Wednesday, July 29, 2015

The Intercept:
"The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York. ...

The tracking of domestic protest groups and peaceful gatherings raises questions over whether DHS is chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights, and over whether the department, created in large part to combat terrorism, has allowed its mission to creep beyond the bounds of useful security activities as its annual budget has grown beyond $60 billion."

-->Homeland Security monitoring peaceful protests? Threats to First Amendment rights? The NYT didn't cover this story.

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The NYT:
"Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East? ISIS and other extremist movements across the region are enslaving, killing and uprooting Christians, with no aid in sight."

-->The NYT printed a long article about the terror and suffering of Christian groups in the Middle East. One 60 year and particularly grievous example is purposefully left out, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians by apartheid Israel. 

The article is a Pentagon wish list of "bad guys" in the Middle East that the US is gearing up to attack. Emotional articles like this are needed to fire up American citizens for another war, this time against ISIS. Never content to cover up the truth, our newspaper of record often indulges in this type of blatant warmongering. In fact, the Pentagon probably paid for the article. 

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Common Dreams:
"In addition to Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is turning to lobbyists for the two biggest private prison companies in the country, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, to raise money for her 2016 presidential candidacy.

Lee Fang of The Intercept made the discovery after examining Clinton's list of lobbyists who are bundlers for her presidential bid, released last week. Bundlers are people who raise money for campaigns by organizing and collecting contributions from other donors. ...

'The future of both criminal justice reform and immigration are critical for private prison firms,' notes Fang. 'The Geo Group, in a disclosure statement for its investors, notes that its business could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws.' "


-->Will Hillary be the agent of change for our racist criminal justice system? Not when she is collecting boatloads of cash from the private prison lobby. The NYT didn't print this story of how corporations pay their way into sleazy politicians' hearts.