GLENN BECK ATTACKS CO-OP CITY

He's taken a step into a co-op project that, for all its faults, as every large complex has, continues to provide the American dream for ordinary working people – civil servants, social workers, cooks and clerks – who can afford to own their own homes in the rocket-high real-estate city they love. When Glenn Beck attacks Co-op City, he attacks every middle-class New York co-op – doing so from his $4.2 million gated estate in Connecticut. He attacks you. He attacks me. At long last, sir, have you no decency?

A Capital Idea

Built between 1968 and 1973 as Mitchell-Lama housing, which offered good ol' capitalist developers decades-long tax breaks for building affordable, below-market-rate housing for working-class people — developers who still made a pretty penny or they wouldn't have bothered to do it out of the kindness of their hearts — Co-op City rose as one of the largest residential complexes in the world, with 35 high-rises and 236 townhouses. Plus, comrade, it has eight parking garages, 15 houses of worship, 12 schools including a high school with a planetarium, several day care centers, four basketball courts, five baseball diamonds and an adjacent shopping center with a 13-screen movie theater, department stores and a supermarket, all on green, landscaped ground along the picturesque Hutchinson River.

"Do you want to live there? This is Co-op City. Oh man! This is so beautiful," Beck said sarcastically on the Tuesday, Jan. 25, edition of The Glenn Beck Show. "That's the Great Society for you," he added, making fun of 1960s efforts to help the rural and inner-city poor.

Confusing capitalism with socialism — not the easiest mistake to make, but he has his own definitions of the terms that no educated person shares — he compared Co-op City's panoply of stores, professional offices, and entertainment center to, um, Soviet housing. That's right. Soviet housing. His reasoning?  Because, Co-op City is "a place where everyone's life is interchangeable, [and everyone then has exactly the same stuff."

That statement does not even make sense. A police officer's life it different from a retail worker's. A musician's life is different from a subway conductor's. So what does even mean, "where everyone's life is interchangeable"?

"Exactly the Same Stuff" ... What?

As for "has exactly the same stuff" … again, that makes no sense. Some people buy from Ikea. Some people buy from thrift stores. Some people inherit furniture from their parents. Some people make some of their own furniture. Do many people at Co-op City own Xbox videogame consoles or flat-screen TVs? Yeah, they probably do … just like people in Connecticut. So what is this blather?

You want to know how horrible Co-op City – where Glenn Beck has evidently never once set foot – is? Ask the citizens. After all, Soviet-housing people, with multiple generations crowded into apartments they were given without choice, unlike here, certainly gave an earful to any Western press that would listen.

[Co-op City is] my piece

of the pie … I came from

poverty and worked my way up.

Here's what residents of The Bronx and Co-op City and even New York City's Republican mayor have to say:

"Mitchell-Lama gave me a chance to have a place to call my own," Leonard Murrell, 76, told the New York Daily News. "I was renting when I came to Co-op City, and now I own. It's my piece of the pie … I came from poverty and worked my way up," he said, echoing the by-the-bootstraps ethos that Beck doesn't imagine Co-op City residents have. Added Murrell, it was a cheap shot for multimillionaire Beck "to go on TV and hammer the program that gave me my shot."

"How dare he?" Councilman James Vacca (D-Bronx/Disrict 13) told the paper, "I'd like to know the last time Glenn Beck stepped into Co-op City. Glenn Beck sitting in judgment of the people of Co-op City is one of the most outrageous things I've ever heard."

"Vitriolic garbage," Co-op City resident Martin Prince, 55, told the News. "He pits one person against another and that's not what this country is about and it's not what I'm about. It's Beck who's un-American."

Next page: Even a super-capitalist finds Beck's claims odd >>