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August 10, 2009
Dem leader denounces orchestrated protests (over health care)
Atlantic Yards Report
Democratic Illinois Senator Dick Durbin has denounced the protests at town-hall meetings on health care. CNN reports him saying:
"Town meetings are not bean bag. I've had hundreds of them, and sometimes folks get upset. And that's part of America, part of our process."But this is clearly being orchestrated, and these folks have instructions. They come down from a Texas lobbyist in Washington."
Durbin said that when "there's a group of people honestly sitting in the middle trying to ask the important questions and get the right answers, and instead someone takes the microphone and screams and shouts to the point where the meeting comes to an end, that isn't dialogue, that isn't the democratic process.
"We need to respect free speech, but we need to respect one another's rights to free speech, too. When these people come in just to disrupt the meetings, no, that isn't right," Durbin said.
That, of course, is what no Brooklyn or New York official said after the July 22 Atlantic Yards informational meeting was disrupted by pro-project forces.
Columnist Errol Louis agrees — with the health care part, anyway.
NY Daily News, Town halls of shame are poisoning the health care debate in America
Some of the disrupters are genuinely ticked-off citizens upset at President Obama's policies on health care, the environment and the economy.
More power to such protesters, I say - provided they allow others at these town halls to hear and be heard.
But a darker, more violent strand of nut jobs is mixed in with anti-reform protesters. And some of the outrage is coming from "rent-a-mobs" hired by Capitol Hill lobbyists and PR firms doing the bidding of insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and other vested interests.
...Political thuggery is always sickening. What makes the current round especially abhorrent is the fact that some of the mob behavior appears to be the work of corporate lobbying groups that are spending an estimated $1.4 million a day to block reform.
...The group has dispatched busloads of "protesters" on trips to more than a dozen states.
Fake populist groups, known as astroturf (as opposed to real grass roots) are a fact of American political life, and corporate lobbyists are free to dispatch as many paid "activists" around the country as they like.
But the right-wing goon squads disrupting health care town hall meetings nationwide aren't just an annoyance - they are a threat to democracy that should be taken seriously....
NoLandGrab: Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, Louis has for years turned a blind eye to the orchestrated disruptions at public hearings on Atlantic Yards by project supporters, organized by "corporate lobbyists" working for Forest City Ratner. Rather, he's accused project opponents of being obstructionists, NIMBYs, propagandists, and much worse. Healthy debate is apparently good for health care, but not for basketball arenas.
Posted by eric at August 10, 2009 10:33 AM