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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of January, 2006.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 480.
- Having decided it was impossible to simply ignore the tragedy, the major powers made commitments of money and personnel, not to help the victims, but to advance their own political and strategic agendas in the region. - The university, which has 50,000 students on three campuses, on Thursday became the 10th college to stop selling Coca-Cola products because of concerns arising from accusations about the company's treatment of workers in bottling plants in Colombia and environmental problems in India. - What could the Americans possibly be offering Turkey... - Former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was stripped of his legal immunity Friday to face charges of diverting public funds to personal bank accounts. - The lopsided reporting is nothing new. American media, in complicity with the U.S. government, has waged a no-holds barred image war with Iran ever since it broke diplomatic relations following the Islamic Revolution. It is safe to say that approximately 99% of the media coverage of Iran over the past 25+ years has been negative, and of that, about 99% is of a political nature. - (newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, music, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies) - The corporate model of media is antithetical to personal freedom. When the marketplace of ideas is reduced to the solitary task of plying soapsuds and tennis shoes for big business, democracy is bound to suffer. Ultimately, commercial media cannot help but become an annex of the political establishment, developing collusive ties with the very people it is supposed to scrutinize. Media as "watchdog of power" is a romantic notion with no real basis in fact. Rather, in its present manifestation, media serves as a junior partner in the "weaponizing" of information; transforming the events of the day into a repetitious mantra extolling the objectives of society’s overlords. - Wars are not waged by those who have to fight them. Those who fight wars know too well their terrible costs. Wars are waged by those who profit from them with minimal or no risk to themselves. War is big business and it is immensely profitable for a select few who are insulated from the effects of war’s environmental impacts and social costs. War never serves the interest of working class people. They are the result of menacing forces of greed and power masquerading as benevolent government, insulating us from contrived acts of terror. - Rumsfeld's lie that it was an employee and not a company problem highlighted by recent developments. - The Bush administration has sent troops into Paraguay. They are there ostensibly for humanitarian and counterterrorism purposes. The action coincides with growing left unity in South America, military buildup in the region and burgeoning independent trade relationships. - Information captured by the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases... - In the world's thirst for oil and the United States' efforts to obtain it outside the troubled Middle East, African oil has become essential. Africa is expected to provide the United States with a quarter of its oil supply in the next decade, compared with about 15 percent now, and much of it will come from the Gulf of Guinea, where the Niger Delta sits. - More and more evidence continues to accumulate that Voter registration fraud was responsible for a great deal if not the total Bush vote margin in the 2004 Presidential election. - Fuel shortages, darkness greet Iraqis in 2006 - No doubt, the mainstream media often LIES. I could go over examples ad nauseum. But more often than not, they merely massage the truth. - Millionaires will receive an average tax cut of $19,000 a year when the two provisions are wiped out, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said. The center added that this comes on top of an average tax cut of $103,000 that millionaires received in 2005 because of other tax cuts adopted since 2001. - Whether we like it or not, Iraq now is the 53rd American state. - It makes perfect sense for the CIA to be attracted to Iran’s Baluchistan province. First, the area has well established drug smuggling routes—and the CIA has an insatiable hunger for profits to be gleaned from illegal drugs—and second Baluchistan is a neglected tribal backwater where Hanafi Sunni Islam has a foothold in contrast to Iran’s Shia majority. - Yes indeed, 9/11 is the ultimate lotto prize for the neocon pigs. Full Spectrum Dominance? Try Full Spectrum Fascism.
- A Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to print positive articles written by American soldiers has also been compensating Sunni religious scholars in Iraq in return for assistance with its propaganda work, according to current and former employees. - Not only is the omnipresent "al-Qaeda" at work in Gaza...but if we are to believe Reuters and the New York Times, the custom-made (by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI) terrorist outfit is also busy at work in Lebanon, firing missile salvos into northern Israel. - ...why does Amy Goodman invite rightwing pundits for "debates" and "discussions"? Not just a few times, but lately quite regularly. Don’t the Rightwing propagandists have almost all the other platforms already? - So this policy will be in place right up until the next election? Election? Let's just say that we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. It may not be wise to have an election in a time of national peril. - Thirty-two privately operated Venezuelan oilfields returned to state control Sunday with the start of the new year, the government said. - Israeli aircraft have struck the Gaza Strip repeatedly, targeting what the army says are roads and a building used by Palestinian resistance fighters firing rockets into the Jewish state. - Bush has actually declared it treasonous to reveal his illegal behavior! His propagandists, who masquerade as news organizations, have taken up the line: To reveal wrong-doing by the Bush administration is to give aid and comfort to the enemy. - When you can blithely kill something which is no threat to you, you'll fit right in the U.S. military... - The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, a frequent critic of the city police, says it plans to arm residents of the city's north side with video cameras to record officers' dealings with the public. - "We must act as (former Prime Minister Menachem) Begin did when he bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor..." - Not one of the reporters who got to ask a question thought to (or dared to) ask Bush how he dared to compare his scratch to the serious injuries of soldiers he had sent off to battle, even in jest. - What's so special about this spot in the sun is that it has been a locus for colonial predation for centuries on account of its rich resources. - The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. - As the new year unfolds, our war crimes complicit corporate media will tell us Bush is "drawing down" the number of troops in Iraq. In fact, the tempo and frequency of mass murder will increase, as the Straussian neocons have no desire to abandon their plan to decimate Muslim society.
- Rather than accept cheap diesel from Venezuela, the city chose to raise commuting costs for low-income residents. - As America continues to tighten its grip on the world’s dwindling hydrocarbon resources, we can expect that the successes of the Iraqi resistance will offer a model to the other disparate groups who have no chance of beating the United States in open battle, but hope to bring the empire to its knees by making the costs of war too great to sustain. - by Daniel Hopsicker - ...appearances to the contrary, "The Big Fix 2006" may already be in on the Republican big money scandals. The show may be over before it began. - Fanaticism is a driving force here, as it often is behind great crimes. This is a crime against nature, and this fanaticism is economic - the belief that money and profit should outweigh all other considerations, including survival of the species. If we maintain our current rates of consumption and environmental strategies, by the end of this century, one-half of the species now alive on earth may be extinct. - The Swedish Prime Minister, Göran Persson, has founded a non-political committee with the intent of making Sweden fossil fuel-independent by 2020. - Words are very important. Words frame issues, palliate, mollify, exculpate or even hide sordid acts. Th(is)...list analyses a few of the prevalent words that hide or exculpate the dispossession of millions. - Why is a company that profits from Internet use demonizing the Internet? - A U.S. air strike killed 14 members of one family in the oil refining town of Baiji in northern Iraq, an Iraqi security force spokesman said on Tuesday. - It’s definitely relevant to Americans’ well-being whether Bush lives in a bubble in the realm of his White House, surrounded by a retinue of ideologues and incompetent cronies. It’s of far greater consequence, however, whether the rest of us in America live in a bubble . . . while failing to recognize it, admit it, and change it. - You can't have war without corruption. The history of war is inseparable from histories of corrupt power and social debasement. War attracts corruption like corpses attract flies. When a country elects "to remain on a wartime footing," the rot can get pretty deep. Americans should know all about this. - Israeli police have evidence that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's family received $3m in bribes, it has been alleged on an Israeli television channel. - Despite the U.S. command's announcement last week that it would seek to curb abuses by Iraqi commando units, the U.S. military has been extremely tolerant of the most abusive unit of all -- the notorious Wolf Brigade ... - The rich and privileged in our government and big banks don't have a clue how most working American families exist. - What’s going on here? Beyond their profitable (for broadcasters) appeal to the public’s most base and voyeuristic instincts, these and other "real—life" television shows play a neglected ideological role in the corporate-crafted "popular culture" of parasitic late capitalism. They are part of an elitist thought control project: the cultural engineering and enforcement of mass consent to social hierarchy. - Bad enough that the U.S. military is occupying Iraq. Now the IMF is occupying the country. - Despite three court rulings that cell phone tracking by government agencies without a court order is illegal, a fourth court ruling has now authorized blanket spying. The government can now use cell phone data to track physical location, without a search warrant or probable cause. - Dust down the slogan, it's needed once again: Save The Whale. Twenty years on from the introduction of the international whaling moratorium that was supposed to protect them, the great whales face renewed and mortal dangers in 2006. - America’s WAR to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi nation has only resulted in creating a society so paralyzed that it is incapable of even burying its dead. - by Wayne Madsen - Intelligence and military sources in the United States and abroad are reporting on various factors that indicate a U.S. military hit on Iranian nuclear and military installations, that may involve tactical nuclear weapons, is in the final stages of preparation.
- Spring exercise to turn city into "battleground" - With help from the U.S. Justice Department and state prosecutors, corporations are getting away with serious crimes by using their executives as cannon fodder... - by Michel Chossudovsky- The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages. - America is to spend £1billion on an embassy in Baghdad "more secure than the Pentagon". - The latest anti-terror advertising campaign by the London Metropolitan Police encourages the residents of London to actively spy on and report anybody, including their own neighbours, should they suspect them to be behaving in a suspicious way. - A feisty Paul Craig Roberts, a former Asst. Sec. of the Treasury during the Reagan years, is starting off the New Year with his "pen blazing," comparing the Bush administration to the Nazi regime while ending his latest column, called "A Criminal Administration," with the ominous possibility of another huge terrorist attack in 2006 orchestrated by the neo-cons" - The U.S. assumed that Cuba would implode and Fidel would be gone. Then, U.S. speculators would take over the country and a new financial bonanza would be created just south of the U.S. mainland. Fairy tales are for kids. - A total of 60 journalists have been killed on duty in Iraq since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, including 22 in 2005. - Here we are, it's 2006. Anybody remember the Anthrax scare? - "He’s a criminal banker … He’s a swindler. He’s interested in getting money, and I suspect it’s all gone into his bank accounts and those of his friends" - It wasn't long ago that a Washington Post article on death from the air in Iraq included not one but more than a half dozen "claims" by the military about the great pains they take to spare civilian casualties, how the Iraqis are always exaggerating, and so on. - Lobbying is Washington's grubby secret. Some say lobbying is part of the democratic process. Others claim it is legalised bribery, even corruption. But love it or loathe it, it is the way Washington works. - ...there's the ethical issues with this so-called journalist hanging out in (and helping with) such a blatantly partisan event. It's again obvious that his schmoozing with the rich and powerful have hampered his ability to commentate on those issues properly detached and rational. He's been co-opted by the DeLay/Abramoff machine.
- The tendency to devalue the enemies' lives is reinforced by not only racist but also sexist ideologies -- history is made by "our boys," and "enemy women's" deaths are not even acknowledged.
- Each and every nuclear bomb is a Holocaust in itself. It can kill, devastate cities, destroy entire peoples. - Says "pull it" meant to evacuate firefighters, but there were no firefighters in the building. - Evidence indicates Bush wire-tapped alternative media - Peak oil is most likely a term most readers have not heard before. That is about to change. The concept is slowly making its way onto the mainstream stage. It is intruding into the fringes of the public conscience and soon it may occupy the greater part. When that time comes, as it inevitably will, and probably sooner than you think, the world as we know it will end. - This is what happens when you deregulate industry. People die. This is what happens when you let companies act as their own watchdogs. People die. - It bears remembering at this vital time, then, that Sharon's plan was not one of "peace" (interesting way to frame the question). He was implementing a plan which his senior adviser Dov Weisglass described as formaldehyde. - On the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked how they could affect Israeli-U.S. relations. His quick reply was: "It's very good…….Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)". - Despite its massive military and economic power, the United States is destined to lose the war in IRAQ. The reason is simple: The world’s superpower has a history of cut and run. It also has a legacy of injustice from the very beginning of its history, which was based on the extermination of the Red Indians who originally owned the plateaus, the mountains, the rivers and the valleys to themselves. - Why, for real diversity, the news is proudly reporting there were even some Democrats. You know, people like Robert McNamara, the guy who helped plan the firebombing deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese...
Pages for January, 2006
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