Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Project censored: Le notizie piu censurate dell'anno scorso

Per 26 anni, l'universita' di Sonoma (USA) pubblica rapporti annuali
di notizie importanti taciute dai
Media Statunitensi.    Nessuna legge o censura ufficiale obbliga
giornali e reti TV a mettere questi
potenziali scoop sottochiave.   Semplicmente, i media (o, piu'
precisamente, le multinazionali
che li controllano), hanno deciso che la pubblicazione di queste
notizie non risponde ai loro
interessi.   O magari, queste storie non sono abbastanza interessanti.
  Decidete voi.
Alcune di queste notizie sono di carattere interno agli Stati Uniti.
Altre sono di importanza globale.   Tutte, comunque, dimostrano il
conflitto di interesse che puo'
succedere quando i media sono in mano a "imperi privati".       
Dettagli su queste notizie a
http://www.sfbg.com/36/48/censored_links.html
============================================================
1. FCC moves to privatize airwaves 
There was a time, not so long ago, when major news organizations
assigned reporters to every semi-significant federal government
office. Even into the 1980s you could find journalists hungry for a
scoop stalking the corridors of regulatory backwaters like the Fish
and Wildlife Service and the Federal Maritime Commission.
In this belt-tightening era that's no longer the case. 
Perhaps that's why the mainstream media missed one of the scariest
stories of the year: how big media, backed by 37 prominent economists,
is angling to buy up the radio airwaves.
If the scheme succeeds, the radio spectrum, now held in common by all
of us and licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to
broadcasters, will be transformed into chunks of electronic real
estate and sold off to the highest bidder. And you think radio is bad
now?
The story actually dates back to 1995, when the Freedom and Progress
Foundation - a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank funded by
tech, telecom, and media heavies - began calling for the privatization
of the airwaves. At the time, the proposal was considered a tad
extreme, even for the deregulation-obsessed Clinton administration.
Now, however, the media titans have found a key ally: FCC chair
Michael K. Powell, a Bush appointee and son of Secretary of State
Colin Powell.
Like Newt Gingrich, the younger Powell is one those curious government
officials who spends most of his time trying to demolish government.
So far in his tenure at the helm of the FCC, Powell has jettisoned its
historic mandate to act "in the public interest," greenlighted the
expansion of Rupert Murdoch's empire, and moved to relax already weak
rules limiting media monopolies. (It's telling that Powell refers to
the companies his agency allegedly oversees as "clients.") In this
über-laissez faire environment, the proposal to gradually privatize
the airwaves seems to be gaining traction.
The implications are enormous. "If the flow of human communications is
controlled by global media companies, how do we ensure that social and
cultural points of view and political expressions that may differ from
those of the companies who own the frequencies will be allowed to flow
over the spectrum?" wrote Jeremy Rifkin, the author and activist who
broke the story for the U.K. Guardian. "We might face the prospect of
a new form of repression as global media companies tighten their grip
on the airwaves."
Jeremy Rifkin, U.K. Guardian, April 200l, and MediaFile, Autumn 2001;
Brendan I. Koerner, Mother Jones, 10/11/01; Dorothy Kidd, MediaFile,
5/6/01.
2. New trade treaty seeks to privatize global social services 
Water may well be the oil of the 21st century. A billion people are in
need of potable water, and demand is growing by the second.
Corporations, sensing that blue gold is the commodity of the future,
are rushing to capitalize on this scarcity. They're eagerly buying up
publicly owned water delivery systems, and of course, hiking rates and
cutting costs.
When San Francisco-based construction giant Bechtel took over the
municipal water service of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1999, the company
promptly jacked up rates by 35 percent to guarantee a 16 percent
return on its investment.
Bolivians gave Bechtel a big one-finger salute. By April 2000 - after
riots, general strikes, several deaths, and almost no coverage in the
U.S. press - they'd run the firm out of the country. Despite the media
blackout, it was a huge victory for the working-class masses and a
highly illustrative episode in the ongoing privatization of
everything.
But as Maude Barlow reported in the Ecologist in February 2001, the
Bolivians' success may not last. Enter the spawn of the World Trade
Organization: the Global Agreement on Trade in Services. GATS, for
those of you who haven't been perusing obscure writings on
international finance, is a trade pact designed to speed up and lock
in the corporate takeover of public infrastructure and services
worldwide. GATS looks at taxpayer-funded services as an unfair
business practice. In other words, the decision by Bolivian government
officials to keep a foreign corporation from acquiring its water
system could be seen as a barrier to free trade and international
commerce.
While the exact terms of the deal are still being hashed out, U.S.
trade representatives have a general idea of what kind of public
services they'd like to privatize: water, health care, dental care,
child care, elder care, education, museums, libraries, law, welfare,
energy, environmental protection, insurance, transportation, mail
delivery, and on and on ...
Though the pact will undoubtedly be watered down before it's ratified,
expect it to contain some nasty privatization mandates. The next round
of negotiations is set for December 2002.
Maude Barlow, the Ecologist, February 2001. 
3. U.S. policies in Colombia support mass murder 
American media, as critic Noam Chomsky have pointed out repeatedly,
has a propensity for downplaying the human rights abuses of U.S.
allies.
So we hear all about the dirty deeds of the Marxist guerrillas in
Colombia but almost nothing about the Colombian government's ties to
paramilitary death squads.
It's not like this information is hard to come by. You don't have to
spend months nosing around the back alleys of Medellín tailing
shadowy, heavily armed characters. All an enterprising reporter has to
do is give a call to the folks at Human Rights Watch. The organization
has uncovered what it calls "detailed, abundant, and compelling
evidence of continuing close ties between the Colombian Army and
paramilitary groups responsible for gross human rights violations."
A really industrious reporter could actually read a couple of the
numerous reports HRW has produced on Colombia. The case studies are
stomach-churning: the 24 villagers whose skulls were crushed by
sledgehammers and heavy stones; the 40 men disappeared from the town
of Llorente; the dismembered and mutilated bodies discovered near
Tulu; the execution of community leader Noralba Gaviria Piedrahíta.
The sheer quantity of violence is staggering. Of the 236 massacres
logged during 2000, most were carried out by right-wing
paramilitaries, and many were perpetrated with tacit or direct support
from the government.
This death-squad government is bankrolled by you. Slated to get $378
million in U.S. aid for 2002, Colombia is the third-highest recipient
of American foreign aid, behind only Egypt and Israel. The bulk of
that money is earmarked for military hardware and combat training. The
blood of the many slaughtered innocents is - at least partially - on
the hands of American taxpayers.
By all indications, the United States has turned a blind eye to
ongoing carnage because the country hosts two of the things Washington
claims to hate most: cocaine and communists. In the past our generous
support was confined, supposedly, to coca-fighting efforts, but now,
with the war on terror widening, congress has voted to underwrite the
Colombian army's ongoing grudge match with Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia, the leftist insurgents. Making matters
worse, new president Alvaro Uribe Velez is reputed to be even closer
to the death squads than previous leader Andres Pastrana. Expect more
massacres.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, January 2001;
Jim Lobe, Asheville Global Report, October 2001; Dan Kovalik and
Gerald Dickey, Steelabor, 5/6/01; Rachel Massey, Rachel's Environment
and Health News, December 2001.
4. Bush administration hampered FBI investigation into bin Laden
family before Sept. 11
Muckraker Greg Palast has a penchant for acquiring damning
confidential documents from deep inside secretive government agencies.
Less than two months after Sept. 11, he scored again, getting hold of
1996 Federal Bureau of Investigation memos indicating the bureau
suspected Abdullah bin Laden, brother of the most infamous terrorist
in the world, of funding terrorist activity.
Unfortunately, angry agents who spoke to Palast told him the
counterterrorism probe was scuttled by bureau honchos before it could
even get off the ground.
The feds, Palast reported in the U.K. Guardian, weren't much
interested in possible Saudi connections to Islamic terror plots.
"There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis," one
source told Palast.
"They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration
took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to 'back
off' from investigations involving other members of the bin Laden
family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition
of nuclear weapons by Pakistan," Palast wrote.
The date of Palast's report was Nov. 7, and the U.S. media, like the
FBI, let the lead go. Few American journalists piggybacked on the
story - and after Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia started asking for
a real examination of any intelligence blunders that may have set the
stage for Sept. 11, she was labeled a conspiratorial loony by the
pundits. Months later, though, when two more FBI agents called press
conferences to say they were pulled off the trail of the Sept. 11
hijackers, the American media couldn't ignore the story.
Greg Palast and David Pallister, U.K. Guardian, November 2001; Amanda
Luker, Pulse, January 2002; Rashmee Z. Ahmed, Times of India, November
2001.
5. U.S. intentionally destroyed Iraq's water system 
When the U.S. military took on Saddam Hussein in 1991, American planes
strategically obliterated Iraq's water system. Then, with the war over
and the water system in ruins, the United States imposed sanctions
barring the importation of water purification equipment. The combined
effect of this one-two punch was the slow death of thousands of Iraqis
- something not unexpected by the U.S. military.
Reporting for the Progressive magazine, Thomas J. Nagy unearthed the
Defense Intelligence Agency documents detailing all of this. In fact,
Nagy's scoop showcases, yet again, the laziness of mainstream media:
the now declassified documents are online, at an official government
Web site, 
www.gulflink.osd.mil
.
Here's a sample from a January 1991 document titled, "Iraq Water
Treatment Vulnerabilities": "Iraq depends on importing specialized
equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which
is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline. With no
domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some
essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United
Nations Sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure
supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of
the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not
epidemics, of disease."
One commodity Iraq was banned from importing was chlorine, a chemical
used for both chemical weapons and water sanitization. The Defense
Department knew a shortage of chlorine would kill - and has kept the
ban in place for the past decade. "Unless the water is purified with
chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and
typhoid could occur," the brief noted.
Ten years on, the U.N. estimates 500,000 children have died as a
result of the sanctions, and Hussein remains, for the moment anyway,
in power.
Thomas J. Nagy, the Progressive, September 2001. 
6. U.S. government pushes nuclear revival 
As the cold war drew to a close in 1989, the antinuclear movement,
thinking it had thwarted Mutual Assured Destruction, lost its sense of
urgency and quickly faded into the background.
But while the peaceniks slacked, a small crew of Dr. Strangelove types
spearheaded by Stephen Younger, the associate director for nuclear
weapons research at Los Alamos national lab, was quietly planning the
nuke's resurgence. The bomb-backers include weapons designers, Energy
Department officials, right-wing foundations, and former military
chiefs. And boy, do they have some plans.
For starters, they want the citizenry to pony up $8 billion just to
maintain our aging stockpile of nuclear warheads. The real hope of the
nuke-lovers, though, is a massive reinvestment in weapons production -
which has been stalled for a decade - and the development of a whole
new range of nuclear armaments.
One concept currently in vogue is the "battlefield nuke," or
"mini-nuke," a relatively small missile that could be used in
conventional combat scenarios - something that should terrify every
U.S. Army grunt - to penetrate hardened enemy hideouts, à la Tora
Bora.
Word of the nuke revival surfaced briefly in the big media in March
2002 when the Los Angeles Times revealed the Bush administration's
revamped nuclear battle plans, or "Nuclear Posture Review." The
classified, apparently tentative plans include the use of mini-nukes
and strategic offensive strikes against enemy countries (a huge shift
in strategy) and target China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea,
and Russia. But the L.A. Times and other establishment media outlets
lost interest in the renewed arms race - days after the story hit, it
fell off the radar.
Stephen I. Schwartz, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 6/7/01. 
7. Corporations promote HMO model for school districts 
If you loathe your health insurance company, you'll be more than a
little concerned about one of the biggest trends in education. Behold
the EMO, or Educational Management Organization.
A quartet of for-profit corporations are lining up to seize (further)
control of public elementary and secondary schools. The biggest of the
EMOs, New York-based Edison Corp., the brainchild of longtime
education corporatizer Chris Whittle, already runs 136 schools serving
75,000 students in 22 states and the District of Columbia.
The EMOs have a fairly standard game plan: they sweep into school
districts with terrible test scores and tired teachers, boasting about
the overnight improvements they'll make. For parents frustrated by the
very real problems with public education, it sounds like a dream.
Oftentimes it is. According to one education expert quoted in Barbara
Miner's award-winning Multinational Monitor story, "Edison students
spend almost 50 percent more time in class each year than regular
public school students. Yet Edison students do not [perform] better
than regular public education students. Edison vowed its schools could
cost no more than regular public schools, but this promise, too, has
been broken."
Indeed, so far the EMOs haven't had much fiscal success. Already
plagued by declining share prices, Edison was pilloried in May by the
Securities and Exchange Commission, which said the company was
misrepresenting its revenue to stockholders. Other EMOs have already
melted down.
Still, it's too early to count the privatizers out. 
Barbara Miner, Multinational Monitor, 1/2/02; Frosty Toy, Progressive
Populist, November 2000; Dennis Fox, North Coast Xpress, Winter 2000;
Linda Lutton, In These Times, June 2001.
8. NAFTA destroys farming communities in U.S. and abroad 
"In 1993, when the North American Free Trade Agreement came before
Congress, farmers were told that it would throw open the gates to the
Mexican and Canadian borders, allowing them to export their way to
prosperity by selling their surplus corn, chickens, and whatnot in
these golden globalized markets," populist pundit Jim Hightower wrote
in his Hightower Lowdown newsletter. NAFTA, however, "turns out to
have been the shafta" for small-time agrarians.
Hightower based his claim on evidence amassed by watchdog group Public
Citizen. The stats, drawn largely from federal records, are
jaw-dropping:
* 33,000 small American farms disappeared during the first seven years
of NAFTA.
* Annual farm income has dropped from $59 billion before NAFTA to an
estimated $41.3 billion for 2001.
* Between the 1994-95 growing season and the 1999-2000 season, the
volume of U.S. corn exports dropped by 11 percent, wheat fell 8
percent, and cotton plummeted 28 percent. During that time the overall
U.S. trade surplus declined by 71 percent.
Things don't exactly seem to be improving massively south of the
border, either. Thanks to a NAFTA-mandated drop in the price of
Mexican corn, farm income in Mexico has slid 17 percent, while debt
has shot up by 50 percent.
Now here was a ridiculously easy story for the press to jump on -
after all, Public Citizen did all the work. Or it could've been the
starting point for endless numbers of engaging articles, especially at
a time when corporate-backed trade agreements are prompting riots in
cities around world. But no: the only NAFTA-related story in recent
memory that's gotten any play was the controversy over Mexican
truckers who wanted to drive in the United States.
Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown, September 2001; Anita Martin,
Fellowship of Reconciliation, November/December 2000.
9. U.S. faces national housing crisis 
Julie Daniels knows all about this country's paucity of affordable
housing. A certified nursing assistant in Stamford, Conn., she's got a
decent union job, earns $28,000 a year, and still can't find a place
to live. You can find Daniels and her three children camped out at a
Stamford homeless shelter.
As any working-class urban dweller can attest, Daniels isn't alone.
There are literally millions of families in need of a place to live -
six million of them, to be precise. Funny how this glorious "new
economy" era is looking more and more like a Dorothea Lange snapshot
from the Great Depression.
And as Randy Shaw pointed out in In These Times, things are only
getting worse. Recent years have seen the loss of 1.5 million low-cost
housing units, corruption and stagnant budgets at the federal
Department of Housing and Urban Development, and an utter lack of
interest on the part of politicians and the press. Even populist
stalwart Ralph Nader spent more time talking about industrial hemp
than housing while campaigning for president in 2000. As for the two
main parties, the Democrats, under Bill Clinton, managed to scuttle a
$1 billion housing construction program, while the GOP, as embodied by
Dubya, wants to solve the crisis with "market solutions" - while
homelessness and misery just keep on growing.
Randy Shaw, In These Times, November 2000. 
10. CIA double deals in Macedonia 
Rounding out the top 10, we have a pair of heavily footnoted essays by
Michel Chossudovsky, director of the Centre for Research on
Globalisation and an economics professor at the University of Ottawa.
According to Chossudovsky, U.S. spooks are meddling in the affairs of
Macedonia by arming an array of guerrilla factions in an attempt to
secure control of a still-unbuilt oil pipeline and fill the coffers of
American corporations.
Drawing from reports in the European press (the London Sunday Times,
Edinburgh Scotsman, etc.) and military trade magazines (Jane's
Defence, Defense Daily) the writer laid out a theory that the United
States has been covertly seeking to "consolidate America's sphere of
interest in southeastern Europe" by installing a Macedonian government
friendly to "oil giants including BP-Amoco-Arco, Chevron and Texaco."
Given the Central Intelligence Agency's inglorious history - "Make the
economy scream!" Richard Nixon once barked to agency operatives in
Chile - Chossudovsky's thesis is plausible and worth exploring.
Really, though, what he offered in these two pieces, which ran online
on the CRG's Web site (
www.globalresarch.ca
) and on the Emperor's New
Clothes (
www.emperors-clothes.com
), was more of a starting point than
a smoking gun.
Michel Chossudovsky, Globalresearch.ca, August 2001; Emperor's New
Clothes, June 2001.
 Runners-up
 Project Censored's other picks for 2001 
11. Former criminals staff the Bush administration. Peter Kornbluh,
the Nation; Terry Allen, In These Times, Extra; Duncan Campbell, U.K.
Guardian; John Sutherland; Michael Zuckerman, Washingtonian.
12. NAFTA shreds public protection laws. William Greider, the Nation;
David Huffman, Terrain.
13. Kissinger and Ford greenlighted invasion of East Timor by
Indonesia. Jim Lobe, Asheville Global Report.
14. Local governments go to war against abortion. Barry Yeoman, Mother
Jones.
15. The Bush energy plan: Recipe for a public health disaster. David
Corn, Tompaine.com; Cat Lazaroff, Environmental News Service; David
Corn, Progressive Populist.
16. CIA kidnaps suspects for torture overseas. Don Greenlees, Weekend
Australian; Barry Gray, World Socialist Web site.
17. Big media ignores the message of antiglobalization protesters. Jim
Giuffo, Columbia Journalism Review.
18. The world's coral reefs are dying. Julia Whitty, Harper's
Magazine.
19. Corporate greed is fueling a fratricidal bloodbath in the Congo.
Dena Montague and Frieda Berrigan, Dollars and Sense; Keith Harmon
Snow, Pioneer Valley, Mass., Voice.
20. The experiments of biotech giant Novartis could have disastrous
ramifications. Antony Barnett, London Observer.
21. Does the AFL-CIO have the guts to unionize temp laborers? Harry
Kelber, Progressive Populist.
22. Aquaculture could become an environmental nightmare. Bruce Barcot,
Mother Jones; Rebecca J. Goldburg, Matthew S. Elliott, and Rosamond L.
Naylor, PEW Oceans Commission Report on Marine Aquaculture.
23. Live horses are used to produce certain pharmaceuticals. The
Animals' Agenda.
24. Wal-Mart bankrolled an anti-union ballot initiative in Oklahoma.
John Nichols, Madison Capital Times and Asheville Global Report.
25. The federal government bails out private prison corporations.
Judith Green, The American Prospect.


E' vero, però lo stesso accade se i media sono in mano a "imperi statali"
(vedi, ad esempio, il Quotidiano del Popolo (Renmin Ribao) cinese).
L'unica via per avere un'infarinatura di verità è il pluralismo che so
benissimo è difficile da realizzare...l'unica strada resta forse
Internet...ed infatti ti ringrazio, così come ringrazio tutti gli altri
utenti che postano qui, per la possibilità che mi date di ampliare le mie
vedute.
Grazie e ciao!

Quello di cui non hai tenuto conto è che l'America c'ha propinato sempre la solfa della democrazia, anche la più grande democrazia della terra contrappondendosi (mentre finanziava le giunte militari sparse nel mondo) ai paesi comunisti.