PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The brackets are set for the big dance - the dance around tax responsibility. Most of the teams are in the bottom bracket. In this league, the lowest score wins.

Outside the stadium our nation's kids and seniors and low-income mothers may be dealing with food and housing cuts, but on the corporate playing floor new low-tax records are being set again this year. Just as this is a golden age for sports, this is also, as noted by the New York Times, "a golden age for corporate profits."

Corporations have simply stopped paying their taxes, perhaps using the 2008 recession as an excuse to plead hardship, but then never restoring their tax obligations when business got better. The facts are indisputable. For over 20 years, from 1987 to 2008, corporations paid an average of 22.5% in federal taxes. Since the recession, this has dropped to 10% -- even though their profits have doubled in less than ten years.

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT               

It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

The free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said "We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money."

With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.

(Photo: Cavin)

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Strategies used by the Church to cover up its worldwide sexual abuse scandal included: the Vatican's refusal to cooperate with civil authorities; officially sanctioned priest shifting; the destruction of evidence; punishing whistle-blowers and rewarding enablers; and, blaming the victims.

Last week, the eyes of the world were on Pope Benedict XVI – who apparently expects to be known as Pope Emeritus – as he left the Vatican by helicopter to spend the final hours of what many would characterize as his scandal-dogged papacy, at the papal summer retreat. According to The New York Times, "Onlookers in St. Peter's Square cheered, church bells rang and Romans stood on rooftops to wave flags as he flew by."

To the thousands of survivors of the Roman Catholic Church's worldwide sexual abuse scandals, however, there was little to cheer about.

A Philadelphia Grand Jury report put the long-lived scandal in unambiguous terms: By sexual abuse, "We mean rape. Boys who were raped orally, boys who were raped anally, girls who were raped vaginally. But even those victims whose physical abuse did not include actual rape – those who were subjected to fondling, to masturbation, to pornography – suffered psychological abuse that scarred their lives and sapped the faith in which they had been raised."

Aftershocks from the decades-long sexual abuse scandal continue to reverberate, even as cardinals gather to choose the next pope. As the Times reported, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Britain's senior Roman Catholic cleric, "said he would not participate in the conclave, after having been accused of 'inappropriate acts' with several priests, charges that he denies." Other cardinals, including some from the United States have also come under fire.

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Steven Brill's article in Time Magazine about the cost of private health care is likely to make most of his readers very angry. Angry about the prices we pay, about the lives that are devastated, and about the fact that we're one of the few developed countries without adequate health care for its citizens.

Economists have told us that the profit motive of privatization comes with an "invisible hand" that automatically corrects inequities in the market. It hasn't worked that way for health care. The personal stories recounted below, and some additional facts to complement them, make it clear that an essential human need has been turned into a product that benefits a few people at the expense of many others.


$15,000 for Blood Tests

Brill's article begins with the story of a 42-year-old Ohio man named Sean Recchi, who traveled to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He and his wife Stephanie had paid $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, for insurance that covered $2,000 per day of hospital costs. His financial troubles started when MD Anderson told him, "We don't take that kind of discount insurance."

But he had to go to the hospital. His wife recalled that he was "sweating and shaking with chills and pains. He had a large mass in his chest that was..growing. He was panicked."

Stephanie asked her mother to write a check for $48,900.

Sean waited for 90 minutes while the hospital confirmed that the check had cleared. He was also required to advance MD Anderson $7,500 from his credit card. The total cost for the initial treatment and chemotherapy was $83,900, including a $15,000 charge for lab tests for which a Medicare patient would have paid a few hundred dollars, $283 for an x-ray that Medicare categorizes as a $20 charge, and $1.50 for a generic version of a Tylenol pill.

ERIC ZUESSE FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT                   

The U.S. State Department’s “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement Keystone XL Project”  released on Friday evening, makes no mention of the impact on the world’s climate that would result from construction of the proposed Pipeline.

The study does discuss “Climate Change Impacts on the Proposed Project,” but not the proposed project’s impacts on climate change. It finds that climate change will have no significant impact upon either the construction, or the operation, of the Pipeline.

In fact, a separate section, “Summary of Impacts,” summarizes the “Climate Change Impacts on the Proposed Project” by saying, “Climate change would have no substantive effects on construction of the proposed Project,” and, “Climate change would have no substantive effects on operation of the proposed Project.”

That is the only section that this study devotes to climate change.

Environmentalists oppose this Pipeline virtually entirely because of the impact that it would have on climate change: speeding it up. They are virtually uninterested in the impact climate change will have on the Pipeline. 

NASA’s James Hansen warned on 9 May 2012 in The New York Times, about the Alberta Canada tar-sands oil that this Pipeline would transport, by saying “It Will Be Game Over for the Climate” (you can see his reasoning if you click on that link) if this Pipeline to a Texas port ever does get constructed. However, he presented no analysis there of the climate-change impact specifically of the Keystone XL. He simply said that “Canada’s tar sands ... contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history,” and that “That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control.” Those were unanalyzed bare assertions.

(Photo: ItzaFineDay)

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

I’m happy for Ben Affleck that “Argo” won best picture of the year at the Academy Awards.  

But in order for the audience to fully appreciate the film, they should know why Americans were taken hostage during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and why Iranians were boiling over with anger at the U.S. government and CIA.

The U.S. oil companies and British Petroleum (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) were stealing most of the oil from Iran and reaping the profits, leaving a mere 16 percent for the Iranians. While the British got rich off the profits, Iranians lived in poverty.  Oil field workers earned less than 50 cents a day and received no benefits or vacations.  The Iranians were outraged in 1950 when the U.S. oil company ARAMCO signed a contract giving Saudi Arabia 50 percent of the profits from Saudi oil.

ERIC ZUESSE FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The first-ever analysis of the taxpayer-subsidy to the Wall Street mega-banks finds that this subsidy is $83 billion this year. This amount is only $2 billion less than this year’s sequester cuts are estimated to be.

That $83 billion subsidy this year is, according to Bloomberg’s, also approximately the amount of profits that those banks are “earning” this year.

The editors at Bloomberg News calculated this $83 billion figure on February 20th, headlining, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” which was the value based upon their analysis of the figures in a widely ignored but rigorous study by IMF economists, a study that had been issued months back, in May 2012, and which was titled “Quantifying Structural Subsidy Values for Systemically Important Financial Institutions.” As Bloomberg’s editors summarized the reason for this ongoing federal subsidy: “The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail,” due to the special Government backing for too-big-to-fail (TBTF) institutions.

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The best actors in America are the business and government leaders who impersonate job creators and makers of prosperity. For their stellar performances over the past year, they deserve to be considered for the special awards listed below.

Here are the nominees:

Best Score

Facebook's Eduardo Saverin scored big-time, landing Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard, using American resources to score billions in income, and then revoking his citizenship to avoid paying any taxes.

Thanks to a capital gains system that benefits the few over the many, the twenty richest Americans made more money in one year than the entire United States federal education budget.

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBiLITY (PEER) on BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

“Cut & Paste Error” accepted as basis for hiding true spill rate in official reports. 

Washington, DC - The federal agency responsible for presenting dramatic underestimates for the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill, the biggest environmental disaster in the nation’s history, will not investigate the errors, according to documents posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) documenting the official response to its scientific integrity complaint on the subject.  Spill rate numbers presented to the public and decision-makers at the height of the crisis were less than half the true flow. The President’s National Commission found that the inaccurate low-ball numbers hampered numerous attempts to cap the run-away well and slowed clean-up efforts.   

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT                             

Truthout recently posted an article about a federal civil jury finding that the City of Chicago, currently under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is responsible for allowing a Chicago Police Department "code of silence." This "blue curtain" often prevents the prosecution of not only criminal misconduct among the police, but more significantly the suppression of democracy.  A "code of silence" makes it extremely difficult to hold the police accountable for violations of civil rights and brutality – and to those who give them their orders and a loose leash.

The December Chicago "code of silence" ruling was upheld by a federal judge, despite Emanuel's ham-handed attempt to vacate the finding.

In many ways 2012 represented, as have past years, the "code of silence" in which police powers have diminished the ever-shrinking First Amendment.  Protestors who challenge the entrenched inequalities perpetuated by the Wall Street/DC Duopoly management class are regularly arrested, bludgeoned and jailed for exercising their right to protest.

But the "code of silence" extends from the unleashing of law enforcement on behalf of those with their hands on the power of the state; it includes the "code of silence" that allows the barons of Wall Street and corporate America who violate the law and cost the nation trillions of dollars to get out of jail free, and to keep their fortunes.

It is a "code of silence" about the plantation politics of modern urban ghettos that differ from slavery only in one being free to be destitute and without the possibility of employment due to vast swaths of job death zones.

It is the "code of silence" about the myth of America being one nation – Obama's crayon colored purple map – when it is one nation dealing with reality, and one nation living in a fantasy bubble of white entitlement divorced from the Constitution.

(Photo: Wikipedia)