Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want keep from the public eye.
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Common Dreams:
"According to senior Indonesian officials and police and details from government files, the US-backed Indonesian armed forces (TNI), now due for fresh American aid, assassinated a series of civilian activists during 2009.
The killings were part of a secret government program, authorized from Jakarta, and were coordinated in part by an active-duty, US-trained Kopassus special forces General who has just acknowledged on the record that his TNI men had a role in the killings.
The news comes as US President Barack Obama is reportedly due to announce that he is REVERSING longstanding US policy - imposed by Congress in response to grassroots pressure - of restricting categories of US assistance to TNI, a force which, during its years of US training, has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians..."
-->US under Obama once again giving aid to death squads in Indonesia? If you depend on The NY Times for your news, you wouldn't know about US supported death squads, or about Obama's decision to drop any restrictions on their funding.
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Common Dreams:
"Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) excoriated the national press on Wednesday during a debate over the war in Afghanistan, charging reporters with shirking their duty to cover the issue and instead focusing on the peccadillos of former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.).
'There's one, two press people in this gallery,' he thundered. 'We're talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on the TV. We're talking about war and peace; $3 billion; 1,000 lives and no press! No press!'
The House is debating a resolution written by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), which would require the military to withdraw from Afghanistan within 30 days or longer if it couldn't be done safely that quickly."
-->The NY Times referred to Patrick Kennedy's comments, but only in a section called reader's "laugh lines." The reporting of The NY Times is an important part of the failure of our media to confront US wars in the Middle East.
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Guardian in the UK:
"...Like so many other states, New York is in the red, facing a budget deficit of $9bn dollars in the coming fiscal year. In response to that deficit our political leaders have thrown out the scalpel and are wildly swinging the axe on just about every public service you can imagine, from prenatal care to senior centres. The accepted wisdom is that there is just no money to be had so these cuts have to be. But the truth is that there are billions of dollars out there for the taking, if Governor Paterson or Mayor Bloomberg were willing to raise income tax on the richest of New Yorkers even by a tiny amount.
Wall Street has just had a bumper year with the top three banks who benefited from Tarp paying themselves almost $30bn in bonuses, higher even than their previous record in 2007. It seems reasonable to expect that a small portion of this windfall would be paid back in the form of income taxes to help out the people who are suffering now largely as a result of Wall Street's wild behavior. But for some bizarre reason the inflated salaries of New York's wealthiest people are off limits."
-->Leave it to the Guardian in the UK to present the simple truth about NY politics and the very wealthy. Such opinions are rarely seen in the US media.
