Common Dreams:
"The private jets of the world's wealthiest men and women are swarming the Swiss Alps for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), which begins Monday in Davos, Switzerland, in the midst of an ongoing global inequality crisis.
And that crisis is accelerating, according to a new Oxfam report released Monday: today, only eight men own the same amount of wealth as the 3.6 billion people who comprise the poorest half of humanity. Those eight men are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.
The report, An Economy for the 99% (pdf), observes that '[f]ar from trickling down, income and wealth are being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.'
It goes on to describe how super-rich individuals and the massive corporations they run are fueling the inequality crisis by offshoring taxes, driving down wages, and influencing government to their advantage, and argues that the 'very design of our economies and the principles of our economics have taken us to this extreme, unsustainable, and unjust point.' "
-->The NYT did not print this story, although it is offered on-line under the category "Davos Special Report - WORLD." The January 16 print edition had other highly important stories, like a long article on what Obama read in office, while he was giving two thirds of all income gains over his last eight years to the top 1%.
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The Guardian UK:
"Responding to Trump’s comments that Merkel had made an 'utterly catastrophic mistake by letting all these illegals into the country', the deputy chancellor and minister for the economy, Sigmar Gabriel, said the increase in the number of people fleeing the Middle East to seek asylum in Europe had partially been a result of US-led wars destabilising the region.
'There is a link between America’s flawed interventionist policy, especially the Iraq war, and the refugee crisis; that’s why my advice would be that we shouldn’t tell each other what we have done right or wrong, but that we look into establishing peace in that region and do everything to make sure people can find a home there again,' Gabriel said.
'In that area, Germany and Europe are already making enormous achievements – and that’s why I also thought it wasn’t right to talk about defence spending, where Mr Trump says we are spending too little to finance Nato. We are making gigantic financial contributions to refugee shelters in the region, and these are also the results of US interventionist policy.' ”
-->Sigmar Gabriel's condemnation was not printed by our newspaper of record, which would never dare say such things in the heart of the empire.
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FAIR:
"NYT: If Only We Knew What We Already Know About Jeff Sessions. In this light, the January 8 New York Times editorial struck me as highlighting, painfully, the limits of elite media.
'What Are You Hiding, Jeff Sessions?' was the headline, and the thrust of the thing was that Sessions has been insufficiently forthcoming:
'If anyone requires a thorough vetting, it’s Mr. Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama who trails behind him a toxic cloud of hostility to racial equality, voting rights, women’s rights, criminal justice reform and other issues at the heart of the Justice Department’s mandate.' -NYT
See, some would say that toxic record constitutes such a vetting. But for corporate media, some questions are forever being 'raised'…even when many another would suggest they’d actually been answered.
Indeed, all the while it was criticizing Sessions’ lack of disclosure, the Times was making clear that it isn’t necessary: Sessions claimed there’s no record of many of the interviews he’s given, 'but a quick Google search disproves that.' "
-->Sessions is a long time racist that Congress is about to approve for Attorney General. Why can't the NYT just come out and say it?
