Year: 2009

aroli was talking about an incident in her neighborhood via Twitter that I later found out to have been at a Healthcare reform protest put on by MoveOn. Karoli recounts the pro-reformer’s side of the event, and there seems to be any number of people wanting to jump on that particular wagon. I’m not one of them.

The facts, if I understand them correctly, are that a group of about 150 pro-reform protestors showed up for a rally, and a much smaller anti-reform group formed across the street. Everything should have been fine if this state had been maintained. The worst that could happen is people going hoarse yelling at each other.

It didn’t remain the same though. Karoli writes that the anti-reform protestors were blocking access to the protest side, but her photo shows no one was blocked, and the anti-reform protest was too small to physically block anyone’s access to the cross walk. More importantly, the anti-reform people stayed on their side of the street. It was the pro-reform person who started this brouhaha, because they were the ones to cross the street, effectively busting into the other side’s territory. In Karoli’s words:

Several minutes later, there was another altercation. My best recollection is that this man saw what happened to the woman and reacted to it. I cannot say with certainty where he was when he saw it — he may have arrived and was navigating his way through that group, or he may have crossed the street to defend her. He was confronted by the same man. I could tell from where I was that the man was belligerent, angry, and confrontational.

The man in the orange shirt hit the pro-reform guy (I’m going to call him PR Guy just to keep the players straight). Hard. ( tweeted in real time) He punched him in the face, knocked him to the ground and into that thruway. As you can see from the photo, cars drive straight through that without stopping. The pro-reform guy could have been run over. He got up, tried to get back up on the curb, but Orange Shirt guy was in his face. Finger in his face, PR Guy standing, steps up to the curb, and there’s a scuffle. Orange shirt seemed to have PR Guy in a hold, but again, I was across the street, so won’t state that as absolute fact. Next thing I see is PR Guy’s hat being tossed into the street, both yelling at one another, then Orange shirt walks away, PR Guy picks up hat and crosses to our side.

When he gets to our side, he tells a story in one sentence: “He punched me hard, straight in the face, so I bit his finger off.”

The woman that Karoli references was someone handing out flyers, who went across the street for some reason. Supposedly while on the other side of the street the man in the orange shirt, whose finger was later bit off, shooed her back across the street, doing so in what Karoli calls an aggressive manner.

Fine. Dandy. If the woman felt threatened, she should have called the police. However, if the woman was across the street trying to hand out flyers to these people, which my spider sense tells me could have been a very real possibility, then it’s not surprising she triggered an angry response. You don’t bait people when emotions are high.

Regardless of why she was on the other side, the woman crossed back and she was in no danger. It was inappropriate for any other pro-reform protestor to cross back over, regardless of reason. This put the pro-reform movement squarely into acting as the aggressor in this event.

Regardless of who did what, the pro-reform movement was in the wrong. Worse, they allowed themselves to be set up in such a way that it could potentially help discredit what they’re supposedly protesting for.

I have to wonder what’s more important to the pro-reform movement at this time: the healthcare reform? Or the healthcare reform protests? Because from my seat, the latter has real potential to hurt the former, if more incidents like this occur.

Shame.

update More information on the incident. It sounds like this was more of an altercation that came about because Code Pink also attended the protest. Why Code Pink felt they had to be there is anyone’s guess.

last update Corrections: the person who lost part of his finger was the first to actually cross the street and confront a pro-reform protestor, before crossing back over to his side. He was the man wearing Khaki, not the orange shirt guy. He also threw two punches at the guy who bit him, not one. The police are not actively looking for the guy who did the biting, probably because Khaki was the one to throw the first punch.

Frankly, no one was an innocent bystander in this. Time to move on to what really matters: healthcare reform.

I find it fascinating to watch what happens when progressives discover what kind of a person the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is. Because his stores sell organic and healthy products, people automatically assumed he was a progressive like themselves. However, Mackey is the worst of fanatical libertarians, though it was only with the recent Wall Street Journal OpEd he wrote that people discovered this for themselves.

In the OpEd, Mackey came out against anything but a free market healthcare system. He states, unequivocally, that in his opinion, healthcare is not a right.

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

I leave those in other countries to respond to what Mackey says about your countries, and focus on what he said about this country.

Mackey lists changes he believes will solve the healthcare problems, including removing items that insurance companies are mandated to provide, allowing cross-state insurance sales, as well as tort reform.

However, as articles, such as this excellent article on healthcare costs in the New Yorker detail, healthcare costs are not driven by malpractice lawsuits, or government mandated health care coverage. If anything, the only thing has kept some small control over the healthcare companies are the state laws that don’t allow them to arbitrarily cancel healthcare coverage for the sick, and those who need care—that demand a minimum of responsibility from these companies.

Healthcare in the US has become nothing more than an exercise in earning profits. Until it’s redefined to what it should be, the care of people, costs will continue to increase exponentially, until eventually only the wealthy will be able to afford truly decent health care. The free market fails when it comes to basic humanity.

According to Mackey, if you’re sick and you can’t afford healthcare, why you should just die. I don’t know about any of you, but I have no interest in giving a man like this the time of day, much less my money. I have disliked Whole Foods with a passion for many years, both because of Mackey’s attitude, and the fact that the company grossly overcharges for its goods. To Mackey, organic and healthy are green marketing, a way to make lots of money.

Now others are discovering the truth of Whole Foods and Mackey, and have started a boycotting campaign, though how well it will do, is anyone’s guess. People have to make choices if they want to live what they believe, and that includes choosing where they spend their money. I can do without the “progressive” whose beliefs are nothing more than Twitter tweets and social media bon mots, and who isn’t willing to put their buying choices behind their beliefs.

But this is an easy one for me, because I’ve been boycotting Whole Foods for years.

update Good Good OpEd piece on this discussion at the NY Times. There are a lot of folks saying, but he’s so environmentally helpful, and has led the green revolution, and so on. Well, I look at it this way: he’s been amply rewarded for this effort. From now on, any money I give the store is payment for his latest efforts, and they have been both anti-union and now anti-healthcare. Whole Foods is not the only game in town when it comes to the environment. Not anymore.