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 to keep from the public eye.
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Salon.com:
"Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were 'militants' – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed 'officials' claiming that the dead were 'militants.' It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.
This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of 'militant' is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: 'Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen')."
-->Glenn Greenwald also takes the media to task for absurd logic. Since every person killed by a drone attack is a militant by definition, there are no civilian casualties.
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Haaretz:
"The sudden economic crash in several southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain as well as Ireland (sometime called the PIIGS, a rather dubious and perjorative name); is commonly blamed on lazy workers, a bloated social security system and unwise borrowings by greedy governments. This is why lenders like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are now asking these governments to cut social spending (austerity measures) and pay ever higher interest rates, despite the fact that only serves to make the situation worse...
In reality, a large chunk of the bailouts are for debts created by private banks in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain borrowing abroad – for speculative real estate schemes and such like - not by shopkeepers, small entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. And a surprisingly big chunk of the rash loans were handed out by private (and some public) banks in just four countries: France, Germany, the UK and Belgium (in that order).
Peter Böfinger, an economic advisor to the German government, put his finger on it when he told Der Spiegel last year: '[The bailouts] are first and foremost not about the problem countries but about our own banks, which hold high amounts of credit there.' "
-->Why can't our mainstream media present this simple analysis of the Euro crisis? Because it doesn't support the deficit reduction fever gripping our politicians in Washington. Turns out that the banks in Europe were too big to fail too, and the workers ended up paying the price for rampant speculation by the 1%.
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Common Dreams:
"The Obama campaign is under fire for not actively supporting the recall election of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Walker's Democratic opponent in the election, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, has been hugely outspent by right wing out of state donors. Brendan Fischer of PR Watch reported on Thursday that 'Walker has raised 120 times as much money from outside the state as his opponent -- approximately $14.4 million for Walker versus only $120,000 for Barrett.'
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has yet to provide significant financial support for the Barrett campaign, The Nation's John Nichols notes. Nichols writes that the 'primary source of money for campaigning on behalf of Barrett has been unions and their allies, not the DNC.'
-->This story simply undermines the differences between the two major parties when it comes to supporting the rights of working people. Obama's agenda is Scott Walker's agenda, for all the president's populist rhetoric. The NY Times didn't cover this sellout by Obama and the DNC.
