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Written by an American expat living in the EU
Beck is at war with the progressive American dream and the progressive European dream of social justice! Beck is trying to convolute this with Communism. Don’t let him.
Soros a prominent progressive supporter,and WWII survivor correctly identified America maybe on Verge Of Dictatorial Democracy slamming Fox & Beck. Also the mainstream German magazine the Spiegel published an analysis referring to Glenn Beck as a protofascist. Given Germany’s experience with fascism we ignore these warnings at our own peril.
Spiegel:”Agitators like Glenn Beck are “nationalist, racist and proto-fascist,” says Henningsen. They take advantage of the economic situation, almost the way the right wing intelligentsia did back in the Weimar Republic.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447-4,00.html
FORBES: Soros Warns U.S. Could Be On Verge Of Dictatorial Democracy, Slams Fox, Glenn Beck
By broadcasting their extreme hatred of the progressive model of social justice, aren’t Glenn Beck and the Fox news disinformation network by calling for an end to so called socialism now moving in the direction of proto-fascism, just as the analysis published by the German Spiegel magazine would indicate?
Isn’t Glenn Beck and Fox news in particular attempting to paint the Obama administration as democratic socialists, just like in the European Union? In doing so aren’t Fox news and Beck trying to convolute the progressive social justice agenda of the Obama administration and the European Union with a dictatorial communism of the former Soviet Union in a fantasy laden illusory vision conjuring up Orwellian overtones?!
Isn’t that a proposition at tension with itself? Considering that every country in the European Union has universal medical access, whereas isn’t Fox news/Glenn Beck/Tea Party illusory vision of America includes maintaining the status quo which is made of;59 million don’t have any medical coverage, 132 million don’t have any dental coverage, 60 million don’t have any paid sick leave & 40 million are on food stamps. Whereas everyone in the European Union has medical coverage and some type of dental plan, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave, paid annual leave no matter what job they have. To convolute this model of progressive social justice advocated by the Obama administration and the European Union with a form of Orwellian communism, shouldn’t this been seen as a proto-fascist Glenn Beck/Fox news and Tea Party disinformation campaign? Also aren’t Glenn Beck’s vitriolic scurrilous rants and railing against the Jewish born progressive supporter George Soros reminiscent of a proto-fascist rant?
Billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros warned tonight in New York that the combination of Fox News, Glenn Beck, The Tea Party, and the ability of Americans to fantasize unrealistically about their political system might lead “this open society to be on the verge of some dictatorial democracy.”
Soros mentioned George Orwell’s novel, “1984″ as a possible precedent for the kind of fantasies being promulgated in our culture today. Orwell’s “1984″ satirized the Communist system of absolute control over society and politics that prevailed in the Soviet Union until 1990.
http://blogs.forbes.com/robertlenzner/2010/12/07/soros-warns-us-could-be-on-verge-dictatorial-democracy-slams-fox-glen-beck/
Below is from Media Matters for America.
Exactly What Glenn Beck Lied About When Vilifying Soros
December 09, 2010 12:42 am ETGlenn Beck demanded an apology from Forbes magazine for claiming that he has been “falsely vilifying” George Soros and said, “I’d like to know exactly what I lied about.” Beck’s attacks on Soros are, of course, demonstrably false.
http://mediamatters.org/research/201012090001
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/01/power-list-profiles/glenn-beck.html
Below is analysis from the German magazine Der Spiegel regarding Glenn Beck. To reiterate, if we ignore the German experience of the last century, aren’t we doing so at our own peril? Isn’t this a serious issue?
“Full of Hatred:
The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn’t know what he wants to be — maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher — and he doesn’t know what he wants to do either, or least he hasn’t come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred.”http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447-4,00.html
Doesn’t the quote below shows us how Glenn Beck really feels?
FOX’s Glenn Beck:
“This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people … this guy is, I believe, a racist.”http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/
When we talk about real family values, one of the things we should be thinking about is that the Fox news, Glenn Beck, Tea Party led crowd whose hateful rhetoric is completely divorced of any family values. We see that in their attempts to maintain America as the only major industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have job protected paid maternity leave required by law. Ask yourself what kind of family values are those in support of the American dream?
Paternity Leave / international comparisons
Did you know that 157 countries offer paid maternity leave?
Check out Wikipedia: “Parental Leave”: there’s a shocking chart which is an embarassment to the United States
Source: http://comet.lehman.cuny.edu/sormani/maternityleave.html
Let’s take a look at how the French maternity leave policies work to support families as an earned benefit provided to working people. In doing so please consider the quote below.
Maternity Leave in France
CNN: Bindi Dupouy, an Australian living in Paris, and her French husband, just had their first child, a son born in the country.
Dupouy, a 28-year-old lawyer, got almost five months paid maternity leave from her company for the birth. She can take another seven months off beyond that — a year total — unpaid, if she wants, with her job guaranteed under French law.http://articles.cnn.com/2010-02-11/world/france.quality.life_1_health-care-france-magazine?_s=PM:WORLD
Let’s take a look at how the German people view real family values in the type of paid maternity benefit protected by law that they provide to their citizens.
Maternity Leave in Germany
German law is very generous when it comes to maternity and paternity leave. Mothers are allowed six weeks leave at full pay prior to the child’s birth and eight weeks at full pay afterward. In the case of a multiple birth, 12 weeks paid leave is allowed. The mother or father is then allowed up to three years of unpaid leave to stay at home with the child. Recently, the German government initiated a program that allows direct subsidies to new parents (Elterngeld).
Source: http://www.howtogermany.com/pages/workplace.htmlMaternity Leave and Job Protection (Mutterschutz)
Source: Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women & Adolescents, Maternity Protection Guide 09.2005Adjusting to motherhood is made a little easier if you happen to be an employed woman working for a German company. You will actually be provided mandatory time-off from work, before and after childbirth. This is revelatory news for many English speaking expats. Basically the Mutterschutzgesetz, Maternity Protection Act of 1968 was instituted to ensure that expecting mothers are not discriminated against when applying for jobs and to provide them with added protection from being dismissed from work as a result of their pregnancy or arrival of their newborn child. This law actually goes well beyond that fundamental claim and provides much more.
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Expectant mothers applying for employment are not required to make their pregnancy known before entering into employment.
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Employers may not disseminate information about an employee’s pregnancy to a third party.
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Women are well protected from loss of employment due to dismissal – from the beginning of pregnancy until 4 months following childbirthSource: http://www.howtogermany.com/pages/maternity_protection.html
The Fox news crowd, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, aren’t they trying to convolute the social justice movement in the US and in the EU with some type of in part religiously motivated zealotry, equating the European Union with the Tower of Babel and a Godless vision of Orwellian dictatorial Soviet era communist fantasy, in order to prevent the American people from enacting commonsense legislation creating a European style social safety net in the United States for the American working class? This would include universal medical and dental that could never be taken away. Paid sick leave, paid annual leave for all workers, even to include the unemployed as a human right, which would include paid maternity leave by right of law. Something that US law presently does not require, but that every country in the EU has and in fact that the American working class should have in support of the American dream. That is why I support President Obama and the Democrats.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Aren’t we living under the threat of the death of the American Dream and loss of American democracy to the forces of proto-fascism to the chorus voice of Fox news, Glenn Beck/Tea Party proto-fascism?
(Cross-posted by the author from DailyKos.)
13 Comments
The real tragic thing is that Glenn Beck admits that his whole schtick is one manufactured for effect.
It is tragic that swaths of our citizenry are being brainwashed and enured to to his toxic messaging purely for the dollars involved, but that does underscore the fascist nature of the situation.
They’re not proto-fascists. They are full-blown fascists. We’ve been existing under a fascist dictatorship since at least December 2000.
Arguing with Beck point for point is a worthless exercise. Like arguing with a mental institution inmate. But Beck’s not crazy, he knows what he is doing and I doubt that he actually believes all the BS he spews just as Himmler and Goebbels and Hess and Hitler himself understood that most of what they advocated was rank propaganda. But it works. Limbaugh and Beck understood early on that there is a nerve in society that responds ferociously to the most outlandish claims and that there really is no limit. You keep notching it up higher and higher and you get richer and richer and all the while, bizarrely, you gain more influence. Limbaugh is almost wholly responsible for purging the Republican Party of ANY moderating factors.
And of course it perfectly serves the oligarchy. A hard, unmoveable core of resistance has been formed against anything that Beck or Limbaugh deems Socialist. (Beck and Lim of course receive their marching orders from the oligarchy.) This is the equivalent of the NRA injected into the realm of political ideology. Indeed, there is much overlap of the NRA and Beck’s audience, which is no accident. If the Revolution comes from the Left, they will be the armed reactionary shock troops “saving freedom.” If the Revolution comes from the right they will be the vanguard of the “new order” to save the homeland from socialism. Perfect.
Thank you for this diary.
Oh and concerning Soros’ term,”dictatorial democracy.” WTF is that?
Sorry to keep bringing this up, but a lot of people in this country would benefit from reading Wilhelm Reich’s, It’s chilling reading his descriptions of how Hitler tricked the middle classes and workers into supporting the Nazis. Even the use of the word “socialist” was done in a conscious effort to attract workers away from the real socialism among the proletariat that was extant after WWI.
Hmmm, don’t know what happened there. The title of the book is The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
A Grassroots Takeover Strategy
The rise of a “dictatorial democracy” can be prevented, according to Joseph Firestone (aka “letsgetitdone”), by a grassroots governmental takeover strategy that he writes about in The Threat to Open Society and the Interactive Voter Choice System.
The system, now in development, provides free web-based tools by which voters across the political spectrum can seize control of government and democratically govern from below — without having to first get control of the media or change any of the laws that are being used to build this “dictatorial democracy”.
Media Matters just received one million dollars from Soros, so citing them to defend Soros is laughable.
Moreover, Media Matters is firmly opposed to any new investigation into 9/11. See here where family members of 9/11 victims call on Media Matters to apologize: http://buildingwhat.org/press-releases/
Not everybody who dislikes Glenn Beck cares about America or the truth. Media Matters has it’s own agenda and I’m sorry to tell you that this progressive doesn’t think its truly progressive. Soros’ commitment to an open society is far far from complete.
Sometimes the pitch really feels like Goebbels warning us that Hitler is an authoritarian extremist.
Beck is the craziest of the bunch but Soros, Obama and the rest are no daisies.
“Jewish born progressive supporter George Soros”
“Soros a prominent progressive supporter,and WWII survivor”
What did Mr Soros do during the war? How did he “survive”?
And isn’t there an outstanding warrant for the arrest of Soros in France?
And what is Mr Soros doing now? Making money by investing in micro finance in India. Micro finance is just a sanitized term for charging 25% interest on the poorest of the poor.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/temasek-soros-snared-in-india-as-microfinance-ipos-stall.html
This isn’t to say that Soros is especially bad or even close to the worst of the billionaire pack but… progressive he is not.
cap, I think he is. Half of what’s written about him is untrue, but I know someone who has been close to him for years who’s good opinion I trust implicitly. His picture of Soros is very realistic, not a whitewash, and yet there’s no room for doubt about his sincere commitment to open society.
I know someone else close to him too, a person who’s been associated with him for years. That person is a man of the highest integrity, and if he has remained associated with Soros over many years. That would not have happened if Soros were not the real thing.
Further, Soros failed to support the Democrats this year because he was dissatisfied with their corporate suck-up performance and his latest remarks about “dictatorial democracy” indicate real disillusionment with this Administration. I think we can conclude from all this that Soros is with us in our attempts to change this system> Like everyone else, he may not always do the right thing or the smart thing. But he won’t quit. Opposition to totalitarianism is in his soul, and I don’t doubt that and his organizations will do as much as they can to change the direction back towards a healthy democracy.
He was a child during the war. His father split his family up and they stayed with different hungarian christian families under ficticious identities, so that the whole family wouldn’t die if one or more were caught. HIs father then helped other Jews to obtain papers to escape or avoid the Nazis until Russia liberated them.
He awarded Media Matters with $1 million after they researched the claims of right wingers the first time.. It’s really sickening that Beck tried to portray him as sending Jews to death camps.
Read the material on Media Matters, and Soros’ semi-autobiography is on Google Books where large parts of it can be read.
Soros is not an angel. He worked with NED, and USAID and contributed to the color revolutions bringing westernized democratic capitalism and privatization to former soviet republics which are are a mess right now, but he is not the monster beck has made him out to be.
President Obama claims he can order people killed and that is OK. How can you oppose Beck and support Obama?
Democrats claimed they opposed the wildly far-Right agenda when it came from Republicans, but Obama has instituted far-Right “reforms” that dwarf anything McCain-Palin could have passed. Obama’s deal with the Republicans to give $40 billion dollars to the family that owns Walmart smacks of Bribery. Yet the Democrats in the House and Senate are so dishonest and morally bankrupt that they’ve begun no investigation of it.
If you say you oppose Fascism, why don’t you oppose it in the Democrats?