Opinion
The corporate media in the United States are ignoring valid news stories, based on university quality research. It appears that certain topics are simply forbidden inside the mainstream corporate media today. To openly cover these news stories would stir up questions regarding “inconvenient truths” that many in the US power structure want to avoid.
For example, current research indicates that public schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades.
According to a new Civil Rights report, published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US.
Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement 40 years ago. Millions of non-white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate.
The most severe segregation in public schools occurs in the Western states, including California – not in the South, as many people believe.
Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum.
Other taboo stories include civilian death rates in Iraq and questions on 9/11.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and a professional survey company in Great Britain, Opinion Research Business (ORB) report that the United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since our invasion six and half years ago.
In a January 2008 report, ORB reported that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003 … We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000.”
A 2006 Johns Hopkins study confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces. Iraqi civilian death levels in the summer of 2009 likely now exceed 1.2 million.
Former Brigham Young University physics professor Dr. Steven E. Jones and some 700 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering and physics have now concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according to laws of physics.
Especially troubling is the collapse of WTC 7, a 47-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint” in 6.6 seconds in the same manner as a controlled demolition.
To support this theory, Jones and eight other scientists conducted chemical research on the dust from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, 2009.
The authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.”
Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.
Each of these taboo news stories is based on solid scholarly research. These stories represent the failure of the corporate media in the US to keep the American people democratically informed on important issues. This lack of coverage of critical and potentially political news stories is what many thousands of people in the US are now calling a Truth Emergency.
Political activists at all levels must support full news transparency as an important component of building a non-exploitative world based on democracy, truthfulness, and human rights.
Peter Phillips is Professor Sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/ and the former director of Project Censored http://www.projectcensored.org/. Daily non-corporate independent news is now online at: http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/13160-validated-independent-news .
- Details
- Written by: Peter Phillips
There are a lot of questions about the health care bill in Congress. Here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about the bill that passed the Ways and Means Committee.
Question: Has Congressman Thompson read the bill?
Answer: I have read and was involved in drafting the bill I voted on. For weeks before the introduction of H.R. 3200, members of the Ways and Means Committee, myself included, met daily to go through the bill line by line and section by section. As a group, we spent 86 hours going over this legislation.
Question: Will health reform force all Americans out of their private insurance plans and into a one-size-fits-all government plan?
Answer: No. H.R. 3200 builds on the current system of employer-based coverage, it doesn’t replace it. If you are happy with your current plan, you can keep it. H.R. 3200 includes a public plan that individuals will have the option of purchasing, along with a variety of other private plans. This public plan will be required to be financially self-sustaining, as private plans are, covering its costs through premiums and co-pays.
Question: Does page 16 of the bill require me to join the public plan if I lose my private insurance coverage?
Answer: No one will be required to join the public plan. If you lose your insurance, you will be able to shop for a new plan at an online exchange that includes information on all insurance options. This exchange will bring together information that is currently scattered giving consumers the opportunity to quickly and effectively compare plans to make informed decisions about what coverage works best for them. The provision on page 16 merely requires individuals joining a private insurance plan after 2013 to do so through the exchange.
Question: Are members of Congress exempt from changes that are being proposed for the rest of the country?
Answer: No. Members of Congress receive the same health care options as other federal employees, with a choice of plans from private insurers that vary by benefits, premiums and co-pays. This legislation would affect federal employees in the same ways that it affects everyone else who gets their health insurance through their employer.
Question: Will proposed legislation provide free health care to illegal immigrants?
Answer: No. Section 246 of H.R. 3200 explicitly prohibits the payment of affordability credits designed to help low and moderate incomes families purchase insurance to anyone who is not lawfully present in the United States.
Question: Will all small businesses be forced to provide coverage to their employees?
Answer: This bill exempts small businesses with a payroll of less than $250,000 from the requirement to provide health insurance for their workers. Businesses with payrolls above $250,000 that do not provide coverage will be charged a payroll tax that will gradually increase with the size of their payroll. The current version of the bill has this tax will start at 2 percent for payrolls above $250,000 and increase to a maximum of 8 percent for payrolls above $400,000, however, there are currently discussions to raise this exemption to $500,000. Proceeds from this tax will go to offset the cost of coverage for individuals purchasing insurance through the exchange. Small businesses that opt to offer insurance will receive tax credits to offset the cost of insurance.
Question: What does this bill do to stop fraud and abuse in Medicare?
Answer: This bill strengthens existing compliance and enforcement tools for Medicare, increases funding to support these efforts and creates new, tougher penalties for individuals who submit false claims or applications to Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that for every $1 we invest in fighting waste fraud and abuse we will produce $1.75 in savings.
Question: Can our nation afford health care reform?
Answer: The truth is that the rising cost of health care for all Americans is a problem that will not fix itself and that we can’t afford to not address. Today, our nation spends one out of every $6 we earn on health care. If we don’t take action to slow the increase in costs, within a decade we will spend one out of every $5 on health care, and within 30 years this will rise to one in every $3. These facts make it clear, the longer we wait, the more it will cost to fix our broken health care system.
Question: How much will this bill cost?
Answer: There is no question that there will be significant costs to implement this legislation. The CBO’s latest estimate puts the price tag at $1.042 trillion over 10 years. Here is how we are going to pay for the bill. First, we are going to address inefficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid and crack down on fraud, waste and abuse in these programs to save $465 billion over the next ten years. Second, we will need to raise $583 billion in revenues to cover the rest of the cost. The Ways and Means Committee proposes to do this through a surcharge on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of income earners, who have enjoyed a tremendous advantage for the last eight years because of the Bush tax cuts (the average reduction in federal taxes for the top 1 percent in these tax cuts was $44,622). The Senate is considering other ways to raise these funds, and it is unclear how this issue will be dealt with in the final bill.
Question: Will this plan lead to rationing of health care? Will Congress be legislating what care my doctor can or must give me?
Answer: No. I believe that medical decisions should be left between patients and their doctors. Section 1401 explicitly forbids any studies or research called for in H.R. 3200 from being used to either mandate or deny care to a patient in any public or private plan. This research will gather data about what procedures are most effective to give doctors more information to consider when treating patients, not to replace your doctor’s judgment with that of a bureaucrat from a private insurer or the government. The bill protects the ability of doctors to do what they think is necessary to help their patients without having to constantly worry about whether they will be reimbursed by an insurance company, which is why this bill has earned the strong support of the American Medical Association.
Question: Why is this bill being “rushed” through Congress?
Answer: Universal health care was first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. President Harry Truman called for it in 1945. Former Representative John Dingell Sr. introduced a bill to provide universal health care in 1947 and his son, Representative John Dingell Jr., has reintroduced a bill every Congress since 1955. So, this is not a new issue and it was supported by both President Obama and Sen. McCain in the November presidential election. This particular legislation has been crafted, reviewed and revised repeatedly since the 111th Congress began, and it has been changed to reflect the considerable input from those in the health care community, members on both sides of the aisle and constituents. This bill is not being rushed – it is long overdue.
Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) represents Lake County in the US House of Representatives.
- Details
- Written by: Congressman Mike Thompson
How to resolve AdBlock issue?