The rules, approved by the FCC during the Obama administration, classified Internet providers as “common carriers” — a move that allowed the agency to regulate those companies more strictly than before. In addition to banning the blocking or slowing of Internet traffic, the regulations also gave the FCC the ability to investigate business practices among Internet providers that it deemed potentially anticompetitive.
Monied interests in Wisconsin have been systematically working to eradicate justice in their courts in order to make it legal for court decisions to be bought by the mighty and the monied. By pushing through a change in this spring’s election to the way the state’s Supreme Court Chief Justice is selected, Wisconsin conservatives may have finally reached the tipping point they’ve been working towards for several years.
They’ve made it legal for money to buy court decisions and for court oversight to be removed – accomplishments they were able to make law because America is not voting, and we don’t seem to know what democracy means.
Today, the highest court in our nation stooped to a new low, thanks to Republican ideology loyal Supreme Court justices who voted to strike down a part of the Voting Rights Act designed to protect the voting rights of this country’s most vulnerable citizens. Adam Liptak of the New York Times writes,
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summarized her dissent from the bench, an unusual move and a sign of deep disagreement. She cited the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and said his legacy and the nation’s commitment to justice had been “disserved by today’s decision.”
A Truthout op-ed article explains the real benefits of Obamacare. Once people understand how much benefit they provide, they love the new healthcare provisions. They’re also going to love the $500 rebate checks that will soon be sent out from insurance companies to compensate policyholders for the price gouging their insurers have been subjecting them to, and the $100 billion our government is going to save this decade because of the bill. Here’s an excerpt:
What the decision does do, using the taxing authority of the Constitution, is assure that everybody gets covered for health care – no one can be turned down. The President’s bill guarantees that everyone is now covered for pre-existing conditions, preventive care, mammograms, colonoscopies, seniors’ drugs, children on parent’s plans through 26, no lifetime caps, and this is a key part, requires that 80 percent of the benefits go to patients, not to administrators, prohibiting insurance companies from overcharging for their salaries and administrative costs. The insurance company overcharges – paying them as middlemen — were one of the factors that made us pay twice as much for health care as any nation on earth.
