Thursday, June 28, 2012

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 to keep from the public eye.

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Common Dreams:
"Pension fund giant TIAA-CREF has removed Caterpillar, Inc. from its Social Choice Funds portfolio. As of May 1, 2012, financial data posted on TIAA-CREF’s website valued Social Choice Funds shares in Caterpillar at $72,943,861. Today it is zero.
'We applaud this decision,' said Rabbi Alissa Wise, Director of Campaigns at Jewish Voice for Peace and National Coordinator of the We Divest Campaign. 'It’s long past time that TIAA-CREF began living up to its motto of ‘Financial Services for the Greater Good’ when it comes to the people of Israel and Palestine.'
Since 2010, We Divest has been urging TIAA-CREF to drop Caterpillar and other companies profiting from and facilitating Israel’s 45-year-old military occupation and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.
'By selling weaponized bulldozers to Israel, Caterpillar is complicit in Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian human rights,' said Rabbi Wise. 'We’re glad to see that the socially responsible investment community appears to be recognizing this and is starting to take appropriate action.' "
-->The NY Times seldom reports any news that is unfavorable to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. Fealty to Israel trumps American readers' right to know.
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Reuters:
"Scores of demonstrators clashed with police, smashed bank windows and blocked roads in Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv overnight during a protest against the arrest of an activist...Police said they detained 85 people at the rally, the latest sign of a nationwide protest movement demanding social reforms and affordable housing...
Hundreds of people gathered in the city late on Saturday and parts of the crowd clashed with police into the early hours of Sunday morning, live television footage showed.
'Over 1,500 people demonstrated at various places in Tel Aviv until a point where the protests turned violent and there were disturbances. They blocked roads and smashed windows at five banks and until 3 a.m. (00:00 GMT), 85 people were arrested,' police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
Last summer, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets and tent cities mushroomed across the country in an unprecedented campaign for economic and social reform that caught the government by surprise."
-->Of course, The NY Times did not cover this story. Even Reuters doesn't connect the lack of affordable housing in Israel with the hundreds of millions spent by the government on illegal settlement housing in the West Bank.
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Guardian UK:
"The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.
In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute 'war crimes'. His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)."
-->The NY Times rarely challenges Obama's drone wars, and didn't even cover this story. All the news that the Pentagon sees fit to print.

Friday, June 22, 2012

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 to keep from the public eye.

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Common Dreams:
"A report released today, the fifth anniversary of the blockade of Gaza, from the charities Save the Children and Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) describes how Gaza's water supply is heavily polluted by fertilizer and human waste, and states that nearly all of the water in Gaza is 'unfit for drinking.'
Gaza's broken sewage system, severely destroyed in Operation Cast Lead, has lead to open cesspits and waste-caused nitrate pollution. The high levels of nitrates in the water, ten times the safe levels established by WHO, have been linked to anemia and some cancers, and are wreaking health havoc heavily upon children and pregnant women in Gaza, the reports details.
'The blockade is a blight on the lives of Gaza's civilians. It is shocking to see so many children struggling to live a fulfilled and healthy life - unable to play in safe areas and forced to drink dirty and dangerous water that is making them sick,' said Aimee Shalan, MAP's Director of Advocacy and Communications."
-->The NY Times prints very little news about Gaza. Ever vigilant in protecting Israel's reputation, our newspaper of record didn't print this story.
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The Truth Seeker UK:
"The nature of the Syrian crisis has changed. The process of destabilization that was to open the path for legal military intervention by the Atlantic Alliance has failed. Removing its mask, the United States has publicly announced the possibility of attacking Syria without the approval of the Security Council, as it also did in Kosovo. Washington must be pretending not to have noticed that the Russia of Vladimir Putin is not that of Boris Yeltsin. After being assured of Chinese support, Moscow literally fired two warning shots in the direction of Washington. The continuing violations of international law by NATO and the GCC threaten to unleash a global conflict...
The message is clear : Moscow is ready for world war if NATO and the GCC do not comply with the international obligations as defined in the Annan Plan and persist in aiding terrorism...
The time is past to lament the expansion of combat into Lebanon, or to conjecture about the possible regionalization of conflict. Over the past sixteen months of the destabilization of Syria, NATO and the GCC have created a situation without exit that might well degenerate into global war."
-->Where is the American media when it comes to accessing the dangers of US military involvement in Syria? Although this story is based on conjecture, the warning is repeated in RT (Russian news network). It seems that our media is playing down the recklessness of US military expansion in the Middle East. 
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RT News:
"Roberto Unger of Harvard Law School has posted a video to YouTube in which the one-time professor of US President Barack Obama expresses his dissatisfaction with how his former student has shaped America since entering the oval office...
Unger insists that a win for the Republican Party would cost the country in both judicial and administrative appointments, but suggests that 'the risk of military adventurism' that began under Barack Obama will only continue unless a true progressive pushes for change in Washington. Under another Obama term, however, Unger says that 'the Democratic Party proposes no new direction.'
"Give the bond markets what they want, bail out the reckless so long as they are also rich, use fiscal and monetary stimulus to make up for the absence of any consequential broadening of economic and educational opportunity, sweeten the pill of disempowerment with a touch of tax fairness, even though the effect of any such tax reform is sure to be modest,' Unger says. 'This is less a project than it is an abdication.' "
-->No mention of Dr. Unger in the US Media. What he says is too honest an assessment of our current president and our broken two party system.
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RT News:
"Google: Western governments increasingly indulge in online censorship
Governments not widely blamed for censorship are increasingly asking Google to remove political content from its services, the company said as it released its bi-annual transparency report.
The IT giant has been publishing data on how and why they have been asked by copyright holders and governmental agencies to remove user content since 2010. On Monday it released a new chunk of info on governments’ requests made from July to December 2011...
A local US law enforcement agency wanted Google to take down 1,400 YouTube videos for alleged harassment. The company refused. A separate request from another agency asked to remove five user accounts over alleged harassment and threats. Google terminated four of them, removing approximately 300 videos, but left the remaining account intact.
Also in the US, a court ordered Google to remove 218 search results that linked to allegedly defamatory websites. The company removed a quarter of the cited results."
-->The NY Times didn't print this story, although it was covered on a NY Times blog. Sad when we have to go to a Russian news agency to learn about American censorship of the Internet. Contrast this silence to the numerous stories The NY Times has run about Chinese censorship of the Internet.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

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 to keep from the public eye.

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Army Times:
"3,000 soldiers to serve in Africa next year...A brigade will deploy to Africa next year in a pilot program that assigns brigades on a rotational basis to regions around the globe, the Army announced in May.
Roughly 3,000 soldiers — and likely more — are expected to serve tours across the continent in 2013, training foreign militaries and aiding locals.
As part of a 'regionally aligned force concept,' soldiers will live and work among Africans in safe communities approved by the U.S. government, said Maj. Gen. David R. Hogg, head of U.S. Army Africa."
-->The ever expanding US military presence in Africa wasn't covered by The NY Times. Although the empire is on the move in a new continent, the last thing the Pentagon wants is to have the American people know too much about it.
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Common Dreams:
"Humankind is facing an imminent threat of extinction, according to new research released on Wednesday by the science journal Nature. The report "Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere" reveals that our planet's biosphere is steadily approaching a 'tipping point', meaning all ecosystems are nearing sudden and irreversible change that will not be conducive to human life.
The authors describe what they see as a fast paced 'state shift' once the tipping point is reached, which contrasts with the mainstream view that environmental change will take centuries. 'It's a question of whether it is going to be manageable change or abrupt change. And we have reason to believe the change may be abrupt and surprising,' said co-researcher Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University in Canada's British Columbia.
'The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations...' "
-->The NY Times prints a science section every week, but this story about the end of human life on earth didn't make the cut. Instead, the big stories are about artificial sweeteners, and incentives for drivers avoiding traffic jams. Our newspaper of record buried this story on their Green Blog.
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Common Dreams:
"The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has questioned the legality of U.S. drone strikes at a news conference in Islamabad today, Agence France-Presse reports.
Pillay stated, 'Drone attacks do raise serious questions about compliance with international law.'
Pillay also highlighted the drones' killing of civilians. 'I see the indiscriminate killings and injuries of civilians in any circumstances as human rights violations.'
Jameel Jaffer and Nathan Wessler also question the legality of the drones and the CIA's sweeping classification of 'all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants' in an op-ed in the Guardian on Wednesday writing, 'direct targeting of noncombatants is a war crime; indeed, it is the prototypical one.' "
-->The NY Times doesn't like to cover war crimes unless they are committed by a regime that America is invading or overthrowing. All the news that the Pentagon sees fit to print.

Thursday, June 07, 2012

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 to keep from the public eye.

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TruthSeeker UK:
"ICELAND (GP) – No news from Iceland? Why? Last we heard, people were rising up and overthrowing the bankers. Then, no news on the television or newspapers for two years. What happened? Why won’t the papers and TV tell us how the bankers successfully crushed or minimized another rebellion?Because… THEY DIDN’T!
This time, the people won. The people of Iceland have overwhelmingly risen up and forced their government puppets of the banks to resign. Primary banks have been nationalized. The debt scam imposed by Great Britain and Holland money printers was declared null and void. A public assembly has been created to rewrite Iceland’s constitution.
The best part is, all of this happened without violence or bloodshed. A whole country’s revolution succeeded against powers that created the current global crisis without a shot being fired. A very good reason exists for the apparent failure of television and newspapers to provide any publicity on this unprecedented event: what would happen if the rest of the EU and the United States took this as an example?"
-->There is another way to resist the impoverishment of the 99% by the elites on Wall Street. It has been done in other countries, although almost all of our media keeps that fact hidden from the general public. The bank CEO's in Iceland even ended up doing time. Bush and Obama will too, if we can bring democracy back to America.
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Common Dreams:
"A new report released this week by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reveals alarming child poverty rates within affluent, or 'developed', nations. The US ranks second highest among all measured countries, with 23.1 per cent of children living in poverty, just under Romania's 25.6 per cent.
The report Report Card 10 shows roughly 13 million children in the European Union (plus Norway and Iceland) lack basic items necessary for their development. 30 million children – across 35 countries with developed economies – live in poverty.
“The data reinforces that far too many children continue to go without the basics in countries that have the means to provide,” said Gordon Alexander, Director of UNICEF's Office of Research."
-->The NY Times didn't think this story was worth putting in print. Hey, we beat Romania, didn't we? Why run the "land of opportunity" down? Or more to the point, why remind US citizens that that a quarter of their kids live in poverty so that a few billionaires can live their lives as greedy pigs?
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Guardian UK:
"Some of America's top companies are spending heavily to block action on climate change or discredit climate science, despite public commitments to sustainable and green values, a new report has found.
An analysis of 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies by researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists exposed a sharp disconnect in some cases between PR message and less visible activities, with companies quietly lobbying against climate policy or funding groups which work to discredit climate science.
The findings are in line with the recent expose of the Heartland Institute. Over the years, the ultra-conservative organisation devoted to discrediting climate science received funds from a long list of companies which had public commitments to sustainability.
The disconnect in this instance was especially stark in the researchers' analysis of oil giants...But even General Electric Company, which ranks climate change as a pillar of its corporate policy on its website, had supported trade groups and think tanks that misrepresent climate science, the researchers found."
-->Not to worry. The readers of The NY Times remain blissfully ignorant of what major US companies are doing behind their backs to destroy the world's environment. Our newspaper of record protects the image of big corporations even as the planet succumbs to global warming. Let's face it, to get honest news about US corporations, you have to read foreign media.
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