August 10th, 2009
Town Hall Bullies
Every worker — formerly or currently employed — and every employer has a vested interest in the outcome of the federal debate over health insurance reform. Similarly, research shows that 49% of the U.S. workforce is aware of workplace bullying, either through direct experience or witnessing it. What passes for health care reform "debate American-style" comes to Town Hall meetings where Democratic Congressional members face the public at home. In the nation’s capital, there has been little dialogue and lots of bullying.
Forget baseball, bullying, it seems, is fast becoming the national pasttime.
Bullying involves intimidation by one side over another acting with unshakeable confidence — whether real or faked. It’s about the unilateral exercise of power — real or imagined. Republican party power comes from its minority role and ability to block bills in the Senate. Republican unity often convinces Democratic leaders to not bother to move bills not certain to garner 60 or more votes. Minorities can bully despite their numerical disadvantage.
Bullies love to claim they are victims. They are whiners, projecting their weaknesses onto others. For example, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform famous for calling bipartisanship "date rape" claims that (1) there is a left wing political handbook, and (2) it dictates the use of lies, harassment and violence at Town Hall meetings to silence meeting disrupters.
However, it’s the vociferous minority at Town Halls who are the harassers. Their startling misconduct paralyzes attendees who are there to get genuine questions answered or to have a reasonable dialogue as a voting constituent. Just like in bullying situations in families, classrooms and workplaces, witnesses tend to stand idly by with a deer-in-the-headlights powerlessness.
Civility and respectful disagreements are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Watch how Rep. Kathy Castor of Tampa tries valiantly to talk through the noise.
Town Hall bullies are the ones with simple-to-follow guidelines for those unwilling to think for themselves. Nothing could be farther from courteous civility in public settings necessary to discuss something as important as whether or not the health insurance industry will change. Changes proposed, but far from finalized, may create new opportunities for coverage for people previously blocked by the industry’s historical habits — rescissions (policy cancellations for dubious reasons), exclusion of pre-existing conditions (rendering the personal insurance game a "Catch 22" in which the only ones eligible for coverage are the ones who least need it), and unconscionably high COBRA rates after separation from employer-purchased group coverage.
Tea-bagger and relative unknown Bob Macguffie of the Rights Principles.com wrote the recipe for incitement and chaos at Town Hall meetings. He directed attendees to be disruptive early and often, shout out a particular vote by the Rep then "freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it." Disrupters are to use intermittent shout outs by different people spread out across the room to make the Rep "uneasy early on .. goal is to rattle" the member of Congress. Macguffie tells people to be angry about "the socialist agenda, infringement of our liberties, and profligate spending."
Bullies are bullies because they target others with hateful attacks. The real targets of bullying in all settings, for a variety of reasons, cannot or will not defend themselves. The presumed bully in Congress could be the Dems, based on their numerical superiority, but they behave more like targets, victims, and let the minority determine the legislative agenda.
Said one Washington State Democratic representative, "we dare not push the other party around or we will be mistreated when they next come to power and can control us." Make no mistake, this sheepish view is not shared by Republicans who historically intimidate their colleagues when in power. (Can you say Clinton impeachment?)
The rowdy folks in Castor’s Tampa meeting identified themselves afterwards as Glenn Beck fans. If they had studied the language crafted by the House Ways and Means Committee (HR 3200), the first of three House bills which will require melding in September, they could have rationally discussed provisions of the current drafts with which they disagree.
It’s a world turned upside down when the mock-"grassroots" message from the shouters is actually pro-corporate. They want to derail any changes to the current patchwork system that leaves millions of Americans uninsured or underinsured so as to risk dying in the world’s richest country for no other reason than they could not afford access to doctors and hospitals.
And based on the film footage of some Town Halls, the screamers are unsure of what angers them — "socialism," having a Black President, government in their lives. The Town Hall I attended personally introduced me to a group of about 10 rabblerousers in a group of about 60 people who naively followed Macguffie’s script.
The Town Hall was held in an American Legion hall with the stated purpose to discuss veterans’ matters. So many of the screamers seemed to be vets — of Medicare-eligibility age and many with VA benefits. Despite the involvement of government in their lives, they stood on cue, clapping, exhorting others in the room to stop the slippery slide into government involvement in healthcare!
To his credit, Congressman Rick Larsen (WA-2) scheduled subsequent Town Halls to focus on health reform right after the events for veterans. He also firmly countered the misconceptions and lies about the reform legislation at the meeting I attended. The faux-angry grumblers did not stay around to have an intelligent discussion with the Congressman afterwards.
So not only do bullies lie, they are whining cowards who have no intention of being reasonable. Stay tuned to see how aggression and conduct at Town Halls further impacts progress toward solving the myriad of societal problems.
Gary Namie
Tags: bullies, Kathy Castor, Macguffie, Rick Larsen, town hall
This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under Health Care, Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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I had been a target by a bully at work. Watching the video made me cringe – realizing how helpless one feels when being attacked. I’m not surprised with these sad developments in the nation because bullies, with their uncivility, loudness, rudeness, zero compassion and “anger” seem able to control and dominate whatever situation they are in. I just hope, like the recent landslide win of Pres. Obama, good old American values prevail in the end.
What makes you think only Republicans are bullies, all Pelosi does is say something to the effect of “neener neener, we have the votes and don’t have to listen”. How silly, this was supposed to be a bipartisan prez and he’s anything but. Very secretive in all things. And why can’t we know EXACTLY what’s in this bill before it’s signed? The Dems in the majority are also the bullies here.
Bullying is a non-partisan skill. In fact, Pelosi bullied the Progressive Caucus by discounting their ability to insist on the inclusion of anything in the bill. But my point is that the type of protest, which really isn’t protest, is thuggery and does a disservice to democracy. It just so happens that it is entirely driven by corporate-backed right wing groups. Left wingers don’t respond in kind.
As for the bill, HR 3200, I’ve provided links so any reasonable person can read it themselves. There are less voluminous summaries on the bill page. Since the bills won’t even be debated until September, your complaint that the bill will be voted on before being read is dishonest. Quit copying the talking points from others.
One benefit that I have noticed in recent months has been that bullying has achieved enough stature in our collective consciousness that labeling someone as a bully without giving examples (or giving twisted examples) has become sufficient to tag an opponent with in our national discourse. We have a long long way to go, but at least there is a perverse recognition of the devastation of bullying.
With regards to this current topic – well, I would have left my position 12 years earlier if I had portable insurance – or national healthcare.
The whole thing is posted on-line but I personally have abdicated that responsibility because I have learnt that my expertise in reading that dry legal material is lacking and I also do not have the health industry experience to translate to real situations. So I have been listening to the radio while going about my chores.
I have learnt to my disappointment, that the right-wing talk show hosts have all been speaking from the same talking points with mischaracterizations. The most obvious one is that people under age 35 CHOOSE to flit about from job to job and CHOOSE not to have insurance. Logically, people in that age bracket are marrying and starting families. They know that they need medical insurance for all of this. No mention is made of the fact that most of the jobs that these individuals flit to and from are not worth having – there is no career path or the employer schedules short work weeks every so often to make the employee ineligible for the insurance or that bullying tactics are commonly used to destroy the competition for the one position worth having.
The mischaracterizations amount to lying and I can’t help but wondering if the insurance companies are behind all of this. Ridiculous examples are allowed onto the shows as fact. For example, yesterday on the Sean Hannity radio show a caller stated that university graduate students are given a $100 per month stipend with which to purchase health insurance for themselves and their young families. There is NO health insurance available for a family for $100 per month. The caller stated that these graduate students CHOOSE to enroll on welfare insurance programs. This was allowed as fact to support the argument against.
I come from a position to dislike and distrust our current President yet every time I listen to him he makes sense – more sense than anybody else on this topic.
Meanwhile I can’t help but wonder if the auto-immune storm of disorders is a sign that the body is methodically and logically doing what the owner is enculturated not to do as a result of mobbing – commit suicide. If we had national healthcare there is a good chance that I would not be disabled now.
Recently President Obama made a comment that can be used against national healthcare. He basically stated that FedEx and UPS are doing fine financially whereas it is the government run postal service that is trouble. This can be used as a strong argument against government run healthcare.
We have had healthcare rationing for all of my adult life as far as I can tell. There was a huge case here in central Arizona about 20 years ago where a young mother developed kidney disease. She lost her job and was enrolled on the Arizona version of Medicaid. She was denied a kidney transplant because it was determined that the same monies could fix broken limbs on 10 illegal aliens, thus more people could be helped with that money. She died. And that was just a case that got in the news. These decisions are quietly made every day.
Today I listened to Rush Limbaugh state that the Obamacare plan would destroy civil society as we know it. He said that everybody would be fighting with everybody else for limited healthcare dollars. A few minutes later he was on a rant about how he does not need to lie on his show and he never does. Sorry Rush, I think that mischaracterization does amount to lying.
Due to talking heads like Rush the American people have become inured to the fact that mischaracterization has no business in our national discourse, or in our workplaces. Mischaracterization is a very common denominator in swaying the mob at work. Mischaracterization IS lying.
As far as Rush’s point goes, I would argue that civil society has been destroyed by the steady outsourcing of jobs, and the dumbsizing of those that remain. Frustrated, underpaid, unfulfilled workers resort to bullying and mobbing as a means to destroy the competition for the few jobs arguably worth having in any workplace. If people were able to work in their fields of choice for sustainable wages and could see a career path to work toward much of bullying/mobbing would naturally to some extent be contained to those truly deformed of heart and character. (By sustainable wages I mean those wages that do not just take care of yourself but are also enough to take care of your replacement in the workplace – your children.)
As a nation, even if we do manage to restore our work opportunities to what they once were we still have a huge job ahead of us to purge ourselves of this destructive behavior. However I must admit that I don’t think that the job opportunities were ever that great for all people during my life-time of Civil Rights and Equal Rights so I think it was a myth. Things were better for some, never optimal.
I always think of that WWII poster “Loose lips sink ships.” Only I think of it in terms of my workplace and the gossip. Many a career ship has been sunk due to the mischaracterization created in gossip.
Subsequently Rush went on to belittle Obama’s effort to create more affordable housing for people. He stated that we already have enough subsidized housing or section 8 housing. Once again I think that Obama is right even though I come from a conservative Obama-hating background. In recent years all of the apartments in my area have been converted to condominiums. So you have to qualify for financing just to live in an apartment anymore. The only ones that have not been converted are the high-end luxury apartments that generally cost 3X most peoples’ annual salary. So with the personal financial destruction that this economy has wrought I totally agree that we need more affordable housing. Once again, mischaracterization designed to appeal to people’s pocketbooks and sense of outrage and the people who are hurt by this are silent due to their homelessness or current living conditions.
As far as who in in control of our national media – the NeoCons or the Libs, well I was never too sure. Both sides had their points. In the last few weeks however, I have a much better idea as I am not finding reasonable people on the radio or TV. For years I have been personally ranting to bring back news stations. Just the news in concise form with special time allotted for “articles” and fair warning that the articles may contain “opinion” ( or mischaracterization. )
So I think that this mischaracterization is an all-American phenomenon that I see everywhere now. I am disappointed that more people cannot see through it and just say NO! To be fair, there is nowhere to go to address it except in this opportunity that I took here and with people in our personal lives. In my personal case, my efforts to stop the entertainment provided by mischaracterization contributed to my being targeted. In terms of current events, others may also be saying no but we have no place to address it and right now I want to scream loudly against this mischaracterization trend in our national discourse and of course, at work.
Mischaracterization serves no good purpose and anybody who needs to resort to it does not have your best options in mind for you.