The Invisible Hand (Behind those Crackpots on the Mall)

Here you’ll find a pretty nauseating gallery of the posters hoisted by the suckers (some would them “sheeple”) who indulged themselves at this last weekend’s hate-fest in DC

And, here is a plea from PFAW, urging people to demand that Congress take a stand against the madness, with a “resolution of disapproval” aimed at those congressional Republicans who will now cravenly (or with a lunatic sincerity) express their solidarity with Glenn Beck’s troops.

This is fine, but I wish that there were far more outrage, and a lot more critical attention, focused on the corporate forces that have brought this on, whether actively or passively, to benefit their own agenda. Would this still be happening if not for the gigantic players who stand to gain the most from it–the health insurance cartel, and Big Pharma, and News Corporation? 

And, for that matter, what about the other mammoth entities that grew the far right in the first place, and that have spent, by now, so many billions on creating their own “noise machine,” as David Brock and others have meticulously demonstrated? Where would Rush Limbaugh be, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage, and, most recently, Glenn Beck–and, no less, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute, and the Olin Foundation, and on and on and on–without the endless riches of the oil and petrochemical, cigarette and agribusiness, prison and “defense” cartels; and the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers, etc.?

All those corporate interests, and the ruthless types who manage them, have long worked closely, and very comfortably, with the kingpins of the so-called Christian right (and, in some instances–Philip Anschutz, Tom Monaghan, the late Joe Coors, et al.–the ruthless types themselves are fervent Christianists). So while the current madness is indeed the latest bit of theocratic handiwork, it’s also something even bigger, too.

And let us not forget to note this awful truth: that Obama and the Democrats are also heavily indebted to those same gigantic interests, which are now playing both sides of the current all-but-war. If it were otherwise, Obama and his party would be doing exactly what I’m asking for–calling out, not just Joe Wilson, but the whole cabal that has impelled Glenn Beck, Dick Armey and the Christianists to send those bus-loads of explosive people to the “town halls” and the Mall. If Obama and the Democrats were not in thrall to those same interests, we’d have quite a healthcare plan now moving through the Congress. And there’d be quite a lot of other good things happening as well, if both the parties (and, by and large, the press) weren’t mostly owned and operated by the same commercial powers, whose primary interest lies in thwarting ours.

This, in short, is not a simple “culture war,” but a class war that has been cast as a spontaneous near-insurrection, on merely partisan and cultural/religious grounds, by an especially combustible subsection of “the grass-roots.” When in fact it’s other, larger entities who’ve drenched them all in kerosene, and set them all on fire.