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! :)