Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Anti-corporate activists, organic farmers, Indigenous peoples, environmental groups and others took to the streets across six continents and over 400 cities on Saturday in a global grassroots march against bioengineering giant Monsanto. 'The fight against corporate control of our food is global,' a food sovereignty campaigner with UK-based nonprofit Global Justice Now rallied the crowd marching in London. ...

This year's march takes place amid allegations of collusion and industry rigging of the regulatory processes surrounding the company's toxic weedkiller Roundup and GMO crops in Europe and the United States. The campaign, based in the U.S., described why so many are fighting the chemical behemoth in a statement:

Monsanto has infiltrated various agencies within the United States government, and as a result both public health and the health of our environment has suffered greatly.

Glyphosate, the cancer-linked herbicide that is an essential component in the expansion of GMO crops, is already being banned around the world over safety concerns. Here in the United States, glyphosate is consistently being discovered in everything from hospital feeding tubes and tampons to the breast milk of nursing mothers."

-->If there is an evil company in the world, then Monsanto is it. But The NYT always gives its corporate buddies a pass. It didn't print this story about the worldwide march. 

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Common Dreams:
"Pentagon officials tasked with protecting whistleblowers have lied under oath, illegally destroyed documents, and gone out of their way to ruin people's careers and lives for attempting to raise concerns about government abuses of power, according to a high-ranking Department of Defense (DoD) official, John Crane, who went public with his story on Sunday.

Crane's explosive revelations are being released in coordination by the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Newsweek Japan.

'We need iron-clad, enforceable protections for whistleblowers, and we need a public record of success stories,' whistleblower Edward Snowden responded to Crane's revelations in the Guardian. 'Protect the people who go to members of Congress with oversight roles, and if their efforts lead to a positive change in policy—recognize them for their efforts. There are no incentives for people to stand up against an agency on the wrong side of the law today, and that's got to change.' "

-->This story makes the Pentagon, the FBI, President Obama, and Hillary Clinton look like liars. There is no way that Snowden could have followed established channels to expose governmental wrongdoing. Our newspaper of record covers things up quite nicely by not reporting the story.

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Common Dreams:
"Pro-Clinton Democrats join Big Pharma and state Republicans in fighting to defeat first-in-the-nation ballot measure for statewide single-payer plan.

Highlighting the divisions in the Democratic party this election, Colorado's ballot measure for a universal, single-payer healthcare plan is facing unexpected resistance from the very same party that has been calling for such a healthcare plan since the 1990s.

'There is a disconnect between the powers that be and the people,' said state senator Irene Aguilar, a former doctor and the chief architect of the statewide 'Medicare-for-all,' called ColoradoCare, in an interview with the Guardian. 'The powers that be are incrementalists. There hasn't been a courage of conviction to try and deal with [healthcare coverage].' "

-->The NYT did report this story, but the emphasis was not on Democrats working with the insurance industry and Big Pharma to defeat universal healthcare. That story is too close to the truth, and too supportive of Bernie Sanders' run for the nomination.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Verizon Calls in SWAT Team to Keep Exploited Overseas Workers Under Wraps. 'It seems Verizon is going to great lengths to try to hide their strategy of outsourcing middle-class American jobs in favor of poverty wages abroad.'

Representatives from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union whose members are currently engaged in a weeks-long strike against Verizon for its 'corporate greed,' say they discovered this week that the communications behemoth has publicly lied about the extent of its offshoring of jobs. …

'Terrified that the public might find out about what has happened to the good middle-class jobs the company has shipped overseas, Verizon sent private armed security forces after peaceful CWA representatives and called in a SWAT team armed with automatic weapons,' the CWA said. 'Presumably, it is difficult to justify paying workers $1.78 an hour when the company's CEO made $18 million last year,' wrote the CWA, 'and the company has piled up $1.5 billion a month in profits for the past 15 months.' "

-->Our newspaper of record can be counted on not to cover stories about labor injustices, including the outsourcing of jobs overseas. It didn't print this story.

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Guardian UK:
"In a hard-hitting Holocaust memorial day speech on Wednesday evening, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) deputy chief of staff, Maj Gen Yair Golan, made remarks that he felt compelled to clarify overnight on Thursday, insisting he had not 'intended to compare Israel to Nazi Germany'. ...

'Because if there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating trends that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in the year 2016.'

'After all, there is nothing simpler and easier than hating the foreigner, there is nothing easier and simpler than arousing fears and intimidating, there is nothing easier and simpler than becoming bestial, forgoing principles and becoming smug.'

-->The NYT did cover this story, but avoided any mention of racism or violence directed at Palestinians. No, The NYT focused on how the Israeli public wants more protection from terrorism and that is creating a crisis in the high moral standards of the IDF. This focus is a subtile but effective way of avoiding the real issues of apartheid and occupation. 

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Common Dreams:
"As Wealthy Surge, U.S. Poor and Middle Class Incomes Have Gone Backward. Middle- and low-income households in the U.S. made less money in 2014 than they did in 1999 as the middle class lost ground in almost 90 percent of the country's metropolitan areas, a new analysis by the Pew Research Center released Wednesday has found.

The report looked at 229 of the 381 federally designated 'metropolitan statistical areas' in the U.S., from Seattle to Boston, which accounted for 76 percent of the nationwide population in 2014. It found that poorer households saw their income drop from a median of $26,373 in 1999 to $23,811 in 2014, while middle-class incomes fell from $77,898 to $72,919 in that same time period. …

'The current and future status of the American middle class continues to be a central issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. Moreover, new economic research suggests that a struggling middle class could be holding back the potential for future economic growth. The national trend is clear—the middle class is losing ground as a share of the population, and its share of aggregate U.S. household income is also declining.' "

-->The NYT let the Associated Press worry about this story. It didn't print this survey showing a remarkable reversal in the American Dream. Too close to covering any news that supports Bernie Sanders.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Mondoweiss:
"Israeli soldiers are almost never prosecuted for killings in the occupied Palestinian territory, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din said yesterday after finding over the past 15 years, no officers were indicted for murder, and only one soldier was convicted of homicide in the case of the killing of a foreign national.

No soldiers were charged with homicide in the slaying of Palestinians during the period of September 2000 to November 2015. In this time frame Israeli forces killed more than 5,500 Palestinians and ten foreign nationals in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, according to the human rights group B’tselem (this figure excludes casualties from both the 2009 and 2014 wars in Gaza).

'The fact is that we see the cases and we see the statistics, and it just seems the army doesn’t know how to or doesn’t have the ability to investigate these cases property,' said Yesh Din spokesperson Gilad Grossman, 'And I’m not sure they have the will to do it either.' "

-->The NYT did not cover this story. I just doesn't fit the pro-Israel narrative so prevalent among our corporate controlled media. 

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Common Dreams:
"Providing 'a rare glimpse into how federal informants work,' The Intercept on Thursday published a recording of a conversation between a lonely, 21-year-old Michigan man and the woman whom he tried to impress by claiming he had both an AK-47 and supposed aspirations for violence.

The man is Khalil Abu Rayyan, who has been indicted on federal gun charges. The woman called hersel 'Jannah Bride,' and claimed to be a 19-year-old Sunni Muslim. In fact, she was an FBI informant who, when Rayyan spoke of wanting to kill himself, 'deftly steered the conversation to violence against other people.'

Jannah Bride was what is known as an FBI 'honeypot'—a spy who uses romantic allure to entrap his or her target. ... Indeed, a 2014 report from Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute revealed the many ways in which U.S. law enforcement treats American Muslims like 'terrorists-in-waiting.' "

-->The NY Times never questions Muslim entrapments by the FBI, insuring that the newspaper will be considered part of the problem when our country finally looks back on its decades of state sponsored Islamophobia.   

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Democracy Now:
"After Hillary Clinton has the nomination nearly sewn up, the New York Times decides to run a Sunday magazine piece titled 'How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,' by Mark Landler revealing conclusively that she has a greater 'appetite for military engagement' than anyone else in the race, on either side. ...

The article details Clinton’s long commitment to the use of force, including incidents never revealed before; explains why Donald Trump is likely to be far less eager to go to war than she would be; and says that Clinton had to hide her hawkishness during the primaries so far. ...

The piece is an ode to Clinton’s 'pugnacity' and her 'muscular brand of American foreign policy,' with a celebratory chorus line of Robert Gates, Jake Sullivan and various functionaries. And lest you had any doubt about the newspaper’s point of view, there’s this foolish bonbon at the end: 'And yet, after the retrenchment of the Obama years, there is polling evidence that they are equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent force.' "

-->The NYT isn't exposing Hillary the war hawk as much as celebrating a return to the aggressive use of US military force in the rest of the world. More war with Hillary proclaims our newspaper of record!

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Common Dreams:
"A leak at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state has prompted warnings of 'catastrophic' consequences, as workers attempt to clean up more than eight inches of toxic waste from one of 28 underground tanks holding radioactive materials leftover from plutonium production.

Alarms on the site began sounding on Sunday, leading workers to discover 8.4 inches of toxic waste in between the inner and outer walls of tank AY-102, which has been slowly leaking since 2011 but has never accumulated that amount of waste before. ...

'This is catastrophic,' the worker, Mike Geffre, who first discovered that the tank was failing in 2011, told King-TV on Monday. 'This is probably the biggest event ever to happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the savior of all saviors [to hold waste safely from people and the environment].' " 

-->For Earth Day, the NYT is busy trying to sell nuclear power to a dubious public in a news article entitled "Climate Change Bias, But on Both Sides." All the "bias" the article cites is against nuclear power which is a favorite Wall Street investment. The NYT didn't cover the Hanford leak.

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Common Dreams:
"Though Clinton led Sanders by sixty points when he entered the campaign less than a year ago, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Monday shows that lead has been 'all but eliminated' – with only two percentage points now separating the Democratic candidates.

As the Journal reports, 'The result continues a steady narrowing of the gap between the two Democratic candidates since January, when Mrs. Clinton led by 25 points, 59% to 34%. And it is a far cry from the way the race looked when Mr. Sanders began his campaign last year: In June 2015, a Journal/NBC poll found Mrs. Clinton leading by 60 percentage points, 75% to 15%.' ...

Though the mainstream media continues to describe Clinton as holding the strategic advantage to ultimately win the Democratic nomination, Monday's poll is only the latest in a series of surveys to reveal growing support for Sanders and waning enthusiasm for the former secretary of state."

-->The NYT has been rooting for Hillary ever since she declared herself a candidate. The newspaper prefers to talk about her dismal "likability" polling, assuring readers that Donald Trump is even more disliked by voters. The lesser of two evils another time around.

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Democracy Now:
"Democracy Awakening: Mass Civil Disobedience Planned on Capitol Hill to Cap Week of 900+ Arrests. More than 900 people have been arrested over the past week on Capitol Hill in a series of unprecedented protests against the influence of big money and corporate lobbying in politics. More civil disobedience is scheduled for today. The arrests began last Monday during an event organized as part of a wave of actions dubbed Democracy Spring. Another protest began on Saturday under the banner of Democracy Awakening. ...

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: 'I come from the South, from North Carolina, where we have seen, since Shelby, the worst coordinated attack in this country. At the very time that African Americans are voting at 70 percent and we’re building fusion with progressive whites and Latinos, we’ve seen an extremist governor and Legislature vote to put in place apartheid voting districts. We’ve seen them shorten the early voting period by a full week, because 70 percent of those that use the first week are African-American. We’ve seen them eliminate same-day registration, because 43 percent of those that use same-day registration are African-American. And we’ve seen them pass a strict form of photo ID that negatively impacts 300,000 voters. This is—this is a racial and class attack on our democracy.' "

-->The NYT didn't print this story about "Democracy Awakening." 900 people arrested in Washington wasn't considered "fit to print," especially for a newspaper that's supporting Wall Street's favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton. Let's face it, the NYT has always been against any awakening of democracy in America.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Popular Resistance:
"Exclusive: Mainstream U.S. journalism and propaganda are getting hard to tell apart, as with the flurry of 'corruption' stories aimed at Russia’s Putin and other demonized foreign leaders, writes Robert Parry.

Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propaganda – and the careerism of too many writers – that I now become suspicious whenever the mainstream media trumpets some sensational story aimed at some 'designated villain.'

Far too often, this sort of 'journalism' is just a forerunner to the next 'regime change' scheme, dirtying up or delegitimizing a foreign leader before the inevitable advent of a 'color revolution' organized by 'democracy-promoting' NGOs often with money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy or some neoliberal financier like George Soros." 

-->The NYT is busy doing the empire's work, using the “Panama Papers” to demonize leaders in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all members of the BRICS economic system now challenging the dominance of the G-7 and the International Monetary Fund. Is Hillary any less corrupted by the millions flowing in from Wall St?

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The Guardian UK:
"As night fell over Paris, thousands of people sat cross-legged in the vast square at Place de la République, taking turns to pass round a microphone and denounce everything from the dominance of Google to tax evasion or inequality on housing estates.

The debating continued into the early hours of the morning, with soup and sandwiches on hand in the canteen tent and a protest choir singing revolutionary songs. A handful of protesters in tents then bedded down to 'occupy' the square for the night before being asked to move on by police just before dawn. But the next morning they returned to set up their protest camp again.

For more than a week, these vast nocturnal protest gatherings – from parents with babies to students, workers, artists and pensioners – have spread across France, rising in number, and are beginning to panic the government. Called Nuit debout, which loosely means 'rise up at night', the protest movement is increasingly being likened to the Occupy initiative that mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in 2011 or Spain’s Indignados."

-->The NYT just hates movements like this that discomfort the 1%. It hasn't printed a story on this French movement yet, although an AP story can be found on the NYT website. 

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RT USA:
"The continued operation of the 'decaying' 40-year-old Indian Point nuclear power plant up the Hudson River from New York City 'makes no sense,' said Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders two weeks before the New York State presidential primary.

The two, 1970s-era Indian Point nuclear reactors, situated about 25 miles (40 km) north of New York City and within 50 miles of 20 million residents, have come under increased scrutiny of late as the facility has experienced nine occurrences of technical problems in the past year or so. Four of them were serious enough to shut down the plant, RT's Alexey Yaroshevsky reported in February. ...

'Even in a perfect world where energy companies didn’t make mistakes, nuclear power is and always has been a dangerous idea because there is no good way to store nuclear waste,' [Bernie] Sanders said. 'That is why the United States must lead the world in transforming our energy system away from nuclear power and fossil fuels.' "

-->Bernie's statement on Indian Point never made it into our newspaper of record, or into most of our other national, corporate controlled media. It did appear in some local papers and on WAMC.

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Across a narrow swath cut by bulldozers and chainsaws through the woods of Westchester County, New York, triangular yellow flags are clotheslined between pairs of trees. The flags trace the eventual path of the gas pipeline that the energy giant Spectra is building through the area, escorted at times by police and harried by local residents worried by its proximity to a decaying nuclear power plant.
If that pipeline leaks or breaks, say experts, its contents could detonate and destroy the switchyard that sits 400ft from the gas line. Entergy, which runs the Indian Point power station, said the plant could be quickly shut down in such an event. Nuclear engineer Paul Blanch is not so sure. Blanch, who has previously consulted for Entergy and now assists an organization calling for the pipeline to be stopped, said that assertion is a best-case scenario. In the worst case, he said, the reactors could melt down. And he believes Entergy and Spectra have not fully considered that worst-case scenario. 'I’m not anti-nuke or anything like that. I’ve been in the business for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything as egregious as this,' he said.

Entergy’s assessment itself also has some experts worried. The safety of the pipeline is addressed in an eight-page document that includes a hand-drawn diagram of the property. Its brevity has some worried that risks have been overlooked. " 

-->The NYT is the original "what, me worry" about the nuclear industry including Indian Point. It reported opposition to the pipeline, but left out the worse case scenario feared by experts. No mention of the hand-drawn diagram that was part of Entergy's safety assessment.  

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Common Dreams:
"A study published Tuesday has found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, had a 'clear impact' on the groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming, raising new concerns over the drilling method.

'This is a wake-up call,' said Dominic DiGiulio, lead author of the Stanford University study, published in Environmental Science and Technology. 'It's perfectly legal to inject stimulation fluids into underground drinking water resources. This may be causing widespread impacts on drinking water resources.'

Residents of Pavillion, an oil and gas boom town, first began complaining of tainted water in the 1990s after fossil fuel companies began conducting more than 180 drilling operations in the state's Wind River Basin. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft study in 2011 which found that oil and gas activities may have contaminated the town's water supply, but the agency shut down its preliminary research in 2013 after criticism from the industry and the state's fossil fuel regulators."

-->No wake-up call for readers of the NYT. This study never saw the light of day in our nation's "premier newspaper," which has long been a supporter of fracking. Bernie, of course, just said "no" to fracking.
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Quartz:
"Reddit’s big hint that the government is watching you is a missing 'warrant canary.' The canary in Reddit’s coal mine has stopped singing. 

Reddit published its annual transparency report yesterday (Mar. 31) and the report usually contains a section known as a “warrant canary,” a series of statements that say the company hasn’t received a secret order for information from US intelligence agencies. If the canary stops singing, it’s a strong indicator that a secret surveillance order has been received. ...

The orders Reddit refers to allow the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the National Security Agency (NSA) to obtain a user’s name, address, and communications records, according to the Electronic Frontier Federation. It can also mean the company’s data is part of NSA bulk data-collection programs including PRISM, the secret program revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Under PRISM, the NSA had direct access to the private communications of users of services from Google, Microsoft, and others."

-->The NYT didn't cover this story of how Reddit informs their Internet users that the NSA is stealing their data. Our newspaper of record almost always supports massive government snooping.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Bernie Sanders claimed three resounding victories on Saturday as caucus-goers in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington overwhelmingly backed the Vermont senator, proving that his campaign has the 'momentum' to battle Democratic rival Hillary Clinton all the way to the convention.

While Sanders was predicted to win in Alaska and Washington, as CNN reports, 'the real news is in the sheer size of his victory.'

Indeed, Sanders bested Clinton by more than sixty points in Alaska, where he took 81.6 percent to her 18.4 percent. In Hawaii, he won 70.6 percent to 29.2 percent and in the delegate-heavy Washington, Sanders beat Clinton 72.7 percent to 27.1 percent." 

-->The NYT didn't report these victories at all, preferring to run more stories about Donald Trump. Our newspaper of record just prints what Wall Street wants it to, and Bernie is scaring the billionaires. You can tell that from the NYT's failure to even cover the Sanders campaign. 

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Guardian UK:
"CIA photographed detainees naked before sending them to be tortured. Classified pictures showing CIA captives bruised, blindfolded and bound raise new questions about US’s willingness to use ‘sexual humiliation’ on suspects

A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as 'very gruesome'. The naked imagery of CIA captives raises new questions about the seeming willingness of the US to use what one medical and human rights expert called 'sexual humiliation' in its post-9/11 captivity of terrorism suspects. Some human rights campaigners described the act of naked photography on unwilling detainees as a potential war crime.

Unlike video evidence of CIA torture at its undocumented 'black site' prisons that were destroyed in 2005 by a senior official, the CIA is said to retain the photographs.
In some of the photos, which remain classified, CIA captives are blindfolded, bound and show visible bruises. Some photographs also show people believed to be CIA officials or contractors alongside the naked detainees."

-->The NYT, to its shame, has not printed this article. Is it just me, or is the NYT becoming a second rate paper, willing to sell out quite easily to the National Security State. Of course, no other major news outlet in the US covered this story either. What a sorry state our corporate media is in.

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Common Dreams:
"What is privacy and what is an individual's right to it? 

That is the question that renowned linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald sought to answer on Friday evening as the three (virtually) shared a stage for a panel discussion at the University of Arizona in Tuscon.

Coming amid the FBI's public battle against Apple as well as days after the bombings in Brussels last week, which have spurred another round of calls for heightened security and surveillance, the conversation challenged the rhetoric that national security requires that governments can access individual communications.

'Should our government be omniscient?' asked Snowden, who took part in the discussion via satellite from Russia. 'That has value, of course, in thwarting nefarious and criminal behavior. But the public has a right to know if the government is going to be omniscient. As it stands, this decision has been made by a few people behind closed doors. That is the problem.' "

-->The NYT joined almost all of the mainstream media in avoiding this discussion by some of our nation's most important intellectuals. One has to read alternative media in the US to know what our government is really up to. It takes some intellectual curiosity, of course, but the truth is relatively easy to find on the Internet. If you don't look, however, you are sure to remain ignorant.

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