Crossposted from Hillbilly Report.
As a Progressive Democrat and a working American these last ten years have been a nightmare. I have watched as Republicans in Congress and the White House enabled Wall St. and Corporate fatcats as they raped the American worker and decimated the American economy. They were neatly bailed out and climbed back up into their ivory towers. All along the way as middle-class jobs were outsourced the only folks in America ever asked to sacrifice is the very folks expected to do the hardest, most stressful work.
Indeed though the man who brought the message has been disgraced there still is and always will be Two Americas, one set who is supposed to work and play by the rules, and another set that gets all the priviledge while bending and breaking the rules. Folks who put profits before people and greed before country. They will stop at nothing to roll back the Enlightenment and once again create a theocracy in which workers are slaves with no rights.
Unfortunately these folks are as close as they ever have been to doing that. They have a clever propoganda machine that sensationalizes everything, twists the truth, and bold-faced lies at the behest of Corporate America to convince average Americans to believe that their money would be best served for everyone in pockets of the very wealthy. These propoganda ministers are on the radio, TV and Fox News daily. They are nothing but the arm of a modern Republican Party that seeks to create a two-class society where the elites rule and everyone else has no rights.
In a media driven culture and in areas where they rule the airwaves uncontested these slick snake-oil salesman are unfortunately most of the information that some of these folks recieve. They have been very successful in convincing them to vote against their own, and their families own interests by scaring the daylights out of them about this or that. In the end, these folks make huge money at the behest of Corporate America to basically propogandize the populace.
One of the most annoying, and unfortunately one of the most effective of these is Glenn Beck. I cannot believe how anyone can listen to the things this man truly says and believes him. The fact that he can openly shill for Corporate American and their interests and be believed by so many of our neighbors is quiet frankly, frightening.
Just listen to this diatribe Beck recently spewed forth:
Now, I wanna be very clear to Glenn Beck. I am so sick of he and his ilk sitting in their cushy studios and making fools of America with his poison. When he talks about workers unemployed for 99 weeks does he even consider the span of time that covers?? These folks were unemployed before his god-king who employed all the Corporate facist policies that unemployed them left office. You see, despite all his self-righteous drivel, all the garbage Beck spews for policy in this country has been tried. IT FAILED MISERABLY!!!!
How in the hell does Glenn Beck think all these people became unemployed?? Because the very people he shills for shipped all their jobs away with the idiotic policies he spits forth. Why??? Because American workers are not slaves and they can exploit a third-world worker and force them to be slaves instead.
At 1:25 in the video Beck states "Now somebody is taking advantage of these people". For the first time ever I have to agree with him. Somebody is. Somebody has stolen their livelihood and stagnated their wages. Somebody has run the deficit up with huge tax cuts, a crashed economy, two failed unpaid for wars, and now are threatening to steal their retirement security and any government program that has ever helped anyone. He got it right, he just will not tell you who.
Then you have the predictable diatribe against Organized Labor. As a self-professed "student of history" does Glenn Beck not even consider why labor unions came about and how that lesson can be applied to our modern day when workers are falling further and further behind??:
A statement by the founders of the AFL expressed their belief in the need for more effective union organization. "The various trades have been affected by the introduction of machinery, the subdivision of labor, the use of women's and children's labor and the lack of an apprentice system-so that the skilled trades were rapidly sinking to the level of pauper labor," the AFL declared. "To protect the skilled labor of America from being reduced to beggary and to sustain the standard of American workmanship and skill, the trades unions of America have been established." Thus the AFL was a federation that organized only unions of skilled workers.
http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/...
Does he not remember what happened the last time that the robber-barons he represents totally crashed our economy?? Fearmongers like himself were there to create straw men, point at them and instill fear in working Americans to cause them to give up their god-given rights:
The post world war I depression brought wages down sharply and caused major erosion of union membership-a loss of about a million members in the years from 1920 to 1923. The difficulties were multiplied by the decision of the National Association of Manufacturers and other antiunion "open shop" groups to wipe out or seriously diminish the status of American , can unions. The fear of "Bolsheviks," often hysterical, that was nurtured by the Russian communist revolution was used gleefully by the antiunion forces. As early as 1913, President John Kirby of the NAM had decided the trade union movement was "an un-American, illegal and infamous conspiracy." As the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, headed by Sen. Robert LaFollette Jr., reported years later, such demands as "union recognition, shorter hours, higher wages, regulation of child labor and the hours and wages of women and children in industry" came to be seen-under the influence of the NAM-sponsored 'American Plan' as aspects of the alleged communist revolution from which the antilabor employers wanted to save the nation. Strikebreaking, blacklisting and vigilanteeism became, for a time, acceptable aspects of this new and spurious brand of patriotism. The "yellow dog contract," which workers had to sign in order to get a job, bound them never to join a union; at the same time, the corporations promoted employee representation plans or company unions-pale and generally useless imitations of the real thing.
That is what is the most frustrating thing of all. With America seeming to be poised to give at least some power back to the very agents who have robbed them blind and bankrupted their country I have nothing but fear. And I have nothing but loathing for the Corporate facists Beck represents who so blantantly take advantage of their fellow Americans.
So I find myself hoping that one of Glenn Beck's paid for ramblings is indeed fulfilled. I hope that Progressives, the unemployed, and every worker that is tired of watching Wall St. get bailed out while they suffer will finally band together and create an army of Americans who want real progress for themselves and their families. Not a violent army, but an informed army that realizes we need Progressive governance as much now as any time in our history.
It is quite obvious that although there are some very fine, decent Congressmen and Senators and others in political office we simply cannot depend on any of our elected officials anymore. The most bitter disappointment of the last two years for me is the realization that just enough people in my own part are bought and paid for by the same forces that rule the Corporate Republican Party that a truly Progressive agenda will never come about and nonetheless will be blamed for the problems it did not even cause.
Unless working Americans can truly wake up and realize they cannot inform themselves with the equally as corrupt media and make a little extra effort to find out what is really going on, then band together as an unignorable voice and demand that the problems that have put them in poverty or on the unemployment line are truly addressed and fight together to save the rights they have earned in the near future I truly fear for the future of the American experiment in freedom and equality for all.