health care TOWN HALL MEETING 'PROTESTERS' - THE UGLY TRUTH

Yesterday's melee at Kathy Castor's Ybor City health care forum has been cloned around the nation. The pattern dates back to antiquity.

 

Bookmark this blog for a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the health care industry Fascists' down-and-dirty tactics to create "public" opposition to "socialized" medicine (aka, astro-townhall meetings). Some of you may recognize the ghosts of the Broward County (FL) "stop the illegal recount" mob in 2000 (Republican operatives and Congressional staffers all) or, perhaps, the more recent patriotic "tea parties." For you history buffs, the countless "spontaneous" uprisings in Weimar in the late 20s and early 30s may prove more evocative - and closer to the truth.

 

`Who Runs Gov  BLOG The Plum Line – Greg Sargent  wapo  http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/

 

The overweening greed that is the driving force of our country is again unmasked for all to see. The health care industry is now spending upwards of 2-3 million dollars a day to kill a viable public option for health care. Three lobbyists (on average) now dog every House and Senate member. The campaign coffers of a majority of these lawmakers are crammed full of health care bucks. For the sordid details of what - 30-odd years on - the Supreme's "money = speech" nonsensical and counterintuitive decisions have wrought, dip into http://www.opensecrets.org/ . Under News, Tracking The Payback is especially illuminating (though slightly behind on the numbers).

 

The mentality that says "win at any cost" runs in a straight line through every psychopathic human venture you can name. At bottom, such myopic fixation is the ultimate destroyer; unhindered, and unhinged,  by any consideration for the human cost of its ends. Further, it is devoid of the usual barriers that constrain human behaviour: compassion, guilt, shame, etc. When this coda is enshrined in the law of the land - as it is in every American corporation's legal structure - then the law, not the right and wrong of it, is the only force proscribing antisocial behaviour. Unlike the immutability of principles, laws may be changed with the stroke of a pen.

 

While I am sure that any number of poorly-informed and easily misled "sheep" are attending the many "town hall"-type gatherings on the issue of health care reform this month, it is clear that a majority of these folks couldn't organize a soup sandwich, let alone bankroll same. Their mix of vaguely defined discontent, racism, xenophobia, jingoism, and all manner of imagined slights have been harnessed into battle on behalf of an industry which has lost all sense of moral bearing and whose sole raison d'etre is to protect its outrageous and disgusting profits; the people be damned.

 

Add to the sorry lot above (Dylan's "pawn(s) in their game") the industry's paid Orcs (operatives), hired to provide the spark to light the fire of the passionate, but misled; it takes very few, if they know what they're about. All in all, a toxic brew designed to: 1) provide the face of a viable "grassroots" opposition (pay no attention to the slew of polls showing upwards of 80% (Pew) of us wanting at least a partially government-run option) even as it; 2) attempts to disrupt and deny any and all who might speak in favor of a public option. The techniques employed by the industry and its ideo-assassins would make Goebbels and Himmler (not to mention Rove) beam with pride; filling the seats with true believers by side doors carefully scouted out in advance, timed outbursts at critical moments in an advocate's speech, ensuring that plenty of misleading signs are on hand to be eagerly clutched by the conned and deceived and, when all else fails, shouting down all those attempting to speak in a civilized or conversational manner, Hidden cameras have also revealed that these "Potemkin crowds'" moments of greatest animation occur with remarkable concurrence to the proximity of television cameras.

 

The unwitting dupes who do the industry's bidding are among those most in need of a public option, but you'll have to out-decibel them to get the message across, so righteous is their indignation that their "taxes" (irony [which requires self-examination] not being in their playbook, said indignation remains untempered by any of their own unemployment) are being "confiscated" to pay for the likes of some damned "illegal's" health care (raw racism, but they'll never see it).

Nigel Watson  freethinker  727.493.1990
freesense@Gmail.com

"We see things, not as they are, but as we are." - Anais Nin

"A great many people think they are thinking when all they are really doing is rearranging their prejudices." - Edward R. Murrow

Consciousness:  that annoying time between naps - Unknown