Now if this can form into anything like a cohesive movement, I’ll be a very very happy man. It’s no surprise that there’s some progressive rage to match. Personally, my progressive rage manifests because I see the success that the teabaggers are having derailing politics and turning it into an angry, frothing shouting match where the loudest (but most uneducated and ignorant) wind up winning because no one takes them seriously. I was worried about that trend when these folks started burning effigies of politicians and other people outside of their offices, and when I see cameras trolling their crowds for opinions and coming away with blatantly false, ignorant, racist, hate-filled rhetoric.

Remember, these are the forces that are sending these people to the polls – racism, hatred, ignorance. When I use my metaphor of shining a light on the cockroaches in order to make them scurry, I mean it – that’s the only way to deal with groups and people like this – expose them for what they are. And sometimes, if that means you have to meet them with some of their own guerilla, crowd-sourcing tactics, that’s what you have to do. And I’m not alone in that perspective:

n the heels of the lightly attended over-hyped “Tea Party Convention” in Nashville, progressives are preparing to respond with a movement of their own. The “Brownbaggers” will be showing up in front of Congressional offices to demand “healthcare not warfare.”

According to a press release from AfterDowningStreet.org: “On February 17th, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) will be joined by CODEPINK, AfterDowningStreet, Democrats.com, the California Nurses Assn./National Nurses United, and United for Peace and Justice in holding brownbag vigils outside (or inside) at least 36 Congress members’ offices.

Brownbaggers are demanding commitments to vote against more money for war. Slogans on their posters include: “Healthcare NOT Warfare,” “Corporations out of Politics,” “Bailout Main Street not Wall Street” and “Brownbaggers not Teabaggers.”

PDA Executive Director Tim Carpenter said, “We have to choose between jobs and wars. The American people are on one side, but our so-called representatives in Congress are on the other. The Supreme Court is busy increasing corporate control of our elected officials. We need to be busy enforcing the people’s control before it is too late.”

Amen, brother.

[ Teabaggers Meet the Brownbaggers ]
Source: Reader Supported News

I’ve mentioned before that Glenn Beck is a dangerous man (I’ve been talking about him since he got his CNN post, the one that he thankfully no longer has), and not for the reasons that you might think – not because he’s factually incorrect and manages to spew forth the kind of fecal works of fiction that are dangerous to anyone who might happen to be paying attention (seriously, the IQ of people must go down when listening to his ranting, hyperbolistic, hysterial monologues, like the crazy guy in the street who starts shouting and everyone just looks at quietly hoping he’ll just go away) but because he’s funded and heeled by a political organization that’s posing as a media outlet and news organization.

Most recent on the ridiculous list? Glenn Beck’s pompous, self-important “documentary:”

When Glenn Beck aired an hour-long documentary titled “Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die” last Friday, it marked a major turning point in the annals of television.

The film, narrated by Beck himself, purported to reveal “really disturbing and shocking stuff,” specifically the “dirty little secret” that progressive political beliefs led inexorably to “some of the most horrifying outcomes in history.” With help from interview subjects like Jonah Goldberg, author of the book Liberal Fascism, Beck linked the progressive political movement to such nightmares as China’s Cultural Revolution and Hitler’s gas chambers. Beck alternated images of the emaciated, tortured bodies of the victims he blamed on progressivism with archival footage of Goebbels, Stalin and Mao.

Behold, America, the future of conservative media.

There was a time when such stunningly irresponsible and historically dubious assertions were the province of isolated individuals holding homemade signs at rallies — but no longer. “The Revolutionary Holocaust” was watched by nearly four million Americans. And it was broadcast by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, News Corporation, which made no effort to disassociate itself from the program’s content.

You hear that? Normally that last bit is where the media company says something like “the opinions expressed here are solely those of XXXXX person and not representative of YYYYY company or its partners,” etc, etc. News Corp decided “you know what? that’s not necessary – they’re pretty much our opinions too.”

This is where the FCC needs to step in. There are regulations for this type of media abuse, and they need to be levvied against News Corp. For a group of people who like to whinge and whine so much about Nazi-ism and rewrite history so their own ills and sins are washed away and anyone they disagree with is somehow painted as “the bad guy,” they have no idea how quickly they walk down the same path as those they’re claiming to protect the American people against.

“Even if you think I’m wildly irresponsible,” Beck said a few weeks ago, “you have to know that News Corp. is not stupid. It’s a company worth billions of dollars. Do you really think this corporation would risk everything on an irresponsible crazy guy?”

Oh yes. Yes they would. Without hesitation, and that’s why they pay you so much, Beck.

[ Glenn Beck Assails Obama and Progressives with Holocaust Imagery ]
Source: AlterNet

This post hit home for me pretty strongly, namely because I’ve seen a number of people who were so energized during the Obama campaign sit back and throw up their hands and claim that he’s “just like the last guy” or “so much for that change we were promised” or “none of it matters anymore.” They forget that the people are the power behind progressive change, and without those people the change only comes at the will and the pace as the people in office allow it to – which isn’t very fast at all. Additionally, when candidate Obama became President Obama, his need for the people who got him to where he is now increased, not decreased. Electing someone as President isn’t a fire-and-forget activity – you need to keep pressing that person and their aligned lawmakers to make the changes you elected them to make reality at the pace you think is realistic.

Too many people, especially young people and tech savvy people, who are used to quick results and instant gratification expected the sun to rise on January 20th and the world to be a million times better and all of the bad stuff that happened over the past 8 years to magically vanish…all without their help or without them lifting a finger outside of the one they used in the ballot box. That’s simply unrealistic, and the lure of armchair politicking is one to be resisted.

Mark Rudd, writing for CounterPunch, has some choice words for those people, and this fatalistic attitude among Americans these days:

Since the summer of 2003, I’ve crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009). In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make a difference.”

The words still sound strange: it’s a phrase I never once heard forty years ago, a sentiment obviously false on its surface. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I – and the rest of the country – knew about the civil rights movement in the South, and what was most evident was that individuals, joining with others, actually were making a difference. The labor movement of the Thirties to the Sixties had improved the lives of millions; the anti-war movement had brought down a sitting president – LBJ, March 1968 – and was actively engaged in stopping the Vietnam War. In the forty years since, the women’s movement, gay rights, disability rights, animal rights, and environmental movements have all registered enormous social and political gains. To old new lefties, such as myself, this is all self-evident.

…

Something’s missing. I first got an insight into articulating what it is when I picked up Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin and Kenyon Farrow (Nation Books, 2005). Andy Cornell, in a letter to the movement that first radicalized him, “Dear Punk Rock Activism,” criticizes the conflation of the terms “activism” and“organizing.” He writes, “activists are individuals who dedicate their time and energy to various efforts they hope will contribute to social, political, or economic change. Organizers are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis and confidence within the context of organizations. Organizing is a process – creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics.” In other words, it’s not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they’ve got to move toward “organizing masses of people.”

Aha! Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building.

Until recently, I’d rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.” The common term for years has been “activists.” Organizing was reduced to the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration. But forty years ago, we only used the word “activist” to mock our enemies’ view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us “mindless activists.” We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy and tactics (and, later, contributing to our downfall ideology).

This is a very important distinction. Anyone can be an activist – hell, I consider myself an activist, but I hardly assume the mantle of organizer. I’m not hitting the streets and pounding pavement and handing out flyers and speaking truth to power outside of the people in my sphere of influence and writing a blog like this. I like to think my words carry, but not nearly as much as those who are actually flying the flag of various causes and organizations, working in call centers soliciting donations, writing impassioned emails to followers, amd delivering petitions to lawmakers to make sure the voices of the activists behind them are heard. Those organizers, “community organizers,” if you will, are at the heart of any progressive movement, and they’re the ones who desperately need our help.

Too many people, young and old, assume that change is spontaneous and happens overnight – that one day they’ll wake up and get a news alert that something radical has changed, and if it doesn’t they get depressed. They forget that behind every dream, every speech, and every major shift in policy or view, is a team of people who worked feverishly to bring that change about. When more of those armchair politicians (myself included) get involved with those movements and become organizers and not just activists, then we’ll see the pace on those changes we want to see pick up.

[ Beyond Magical Thinking: How to Really Make Change Happen ]
Source: Counterpunch (courtesy of AlterNet)

Bashing the Republicans and the right-wing (even the center-right) for their blindness to privilege and racial injustice is low-hanging fruit for me, but every now and again there’s more good data to share on the matter. For example, a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that during the Bush years, everything we’ve said about civil rights is absolutely true. The Bush Administration went out of its way to dilute the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and placed political appointees in places where they could obstruct the actions of career lawyers and officials who would want to take on civil rights abuses that were reported to their office.

George W. Bush was never particularly taken with the civil-rights crowd. Not that he was exactly hostile to the notion of protecting society’s most vulnerable groups. But he and his minions assumed that the time for coddling minorities had passed. So after sizing up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice—the most powerful advocate for civil rights within the federal government—Bush’s operatives endeavored “to rip the heart out of [it],” in the words of Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

In dry statistics and even drier prose, a report released last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) spells out how sweeping that effort became. The Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division veered away from challenging “at-large election systems” that marginalized African-Americans and focused on language discrimination against Spanish speakers. The Employment Litigation Section moved away from so-called pattern or practice cases (suits that took on widespread or systematic discrimination) in favor of individual complaints. (“Plenty of individual lawyers can bring these individual discrimination cases,” pointed out Alan Jenkins, executive director of The Opportunity Agenda, a New York–based nonprofit; but only the Justice Department can pursue certain big cases that can make a real difference.) Bush’s Justice Department was also particularly sensitive to discrimination against white males. In 2007 the division filed a suit against Indianapolis for favoring African-Americans and females over white males for promotion to police sergeant.

For Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the breadth of the changes crystallized during a meeting with Ralph Boyd Jr., an assistant attorney general for civil rights under Bush. A case filed by several women against the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) was then working its way through the courts. SEPTA had instituted new physical-fitness standards for aspiring transit police. Many women had a hard time meeting the new standards, which required all new applicants to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes or less. After being rejected by SEPTA for failure to pass muster, the women sued. The Justice Department signed on to that suit under President Clinton. Under Bush, it withdrew. Henderson tried to convince Boyd of the necessity of taking a stand against what he considered a clear case of discrimination against women. Boyd, as he recalls, responded with a lecture on how the women should exercise and get in better shape. He reduced “this case of discrimination to one of personal failings,” observed Henderson.

What really entertains me here is that not only was the Civil Rights Division hostile to minorities, they were also hostile to women. And not only were they hostile to minorities and women, they are particularly sensitive to the group that benefits the most from privilege and the old boy’s network, but seems to always feel threatened when confronted with their own prejudices and privilege. It’s absolutely stunning how scared even some so-called libertarian and centrist white males will get when they have to come to terms with their own privilege, and most of those same men will then deny that privilege exists and sputter into the tailspin of claiming that, like Bush and his minions did, the time for “coddling” minorities and women has passed and that all of this racism doesn’t really exist and is a figment of the imaginations of minorities. It’s a pretty quick jump for those particular white males, but it’s always an amusing one to watch them take.

Beyond this though, the GAO report is pretty damning, and while I’m sure things are getting better at the Justice Department and a breath of fresh air is headed through the department, it’s important to remember that it’s things like this that are relieved by having someone like President Obama in office. So while we may disagree with him or wish he were pressing harder on progressive issues, it’s important we don’t lose sight of the so-called smaller issues and positions that the Administration takes that keep our agencies of social justice in line with American values.

[ The GOP’s Civil-Rights Problem ]
Source: Newsweek

This one comes from the “we had to know this already” files, but just in case you didn’t know it was as bad as it is. Max Blumenthal was recently on NPR’s Fresh Air to discuss his book, called Republican Gomorrah, where he lays out the history of how the conservative right got to a position where even fiscal conservatives and people who expect good governance from their politicians can’t respect their side of the debate anymore:

Well, I would simply say that the Republican Party, over the last 20 years, has been subsumed by extreme elements, mainly by the Christian right, and the Republican Party at the same time has been the most dominant party for the last 30 years. So naturally, you know, the extreme rhetoric of the right-wing fringe is going to become mainstream if the major opposition party to the Democrats, who now control Congress and the White House, are echoing it, and Fox News is providing a megaphone for it.

So this is no surprise at all. What also needs to be noted is that many of the radio shows that are projecting this information and broadcasting it – these conspiracy theories about concentration camps for right-wing dissidents, about mass gun seizures, about death panels – are some of the most popular radio shows in the country. James Dobson of Focus on the Family is one of the top five radio hosts in the country. So is Michael Savage, who accused Obama of trying to indoctrinate an Obama youth corps with his speech encouraging public school students to study hard and stay in school – the same with Sean Hannity.

So all of the people who are introducing these conspiratorial theories about Barack Obama, suggesting that he’s either Hitler or Stalin or both, command enormous audiences and are therefore taken seriously by the mainstream media, which attempts, you know, this veneer of balance, of entertaining both sides.

But when one side is completely hysterical, conspiratorial and is leveling baseless attacks, should it be taken seriously? And what are the consequences of taking those attacks seriously in a democracy? I think those are questions that need to be raised. … Now, you went to a couple of gun shows in Reno, Nevada, and in Antioch, California, and you write that you came away with a portrait of a heavily armed, tightly organized movement incited by right-wing radio to a fever-pitched resentment of Obama and his allies in Congress.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a report saying that the militia movement, which had strengthened during the Clinton years, organizing against the powers of the federal government, faded out early in this decade with Republicans in power, but it’s on the rise again. The militia movement is on the rise again. Did you see evidence of that at the gun shows that you attended?

Blumenthal: Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a perception, especially within the media, that Barack Obama could avoid inciting the kind of opposition that President Clinton did by implementing a moderate to liberal agenda. And what I was able to witness at these gun shows earlier in the year, before the battle was brewing over health care and the government bailout, was an incipient extreme opposition to Barack Obama building within the Republican grassroots and on the far right.

And it stemmed from conspiracy theories spread by radio hosts who are not very well-known in the mainstream but are extremely popular, like Alex Jones, that President Obama had a plan to put right-wing dissidents in concentration camps under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. And when I spoke to people at gun shows, this conspiracy theory was really popular, the same with, you know, Obama’s supposed plan for mass gun seizures.

And so, people were buying as many guns as they could, including high-powered weaponry, like 50-caliber, semiautomatic rifles, which have been shown to be able to down aircraft, you know, sniper rifles that can be easily disassembled and put into a briefcase that’s concealable. I showed this in a video I did called “Gun Show Nation.”

And the crowd you see at gun shows, I mean, some people are just basic, apolitical gun enthusiasts, but it’s a very political gathering. There are Confederate flags. There are even Nazi flags being displayed throughout the conference because it brings in elements that are even considered extreme within the right-wing grassroots, like neo-Nazis.

And it’s a gathering place. Gun shows have become a gathering place for people who are the most extreme opponents of Barack Obama’s agenda, and they’re energized again by the battle over health care. And we’re seeing it across the board; it’s not just with the extreme, militia-oriented elements. We’re seeing it within the Christian right.

A recent poll showed that seven out of 10 white evangelicals are extremely opposed to Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reforms. And the Christian right is raising a lot of money, organizing against health care. So it’s across the board. The right is growing again. And those who pronounced the death of conservatism, or the death of the Christian right, were premature.

Gross: You know, you say at these gun shows, you know, in addition to there being conspiracy theories that Obama will put people who oppose him in concentration camps, which would be another Hitler comparison; there’s also a lot of people who are convinced that Obama plans to usher in a Marxist dictatorship.

Blumenthal: There are, and there are also a lot of people, possibly the majority of people I spoke to, who didn’t really seem to know the difference between fascism and communism. The goal is to paint Obama as a totalitarian, a secret communist, fascist, terrorist, Muslim, whatever they can do, a basic pastiche of right-wing hobgoblins, a multicolored pinata of every evildoer they want to smash in order to de-legitimize him and mobilize as much opposition as possible.

And as I discuss in my book, this began during the rallies after Sarah Palin was nominated as vice president. It began when Sarah Palin said — I’m slightly paraphrasing — that Barack Obama is not one of us. His America is not our America, and he’s palling around with terrorists.

And at that point, you began to hear cries from the crowd that Barack Obama is a traitor, that he is treasonous and so on. And the campaign didn’t end with Barack Obama’s inauguration. Those rallies didn’t end. They’ve extended into the health-care debate, into the debate over the government bailout and into every element of Barack Obama’s agenda. And the more time that goes on, the more extreme the rhetoric becomes and the more diffuse the opposition to Barack Obama becomes.

That, my friends, is epically frightening. And all the more reason why we each need to make sure we stand for what we believe in, before this fringe takes it away from us. It’s been said that historically it’s easier to organize an opposition against something than in support of something, but if there’s a time to prove that old adage wrong, it’s now.

Read the whole interview below.

[ Republican Gomorrah: The Shattered GOP, Taken Over by Authoritarian Radicals, Is Incapable of Compromise ]
Source: AlterNet

Listen to the interview and read a passage from Republican Gomorroah below:

[ A 'Shattered' Republican Party? ]
Source: Fresh Air, from WHYY – National Public Radio

My friends in California could very easily save themselves with a single sentence in their state constitution. California has walked a long long road that’s finally ended where people have been warning it would for years: in fiscal chaos. And frankly, it’s not particularly the fault of any one political party: California’s Democrats and Republicans have a long history of being obstinate, unworkable, and in the end doing things that simply aren’t sustainable while crying about how they need to change their behaviors.

But when you look at where we are now in California and ask yourself how we got here, part of the problem is that there’s simply too much red tape for the legislature to go through in order to approve funding or fundraising for any of their projects. Add to this the fact that the state is all about sending every public project or initiative to referendum (direct Democracy as opposed to representative democracy) and you have a situation ripe for issues.

One way to fix some of those problems? Don’t let the government keep passing and the referendums keep approving public spending plans and projects for which the legislature can’t raise funding. George Lakoff, writing for TruthOut, has a solution:

California is in deep trouble because it has a dysfunctional system of government. Much of the problem can be change by one sentence.

I have sent to the attorney general a ballot proposition for the 2010 ballot called The California Democracy Act, the content of which is the following: All legislative action on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.

It would change two words in the Constitution, turning “two-thirds” to “majority” in two places. It is simple, understandable and it is about democracy.

Craziness! Madness! Insanity!

Wait – this is exactly what a number of observers, Lakoff included, have realized needed to happen for years. Now the time is right for it because without it, the state will remain in financial ruin far longer than it needs to.

Minority rule is closing California. State parks: closed. Schools: closed. Fire departments: closed. Nursing homes: closed. Medical clinics: closed. Libraries: closed.

We do not have to stand for it.

The majority of voters choose the majority of legislators. That’s simple democracy. When the majority of legislators rule, the majority of voters rule.

Can this work? It can, with strong support. What is needed is a serious campaign making the case for democracy, and allowing the voters to see that minority rule is the root of the problem.

Since the minority is a strongly conservative Republican minority, progressive Democrats running for the legislature in 2010 can run on a prodemocracy platform, placing the blame for gridlock where it belongs, on their opponents.

[ Ending Minority Rule in California: One Sentence Can Do It ]
Source: TruthOut

No matter than moments after a pair of ACORN staffers who were later revealed to be part of the set up fell for a set up involving a pair of conservative operatives who had been going from ACORN office to ACORN office looking for someone gullible enough to fall for their ploy, congressional Republicans have launched an all out assault, designed to please their base and earn points with their friends in conservative talk radio and televison – they want to revoke any and all funding from ACORN that may be provided by the federal government.

Now there’s no excusing what happened there unless the staffers were in on the deal, which has been implied here – that the staffers were part of a setup of their employers – but as media outlets have descended on ACORN to talk about the issue, they’re missing several crucial pieces of the puzzle. Not the least of which is one I already wrote about already; Why Are African-Americans So Frequently the Subject of Glenn Beck’s Ridicule?, but one of the bigger missing pieces some people have called out is the fact that Karl Rove himself led a massive five year campaign to smear and defame ACORN because they were simply effective at what they do: advocating for the poor, minorities, and the underprivileged, and then getting them to vote for policies and politicians that were looking out for their best interest.

In recent days, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the “troubled” history of the poor people’s advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

Dropped down the memory hole is the fact that ACORN was at the center of the so-called “prosecutor-gate” scandal, when the Bush administration pressured US attorneys to bring indictments over the grassroots group’s voter-registration drives, then fired some prosecutors who resisted what they viewed as a partisan strategy not supported by solid evidence.

The latest furor over ACORN was touched off by conservative filmmaker James E. O’Keefe III and a right-wing columnist who posed as a couple planning to buy a house for use as a brothel and getting advice from a few ACORN employees, rather than being turned away.

The pair filmed their meetings at ACORN offices with a hidden camera, producing a video that brought to a fever pitch the long-simmering Republican war against ACORN. The video was trumpeted by Fox News and other right-wing news outlets, starting a stampede in the mainstream press and in Congress, where a majority of panicked Democrats joined the herd in approving legislation to strip ACORN of federal funds.

Remember that? When Bush’s Justice Department made a habit of firing people who didn’t share the Predsident and his friends’ political ideology? Yeah – that was part of the ACORN smear campaign. And now this campaign to smear ACORN, weaken that case, and then subsequently rid themselves of a formidible political foe, the far right feels like this is a win-win setup.

And it very well may be, if the truth weren’t crystal clear to people who are able to see enough history to know that there’s more to the story here. Conservatives have a short memory for some reason; and they think people tend to forget these things. While panicked Democrats rush to condemn ACORN along with the Republicans who want to strike while the talk radio iron is hot, time will prove that this is just another attempt to smear an organization that serves the people, instead of their special interests.

Want to know why ACORN is so dangerous to the conservative right-wingers looking to shut it down? And want to know why it’s actually doing America far more good than harm? Check out the whole article, along with the bitter attacks that conservatives have lodged against ACORN in the 5-year smear campaign they’ve waged against the organization. This recent news? This is just another volley in a long long battle.

[ The Republican War Against ACORN ]
Source: TruthOut

I’ve been known to go a bit easy on Whole Foods – since I’m a pretty big believer in incrimental progress, I tend to think that some progress in a dirty market – even if it’s slight and I don’t always side with it – is good progress and paves the way to better things. Unfortunately, time and time again Whole Foods comes out and proves to me that for as much as they’re cuddly and progressive on the surface, and even so several layers deep, there’s always that rotting core at the middle working against the interests of the people who hand over their money-and I do mean hand over fist-to keep them lodged in the market they essentially dominate.

That rotting center? CEO John Mackey.

Writing for Counterpunch, Russell Mokhiber calls Mackey out for who he is – something I’m sure he’s proud of, but something I’m sure his customers wouldn’t be terribly happy to know:

John Mackey is a right wing libertarian.

He’s a union buster.

He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.

He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.

And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods.

He continues:

That’s why, today, we are calling on all American citizens to boycott Whole Foods.

Why?

Because Mackey has launched a public campaign to defeat single payer national health insurance.

This despite the bottom line reality that single payer is the only way to both control health care costs and cover everyone.

As Dr. Marcia Angell says in today’s New York Times, “if you keep health care in the hands of for-profit companies, you can increase coverage by putting more money into the system, or control costs by decreasing coverage. But you cannot do both unless you change the basic structure of the system.”

Mackey leads his Wall Street Journal diatribe against national health insurance with a quote from one of his heroines – Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

And the problem with Mackey’s campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance.

Mackey is responsible for these deaths as much as anyone.

Whether single-payer becomes a reality or not, and it’s looking depressingly more and more like it won’t – at least this time around – Mackey can’t be allowed to stand uncorrected for spreading this nonsense. Calling progressive policies as “socialism” and danging it in front of the American public as a scare-word as if it were remotely true is a tactic that the progressive camp has let the libertarians and conservatives get away with for far too long.

[ Boycott Whole Foods ]
Source: Counterpunch

I’m not normally a fan of talking points, or republishing them for that matter, but I really had to do something about the nonsense that’s going on out front of these town hall meetings as of late, and if it takes talking points to fight talking points, then so be it.

As Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA) so gloriously said:

“Now folks will say that’s not true, but I’ve got facts on my side and you’ve got Glenn Beck on your side.”

That should put that to rest:

Lie #1: President Obama wants to euthanize your grandma!!!

The truth: These accusations—of “death panels” and forced euthanasia—are, of course, flatly untrue. As an article from the Associated Press puts it: “No ‘death panel’ in health care bill.”4 What’s the real deal? Reform legislation includes a provision, supported by the AARP, to offer senior citizens access to a professional medical counselor who will provide them with information on preparing a living will and other issues facing older Americans.5

Lie #2: Democrats are going to outlaw private insurance and force you into a government plan!!!

The truth: With reform, choices will increase, not decrease. Obama’s reform plans will create a health insurance exchange, a one-stop shopping marketplace for affordable, high-quality insurance options.6 Included in the exchange is the public health insurance option—a nationwide plan with a broad network of providers—that will operate alongside private insurance companies, injecting competition into the market to drive quality up and costs down.7

If you’re happy with your coverage and doctors, you can keep them.8 But the new public plan will expand choices to millions of businesses or individuals who choose to opt into it, including many who simply can’t afford health care now.

Lie #3: President Obama wants to implement Soviet-style rationing!!!

The truth: Health care reform will expand access to high-quality health insurance, and give individuals, families, and businesses more choices for coverage. Right now, big corporations decide whether to give you coverage, what doctors you get to see, and whether a particular procedure or medicine is covered—that is rationed care. And a big part of reform is to stop that.

Health care reform will do away with some of the most nefarious aspects of this rationing: discrimination for pre-existing conditions, insurers that cancel coverage when you get sick, gender discrimination, and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage.9 And outside of that, as noted above, reform will increase insurance options, not force anyone into a rationed situation.

Lie #4: Obama is secretly plotting to cut senior citizens’ Medicare benefits!!!

The truth: Health care reform plans will not reduce Medicare benefits.10 Reform includes savings from Medicare that are unrelated to patient care—in fact, the savings comes from cutting billions of dollars in overpayments to insurance companies and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.11

Lie #5: Obama’s health care plan will bankrupt America!!!

The truth: We need health care reform now in order to prevent bankruptcy—to control spiraling costs that affect individuals, families, small businesses, and the American economy.

Right now, we spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care.12 The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade13—and each year, nearly a million people face bankruptcy because of medical expenses.14 Reform, with an affordable, high-quality public option that can spur competition, is necessary to bring down skyrocketing costs. Also, President Obama’s reform plans would be fully paid for over 10 years and not add a penny to the deficit.15

We’re closer to real health care reform than we’ve ever been—and the next few weeks will decide whether it happens. We need to make sure the truth about health care reform is spread far and wide to combat right wing lies.

[ Top Five Health Care Reform Lies—and How to Fight Back ]
Source: MoveOn.org