Thursday, November 25th,
2010
Friends,
As I head off for Thanksgiving, I wanted
to share a final thought with you about this past week's news
regarding the health care executives who sat around that table
in Philadelphia four years ago and decided on a course of action
to, if need be, "push Michael Moore off a cliff."
Having spent the week reading all their
secret documents (and the book
"Deadly Spin"), it's clear that there was something far more
scary to these companies than me.
They were, in fact, scared of you. They
were afraid YOU would end up pushing them over their
own greedy cliff.
Yes, they spied on me and my family in
the hopes of finding something with which to smear me and my
film, "Sicko." Finding nothing (sorry, guys, I live a pretty
boring life), they then resorted to the old chestnuts that have
been hurled at me by General Motors, the Bush White House, the
National Rifle Association and others since my first film 20
years ago, and they essentially boil down to this:
"Don't listen to him! He hates America!
He hates our way of life! He's not telling you the truth! He
plays fast and loose with it! Patriots, don't waste your good
money to see his movie!"
And it's that last message that's at the
epicenter of their biggest fear. Back in 2007, these health
insurance companies believed that if you strolled inside a
theater showing "Sicko", their golden goose would be cooked.
They knew, according to former health
care exec and
whistleblower Wendell Potter, that the truth was up there on
that screen -- and the LAST thing they wanted was for millions
of Americans to be exposed to it.
Why? Well, we need look no further than
the
document containing their own secret directive on how they
should deal with the movie:
"[We Must] Prepare for the Worst
Case...SiCKO evolves into a sustained populist movement."
There it is. Their biggest fear. Their
"worst case" scenario. That YOU, the American public, would rise
up against them. I wasn't their worst nightmare -- you were.
Their own research and private polling showed that you were
getting fed up with how they were screwing you, gouging you,
ripping you off, denying you coverage and flat out just kicking
you off the insurance. They knew, according to Potter, that they
were killing 45,000 of you every year simply by denying you
coverage.
We Americans don't like people who kill
us. We're the kind of people who will throw billions of dollars
and the mightiest military on earth at just one guy because he
killed just 2,977 people. What would we do if we discovered
who's killing 45,000 of us every year? How fast would
we act to sever the head of that beast?
You don't need to answer that question
because the executives of the country's health insurance
conglomerates already know it -- it's their big "What If",
followed by an even bigger "Holy Shit." "What If the
millions of average Joes and Janes ever got it together enough
to bring us all down, to end our profiting off the misery of
others? What If the citizenry one day begin electing
representatives who couldn't be bought and who would end our
for-profit health insurance racket?" Holy shit, indeed.
Yes, they feared that day more than
anything else, and a movie coming out before a big election year
with two popular Democrats pushing for some vague version of
universal heath care was all that was needed to get Big
Insurance to spend millions of dollars to attack me. These
corporate kingpins knew they had pushed their luck too far and
now they were worried that a movie -- a movie! -- could ignite a
"populist movement."
All that money spent smearing me because
they thought you would get up from your theater seat
and start a revolution.
It's a great compliment to you. They
fear the power you have. But that's 'cause they're good at math.
They know there will always be more of us than there are of
them. And unless they can repeal "one person, one vote," they
know they are doomed. In the meantime they will try to maintain
the power they have by buying off politicians, dumbing us down,
distracting us with Dancing/Ice Skating/Drinking with the Stars
and getting us so scared we'll acquiesce to having naked
pictures taken of us at airports this Thanksgiving weekend. Over
the river and through the body scan, to grandmother's house we
go...
So let us give thanks today that the
richest 1% begrudgingly know that we are still, on paper at
least, in charge. It is, I believe, a glimmer of hope of what we
could possibly accomplish in the coming new year.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
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