Greg Grandin: Beck, BP and Latin America’s Leadership (Grit Tv)

Latin America is ahead of the curve when it comes to fighting resource-extracting corporations, says NYU professor Greg Grandin. While Obama makes nice with BP CEO Tony Hayward (and Glenn Beck claims that Obama is unfair to Hayward because he's white), Grandin notes, social movements across South and Central America have been fighting the companies that are after their resources for a while now--and dealing with the repercussions; often violent death squads, as well.

Grandin joins us to keep us up to date on the coup in Honduras, the ongoing resource struggles in Latin America, and give us some insight on just why Glenn Beck has a "Tourettes-like" obsession with race.

We also bring you footage from a new film that goes inside the Honduran coup; from director Katia Lara, check out Who Is Afraid: Fathoming the Coup in Honduras.

http://www.grittv.org/2010/06/18/greg-grandin-beck-bp-and-latin-americas-leadership/

Video at link. Sorry, no transcript. :(

Here is the article referenced in the interview:

Glenn Beck, America’s Historian Laureate

Greg Grandin | May 13, 2010

Americans, it’s been said, learn geography when they go to war. Now, it seems, many get their history when they go to a Tea Party rally or tune in to Glenn Beck.

History is a “battlefield of ideas,” as Beck recently put it, while looking professorial in front of a blackboard filled with his trademark circled names connected by multidirectional arrows, his hands covered with chalk dust. In this struggle, movement historians like Beck go all in, advancing a comprehensive interpretation of American history meant to provide analytical clarity to believers and potential converts alike. As paranoid as it may be, this history is neither radical nor revisionist, since the Tea Party activists and their fellow travelers pluck at some of the major chords of American nationalism.

It’s easy to dismiss the iconography of the movement: the wigs and knee breeches, the founding-father fetishism, the coiled snakes, and, yes, the tea bags. It’s no less easy to laugh at recent historical howlers like the claims <1> of Dick Armey, who heads FreedomWorks, a corporate Tea Party front <2>, that Jamestown was settled by “socialists” or the Texas School Board’s airbrushing <3> of Deist Thomas Jefferson from its history textbooks. It’s fun to ridicule Beck, as Jon Stewart recently did <4>, when he goes all “Da Vinci Code,” and starts connecting <5> Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, and ACORN <6> in order to explain 2008’s economic collapse.

But historical analysis is about making connections, and there is, in fact, coherence to the Tea Party version of history, which allows conservative cadres not just to interpret the world but to act in it. And yes, it is all about race.

http://www.thenation.com/article/glenn-beck-america%E2%80%99s-historian-laureate