Perhaps HUAC should come back and investigate these folks…
Insurance industry funded fascism, from Frank Schaeffer, alternet: ” The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama’s election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform. They are using my old shock troops — given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.
Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized “tea parties” fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect the profits of the insurance business. Armey’s FreedomWorks is organizing against health care reform. Armey’s lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey’s lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry. FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. (They are also fans of fossil fuels. Armey’s lobbying firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE, on energy related issues.)…I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.
The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson) “broke their brains.” What else could explain their embrace of intimidation — rather than discourse — over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they’d just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?…Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they’ve wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people — and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can’t win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!…A barrage of outright lies, wherein the Democrats are being accused of wanting to launch a massive euthanasia program against the elderly, free abortions for everyone, and “a government takeover” of health-care is now being combined with physical intimidation that in several cases has required police escorts to protect pro health-care reform speakers… It’s time that this whole shabby (and insane) business be exposed, vilified in run out of town on a rail by whatever responsible Republicans — if any — that are still in the party and who want to see the fortunes of their party revived. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money via lobbying firms and using it to organize what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but thrown out of the public debate forever. They should become absolute pariahs.
It’s time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.”
N.B.: Frank Schaeffer – and his father Francis – was a right wing “pro life”zealot”.
Emphasis mine.
charles' log 