Progressives Should be Shutting Down These So-Called 'Town Meetings' Too!

By Dave Lindorff

Many progressives are getting all bent out of shape over the "brown
shirt" rabble organized by health industry PR firms to disrupt the
so-called "town meetings" being organized all over the country by
Democratic members of Congress.

What they are conveniently forgetting is that 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.

The right-wing nuts who cry that ObamaCare is introducing euthanasia
for the elderly and infirm, or that it is socialism, are ignorant
wackos, to be sure, but they are right about one thing: 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, and
through cuts in Medicare benefits.

This isn't "reform." It's corruption, pure and simple.

Any mention of a system that works--single payer--the system we
already have in the form of Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and
the system that has proved successful for almost four decades in
Canada-- has been systematically blocked and censored out of the
discussion. Every effort has been made to bury an excellent bill, HR
676, offered up by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), which would cover every
American by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

The only proper response at this point is obstruction, and the more militant and boisterous that obstruction, the better.

Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events,
progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of
calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing
them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own
both Democrats and Republicans alike.

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. We want Medicare for all.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992), and more recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net