Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Guardian UK:
"Who would have known many of those smiling soldiers on the football stadium scoreboard, the ones home from war, were for sale? The stadium announcers never said this as they demanded fans stand and applaud the waving men on the screen. Somehow they forget to mention that the defense department has sold these soldiers’ names and stories and plights for the fiction that this tender moment came without a check written to the home team. ...

According to the report, taxpayers spent close to $7m on patriotic displays at professional and college sporting events over the last four years. This included the unfurling of a gigantic flag held by service members at an Atlanta Falcons game, the re-enlistment ceremony for 10 soldiers at Seattle’s Century Link Field and the recognition of Air Force officers at a Los Angeles Galaxy soccer game. In fact the report lists 74 pages of examples where military branches (mostly the National Guard) paid more than 50 sports teams for patriotic acts that were disguised as benevolent contributions by the teams themselves."

-->Oh yes, the rich hypocrisy of selling the empire's killing machine to young males, looking for patriotic glory. Of course, The NYT did not print this story, but preferred to bury it in the on-line edition. The Washington Post, however, did print it.

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Common Dreams:
"The Environmental Protection Agency concluded in June that there was 'no convincing evidence' that glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the U.S. and the world, is an endocrine disruptor.

On the face of it, this was great news, given that some 300 million pounds of the chemical were used on U.S. crops in 2012, the most recent year measured, and endocrine disruption has been linked to a range of serious health effects, including cancer, infertility, and diabetes. Monsanto, which sells glyphosate under the name Roundup, certainly felt good about it. 'I was happy to see that the safety profile of one of our products was upheld by an independent regulatory agency,' wrote Steve Levine on Monsanto’s blog.

But the EPA’s exoneration — which means that the agency will not require additional tests of the chemical’s effects on the hormonal system — is undercut by the fact that the decision was based almost entirely on pesticide industry studies. Only five independently funded studies were considered in the review of whether glyphosate interferes with the endocrine system. Twenty-seven out of 32 studies that looked at glyphosate’s effect on hormones and were cited in the June review — most of which are not publicly available and were obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request — were either conducted or funded by industry. Most of the studies were sponsored by Monsanto ..."

-->Oh yes, here we have the EPA making decisions almost exclusively based on Monsanto's warped scientific studies! Could it get any better? Yes, our newspaper of record didn't print the story.

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The New York Times:
The NYT carried a story on Sat, Nov 7 entitled "Enforcing Silence About Indonesia's Bloody Past," that describes how the security apparatus suppresses any mention of the killing spree it engaged in under the dictatorship of Suharto. In the mid sixties, over half a million people were killed after the overthrow of Indonesia's founder and first president, Sukarno.

But The NYT does its own "enforcing" of silence when it comes to some key issues. Left out of this story is the fact that the CIA was involved in overthrowing the president and putting in the dictator, Sukarno. Not only that, the CIA supplied "extensive lists of communist to Indonesian death squads," which resulted in massacres that "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." As it turns out, the US embassy's only worry during the mass murders was that not enough people were being included.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Aeiejs-lxn8C&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=intercept+Indonesia+suharto&source=bl&ots=a0qVoDeWT9&sig=FdQ8H9_ljGvtjO75haSdRaH5N74&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBGoVChMI85HmxuyIyQIVi3Q-Ch2ghApM#v=onepage&q=intercept%20Indonesia%20suharto&f=false

-->So we have the lovely irony of The NYT reporting on the "enforced silence" in Indonesia on the slaughter of half a million, while omitting the key roles of the US Embassy and the CIA. America has its own way of keeping the truth hidden from its citizens.