Poisoning PA rivers for profit; manufacturing the news; baggers will reap rewards; P in Obama stands for privatizing government; Bloomberg asks politician to be priest; power of example in college sports corrupts everything

When will we stop trading our well being for wealth and oil?

The natural gas boom gripping parts of the U.S. has a nasty byproduct: wastewater so salty, and so polluted with metals like barium and strontium, that most states require drillers to get rid of the stuff by injecting it down shafts thousands of feet deep.
Not in Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush.
There, the liquid that gushes from gas wells is only partially treated for substances that could be environmentally harmful, then dumped into rivers and streams from which communities get their drinking water.

________________________________________

How the news gets manufactured

How the media played up Saddam Hussein’s toppled statue
Mon Jan 3, 10:37 am ET
By Michael Calderone
On April 9, 2003, U.S. Marines helped bring down the monument to Saddam's regime in an image that Fox News and CNN replayed every 4.4 and 7.5 minutes during their broadcast day. Other networks also aired the clip repeatedly, with anchors gushing about the "historic" nature of the events unfolding in Baghdad. But the event wasn't without controversy: Critics argued that the military staged the moment in Firdos Square to generate positive news coverage while the war continued.
The U.S. media — with few notable exceptions — had already played a role in promoting the Bush administration's rationale for war, including bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction. Now, the media once again helped the Bush administration by focusing on a single event that, for some, could symbolize a people being liberated from a brutal dictator. One anchor likened the image to that of the Berlin Wall coming down

_________________________________________

We shall reap what we sew--and the baggers will rue the day they hooked up with the rich

Throwing Public Unions Under the Bus
Shamus Cooke, Truthout: "The stage is set and the main actors in Congress and in the corporate establishment are ready to perform after rehearsing behind closed doors for the coming assault on organized labor's most powerful sector: public workers. The final preparations were smoothed out in Obama's tax 'compromise' with the Republicans, which gave details of the drama's first act. The tax plan purposely did not include a critical element for state funding, called the Build America Bonds program (BAB), which allows recession-sunk states to easily borrow money from the federal government. In the face of enormous deficits, the states would be left to drown."

___________________________________________
Obama proving where his heart is and it ain’t with the people. It’s with the power brokers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama is considering tapping J.P. Morgan Chase executive William Daley for a senior role in the White House, possibly chief of staff, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday.
Daley is also a former commerce secretary. If he were chosen, the move would help satisfy a clamor in the business community to have greater representation for private industry within the administration.

_________________________________________

What a subversive way to privatize government secret ops. Pretty soon we won’t have a private government just to run Treasury and Commerce and Education

WASHINGTON – The top Pentagon job overseeing the secret special operations war on terrorist groups has been offered to former U.S. counterterrorism ambassador Michael Sheehan, according to two senior U.S. officials.
Sheehan, a retired U.S. Army Green Beret, did not return calls to his New York-based consulting firm, the Lexington Security Group
Increasingly, the sensitive operations Sheehan would oversee are performed by personnel from a number of different agencies, including the U.S. military's elite Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA and other members of the defense, intelligence and law enforcement community. Special operations personnel assigned to JSOC include Navy SEALs, U.S. Army Rangers and Green Berets.

___________________________________________


Just what we need for an educational fix--another Five Minute Manager. Like asking a politician to be a priest

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former publisher Cathie Black, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's controversial choice to run the city's schools, began her new job on Monday visiting classrooms and defending her qualifications to run the nation's largest school system.
Praised by Bloomberg as a "superstar manager" from the private sector, Black faces a system of some 1.1 million students and nearly 1,700 schools suffering from declining performance test scores and devastating budget cuts.

_____________________________________________

College sports condones inflated grades and surrogate exam takers and thesis writers by example

Pryor’s acts expose charade of college athletics
By Dan Wetzel
Terrelle “The Truth” Pryor is my favorite college football player and it isn’t just the way the Ohio State quarterback can shred defenses.
Pryor is a godsend to anyone who believes the business of college athletics is little more than a smoke-and-mirror show of situational ethics, selective enforcement and tightly controlled public relations designed to dodge taxes and make millionaires out of administrators.
Then there’s the general cronyism that exists between bowl games and the college administrators who keep them financially alive. On Dec. 30, PlayoffPAC revealed that the Orange Bowl provided a free, five-day Caribbean cruise in 2010 to 40 athletic directors, conference officials and their wives, in violation, the group alleges, of IRS rules.