By now, we’ve all seen the angry “regular Americans” who are rising up to resist health-care reform. They are demonstrating loudly at town hall meetings. They are holding rallies. They are e-mailing all their friends and family about the absolute horrors that will accompany any government-run program of Obama-Care.

Who are these people? Where did they come from? Is this really how Americans feel about health-care reform?

I started digging a little into the organizing strategy behind this “grassroots” movement and found … wait for it … Ralph Reed!

You remember Ralph from the Christian Coalition, right? He was the political strategist for the Far-Right Republican wing and handed the political Far Right a “faith-based” cover for their political agenda. More recently, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia in 2006 but lost due his involvement in the Abramoff Indian gaming and Congressional bribery scandal. In 1997, Ralph started Century Strategies, a political consulting firm for Republican candidates and causes. His clients have included Enron, online gambling companies, Indian gambling firms, and the cable industry to fight decency standards proposed in Congress.

So, when Far-Right political operatives and insurance industry giants wanted to defeat major health-care reform, who did they call? Their old buddy Ralph Reed.

Ralph’s friend, and former Century Strategies’ business exec, Tim Phillips, was tasked to head up Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing PR firm funded primarily by Koch Industries (global energy firm that runs coal plants, agribusiness, major oil refineries, etc. Papa Koch was a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, according to BusinessWeek). AFP is part of a handful of corporate industry front-groups that are leading the propaganda campaign against health-care reform. AFP’s health-care targeted subsidiary is called Patients First. PF is launching bus tours against health-care reform right now. It’s AFP who brought you “Joe the Plumber,” the “Drill, Baby, Drill” rallies, the “tea-bagging parties” (ahem), and most recently the “Survivor” TV ad with the Canadian woman who had to sneak into the U.S. to get her cancer treated, because “in Canada, treatment is delayed or denied.” Wrong.

Here are a few of the groups: Club for Growth is a right-wing lobbying organization that represents the Wall Street elite. RecessRally.com is the network getting people out to the town hall meetings. It’s a subsidiary of the American Liberty Alliance, whose executive director is Eric Odom, a Far-Right media strategist and president of Strategic Activism, his online political strategizing company. RecessRally is networked with American Majority, a right-wing non-profit that is staffed primarily with conservative Christians who came out of the Bush administration and the Generation Joshua project (a Christian youth league training students in conservative activism).

So, that’s a rough roundup of who’s leading the so-called “populist uprising.” As Rachel Maddow said in her excellent expose, “Corporate interests do this ‘fake grassroots’ movement as an industry. This is a professional PR campaign to line their own pockets. It is professional, corporate-funded Republican PR  and should be named and reported as such.”

I recommend reading Lee Fang’s article “Tim Phillips, The Man Behind The ‘Americans For Prosperity’ Corporate Front Group Factory.” And, in the interest of full disclosure, Fang works for the Center for American Progress, a think-tank full of operatives for the Dems. But Lee is a really good researcher. Here’s a bit of his article:

The rate at which the Koch Industries funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) churns out front groups to promote its right-wing corporate agenda sets the organization out among similar conservative “think tanks.” This week, AFP created their latest front group called “Patients United Now,” an entity set up to defeat health care reform. Patients United follows a familiar pattern AFP has used for their other front groups: create a new stand alone website, fill it with lines like “We are people just like you” to give the site a grassroots feel, and then use the new group to recruit supporters and run deceptive advertisements attacking reform.

Access to adequate health care is a human right. Human rights generally are antagonistic to corporate interests. As people of faith we are called to stand up for human dignity and human rights. Now would be a good time to go ahead and shine the Light on these corporate con artists, especially the one’s masquerading as Christians.

Rose Marie Berger, an associate editor at Sojourners, blogs at www.rosemarieberger.com.

To learn more about health-care reform, click here to visit Sojourners’ Health-Care Resources Web page.