Thursday, October 29, 2009

Motives behind Corporate Whore's Corporate Whoring Remain Unclear

In case you were wondering who was excited about Joe Lieberman's douchery...

(image via Thinkprogress)

Not that this is surprising, it would just be nice if the press made this the focus of their coverage rather than going along with his plea for attention. Or they could have gone with this angle:

Following Lieberman's threat to filibuster a public option, every paper played up the story of how the "centrists" are now rebelling. Watch out, the centrists are coming! "Centrists unsure about Reid's public option," the Washington Post reported Wednesday. Let's get real. These holdouts are not centrist Democrats; they are corporate Democrats, which should be an oxymoron. They'll do whatever the healthcare industry wants and use their red state constituents as an excuse to do so. Only Lieberman is from Connecticut, one of the bluest states in the country. So what's his excuse?

Well, some rather large insurance companies reside in Connecticut and, as Joe Conason points out, Lieberman's wife just so happens to have been a drug industry lobbyist for Hill & Knowlton. Conason reports:

"Among Hill & Knowlton's clients when Mrs. Lieberman signed on with the firm last year was GlaxoSmithKline, the huge British-based drug company that makes vaccines along with many other drugs. As I noted in July, Sen. Lieberman introduced a bill in April 2005 (the month after his wife joined Hill & Knowlton) that would award billions of dollars in new "incentives" to companies like GlaxoSmithKline to persuade them to make more new vaccines. Under the legislation, known as Bioshield II, the cost to consumers and governments would be astronomical, but for Lieberman and his Republican cosponsors, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the results would be worth every penny. Using the war on terror as their ideological backdrop, the pharma-friendly senators sought to win patent extensions on products that have nothing to do with preparations against terrorist attack or natural disaster."

Calling these people "centrists" has always been one of my pet peeves. While the media can't call them whores or douche bags like some assholes do, pointing out extremely obvious conflicts of interest would be nice.

1 comment:

  1. pfft, this is just the LIEBERAL MEDIA providing cover for another democrat... er, for another CONNECTICUT FOR LIEBERMANER, that is.

    ReplyDelete