because he served evil outside entity C—and then say entity C is just being itself, no need to do anything about the fact it was corrupting the democratic process. We don’t (or we say we don’t) prosecute individuals of organized crime organizations, and then ignore or let slide the organizations themselves. RICO and other measures are there because those individuals both serve and are controlled by those organizations, and the organizations themselves are considered the larger threat.

Of course, much of this kind of dialogue and thought has wisped into academic discussion—the consortium doesn’t really fear us much anymore.

Forty years ago, there was great worry because the number of major media/press/news outlets had shrunk to 30. Today there are five. As we will discuss in a future posts, there is control and direction, and a general lack of investigative reporting, and your links point to that.

Yes, the Founders’ protections, all the things they put in place to inhibit tyranny—they are just that, inhibitors. They are not magic. As Jefferson said, vigilance is the eternal price of liberty. A long pattern of selection and confirmation of judges based on where they came from (serving corporate law and cases) is coming into fruition for the corporations. Same pattern of interlocking elites. Although dressed up nicely, often the result is the same: taking care of your friends. Now, it is more complicated than that, and many justices cannot be quite pigeonholed, and still others change a bit over time, but the general pattern is sufficiently satisfying for corporations, and that’s enough.

10% after the first election? That’s quite the severe, and probably quickly insurmountable, penalty!

Jefferson would be an astute enough observer to perhaps think that the low turnout you cite means that enough people instinctively suspect that voting doesn’t much matter. But yes, we the people have been remiss. And your suggestions about service could indeed have good effect.

Cultures either encourage character, or they promote the enfeebling of it. Ours pays lip service to encouragement, and does all manner of things to enfeeble or even belittle.

Creaking sound? About what in particular?

Will turn to more (and lengthy!) critique on Beck tomorrow or the next day! Must be off to sleep now! Of course, I will understand if you think I’ve been sleepwalking through this entire reply! :)

Busting Our Trust

Professor J,


As we continue our discussion I cannot help being reminded of our friend, Gibbon frequently. How clearly he would recognize much of it!

You chastise Beck for immediately blaming government while you appear to do much the same thing with corporations when in both cases these are merely organizations of one sort and another made up of people, I'm wont to hold individuals responsible no matter what collective they are hiding in. As you have said the elites from both these groups run in the same circles (and protect and cover for each other) but I have trouble holding the corporations any more responsible than the government. Corporations are at least honest about the purpose for their existence. If they don't do all we would have them do in terms of fair wages, community support, or environmental responsibility, are they breaking a sacred trust? They haven't in the past taken an oath promising to do anything, although this idea is being proposed more and more often. They may be breaking a trust with shareholders and investors, when they engage in corruption and graft, but not necessarily society technically (though all of us are operating under the kind of social trust that holds civilization together), certainly we would have them behave better for all our sakes. On the other hand our government when it fails to do what our defining documents outline, is. However the corporations may influence with money and  promises of posh jobs post public service, those legislators write the law that allows the shadowy behavior and graft that we see.

We might hold yet a third group complicit in all of this. THE PRESS.  Edward R. Murrow said, "No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices." I love the old movie image of the surly reporter, doggedly trailing the truth in his rumpled suit. Where has he gone? The press might have served as the proverbial beacon of light exposing much of the corruption festering in the unchecked darkness, except that here probably more than anywhere I agree with you that the corporations are running the show. And a "show" it is, we can barely call any of it news at this point. This is a discussion all its own that I'm sure we'll get to later but here are some links that the reader may find enlightening in the meantime:

FAIR's listing of interlocking directorates, 
Media Reform Information Center
Who Owns What

The conferring of dignity on corporations by treating them as "persons" with free speech rights was put in place and more recently upheld and expanded by who? The Supreme Court, which is supposedly above the influence of money and hope of some better job later on, members being appointed for life. If one disagrees with the court, then who failed to protect society from the "corporate masters" gaining even more power? The judicial branch of government, those individuals.

While it may be true that the founders "saw far, but they could not foresee the rise of these artificial entities called corporations" they had certainly seen things which were in some ways comparable. Couldn't we say that the new "corporate masters" you reference are just running an updated feudal system? The permeating effects and globalization of it they could not have imagined, but the concept seems very old indeed and one, the degradation of which, the framers would have been familiar with from their thorough reading of history.

I like your proposed alternative to term limits. I think the idea of having a certain percentage of the votes for the incumbent being "discarded" however might not be the best way of framing it for an electorate where so few people participate in the process and those that do already have real questions as to whether or not their votes count and how much. I would rather see the office holder required to win by a certain percentage of the vote, perhaps at least 10% for his second term, 20% for the third, and so on up to a reasonable point. The result would be the same in that eventually he would really have to have great support to stay in office.

Gerrymandering: Would that we had gone with Jefferson's ward idea which Beck outlines on p. 54. "Jefferson understood the importance of bringing communities together in the political process." I found something beautiful  (in what he imagined) and sad (in what we have) in TJ's quote, "every citizen can attend when called on and act in person. Ascribe to them the government of their wards in all things relating to themselves exclusively."
What would he make of last spring's voter turnout in my county of 10% for a local primary?


WE THE PEOPLE are ultimately to blame, as you say, for being remiss in our duties as citizens in all these things.
We might have been better off leaning a bit more toward the Greek model in some ways, including requiring military service in order to secure the right to vote or before heading to college as the Israelis do. Much of what you outline as problems with defense might be alleviated if the overall population had a better understanding of how it operates.  A society with a military made up of EVERYONE'S children might be a bit more careful as to where and when we think force necessary.


Yes, Obama is hard hitting about poverty and the inner city. He has the luxury of being able to say those things and being listened to by those most affected because of his background. Although I would say only to a point, as Bill Cosby found out. Something within the culture it seems draws a line at the truth it is willing to hear publicly regardless of how much those involved might privately agree with it. So I do give him credit for pointing out how parents and communities are at least somewhat culpable in the problems.


Paine's point (verified by your Madison and Adams quotes, not to mention the ten o'clock news), means the broader question may then be-- how to instill (or REinstill) character in a culture becoming more parched for it by the day? Didn't the Greeks tie morality (the universal kind) to personal liberty from the start? Gibbon references it again and again as key to the downfall of Rome.  Where does that leave us?

I couldn't find where he mentioned being responsible for welfare reform either, but it turns out to be some "ambient" information floating around in my brain from campaign speeches and ads. One of the fact checking sites  Politifact, deemed it a "half truth."

Do you hear that creaking sound (again)? It is a certain housewife's brain. ;)

Critique Du Beck

Continuing the vein: Beck is hard on some Obama nominees, and Democratic congressmen, for financial matters, and he should be, although a little hypocritical since he wasn’t as hard on some Bush nominees and Republican congressmen who had similar issues.

Beck is being a bit disingenuous, in the process conflating democracy and socialism, by implying that any question of how wealth is obtained is inappropriate. Such an attitude serves those who have obtained their wealth by exploitation because those who attain theirs by ingenuity, industry, and/or thrift would not fear the question.

Highly interesting that Beck, on page 41, vilifies the very same Shock Doctrine as reviled by Naomi Kline in her book of the same name. That Shock Doctrine means using a crisis to force through things you want to have happen but could not come about in normal times (in her book, this is the advancement of the Chicago School of “free market” economics at any cost and without any other considerations, including humanity). Yet many of the things he is incensed about seem odd: that the government should be ashamed that it wanted AIG to give back most of its bonuses that AIG gave out WHILE AIG WAS BEING BAILED OUT BY TAXPAYERS. If Beck was as for the common man as he says he is, he would instead be pointing out that AIG’s behavior is an example of how laws and corporate jurisdiction are twisted to serve the true power centers, even when those power centers have by colossal and criminal greed brought the economic system to the verge of ruin. I am all for vigilance against government encroachment on the legitimate affairs of business, so that we never approach the need for Atlas to Shrug (a nod to Ayn Rand), but this idea of granting carte blanche to business, to assume WITHOUT QUESTION that they will carry out honest private decisions that will by extension benefit society, is past ludicrous. That Beck espouses this philosophy too much brings a cloud of suspicion over his head and detracts from the yeoman’s work he does in other areas.

Demagogues always see simplicity instead of nuance and the complexity of the human condition, and Beck is not exception. For example, it’s true that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn’t get the attention that AIG and others got (albeit, they got it briefly), but the bonuses had already largely been suspended in those two, and not in AIG.

Yes, we need to be on guard against class warfare, for it is counter-incentive. But to question completely unmerited, utterly manipulated, and possibly criminally attained wealth is not to initiate class warfare. It is to initiate justice, and real economic opportunity, of which we have so little.

Beck shows anti-union bias. Unions deserve a great deal of criticism, especially where organized crime has been involved, but unions today are limited in power, besieged or broken both by economics and twisted sentiment, and occasionally by their own short-sightedness. But this short-sightedness has been too magnified by the corporate power centers, and often all the unions are trying to do is prevent their taking cuts in jobs and benefits and then the corporation or municipality still doing away with many of the jobs and the rest of the benefits anyway.

Because it isn’t the wealthy elites who are ever in any danger on these decisions. Who make up the wealthy elites? Law firm partners, investment bankers, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, lobbyist leaders, the top executives of the Big Consortium: Agribusiness/Food/Drink; Fossil Fuels; Pharmaceuticals; Insurance; Mining; the Financials and the rest.

You know those guys, right? The ones who say, yes, plant workers, you are very productive, and do quality work, but we need to be competitive in the world (an old refrain, partially true but often largely a creation). So the company gets the workers to take cuts in pay, cuts in benefits, to “slim down” (layoff) some of the workforce. They’ll get the state and city to give tax breaks, to build facilities and roads, to issue bonds and go into debt even, to “help” the company, which for all the above reasons makes high (maybe even obscene) profits in the time being from the plant. And then, after milking it for years, the company will just close the plant anyway, despite its promise to stay in return for all the breaks and concessions, claiming “global competition.” It moves the plant to China or someplace where labor can be cheapened and commoditized even more.

All in the name of “free enterprise.” Except it’s not free. There is a cost to the society of not only all that displacement, but the disillusionment, distrust in general, and particularly lack of faith IN THE SYSTEM. And what’s more, the company often lies that it will stay when it has no intention of doing so, and often cynically devastates lives and communities because a CEO wants to bump up the stock price so he can cash out some options, or influential stockholders want a bump in the stock price THIS QUARTER.

Notice that this isn’t classic competitive capitalism, where the inefficient and unproductive are replaced by the innovative and productive. It wasn’t the bogeyman of “out of control union benefits” strangling business. This was robber-capitalism, a system entirely at the mercy of its corporate masters. The plant in this example was competitive, it was doing good work, the company was making a profit on it.

Beck takes the parties, and the politicians in them, to task, and rightly so. “We vote for Republicans and get bigger government and more spending. We vote for Democrats and get bigger government and more spending.” Beck 57 Or how the parties whip up people against the other party—Beck tells very well what the result is: “Every time you vote ‘against’ someone rather than ‘for’ someone the two-party system wins and America loses.” Beck 60

But then his brush goes broad and wide of the mark: “Both are infected with progressivism—the belief that your individual rights are subservient to government power and that no personal liberty is above sacrificing for the greater good.” Beck 58. That’s far in excess of the academic definition of progressivism, which is to seek reform of various problems through governmental action that do not respond to other measures of remedy. Once again, this is smacking too much of sheer anti-government machination.

Similarly, his assertion that all governments are fascist in nature is another seed-bomb placed against government (again leading to the question, what’s the motive for doing that?). While all governments—because they are governments—hold within them the POSSIBILITY of coercion and authoritarian-like behavior, and they do have a natural inclination to grow and consume more money and resources, this isn’t a foregone conclusion. Britain’s government, for example, while being ossified and strickening at times, has rarely been like Beck says is a Fascist certainty, and they have had a government a lot longer than we have.

Beck is needlessly antagonizing. “Shortsighted professors who saw America as a giant shopping mall didn’t want the (good) changes” that happened after 9/11. Beck 61. What professors would those be? This is ideological predisposition, the same kind that believes professors are indoctrinating students with liberal bias, or that professors are part of a privileged sector that gets in the way of needed conservative tides. Maybe the reality is that these profs point out the holes in the demagogues' diatribes?

Beck’s distorted views of progressivism (“cancer,” anti-liberty, anti-property), like progressivism is some disease that needs eradicated, is not just hyper-polemical, it’s fanaticism, and he gets no agreement from me on that. But his assertion that too many look at the government as their own ATM machine is unfortunately on target. His assertion that those on the right wanted to use the state to expand through military strength is correct partially, at least in the guarantee of the economic empire. But his assertion that those on the left just wanted to use the state to expand into trans-nationalism is off-target. The desire to be at peace, cooperative, and part of a greater community, is not some extreme, it’s natural human desire. Yes, we need to be on guard against government intrusion into private matters. Yet, while Beck is right that progressivism, like most any political view, can be taken to a destructive extreme, his hyperbole is excessive. Regulating and providing some supervision of the activities of corporations, that are publicly sanctioned entities, was and is wrong? How? Beck’s uttering that makes one suspect that he favors the true ruling powers.

For someone who says he prides himself on history, he happens to leave out quite a lot. While the Federal Reserve has morphed into some excesses after the Great Depression, Beck ignores the ruinous extremes which prompted calls for the Federal Reserve. And Beck seems to imply that before all the things he rails against—taxation, regulation, etc.—that life was great. It wasn’t. Exploitation was the rule of the day for far too many. In fact, that’s what gave progressivism its appeal.

But Beck’s correct that every correction, especially in an over-correcting society like ours, goes far past what is needed, and then gets into excessive and damaging interference, whether it's Finance, Education, etc. And redistribution schemes are usually just foolish and repressive.

But Beck isn’t making or is deliberately ignoring connections. He faults Bush for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, and he should. But he intimates that it was progressivism to redistribute wealth. Look for a moment who benefitted. The government was weakened firstly, but more importantly, the pharmaceutical industry got a bonanza, not only from the direct money, but from the increased drug addicts it got from getting the addicts (the seniors) more hooked.

Beck’s odd comparisons often don’t ring authentic to me: On page 67, he puts forth a comment from Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist prof who lost his good sense about a great deal. But taking both Wilson’s comment out of text, and then taking Obama’s out of text as well as seeming to deliberately twist it, is misleading—or worse. Wilson’s was war-related, attempting to get people pulling in a common direction. Obama’s was about recognizing a simple truth: certain folks had benefitted far more over the preceding 8 years, in a system that often artificially favored them, so making real opportunity open to more people might mean rescinding some of those artificial advantages.

It is interesting to note that there is more howling over incremental changes in historically low tax rates than there was over ridiculously high tax rates in previous decades. Some of this is selfishsness and the lack of citizen fellowship, and the rest is likely that the system has been skewed to seem hard.

The excessive and utterly lost-focus, misdirected efforts of so-called progressives (political correctness fanatics, coddlers, and their lawyer allies) do exist as a cross-current in society even as government weakens in most areas. This cross-current serves as great fodder for those who want to dismantle and weaken government further. But once again, who does that serve?

Beck’s disillusion with Teddy Roosevelt is not balanced. There are a great many things that Teddy Roosevelt deserved criticism for, and his arrogant, ethnocentric attitude was only one of them. But Roosevelt saw, correctly at the time, that the power of corporations (not just the key robber barons) was becoming so great, so manipulative, and so damaging to both society and democracy, that they must be curbed. And only one institution could do that: government. The same could be said for the rapid disappearance and destruction of wilderness. Private interests weren’t preserving much of anything, but were instead using it up. Once again, only government—the people through its representatives—had the power and the reach to do something about it. I can sympathize with some of Beck’s arguments, but his blanket statements fall flat.

The power of the state against individuals must be in most cases opposed severely. But the power of the state against corporations is not the same. Yes, if it gets excessive, then we should rein it in. But right now, it’s not the government that’s excessive in comparing the power of the two. Comparing otherwise is fantasy. Thirty years ago that might have been a slight bit different. It’s not today.

Beck’s listing of Madison’s quote (68) about silent and gradual encroachments is off the mark too. Madison made those not about changing opinions, as Beck hints, but at the gradual erosion of freedoms and the giving away of power, often in response to “crises” and “emergencies,” and other aspects of excessive fears.

Free market conservatives want to dismantle all “impediments” to that mythical market. They say that the country will be better off, and that the “magic of the marketplace” will ensure prosperity. That’s not what has happened historically. What was life in America like before any form of social insurance, before any pensions, before any form of meaningful government regulation, back in the romanticized days the 1800s?

Well, there was a small, highly rich class, a somewhat bigger but still small middle class, and multitudes of the poor and exploited. Only the lure of the frontier kept the hope of better alive. Interestingly enough, the rise of the progressivism that Beck so decries fortunately coincided with the closing of the frontier, allowing America to make the transition in the losing of its steam-release (what the frontier had been).

Will close with a bit of thanks: Beck, I had forgotten Jefferson’s idea about wards, and the really local neighborhood or village government of it. It seems a good idea, a step in the right direction of not only good governance but community.

To Answer Madame First

When it comes to saying that government granted the corporations the power, that might be technically correct, but I would say that we need to be careful not to put cart before the horse. Money influenced things so it could bring in more money, and to make sure no threats would arise to it. Would that we could find many individuals with the traits you list! This goes back to the Framers’ arguments. Paine thought character was paramount in preserving a republic. Madison and Jefferson agreed that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” so they assumed men were selfish and then got busy devising a system to atomize power. Madison in particular looked at the capitalist market, and its system whereby compromise set the market price, and sought to infuse similar elements into our government—powers separated, checks and balances, etc. With our representatives having to compromise with each other, he thought, this would help keep power from being consolidated. Furthermore, he thought that so many special interests vying with each other in the political marketplace would mean that no one sector, or even a group, could seize power, and that would help keep tyranny at bay. These men cultivated wisdom, and they saw far, but they could not foresee the rise of these artificial entities called corporations. Nor could they foresee how these legal constructs would be treated as persons when it suited them, and yet as impersonal businesses when it did not, by the complete system—economic, legal, legislative, etc.

Government is often a half-weak vehicle today, a temporary station for those in the corporate power structure and all those who serve it. Their corruption is part and parcel of the generally corrupt big corporate power structure, and can seldom be separated from it. The elites tend to run in the same circles.

There is of course plenty of responsibility to go around for our sorry state of affairs. Corporate-power is the driving force, but it by far isn’t the only one. When it comes down to it, WE THE PEOPLE have been deficient. Like the famous passage from Éttiene de la Boétie, we have provided for, submitted to, ignored wrong, and been passive and active accomplices or dupes in the subjugation.

Yes, money corrupts our campaigns, but they are also contrived spectacles because we let them be. If campaigns were entirely of a different character, both in time period and scope, and perhaps even in funding (I am still undecided on whether money can truly be neutralized, or even if it should be), they would have less distaste and be more fulfilling, to paraphrase a famous beer commercial.

With your explanation, now I too am discontented over Obama’s omission of a few sentences to instruct on republic and democracy. This prof sends him a cold prickly on this part of the eval! :) As you say, it would have only taken a few sentences to explain.

Thank you for pointing out another facet of term limits. That IS one that is also listed as a proven drawback, and I was deficient for not mentioning it also. And while our politicians are not entirely disconnected from their localities “back home,” you are correct in that there is more manipulation and capitol-focus by them than our Framers intended.

To reiterate: Beck thinks term limits on representatives will give us “freedom from corruption, greed, arrogance, and, most of all, freedom from those who put their careers above country.” (P.56) Sorry Beck, the facts don’t support you. Studies have shown that, counter-intuitively, corruption actually INCREASES under term limits. When public servants know they can have no possibility of a career serving the public, they get very mercenary and self-centered, focused on the job (often with a lobbying organization or business they are “regulating”) they’ll have when their public “service” is over. In fact, term limits is another tool in the arsenal of those who would weaken government. And who might those be? Ah yes, the corporate masters again.

There is indeed too much isolation and insulation of our politicians in Washington. They, along with the rest of the elites and their allies, have largely (although not completely) decoupled from the rest of us. Instead of term limits, perhaps we could just make it progressively harder for re-election after a certain point (this would also help offset the incumbent’s advantage), say by imposing a 1% penalty per re-election attempt after a certain point, cumulative. So, say that after 12 years in office, each re-election attempt has one percent of the votes for that incumbent discarded (a second re-election attempt would have two percent discarded, etc.). Voters would really have to be in favor of the incumbent after a while.

A more critical problem, of course, is gerrymandering. Obama is right in every way about that one, and so was Schwarzenegger.

I welcome Beck for trying to shake us out of our apathy. But bringing something up and then immediately decrying government as the source or influence of that problem is leading, or rather misleading, and does a disservice. We the people don’t need any more disillusionment or disgust with our instrument, as every time it gets more gutted, more weaker, more bloated with irrelevance, we the people lose more of what little power we have left. I always look at who and what are trying to make government weaker, and why they are trying to do that. Those who want the government out of our private lives can be excused; those who want government “out of business’s business,” are suspect until demonstrated otherwise—as we have seen, just in the case of BP, Exxon, Wall Street, the mining industry, etc. de-regulation is a disempowering giveaway of power and influence, and breeds only dismissive contempt from the corporate elite. Yes, we need to be on guard for stifling regulation and bureaucracy, but its opposite number is just as, and perhaps more, of a danger.

So Beck would garner more agreement from me if he would be more shake-up and less knee-jerk against government itself, as that only plays into the hands of the corporate elite.

I guess I still have a different reading of Obama’s position on welfare.
“Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had grown over the previous twenty-five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a total share of the U.S. economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western Europe, even when you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget. Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth.” Obama 156-7

Obama is hard hitting about poverty and the inner-city. He says conservatives and Clinton were right about the way they transformed welfare, but he also points out that the job went no further, to the detriment of the newly working poor. Similar to Brown in his book Plan B, 4.0, Obama makes the case that poverty is a destructive and reverberating force throughout the greater society, and if we are to avoid its ills (let alone be fair to our fellow man), we need to address it in a holistic way. We Americans have this bad and self-damaging trait of throwing A solution at a problem without considering the long-term, without considering connections. And then when it blows up or blows back or merely just fails after expending time, talent, and treasure, we scratch our heads momentarily, promptly learn all the wrong lessons (if we learn any at all), and are on to repeating the same process in another avenue.

I saw no passage where Obama takes credit for welfare reform. He wasn’t in office then. But since Obama has a way of narcissistically inserting himself in the center of too many group efforts (it happens by page 2: “I had subsequently passed a slew of bills”), perhaps I just missed it. Welfare reform, which largely took place in 1995-1996, was a Republican Congress/Bill Clinton agreement (federal because that’s where the money flowed from to the states) that moved large numbers off welfare and into the work force, albeit the desperately poor workforce. Obama agrees that much of that needed to happen, as do I, and the debilitating effects of dependency and entitlement are just first in a long list of bad things. Yet because the corporate elites did not care, and indeed, were happy for another group of working people to exploit, bad consequences arose. This is one of the points, to my eyes, that Obama is trying to make.

Defense itself has become another entitlement program, a self-perpetuating fiscal beast. Because we have too long had a standing military, it has become the very thing Eisenhower (and the Framers) warned about. We now talk about “programs” to fund, bases to man, places to go, defense contracts to award, etc. etc. It has already become the largest expenditure in the federal budget. And yet who are our enemies? Largely only those we make, and certainly not symmetric ones. Yet we keep the structure in place to do everything, much of it by inertia, because that’s what we’ve had for the past 60 years. There is no strategic vision, and no holistic one that considers all aspects of security—including and particularly economic and ecological security. It has become a Defense machine, and one perpetually engineered for frequent or even constant intervention somewhere, “threats,” and even war. While much of it is a marvelously professional instrument, much of it too is bloated and utterly out of touch.

Social Security deserves its own future post, as it is complex. Suffice to say at this moment that it transformed in people’s minds and expectations, and by corporate abandonment of one, and perhaps two, of the three stools of retirement.

Education will be addressed more by me when we get around to focusing largely on Obama’s book alone, but I both agree and somewhat disagree with you.

Yes, Senator Obama appeared to be a fairly free-thinking and thoughtful guy, before becoming the Stepford Husband to the Corporate Controllers. :)

Answers Too

Professor J,

You know how I love questions. I like this quote:


"I'm not an answering machine, I'm a questioning machine. If we have all the answers, how come we're in such a mess?" - Douglas Cardinal, architect.


Now that I'm more settled allow me to tie up some loose ends and put things a bit more in order. Especially as you've pointed out that "Beck is all over the place..." Hmm...something I have in common with him perhaps. :)

I'm glad you took the time to post so many quotes from these books. You are correct when you write that,
"While their actions are too often something else, their words are often wonderful."

"You will have to point out Obama’s 'defense of policies that have ravaged poor families over the last 50 years.”

I know I'm painting with that broad brush you are so fond of, there. ;) Perhaps I want something which is impossible.  It may  be too much to ask of him to raise the idea of dismantling the current system (over time) and replacing it with something better when the recipients are such a reliable voting bloc.

Wasn't the welfare reform he takes credit for in the book  federally mandated and going to happen anyway?
While the idea of welfare reform appeased the middle class somewhat with the idea that the recipients were being made to work, it hasn't proven to make the kind of difference needed for economic self sufficiency in the long run.

Unfortunately it goes in same file as the other government programs you listed, Soc. Security, etc. (You've hinted at what you see as part of the problem with Defense, can you expound?) which are programs with noble intentions that have morphed into bankrupting disasters over time due to greed, mismanagement, and corruption.  The welfare safety net now seems to have been thrown over entire communities and traps, rather than helps. 

He does the same thing with education (a subject where I'm sure we could camp for weeks). He says he favors charter schools, but stops short of being for real school choice (WHY should the education you receive be tied to the home you can afford?) thereby leaving those families living in poor neighborhoods stranded in inadequate and many times dangerous schools. Again the loyal union voters skulk in the margins.

He candidly tells us (p. 119) how much he owes them and that he doesn't consider it corrupting "in any way." The question isn't really whether he considers it corrupting, but whether or not it is. Politicians historically haven't been the best judges of this.

He does do a very good job pointing out the complexity of all these problems, compared to GB who over simplifies, and the others he addresses and certainly no one can say that he hasn't given careful thought and consideration to all the issues he speaks on.

I think that catches me up. :)

Questions Beckon

Professor J,

You did such a good job with the site in my absence that I doubt our readers noticed I was away! :)


I'll be posting in two parts this week while I unpack and adjust back into real life.

You take Beck to task for blaming the government for the mess we find ourselves in now, and you want him to place more (perhaps most, if not all) the blame at the feet of
"the corporate masters of the Consortium." But the tax laws that favor the wealthy, corporate welfare in the form of tax cuts and subsidies, and the other things you mention are all things put in place by the government (or perhaps more specifically those in government). A governing entity made up of individuals with ironclad ethics, unable to be bought cheaply with security and ease, and smart enough to see the tentacles of power seeking to attach themselves to those who create the laws and influence them for their own gain would have served as protection for the people. In that way I think GB is correct that the source of much that is wrong lies with the government. Perhaps he could more accurately have used the term "corruption in government".

The question is, given the massive amounts of money needed to fund a campaign and buy advertising - how likely is it that anyone is going to rise to a powerful legislative (let alone the executive) position completely disentangled from the powerful elite? Like the saying that Molly Ivins used as the title of a book "You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You." And dance with them they do, to the detriment of us all.

Republic vs. democracy: 

Words matter. In a day when the thinking is sloppy and scattered, the reading light and fast (if at all), and words and phrases manipulated by those in power to affect the thinking of the population, perhaps they matter more than ever. Historically such manipulation of language is nothing new but never before has the ability to do it so quickly and frequently existed. A culture bombarded by sound bites and carefully manipulated images allows for misinformation to be repeated often enough to "become truth" in the minds of many.


The shrugging off of specific definitions because the majority of the general population won't know the difference, worries me. Yes, you are correct on both your assumptions as to WHY. The checks and balances built into the system certainly, but even more so the protection of the views of the minority. History proves majority rule to be an ugly thing, so easy to twist the thinking of an angry and shallowly educated (or merely "trained") populace. I was disturbed as well by Bush's constant use of the term "democracy" and for much the same reason. If most people are unfamiliar with the exact definitions then shouldn't those with the power to be heard over the crowd be correcting misconceptions/misinformation instead of perpetuating the hazy thinking? A layman might find it exhausting and fruitless to do it every time it comes up in conversation (though some of us try) but if I'm writing a book, especially if I've been a teacher of the material being discussed, then what is wrong with using up a couple of sentences to set things straight? I may be both parsing words and overreacting to something that irks me every time I hear it but may not make all that much difference given all our other problems. :)

I agree with you about term limits but for a different reason.  I would think that constantly having new people head off to Washington would possibly mean a shift in power from people's whose names we know and appear on the ballot to faceless handlers behind the scenes who would know how things really work and would remain in their jobs as the elected officials shuffled in and out. 
 
You've rightly pointed out that corruption goes up because the elected official has no voters at home to keep him in check and is able to make connections that allow him to happily skip off to a lobbying firm or some other plum job after his term. Wasn't the intention of the framers of the Constitution that an elected official would not only be interested in keeping voters happy in light of the next election but that he was going to return to his hometown and live among the people he had represented? Isn't this part of what is missing in the current system, our lack of sense of duty to community and an honest desire to have them feel they have been represented well? An additional problem here is that often now we have politicians move to districts where seats are opening up, set up residence, and run for office where they have no history, ala Hillary Clinton and Harold Ford.

I agree with GB however that having people show up in Washington and remain for 40 years is absurd. The isolation and insulation from real life (remember when Pres. Bush [40] went to a grocery in the early 90s and was fascinated by the scanners?) make it difficult to relate to the real life needs and struggles of their constituents. I thought Obama did a good job outlining how easily that can happen with his anecdote where he compared flying on a private jet to flying commercial, and admitting how easily one could slip into that lifestyle. 

You are frustrated with Beck for correctly pointing out many things but "then not only neglects to take it further, but instead centers blame on 'the government". I understand your point but again, his main purpose with the book is to shake us out of our apathy. He isn't trying to  produce all the solutions. I take most of his ranting to be about getting everyone involved and then coming up with solutions for the issues at hand. A detailed diagnosis can't be made and remedies prescribed until we all agree that we are sick.

While it's true that GB didn't publish any books during the Bush administration rest assured that from the time I discovered his radio show (around '06) and all during his time at CNN he did constantly rail against that administration and many of their policies. In '08 while still at CNN (Fox hired him away in October, before the election) people began sending him pitchforks which were displayed on his set. It was the events of September that sparked the anger, though only 2 months out from the election it's easy to look back now and think it is the result of the change in administration. So while publishing companies hadn't come knocking yet he was, even then, pointing out much of what he has been saying more recently.  

More to follow in a day or two, I've have reentered a world where people expect me to make dinner and do laundry. :)

Beck On

Madame M:

Now that I’ve listed the unqualified agreements, now we move on to the more complex critique. We will start with Mr. Beck’s book:

Beck is all over the place pretty quickly. In one paragraph, he is dissing on Wall Street, Ivy League connections, and saying average Americans aren’t listened to, and the next he is jumping to hyper-fear of supranationalism and saying “most Americans don’t know what they believe.” P. 12.

Yes, Beck is correct that we don’t need to hand ourselves over to foreign ideologues. But we don’t need to arrogantly place ourselves utterly above justice and equanimity either. When America weakens enough that others just economically order us, they will remember our arrogance, and punish it severely.

Yes, Beck, inaction is often the best course of action when it comes to government, but that can also be a debilitating de-empowerment by those who want government to be weak.

Beck points out correctly that safety nets and bailouts may prevent us from learning the hard teachings of our failures and mistakes. But it is also deflective. Focusing on those who DON’T have the money (and perhaps were not good credit risks in the first place) can be diversionary from where the money IS. Yes, we need common sense about having reasonable debt for reasonable things and having a financially responsible lifestyle, yet we must also be careful not to strain at gnats and swallow elephants.

“Our companies are either being taxed to death or run by Washington politicians” (p.13) is misleading for its half-truth. The complex truth is that sometimes companies are taxed too much and regulated too much, especially in their vulnerable stages. This doesn’t apply to the true corporate masters, however, for those pay miniscule taxes in comparison. Beck knows that, and deserves scorn for misleading half-truth.

For it isn’t the parent-like state that Beck trumpets as the problem. It’s that the corporate masters allow us an illusion of freedom, but it’s limited. Limited freedom, limited opportunity, limited choices. He says that POLITICIANS made the false promise that we could buy things and vacations and clothes and dinners on debt. No they didn’t. While those politicians didn’t set a good example, it was we who did it to ourselves, led merrily by the pied pipers of the corpocracy.

But Beck has an agenda, written right on the front as the sub-title: “The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government.” I will speak more about this diatribe against government itself in a moment, but he publishes this book in 2009, and his thinly disguised barbs at the “politicians” who are out of control obviously implied the current administration and the Dems. Where was this book in the Bush administration, in 2008 or before? I haven’t read all of Beck’s books (he puts out a lot in a short time) however, so if I have missed something, set me straight Madame!

Beck implies the blame for the mortgage crisis is that people who shouldn’t have been were given money to buy houses, and that the current political bunch is to blame. How disingenuous. The primary driver in all this was greed. The finance industry and their political servants changed the rules to make money, get it guaranteed, and then invent additional financial instruments to keep the thing going. Politicians of both parties did this. Yes, some of those politicians did it for reasons IN ADDITION TO the greed, and there is just enough truth (although not a preponderance) in Beck’s assertion that some financial institutions were pressured or bandwagoned into making loans to those they shouldn’t have. But little of that was because of some misplaced bleeding heart liberalism. This transcended party or administration. Whether it was a Democratic or Republican chairman, whether the president in office was Clinton or Bush, the systemic actions (and inactions) were largely the same. And they haven’t been momentously different under Obama.

Yet once again, Beck is directing the ire against the GOVERNMENT (and especially the current administration), not the corporate masters of the Consortium. At the government, the one institution with the latent power to rein in the Consortium.
Beck says that directing ire against “the wealthy” is misplaced and diversionary, that it is THE GOVERNMENT that is the problem. Notice how quickly this man, who says he is all about responsibility, excuses the wealthy from it. Notice too, that he uses the term, “the wealthy,” a general term (and one that Americans inwardly aspire to) and not plutocrats or top corporations or anything of the sort. “Don’t pay attention to all the tax breaks and tax cuts given to the wealthy over the last decade,” he seems to be saying. Those tax breaks and tax cuts were granted by that government, by politicians doing the bidding of their masters, their masters who mostly aren’t interested in, and often preventing, the common man from joining their ranks.

Increasing regulation of the Wall Street and bankers who stole so much money and brought the system to the edge of ruin? No, no, Beck says, this isn’t about money, “it’s a life-and-death struggle for personal freedom and national liberty.”(p. 19) How so, GB?

I don’t excuse the politicians who currently reside in government (or did before the revolving door and lure of lobbying got them, often even the ones who get voted out). Our government IS at once too big and too intrusive on many things, while small and weak or crookedly outsourced on some key things. But it is and has been in the last 30 years an instrument for people and organizations that have little to do with the needs of the middle class.

The wealthy “elites” don’t feel the pain. Their children don’t go off to the wars they initiate, nor do they suffer economic hardship in any way. They are not denied or delayed an education, they do not suffer lack of health care or potential bankruptcy from getting health care. They are not at the mercy of a legal system that favors others. They do not have to scramble hard for limited jobs (when there are jobs) with limited possibilities. Especially not after graduating college and doing all the things that society says you should do to get a good job, let alone any job.

People are supposedly losing a lot of freedoms, but when pressed, can’t name very many actual specifics, only occasional generalities. But freedom to get an education? Freedom to have a shot at a livable wage? Freedom to even get a full-time and secure job? Freedom to have America not go into debt and lose its power to defend itself? Those are the freedoms we are losing for sure.

If you ever wanted a more sure indication that corporate masters pull the strings, look at the otherwise strange bedfellows in the Carlyle Group. And that group pulls strings to get what it wants, regardless of politics.

Beck rails, correctly, at prescription drugs being added in 2003 to a Medicare that already had unfunded liabilities the tune of a nearly incomprehensible 68 trillion dollars, a criminal irresponsibility that has already added another 18 trillion in unfunded liabilities. But Beck neglects to mention, purposely one could surmise, who pushed so hard for that prescription drug act: Big Pharma.

This is the frustrating thing about Beck: he correctly points out many things, and then not only neglects to take it further, but instead centers blame on “the government,” as if that government was an entirely separate and independent power source from the big corporations. It’s not, and Beck does at least a disservice, and maybe a deliberate deception and deflection, by foisting this fable.

And his call for term limits for not just politicians, but all government employees, is not only irresponsible, but flies in the face of empirical evidence. That evidence (the Michigan study foremost) shows that corruption goes UP when term limits are imposed, because government officials lose nearly all incentive to serve the public interest, and are only focused on what happens AFTER their public service, which just so happens to usually be at lobbying firms or the corporations that the officials were supposedly regulating.

This appears a full-scale ideological assault on the idea of government. Maybe, just maybe, one could give plausibility to that as an option, were it not for the exploitative, manipulative, greed demonstrated already by the corporations. And how those corporations have locked into low-paying, overworked servitude, much of the labor force. So the option we are supposedly favoring, the “freedom” of the market, is just a carefully crafted myth designed to draw in suckers who won’t realize they’ve been had until it’s too late, and that the one institution, the one instrument they could lift to fight back—their government—well, they undermined and effectively vaporized it. Leaving them at the mercy of a corporate cabal and interconnected elites who iron-clad control all that is meaningful.

Beck rightly points fingers at the big programs of Social Security and Medicare (and Medicaid). But he neglects the biggest one of all, Defense, which not only is by far the biggest in amount, but unlike the others, has no dedicated payroll tax to at least partially fund it.

More on Mr. Glenn’s book next time. Waiting on you to return good Madame! But if you don’t soon, never fear, I have endless windbaggery in the offing! :)

While Madame Is Away

Madame M is away on a pleasurable cruise with her husband, so it is just me this week. She is the driving force behind the management of the site, but I will attempt to keep it from cracking up while she’s gone. :)

One of the first things to do is actually answer her previous post:

Good ideas on the states as laboratories and bastions of varying diversity.

You will have to point out Obama’s “defense of policies that have ravaged poor families over the last 50 years.” My reading is that he acknowledges that welfare needed reformed, although he believes a narrow piece of the poverty and disabling entitlement problem was addressed in a vacuum to the detriment of holistic progress.

Beck is right that we need shaken from our apathy. We are Nero fiddling with our electronic devices while Rome burns.

Good reference to the Cultural Revolution. Many about-to-get repressive societies turn against their intellectuals, or co-opt them ruthlessly.

Yes, democracy is an overused word in Obama’s book, as it is by many speakers. Most people are not going to know the political science difference between a democracy (often referred to as pure democracy) and a republic (often referred to as republican democracy) where the people elect their representatives rather than make all the decisions directly. Yet I guess I am not following you on what impact there would be to emphasize republic, even if people generally understood the nuance. Unless you mean the protection of minority views built into the system? Or the checks and balances and separation of powers? Awaiting Madame’s clarification to comment more directly! :)

While we wait, here is more from/on the books that I generally agree with:

Obama says we want more competence and consideration from each other. And he takes to task his fellow politicians. For a sector that preaches values, he says, their “practice of modern politics seems to be value-free. Politics (and political commentary) not only allows but often rewards behavior that we would normally think of as scandalous: fabricating stories, distorting the obvious meaning of what other people say, insulting or generally questioning their motives, poking through their personal affairs in search of damaging information.” Obama 64

Beck is right in one sense that Social Security and Medicare are Ponzi schemes, begun with the best of intentions but shortsighted, bloated, and unsustainable.

“In today’s interconnected world, it’s difficult to penetrate the consciousness of a busy and distracted electorate. As a result, winning in politics mainly comes down to a simple matter of name recognition, which is why most incumbents spend inordinate amounts of time between elections making sure their names are repeated over and over again…And then there’s the role of political gerrymandering in insulating House members from significant challenge. These days, almost every congressional district is drawn by the ruling party with computer-driven precision to ensure that a clear majority of Democrats or Republicans reside within its borders. Indeed, it’s not much of a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.”Obama 103

Beck points out rightly the hypocrisy of Congress not following the laws it makes for the rest of us. He asks the question about why we don’t vote all of them out and start over. Well, aside from the fact that it would be a six year process given Senatorial elections, the blunt truth of the matter is that constituents hate Congress as an institution but love their Congressman, and the gerrymandered districts pretty much assure it largely stays that way. Interesting that Beck and Obama use almost the exact same words about gerrymandering.

Obama is a man who recognizes complexity: “I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.” 97 And he summons a Republican, the second father of the country, to recognize this as a virtue. For Lincoln maintained “within himself the balance between two contradictory ideas—that we must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side, and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.” Obama 98

Obama does a sobering job of relating how the sausage-making, distasteful, incredibly compromised bills that have to be voted on give endless ammunition for future opponents to twist into misunderstandings to paint a very different picture from reality. The cynical process of what politics has become now means that character is punished, nuance ignored, balance and consideration scorned, and frailty never excused.

And if you are one of our representatives or senators,, you become affected by the money that flows to you and especially around you. It deadens you to the reality that exists for most people elsewhere. It disconnects you from your fellow citizens.

Beck reminds us of Washington’s words about the perils of parties, for Washington watched as the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, each of whom thought the other was going to destroy the infant American republic, very nearly did so in their mighty struggles against each other. One, the Federalists, even used anti-Constitutional means. All this from the very generation that fought the Revolution and devised the Constitution! Their actions should be perilous warning to us: if THAT generation, with all they fought for and accomplished, could nearly undo it all, how much more on guard do we need to be against ourselves?

Words in Agreement

Both these men say many things I agree with. While their actions are too often something else, their words are often wonderful. I think people should read both of these books.

Most working people feel that anyone willing to work should be paid a livable wage. And that getting sick shouldn’t make you bankrupt, that every child deserves the chance for a good education, that people deserve to be safe from criminals and terrorists, and that clean air, water, and pure food should be standard. That work should not be all time consuming, but allow time to be with one’s kids. And that when retirement comes, it should be with dignity and respect. Those are Barack Obama’s words from his book. Those, and his pleadings for commonality, to rise above partisanship, aren’t too dissimilar from Beck’s.

Obama believes we have rewarded manipulation of law to the detriment of rewarding builders and designers. He refers to it as having too many lawyers and too few engineers. “Most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or political operatives—professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems.” Obama, 48.

Beck, page 9: “Through blood and sacrifice we have been given the precious gift of self-rule and freedom. But because this gift was simply handed to us, we esteem it far too lightly.”

How the new politics supplanted the old—Obama, p. 17: “Some of the older veterans (in the Senate) would wistfully recall the days when Republicans and Democrats met at night for dinner, hashing out a compromise over steaks and cigars. But even among these old bulls, such fond memories rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s political operatives selected them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.”

Obama says that voters are tired of distortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to complicated problems. Yet isn’t that what they emotionally fall prey to? When people fall for negative smear—made even more possible by the Supreme Court’s ruinous granting of First Amendment rights to corporations (their masters?)—then politicians are not defeated on their record, but on unaccountable and demonstrably (but too late) false (and often deflective) assertions of “baby killing” and “supporting men in wedding gowns.” Or from groups whose ranks are misty and whose funding even mistier, but with high-sounding names and false innuendo.

“For too long we have ignored, enabled, or embraced the flawed character of those we’ve selected to protect and defend our Constitution. By lowering our standards for them, we’ve lowered the standards for ourselves. We wanted a life of ease, a life of little consequence and high reward. To get it, we repeatedly empowered thieves, liars, and con men, simply because they promised us ease. Now, because we’ve trained them that repeated injury has no consequences, they’ve grown bold and fearless. When we do speak up, they ease our pain with pork, a steady stream of entitlements, and financial candy, and back to sleep we go.” Beck, p. 10

“If you think that things would be different if your party was in power, or that things will be different now because your side won, think again. Both parties have betrayed our founding principles…” Beck p. 19

Although I think it could unfortunately change too rapidly, Obama says, and I agree, that we are less radical, less polarized, than elites would have us believe. We may sometimes get whipped up by them into an emotional frenzy, but mostly we’re regular folks. The well off (save a large share of the uncaring very top) often want people not so well off to succeed. Those not well off are more self-critical than believed.

“We believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those—whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors—who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well…the values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility. That as long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper.” Yet also “value family…community…patriotism…obligations of citizenship…duty…sacrifice.” Obama 54-55

Senator Obama tries to get us to see nuance, to recognize complexity, to see the striving for balance, to get us to recognize the imperfections of ourselves:

And “in every society (and in every individual)…the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity, are in tension…Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost…patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, close-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.” Obama 56

“We either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.” Obama 57

And Beck taps a real disgruntlement: those who are prudent look punished or at least unrewarded, while those who are imprudent are saved from their mistakes, often at the prudent people’s expense. One doesn’t have to conjure forth Ayn Rand to be disturbed at that. If being productive and prudent bring no benefits, and maybe even drawbacks, the people with those qualities will, like too much of late-stage Rome, give up trying to make things better, and may even join the rotting system, accelerating its collapse. (We will leave for later discussion about how more than a few of the “imprudent” only appear so to those who don’t look into all the facts).

Beck is hard on Bush and global corporations. And debt. “Thomas Jefferson knew that government debt was not only bad economic policy but morally unacceptable because it effectively makes your children responsible for what you bought.” 23

Beck also rightly points out that the emperor has no clothes, and that our debt situation, and especially our avoiding of inevitable reality, has nearly assured us of colossal pain—and maybe ruin.

Beck is right to take to task Obama and the Democrats’ airy plans for coming up with “funding” for health care, or their completely unrealistic projected savings in Medicare.

Beck is correct in pointing out that the tax code often does things similar to subsidies: grant special interest corporate welfare to the often undeserving and often already rich.

I like his quoting Samuel Adams, “that those who prefer the ‘tranquility of servitude’ had best be prepared to ‘crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!’” 31

Obama conflates Hobbes a bit, but he is right about Locke and how his Enlightenment thinking led to our own Framers’ thoughts on how to form this democracy: “That free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty—a form of government in which those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent, apply equally to rulers and the ruled.” Obama 87

Both these men are calling us back to our roots a bit. In an ahistorical and often anti-historical society, that is a difficult challenge to answer.