John Pilger: Why they're afraid of Michael Moore

[Briar]

Why they're afraid of Michael Moore

John Pilger


In Sicko, Michael Moore’s new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject “socialised medicine” as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were “anti-American”.

Watching this, I found myself recalling the effusive farewells to Reagan when he died three years ago. “Many people believe,” said Gavin Esler on the BBC’s Newsnight, “that he restored faith in American military action was loved even by his political opponents.” In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan “embodied the best of the American spirit – the optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are”.

Such drivel about a man who, as president, was responsible for the 1980s bloodbath in central America, and the rise of the very terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, became the received spin. Reagan’s walk-on part in Sicko is a rare glimpse of the truth of his betrayal of the blue-collar nation he claimed to represent. The treacheries of another president, Richard Nixon, and a would-be president, Hillary Clinton, are similarly exposed by Moore.

Just when there seemed little else to say about the great Watergate crook, Moore extracts from the 1971 White House tapes a conversation between Nixon and John Erlichman, his aide who ended up in prison. A wealthy Republican Party backer, Edgar Kaiser, head of one of America’s biggest health insurance companies, is at the White House with a plan for “a national health-care industry”. Erlichman pitches it to Nixon, who is bored until the word “profit” is mentioned...


http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=458

[leftchick]

1. I Love John!

and for the clinton fans with selective memories....

Later on, we meet that glamorous liberal couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is 1993 and the new president is announcing the appointment of the first lady as the one who will fulfil his promise to give America a universal health-care. And here is “charming and witty” Hillary herself, as a senator calls her, pitching her “vision” to Congress. Moore’s portrayal of the loquacious, flirting, sinister Hillary is reminiscent of Tim Robbins’s superb political satire Bob Roberts. You know her cynicism is already in her throat. “Hillary,” says Moore in voice-over, “was rewarded for her silence as the second-largest recipient in the Senate of health-care industry contributions”.

Moore has said that Harvey Weinstein, whose company produced Sicko and who is a friend of the Clintons, wanted this cut, but he refused. The assault on the Democratic Party candidate likely to be the next president is a departure for Moore, who, in his personal campaign against George Bush in 2004, endorsed General Wesley Clark, the bomber of Serbia, for president and defended Bill Clinton himself, claiming that “no one ever died from a blow job”. (Maybe not, but half a million Iraqi infants died from Clinton’s medieval siege of their country, along with thousands of Haitians, Serbians, Sudanese and other victims of his unsung invasions.)

:grr:

[SlingBlade]

2. Michael Moore has that unique talent

of using their own words and deeds as the prosecutor in the court
of public awareness.

Each and every time they open their lying mouths they are wondering if it might
wind up in Michaels next film,

[yurbud]

3. kick

[lligrd]

4. No Wonder My Health Insurance Sucks..,.

" A wealthy Republican Party backer, Edgar Kaiser, head of one of America’s biggest health insurance companies"

[Briar]

5. Meanwhile, back in the UK

Only dogma and corporate capture can explain this


It beggars belief that US health privateers straight out of Michael Moore's Sicko are being lined up to run core NHS services

Seumas Milne

...Last month, UnitedHealth agreed with insurance regulators in 36 states to pay out $20m in fines for failures in processing claims and responding to patient complaints. That follows a string of other fines over delayed payments, Medicare fraud and "cheating patients out of money" in New York State.

Other major US health corporations, such as Aetna and Humana, have also faced repeated fines for shortchanging doctors, using unlicensed agents, payment delays, failures to give information to claimants or fraud. In one case of a cancer patient who was refused payment for a failed experimental treatment its own doctors recommended, Aetna was ordered to hand over $120m damages after it was found by a California jury to have committed "malice, oppression and fraud".

All three companies figure prominently in Michael Moore's new film Sicko, a compelling indictment of the US health system - under which 18,000 Americans die a year because they are uninsured. Hardly the ideal players, you might think, to take a central role in the reform of the National Health Service.

But it is precisely these three corporations, along with 11 other private firms including KPMG, McKinsey and Bupa, that the government this month announced have been lined up to advise on or even take over the commissioning of the bulk of NHS services. Primary care trusts, which control most of the NHS's £90bn budget, will now be encouraged to buy in advice from the 14 selected companies on health needs, contracts and local provision. Potentially, these corporations could take over the management of the heart of the NHS...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2193518,00.html

"Beggars belief" indeed.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Ack, you seem to have a Tory/New Labour problem similar to our

Republican/DLC problem.

Both the U.S. and the U.K. need politicians who will UNDO the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions.

[TheBaldyMan]

7. Don't forget the NHS trusts that have £millions in debt - all privately run

the directors all get their hefty bonus while the hospitals close down wards. PFI is bleeding the NHS white.

Private Eye has been dishing the dirt on these crooks for years.

Computing magazine has also chronicled the IT debacle, "Connecting for Health" programmes are overblown, badly thought out and the direst cardinal sin - Blair said 'Let there be a massive government IT programme and lo the decision was made', without as much as a single feasibility study - systems installed on a nationwide basis without talking to a single member of staff; medical, ancillary or administrative.

[BridgeTheGap]

8. That's their M.O.: smear and slander

Michael Moore points out what's so & they go after him.
Most of what Moore does is show us the historical record of what these idiots have said in public but never made the 6:00 P.M. news.
Yeah, sometimes the truth hurts and those feeling the pain go after the truth tellers.
WE NEED MORE MICHAEL MOORES!!!

[Joe Chi Minh]

9. Esler is a stenographer of the most vapid kind. We don't get Pilgers or Moores on

our MSM in the UK, but Esler is at the other extreme. Somehow, when peddling the unadulterated, establishment flim-flim and lies emanates from an affable-seeming type, it's all the more maddening.