Taxes by Corporations on Us and Other Suppressed Stories

Posted on September 22, 2003 in Censorship Journalists & Pundits

With such thorough self-censorship in the U.S. press – reading the international press is now akin to going into the remote bush. — Michael I. Niman

Project Censored’s list of the top 25 underreported news stories has hit the stands. The quote from above comes from a story about how the United States removed 8000 pages from a UN Report on Iraq and then had the gall to claim that the report was incomplete! This report tells all: the part the Rumsfeld cabal hated was that where it discussed how 24 U.S. corporations and the Reagan/Bush Sr. governments aided Sadam Hussein’s military buildup in the 1980s. Iraq made and distributed a copy of the full report to European journalists where the story broke in December, 2002 in Germany. (This helps explain why the Germans haven’t been too keen on the war — a little fact-finding goes a long way!)

Aside from this story (which ranked third), blog pundits will find plenty to muckrake about. Remember the Modem Tax that conservatives forwarded in an effort to discredit the Clinton era FCC? Story #6 reveals that the secret corporate tax (called unregulated profits) are beginning to cut into your InterNet access:

The monopoly power being handed over to the cable and phone companies will enable them to sell different levels of Internet access, much like they do with cable television. For one price, you could access only certain pre-approved sites; for a higher price, you could access a wider selection of sites; and only for the highest price could you access the entire World Wide Web. This is already the way that many wireless Internet packages operate. It’s clear that “marginal” content that isn’t associated with e-commerce, big business, or government would have a hard time making it into the first-tier, “basic” packages. This isn’t censorship, we’ll be told. It’s just that there is only so much bandwidth to go around, and customers would rather see CNN, the Disney Channel, and porn, than community-based websites, such as www.indymedia.org.

Do you want your local cable company deciding what is fit for you to see and what you should not see (like the European press and this weblog)? Industry is ever-willing to discuss government taxes, but I suspect that if we examined their profits, we would find far more wastage that goes absolutely nowhere except a few corporate executors’ pockets.

All the stories are worth the read.

Original link filched from Tuesday.