LIBERADIO(!)

The Rachel Maddow Show investigates RecessRally.com and the people behind the people disrupting the town hall meetings. What Maddow and her staff find is that they’re professional, Republican-staffed organizations and companies who are doing the bidding of their corporate healthcare overlords and who are very adept at using the American people.

“These guys are the pros. This is an industry. Americans are showing up at these events to shout down the discussion and chase their Congressman and they are enraged. And they’re enraged at least in part because they’re being riled up by over-the-top fabricated conspiracy theories about healthcare. And they’re being directed and orchestrated by corporate interests that do this for a living and do it very well.

Recessrally.com is not some organic outgrowth of American anger. This is how corporate America creates the illusion of a grassroots movement to support their own interests. This is what they do. They are professionals. This is an industry. To talk about these town hall events as some organic outpouring of average American folks who have concerns about healthcare is to be willfully blind to what is really going on which is, professional PR operatives generating exploitative manufactured strategically deployed outrage in order to line their own pockets.

These PR spinmeisters get paid a lot of money for doing it. The corporations they work for get to kill legislation that would hurt their profits. And the real people who they launch into these town hall settings after they’ve been told that healthcare reform is a secret Commie plot to kill old people and to mandate sex changes? Those real people get more and more and more and more angry and more and more and more alienated. And ultimately they get left like the rest of us with a healthcare system that is broken and doesn’t work in the interest of the American people and that does work in the interestes of the corporations who profit from the way the system is now.

This is professional, corporate-funded, Republican-staffed PR…and it should be reported as such.”

Would you like fries with that manipulation?

I just heard a story on NPR about a spontaneous protest twenty years ago by some older Americans trying to get their Congressman to listen to them. He wouldn’t give them any time so they waited outside his office and, trying to be heard, they yelled at him and followed him out to his car.

Now, Americans have an opportunity to be heard about about healthcare – you know, the real concerns most of us have about meaningful reform with a public option – and instead of allowing these concerns to be heard, they are being thwarted by other Americans who have been armed with lies and misinformation and who, because of their bad behavior, won’t allow a real healthcare discussion to take place.

What about the other Americans who are attending these town halls hoping to learn something or get a question answered? Is it a coincidence that along with their elected official, they aren’t being heard either? Uh, no. When recent polls show that over 70% of the American people want healthcare reform, not allowing them to be heard is part of the plan.