Thursday, April 29, 2010

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

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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Huffington Post:
"Concerned that President Obama's deficit-reduction commission is going to look in the wrong places for budget cuts, Barney Frank has appointed his own bipartisan commission. This one will specifically look at ways to reduce the bloated military budget.

Defense cuts seems to be politically off-limits these days, but the group convened by the outspoken liberal congressman from Massachusetts shares a belief that America is "overextended and overcommitted" and that there should be a "substantial reduction in the reach of American military commitments," Frank told HuffPost.

He expects the group to propose reducing the number of overseas bases, especially in the rich countries of Western Europe and Japan. 'There's a big debate right now about where 3,000 Marines in Okinawa should go. My suggestion is Nebraska,' he said.

And he expects it will propose cutting weapons systems that don't meet any plausible need...

Frank despairs that the deficit-reduction debate plays out in Washington as if there are only two choices: raise taxes or cut entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/23/the-barney-commission-def_n_550066.html

-- >Readers of The New York Times are limited to the same two choices. Our newspaper of record didn't cover Barney Frank's new commission, nor his comments on the runaway defense budget. Some things are just too sacred to question.

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Guardian UK:
"Meanwhile in the United States, a rebellion is growing in Congress against the war. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, House Democrat Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, and House Republican Walter Jones from North Carolina have introduced legislation that would require President Obama to establish a timetable for withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan. The bill has quickly picked up 29 co-sponsors, and could reach 100 within the next few weeks.

How does this get us out of Afghanistan? My colleague Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy explains:
'A signal like this is likely to have dramatic political effects in Afghanistan, just as these things had dramatic political effects in Iraq. In 2007, Congress never succeeded legislatively in writing a military withdrawal timetable into US law. But the fact that the majority of the House and Senate went on the record in favour of a timetable had dramatic effects in Iraq. It put pressure on the Bush administration to compromise its objectives, to start serious negotiations with people it had previously been trying to kill.'" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/23/usforeignpolicy-afghanistan

-- >Not a word about any of this from The NY Times. A signal being sent to stop the war in Afghanistan? You have to read newspapers in England to learn about it.

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Politico:
"Indifference has given way to curiosity, and -in recent weeks especially- to a nearly manic obsession that sometimes seems to place the tea partiers somewhere near the suffragettes and the America-Firsters in the historical ranking of mass political movements.

Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks media reports, found that the tea parties consumed a steady measure of news for most of this year before exploding during tax week to compete with the Icelandic volcano for attention and outstripping health care with 6% of all media reports that week.

But various sides have their own reasons for finding something new and arresting in the spasms of outrage personified by the tea partiers. The right sees the protests as evidence of a popular revolt against President Barack Obama-proof of a changing tide they believe will bring massive victories in 2010 and 2012. The left sees them as evidence of incipient fascism and an opposition to Obama rooted in racism-proof of the beyond-the-pale illegitimacy of large swaths of the conservative moment."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/22-3

-- >Obsessed with the Tea Party movement, mainstream media is incapable of this type of political assessment. A reporter would have to step out of the two party paradigm to write such a thing. Even to think such a thing.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

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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The Nation:
"There has been almost universal silence among Congressional Democrats on the Obama administration's recently revealed decision to authorize the assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki...

One of the few Democrats to publicly address the issue of government-sanctioned assassinations is Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. 'I don't support it--period,' he said in an interview. 'I think people in both parties that are concerned about the Constitution should be speaking out on this. I can't account for what anyone else doesn't do...

The assassination policies vitiate the presumption of innocence and the government then becomes the investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner all in one. That raises the greatest questions with respect to our constitution and our democratic way of life.'"
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/16-6

-->But the powers that be, the military industrial complex, does not care about due process or the Constitution. That is why flagship media like The NY Times would never cover a story like this. Not a word was written about Kucinich's warning to the US people.

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The Daily California (UC Berkeley)
"International attention will descend on the ASUC Senate meeting tonight as senators consider upholding the passage of a controversial bill urging the student government and the University of California to divest from two companies that have provided war supplies to the Israeli military.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. In a recent letter to the UC Berkeley community, Tutu, who won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts opposing apartheid in South Africa-said he endorsed the bill and urged senators to uphold the original vote, which he compared to similar efforts at UC Berkeley to divest from South Africa in the 1980s.

The bill names two companies-United Technologies and General Electric-as supplying Israel with the technology necessary to attack civilian populations in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The bill originally passed the senate March 17 by a 16-4 vote following about six hours of discussion. A two-thirds majority, or 14 votes, is needed in order to override the veto.

Senators have received more than 13,000 e-mails, roughly split between both sides of the controversy."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/14-7

-->The NY Times, however, did not report this major BDS fight in California. All the international attention in the world, but The NY Times prefers stories with positive images of Israel.

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Institute for Public Accuracy:
"Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord are former soldiers of the company documented in the video recently released by Wikileaks, which shows U.S. soldiers killing civilians including a Reuters photographer and then shooting at people in a van attempting to rescue the wounded.

They have co-written 'An Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People,' which states: 'We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months...There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.'"
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/04/20-4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

-->These are humble, human words from some of the soldiers we heard on Wikileaks. The links to the video of their killing spree are on http://www.classwars.org. But to the US media, all this didn't happen. The NY Times, ever eager to please the Pentagon, never even covered the original story. In a way it is like what the Pentagon did, hid these tapes for several years so the American people would never know what is being done in their name.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

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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The NY Times (Published: July 13, 2007):
"The American military confirmed that the journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen, top, and Saeed Chmagh, were killed as American forces battled insurgents in the area...

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed...

'There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,' said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad."
-->Sound familiar? Watch Wikileaks to see what really happened in Iraq that day. That is if you can bear watching American troops indiscriminately murder unarmed civilians from the air. The video had been hidden by the Pentagon. And The NY Times was only too willing to report the lies. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
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Institute for Public Accuracy:
WASHINGTON - April 13 - Solicitor General Elena Kagan is widely reported to be a leading contender for the Supreme Court position being vacated by John Paul Stevens...
As dean of the Harvard Law School, Kagan hired Bush's outgoing director of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, as a law professor. Goldsmith is regarded by (many) in the field as a war criminal. He wrote some of the memos that attempted to make violations of the Geneva Conventions appear legal. Kagan actually bragged about 'how proud' she was to have hired Goldsmith after one of his criminal Department of Justice memoranda was written up in the Washington Post.

During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration's bogus category of 'enemy combatant,' whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right...
Kagan is apparently being backed by several people who are indebted to her from her time at Harvard...(including) Alan Dershowitz (who) had plagiarism scandals while Kagan headed up the law school -- and she in effect bailed (him) out....
Kagan has said 'I love the Federalist Society.' This is a right-wing group; almost all of the Bush administration lawyers responsible for its war and torture memos are members of the Federalist Society...

-->But The NY Times gives us a different story: "Before becoming solicitor general...she has provided few clues about where she stands on the great legal issues of the day, notably the Bush administration’s broad assertions of unilateral executive power in areas like detention, surveillance, interrogation and rendition." Few cues that The NY Times wants to report on anyway.
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The Daily Dish:
"The inmates at Gitmo were routinely referred to as 'the worst of the worst.' Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney all knowingly pushed this lie. And it was a lie - because they all knew that the chaotic way in which these terror suspects had been captured had left such esoteric questions as innocence or guilt by the wayside.
In a March 24 legal declaration in the Hamdi case, a first-hand eye-witness to the Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process and embrace of torture, stated under oath what he saw on the inside. The statement - widely covered across the world - was largely ignored by the US (media).
But it's devastating to have a former high Bush-Cheney official state under oath that the last administration knew it had countless innocent prisoners, lied about it, and tortured many. Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, is the man putting the record straight.
'In fact, by late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review.'"
-->The NY Times doesn't cover stories about American war criminals. Our newspaper of record prefers covering them up.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

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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Inter Press Service:
"When Pres. Barack Obama took office in January 2009, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarised and unilateral security policy that had been pursued by the George W. Bush administration toward Africa, as well as toward other parts of the world.
After one year in office, however, it is clear that the Obama administration is following essentially the same policy that has guided U.S. military policy toward Africa for more than a decade. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to expand U.S. military activities on the continent even further...

In December 2009, U.S. military officials confirmed that the Pentagon was considering the creation of a 1,000-strong Marine rapid deployment force for the new U.S. Africa Command (Africom)...
February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops began a 30-million-dollar, eight-month-long training programme for a 1,000-man infantry battalion of the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)..."
-->Obama reviving the Vietnam War-era counterinsurgency doctrine in Africa? You wouldn't know this from reading The NY Times.
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Bankster.com:
"Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding.
CMD's assessment demonstrates that while the press has focused its attention on the $700 billion TARP bill passed by Congress, the Federal Reserve has provided by far the bulk of the funding for the bailout in the form of loans amounting to $3.8 trillion."
-->Despite its coverage of the financial collapses of the last two years, The NY Times has never probed into the full extent of Wall Street's bailout package. 
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Guardian UK:
"America's main pro-Israel lobby group is mobilising members of Congress to pressure the White House over its bitter public confrontation with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
The move, by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), appears aimed at exploiting differences in the Obama administration as it decides how to use the crisis around settlement building in Jerusalem to press Israel towards concessions to kickstart peace negotiations.
Aipac has persuaded more than three-quarters of the members of the US House of Representatives to sign a letter calling for an end to public criticism of Israel and urging the US to "reinforce" its relationship with the Jewish state."
-->The NY Times rarely covers the workings of the Israeli Lobby here in the US. To read about this latest attempt to keep building the illegal settlements, one must read the Guardian in the UK.

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

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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Democracy Now:

"The larger scandal is that Chicago has basically a two-tiered education system, with a handful of these selective enrollment magnet schools, or boutique schools, that have been set up under Renaissance 2010 in gentrifying and affluent neighborhoods, and then many disinvested neighborhood schools. So parents across the city are scrambling to try to get their kids into a few of these schools. So instead of creating quality schools in every neighborhood, what CPS has done is created this two-tier system and actually is closing down, as you said, neighborhood schools under Renaissance 2010 and replacing them with charter schools and a privatized education system, firing or laying off, I should say, certified teachers, dismantling locally elected school councils, and creating a market of public education in Chicago, turning schools over to private turnaround operators. And this is, in the bigger, bigger scandal, this is now the national agenda under the Obama administration for education."
-->Obama on track to destroying public education? Arne Duncan, who created this mess in Chicago, is Obama's Secretary of Education. And mainstream media will never cover Duncan's real agenda.
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Inside Costa Rica:
"TEGUCIGALPA - The Honduran professor Jose Manuel Flores, member of the anti-coup resistance movement was murdered at the school were he worked, it was informed Wednesday.
"His coward murder is in line with a campaign of selective crimes against union and people leaders grouped in the National Front of Popular Resistance" denounced PSOCA in a communiqué.
According to social organizations, since the coup of June 28 in Honduras were reported about 4.200 human rights violation among then more than 130 murders against members of the resistance and about 3.000 arrests."
-->Imagine how The NY Times would have covered this if it had happened in Iran? But here, the US has protected the military dictatorship, even when it seems to be establishing all too familiar death squads for political opponents. 
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The NY Times:
On March 25, The NY Times featured a front page story about Social Security's future. According to the Times, Social Security is running out of money, and there are few acceptable options left.
One of the options, however, never gets mentioned. That is requiring individuals making over $100,000 to pay slightly more into the fund. Now, Social Security contributions stop when income exceeds $98,000. If that were changed to $120,000, Social Security would be solvent for the next 50 years. 
But raising any taxes on the rich, even by a little bit, is something that The NY Times would never explore. Especially since Wall Street is licking its chops over the prospect of Social Security's privatization. Of course, nowhere in this two page article does our newspaper of record report that a worker earning $20,000 per year pays an effective Social Security tax of 7.7%  while a worker earning $200,000 pays a tax of about 4.3%.