Guess who wrote the following, someone on the left or the right:
These are not really "town meetings" at all, at least in the sense of the town meetings I grew up with, and started out covering as a young journalist in Connecticut--that is, meetings called and run democratically, with leaders elected from the floor, open to all residents of a community.
These "town meetings" are really nothing but propaganda sessions run by members of Congress who are trying to burnish their fraudulent credentials as public servants, and trying to perpetrate a huge fraud of a health care bill that purports to be a progressive "reform" of the US health care system, but that actually further entrenches the control of that system by the insurance industry, and to a lesser extent, the hospital and drug industry.
ObamaCare is to health reform what bank bailouts are to financial system reform, which is to say it is the opposite of what its name implies...Americans are about to be royally screwed on health care reform by the president and the Democratic Congress, just as they've been screwed by them on financial system "reform."
The appropriate response to this screw-job is the one the right has adopted: shut these sham "town meetings" down, and run the sell-out politicians out of town on a rail, preferably coated in tar and feathers they way the snake-oil salesmen of old used to be handled!
This is not about civil discourse. This is about propaganda. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congressional leadership have sold out health care reform for the tainted coin of the medical-industrial industry, and are holding, or trying to hold, these meetings around the country to promote legislation that has essentially been written for them by that industry--legislation that will force everyone to pay for insurance as offered, and priced, by the private insurance industry. What a deal for those companies--a captive market of 300 million people! There will be little or no effort to control prices, and the higher costs will be financed through higher taxes..
This isn't "reform." It's corruption, pure and simple...The only proper response at this point is obstruction, and the more militant and boisterous that obstruction, the better...
The only proper approach to the wretched health care legislation currently working its way through Congress at this point is to kill it and start over. At these "town meeting" staged events, Obama and the Democrats need to hear, in no uncertain terms, that we don't want no stinkin' ObamaCare.
If you guessed someone on the right, you'd be wrong.
The above was written by a prominent liberal writer, Dave Lindorff.
Lindorff is right: the "townhall meetings" are actually staged events to begin with (and see this).
And the Huffington Post confirms that the White House is including big giveaways to the healthcare industry as part of its plan.
And the New York Times says that Obama assured drug companies that his plan won't significantly reduce drug costs.
Indeed, leading investigative reporter Greg Palast - who studied healthcare economics at the Center for Hospital Administration Studies at the University of Chicago - says that Obama got next to nothing in return for his concessions to the healthcare lobby.Specifically , he says that the "$80 billion in healthcare savings" claim touted by Obama is not very impressive:
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