Inside Story on Town Hall Riots: Right-Wing Shock Troops Do Corporate America's Dirty Work

[one...two...tree 2,762]

How the health-care industry, the GOP and one media mogul made common cause with the anti-government fringe.

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet.

The recent spate of town hall dustups may look like an overnight sensation, but they've been years, even decades, in the making.

Since the days in the late 1970s, when the New Right began its takeover of the Republican Party, it has cultivated a militia of white people armed with a grudge against those who brought forth the social changes of the '60s.

These malcontents have been promised their day of retribution, a day for which they are more than ready. Few seem to understand that they are merely dupes for a corporate agenda that will only worsen the conditions in which they live.

Why, you may ask, would men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists?

Because somebody's got to do the dirty work. Magnates don't like to soil their French cuffs, and it's hard for a bunch of rich guys to garner sympathy for threats to their bottom lines. It's the classic inside-outside game that the right wing of the GOP has played for the last two decades.

The Health-Care Industry Executive

Imagine you're an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Your U.S. operations are your cash cow; they earn you wild net profits because, unlike in other industrialized nations, you do not experience the price controls of a government-administered program in which the government negotiates for the best price on prescription drugs and devices.

Along comes a government plan for health-insurance reform that includes a public, government-financed plan. The public option, they call it. As part of the plan, you will be required to negotiate with the government for the price of medications and devices to be distributed within the plan.

Now that could really screw up your massive profit margins. Private plans might then insist on prices more like those the government is getting.

Instead of increasing your profit by double digits in the worst year the economy has seen since the Great Depression, as did an outfit called The Medicines Co., your shareholders may have to settle for profits more in line with the overall growth of the economy. And wouldn't that just stink?

Meanwhile, polls show a clear majority of Americans -- you know, regular Americans, the kind who don't want to own an AK-47, or who do accept the president's citizenship status -- favor the public option. In fact, in June, CBS News found that majority to be 72 percent.

So, whaddaya do? Well, if your lobbying firm counts former Rep. ####### Armey, R-Texas, as its senior policy adviser, you don't have do much. ####### will take care of the rest through FreedomWorks, the ostensibly grassroots, nonprofit organization of anti-taxers, cold warriors and affirmative-action opponents, which he chairs.

Need to make it look like regular Americans oppose the health-insurance reform bills now being considered by Congress? Make sure a handful of those angry white people turn up at the town hall meetings now being conducted by members of Congress throughout the country. Make sure they disrupt the meeting and rattle the congressperson.

Capture it all on amateur video and put it up on a faux, amateur-looking Web site, and try to kid the media into thinking there's a widespread rebellion happening. After all, the media are gonna want that dramatic footage.

The Republican Member of Congress

Now, suppose you're a Republican member of Congress. Your party got totally throttled in the 2008 election, and if you don't derail this health care thing, it's going to be a big win for your Democratic opponents, as millions of underinsured and uninsured Americans finally have some health care coverage -- one bright spot in a largely dismal economy.

Meanwhile, you get a lot of your campaign cash from health-care-related industries and from the Wall Street bankers and brokers who want to keep those profits soaring.

A public option is going to stink for you, too. So, while Armey's army of taxphobes is useful to you, it would be great to get some really hard-core types to further stoke the fires -- especially if marshaled by guys who know how to really tar Democrats with racist imagery and slurs of unpatriotic behavior.

That's where Grassfire.org and its brother networking site, ResistNet, come in. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who promised to make health-care reform President Obama's "Waterloo," is a big fan. Says so right there on the Grassfire Web site. ResistNet is yet another right-wing hub for organizing the disruption of health-care town hall meetings.

The Media Mogul

Okay, now put on the hat of a media mogul, one who rails against the minimal restrictions the U.S. has on multi-outlet ownership, and one for whom the bottom line is everything. In fact, you actually own the Wall Street Journal.

If you can nip this health care thing in the bud, you could stand in the way of a president who wants to rein in Wall Street's worse excesses and who may depress the profit margins of health-care companies in which your readers invest with his dastardly public option. What's a mogul to do?

Why not hire a guy known for riling the discontented to host a show on your cable news channel, and empower him as an organizer? Let him create a little project pegged to fear and nationalism -- something, say, like 9/11 -- through which he mobilizes bands of those aggrieved by the fact of a black president to disrupt town hall meetings.

That's exactly what Rupert Murdoch did when he hired Glenn Beck to host a Fox News Channel show and to put together a little organizing site called The 9-12 Project.

Although Beck's stated goal is to bring America back to where it was on Sept. 12, 2001 -- a nation pulled together in the wake of the terrorist attacks the day before -- he draws together only those who embrace the goals of the right.

But his project site is shaped like a social-networking tool, and activists in Florida credit the Tampa 9-12 chapter as turning them out to a town hall they helped turn into a ruckus.

Put these three scenarios together, and you have the phenomenon that has become the summer of the town-hall scuff, a heated season of right-wing disruptions of civic fora.

Add to that an oppressed-white-people narrative that has its roots in the origins of what used to be called the New Right, and you have a confluence of interests ready to elevate to prime-time status a disgruntled and paranoid minority with a penchant for misplaced blame.

FreedomWorks and the K Street Lobbyist

In Washington's K Street corridor, ####### Armey is a very important man -- so important, in fact, that he was scooped up, upon his retirement from Congress, by the lobbying firm DLA Piper.

It's been widely reported that Piper lobbies on behalf of health-care industry interests, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, but its top health-care-industry client, according to OpenSecrets.org, is The Medicines Co., a small, below-the-radar firm that has paid Armey's lobbying firm nearly $2.4 million since the beginning of 2008 -- nearly 15 percent of DLA Piper's overall lobbying income for the period.

I called The Medicines Co., requesting an interview with someone on staff who could spell out the company's position on the pending health care bills, and I got back a rather empty, generic statement via e-mail from the company's public relations firm, FD:

The Medicines Co., a small biotech company, was founded on and continues to follow our mission of saving lives, improving patient outcomes and reducing health care costs. Any suggestion that the Medicines Co. has opposed or retained anyone to oppose the pending health care reform bills is entirely mistaken.

I sent an e-mail back, asking for the company's position on the health-care bills what it spent $2.4 million to lobby for, and received no response by press time.

The Medicines Co. operates so below the radar that it is not even listed as a member on the Web site of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturer's Association (PhRMA), which opposes the House bill because it empowers a non-elected panel of experts to oversee cost-containment in public programs.

PhRMA also claims the House plan will raise premiums on senior citizens enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug plan, a plan, as currently construed, largely seen as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies.

Last year, The Medicines Co. saw net earnings on its major product, the anti-coagulant Angiomax, increase 17 percent over the course of a single year.

Because of The Medicines Co.'s tight lips, we may never know whether it feels it's getting its $2.4 million worth out of Piper, or its senior policy analyst, Armey, in his effort to derail health care through the FreedomWorks astroturf site.

Go to the site, and you'll find a Health Care Action Kit (PDF), complete with talking points and Armey's "ObamaCare translator" of key terms in the health care discussion, laced with Armey's own witticisms. There's even a mock "ObamaCare insurance card" (PDF) you can print out and pass around at town halls. It promises, among other things on a bulletted list, "Rationed health care" and "Anxiety, pain, risk of death."

At the risk of mixing messages (a big public-relations no-no), Armey also advises health-care protesters to raise their opposition to the energy-reform provision called "cap and trade" in the health-care town halls.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/politics/141860/in...27s_dirty_work/

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

That's too long.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

That's too long.

It's a great read though and reads well.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Or I could just make a snarky (and meaningless) comment about alertnet and the kind of people who read it and move on.

[Ban Hammer 14,668]

That's too long.

first time steven ever heard that.

[natty bumppo 297]

That's too long.

first time steven ever heard that.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

That's too long.

first time steven ever heard that.

I won't ask how you seem to have such intimate knowledge of Steven

What happens in Kansas, stays in Kansas.

That's too long.

first time steven ever heard that.

[Ban Hammer 14,668]

That's too long.

first time steven ever heard that.

I won't ask how you seem to have such intimate knowledge of Steven

What happens in Kansas, stays in Kansas.

why do you hate kansas?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

lol. Yes, this thread is all about me.

[alienlovechild 75]

Imagine you're an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Your U.S. operations are your cash cow; they earn you wild net profits because, unlike in other industrialized nations, you do not experience the price controls of a government-administered program in which the government negotiates for the best price on prescription drugs and devices.

Imagine that same exec is running pro-Obamacare commercials right now so this article is garbage on this point alone.

The idea everyone against Obama's plan is scripted is more than silly. There are plenty of organizations pushing for the health care plan but I wouldn't say everyone for the plan is a phony as well.

[Heracles 417]

This retarded looking guy clearly knows a lot about health care.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

This thread is retarded.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

This thread is retarded.

So much for contributing any real discourse to the topic.

[mendeleev 69]

Too bad folks can't take a few minutes to read. It is a good article that did take me all of 3 minutes to read. The attention span of most American's has gotten shorter than that, I realize.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Too bad folks can't take a few minutes to read. It is a good article that did take me all of 3 minutes to read. The attention span of most American's has gotten shorter than that, I realize.

It's an easy read.