Friday, July 10th, 2009

ALERT: We’ve just been informed that Bill Moyers, on his
show later tonight, will expose for the first time the
health insurance industry’s secret campaign against Michael
Moore and his film, “Sicko.” It contains a stunning
revelation and admission by a top health insurance executive — the former head of publicity for CIGNA, one of the top health insurance companies in the country — that the disinformation and attacks on Michael and the film were extensive and well-planned. Their job was to stop the movie from reaching a wide audience (and, more importantly, from having the widespread political impact the industry feared “Sicko” would have).

Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA (which provides health insurance to nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies) admits that, in fact, “Sicko” “hit the nail on the head” and told the real truth about how much better people in other countries have it when it comes to their health care.

The show airs tonight at 9:00 PM on PBS. (Check your local listings for exact times. Many areas show it on Saturday night, too.)

You can check out the segment about Michael and “Sicko”
here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv1FwOCNoZ8

Be sure to tune into Bill Moyers Journal tonight at 9:00 PM for the full program. Check here for local listings (and rebroadcasts).

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/about/airdates.html

If you get this email too late, their website will soon post the full show soon:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers

Finally, the truth comes out. From one of their own.
Amazing.

Yours truly, Webmaster
MichaelMoore.com
webguy@michaelmoore.com

Trent Lott must think he’s living in a nightmare. More than one week has passed since his segregationist cheerleading at Strom Thurmond’s century celebration, and the chorus of anti-Lottism has swelled ever louder. Conservatives in particular can’t scream loud enough. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, called Lott’s comments “thoughtless” and told CBS’s “Early Show” audience on December 12 that “Trent Lott shows such a lack of historical understanding that I think it would be appropriate for him to offer to step down.” And conservative pundit Peggy Noonan told Chris Matthews this Sunday, “I am personally tired of being embarrassed by people … who don’t get what the history of race in America is, what integration has meant, what segregation was. I’m tired of being embarrassed by Republicans … who don’t get it.”

It’s a nice sentiment, and, if conservatives are serious about it, they might want to direct their attention one state to Lott’s east, home of Alabama Republican Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. His record on race arguably rivals that of the gentleman from Mississippi–and yet has elicited not a peep of consternation from the anti-racist right.

The New Republic: Closed Sessions

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The Great American Bubble Machine

As things stand now, there really isn’t much difference between the Right and Left; they have both been bought off and the current government is heavily seeded with former Goldman-Sachs employees. (Please do get a hold of a copy of Matt Taibbi’s “Bubble Machine” article in the Rolling Stone; it’s an eye-opener.)

And the proof that the fix is in can be seen in Obama’s policies which are at odds with his liberal campaign stance. From Obama’s mind-boggling FISA vote, to AIG, to the TARPs bailouts, to his reaffirmation of NAFTA, to his embracing the Clinton machinery, to his support of Free Trade ideology together with his primary raison d’etre to cobble together all of the industrial countries of the world into a fully functional and global dominating WTO (if you think soaring prices are a problem now, wait ’til the WTO gets off the ground…), to his failure to keep so many campaign promises like rebuilding the American infra-structure with new jobs and rebuilding the American manufacturing base, to changing trade tariffs in favor of American workers, all of which should have been a top priority, but no, this president is either weak or a coward to so throughly turn his back on right-from-wrong, the dream of an American democracy, and the American people in favor of pandering after the riches and approval of three-tenths of one percent. Bill Clinton looks like a dog on a leash being lead around by Poppy Bush as a show of defeat of American democracy and the supreme rule of the oil magnates and the industrial aristocracy. Both the Clintons and the Obamas willingly embrace complete corruption in every aspect of American life to satisfy their lust for ambition and the results are a Huey Long state where candidates for office, like Sen. Al Franken, are elected on the promise to be Wellstonian in policy, yet, the day after being sworn in shift their position to “I want to make nice with the Repbulicans,” even though the Republican Party is in tatters on the floor and the Senate now has a 60 vote margin. Why are so many supposedly Democratic politicians caving to Far Right thinking and policy? Summarily: corruption, fear, cowardice, weakness, meets the power of controlling corporate campaign contributions.

We need campaign finance reform. Plain and simple. And nothing changes if nothing changes.

I’ve said it before but I’m going to say it again, if there was a shred of decency in Washington these days, the members of Congress would come together and put through the campaign finance reform that is so desperately needed to get the corruption out of government.

If every adult in the US contributed one to ten dollars toward election campaigns and arrangements were made with TV stations such as PBS or C-SPAN to carry any and all campaign messages, there would be a chance for democracy. But as things stand now, our government goes up on the auction block every four years and is sold to the highest bidders and We the People are little more than economic slaves on that block up for bid.

Democrats and Republicans are pretty good at co-opting any major issues that crop up, at least in rhetoric. Often, they don’t live up to their promises, which tends to hurt individual candidates more than the parties.

Also to consider, the parties themselves are not as important anymore as the media in shaping elections. The conventions are media events. The Fourth Estate mainly stomps out any third party movements by keeping them out of print and off the airwaves.

It remains to be seen what influence the Web Press will have on this in the long-term…