Giving One

I've been reading about the demonstration yesterday, and trying to think about what I want to say about Dick Armey (it looks like the demonstration was somewhere between 60,000 and 75,000), and was poking around at Metafilter when I realized: man, I don't give one. The interests and arguments of the FreedomWorks demonstrators sound a little bit like this to me, or something like this:
(from Cake Wrecks)

Where opponents of the public option are concerned, these protesters are neither the most numerous (rank-and-file Republicans) nor the most committed (the insurance industry) nor the most authoritative (perhaps the AMA, although they only represent about 15% of practicing doctors). But I don't even really give one about them, either -- at the heart of it, their own interests (power, profit, and profit, respectively) drive their objections.

After the coffee runs out and my rancor subsides, basically all I really give one about is the people who will be affected by public option reform. Consider:

-- We currently guarantee universal health care to all Americans by making it illegal to turn away ill patients from emergency rooms. We know and accept that it is wrong for a person who is sick or dying to be refused treatment. However, we make that guarantee in the most inefficient, expensive, and dehumanizing way possible. We know that we are morally responsible for the health of our fellow Americans -- I'd like to see even a committed tea-partier withhold antibiotics from someone with an infected wound -- but we refuse to care for them.

-- Our society provides guaranteed health care to our congressmen, but not our cab drivers; to our child molesters, but not our children. If you are schizophrenic and stab a stranger on the street, you will be locked up and given medical care which can vastly improve your condition. If you are schizophrenic and do not stab a stranger on the street, if you manage to hold down a job, then you will be left alone with the torments of your treatable illness.

-- The reason we do all this? The profit of the few. The health insurance industry employs about 400,000 people nationwide, a FIFTH as many people as are uninsured in Los Angeles County RIGHT NOW. Insurance companies provide no service; they heal no wounds; they are a financial artifact intended to share risk among large pools of people, and they should not be allowed to keep 30 cents out of every dollar we give them.

So call your senator, find an event, or make your voice heard. There's no mechanism in the Constitution or in Congress that will make sure that we do what's right: people have to make that happen.

Who's protesting?

I have to stop reading the New York Times -- I read their headline today, "Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government" and eagerly clicked in -- news, news! But the article never once told me who organized the protest. Who's out there? Who's in charge? Who rented the microphone? No answers -- and a group with some kind of specific opposition to some particular policy or government priority is transformed into a faceless checkmark on a party-politics scorecard.

So I figure, hah. Liberal media bias. And I go over to the Drudge Report -- nothing. There isn't even a headline today, but buried somewhere down the page is an article "Bomb Threat Forces Evacuation of DC TEA Party Planners" from which one can find out that the demonstration was planned by FreedomWorks, headed by former House Majority leader Dick Armey. So -- as opposed to the groundswell of opposition to health care reform that the Times (and FreedomWorks) would like us to believe this demonstration represents, let's look at FreedomWorks specifically.

FreedomWorks, formerly called Citizens for a Sound Economy, is funded in part by donations from MetLife, Phillip Morris, and the Scaife family fortune. Their stated goal is to increase individual freedom by decreasing taxes; they were organizers of the April 15th tea parties (pictures here), although they generally prefer to label their events and websites as 'grassroots' in an attempt to prevent the devolution of responsibility onto them personally. The term NPR uses, daintily, is 'faux grassroots'.

As far as I can tell on their website, FreedomWorks formally opposes: the bank bailout, the stimulus package, environmental cap-and-trade legislation, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, and most other government initiatives that require significant spending or limit corporate power (which they equate with individual liberty) in any significant way. As a group, they also seem to be strong supporters of Israel, strong opponents of abortion, and Christians generally. This has led to them being confused for rank-and-file Republicans, but although they were real supporters of President Bush (who was the right religion, and passed big tax cuts for the wealthy), the last presidential candidate they really loved was Steve Forbes, who serves on their board of directors.

Much of the press online about FreedomWorks centers around discoveries of the extent to which they are willing to go to lie to their own members and the public about their tactics. The Washington Post caught them out secretly signing up members through insurance sales (i.e. want a low group rate? Sure! Just sign this contract -- um, petition/membership form/contract) and they are particularly energetic astroturfers -- creating fictitious sites and conversations online in order to expand positive perception of their issues (we'll see if tagging their name and linking to a bunch of stories about them as I do here attracts some 'concerned democrats' who are worried that government is 'just too big').

Anyway, this is still developing -- if they break 50,000 demonstrators (by any estimate other than their own, which I'm sure is already at like 4 million people) in Washington, I'll do a little bit about Dick Armey tomorrow. He's a colorful fellow!

EDIT: I seem to be getting some traffic from searches for estimates for the size of the rally, so I'll bite: ABC is going with the DC Fire Department's estimate of 60 to 70 thousand people; CNN is elaborately silent on the issue of size; the New York Times's headline says that "thousands" came to the capital; the Washington Post says only that 30,000 people registered for the protest. It seems like all the links estimating 2 million (which, if it really happened, would be larger than the Inauguration, FIFTY times larger than the largest sourceable media estimate, become immediately visible to any onlooker of any party, and be the lead in any news story that wanted to be credible) go back to Michelle Malkin. For a complete debunking of the 2 million figure, see here.