Common Dreams:
"Water protectors battling the Dakota Access Pipeline are taking their increasingly urgent fight directly to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, making a final push for the Obama administration to reject the pipeline's permit before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
Trump has invested in the pipeline company and denies climate change, promising to reinvigorate the coal, oil, and gas industries and strip away environmental regulations. On Tuesday, supporters of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will demonstrate and march at Army Corps offices across the country, along with over 200 solidarity actions planned around the world.
'[T]he election last Tuesday made this Tuesday's demonstrations in support of Standing Rock even more important," wrote environmentalist Bill McKibben.
'We'll be gathering in nearly 200 cities worldwide to demand that the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Obama Administration, do their jobs and reject the Dakota Access Pipeline's final permit.' "
-->The NYT is predictably silent on the growing resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. A search of the last seven days shows that of the ten stories on the pipeline that appeared on the NYT website, none had made it into print. All the stories were from AP and Reuters. Our newspaper of record doesn't like to encourage popular resistance against oil companies.
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FAIR:
"The TPP probably would not have substantially contributed, at least directly, to further depressing wages. We already have trade deals with six of the 11 countries in the pact, and have extensive trade relations with the others. Rather, the TPP was about putting in place a business-friendly structure of regulation. It also increased patent and copyright protection, with the goal of increasing the profits of the pharmaceutical, software and entertainment industries. In other words, the TPP was about further extending a pattern of trade aimed at redistributing income upward.
It is important to understand that this is not some natural process of globalization. We deliberately placed our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. The predicted and actual effect of this policy is to lower their wages. ...
In addition, making patents and copyrights longer and stronger, both here and around the world, redistributes income from the bulk of the population to those in a position to profit from these protections. This is the story of the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, which has a list price of $84,000. The free market price is a couple hundred dollars. We will pay more than $430 billion this year for drugs that would sell for 10–20 percent of this amount in a free market.
There was nothing natural about the upward redistribution we have seen over the last four decades; it was deliberate policy. And the TPP was a symbol of this policy. It was a trade pact that was crafted by and for major business interests."
-->Straight talk about the role of the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) in reducing wages while increasing corporate profit. The mainstream media and the NYT are incapable of presenting this relatively simple story to the American public.
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Huffington Post:
"Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would have beaten Donald Trump by a historic margin if he had been the Democratic nominee, according to a private pre-election poll provided to The Huffington Post.
The national survey of more than 1,600 registered voters, conducted by Gravis Marketing two days before the general election, found that Sanders would have received 56 percent of the vote while Trump would have won 44 percent. ...
The last election result that decisive was Ronald Reagan’s victory over Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984.
Crucially, independent voters, who made up nearly one-third of the general election voters this year, favored Sanders over Trump, 55 percent to 45 percent, the poll found. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, lost independents 48 percent to 42 percent, according to exit polls."
-->In a followup analysis of the election, the NYT headlined a story, "Hillary Clinton’s Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps." Missing in the exhaustive review of the election was the fact that Bernie would have beaten Trump by 12 percentage points. The NYT just has never gotten it.
