By Thom Hartmann
Today on its Twitter page, FreedomWorks - the astroturf group run by Dick Armey, the former Republican leader and former lobbyist for the People's Mujahadeen of Iran, the natural gas industry, Dubai Group, Comcast, military contractors and weapons manufacturers, and numerous other corporate interests - announced that it was officially partnering with Glen Beck.This is a brilliant business deal, which will create huge profits for both Freedomworks and Beck.
Beck has the Fox platform, which has turned out most of the people for tea party events, and Freedomworks now has the database of all the tea partiers that they can hand off to Beck, who will then expose them to his advertisers. Everybody wins and makes money - except for our nation, which gets kneecapped since Beck and Dick Armey are open advocates for the interests of millionaires and billionaires and openly hostile to working people, unions, social security, medicare, and want to turn the commons over to the tender mercies of transnational corporations. Their money comes from Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other devoted funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.
Their goal is to take down Democratic or progressive candidates and now they'll have more money and power and a larger media platform.
http://www.thomhartman.com/blog/2010/05/freedomworks-beck-everybody-wins-except-our-nation
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To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
~ Howard Zinn
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