Thursday, July 11, 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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Common Dreams:
"Following his recent trip to Africa, President Obama has been lauding his new 'Power Africa' program, which he claims will funnel money and resources to 'double access to power in sub-Saharan Africa.' Yet, the money the U.S. government is throwing at the program will in fact be pumped into U.S.-based multinational corporations.

General Electric is slated to receive billions of dollars in power deals and open access to Africa's energy markets as a result of 'Power Africa.' As the White House fact sheet on 'Power Africa' points out, the continent has 'vast reserves of oil and gas.' The new deal means open season for companies like GE. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, is a former chair of the president’s Council on Jobs and Effectiveness and accompanied the president on his trip to Africa.

President Obama, who announced the initiative Sunday during his visit to South Africa, insists that he is interested in 'partnering' with African nations. Yet the new deal circumvents the people of sub-Saharan Africa and invests directly in private corporations. Critics charge that the 'Power Africa' plan is part of U.S. efforts to exert geopolitical control of the region and expand resource extraction, in tandem with the expansion of U.S. military bases and outposts across the country, accelerated with the 2007 creation of AFRICOM."

-->The NY Times printed two stories about the "Power Africa" program, both glowing with support for Obama's economic initiatives. Where did the investigative reporting go in our newspaper of record?

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Guardian UK:
"The suspicion that Bolivian President Evo Morales’ jet was carrying Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who has become Washington's public enemy number one, triggered an unprecedented international incident. Four European countries – France, Italy, Spain and Portugal – denied Morales’ presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way back from Moscow to La Paz. ...

Morales’ aircraft was rerouted and forced to land in Austria, where it was stuck on the tarmac for 14 hours. The governments implicated in the incident brandished technical explanations, and after hours of heated negotiations, the presidential jet was allowed to take off again. ...

The incident violates international law, because aircraft carrying national leaders have diplomatic immunity. Bolivian diplomats complained at the United Nations that Morales had been 'kidnapped' during the time he was grounded in Austria. And the indignation spread to other South American governments."

-->The NY Times had several stories about Morales and the grounding of his jet. None of he stories presented readers with the most important fact of all, that the denial of airspace violated international law. All the news that the empire sees fit to print.

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France 24:
"Fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said the US National Security Agency operates broad secret spying partnerships with other Western governments now complaining about its programs, in an interview published Sunday.

Snowden said in comments made before his exposure of US espionage practices came to light last month and printed in German news weekly Der Spiegel that NSA spies are 'in bed together with the Germans and most other Western states'. In remarks published in German, Snowden said an NSA department known as the Foreign Affairs Directorate coordinated work with foreign secret services. ...

The partnerships are organized so that authorities in other countries can 'insulate their political leaders from the backlash' if it becomes public 'how grievously they're violating global privacy,' he said. ..."

-->The NY Times prints many stories about Edward Snowden, but prefers not to use his actual words. That way, American readers can be directed to personal issues rather than realizing the extent of our government's spying on the entire world.

Thursday, July 04, 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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Common Dreams: 
"South Africans Slam US 'Plunder' and 'Atrocities' as Obama Arrives. 'No You Can't!' was the cry as hundreds of South Africans marched on the US Embassy in the capital city of Pretoria Friday in protest of visiting United States President Barack Obama.

Demonstrators were organizing to raise public awareness about the gross human rights violations being committed by the Obama administration, including the proliferation of drone warfare and the treatment and indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo.

In a statement released ahead of the visit, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) denounced the Administration's 'horrifying record of foreign policy in the world,' citing the 'militarization of international relations for the multinational companies and their profit-seeking classes in the US,' and the presence of AFRICOM and other Special Operations forces, 'which are largely responsible for the destabilization of various countries and communities.' "

-->No US media would cover this story. Maybe the Pretender Obama already looks too bad hanging around Nelson Mandela's deathbed hoping for a photo op.  

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Common Dreams:
"The Real Truth: Gitmo Held Hearing So Secret It Barred the Defendant. 
Invoking the by-now-meaningless mantra of 'grave damage to national security,' a military judge at a Gitmo hearing excluded not just the public and press but the accused himself - Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, charged with carrying out the USS Cole bombing - in the first closed session of military commission trials under Obama. 

Al Nashiri, 48, has been at Guantánamo since 2006; for four years before, he was held in secret CIA prisons where he was reportedly waterboarded, subject to mock executions, and tortured at the point of a revving power drill. Observers speculate the extreme secrecy about the legal proceedings - which have been underway for over a year and sometimes devolved into idiocy about notebooks - is about not what he knows, but what his treatment could reveal about U.S. torture. To date, officials have only released a transcript so heavily redacted - there isn't even a subject or title - it appears to be written by Orwell."

-->The NY Times isn't interested in Orwell, or in a fair trial for Guantanamo prisoners either. Yet this mockery of justice is just what Orwell predicted for the dystopias of the future. Too bad it turned out being the American Empire.

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Common Dreams:
"In a little reported development, the Environmental Protection Agency last week issued a new rule raising the allowable concentration of Monsanto’s herbicide glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup, on food crops, animal feed and edible oils

Despite the proven risk, this ruling is clearly a result of successful lobbying efforts on the part of the Ag Giant to raise the residue limits of this toxic chemical.

'Glyphosate has been shown in several recent studies to be an endocrine disruptor,' writes the Cornucopia Institute, in a statement about the news. 'According to the National Institutes of Health, endocrine disruptors could have long-term effects on public health, especially reproductive health. And the 'dose makes the poison' rule does not apply to endocrine disruptors, which wreak havoc on our bodies at low doses.' "

-->The NY Times left this story out, but gets some credit for its Opinionator Blog which states, "If Secretary of State John Kerry’s G.M.O.-boosting speech announcing the World Food Prize at the State Department last week is any indication of his ability to parse complicated issues, he might be better off windsurfing."