Obscene: What A Falling Off Was There - Democratic Underground

Mr_Jefferson_24

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Sat Aug-28-10 05:41 PM
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Obscene: What A Falling Off Was There

Commondreams.org poster, Metal contributed:

"To know it is good and to act upon it are one and the same."

--Buddhist Samurai saying

It's too easy to dismiss Beck simply as a buffoon. He is successfully
preying on the rapidly spreading ignorance of millions upon millions
of post-Clinton, post-Bush "Amurkans." He wields the Big Lie in way
that is perceived as overt only by those dwindling numbers of
left-leaning but thoroughly disorganized and too easily intimidated
Americans who know any better.

What is most evil about Beck in an Orwellian sense is that he
correctly warns about an impending broader and deeper collapse of
America, and rightly compares America to Weimar Germany--having done
his research to know that this is what many true progressives have
been warning about for some time: He does this in order to co-opt
their message.

But his PRESCRIPTION to "save" or "restore" America, or "reclaim the
Civil Rights moment" is what MATTERS here, and that false prescription
is scorched earth Libertarianism, which would have government throw
all the poor, elderly, infirm, unemployed and underemployed over the
side; negate all environmental protections, food safety laws and labor
protections; further deregulate banks and corporations of all kinds;
end all public education; generally abandon government oversight of
anything but the military and post office, and continue the process of
elevating the legal fiction and wanton profit desires of "corporate
personhood" above the needs of actual flesh & blood human beings,
regardless of whether they are citizens or not.

Glenn Beck's agenda is the right of the economically down-trodden to
pray, die of preventable or treatable diseases, or starve to death in
spreading squalor and ignorance in the streets. He holds blameless
the "too big to fail" banks and mortgage resellers (and the
politicians who deregulated them) who fraudulently cost millions of
American families their breadwinners' jobs. He would leave the tens
of millions of victims of these banks, resellers and pols to the mercy
of the fictional "free market" without food stamps, unemployment
benefits or any other government aid.

Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out the DIRECT cost of un-just wars
that enrich a select economic elite to government revenues that would
be better used for programs of broader economic & social uplift of the
poor. Glenn Beck promotes an agenda of economic and social
down-trodding upon everyone but plutocrats and those in the
upper-middle-class who serve their upper-class interests.

The ONLY purpose of the dwindling middle-class & burgeoning
lower-class to the sort of scorched earth Libertarian plutocrats who
bankroll Goebbels wannabes like Glenn Beck is to maintain minimum
necessary domestic market share for some of their globalized,
increasingly foreign-manufactured goods, and to economically
parasitize them in every other respect. This is simultaneous with a
process of gradually stripping them of any recourse in the courts, in
the media or in politics while imposing upon them an increasingly
totalitarian Police State: One that punishes citizens who videotape
criminal police misconduct on public property while claiming police
arrests in public are "private matters"; wields WMTs (Weapons of Mass
Torture) such as LRAD sound cannons on civilian protesters and Active
Denial microwave "pain beams" on prisoners, and has created a bogus
Military Commissions Tribunal "court system" for the purpose of
carrying out politically expedient media-hyped show trials of citizens
and non-citizens labeled as "terrorists" using secret Executive Branch
criterion. One that uses similarly secret criterion to order the
execution of American citizens overseas in blatant violation of the
Constitution and due process.

Things ARE about to get a LOT worse. But an authentic progressive
prescription for what presently ails us is nowhere to be seen in mass
media. What share of the fault for this belongs to America's
authentic progressives? That is the question we on this site should
all be asking ourselves. We know our cause is good. What must we do
to effectively act upon it?

At the least we need a broader and deeper sense of solidarity that
reaches across race, income and education level and seeks to create a
morally acceptable minimum standard of existence-as-a-human-right for
ALL human beings: Decent shelter, adequate safe food, clean safe
drinking water, adequate decent clothing, adequate public education
for all that includes opportunities for artistic education &
expression, access to green public transportation, access to mass
media & public political debates for ALL political parties who meet a
reasonable minimum membership number, universal adequate, timely
medical care including safe prescriptions, and a healthy sustainable
environment.

We should continually ask society at large: Do human beings exist to
serve corporations, or do corporations exist to serve human beings?
What is the purpose of humanity if not to take care of each other and
the environment? I would add that this purpose should include the
goal of seeking a harmonious economic & ecological balance similar to
the ecological species & resource balance that nature achieves over time even in
its most complex habitats. This should include a humane, scientific, global
plan for gradually reducing regional human over-populations to levels
sustainable within their regional ecological habitats--the present
alternative being spreading resource wars, genocide, unsustainable
economic & environmental degradation and mounting millions of annual
related deaths.

If we as America progressives, indeed as a species, don't begin to ask
and formulate effective answers to these questions, then neo-liberal capitalist
resource rape and related resource pressures created by
over-populations around the world will accelerate us all irretrievably
down the present nihilistic path of spreading resource wars
opportunistically intensified by racial and religious tensions leading
to genocide of human populations and extinction of millions of animal
and plant species, perhaps even our own.

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/further/2010/08/28