WHERE’D YOU HEAR THAT?

Every year since 1976, Project Censored has spotlighted the 25 most
significant news stories that were largely ignored or misrepresented by
the mainstream press.

The term “censored” doesn’t mean 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.

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 end product is a book that
summarizes the top stories, provides in-depth media analysis and
includes resources for readers who are hungry for more substantive
reporting. Find more information at projectcensored.org.

Here are some examples from this year’s list.

CONGRESS SELLS OUT TO WALL STREET

The total tab for the Wall Street bailout, including money spent and
promised by the U.S. 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 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.

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 UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. 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 youths attend schools Orfield characterizes
as “intensely segregated,” composed of 90 percent 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 ending desegregation plans in public schools nationwide.
Schools segregated by race and poverty tend to have much higher dropout
rates, more teacher turnover and greater exposure to crime and gangs,
placing students at a major disadvantage in society.

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.”

SOMALI PIRATES: THE UNTOLD STORY

Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa were like gold for mainstream
news outlets this past year. But even as the pirates’ exploits around
the Gulf of Aden captured the world’s attention, 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 their coastal waters.

In the early 1990s, when Somalia’s government 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.
Meanwhile, the uncontrolled fishing harvests damaged the economic
livelihoods of Somali fishermen and eroded the country’s supply of a
primary food source. That’s when the piracy began.

“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.'”

U.S. FAILS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS AGAINST TOXICS

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 like lead in lipstick, endocrine
disruptors in baby toys and mercury in electronics can threaten human
health. The European legislation aimed to gradually phase out these
toxic materials and replace them with safer alternatives.

The story that has gone unreported by mainstream American news media
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
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 UC Berkeley estimate that
42 billion pounds of chemicals enter American commerce daily, and only
a fraction have undergone risk assessments. When it comes to meeting
the safer, more stringent EU standard, the stakes are high — with
consequences including economic impacts as well as public health.

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
federal government ensuring that the lobbyists got 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 Washington 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 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.

BIG BUSINESS CHEATS THE IRS

The Cayman Islands and Bermuda are magnets for Bank of America,
Citigroup, American International Group and 11 other financial giants
that were the beneficiaries of the federal government’s 2008 Wall
Street bailout. 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 December 2008, banking giant Goldman Sachs reported its first
quarterly loss and promptly 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 News. “With the right hand out
begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

OBAMA’S CONTROVERSIAL DEFENSE APPOINTEES

President Barack Obama’s appointments to the 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 he 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 Company and was a registered lobbyist for
Raytheon until July 2008. Lynn, who previously served as Pentagon
comptroller under the Clinton administration, came under fire during
his confirmation hearing for “questionable accounting practices.” The
Defense Department failed 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.

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

The attack on the relief-agency headquarters is just 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 U.N. school in
Gaza.

Human Rights Watch says the IDF’s use of white phosphorous violated
international law, which prohibits deliberate, indiscriminate or
disproportionate attacks that result in civilian casualties. After
gathering evidence like spent shells, the 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.

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 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 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. Nonetheless, the move served to expose
deficiencies in the World Bank system, which provides little recourse
for countries to resolve disputes over potentially illegitimate
debt.

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.

news@clevescene.com

This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2009.