Who is Glenn Beck?

Here are a few highlights from a NYT Magazine article on Glenn Beck, who is someone, I'll admit, I don't understand:

--He's not all that interested in the Tea Party movement.

"He showed little interest in the results from primary elections held the day before — upsets in Delaware and New York for Tea Party candidates whose followers often invoke Beck and Palin as spiritual leaders and even promote them as a prospective presidential ticket in 2012.

“Not involved with the Tea Party,” Beck told me, shrugging. While many identify Beck with a political insurgency — as Rush Limbaugh was identified with the Republican sweep of 1994 — to believe that the nation suffers from “a political problem” comically understates things, in his view."

--Beck doesn't speak with an ideological certainty, a la Hannity or O'Reilly.

"Beck rarely speaks with the squinty-eyed certainty or smugness of Rush Limbaugh or his fellow Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. He often changes his mind or nakedly contradicts himself." He's more approachable, personable, even feminine about Beck. "Fans approach Beck and give him hugs. Do people feel they can hug Limbaugh? There is something feminine about Beck — the soft features, the crying on the air, the reflexive vulnerability. It sets him apart from the standard, testosterone-addled rant artists of cable and talk radio. Women tune into Beck’s radio show more heavily than they do to other conservative commentators....Beck’s staff and loyalists love to compare Beck with Oprah Winfrey."

--His willingness to admit his mistakes may be somewhat self-serving, rather than truly humble.

"Beck is constantly admitting his weaknesses and failures, which he wields as both a crutch and a shield. 'Maybe Glenn’s transparency is what keeps him out of trouble,' says Robert Beath, Beck’s drama teacher at Sehome High School in Bellingham, Wash. Beath, who was fond of Beck as a teenager, said Beck appears to now think that his revelations grant him license. 'When he says, ‘I am not perfect,’ he seems to escape accountability for his various points of view. Yet he expects others to be accountable for their point of view without seeming to allow them the ‘I am not perfect’ exception.”

--Beck is exceptionally polarizing.

“He has a spiritual connection to us; you can hear his heart speaking,” Susan Trevethan, a psychiatric nurse from Milford, Conn., told me at the “Restoring Honor” rally. “I believe he has been divinely guided to be here in this place,” she said. “He is doing the research. He is teaching us.”

Or if you prefer: “Even the leather-winged shouting heads at Fox News look like intellectual giants next to this bleating, benighted Cassandra,” wrote The Buffalo Beast, in naming Beck one of the 50 most loathsome people in America in 2006. (No. 24 then, but in January he made it to No. 1.) “It’s like someone found a manic, doom-prophesying hobo in a sandwich board, shaved him, shot him full of Zoloft and gave him a show.”

Impeaching Obama?

Michael Tomasky, writing in the New York Review of Books, thinks that the biggest result of a Republican takeover of Congress would be investigations:

In a morbid sort of way, it will be fascinating to see what will happen in a Congress populated by so many people keen to join it because they despise it. Whatever emerges, one thing is not in doubt: if the Republicans win the House, they will launch a series of investigations into the Obama administration, quite possibly leading to another impeachment drama.

This is not often discussed, but it is certainly no secret. Politico reported in late August:

Everything from the microscopic—the New Black Panther party—to the massive—think bailouts—is on the GOP to-do list, according to a half-dozen Republican aides interviewed by POLITICO.

Republican staffers say there won’t be any self-destructive witch hunts, but they clearly are relishing the prospect of extracting information from an administration that touts transparency.

And a handful of aggressive would-be committee chairmen—led by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas)—are quietly gearing up for a possible season of subpoenas not seen since the Clinton wars of the late 1990s.6

Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann, who often speaks as the unrestrained id of this new right, said, when asked how Republicans should wield their subpoena power: “Oh, I think that’s all we should do. I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

Republicans would deny that impeachment is ultimately on their minds. But why wouldn’t it be? They have shown repeatedly that they play to their base, and much of their base already believes that Obama is probably not an American citizen and therefore is an illegitimate president. In a Harris Poll from March, 24 percent of Republicans even agreed that Obama “may be the Antichrist.” When your most loyal voters think that, not trying to remove the man from office would amount to malpractice. If the Democrats are worried about the much-discussed “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans’ voters and theirs, perhaps bringing these issues out of the shadows would help close it.

"I Don't Feel LIke Anybody Cares About People Like Me"

In today's NYT is a story about Congressman Patrick Murphy, a moderate Democrat from north of Philadelphia, who won election in 2006 and was reelected in 2008, which included early support for Obama.  This year, however, he's trailing in the polls to his Republican challenger.  The journalist writer accompanied Murphy for three hours one evening as he went door to door in his district:

As Mr. Murphy moved from house to house, he tried to connect in any way he could, rattling off whatever biographical facts seemed to apply. He’d say he was in a “mixed marriage” — his wife is an enrolled Republican — or talk about his military background or his father, a retired Philadelphia police officer now working three part-time jobs. At a house with a pickup truck in the driveway plastered with Philadelphia Flyers bumper stickers, he remarked that he had played hockey as a child at a rink in neighboring Bristol Borough. To a woman wearing a crucifix, he said he had once been named altar boy of the year at his local parish.

Very few people seemed to want to actually listen to him. They jumped in with long lists of grievances: taxes, job losses, immigration, crooked local officials, junked cars in neighbors’ yards.

Marge Reed, 75, opened her screen door and before he could complete a sentence said, “You know what, Mr. Murphy, I don’t believe anything anybody tells me anymore.” She apologized for her frankness but said it was to be expected because of her Irish heritage. “I’m Irish, too,” Mr. Murphy said, as if she might not know that. “So is your opponent,” she said, and they both laughed. She told Mr. Murphy that she planned to vote for him, then continued giving him a piece of her mind.

Little of the anger Mr. Murphy encountered was aimed directly at him or even at President Obama. Mr. Murphy never once mentioned the president’s name, and, oddly, over the course of three hours, neither did any of the Levittown residents. People just did not like their situation or the general drift of the country, and seemed to hold everyone in a position of power — locally and in Washington — responsible.

I called Marge Reed the next day. She had worked for the Spiegel catalog company at a store in Levittown where people picked up their orders. She said she had lost much of her retirement nest egg in the stock market and was living on $13,750 a year and having a hard time paying for her prescriptions. Her husband died in 1993. “I don’t feel like anybody cares about people like me,” she said. “I remember President Obama talking about how he worried about his mother paying her health bills when she had cancer. Well, I’m somebody’s mother, too.”

Rick Rook, 59, a retired Air Force man, said he was not sure that he would vote at all. “I know why people go into politics,” he said. “They’re idealistic. But they get to Washington because somebody gave them money and then they’ve got to return the favor. I still believe in our system, but I don’t believe in the politicians.”

Mr. Murphy’s campaign has vehemently contested the accuracy of a late September poll that had him trailing Mr. Fitzpatrick by 14 points among likely voters, pointing out that the same pollster, G. Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College, had him well behind in his 2006 race just weeks before the election. “I’m not saying the race is over,” Mr. Madonna said when I called him. “The poll was taken at five weeks out and there were a large number of undecideds. Murphy could still win. I don’t think, politically speaking, he’s a dead man walking.”

My walk with Mr. Murphy in Levittown began in a steady drizzle, which as the night wore on became a cold, driving rain. He had an umbrella but didn’t use it. I wondered at times why he, or anyone, would want to win office. The low regard for public officials that pollsters are finding could be viscerally felt.

Several people shook Mr. Murphy’s hand and commented on how cold it was. They couldn’t believe that he was outside on such a horrid night. But they let him stand at the door. No one invited him in for so much as a cup of hot tea.

The Shriveling of the Middle Class

The Right and the Left in America today are talking past the real problem in the American economy, as described here by Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Reagan:

The millions of unemployed today are blamed on the popped real estate bubble and the subprime derivative financial crisis. However, the US economy has been losing jobs for a decade. As manufacturing, information technology, software engineering, research, development, and tradable professional services have been moved offshore, the American middle class has shriveled. The ladders of upward mobility that made American an “opportunity society” have been dismantled.

The wage and salary cost savings obtained by giving Americans’ jobs to Chinese and Indians have enriched corporate CEOs, shareholders, and Wall Street at the expense of the middle class and America’s consumer economy.

The loss of middle class jobs and incomes was covered up for years by the expansion of consumer debt to substitute for the lack of income growth. Americans refinanced their homes and spent the equity, and they maxed out their credit cards.

Consumer debt expansion has run its course, and there is no possibility of continuing to drive the economy with additions to consumer debt.

Economists and policymakers continue to ignore the fact that all employment in tradable goods and services can be moved offshore (or filled by foreigners brought in on H-1b and L-1 visas). The only replacement jobs are in nontradable domestic services, that is, those jobs that require “hands-on” activity, such as ambulatory health services, barbers, cleaning services, waitresses and bartenders--jobs that describe the labor force of a third world country. Even many of these jobs are now filed with foreigners brought in on R-1 type visas from Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, Romania, and elsewhere.

The loss of American jobs and the compression of consumer income by low wages has removed consumer demand as the driving force of the economy. This is the reason expansionary monetary and fiscal policies are having no effect.

The latest jobs report issued today shows that America’s transformation into a third world economy continues. The economy lost 95,000 jobs in September, mainly due to cuts in local education and federal employment. Part of the loss of 159,000 government jobs was offset by 64,000 new private sector jobs.

Where are the new jobs? They are in nontradable lowly paid domestic services: 32,000 were in health care and social services, and 33,900 were in food services and drinking places.

There you have it. That is America’s “New Economy.”

Our Permanent War Economy, Predicted by John Flynn

Over the last couple of days, I've been reading some writing by Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian, who's work is often offered to the readers of the libertarian website Lew Rockwell.com.  I've never thought of myself as a libertarian, and while I find some of their stuff rather bizarre and extreme, the historical writing of Murray Rothbard has been very insightful and helpful in understanding where we are politically in the US these day. 

Also, I have to say that it was the essays from Lew Rockwell.com (and the Daily Reckoning.com) that persuaded me about five or six years ago to take seriously our very precarious financial situation, and thus to be able to predict the financial/housing crash of '08, long before it arrived.  I also like their principled antiwar position.  (Perhaps I'm more libertarian than I realize?)

In Rothbard's historical essays, he describes an important figure of the libertarian persuasion (aka 'old right' or what we today would call 'paleoconservative'), a writer/intellectual named John T. Flynn, who wrote in the thirties, forties, and fifties of the 20th century.  Flynn was a pre-New Deal liberal/progressive who opposed the New Deal and World War II for ideological reasons, and who was blacklisted as a 'Nazi', even though that was a ridiculous charge.

What really interested me was how accurate Flynn was in his prediction of how militarized and imperialistic (and therefore, akin to fascist) America would become  if we went in this direction.  Read the following excerpt from Rothbard's essay and see if it doesn't sound what we have become.

All in all, the Old Right was understandably gloomy as it contemplated the inevitable approach of war. It foresaw that World War II would transform America into a Leviathan State, into a domestic totalitarian collectivism, with suppression of civil liberties at home, joined to an unending global imperialism abroad, pursuing what Charles A. Beard called a policy of "perpetual war for perpetual peace." None of the Old Right saw this vision of the coming America more perceptively than John T. Flynn, in his brilliant work As We Go Marching, written in the midst of the war he had done so much to forestall. After surveying the polity and the economy of fascism and National Socialism, Flynn bluntly saw the New Deal, culminating in the wartime society, as the American version of fascism, the "good fascism" in sardonic contrast to the "bad fascism" we had supposedly gone to war to eradicate. Flynn saw that the New Deal had finally established the corporate state that big business had been yearning for since the end of the nineteenth century. The New Deal planners, declared Flynn,

"were thinking of a change in our form of society in which the government would insert itself into the structure of business, not merely as policeman, but as a partner, collaborator, and banker. But the general idea was first to reorder the society by making it a planned and coerced economy instead of a free one, in which business would be brought together into great guilds or an immense corporative structure, combining the elements of self-rule and government supervision with a national economic policing system to enforce these decrees. . . . This, after all, is not so very far from what business had been talking about. . . . It was willing to accept the supervision of the government. . . . Business said that orderly self-government in business would eliminate most of the causes that infected the organism with the germs of crises."

The first great attempt of the New Deal to create such a society was embodied in the NRA and AAA, modeled on the fascist corporate state, and described by Flynn as "two of the mightiest engines of minute and comprehensive regimentation ever invented in any organized society." These engines were hailed by those supposedly against regimentation: "Labor unions and Chamber of Commerce officials, stockbrokers and bankers, merchants and their customers joined in great parades in all the cities of the country in rhapsodical approval of the program."13 After the failure of the NRA, the advent of World War II re-established this collectivist program, "an economy supported by great streams of debt and an economy under complete control, with nearly all of the planning agencies functioning with almost totalitarian power under a vast bureaucracy."14 After the war, Flynn prophesied, the New Deal would attempt to expand this system to international affairs.

Controlling What We Watch and Hear

Here's something to think about:

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites.

Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest. Most Americans don't really seem to care about who owns the media. But they should. The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media. The average American watches 153 hours of television a month. In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something. Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal. Together, the "big six" absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States. But even those areas of the media that the "big six" do not completely control are becoming increasingly concentrated. For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly dominating the Internet.

But it is the "big six" that are the biggest concerns. When you control what Americans watch, hear and read you gain a great deal of control over what they think. They don't call it "programming" for nothing.

Our Elected King

Andrew Bacevich writes about the Presidency and this President:

"The President is an elected king," wrote Randolph Bourne nearly a century ago, "but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance ... than the fact that he is pragmatically a king."

Bourne thereby identified a central truth of modern American politics: Stripped to its essence, our democracy has become an elaborate process of conferring enormous power on a single individual. What we choose to call an inauguration is more accurately a coronation. Nominally a chief executive, the president today occupies a position more akin to that of emperor, and Americans both expect much and demand much of their emperor.

To be "the most powerful man in the world" is to be simultaneously worshiped and despised. To occupy the Oval Office is to become the modern-day equivalent of a Sun King, commanding deference, while also becoming the subject of endless gossip, envy, jealousy, and intrigue, all to be reported at length and ad nauseam by Bob Woodward.

What lends this arrangement a semblance of legitimacy is the expectation that our president-monarch knows how to wield power effectively. Through the exercise of royal prerogatives, the king demonstrates his worthiness for high office.

Should a president demonstrate an absence of mastery—if he comes across as a weakling or a ditherer—profound dysfunction results. Recall the Carter era. Jimmy Carter's inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis reduced him to a figure of contempt and left Americans with a sense that the country itself was adrift. In short order, they stripped Carter of his crown.

Yet presidential weakness—even an inkling of weakness—can have international as well as domestic implications. This is notably the case in matters related to national security. If the occupant of the Oval Office appears less than fully in command, friend and foe alike will wonder who exactly is in charge.

Confusion about American priorities and intentions can thereby result. Out of confusion can come miscalculation, as allies revise downward their estimate of American reliability and adversaries persuade themselves that they can get away with mischief. In other words, the implications of weakness extend beyond the who’s up, who’s down preoccupations of garden-variety politics. This confusion describes where we find ourselves today. There is no doubting that President Obama is smart, talented, well intentioned, and smooth as they come. Yet whether he possesses the temperament to govern is fast becoming an open question. Put simply, the question is this: Does Obama have sufficient backbone?

The release of Bob Woodward's new book Obama’s Wars has raised this question to new heights. It depicts a president who not only gets rolled but who knows when he is getting rolled and still allows it to happen. With regard to how to proceed on Afghanistan—the most important foreign policy decision to cross Obama’s desk thus far—the president last year demanded that the Pentagon present him with distinctive policy options. The king didn’t want to be handed the solution; he wanted to choose.

In fact, however, the members of his court offered him three variations of a single course of action, the one that the Pentagon itself preferred—a textbook example of how the theory of “civilian control” differs from actual practice.

Particularly disturbing is the fact that our very smart president understood exactly what was happening. Woodward shows Obama complaining loudly. Having registered that complaint, the president more or less meekly rubber-stamped the policy that the Pentagon was foisting on him. In effect, on Afghanistan he thereby forfeited to others the power to decide. Once Obama endorsed choices made by unelected subordinates, the office of commander-in-chief had acquired additional tenants.

Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later, or, Why Taxes Shouldn't Be Cut (Somebody's Got To Pay the Bill)

The United States is saddled with a rapidly decaying and woefully underfunded transportation system that will undermine its status in the global economy unless Congress and the public embrace innovative reforms, a bipartisan panel of experts concludes in a report released Monday.

U.S. investment in preservation and development of transportation infrastructure lags so far behind that of China, Russia and European nations that it will lead to "a steady erosion of the social and economic foundations for American prosperity in the long run."

That is a central conclusion in a report issued on behalf of about 80 transportation experts who met for three days in September 2009 at the University of Virginia. Few of their conclusions were ground-breaking, but the weight of their credentials lends gravity to their findings.

Co-chaired by two former secretaries of transportation - Norman Y. Mineta and Samuel Skinner - the group estimated that an additional $134 billion to $262 billion must be spent per year through 2035 to rebuild and improve roads, rail systems and air transportation.

"The United States can't compete successfully in the 21st century with a 20th century transportation infrastructure," the report said.

The key to salvation is developing new long-term funding sources to replace the waning revenues from federal and state gas taxes which largely paid for the construction and expansion of the highway system in the 1950s and 1960s, the report says.

The Cost of War

Look Into My Eyes and Repeat After Me: Fair and Balanced...Fair and Balanced...Fair and Balanced....

Paul Krugman makes the now obvious observation:

As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

I'm not sure any Fox viewers actually care, but the Fox cable network has become the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Or perhaps it's the reverse, the Republican Party has become the political arm of Fox and Friends (the wealthy ones).  "As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, 'Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox'" (Krugman) .

(Fox lovers might retort, "Well, MSNBC does the same for the Democrats." There is some truth in that, I suppose, but at the same time, the hosts of the political shows on MSNBC have not been shy about criticizing Obama and his administration, in the process showing their political independence.)