Thursday, June 30, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Betraying Progressives, DNC Platform Backs Fracking, TPP, and Israel Occupation. 

Despite its claims to want to unify voters ahead of November's election, the Democratic party appears to be pushing for an agenda that critics say ignores basic progressive policies, 'staying true' to their Corporate donors above all else.

During a 9-hour meeting in St. Louis, Missouri on Friday, members of the DNC's platform drafting committee voted down a number of measures proposed by Bernie Sanders surrogates that would have come out against the contentious Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), fracking, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. At the same time, proposals to support a carbon tax, Single Payer healthcare, and a $15 minimum wage tied to inflation were also disregarded."

-->Already the Wall Street war monger, Hillary Clinton, is backing out of any of her "progressive" stands. She stands for one thing, Neoliberal cash. That's the same thing that The NYT stands for, which didn't cover her most recent betrayal of working people. 

-----

Common Dreams:
"The 'compromise' food-labeling bill announced Thursday by leaders of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee is nothing less than a 'rollback of democracy at the behest of the world's largest agribusiness and biotech corporations,' said Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter. 

The legislation in question would create the first mandatory, nationwide labeling standard for food products containing genetically modified organisms that are commonly referred to as GMOs.

Unlike Vermont's GMO-labeling law, which would require items to be clearly marked 'produced with genetic engineering,' the compromise bill would allow food companies to use a text label, a symbol, or electronic 'QR codes' accessed by smartphone—a system 'that will send shoppers on a wild scavenger hunt to figure out what GMOs might be in their food,' wrote Jo Miles of Food & Water Watch on Friday."

-->No coverage of this by The NYT, which only carried an on-line version of the story from AP. Even that story was biased, terming the compromise bill as "more lenient than Vermont's law." More lenient on whom? Certainly not consumers who will spend a lot more time trying to figure out which foods to avoid. 

-----

WAMC/NPR:
"The Way To The Spring: Life And Death In Palestine By Joe Donahue. Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Eventually Ehrenreich moved to Ramallah, and started writing what would become his new book: 'The Way To The Spring: Life and Death in Palestine.'

Ehrenreich was moved by the injustices that he witnessed, and by the general silence about them in most U.S. media. As well informed as he was on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he nonetheless was consistently shocked by what he saw, and by how little the vast majority of people in the U.S. (and even in Israel, just few miles away) understood about the lived realities of the occupation. He felt strongly that he wanted to write to break through those silences.

In cities and small villages alike, men and women, young and old, shared their lives with Ehrenreich and made their own case for resistance and resilience in the face of life under occupation. The Way to the Spring makes clear that conditions on the ground are changing--and getting worse."

-->There was a real breakthrough for NPR this past week. Joe Donahue's interview with Ben Ehrenreich was free from any belittling, doubting, and explaining away. Joe asked straightforward questions about Palestinian suffering and Ben answered them eloquently and convincingly. So this is what real reporting on Israel is like! Truth without Zionist propaganda.