Common Dreams:
"Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer worked behind the scenes through December in the Senate to defeat a bipartisan initiative to curb surprise medical billing, according to a new report Friday which details the lobbying victories won by the for-profit healthcare industry in 2019.
'The success shows how formidable the health-care industry remains.'
Reporting Friday by the Washington Post's Jeff Stein and Yasmeen Abutaleb points to Schumer, a New York Democrat, as a consequential figure in stopping the surprise billing measure from being included in an end-of-year spending bill.
As Common Dreams reported on Tuesday, Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, effectively killed the bill last week by introducing a competing measure and pushing off the legislation until 2020."
-->The NYT reported the bill's failure, but omitted Schumer's role in killing it. Schumer's neoliberal agenda and collusion with big business never make it into print.
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Common Dreams:
"'Bernie Blackout' Strikes Again? Despite Iowa Poll Average Showing Sanders in Solid 2nd, CNN Uses Old Poll to Show Him in 4th.
After CNN on Monday reportedly twice displayed a six-week-old poll from Iowa showing Bernie Sanders in fourth-place among hopefuls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to viewers, ignoring more recent polling showing the Vermont senator climbing to a strong second behind South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, progressives struck back. ... "They had to use a poll over a month old to mis-inform it's audience this morning. We have had over 15 Iowa polls released since then that have Bernie in 1st or 2nd. Still think this is not deliberate?"
The CNN poll wasn't the only instance of perceived bias against the Sanders campaign from the mainstream media, dubbed the "Bernie Blackout" by the senator's supporters."
-->Any real change in the direction of this country will have to overcome the neoliberal media. The NYT is famous for not covering Bernie except when the news is bad. Our supposed "liberal" media is really in bed with the large corporations, just like Trump is.
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Common Dreams:
"Google co-founder and billionaire Larry Page is the subject of a report Wednesday from tech journal ReCode which shows how the Silicon Valley super-rich use workarounds in managing their private foundations that avoid direct contributions to actual charities.
Page's Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation pushed around $400 million in publicly announced Christmastime donations between 2015 and 2017, but none of it reportedly went directly to charity. 'This a very bad look for Larry Page,' tweeted National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy researcher Ryan Schlegel. ...
As a result of the DAF [donor-advised funds] system the money in the funds can remain, untaxed, forever. It's a clever tax workaround that uses the specter of altruism to mask a cold calculation over how to hoard capital."
-->Billionaires cheating the tax system to hoard even more money. One would think that our "newspaper of record" might cover this story. But no, the NYT has always served the interests of the very rich.
