Friday, January 18, 2013

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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The NY Times:
Friday's front page picture and extensive story entitled "Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide" sets a new record for American's premier news publication. Readers are taken around the world with images and often frightening stories of how dangerous climate change has become. 

So much in depth reporting, but not a word about what might be causing these planet wide calamities. You would think that just one of the multitude of people interviewed might mention fossil fuels, but no. Same goes with the scientists and the meteorologists. Not one touches on the reasons behind climate change. Not one even mentions that it could be "man made" and have something to do with America's refusal to implement any meaningful change in energy production or consumption. 

Mindless reporting. This is an article that Exxon Mobil and the Koch Brothers can support. Which is the point, of course. The NY Times along with much our our national media is in bed with the energy producers. And it's this sellout by our media that will delay any action on global climate change until it is too late. 

The real story should be: "NY Times Continues to Obscure the Reasons Behind Climate Change." 

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Democracy Now:
"Well, on financial matters, Jack Lew has been a failure of pretty epic proportions, and he gets promoted precisely because he is willing to be a failure and is so useful to Wall Street interests. So, you’ve mentioned two of the things in terms of the most important and most destructive deregulation under President Clinton by statute. But he was also there for much of the deregulation by rule, and a strong proponent of it, and he was there for much of the cutting of staff. For example, the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, lost three-quarters of its staff, and that huge loss began under Clinton. And the whole reinventing government, Lew was a strong supporter of that. And, for example, we were taught—instructed by Washington that we were to refer to banks as our "clients" in our role as regulators and to think of them as clients.

He goes from there to Wall Street, where he was a complete failure... And the unit that he was heading would have not been permissible but for the deregulation of getting rid of Glass-Steagall under President Clinton. And you saw, as an example of Citicorp, why we shouldn’t be doing this. Why would we create a federal subsidy where all of us, through the U.S. government, are on the hook for Citicorp’s gambling on financial derivatives for its own account, you know, running a casino operation? That makes absolutely no public policy sense.

Then he comes into the Obama administration, and he was disastrously wrong. He tried very hard to impose austerity on the United States back in 2011, which is—he wanted, you know, the European strategy, which has pushed the eurozone back into recession, and Spain, Greece and Italy into Great Depression levels of unemployment."

-->The NY Times doesn't see Jacob Lew, Obama's nominee for Treasury head, as a Wall Street patsy ready to throw the US public under the bus for the big banks. The story that appeared in our newspaper of record is entitled, "Obama Picks a Wall St. Outsider to Lead Treasury." It is simply more dishonest reporting about Wall Street, a hallmark of The NY Times.

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The Guardian UK:
"Hundreds of thousands of Iranians with serious illnesses have been put at imminent risk by the unintended consequences of international sanctions, which have led to dire shortages of life-saving medicines such as chemotherapy drugs for cancer and bloodclotting agents for haemophiliacs.

Western governments have built waivers into the sanctions regime – aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear programme – in an effort to ensure that essential medicines get through, but those waivers are not functioning, as they conflict with blanket restrictions on banking, as well as bans on 'dual-use' chemicals which might have a military application...

'There are patients for whom a medicine is the different between life and death. What is the world doing about this? Are Britain, Germany, and France thinking about what they are doing? If you have cancer and you can't find your chemotherapy drug, your death will come soon. It is as simple as that.' "

-->The NY Times would never cover a story like this that makes the empire look bad. It's as simple as that. Our nation's premier newspaper always chooses Pentagon interests over its readership's right to know.