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%.
