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."