Analysis: In this country, there has been virtually no mainstream media coverage of the General Accounting Office's recent report verifying that voting anomalies in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio raise serious concerns about the likelihood of fraud, meaning that Bush probably didn't actually win the 2004 election.
Readers may remember when "people power" demonstrations brought down governments in the Ukraine, Philippines and elsewhere that had assumed power after fraudulent elections; the U.S. media, especially television, was all over those foreign miscarriages of electoral justice. Apparently, the U.S. media assumes that fraudulent elections never happen in America, and reporting on the possibility of rigged vote-tallies is simply not done by mainstream media outlets.
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Analysis: In contrast, administrative costs for our country's one national-insurance program, Medicare, are estimated at around 2%. In other words, if our country had some variant of Medicare as a safety-net base for all citizens -- a national health-care system, along with your right to see your own private physicians if you chose to -- it would be infinitely cheaper and perhaps even better-run than most folks' current HMOs.
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Story: Halliburton, the giant conglomerate formerly run by Dick Cheney that has received all those no-bid government contracts in Iraq and New Orleans, had to pay $8.6 million in fines because of violations in its pension-plan program, including charging some costs of the company's executive pension and bonus plans to the workers' pension fund.
Analysis: In other words, they apparently were doing some skimming-type accounting, for which their $8.6M fine is little more than chump change. Such is life in the corporate fast-lane.
This kind of story helps explain why large corporations -- the Enrons, the Halliburtons, the tobacco giants, the big pharmaeuticals, the energy industry, et al. -- are seen by many average, middle-class citizens as gouging and greedy, not terribly interested in the welfare of ordinary people.
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Well, I could go on to stories on other pages, trenchant columns and angry letters to the editor, further tales of outrage regarding the Bush Administration, the revived Taliban in Afghanistan, the deteriorating situation in Iraq and elsewhere -- but you get the idea:
There is hypocrisy, mendacity, deception, corruption at all levels of public life -- in our business (and labor) and religious sectors, and certainly in the Bush White House. Most of the time, government scandals involve either money or sex. But the current scandals of our federal government, as evidenced by just this one day's worth of news stories, are much more serious.
In what ways are they more serious? Because tens of thousands of people are dying or being maimed because of the lies underpinning Bush's war policies; because a significant number of detainees in our care (and in our name) are being humiliated, beaten, "water-boarded" and sometimes killed as torture under Bush is now enshrined as official state policy; because the Constitutional protections of citizens' rights, which our genius Founding Fathers worked out carefully several hundred years ago and which have stood us in good stead until now, have been shredded and ignored by Bush&Co.
"ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE"
I.F. Stone's famous truism that "all governments lie," and that it's the journalist's job to ferret out those falsehoods and alert the public, is all the more potent today -- and, in some ways, more tragic, since the corporate mainstream press does such a poor job of getting the facts out.
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