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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 February, 2006.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 432.
- While big business racks up historic profits, workplace life is becoming more unbearable for the people who make the products and services. - ...the Pentagon had paid $20 apiece for ice cube trays that retail for less than a dollar. - In another shining example of modern day corporate fascism, it was announced recently that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency. - Imagine my shock when it came to light that Fox News had prostrated itself in front of the government and adopted lockstep the 'terrorist surveillance program' rhetoric on its news broadcasts. - The offense: her shirt, bearing an anti-war message and other "unlawful conduct," police said. - A hand comes down again to push my chin against the concrete. By this time there are four cops on the scene. My hands are tightly cuffed behind my back. They lift me up and shove me onto a parkbench and shackle my legs. I am still calling out, telling people what this is about. One of the cops says to me, "Shut up or I will kill you!", "I am sick of this anti-Bush shit!" "You are definitely going to the psyche ward." Then somebody calls the EMS, and a fire squad shows up. - Sometime before the 2008 presidential election, and possibly much, much sooner, the United States Government will detonate a small nuclear bomb in an American city, killing 10,000 to 100,000 civilians. - by Cindy Sheehan - I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled; "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. - Four Canadian diplomats, including the charge d’affaires to Iraq, escaped injury Tuesday when their vehicle was shot at in Baghdad by U.S. soldiers. - We now know there was a political deal between the Bush Administration and New Jersey Democrats to get rid of the Abramoff prosecutor, Noel Hillman, by offering him a federal judgeship in New Jersey. - Officials from six major oil companies have refused to testify this week at a Senate hearing looking into whether oil industry mergers in recent years have made gasoline more expensive at the pump. - Ohio's GOP-controlled legislature has passed a repressive new law that will gut free elections here and is already surfacing elsewhere around the US. The bill will help end free elections and continue the process of installing the GOP as America's permanent ruling party. - Israel has targeted far more civilians than Hamas, and the United States is the current undisputed world champion in targeting civilians. Hypocrisy is the playground of the powerful. - ...the election of Hamas is a godsend for Zionist settlers who need a never-ending cycle of violence in order to perpetuate their colonialist project of an Ashkenazi state planted in the middle of the Islamic world. Now, with the war criminal Ariel Sharon slumbering in a coma, the Israeli government has decided to crank up the heat, using the so-called election of Hamas as an excuse. - What the U.S. is spending to crush Iraq - Speak out too loudly against the drug war, and you might be targeted. Peter McWilliams had AIDS and cancer and was dependent on marijuana to stay alive. But the federal government wouldn’t let McWilliams, a vocal anti-prohibition activist, have his medicine. They threatened to take his mother’s house away if he used the substance that was keeping him alive. He was found dead in his home in June 2000. The drug war killed him directly. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. - Pensions were once considered one of the central features of the American Dream. That was the dream, but U.S. workers are waking up to a different reality today--that pensions are fast becoming a thing of the past. - Few people...believe the elections hold out any hope for an improvement to the desperately miserable lives of the bulk of the population. None of the contending parties or candidates offer a programme that would reverse the damage done by following the neo-liberal plan, nor relieve the phenomenal wealth inequalities and exploitation that characterise Haitian society. - The State of the Union speech given by George W. Bush Tuesday night was among the most menacing and belligerent in American history. The US president outlined a program of limitless and perpetual warfare, on every continent, and against any regime that stands in the way of the rapacious American ruling class.
- Just when you thought TSA screening horror stories couldn't get any more anathema to common sense, the latest victim of the little Hitler airport Gestapo proves otherwise. - Those who doubt that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team will attack Iran, while so conspicuously overextended in Iraq, are ignoring the subtleties of the administration’s Middle East strategy. - The America born in 2001, first with the ascension of Bush and later with the psychological war on Americans begun on 9/11, has degenerated according to plan, methodically and perniciously engineered by entities intent on corporatist control, molded into an immovable ship on a collision course with a giant iceberg. In order for America to sink its people had to be molded to one day accept the fate awaiting us. Our brains had to be programmed and altered, our minds controlled and conditioned, our beliefs brainwashed and engineered. - G.W. Bush, a man whose family made their fortunes from banks, oil, CIA deceptions and war profiteering had the gall to spin an "addicted to oil" story line in his state of the union speech last night. In yet another Orwellian spin job to distract and manipulate his listeners he introduces the concept of throwing a few scientists at a problem from which he and his have greatly profited. - I sense a pattern developing. - The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. - Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change. - Afghanistan is Bush's dystopia, a failed narco-state run by American puppets, Islamic fundamentalists and human rights abusers. The corporate media has done the American people a grave disservice by characterizing this drug-dependent settlement as a burgeoning democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Karzai regime has no popular mandate and will vanish in the first hours after the American occupation ends. - When people ask why so many tens of millions of people lack decent health care and education, one answer is clear. For over two decades the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the governments that control those institutions have consistently told weak national governments in less developed countries to reduce public social spending. - Last month, President George W. Bush murdered four children. This is not a controversial statement. There is no dispute about the facts. Indeed, Bush's own minions fully acknowledge – even celebrate – the deed. Nor has the political opposition or the national media offered the slightest objection to the principle of presidential murder. - Key White House email records in the investigation of the leak of a covert CIA operative's name to the press are missing. - They’re dancing in the halls at ExxonMobil, but quietly. See, they’ve just set the earnings record for American companies, raking in $36 billion in annual income, even more than Wal-Mart, which makes ExxonMobil number one. - This is all part and parcel of the mind control. The image is king. The image is the reality. There is no person. There is no president. Nobody is there. Only the image. - Facing an enlistment crisis, the Army is granting "waivers" to an increasingly high percentage of recruits with criminal records -- and trying to hide it. - What they have that you don’t - Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our global economy decline and eventually collapse. One way or another, the decision will be made by our generation. Of that there is little doubt. But it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.
- The single most striking deterioration that has happened in the United States in the last ten years or so is the loss of the right to dissent. The United States government has always done terrible things, but through it all Americans have always had the right to complain about it. - According to in-house memos now circulating, the DHS has issued orders to banks across America which announce to them that "under the Patriot Act" (whatever that crap means) the DHS has the absolute right to seize, without any warrant whatsoever, any and all customer bank accounts, to make "periodic and unannounced" visits to any bank to open and inspect the contents of 'selected safe deposit boxes." - ...the creation of a special operations regiment has the Canadian Forces following in the footsteps of other militaries that discovered in recent years a need for a multi-tasking specialized unit that can provide muscle in missions abroad... - ...revelations that Tony Blair and George W. Bush debated staging an act of provocation to goad Saddam Hussein into war sends a very clear warning as to how a pretext for a conflict with Iran could be manufactured. - The United States has expelled a Venezuelan diplomat a day after Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, compared Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler. - The ill-gotten gains financed a lavish spending spree. Mr Stein used them to buy - among other things - Lexus and Porsche cars, a Cessna light aircraft, watches, jewels, guns and grenade launchers as well as two plots of land in his native North Carolina. For his part, Mr Bloom is said to have provided his benefactors with money, first-class air tickets, and sexual favours provided by women kept in a villa in Baghdad. - Prisoners and the prisoner issue play a major role in Palestinian politics. Palestinians are proportionally one of the most detained nations on earth. - Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has spent a half-million dollars a year creating a database it claims is "arguably the largest repository of 16-25 year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records." - "The autopsy showed that Rahil was shot from about 50 meters' distance, and his body was found 700 meters away from border line on the Lebanese side..." - This is about conditioning Americans to accept the abolition of Posse Comitatus for the future military takeover of law enforcement outlined by Bush following Hurricane Katrina. - What are we to make of the furore surrounding the publishing of anti-Islam cartoons by Dutch and French daily papers? The intent seems clear enough - to portray Islam, and therefore all Muslims as fanatic terrorists, and to provoke Muslim groups to confirm for the world that this portrayal is accurate... - There is little doubt that an orchestrated stand down order was issued to NORAD by the highest levels of the US federal government. - A £4.2 billion plan proposed by a Chinese bank and backed by Jakarta politicians would clear 1.8 million hectares of this wilderness over the next six years to grow oil palms to feed the world’s growing appetite for margarine, ice-cream, biscuits and biodiesel fuel. - In a cheerier version of the "duck and cover" 1950s-era classroom drills that advised schoolchildren to dive under their desks in the event of nuclear attack, Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff outlined the "Ready Kids" campaign at a Chicago elementary school library. - In the wake of George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, the White House and the Republican-led Congress have moved swiftly to implement a series of budget measures that will slash funding for health care and education while allocating vast new sums for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts for America’s wealthy elite. - I am not sure if this change would eliminate war crimes laws altogether, or just for Israelis. - The White House said Thursday that it plans to ask Congress for an additional $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, driving the cost of military operations in the two countries to $120 billion this year, the highest ever.
- For anyone who doubts that we live in a 1984esque society, the high-tech surveillance that is planned for Super Bowl XL this Sunday should prove once and for all that not only has Big Brother arrived, he's moved in, unpacked, and cracked open a beer. - Increaseing US Hostillity Toward Venezuela - Why is President Bush hell-bent on getting Iran’s alleged violations referred to the UN Security Council before March? Perhaps it’s because John Bolton is President of the Security Council this month. - The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats. - The Most Obscene Profits in American History - Record profits coupled with little or new regulation on an industry gone venally berserk and it's off to the races once again in Canada as far as natural resources versus the health of the environment are concerned. This time the triggering mechanism is the tremendous oil reserve contained in Canada's oil sands (or tar sands if you're a traditionalist) deposits. Fueled by the US's insatiable desire for gasoline, and its historical dependence on Canada, the current boom is only expected to escalate in profit-taking frenzy. - It is truly fascinating that U.S. officials are simply oblivious to how much they are disliked around the world. They seem to have this quaint notion that they are loved everywhere or that the problem is simply a PR one, which they think they can cure if they can just "get their message out." They don’t realize that the more they get their message out, they more they are disliked by people everywhere. - At the end of this operation, Washington should have complete control over the world’s main hydrocarbon production and reserves. It will control the world economy without the need to share power. - The United States will be using Blackhawk helicopters and planes along the Montana border with Alberta and Saskatchewan to watch for terrorists, drug-runners and illegal immigrants. - The Secret Service on Thursday said it was investigating a Rhode Island student who wrote a rambling essay advocating violence against President Bush and major U.S. corporations. - Beyond the massive amounts of money involved, such a mind-numbing event as the Super Bowl serves to divert the population—reeling from economic blows and witness to the carryings-on of a ruling elite that has lost its head—from everyday life and all the unresolved problems in American society. The shrillness of the media hype about everything trivial increases as the list of major disasters lengthens...A bewildered population is urged to ignore all this and concentrate on the appropriate menu for three (or four!) hours of television viewing. It’s untenable and absurd. - In the Bush Age, such hostility to free speech has become all too common. Students have been booted from school, shoppers from malls, protesters from Bush rallies, simply as a result of the shirts on their fronts. - Both law-enforcement and intelligence agencies fundamentally depend on informants. Informants in foreign intelligence are at best traitors to their respective countries. Informants in domestic crime issues are often paid, either in cash or in deals cut on crimes they have committed. Altogether, they are a sleazy lot. - The people who breathed that "dust" were inhaling microscopic shards of glass windows, computers, asbestos, mercury, fluorescent light bulbs, coffee makers, carpeting, firemen, toilets, garbage, electrical wires, and other dangerous items. - As the pretexts to justify the illegal war of aggression against Iraq started to collapse one after the other, the Bush Administration, its vassals and the mass media adopted the cliché of "democracy" to justify the invasion and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. However, from the outset of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. objective was conspicuous; to destroy Iraq, install a puppet government and pillage the nation’s resources. - The Internal Revenue Service’s taxpayer advocate recently revealed that the agency froze tax refunds owed to hundreds of thousands of poor Americans, labeling them fraudulent. Refunds were withheld by the IRS without notifying taxpayers that their claims were under review, thereby eliminating any opportunity to respond to the agency. - This week's revelations that George W. Bush and Tony Blair considered staging a war provocation by painting a US spy plane in UN colors and flying it over Iraq, in the hope that Saddam would order it shot down, illustrates a desperate depth of criminality only rivaled by previous notorious historical examples.
- God forbid critics of the war on Iraq should compare it with the war in Vietnam. But perhaps it is worth mentioning that the liberation of Iraq is now costing more each month than the preservation of the Republic of South Vietnam did more than 30 years ago.
- ...the real enemies of the state are basically the same enemies monitored, harassed, and even assassinated during the Vietnam-era and well before. Osama bin "Forgotten," al-CIA-duh, and the dim bulb patsy Mohammad Rauf are nothing more than an engineered pretext for the current clique of fascist authoritarians in the White House and the Pentagon to go after sincere threats—antiwar, anti-globalist, and patriot movement activists... - It is nothing short of a stroke of genius to mix police state imagery in with football imagery and thus make slavery palatable to the masses. - Britain is laying secret plans to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq. - He has obviously fallen prey to the epidemic of Beltway coziness that has turned far too many in the MSM into toothless house cats curled at the feet of those in power.
Pages for February, 2006
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