angry mobs in insurance company executives' yards sounds like just what the doctor ordered to me. especially when they are willing to "live in a walled off world where they are never confronted..."

if i should die due to a lack of access to health care, lay my body down in one of these fuckers' driveways.

What are we really discussing here? Some nebulous term like "Medicare for All"? Or are we saying that morally, each and every one of us, as human beings, deserve health care? Isn't that personal? Isn't it deeply personal to those who are being robbed of their health, and their families destroyed?

But we should never forget we are dealing with human beings.

I think the more important lesson here is that *they* should never be allowed to forget they are dealing with human beings.
If an embarrasing confrontation at the "walled off retreat" is what it takes to get traction...

what happens when an angry mob of teabaggers descend on Donna Smith's private home? You see the problem with this.

I don't think that denial of health care is any more personal than someone lynching your son. But so far as I know civil rights volunteers never staged demonstrations in front of private homes.

I think it is extremely important to keep our dignity if we are to expose AHIP as greedy parasites. I think we should protest at their offices, trade associations, conferences, and any other place of business, but private homes should be off limits.

I don't have an issue with "making it personal" but let this be done in public settings. I also think the idea of trade shows and conferences is excellent, especially in the DC area, and to this I would add think tanks.

http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/

from Ralphbon at, well, some other site. ;)

But the point is that civil rights demonstrators would have been shot if they even attempted to go into white neighborhoods. Either that or photos would have been taken, and demonstrators targeted for rape or murder later. Why is it so easy to overlook that the fighters for racial equality faced real violent response?

The comparison above between the risks they took and the risks health-care demonstrators face now is borderline insulting. What demonstrators face -- should their actions be classified as terrorist -- is, yes, possibly worse on the reputational scale. Loss of credit rating/indefinite imprisonment/public censure -- but it's nothing compared to being lynched and castrated. State and Federal authorities had to respond to non-violent protests with positive action only after their public image was tarnished. There's no possibility of this happening to health-care reformers, yet, until the economy gets so bad that the drawbridges to gated communities go up.

*That's* the problem with limiting demos to "public" settings, and why despite my criticism above I agree that the fight has to go beyond publically-approved places. Those places are now sanitized against any impact; protests are ignored beyond the inconvenience they cause with traffic. Technically, there are some public spaces left, but practically any space deemed as requiring heightened security by the state immediately becomes privately-controlled and publicly-surveilled.

Those "trade shows and conferences" as potential protest sites? Have one health care company with a Federal contract attend, and it can justifiably call upon Homeland Security intervention when facing a DFH with a placard. Also, municipalities can control who they allow in their convention centers; they probably offer exhibitors this perk in their event contracts.

This is how bad it has gotten: We assume we still have a commons where we can be heard, but that frontier has finally been closed up.

Their annual conference was picked in 2008 and the same day there were smaller demonstrations at insurance company HQs all across the country. There was no inappropriate police conduct that I know of.

I don't mean to suggest that in going up against health insurance parasites we are up against anything like Jim Crow. It was indeed and entire system based on oppression. I only mean to suggest that their methods were successful and we should learn from that.

Believe me, if you work for AHIP, it is very wearying to have to walk past continued demonstrations of people accusing you of killing people. Even if is the same six people once a week, it is very bad for morale.

The executives of the private health insurance industry reap billions of dollars in profits by denying Americans health care at vital times, often with little justification. They profit off of death. Their mansions are built and bought with blood money in the most literal sense.

Anyone who would enter this industry and spend enough time in it to rise to an executive position knows what they're involved in. They have clearly decided that human life means little to them. In my eyes, that means they've given up their right to the respect that human beings typically accord each other.

I'll continue to respect health insurance executives in the most general sense- I respect them insofar as I respect and honor all human life and choose to preserve rather than destroy it. But I see no reason to accord them anything more. They've placed themselves beyond the reach of my respect.

My first reaction to the demonstrations at the CEO's home was the image of the anti-abortion crowd picketing medical providers' homes. After all, they believe that they're doing it to save lives (they're deluded; they're doing it to insure that bad women are punished for sex, but self-justifying beliefs can be pretty strong). It's fighting a philosophical and public policy battle through personal intimidation.

But then, medical providers don't move in the kind of bubble that a $20 million a year CEO moves in. I don't see the philosophical or policy issue involved in refusing to provide contracted benefits, especially when the result can be death. In a small town or community setting, when the people you're trying to influence have to see you on a regular basis, I'd say hitting their houses is off limits. But when he and his peers live and move behind palace walls while his flunkies put the screws to the peasants, I tend to come down on "Put the pressure on where you can."

No, nobody thinks of himself as evil. But they can do very self-interested, evil things for their own comfort as long as they are protected from any uncomfortable opposition.

I hadn't thought about this precise topic before but I'm inclined to agree with DCB on this.

This issue, for me, isn't really about the actions of the CEOs or how "deserving" they are or what "respect" they are owed. For the sake of argument, I'm willing to say 100% deserving and zero amount respect.

"Effectiveness" might not be the right standard, either, especially if other methods work as well (as shown by DCB's example of demonstrations having to do with South Africa), and, arguably, even if they don't.

The issue is about what values and standards of the protesters and their supporters (by extension, "us") adhere to, not whether the reprehensibility of the targets warrant some possibly lower standard. At the end of the day we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

(The other thing is who exactly the target is here. Complaining to a scorpion about him going around stinging people is a little aside the point—that's what scorpions do. It's better to clear the place of scorpions. So, if the protests are actually to put pressure on United Health to stop raking in huge profits—which is what corporations do, unless regulated—the protests are, IMO, somewhat misdirected. If the protests are to dramatize for the public or lawmakers the high profits of the private insurers in order to regulate them, or better, legislate them out of the business of insuring basic health care through a single payer system, that can be done just as easily at a place other than the CEO's home, although Stephen Helmsley's mansion probably makes a nice backdrop. Given that it's apparently an HCAN protest, the misdirection seems almost calculated—e.g., "if we could only convince these private insurers not to profit so much, everything (or some things) would be resolved.")

The fight against Apartheid was not always so non-violent. Which isn't to say that I disagree with DCB, just that the fight against Apartheid might not be the best model given that there was a lot more going on there than protests.

To get out a message. I was talking about this issue over at Digby where part of the problem is that this event wasn't even covered by the press at all. So I addressed the issue of one goal of a protest, to get a media to pay attention and get a message out.

Sometimes if you want to get a message out to the media you actually don't even have to bring all the bodies!

For example how many times have we seen 150,000 people at an anti-war protest with a 60 second TV spot. The news crew would shoot video of the 150,000 and they would devote 20 seconds to the 15 pro-war protesters there.

So those 15 people got 1/3 of your story and they didn't have to mobilize 150,000 people. Sometimes the proportions on the news are 50/50 in the stories when the actual support is 80/20. (Not to mention getting 150,000 vs 15 people out of their houses)

Remember, most of the political stories are X vs. Y. to get their attention we need to create the narrative for them. If we don't they will create it for us.

So if I was in charge of that HCAN story instead of doing an event at his house I would work another angle, health care and privacy. Instead of asking the reporters to go out to see them at his house, send them Google street view links to his house and Google street view links to the homes of the people screwed by his system. Another alternative? Look for and expose some bizarre way they spend their money that is just insane and/or illegal.

Third alternative? Put the CEO on the defensive against this problem with his board of directors, NOT against the people who he is supposed to care about but doesn't. He doesn't care about patients, he cares about his stock price. What can you do to piss off the stock holders which might impact his stock price? Or also what pleases his stock holders that would make a normal person vomit? Then give that story to the media.

Also think about visuals. Just how strong are your visuals for TV? That sounded kind of static. Where is the movement? This is TV people.
Protests can be creative and make a point, but a striking visual (remember the Ice David with vodka flowing out of his Penis)

Can you give them some interesting Audio? Remember the "Burn Grandma Millie Burn?" of Enron? Think about how damning that was.

There were no protests, no signs, just using their own words to incriminate them.

You can use communications as if you are fighting a war, and if the other side is huge and slow moving you act fact and creative. Use their tools against them, co-opt their organizations.

In San Francisco, I let the media know about the crazy things the organizer has said in the past so that if they interview him they will know about all the other crazy things he said. I also used the violent comments of tea party protesters to warn their insurance carriers at the radio stations. This will make them think twice before they lend their support to these crazy protesters who have violently attacked others in the past.

This post is an emotional appeal and doesn't have any logic to it. It is very much in keeping with the imperial beltway phrase "off the table" [Pelosi, Reid....& DCB ?]

The South African comparison is ludicrous, the offenses were occurring in South Africa and the response was not anywhere near as nice. Collaborators in South Africa were being burned in public, it was called "necklacing" and was the most brutal form of murder imaginable, I can't believe you would you would honestly compare the two situations, nothing could be more different, both in context and tactics. In this country there was Martin & Malcolm, good cop, bad cop. BTW, MLK, clearly despised people who argued as you do. If you argue with me on this point, I have a number of quotes waiting for you.

1] These protests seem to comport with the Constitutions right to assemble [read, our founding fathers would approve].

2] These corporate officers are directly responsible for at least 48,000 deaths a year...not counting deaths where insurance companies illegally practice medicine, which has cost a number of my friends there lives. What do you have to do to draw protesters to your house...Kill 6,000,000 people?

3] The right wing comes to peoples home and does more than protest, it shoots them...not in the distant past, but as recently as a few weeks ago...Since you don't have a clue, see Abortion Providers.

4] There is nothing I know that will do more to turn a soul from the devil than the forced acknowledgment of their sins by their neighbors. These protesters are helping to save souls from oblivion.

5] Yes, they will move to walled off neighborhoods with private police...and that is where the un-repentant devils belong....and oh yes, I think it's perfectly admissible to protest outside the gates of hell if it come to that.

it is an imprecise comparison. Randall Robinson of TransAfrica was always careful to say that his organization was in solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement in SA. He was always careful to say it was their struggle. Indeed, much of it was not very nice.

But the Free South Africa Movement in this country, whose narrow purpose was to end American collaboration with aparthied (as distinct from ending apartheid itself, which was a SA responsibility) was always conducted with dignity.

As for the media, we are on our own. We need to take cameras, make our own videos. put them on YouTube and do our best to promote them. As documented elsewhere, our news media has all the corrupt corporate relationships with health insurance parasites, PhRMA, etc.

The HCAN demostrations are a very encouraging sign.