The American people just don’t understand healthcare. We believe that the best way to control our healthcare and treatment is to hand it over to the greedy HMOs to create ‘capitalism,’ in this case the euphemistic snookering of American dollars. While those in Europe and the Great White North have healthcare paid by taxes and their governments--although flawed, surgery waiting lists and all-- they still give all people, not just the rich and the exceptionally poor, healthcare.
This spin of healthcare from the modern American media, that we would cause a socialist monopoly healthcare, is complete bunk. What they don’t understand is the fact that the private healthcare system can survive, but in opposition to and in competition with what would be a country-wide form of Medicare. We’ll see who wins; the private system no one who doesn’t have healthcare can afford anyway, and the public system that would already be paid for via taxes. It’s win-win: the people that don’t have healthcare can afford it, and the rich will be able to get their plastic surgery covered by their medical plan.
And we wouldn’t have to raise taxes either; four to five percent of our tax dollars are going to Medicare and Medicaid combined; three percent of our tax dollars towards Medicare alone. Raise that number, taking any pork barrel spending out of our budget, and you have enough money to fund this.
That’s what we can do about healthcare. Of course, I did this post today to coincide with the new Michael Moore documentary, Sicko. Click the link below for a review from the Washington Post. To respond to this post(and we love responses, don’t we?), e-mail us at Mailbag.Notepad@gmail.com, or send us a comment right here on the site. Plans for a forum will come eventually on this and many more topics.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=cityguide/profile&id=1137198&categories=Movies&nm=1&referrer=email&referrer=email&referrer=email
29 June 2007
28 June 2007
On the Modern American Media
This week, dozens died in Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain changed heads of state, hundreds died in Darfur, and the Vice President has declared himself a member of neither the executive nor the legislative branch, while still somehow being part of the Constitutional framework.
But the main stories were the iPhone and Paris Hilton getting out of prison.
This is the plight of the modern American media-the ‘newstainment’, 24-hour news cycle owned by corporations instead of people, making it not a medium of important information, but a way for the benefit of ratings.
40 years ago, network stations never cared about ratings, but their modus operandi was for quality journalism. You had news anchors such as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and, a decade or two later, the Big Three anchors-Rather, Brokaw, and the late Peter Jennings. You had Bob Woodard in his prime at the Washington Post. You had news that wasn’t terribly editorialized, somewhere between the truth and yellow journalism. However, you don’t get quality journalism anymore; what do you get when you watch TV news, the most influential and outreaching medium, now? You get 5 minutes of actual news-today, generally 2008 election coverage, and 20 minutes of human interest stories.
And don’t even get me started on the Big 5 cable news networks, the ‘24-hour’ networks: MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, CNN Headline News, and Fox News. They’re really a combination of almost all government spin in prime time evening hours, with entertainment news in the other parts of the day. For example, during the Paris Hilton jailing, on MSNBC there was a ‘Paris Watch’ split-screen about 12 to 13 hours of the day. Tucker Carlson, who used to be a right-wing spinster on CNN’s Crossfire, and Joe Scarborough, a former Congressman(R-FL) who now has his own eponymous Country, were tracking Paris, as well. Somewhat respected bodies of information have now stooped to entertainment news. You let the bow tie a little too loose, Tucker. Joe, the sponsors must have gotten to you, taking your brain prisoner.
Even PBS, the broadcasting system paid for by our tax dollars, is in trouble. Recently, the conservatives in the Republican Party took control of PBS, and also took Bill Moyers, a nonpartisan journalist, off his show, NOW, after one story that angered them. They then put Moyers on a new show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, that has lesser journalistic leeway, for they would not like to see but a dent into their credibility. NOW today is a soapbox for the Republican ‘small-government’ movement.
Finally, there are 6 corporations controlling almost all of our Audio, Video, and Print Media: News Corporation, GE, Disney, Clear Channel, Time Warner and Tribune. This is like the Teddy Roosevelt-era trusts that he tried to bust, like Rockefeller and Carnegie revisited! While they preach ‘the news,’ they spew a concoction of little news, much of which is filtered to meet the corporations’ needs, entertainment, and human interest.
Here’s what we can do to make journalism what it ought to be in the States:
• Bust the trusts of the news networks.
• Make C-SPAN a network on “free television”, not cable.
• Make PBS a station controlled not directly by government, but controlled indirectly by the Smithsonian.
But the main stories were the iPhone and Paris Hilton getting out of prison.
This is the plight of the modern American media-the ‘newstainment’, 24-hour news cycle owned by corporations instead of people, making it not a medium of important information, but a way for the benefit of ratings.
40 years ago, network stations never cared about ratings, but their modus operandi was for quality journalism. You had news anchors such as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and, a decade or two later, the Big Three anchors-Rather, Brokaw, and the late Peter Jennings. You had Bob Woodard in his prime at the Washington Post. You had news that wasn’t terribly editorialized, somewhere between the truth and yellow journalism. However, you don’t get quality journalism anymore; what do you get when you watch TV news, the most influential and outreaching medium, now? You get 5 minutes of actual news-today, generally 2008 election coverage, and 20 minutes of human interest stories.
And don’t even get me started on the Big 5 cable news networks, the ‘24-hour’ networks: MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, CNN Headline News, and Fox News. They’re really a combination of almost all government spin in prime time evening hours, with entertainment news in the other parts of the day. For example, during the Paris Hilton jailing, on MSNBC there was a ‘Paris Watch’ split-screen about 12 to 13 hours of the day. Tucker Carlson, who used to be a right-wing spinster on CNN’s Crossfire, and Joe Scarborough, a former Congressman(R-FL) who now has his own eponymous Country, were tracking Paris, as well. Somewhat respected bodies of information have now stooped to entertainment news. You let the bow tie a little too loose, Tucker. Joe, the sponsors must have gotten to you, taking your brain prisoner.
Even PBS, the broadcasting system paid for by our tax dollars, is in trouble. Recently, the conservatives in the Republican Party took control of PBS, and also took Bill Moyers, a nonpartisan journalist, off his show, NOW, after one story that angered them. They then put Moyers on a new show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, that has lesser journalistic leeway, for they would not like to see but a dent into their credibility. NOW today is a soapbox for the Republican ‘small-government’ movement.
Finally, there are 6 corporations controlling almost all of our Audio, Video, and Print Media: News Corporation, GE, Disney, Clear Channel, Time Warner and Tribune. This is like the Teddy Roosevelt-era trusts that he tried to bust, like Rockefeller and Carnegie revisited! While they preach ‘the news,’ they spew a concoction of little news, much of which is filtered to meet the corporations’ needs, entertainment, and human interest.
Here’s what we can do to make journalism what it ought to be in the States:
• Bust the trusts of the news networks.
• Make C-SPAN a network on “free television”, not cable.
• Make PBS a station controlled not directly by government, but controlled indirectly by the Smithsonian.
On 'Counterterrorism': The Interactive Debate
Hello all. Let's see that those of you reading are still alive with a fun little interactivity. Anyone who disagrees with me on the topic is graciously invited to debate me. E-mail the site at Mailbag.Notepad@gmail.com and we will see what time is right for you.
Speak your mind!
Speak your mind!
On 'Counterterrorism'
It is fitting that, while we are fighting a proxy-"War on Terror" in Iraq, the amount of terrorist threats against the US has totalled zero and that we have had a greater amount of people killed by being stomped on by an elephant than that of those killed in terrorist attacks emenating from Iraq. This is just a microcosm of how overtly inefficient, inhumane and unconstitutional, the most of this in the history of the democratic system, our counterterrorism system is.
Never good, it is, for the Geneva Convention, one of
the most important documents in our history, a document we as a nation signed, to be called quaint and insignificant. But that is what our current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, did as White House counsel. Because of this, we have been practicing torture instead of interrogation; not getting what we should hear, nor what is the truth, but what we want to hear. We have even, instead of correctly
and humanely interrogating our captives, sending them to countries such as Syria and Saudi Arabia so we can torture them by any means possible. When will this administration see that we signed a UN document, which, as a founding
nation of the UN, must uphold? When will our Attorneys General and President see that waterboarding is not what John Kerry did in 2004, nor a 'dunk in the water'? When will this administration and Cabinet see they are not a collective incarnation of Jack Bauer?
But it is not just this that shows the administration's ineptitude towards counterintelligence. Through a series of signing statements, executive orders, and the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA can now check our library accounts, our mail(both electronic and of the 'snail' variety), our phone calls, and even what you're renting from your local Blockbuster. Do we, as an American society, want an
Orwellian-like NSA, CIA, DOD, and Presidency, who fight a continuous proxy-war while maintaining the ever-present shadow of Big Brother?
The counterterrorism system is a threat to everyone's civil liberties, everyone's safety, everyone's inalienable rights, as written by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and as upheld by all 41 Presidents of the United States. Not only that, it does Al-Qaida's job for them; it doesn't stop terrorism, it creates it tenfold.
Never good, it is, for the Geneva Convention, one of
the most important documents in our history, a document we as a nation signed, to be called quaint and insignificant. But that is what our current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, did as White House counsel. Because of this, we have been practicing torture instead of interrogation; not getting what we should hear, nor what is the truth, but what we want to hear. We have even, instead of correctly
and humanely interrogating our captives, sending them to countries such as Syria and Saudi Arabia so we can torture them by any means possible. When will this administration see that we signed a UN document, which, as a founding
nation of the UN, must uphold? When will our Attorneys General and President see that waterboarding is not what John Kerry did in 2004, nor a 'dunk in the water'? When will this administration and Cabinet see they are not a collective incarnation of Jack Bauer?
But it is not just this that shows the administration's ineptitude towards counterintelligence. Through a series of signing statements, executive orders, and the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA can now check our library accounts, our mail(both electronic and of the 'snail' variety), our phone calls, and even what you're renting from your local Blockbuster. Do we, as an American society, want an
Orwellian-like NSA, CIA, DOD, and Presidency, who fight a continuous proxy-war while maintaining the ever-present shadow of Big Brother?
The counterterrorism system is a threat to everyone's civil liberties, everyone's safety, everyone's inalienable rights, as written by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and as upheld by all 41 Presidents of the United States. Not only that, it does Al-Qaida's job for them; it doesn't stop terrorism, it creates it tenfold.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
