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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BillMoyers.com :
"Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. ...
In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed."
-->It is hard to find the Pope's actual words (Dec. 1 Mass) in the US media. The "National Review" came the closest, but that was because the reporter was challenging the translation, trying to make the Pope's message more business friendly. The NY Times printed a sentence or two in an op-ed that concluded, "when it comes to lifting the poor out of poverty, global capitalism, faults and all, has a better track record by far than any other system or approach." All the pro-business news that's fit to print.
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McClatchy:
"Schools have a lot to learn from business about how to improve performance, declared Bill Gates in an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2011. He pointed to his own company as a worthy model for public schools. ...
The Microsoft model, called 'stacked ranking' forced every work unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, a certain groups as good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. ...
And now, just as public school systems have widely adopted the Microsoft model in order to win the Race to the Top, it turns out that Microsoft now realizes that this model has pushed Microsoft itself into a Race to the Bottom.
In a widely circulated 2012 article in Vanity award-winning reporter Fair Kurt Eichenwald concluded that stacked ranking effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. 'Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one— cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,' Eichenwald writes. 'It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.' "
-->When will our national media begin questioning Obama's Race to the Top, his attempt to destroy public education through competitive testing and charter schools? It's a model now discredited by the very corporation that invented it.
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The Independent UK:
"In a move celebrating academic freedom not as a geopolitically-based privilege but as a universal right, the executive council of the American Studies Association voted at its annual meeting to support the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israel - a move some see as a key step toward breaking the taboo on boycotting Israel.
Speakers at the meeting of the oldest U.S. organization of academics and scholars cited U.S. complicity in the Israeli occupation, the denial of access to 'normal scholarly life' for Palestinians through occupation, blockade, school closings as collective punishment and the inability to travel, and the importance of current calls for cultural boycott of Israel, as in apartheid South Africa, as 'a test case for our intellectual and moral consistency.'
'In the intellectual world, the resort to force is not a position of strength. (The vote) showed the power of reasoned, moral argument (and) there is no going back.' "
-->The NY Times doesn't care much for "intellectual and moral consistency" when reporting news critical of its favorite client, Israel. It didn't print this story.
