Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Common Dreams:
"Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday applauded a new study published today by a team of epidemiologists in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, which found that Medicare for All will save Americans $450 billion and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each and every year.

'This study confirms that Medicare for All will save the American people $450 billion on health care costs and will prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths – each and every year,” Sanders said. “In other words, guaranteeing health care as a human right by creating a Medicare for All system will cost substantially less than our current dysfunctional health care system. ... While the CEOs in the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry may not like it, we will end their greed and enact Medicare for All when I am president.' "

-->This might seem to be good news for the Sanders campaign. But not for readers of the NYT; they didn't see the story. Instead they got an article captioned ""Medicare for All Plan Lands With a Thud, and Rivals Pounce." All the news that fits the corporate agenda. UPDATE: The NYT carried the story 2/19/20. 

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The Guardian UK:
"The UN has published a list of companies with business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the US-based TripAdvisor and Airbnb and the British truck and digger maker JCB.

Most of the 112 companies linked to settlements, which are regarded as illegal under international law, were Israeli. The list included 18 international firms, including the London-based online travel agency Opodo and the Netherlands-based Booking.com.

The UN statement made clear the report was not part of a judicial process and the database will have no immediate legal implications for the companies. However, an official list published by a UN agency could lend energy to pro-Palestinian efforts to pressure governments and consumers to take action such as boycotts against businesses linked to the occupation."

-->No mention of this story in the Zionist NYT, although coverage by Reuters and AP were on the newspaper's webpage. 

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Common Dreams:
"A national Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Sen. Bernie Sanders leading President Donald Trump by 18 percentage points among independent voters in a hypothetical general election match-up, a result Sanders supporters viewed as evidence that the Vermont senator has the best chance of defeating the president in November.

According to the new survey (pdf), Sanders has the support of 46% of registered independent voters while Trump polled at 28% support. The poll also showed former Vice President Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) ahead of Trump among independents, but Sanders' lead was the largest.

-->The mainstream media has little interest in promoting Bernie. The NYT didn't even cover this story.

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Mondoweiss:
"The U.S. mainstream media, with the New York Times in the lead, is covering up a shocking feature of the Netanyahu/Trump annexation plan that would strip 350,000 to 400,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship. The 'denationalization' proposal is a crime against humanity, but the American press is ignoring it.

Thabet Abu Rass lives in the affected area, a predominately Palestinian part of northeast Israel known as 'The Triangle,' where he heads an organization devoted to promoting peace between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. Here’s how he translated the denationalization proposal:

'Just imagine if today Donald Trump would tell Hispanic Americans living in the southwest, in territories annexed to the United States from Mexico in the 19th century, that they are Mexican citizens now and no longer American citizens. . . That is exactly what they are trying to do to us.' "

-->No, apartheid won't be televised, or reported on by the NYT. The US media is complicit in the occupation of Palestine, and has been for a very long time.

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The Intercept:
"New details show how deeply Iowa Caucus app developer was embedded in Democratic Establishment. ...

A person with knowledge of the company’s culture, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, shared communications showing that top officials at the company regularly expressed hostility to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters. McGowan is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist with the Buttigieg campaign. There is no evidence any preference of candidates had any effect on the coding issue that is stalling the Iowa results.

Federal campaign finance records show that the Iowa Democratic Party and the Nevada Democratic Party retained Shadow to develop its caucus app. Shadow has also been retained for digital services by Buttigieg’s campaign, which paid the company $42,500 for software-related services last July, and by Joe Biden’s campaign, which paid Shadow $1,225 for text messaging services, last July as well.

-->A NYT story covered most of the issues on the app's failures. But there was no reference to top officials being hostile to Bernie, or tied into the Buttigieg campaign. Buttigieg's software payments to the company were far more extensive than any other Democratic candidate, another omission from the NYT article.  
  
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Common Dreams:
" 'In Law School They Called This Conflict of Interest': [Rep. Rashida] Tlaib Objects to Paid Bloomberg Staffers on DNC Committees. 'Out of tens of millions of qualified people, Tom Perez's DNC is seating two Bloomberg campaign surrogates on bodies that can propose changes.' ...

The Sludge report came a week after the DNC announced it was amending debate rules to eliminate a requirement for a minimum number of individual donors—a change that could allow Bloomberg to participate in the debate coming up on February 19. ... The elimination of the fundraising requirement was also announced after Bloomberg donated $320,000 to the DNC in November, as well as $800,000 to a joint PAC that raises funds for the DNC and state Democratic parties."

-->The trail of money that continues exposes the corruption in the Democratic National Committee. The NYT doesn't have the stomach to criticize the ultra rich, and didn't connect Bloomberg's gifts to the DNC with any rule changes.

Thursday, February 06, 2020

The Intercept:
"Few news outlets covered the detention of Steven Donziger, who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region and has been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers there for more than 25 years. ...

'I’m like a corporate political prisoner,' Donziger told me as we sat in his living room recently. ...Donziger is not exaggerating. As he was arguing the case against Chevron in Ecuador back in 2009, the company expressly said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And since then, Chevron has continued its all-out assault on Donziger in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law. Chevron has hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication to smear him, and put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him."

-->The legal assault against climate activist lawyers didn't make the cut for the NYT. Big Oil won heart of the "Grey Lady" a long time ago.

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FAIR:
"As the Iowa caucuses approach, corporate media are beginning to panic.
'Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity,' insisted  Jonathan Chait in New York magazine (1/28/20). The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman (1/20/20)—among many others—revived the 2016 media trend of tarring Sanders as 'Trumpian.'

The Never Trumper holdouts—an increasingly endangered species—are as scared as the establishment Democrats. 'Bernie Can’t Win,' David 'Axis of Evil' Frum wrote pleadingly in the Atlantic (1/27/20). 'Bernie Sanders’s Trump-Like
Campaign Is a Disaster for Democrats,' cried the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin (1/27/20). 'Anyone But Trump? Not So Fast,' counseled the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (1/24/20).

-->The mainstream media, securely in the pocket of the very rich, will never give Bernie a chance. And that will be true in the general election as well. The elites would rather have Trump as president, and the NYT, that handmaiden of the cleptocracy, will go right along.

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The Guardian UK:
"Chilean anti-rape anthem becomes international feminist phenomenon:
The rapist is you.
The rapist is you.
It’s the cops,
The judges,
The state,
The president.
The oppressive state is a rapist.
The oppressive state is a rapist.
The rapist is you
The rapist is you"

-->The NYT waited a whole month to print this story. And then it appeared on the "Opinions Page" rather than as a news report. Also, references to the Santiago's National Stadium, the prison and torture camp established by Augusto Pinochet, were left out. Why remind readers that the US was behind the coup that put this murderer in place.