Since Fox News kicked Glenn Beck to the curb a few months ago, the largely forgotten radio blowhard has tried to shore up his radio listenership with a steady stream of authoritarian rhetoric. Increasingly, he is spending more and more time smearing the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as a “shameless display of moral depravity.”

As Beck plays defense for billionaires and big banks, he conceals quite a bit to his listeners. Beck in fact works hand in hand with the same corporate lobbyists and plutocrats responsible for corrupting our political system:

– Glenn Beck Secretly Met With Koch Brothers And Right-Wing Corporate Executives In An Election Planning Event In 2010: In June 2010, Glenn Beck was the guest of honor at a major fundraising retreat convened by the billionaires Charles and David Koch. The meeting, which included hedge fund managers Cliff Asness, Steve Schwarzman, and Ken Griffin, as well as executives from Bank of America, JLM Investment, Allied Capital Corp, Amway, Bechtel, and other leading firms. The twice annual secret Koch gatherings discuss efforts to finance Tea Party front groups, like Americans for Prosperity. At the last such gathering, partipants discussed how Americans for Prosperity has been “designed” to elect Republican candidates.

– Glenn Beck Officially Partners With FreedomWorks, A Group Run By Lobbyist Dick Armey: In May 2010, Beck announced an official partnership with the lobbyist-run group FreedomWorks. Beck would help recruit for the organization, and in exchange the organization sponsored his show. In touting the priorities of FreedomWorks, Beck never disclosed that the group has a long history of generating fake support for Wall Street privatization schemes. Over the years, FreedomWorks has promoted the interests of the same Wall Street firms paying Armey as a lobbyist. As ThinkProgress has documented, FreedomWorks takes money from corporations and pushes policies that directly benefit their big business donors.

– Glenn Beck Partners With The Lobbying Association For AIG, JP Morgan, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Dow Chemical: Beck has quietly developed a relationship with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest big business lobby in the world that counts top firms like Goldman Sachs and Chevron as members. The Chamber pushed for the bank bailouts, demanded corporate tax cuts, successfully stopped Congress from acting on climate change, said taxpayers should pay for BP’s oil spill, and nearly killed both financial reform and health reform. Nevertheless, Beck has appeared as a speaker for Chamber fundraisers, welcomed Chamber lobbyists on his show, and pledged support for the Chamber’s crony capitalist agenda.

Beck, who owns a $27 million media company, a fancy Manhattan apartment with his own face adorning the walls, and his own personalized Mercedes Benz, still cultivates an image of being a regular American guy. That’s why, unlike Rush Limbaugh, who is proud of his association with so-called country club Republicans, Beck never discloses or fully explains his relationship with lobbyists and people like the Koch brothers.

Beck’s smears against the 99 Percent Movement benefit the 1 Percent: rich media pundits like himself and his billionaire backers.

Erickson wants Americans to protest against the poor, not the rich.

The tumblr features various people explaining their economic circumstances and often boasting of being self-made and not needing help from anyone. The flippant disclaimer for the tumblr explains that the 53 percent number was chosen because the site’s originators believe that this is the percentage of Americans that pay taxes:

So, like, when you’re, like, community organizing for solidarity and stuff, it’s totally cool to have this little hashtaggy thingy when you’re on twitter, so other people, like, totally know what you’re talking about and stuff. So if you’re, like, totally gonna spread the word about being one of the 53% of people who actually, like, pay taxes in America and don’t just, like, hang out protesting stuff all day… like, here’s the hashtaggy thingy. See you at the protest! #iamthe53

But the founding principles of the tumblr and the “53 percent” meme itself is flawed. It is true that 47 percent of Americans did not pay net federal income taxes in 2009 — the number is unusually high because of the depression in incomes following the recession — but it is completely false that only 53 percent of Americans pay taxes.

For example, if you look at state and local taxes, the working poor actually pay a higher percentage of their income in these taxes in every state except for Vermont. In “Alabama, for example, low-income families (which make less than $13,000) pay 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those making more than $229,000 pay just 4 percent.”

And it is worth noting that Americans who are too poor to be asked to pay net federal income taxes are not a good target for those complaining that some aren’t paying their fair share. If there’s one group of Americans that is paying less and less as the median American family is asked to pay more, it’s the super-wealthy. As this chart from Wealth for the Common Good shows, the top 400 taxpayers — who have more wealth than half of all Americans combined — are paying lower taxes than they have in a generation, as their tax responsibilities have slowly collapsed since the New Deal era as working families have been asked to pay more and more:

Rather than taking aim at some of the poorest members of our society — 62 percent of whom have incomes under $20,000 — Americans should be asking how we can get the super-wealthy to pay tax rates closer to their modern historical average and how we can lift up the incomes of those who are too impoverished to be asked to pay federal income taxes.