Censored!

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored for 13 years, says he’s
finished with reform. It’s impossible, he said in a recent interview,
to try to get major news media outlets to deliver relevant news stories
that serve to strengthen democracy.

“I really think we’re beyond reforming corporate media,” said
Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and the
director of Project Censored. “We’re not going to break up these huge
conglomerates. We’re just going to make them irrelevant.”

Every year since 1976, Project Censored has spotlighted the 25 most
significant news stories that were largely ignored or misrepresented by
the mainstream press. Now the group is expanding its mission—to
promote alternative news sources. But it continues to report the
biggest national and international stories that the major media
ignored.

The term “censored” doesn’t mean that some government agent stood
over newsrooms with a rubber stamp and forbid the publication of the
news—or even that the information was completely out of the
public eye. The stories Project Censored highlights may have run in one
or two news outlets—but didn’t get the type of attention they
deserved.

The project staff begins by sifting through hundreds of stories
nominated by individuals at Sonoma State, where the project is based,
as well as 30 affiliate universities all over the country.

Articles are verified, fact-checked and selected by a team of
students, faculty and evaluators from the wider community, then sent to
a panel of national judges to be ranked. The product is a book,
co-edited this year by Phillips and associate director Mickey Huff,
that summarizes the top stories, provides in-depth media analysis and
includes resources for readers who are hungry for more substantive
reporting.

Project Censored doesn’t just expose gaping holes in the news
brought to you by the likes of Fox, CNN or USA Today—it
also shines a light on less prominent but more incisive
alternative-media sources serving up in-depth investigations and
watchdog reports.

Phillips is stepping down this year as director of Project Censored
and turning his attention toward a new endeavor called Media Freedom
International, which will tap academic affiliates from around the globe
to verify the content put out by independent news outlets, in order to
facilitate trust in these lesser-known sources. “The biggest question I
got asked for 13 years was, who do you trust?” he explained. “So we’ve
really made an effort in the last three years to try and address that
question, in a very open way, in a very honest way, and say, these are
[the sources] who we can trust.”

Benjamin Frymer, a sociology professor at Sonoma State who is
stepping into the role of Project Censored director, says he believes
the time is ripe for this kind of push. “The actual amount of time that
people spend reading online is increasing,” Frymer pointed out. “It’s
not as if people are just cynically rejecting media—they’re
reaching out for alternative sources. Project Censored wants to get
involved in making those sources visible.”

The Project Censored book this year uses the term “truth
emergency.”

“We call it an emergency because it’s a democratic emergency,” Huff
asserted. In this media climate, he said, “We’re awash in a sea of
information. But we have a paucity of understanding about what the
truth is.”

The top 25 Project Censored stories of 2008-2009 highlight the same
theme that Phillips and Huff say has triggered the downslide of
mainstream media: the overwhelming influence of powerful, profit-driven
interests. The No. 1 story details the financial sector’s hefty
campaign contributions to key members of Congress leading up to the
financial crisis, which coincided with a weakening of federal banking
regulations. Another story points out that even in the financial tumult
following the economic downturn, special interests spent more money on
D.C. lobbyists than ever before.

Here’s this year’s list:

1. Congress sells out to Wall Street

The total tab for the Wall Street bailout, including money spent and
promised by the United States government, works out to an estimated
$42,000 for every man, woman and child, according to American
Casino, a documentary about sub-prime lending and the financial
meltdown. The predatory lending free-for-all, the emergency pumping of
taxpayer dollars to prop up megabanks and the lavish bonuses handed out
to Wall Street executives in the aftermath are all issues that have
dominated news headlines.

But another twist in the story has received scant attention from the
mainstream news media: the unsettling combination of lax oversight from
national politicians with high-dollar campaign contributions from
financial players.

“The worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were
together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état,” Matt Taibbi wrote
in “The Big Takeover,” a March, 2009 Rolling Stone article.
“They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been
snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a
small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections,
buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.”

In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, the financial sector spent
$1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions, and another $3.4
billion on lobbyists. Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have
donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential
candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties.

Wall Street’s spending spree on political contributions coincided
with a weakening of federal banking regulations, which in turn created
a recipe for the astronomical financial disaster that sent the global
economy reeling.

Sources: “Lax Oversight? Maybe $64 Million to DC Pols Explains
It,” Greg Gordon, Truthout.org and
McClatchey Newspapers, October 2, 2008; “Congressmen Hear from TARP
Recipients Who Funded Their Campaigns,” Lindsay Renick
Mayer, Capitol Eye, February 10, 2009; “The Big
Takeover,” Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, March 2009.

2. De facto segregation deepening in public education

Latinos and African Americans attend more-segregated public schools
today than they have for four decades, Professor Gary Orfield notes in
“Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge,”
a study conducted by the Civil Rights Project of the University of
California Los Angeles. Orfield’s report used federal data to highlight
deepening segregation in public education by race and poverty.

About 44 percent of students in the nation’s public school system
are people of color, and this group will soon make up the majority of
the population in the U.S. Yet this racial diversity often isn’t
reflected from school to school. Instead, two out of every five African
American and Latino kids attend schools that Orfield characterizes as
“intensely segregated,” comprising 90 to 100 percent people of
color.

For Latinos, the trend reflects growing residential segregation. For
African Americans, the study attributes a significant part of the
reversal to the ending of desegregation plans in public schools
nationwide. Schools that are segregated by race and poverty tend to
have much higher dropout rates, higher teacher turnover and greater
exposure to crime and gangs, placing students at a major disadvantage
in society. The most severe segregation is in Western states, including
California.

Fifty-five years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of
Education ruling, Orfield wrote, “Segregation is fast spreading
into large sectors of suburbia and there is little or no assistance for
communities wishing to resist the pressures of resegregation and ghetto
creation in order to build successfully integrated schools and
neighborhoods.”

Source: “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A
21st Century Challenge,” Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights
Project, UCLA, January 2009.

3. Somali pirates: the untold story

Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa were like gold for mainstream
news outlets this past year. Stories describing surprise attacks on
shipping vessels, daring rescues and cadres of ragtag bandits
extracting multimillion-dollar ransoms were all over the airwaves and
front pages.

Even as the pirates’ exploits around the Gulf of Aden captured the
world’s attention, however, very little ink was devoted to factors that
made the Somalis desperate enough to resort to piracy in the first
place: the dumping of nuclear waste and rampant over-fishing in their
coastal waters.

In the early 1990s, when the government of Somalia collapsed,
foreign interests began swooping into unguarded coastal waters to trawl
for food—and venturing into unprotected Somali territories to
cheaply dispose of nuclear waste. Those activities continued with
impunity for years. The ramifications of toxic dumping hit full force
with the 2005 tsunami, when leaking barrels were washed ashore,
sickening hundreds and causing birth defects in newborn infants. The
uncontrolled fishing harvests, meanwhile, damaged the economic
livelihoods of Somali fishermen and eroded the country’s supply of a
primary food source. That’s when the piracy started.

“Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their
beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish
to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?” asked journalist
Johann Hari in a Huffington Post article. “We didn’t act on
those crimes—but when some of the fishermen responded by
disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil
supply, we begin to shriek about ‘evil.'”

Sources: “Toxic Waste Behind Somali Piracy,” Najad Abdullahi, Al Jazeera English, October 11, 2008; “You Are Being Lied to About
Pirates,” Johann Hari, The Huffington Post, January 4, 2009;
“The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other,” Mohamed
Abshir Waldo, WardheerNews, January 8, 2009.

4. North Carolina’s nuclear nightmare

The Shearon Harris nuclear plant in North Carolina’s Wake County
isn’t just a power generating station. The Progress Energy plant,
located in a backwoods area, bears the distinction of housing the
largest radioactive-waste storage pools in the country. Spent fuel rods
from two other nuclear plants are transported there by rail, then
stored beneath circulating cold water to prevent the radioactive waste
from heating.

The hidden danger, according to investigative reporter Jeffery St.
Clair, is the looming threat of a pool fire. Citing a study by
Brookhaven National Laboratory, St. Clair highlighted in
Counterpunch the catastrophe that could ensue if a pool were to
ignite. A possible 140,000 people could wind up with cancer.
Contamination could stretch for thousands of square miles. And damages
could reach an estimated $500 billion.

“Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up
relatively rapidly and catch fire,” Robert Alvarez, a former Department
of Energy advisor and senior scholar at the Institute for Policy
Studies, noted in a study about safety issues surrounding nuclear waste
pools. “The fire could well spread to older fuel. The long-term
contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly
worse than Chernobyl.”

Shearon Harris’ track record is pocked with problems requiring
temporary shutdowns of the plant and malfunctions of the facility’s
emergency-warning system. When a study was sent to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission highlighting the safety risks and recommending
technological fixes to address the problem, St. Clair noted, a
pro-nuclear commissioner successfully persuaded the agency to dismiss
the concerns.

Source: “Pools of Fire,” Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch,
August 9, 2008.

5. U.S. fails to protect consumers against toxins

Two years ago, the European Union enacted a bold new environmental
policy requiring close scrutiny and restriction of toxic chemicals used
in everyday products. Invisible perils such as lead in lipstick,
endocrine disruptors in baby toys and mercury in electronics can
threaten human health, and the European legislation aimed to gradually
phase out these toxic materials and replace them with safer
alternatives.

The story that’s gone unreported by mainstream American news media,
however, is how this game-changing legislation might affect the U.S.,
where chemical corporations use lobbying muscle to ensure comparatively
lax oversight of toxic substances. As global markets shift to favor
safer consumer products, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is
lagging far behind in its own scrutiny of insidious chemicals.

As investigative journalist Mark Schapiro pointed out in Exposed:
The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for
American Power, the EPA’s tendency to behave as if it were beholden to
big business could backfire in this case, placing U.S. companies at a
competitive disadvantage because products manufactured here will be
regarded with increasing distrust.

Economics aside, the implications of loose restrictions on toxic
products are chilling: Just one-third of the 267 chemicals on the EU’s
watch list have ever been tested by the EPA, and only two are regulated
under federal law. Meanwhile, researchers at University of California
Berkeley estimate that 42 billion pounds of chemicals enter American
commerce daily, and only a fraction of them have ever undergone risk
assessments. When it comes to meeting the safer, more stringent EU
standard, the stakes are high—with consequences including not
just economic impacts, but public health.

Sources: “European Chemical Clampdown Reaches Across Atlantic,”
David Biello, Scientific American, September 30, 2008; “How
Europe’s New Chemical Rules Affect US,” Environmental Defense Fund,
September 30, 2008; “US Lags Behind Europe in Regulating Toxicity of
Everyday Products,” Mark Schapiro, Democracy Now! February 24,
2009.

6. As economy shrinks, D.C. lobbying grows

In 2008, as the economy tumbled and unemployment soared, Washington
lobbyists working for special interests were paid $3.2
billion—more than any other year on record. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, special interests spent a collective
$32,523 per legislator, per day, for every day Congress was in
session.

One event that triggered the lobbying boom, according to CRP
director Sheila Krumholz, was the federal bailout. With the U.S.
government shelling out billions in stimulus money, industries wanted
to ensure they’d get a piece of the pie. Ironically, some of the first
in line were the same players who helped precipitate the nation’s sharp
economic downturn by engaging in high-risk, speculative lending
practices.

“Even though some financial, insurance and real estate interests
pulled back last year, they still managed to spend more than $450
million as a sector to lobby policymakers,” Krumholz noted. “That can
buy a lot of influence, and it’s a fraction of what the financial
sector is reaping in return through the government’s bailout
program.”

The list of highest-ranking spenders on D.C. lobbying reads like a
roster of some of the most powerful interests nationwide. Topping the
list was the health sector, which spent $478.5 million lobbying
Congress last year. A very close runner-up was the finance, insurance
and real-estate sector, spending $453.5 million. Pharmaceutical
companies plunked down $230 million, electric utilities spent $156.7
million, and oil and gas companies paid lobbyists $133.2 million.

Source: “Washington Lobbying Grew to $3.2 Billion Last Year,
Despite Economy,” Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets.org

7. Obama’s controversial defense appointees

President Barack Obama’s appointments to the U.S. Department of
Defense have raised serious questions among critics who’ve studied
their track records. Although the news media haven’t paid much
attention, the defense appointees bring to the administration
controversial histories and conflicts of interest due to close ties to
defense contractors.

Obama’s decision to retain Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under
President George W. Bush, marks the first time in history that a
president has opted to keep a defense secretary of an outgoing opposing
party in power.

Gates, a former CIA director, has faced criticism for allegedly
spinning intelligence reports for political means. In Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, author and former
CIA analyst Melvin Goodman described him as “the chief action officer
for the Reagan administration’s drive to tailor intelligence reporting
to White House political desires.” Gates also came under scrutiny for
questions surrounding whether he misled Congress during the Iran-Contra
scandal in the mid-1980s, and was accused of withholding information
from intelligence committees when the U.S. provided military aid to
Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

Critics are also uneasy about the appointment of Deputy Defense
Secretary William Lynn, who formerly served as a senior vice president
at defense giant Raytheon and was a registered lobbyist for the company
until July 2008. Lynn, who previously served as Pentagon Comptroller
under the Clinton Administration, came under fire during his
confirmation hearing due to “questionable accounting practices.” The
defense department flunked multiple audits under Lynn’s leadership,
because it was unable to properly account for $3.4 trillion in
financial transactions made over the course of several years.

Sources: “The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates,” Robert Parry,
ConsortiumNews.com, November
13, 2008; “Obama’s Defense Department Appointees—The 3.4 Trillion
Dollar Question,” Andrew Hughes, Global Research, February 13,
2009; “Obama Nominee Admiral Dennis Blair Aided Perpetrators of 1999
Church Killings in East Timor,” Allan Nairn, Democracy Now!
January 7, 2009; “Ties to Chevron, Boeing Raise Concern on Possible
NSA Pick,” Roxana Tiron, The Hill, November 24, 2008.

8. Big business cheats the IRS

The Cayman Islands and Bermuda are magnets for financial giants such
as Bank of America, Citigroup, American International Group and 11
other beneficiaries of the federal government’s 2008 Wall Street
bailout. It’s not the balmy weather that inspires some of America’s
wealthiest companies to open up operations in the Caribbean
archipelago: The offshore oases provide safe harbors to stash cash out
of the reach of Uncle Sam.

According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability
Office—which was largely ignored by the news media—83 of
the top publicly held U.S. companies, including some receiving
substantial portions of federal bailout dollars, have operations in tax
havens that allow them to avoid paying their fair share to the Internal
Revenue Service. The report also spotlighted the activities of Union
Bank of Switzerland (UBS), which has helped wealthy Americans to use
tax schemes to cheat the IRS out of billions in recent years.

In December 2008, banking giant Goldman Sachs reported its
first-ever quarterly loss, then followed up with a statement that its
tax rate would drop from 34.1 percent to 1 percent, citing “changes in
geographic earnings mix” as the reason. The difference: Instead of
paying $6 billion in total worldwide taxes as it did in 2007,
Goldman Sachs would pay a total of $14 million in 2008. In the
same year, it received $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S.
government.

“The problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” U.S. Representative
Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House
Ways and Means Committee, told Bloomberg. “With the right hand
out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it
offshore.” 

Sources: “Goldman Sachs’s Tax Rate Drops to 1% or $14 Million,”
Christine Harper, Bloomberg, December 16, 2008; “Gimme Shelter:
Tax Evasion and the Obama Administration,” Thomas B. Edsall, The
Huffington Post, February 23, 2009.

9. U.S. connected to white phosphorous strikes in Gaza

In mid-January, as part of a military campaign, the Israeli Defense
Forces fired several shells that hit the headquarters of a United
Nations relief agency in Gaza City, destroying provisions for basic aid
such as food and medicine.

The shells contained white phosphorous (referred to as “Willy Pete”
in military slang), a smoke-producing, spontaneously flammable agent
that is designed to obscure battle territory but can also ignite
buildings or cause grotesque burns if it touches the skin.

The attack on the relief-agency headquarters is but one example of a
civilian structure that researchers discovered had been hit during the
January air strikes. In the aftermath of the attacks, Human Rights
Watch volunteers found spent white phosphorous shells on city streets,
apartment roofs, residential courtyards and at a UN school in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch says that IDF’s use of white phosphorous violated
international law, which absolutely prohibits deliberate,
indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks that result in civilian
casualties. After gathering evidence such as spent shells, the
international organization issued a report condemning the repeated
firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza
as a war crime. Amnesty International, another human-rights
organization, followed suit by calling upon the United States to
suspend military aid to Israel—but to no avail.

The U.S. was a primary source of funding and weaponry for Israel’s
military campaign. Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache
helicopters, tactical missiles and a wide array of munitions, including
white phosphorus.

Sources: “White Phosphorus Use Evidence of War Crimes Report:
Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” Fred
Abrahams, Human Rights Watch, March 25, 2009; “Suspend Military Aid to
Israel, Amnesty Urges Obama after Detailing US Weapons Used in Gaza,”
Rory McCarthy, Guardian/UK, February 23, 2009; “US Weaponry
Facilitates Killings in Gaza,” Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service,
January 8, 2009; “US Military Re-supplying Israel with Ammunition
Through Greece,” Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media
Center News, January 8, 2009.

10. Ecuador says it won’t pay illegitimate debt

When President Rafael Correa announced that Ecuador would default on
its foreign debt last December, he didn’t say it was because the Latin
American country was unable to pay. Rather, he framed it as a moral
stand: “As president, I couldn’t allow us to keep paying a debt that
was obviously immoral and illegitimate,” Correa told an international
news agency. The news was mainly reported in financial publications,
and the stories tended to quote harsh critics who characterized Correa
as an extreme leftist with ties to Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez.

But there’s much more to the story. The announcement came in the
wake of an exhaustive audit of Ecuador’s debt, conducted under Correa’s
direction by a newly created debt audit commission. The unprecedented
audit documented hundreds of allegations of irregularity and illegality
in the decades of debt collection from international lenders. Although
Ecuador had made payments exceeding the value of the principal since
the time it initially took out loans in the 1970s, its foreign debt had
nonetheless swelled to levels three times as high due to
extraordinarily high interest rates. With a huge percentage of the
country’s financial resources devoted to paying the debt, little was
left over to combat poverty in the Ecuador.

Correa’s move to stand up against foreign lenders did not go
unnoticed by other impoverished, debt-ridden nations, and the decision
could set a precedent for developing countries that are struggling to
get out from under massive debt obligation to first-world lenders.

Ecuador eventually agreed to a restructuring of its debt at about 35
cents on the dollar, but the move nonetheless served to expose
deficiencies in the World Bank system, which provides little recourse
for countries to resolve disputes over potentially illegitimate
debt.

Sources: “As Crisis Mounts, Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt
Illegitimate and Illegal,” Daniel Denvir, Alternet, November 26, 2008;
“Invalid Loans to Ecuador: Who Owes Who,” Committee for the Integral
Audit of Public Credit, Utube, Fall 2008; “Ecuador’s Debt
Default,” Neil Watkins and Sarah Anders, Foreign Policy in
Focus, December 15, 2008.

Other stories in the Top 25

11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine

12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election
Thief

13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War

14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts

15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco

16. US Repression of Haiti Continues

17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan

18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature

19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor

20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates

21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare

22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team

23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud

24. Dollar Glut Finances U.S. Military Expansion

25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Read them all at projectcensored.org.

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.