All life from beginning to end
You pay your monthly installments
Next to health is wealth
And only wealth will buy you justice
At The American Street, Thomas Nephew responded to an email that has been making the rounds attacking healthcare reform with the standard RW lies. The source of that email is unclear but an assumption that it was developed and sent out originally by FreedomWorks or a similar astroturfing group is justified when obnw tracks down the sources of the bogus claims in it: Betsy McCaughey and the Moonie Washington Times. An example:
REPLY: FALSE. First, while it’s too bad, no major health care reform bill advocates a health care system anything like England’s. But second, the statement is flatly wrong. Factcheck.org actually contacted the U.K. Department of Health and and an English nonprofit group advocating for older persons about this claim:
[A spokesman] said medical procedures in the U.K. are not routinely denied for older people. The National Health Service, the U.K.’s public health care service, has a constitution which prohibits discrimination on the basis of age and other factors. “The NHS Constitution states that the NHS provides a ‘comprehensive service, available to all irrespective of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief,’ “ the spokesman said. We also contacted a nonprofit group, England’s Age Concern and Help the Aged, which works to stop age discrimination in various facets of life, including employment and health care. Age Concern’s press office had never heard of any kind of prohibition on heart surgery for those 60 and older.
(all emphasis in the original)
Spreading rumors, lies, distortions, and misinformation is the first stage in controlling a social dialogue.
STAGE TWO
Once the disinformazia (a Soviet KGB term, which fits since the techniques were developed by them) has been injected into the debate, the next step is to use the lies to confuse, limit, and then frame the ground on which the debate will be allowed to go on.
STAGE THREE
Once the frame has been established,the next stage is to use both it and the disinformazia to get people angry over the terrible thing they now believe is happening by beginning to define the lies as truth and to use outrageous hyperbole to describe them. For instance: (Via Steve Benen)
First was the rumor—promoted by high-profile Republicans like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley—that Democratic health care plans would create "death panels" which would pass judgment on which citizens deserved to live. Next, a White House suggestion that people who have received e-mails with questionable information about health reform forward those to get clarification was reported by Fox News as a trap to collect the names and e-mail addresses of health reform opponents for an "enemies list." (See 10 players in health-care reform.)
Now conservative opponents of health reform have found a new threat: home nurse visits to low-income parents. "We are setting up a situation where Obama will be invading parent's [sic] homes and taking away their children," one columnist warned on RightWingNews.com. That something as harmless as home nurse visits has become a target of conservative ire is surprising because of its longstanding popularity with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. But health reform advocates are scratching their heads at the attacks for another reason: funding for home nurse visits was largely included in health reform legislation to accommodate social conservatives.
There is a certain percentage of the population willing to believe that a black president is evil incarnate, the anti-Christ, the kind of man who would take children away from their parents and eat them, and the extremist GOP has been doing its damndest to find those whackos, recruit them, and activate them. That recruitment and activation has resulted in the Town Hells of the last few weeks: death threats, swastikas, effigy hangings, screaming hissy fits, the whole magilla.
Result: The "public option" will likely be withdrawn altogether. As Benen put it:
The right said a bipartisan, common-sense measure on end-of-life care was scandalous. It wasn't, but reality didn't matter -- conservatives believed it was true, and now it's apparently gone from the bill. The right said a public option would represent a Soviet-style takeover of the health care system. . It wasn't, but reality didn't matter -- conservatives believed it was true, and now the idea is in trouble.
So successful was this engineered ploy that despite Dick Armey being fired from his lobbying company for organizing the Town Hall assaults, the oil industry has been caught planning to iuse astroturfed, Town Hall-type groups to organize defeat of any climate change bill.
A leaked memo sent by an oil industry group reveals a plan to create astroturf rallies at which industry employees posing as "citizens" will urge Congress to oppose climate change legislation.
The memo -- sent by the American Petroleum Institute and obtained by Greenpeace, which sent it to reporters -- urges oil companies to recruit their employees for events that will "put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy," and will urge senators to "avoid the mistakes embodied in the House climate bill."
API tells TPMmuckraker that the campaign is being funded by a coalition of corporate and conservative groups that includes the anti-health-care-reform group 60 Plus, FreedomWorks, and Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform.
The memo, signed by API president Jack Gerard, asks recipients to give API "the name of one central coordinator for your company's involvement in the rallies."
Astroturfing against climate change legislation is the latest application, and it doesn't seem to require any integrity a'tall. False information is being sent under false names and forged letters claim to be coming from people and places they're not coming from.
[T]hese new letters plumb the depths of sleaziness.
The letters, written under the names of local senior centers, urged Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA), Christopher Carney (D-PA), and Tom Perriello (D-VA), to make changes in the Waxman-Markey climate change bill because fixed-income seniors were worried about energy price hikes.
As a letter to Dahlkemper, purportedly from Slippery Rock Senior Center in Slippery Rock, PA, put it:
Many of our seniors, as you know, are on low fixed incomes. Some of our seniors have even received decreases to their social security payments. Further making it a difficult choice to meet the basic necessities of life (food, prescription medication and the like). The cost to heat and cool their homes, run hot water and use othe appliances is very important to those seniors on a budget.
Our state gets 56% of its electricity from coal. We urge you to pass legislation that reduces greenhouse gases but at the same time protects seniors and consumers from unaffordable increases in the basic necessity of electricity.
Of course, the letter wasn't crafted by concerned advocates of seniors at all -- but by skilled Washington astrotruf [sic] lobbyists.
There is no reason this technique can't be used on virtually any policy anyone ever proposes that is antithetical to corporate interests. As long as they can mine idiots and shoot them at us out of the media's cannon, we're just ducks in a corporate shooting gallery.
Quack.
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