PRESS RELEASE
Congressmen Begin to Take a Stand
On D.C. General Hospital
This release was issued by FDR-PAC on May 12, 2001.
In response to a national and international campaign to save D.C. General Hospital, the capital's only public hospital, sitting Representatives and Senators of the U.S. Congress have begun to take a stand, by adding their names to a petition calling for keeping the hospital open, and restored to its full operational capability. The first two to do so are Senator Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) and Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.).
The petition, launched in February by FDR-PAC, the multi-candidate political action committee led by associates of Lyndon LaRouche, has already garnered the signatures of approximately 600 citizens, including 85 current and former state legislators, 150 trade unionists and activists from 40 states plus the District of Columbia, and numerous former Congressmen and Administration officials. It demands that D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and the Congress as a whole, act to defend the General Welfare, as FDR did, by saving the hospital, or face the Nazification of America. It also stresses the danger of carrying out a hospital shutdown in the midst of the current depression collapse, and wave of epidemic disease.
The most notable signers so far, outside Congress, are former Senator George McGovern; former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders; John Dow, former Congressman, Grandview, N.Y.; Robert J. Cornell, former Congressman, Professor of History, St. Norbert College, Depere, Wi.; Clair Callan, former Congressman, Fairbury, Ne.; Cornelius Gallagher, former Congressman, New Jersey, and James R. Mann, former Congressman, Greenville, S.C.
In the immediate weeks ahead, FDR-PAC and other concerned citizens will be demanding that each and every member of Congress take a stand on the vital issue of the fate of D.C. General Hospital. As of this writing, the hospital's vital functions are being shut down, and the death toll among those who cannot get emergency treatment there is beginning to rise.
Contrary to widespread misinformation, spread especially by KKK-Katy Graham's Washington Post, the actions of the bankers' group called the D.C. Financial Control Board, in handing the public hospital over to private interests April 30, are not only illegal, but totally reversible by the Congress, which can override any legislation enacted by the Control Board.
