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.