ANDY LEE ROTH, STEVE MACEK,
and ZACH MCNANNA
Introduction by ANDY LEE ROTH
Story selection is essentially composed of two processes: one determines the availability of news and relates journalists to sources; the other determines the suitability of news, which ties journalists to audiences.
—herbert j. gans, Deciding What’s News1
Availability and suitability. This elementary pair of factors shapes whether an event gets reported as news or not, sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in Deciding What’s News, his groundbreaking 1979 study of the professional values, daily routines, and competitive pressures that shape journalists’ news judgments.2
Inaccessible or inappropriate. Each of the 25 independent news stories presented here evidently failed, one way or another, to rise to the attention of the corporate news media or to meet their criteria for newsworthiness.
Nevertheless, a rich mix of fiercely independent news outlets—punching well above their weight, when compared to the staff size and operational budgets of their corporate counterparts—managed to identify and cover these events and issues as newsworthy, thus informing the public about several dozen crucial but otherwise marginalized or ignored news stories.
In what ways were such stories available to independent journalists but not so for their corporate counterparts? Due to constraints on budgets and staff as well as a lack of time, establishment news outlets often employ what Gans described as “quickly and easily applied methods of empirical inquiry.”3 By contrast, the exemplars of independent investigative journalism highlighted here often depended on time-consuming, labor-intensive public records requests to unlock or substantiate important news stories—as in the case of Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger’s report for The Conversation on the US military’s contribution to the climate crisis, which constitutes the basis for story #3 in this year’s Top 25 list.
In other instances, the stories celebrated here depend on research studies and policy documents produced by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which corporate news outlets perhaps dismissed—mistakenly—as bit players or prejudiced advocates. By contrast, as featured in story #14, Fran Quigley’s Common Dreams article covers an extensive report, “Medicine for All,” produced by the Democracy Collaborative; while story #20, on transforming the criminal-legal system, draws on a fourteen-point “Vision for Justice” platform advocated by 117 rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Color of Change, and the Prison Policy Initiative.
Still other stories in this year’s Top 25 list may have seemed inaccessible to corporate news outlets due to geographical or social distance. This is almost certainly the case in the pair of stories focused on efforts by First Nations and Native American communities to counter the living legacy of colonial trauma, as covered here in story #1 (“Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls”) and story #15 (“Indigenous Trauma and Suicide an Enduring Legacy of Colonialism”). Nevertheless, independent news organizations consistently manage to span these geographical and social distances, to center the stories of communities and issues that have been marginalized or ignored by corporate news—as exemplified by Devon Heinen’s New Statesman article “Nobody to Call,” a harrowing, intimate account of Indigenous suicide as a public health issue, highlighted here in story #15.
Independent news coverage of violence against people of color, including, especially, women of color—as featured in stories about Indigenous women and girls, and also in story #7, on the underreporting of missing and victimized Black women and girls—makes it obvious that there is more to story selection than story availability. As institutions, US newsrooms are not removed from, or immune to, the structural racism that underlies the social problems addressed by these stories.
Direct, detailed reporting on missing, murdered, or victimized women and girls of color places demands on audiences to reckon with the living legacies of colonial conquest and slavery, including institutionalized racism, sexism, and economic inequality. As Matt Taibbi notes in this book’s foreword, “News companies hate stories about inequality,” in part because “images of deprivation and suffering depress the urge to buy.” Such stories make for ideologically unsuitable news.
In some cases, this is reinforced by conventional journalism’s orientation to events rather than to issues, as Gaye Tuchman pointedly observed in her pioneering 1978 study, Making News.4 Thus, story #5, on the deadly consequences of the widening gap between the richest and poorest Americans, likely seemed unsuitable to corporate news outlets—even despite the readymade news hook of an August 2019 Government Accountability Office report on that topic. The deep-rooted processes and myriad institutions that drive increasing inequality in the United States (and around the world) resist simple descriptive reporting.
As both Gans and Tuchman found in their studies of US news organizations, establishment journalists also typically shy away from critiques of capitalism.5 Thus, Gans’s conception of “built-in anticipatory avoidance” helps to explain corporate news outlets’ reticence to cover economic inequality (story #5), the movement to establish public banks (story #8), and reports that, under the existing economic order, many of the poorest are now selling their own blood to survive (story #17).6 Anticipatory avoidance may also explain the corporate media’s silence on story #24, about independent journalist Abby Martin’s court case to challenge a Georgia state law that restricts advocacy of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), the movement to persuade Israel to obey international law and respect the human rights of Palestinians. Just as the corporate news media skirted covering the censorship of an Al Jazeera documentary that exposed the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, so they decline to report on Martin’s First Amendment case against Georgia.7 As Tuchman wrote, “The power to keep an occurrence out of the news is power over the news.”8
From this perspective, Project Censored’s annual Top 25 list can be read as an index of the corporate news media’s power to set an agenda that includes some stories as suitable while invisibly excluding others as non-news. As Tuchman emphasized, “ideology prevents knowledge by limiting inquiry,” and many standard reporting procedures work to hide “the socioeconomic structure of contemporary society” and to obscure “structural linkages between events.”9
But there is more to the Project’s annual Top 25 story list than a condemnation of the establishment media’s shortcomings in story selection, its daily—even hourly—framing for the public of “all the news that’s fit to print,” as stipulated by the New York Times’s daring but dubious slogan. The Top 25 story list can and should also be read as evidence of how inquiry can lead to knowledge that challenges conventional news frames and official narratives.
The journalists and news outlets whose work this chapter highlights exemplify how independent investigative reporting hinges on alternative, more inclusive conceptions of story availability and story suitability—Gans called this “multiperspectival news”—that, in turn, enhance the public’s knowledge. In some cases, as noted in the story summaries that follow, independent news coverage has spurred subsequent corporate news coverage—a type of “agenda setting” that has not received adequate attention from scholars of news production, but which, nonetheless, underscores how independent news outlets play a crucial role in informing the public, whether directly or indirectly.
Inquiry and knowledge are also cornerstones of Project Censored’s Campus Affiliates Program, which coordinates students and faculty from colleges and universities in a collective effort to identify, vet, and publicize independent news reports on topics and issues that the corporate news media have obscured or ignored. This year, 308 students under the guidance of 32 faculty members from 19 college and university campuses across the United States and Canada participated in this process, identifying and reviewing several hundred independent news stories, from which this year’s top 25 stories have been selected. These students’ direct, hands-on development of their critical thinking and media literacy skills contributes to Project Censored’s ongoing, collective effort to invigorate the public’s knowledge of—and demand for—high-quality, independent alternatives to the corporate version of news that otherwise sets a narrow agenda for what and who counts as important and newsworthy in the United States.
acknowledgments: Geoff Davidian provided invaluable assistance and effervescent camaraderie in helping to prepare this year’s slate of several hundred Validated Independent News stories for the voting process. Troy Patton, Matthew Phillips, and Veronica Vasquez provided keen research assistance during the final vetting of this year’s top Censored stories. John Roth offered helpful comments on the chapter’s introduction.
How do we at Project Censored identify and evaluate independent news stories, and how do we know that the Top 25 stories that we bring forward each year are not only relevant and significant but also trustworthy? The answer is that every candidate news story undergoes rigorous review, which takes place in multiple stages during each annual cycle. Although adapted to take advantage of both the Project’s expanding affiliates program and current technologies, the vetting process is quite similar to the one Project Censored founder Carl Jensen established more than forty years ago.
Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or are nominated by members of the general public, who bring them to the Project’s attention.10 Together, faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is not included.
Once Project Censored receives the candidate story, we undertake a second round of judgment, using the same criteria and updating the review to include any subsequent, competing corporate coverage. Stories that pass this round of review get posted on our website as Validated Independent News stories (VINs).11
In early spring, we present all VINs in the current cycle to the faculty and students at all of our affiliate campuses, and to our panel of expert judges, who cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from several hundred to 25.
Once the Top 25 list has been determined, Project Censored student interns begin another intensive review of each story using LexisNexis and ProQuest databases. Additional faculty and students contribute to this final stage of review.
The Top 25 finalists are then sent to our panel of judges, who vote to rank them in numerical order. At the same time, these experts—including media studies professors, professional journalists and editors, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission—offer their insights on the stories’ strengths and weaknesses.12
Thus, by the time a story appears in the pages of Censored, it has undergone at least five distinct rounds of review and evaluation.
Although the stories that Project Censored brings forward may be socially and politically controversial—and sometimes even psychologically challenging—we are confident that each is the result of serious journalistic effort, and therefore deserves greater public attention.
Danielle McLean, “Missing and Murdered Women is a Grim, Unsolved Problem. Native Communities are Demanding Action,” ThinkProgress, August 24, 2019, https://archive.thinkprogress.org/missing-and-murdered-women-is-a-grim-unsolved-problem-native-communities-are-demanding-action-cdde640e38b3/.
Abaki Beck, “Why Aren’t Fossil Fuel Companies Held Accountable for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women?” YES! Magazine, October 5, 2019, https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/native-fossil-fuel-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-mmiwg-20191004.
Hallie Golden, “‘Sister, Where Did You Go?’: The Native American Women Disappearing from US Cities,” The Guardian, May 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/30/missing-native-american-women-alyssa-mclemore.
Carrie N. Baker, “Making Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Visible,” Ms. Magazine, December 2, 2019, https://msmagazine.com/2019/12/02/making-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls-visible/.
Student Researchers: Jeramy Dominguez (Sonoma State University), Katrina Tend (Diablo Valley College), and James Byers (Frostburg State University)
Faculty Evaluators: Ashley Hall (Sonoma State University), Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College), and Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University)
Indigenous women and girls face physical violence—including murder, kidnapping, sexual trafficking, and rape—with a “shocking regularity” that amounts to an “epidemic” of violence, according to an August 2019 report from ThinkProgress.13 From tribal reservations and rural communities to urban areas, the scope of the problem is “almost impossible to put into context,” the Guardian reported in May 2019, because no single federal government database consistently tracks how many Native women and girls go missing each year. Due to negligence and incapacity, combined with the complexity of criminal jurisdiction on tribal lands limiting which crimes tribal courts can prosecute, law enforcement and the justice system seldom identify the perpetrators of these crimes, much less charge or convict them.
With some notable exceptions, the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls receive little to no major news coverage: A January 2020 article in the New Republic described one New York Times report on the subject as “a small recognition in a sea of loss.”14 Both the crisis and Native responses to it—epitomized by the burgeoning Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement—are dramatically underreported.
As ThinkProgress reported, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) found 5712 reports of murdered or missing Native women and girls throughout the United States in 2016—but only 116 of these were logged in the Department of Justice’s database.15 According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data, Native Americans disappear at twice the per capita rate of white Americans, while research funded by the Department of Justice found that on some tribal lands Indigenous women were murdered at more than ten times the national average, the Guardian reported. A 2016 Department of Justice report, based on 2010 data, found that “more than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime,” and more than one in three (34.1 percent) have experienced rape.16
“I wouldn’t say we’re more vulnerable,” Annita Lucchesi, a Southern Cheyenne descendant and executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, told the Guardian, “I’d say we’re targeted.”
Campaigners, including the Sovereign Bodies Institute, the Brave Heart Society, and the Urban Indian Health Institute, identify aspects of systemic racism—including the indelible legacies of settler colonialism, issues with law enforcement, a lack of reliable and comprehensive data, and flawed policymaking—as deep-rooted sources of the crisis.17
As YES! Magazine reported, tribal communities in the United States often lack jurisdiction to respond to crimes: The Major Crimes Act of 1885 restricted the crimes that tribal courts could prosecute, and in a 1978 case, Oliphant v. Suquamish, the Supreme Court determined that tribal
“I wouldn’t say we’re more vulnerable, I’d say we’re targeted.”
Annita Lucchesi, Sovereign Bodies Institute
courts cannot prosecute non-Native offenders, even if they live on tribal lands. Although the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act empowered tribal courts to handle some cases related to domestic violence, dating violence, and violations of protection orders, it left sex trafficking and other forms of sexual violence outside tribal jurisdiction, YES! Magazine reported.18
In the absence of tribal jurisdiction, in many cases the FBI or county sheriffs are officially responsible for investigating crimes against women and girls. However, county sheriffs and local FBI offices are typically “understaffed and underfunded,” Lucchesi told YES! Magazine. The impacts of inadequate staffing and funding are evident in a 2010 Government Accountability Office report, which found that, from 2005 to 2009, federal prosecutors declined to prosecute 67 percent of the 2594 cases involving sexual violence in Indian Country.19 As noted in a report from the Sovereign Bodies Institute and the Brave Heart Society, “lack of accountability helps to maintain a culture of violence, where Indigenous women and girls are made to be easy targets.”20
Nearly three-quarters of American Indian and Alaska Natives live in urban areas, but the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in US cities is not necessarily any better reported.21 In a 2018 report, the Urban Indian Health Institute documented 506 cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls across 71 cities. The report found 280 cases of murder (56 percent), 128 missing persons cases (25 percent), and 98 cases with unknown status (19 percent). The UIHI report emphasized that, due to the Institute’s limited resources and “poor data collection by numerous cities,” the 506 cases its report identified are “likely an undercount” of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in urban areas.22 As the Guardian reported, more than 60 percent of the police departments in the 71 cities studied either failed to “demonstrate that they were accurately tracking disappearances, or provided [UIHI] with compromised data.” Despite incomplete data, the UIHI report documented cases tied to domestic violence, sexual assault, police brutality, and lack of safety for sex workers—all underscored by “institutional and structural racism, gaps in law enforcement response and prosecution, along with lack of data,” the Guardian reported.
ThinkProgress reported how Native organizations, such as the Global Indigenous Council, have taken the initiative to draw attention to the epidemic of violence: In collaboration with regional tribal leadership groups, the Global Indigenous Council has placed “Invisible No More” billboards, depicting a Native woman with a giant red hand painted over her mouth, along state highways in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma.
The MMIW movement has also focused attention on connections between the fossil fuel industry—including “man camps,” the temporary housing facilities for crews working on pipeline projects like Keystone XL—and violence against Native women. A production boom in oil fields in northeastern Montana, for example, has led to surges in violent crime, sex trafficking, and rape cases, according to tribal police and local activists, YES! Magazine reported. The Sovereign Bodies Institute has documented 529 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, states that would be further impacted by extensions to the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline. Nearly 80 percent of those cases, YES! Magazine reported, are either unsolved or without an identified perpetrator, and 30 percent are active missing persons cases.
From the White House, a world apart from both tribal lands and most Native people living in cities, Donald Trump issued an executive order in November 2019 to establish a task force—comprised exclusively of federal officials—on missing and murdered Indigenous people.23 A report in the New Republic characterized Trump’s order as “a meager offering from a violent administration.”24 Although a number of Native leaders joined in the announcement and thanked the president, other prominent leaders were more circumspect.25 Suzan Harjo—a member of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee Tribe and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient—described the task force as coopting the efforts of Native activists at the tribal, community, and state levels; Congresswoman Deb Holland (D-NM), a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, released a statement condemning “lack of consultation with Tribes, which is a pattern of this Administration on all Indian Country issues.”26
The New York Times and the Seattle Times deserve recognition for their reporting on the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in the United States, but the failure of other major news outlets on this issue is striking.27
In June 2019 the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report, which received widespread news coverage in the United States.28 The Washington Post and Time magazine reported on the Inquiry’s conclusion, that the crisis constituted genocide.29 In a segment that featured Annita Lucchesi of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, NPR compared the situations in the United States and Canada.30 The New York Times noted that, “even before its release, the inquiry has been forcing a national reckoning.”31
But coverage from major outlets such as the Washington Post, Time magazine, and others might well have left US audiences with the impression that the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women is primarily a Canadian issue. Beyond coverage of Canada’s National Inquiry, US corporate news outlets have provided nearly nothing in the way of reporting on missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States. When corporate news outlets do cover this topic, reporting has tended to focus on congressional legislation and divisive party politics.32 Although numerous news outlets reported in late 2019 on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to block reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, corporate news outlets mostly ignored how amendments to it would address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.33
With few exceptions, major news outlets like NPR and the Washington Post have limited their coverage to other important but secondary matters, such as Native women organizing self-defense classes, the symbolism of the clothing worn by the gay Indigenous couple who won Canada’s Amazing Race, and book reviews.34
As a result of limited news coverage, the United States is far from a national reckoning on its crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.35
Sam Levin, “Revealed: How Monsanto’s ‘Intelligence Center’ Targeted Journalists and Activists,” The Guardian, August 8, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/monsanto-fusion-center-journalists-roundup-neil-young.
Student Researcher: Sarah Ghiorso (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Kyla Walters (Sonoma State University)
The agricultural giant Monsanto—which the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer acquired in 2018—created an “intelligence fusion center” in order to “monitor and discredit” journalists and activists, Sam Levin reported for the Guardian in August 2019.
Levin wrote that Monsanto “adopted a multi-pronged strategy” to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who had reported on the likelihood of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer causing cancer. Monsanto also monitored a nonprofit organization focused on the food industry, US Right to Know, and the Twitter account of musician Neil Young, a prominent critic of Monsanto. An ongoing legal case over the dangers of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer led to disclosure of the internal documents. As Levin reported, company communications “add fuel to the ongoing claims that Monsanto has ‘bullied’ critics and scientists and worked to conceal the dangers of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide.”
Monsanto’s internal communications documented how the company planned a series of “actions” to attack the credibility of Gillam’s 2017 book, Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, by providing “talking points” for “third parties” and explaining to “industry and farmer customers” how to post negative book reviews; how the company paid Google to promote search results for “Monsanto Glyphosate Carey Gillam” that criticized her work; and how it considered placing pressure on Reuters, where Gillam had worked for seventeen years, to “push back on her editors” in hopes that she would be “reassigned.”
After musician Neil Young released a 2015 album titled The Monsanto Years, Monsanto’s fusion center also produced reports on Young’s public criticism of the company, and the center evaluated the album’s lyrics “to develop a list of 20+ potential topics he may target.”
The revealed documents show that Monsanto considered legal action against Young.
According to the LinkedIn page of one person identified as a manager of Monsanto’s “global intelligence and investigations,” the fusion center included a team “responsible for the collection and analysis of criminal, activist/extremist, geo-political and terrorist activities affecting company operations across 160 countries,” the Guardian reported.
Noting that government-run fusion centers have “increasingly raised privacy concerns surrounding the way law enforcement agencies collect data, surveil citizens and share information,” the Guardian quoted Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who distinguished between corporations monitoring legitimate criminal threats, such as cyberattacks, and “corporations levering their money to investigate people who are engaging in their first amendment rights.”
A Bayer spokesperson, Christopher Loder, told the Guardian that Monsanto’s activities were “intended to ensure there was a fair, accurate and science-based dialogue about the company and its products in response to significant misinformation.”
As the Guardian reported, Bayer “has continued to assert that glyphosate is safe,” but three US court cases, in 2018 and 2019, resulted in verdicts against Monsanto, holding the company liable for plaintiffs’ non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer.36 In August 2019, The Hill reported that, in response to more than 18,000 people having filed suit against Monsanto, alleging cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma caused by exposure to Roundup, Bayer was offering $8 billion to settle all outstanding claims.37
Monsanto’s campaign to monitor and discredit journalists and other critics has received almost no corporate news coverage. In June 2019, ABC News reported that Monsanto had “started contacting journalists, politicians and activists it was keeping tabs on and documenting via ‘watch lists,’” according to Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer.38 ABC’s coverage was noteworthy—not only as a rare instance of corporate news coverage on this topic, but also for how it consistently emphasized the perspective of Monsanto and Bayer. ABC quoted a statement made by the PR firm FleishmanHillard that sought to normalize Monsanto’s actions and its own business relationship with Monsanto: “Corporations, NGOs and other clients rightfully expect our firm to help them understand diverse perspectives before they engage. To do so, we and every other professional communications agency gather relevant information from publicly available sources.” These planning documents, FleishmanHillard asserted, “help our clients best engage in the dialogue relevant to their business and societal objectives.” Other than the PR firm FleishmanHillard, the ABC News report quoted only Bayer officials, including the company’s head of corporate communications and its chairman of the board of management.
In September 2019, HuffPost published a substantial article on Monsanto’s history of using “shady tactics to attack critics and influence the media.”39 Paul D. Thacker’s report included a summary of the Guardian’s August 2019 report as “the latest example of Monsanto’s efforts to track journalists,” and it provided additional detail about how Monsanto avoided undertaking direct responses to its critics by engaging a network of third-party supporters, including the Genetic Literacy Project and the American Council on Science and Health.
Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger, “US Military is a Bigger Polluter Than as Many as 140 Countries—Shrinking This War Machine is a Must,” The Conversation, June 24, 2019, https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-as-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269.
Student Researcher: Fabiola Gregg (City College of San Francisco)
Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Levinson (City College of San Francisco)
The US military is “one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries,” Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger reported for The Conversation in June 2019. By burning fossil fuels, the US military emitted more than 25,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide in 2017. If the US military were a country, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger wrote, its fuel usage would make it “the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.”40
Noting that studies of greenhouse gas emissions usually focus on how much energy and fuel civilians use, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger wrote that US military emissions “tend to be overlooked in climate change studies.” Nevertheless, they reported, “Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.”
Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger’s report for The Conversation summarized key findings from a research article they wrote with Cara Kennelly and published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, a peer-reviewed academic journal, in June 2019.41 In the study, they examined how US military supply chains impact the world’s climate, by analyzing bulk fuel purchases, as documented by the US Defense Logistics Agency–Energy (DLA‐E). A sub‐agency of the US Department of Defense, the DLA-E manages “the US military’s supply chains, including its hydrocarbon fuel purchases and distribution.” The authors obtained data on US military fuel purchases through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to the DLA-E.
“It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments,” Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger wrote. A loophole in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol exempted the United States from reporting military emissions. Although the Paris Accord closed this loophole, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger noted that, “with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap . . . will return.”
Nevertheless, based on the data they were able to analyze, the authors in the Transactions article concluded that if “the US military were a country, it would nestle between Peru and Portugal in the global league table of fuel purchasing,” going on to observe that the military’s carbon emissions for 2014 were “roughly equivalent to total—not just fuel—emissions from Romania.”42
Moreover, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger found that US “forward operating bases” (FOBs) located in Afghanistan and other overseas theaters of operations have enormous fuel requirements and spew huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. They wrote that “a single US Marine Corp brigade operating across . . . a network of FOBs requires over 500,000 gallons of fuel per day.”43
Noting that “action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine,” Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger recommended that “money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the US empire” be reinvested as “a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take.”
As of May 2020, the original report by Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger appears to have received little to no corporate news coverage, with the exception of the republication of their Conversation piece by news aggregator Yahoo! News and Newsweek, a report in the British newspaper The Daily Mail, and a brief summary in ScienceDaily.44 Independent news outlets, including YES! Magazine, The Ecologist, and Quartz, also republished the original article from The Conversation.45
Peter Cary, “Republicans Passed Tax Cuts—Then Profited,” Center for Public Integrity, January 24, 2020, https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/taxes/trumps-tax-cuts/republicans-profit-congress/; also published as “How Republicans Made Millions on the Tax Cuts They Pushed through Congress,” Vox, January 24, 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/24/21078559/republicans-tax-cuts-congress-profits.
Donald Shaw, “Facing Climate Crisis, Senators Have Millions Invested in Fossil Fuel Companies,” Sludge, September 24, 2019, https://readsludge.com/2019/09/24/facing-climate-crisis-senators-have-millions-invested-in-fossil-fuel-companies.
Student Researchers: Cale Carpenter (North Central College), Chris Valenzuela (College of Western Idaho), and Christopher Rodriguez (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators: Steve Macek (North Central College), Anna Gamboa (College of Western Idaho), and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
In January 2020 the Center for Public Integrity and Vox reported that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which granted corporations a 14 percent reduction in taxes, also helped Republicans in Congress who own shares in those corporations reap huge financial rewards. Although Republicans “sold the bill as a package of business and middle-class tax cuts that would not help the wealthy, the cuts likely saved members of Congress hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes collectively, while the corporate tax cut hiked the value of their holdings,” Peter Cary of the Center for Public Integrity reported. Democrats in Congress also benefited, but none of them voted for the legislation.
The Act doled out nearly $150 billion in corporate tax savings in 2018 alone.46 Because the tax cuts were not “paid for” with corresponding reductions in government spending, the move will likely cause an increase of some $1.9 trillion in the national debt over the next decade.
In the months after the tax cuts were passed, stock prices soared. As a result, congressional Republicans saw a significant boost to the value of their portfolios. For example, Apple’s stock prices rose in October 2018, jumping 37 percent. Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania and his wife own stock in the tech giant and many other companies; the total value of their investments is at least $439,000. Likewise, Representative Orrin Hatch of Utah and his spouse’s assets are worth between $562,000 and $1.43 million, and include ownership of mutual funds and a limited liability corporation (as well as a “blind trust” worth between $1 million and $5 million). All but one of the 47 Republicans on the three key congressional committees that controlled the drafting of the tax bill own stocks and mutual funds.
Adding to the congressional Republicans’ windfall was what Cary called the Act’s “crown jewel,” a newly created 20 percent deduction for income from “pass-through” businesses, or smaller, single-owner corporations. These businesses do not pay corporate taxes and they shift profits to investors and shareholders, who are only taxed at lower, individual rates. At least 22 of the 47 members of the House and Senate tax-writing committees have investments in pass-through businesses.
Real estate developers and investors also benefited greatly from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Cary quoted Ed Kleinbard, the former chief of staff of the Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, as saying “[i]f you are a real estate developer, you never pay tax.” An addition to the bill featured a provision that allows real estate companies with relatively few employees to take the 20 percent deduction usually reserved for larger business with a sizeable number of employees. Out of the 47 Republicans responsible for drafting the bill, at least 29 held real estate interests at the time of its passage.
Over the past year, taxes were not the only legislative issue in which decisions were potentially influenced by the financial interests of members of Congress.
Members of the US Senate are heavily invested in the fossil fuel companies that drive the current climate crisis, creating a conflict between those senators’ financial interests as investors and their responsibilities as elected representatives. According to a September 2019 Sludge investigation by Donald Shaw, 29 senators and their spouses hold between $3.5 million and $13.9 million worth of stock in 86 fossil fuel companies, including well-known giants like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and “a range of lesser known companies that specialize in pipeline operations, natural gas exports, and oilfield services.”
Shaw’s report was based on the senators’ personal financial filings as of August 16, 2019. According to the US Energy Information Administration, fossil fuel combustion accounted for about 76 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted in 2017.47
Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, where coal mining is a major business, has millions invested in coal. Shaw found that Manchin owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of non-public stock in a family coal business, Enersystems. Manchin’s 2018 financial disclosure reported that he earned between $100,001 and $1 million in dividends and interest from Enersystems, in addition to $470,000 in “ordinary business income.”
Manchin is the senior Democrat on the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees legislation on energy resources and development, nuclear energy, federal coal, oil, and gas, and other mineral leasing, among other issues. If Democrats take control of the Senate in 2020, Manchin is in line to chair the Committee.
Manchin was the only Democrat to vote against protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling in 2017. Manchin also voted to approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Jerry Moran, the Republican junior senator from Kansas, is likely the largest senatorial investor in ExxonMobil. Moran owns between $102,003 and $280,000 worth of ExxonMobil stock. He has stated that he does not believe that human activity has any effect on climate change.
ExxonMobil has known since at least 1977 that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, but the company suppressed that information for decades and worked to sow confusion over the scientific evidence for climate change in service of its bottom line, as Shaw’s report documented in detail and as Project Censored has previously reported.48
Although the corporate media, including CBS News, have provided some critical coverage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and its impacts, the report by the Center for Public Integrity and Vox is distinctive in having analyzed the financial disclosure forms of the lawmakers who drafted and voted for the legislation to show how they profited from it personally.49 Corporate news outlets have not covered this important aspect of the story.
In addition, despite the significant conflicts of interest exposed by Donald Shaw’s reporting for Sludge, the alarming facts about US senators’ massive investments in the fossil fuel industry appear to have gone completely unreported in the corporate press.
Fernando De Maio, “We Must Address the Roots of Inequality to Keep It from Killing Us,” Truthout, December 21, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/we-must-address-the-roots-of-inequality-to-keep-it-from-killing-us.
Patrick Martin, “US Study Shows: Poverty and Social Inequality are Killers,” World Socialist Web Site, September 12, 2019, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/12/pers-s12.html.
María José Carmona, “Stress, Overwork, and Insecurity are Driving the Invisible Workplace Accident Rate,” Inequality.org (Institute for Policy Studies), September 13, 2019, https://inequality.org/research/invisible-workplace-accident-rate/.
Student Researchers: Maria Meyer (San Francisco State University) and Marco Gonzales (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
COVID-19 has made clear the crucial links between inequality and poor health.50 But in December 2019, well before the United States began to grapple with the pandemic, Fernando De Maio reported for Truthout that the “true root causes of illness extend beyond the health care system” to the social determinants of health. As documented in several recent research studies, some of those social determinants can be clearly discerned in the links between income inequality and life expectancy and between racial segregation and premature mortality.
As the World Socialist Web Site reported, an August 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concluded that poor Americans are nearly twice as likely as their rich counterparts to die before reaching old age;51 while Truthout reported on 2018 data from the US Census Bureau that showed the gap between the richest and poorest households in the United States is now the largest it has been in more than fifty years, with wealth more concentrated than ever before.52 “Democrats and Republicans may have different interpretations of these facts,” De Maio wrote, “but in public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills.”
Understanding the links between inequality and poor health requires examining data at the levels of cities and communities, De Maio reported. “Without this kind of data,” he wrote, we maintain the “mirage” that “the economy is great because macroeconomic indicators say so.” Across the five hundred largest cities in the United States, income inequality correlates with premature mortality. For example, the Chicago Health Atlas has documented a nine-year gap between the life expectancy of Chicago’s Black and white residents, where the Black residents have a higher degree of economic hardship than their white counterparts.53 As De Maio reported, this gap in life expectancy results in more than 3000 “excess deaths”—deaths that likely would not have occurred if Black residents had similar incomes to white residents. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease account for premature mortality among Chicago’s Black residents, researchers determined. “All of these are conditions that an equitable health care system would address,” De Maio noted.
A separate 2018 study of Chicago, which De Maio co-authored, found a “strong relationship” between racial and economic segregation and premature mortality.54 As
“Democrats and Republicans may have different interpretations of these facts, but in public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills.”
Fernando De Maio, co-director, Center for Community Health Equity
he wrote for Truthout, “decades of disinvestment” provide the foundation for current patterns of segregation, which public health experts identify as one form of “structural violence,” a term for social and political arrangements that harm populations. From this perspective, lowering premature mortality requires more than healthcare reform; “it requires concerted action to limit the concentration of wealth and power,” De Maio wrote.
In Chicago, West Side United (WSU), a coalition of healthcare institutions, residents, community-based and nonprofit organizations, and government agencies, has formed to tackle the sixteen-year life expectancy gap that exists between the city’s downtown Loop and West Side communities. Focused on healthcare, neighborhood and physical environment, economic vitality, and education, WSU works to address the root causes of poor health by increasing hiring from West Side neighborhoods, supporting business development, and expanding the use of community health workers, De Maio reported.
As Patrick Martin noted in his report for the World Socialist Web Site, the damning GAO report “was not actually commissioned . . . to expose the connection between poverty and premature death.” Instead, Congress called for the GAO to examine how changes in life expectancy might affect Social Security and Medicare programs, “to assist congressional efforts, supported by both parties, to cut spending on these ‘entitlement’ programs,” Martin wrote. He noted that, with stagnant incomes and the disappearance of traditional pension plans, Social Security and other safety net programs “are increasingly the lifeline on which millions depend,” and politicians’ efforts to shrink or eliminate them “could run into widespread opposition.”
The poorest Americans are also more likely than their rich counterparts to face illness or premature death due to the inherent dangers of low-wage work. From delivery drivers to home care providers, low-paid workers face increasing pressures to work faster and longer, making their jobs more stressful—and, ultimately, deadly, María José Carmona reported for Inequality.org in September 2019. Carmona reported on a 2019 International Labour Organization (ILO) study, which found that less than 14 percent of the 7500 people who die “due to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions every day” die from occupational accidents. Instead, the ILO determined, the vast majority of work-related deaths are due to stress-related illnesses or accidents that take place when workers are off-duty.55
“Today’s greatest workplace risk isn’t falling or infectious agents . . . but increasing pressure, precarious contracts, and working hours incompatible with life, which, bit by bit, continue to feed the invisible accident rate that does not appear in the news,” Carmona wrote.
The ILO report noted that excessive working hours are associated with “chronic effects of fatigue which can lead to cardiovascular disease and gastrointestinal disorders, as well as poorer mental health status, including higher rates of anxiety, depression and sleeping disorders.”56 Workers employed on temporary or casual bases are most vulnerable, Carmona reported; temporary and casual workers “have a harder time asserting their rights” and they consistently face having to choose between health and work, “between enduring pain [and] running the risk of not being called back.”
When focusing on work-related stress, “we have to be careful with labels,” José Antonio Llosa, a professor of psychology based in Spain, warned. “It’s not the fault of the worker who doesn’t know how to deal with the stress,” Llosa told Inequality.org, and the solutions are not individual anti-anxiety drug prescriptions, exercise programs, or meditation routines, but rather “changing the way that work is organized.”
While noting that protecting workers is “impossible in a market that is unrestrained and insecure,” Carmona concluded that curbing competition, better regulating work hours, and slowing down work processes could all help to improve workers’ health and safety, on and off the job.
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality, or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents, and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
Priyanjana Bengani, “Hundreds of ‘Pink Slime’ Local News Outlets are Distributing Algorithmic Stories and Conservative Talking Points,” Columbia Journalism Review, December 18, 2019, https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/hundreds-of-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-are-distributing-algorithmic-stories-conservative-talking-points.php.
Katherina Sourine and Dominick Sokotoff, “Pseudo Local News Sites in Michigan Reveal Nationally Expanding Network,” Michigan Daily, November 1, 2019, https://www.michigandaily.com/section/community-affairs/pseudo-local-news-sites-michigan-reveal-nationally-expanding-network.
Carol Thompson, “Dozens of New Websites Appear to be Michigan Local News Outlets, but with Political Bent,” Lansing State Journal, October 20, 2019, updated October 22, 2019, https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2019/10/21/lansing-sun-new-sites-michigan-local-news-outlets/3984689002/.
Student Researcher: Troy Patton (Diablo Valley College)
Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)
A December 2019 report by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) highlighted how a network of 450 websites operated by five corporate organizations in twelve states “mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations” in order to “manipulate public opinion by exploiting faith in local media.” These sites “co-opt the language, design and structure of news organizations,” Priyanjana Bengani reported, to “cover certain candidates and topics, including limited government, tort reform, and labour unions, with a conservative bias.”
The story of “[d]ozens of websites branded as local news outlets” in Michigan, a crucial swing state in the 2016 election, was originally reported by Carol Thompson for the Lansing State Journal in October 2019. The CJR report expanded on previous investigations conducted by Thompson, the Michigan Daily, and others, which had identified around two hundred sites in several states posing as local news outlets while publishing politically biased content.
Thompson’s original report for the Lansing State Journal noted that the network of websites in Michigan shared a common “About Us” section, identifying Metric Media as the publisher and describing its plans to launch thousands of such sites nationwide. The sites’ privacy policies pages indicated that they were all operated by Locality Labs. Thompson reported that Locality Labs ran similar networks of sites in Illinois and Maryland, and identified Brian Timpone as Locality Labs’s CEO.
The Michigan Daily’s November 2019 report provided further detail on the intricate relationships between Brian Timpone, Metric Media, Locality Labs, and other outlets. Although the web of interconnected sites is difficult to follow, the CJR highlighted five corporate bodies with 21 news networks that are connected through a complex web of shared IP addresses, backend web IDs, and the involvement of Timpone. As CJR reported, “In 2012, Timpone’s company Journatic, an outlet known for its low-cost automated story generation (which became known as ‘pink slime journalism’), attracted national attention and outrage for faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism.”57 In 2013, Journatic rebranded as Locality Labs. Brian Timpone is also the co-founder of Local Government Information Services (LGIS), a network of more than thirty print and web publications in Illinois that feature conservative news and share the same layout as Metric Media’s websites. And, as CJR reported, in 2015 Timpone incorporated Newsinator, a firm that the Chicago Tribune described as having a history of “doing paid political work and offer[ing] marketing services to companies under the name Interactive Content Services.”58 The CEO of Franklin Archer, which operates the single largest network of these faux-local publications, is Michael Timpone, Brian’s brother.
Based on CJR’s network analysis of Metric Media, Franklin Archer, Newsinator, LGIS, and Locality Labs (also known as Local Labs), Priyanjana Bengani concluded, “Typically, creating entities that focus on communities, local news, and single issues important to the general public would be a worthwhile endeavour. But, the partisan material present on the more established networks along with the ideological leanings of some of the key personnel give us pause.”
Since October 2019 at least three significant scholarly books have been published that address the topic of growing control over local media outlets by conservative owners with ties to right-wing organizations, but during the past year major corporate news outlets have provided minimal coverage of this topic.59 In October 2019 the New York Times published an article that credited the Lansing State Journal with breaking the story on pseudo-local news organizations in Michigan, and drew significantly from Carol Thompson’s original report.60 Corporate coverage has been lacking in regard to this Sinclair-like network of right-leaning news sites filling the holes left by the demise of many local news outlets. The Columbia Journalism Review’s piece expands on the breadth and scope of previous coverage, but its findings do not appear to have been reported by any of the major establishment news outlets.
Carma Henry, “There are 64,000 Missing Black Women and Girls in the United States and No One Seems to Care,” Westside Gazette, February 21, 2019, https://thewestsidegazette.com/there-are-64000-missing-black-women-and-girls-in-the-united-states-and-no-one-seems-to-care/.
Tanasia Kenney, “‘693 Bodies . . . All Black’: White S.C. Man Accused of Trafficking, Kidnapping Underage Girls for Sex Withdraws Request for Bond, May Have More Victims,” Atlanta Black Star, October 17, 2019, https://atlantablackstar.com/2019/10/17/693-bodies-all-black-white-s-c-man-accused-of-trafficking-kidnapping-underage-girls-for-sex-withdraws-request-for-bond-may-have-more-victims/.
Paula Rogo, “South Carolina DJ Accused of Trafficking and Sexual Crimes Against Black Girls,” Essence, October 19, 2019, https://www.essence.com/news/south-carolina-dj-human-trafficking-black-girls/.
“Everything to Know about the White Man Who May Have Sex Trafficked Nearly 700 Black Girls,” NewsOne, October 18, 2019, https://newsone.com/3890531/jason-roger-pope-dj-kid-sex-trafficking/.
Student Researchers: Zakeycia Briggs (Indian River State College) and Melissa Harden (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluators: Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College) and Steve Macek (North Central College)
The rate at which Black women and girls go missing in the United States is higher than that of their white counterparts. As Carma Henry reported for the Westside Gazette, “What’s even more alarming is that the media coverage and legislation that missing Black girls are getting seems to be lacking compared to missing white girls.” As of 2014 there are 64,000 missing Black women and girls, most of whom have not been found, due in part to the lack of coverage their stories garner.
As Henry explained, a 2010 study of US media coverage of missing children found that “only 20 percent of reported stories focused on missing Black children despite [their disappearances] corresponding to 33 percent of the overall missing children cases.”61 The study concluded that missing persons stories involving Black children, and specifically missing Black girls, are reported on by corporate media less frequently than other missing children cases.
A 2015 study discussed in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice found that the disparity listed in the 2010 study between the reportage and the reality of missing Black children had increased substantially.62 As of 2015, Black children accounted for 35 percent of missing children cases, while only representing a dismal 7 percent of media reports on missing children. Media coverage is often vital in missing person cases because it raises community awareness and can drive funding and search efforts that support finding those missing persons.
The Atlanta Black Star shed light on perhaps the most prolific offender against Black women and girls in recent history, Jason Roger Pope, who has been indicted on charges relating to human trafficking and child sex crimes. Pope, a white South Carolina promoter and popular disc jockey better known as DJ Kid, has made claims suggesting he may have participated in the trafficking, assault, and/or rapes of nearly seven hundred African American girls—primarily under-aged—right up until his arrest in August 2019. Victims as young as thirteen years old testified that Pope coerced them into performing sex acts in exchange for items such as money and drugs.
On his active Facebook page, Pope wrote, “I’m 36 with 693 BODIES (All Black females), WBU?” In a photo album called “DJ KID (PARTIES & GIRLS—Part 1)” there are numerous photographs depicting Pope in inappropriate, sexually-charged poses with under-aged African American girls. A relative of Pope’s reportedly contacted police in mid-2018, claiming that Pope would pay underage girls to perform sex acts and later post about the encounters online, but their concerns were ignored. Pope has police records going as far back as 2011 relating to sexual misconduct with minors. Yet outside of a few local news outlets, the corporate media has been silent on Pope’s crimes.
Human trafficking relies on an expansive underground market that frequently goes unnoticed and underreported. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it is estimated that, globally, 94 percent of humans trafficked for sex consist of women and girls.63 The Human Trafficking Search also notes that African Americans are affected by sex trafficking disproportionately in the United States, accounting for more than 40 percent of confirmed sex trafficking victims despite only representing 13.1 percent of the population.64
The corporate media’s failure to report on Pope’s egregious acts is reflective of their larger pattern of ignoring crimes against Black women and girls, whether they are trafficked, abused, or disappeared. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi has spoken out against the widespread problem of missing Black women and girls in the United States, hoping to call attention to the often-ignored issue, yet the little coverage she received on the issue ironically tended to obscure the fact that a disproportionate number of the women and girls missing in the United States are Black.65
Apart from small independent sources, many of which report primarily on the Black community, this gap in coverage of missing Black women and girls has gone widely underreported. An ABC News article discussed the fact that many Black families have to fight to get the attention of media and police for their missing person cases.66 CNN detailed the many factors that contribute to higher rates of missing Black children in America and identified inadequate media coverage as a source of the disparity.67 But, broadly, US corporate media are not willing to discuss their own shortcomings or to acknowledge the responsibilities they neglect by failing to provide coverage on the search for missing and victimized Black women and girls.
Ellen Brown, “The Public Banking Revolution is upon Us,” Common Dreams, April 18, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/18/public-banking-revolution-upon-us.
Ananya Garg, “California Just Legalized Public Banks. Will the Rest of the Nation Follow Suit?” YES! Magazine, October 4, 2019, https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2019/10/04/california-public-banking-law.
Mario Koran, “California Just Legalized Public Banking, Setting the Stage for More Affordable Housing,” The Guardian, October 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2019/oct/03/california-governor-public-banking-law-ab857.
Eric Heath, “Public Banking Can Fund Green Investment,” The Hill, July 22, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/454075-public-banking-can-fund-green-investment.
Oscar Perry Abello, “To Keep the Economy Afloat, the Fed Turns to North Dakota,” YES! Magazine, April 29, 2020, https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/04/29/coronavirus-economy-public-banking/.
Student Researcher: Matthew Ascano (San Francisco State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)
In October 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom signed the Public Banking Act, authorizing city and county governments to create or sponsor public banks. As YES! Magazine reported, though establishing the charters for such banks will likely take several years, public banks like the Bank of North Dakota, which was established in 1919, provide a robust alternative to the “big for-profit banks that the government uses to invest public money into Wall Street, rather than local communities.” Public banks will provide “public agencies access to loans at interest rates much lower than they could find at private banks,” the Guardian reported. Run like nonprofits, public banks are not legally obligated to maximize profits, as private banks are; instead, public banks are mandated to serve their communities. As Ellen Brown, the founder of the Public Banking Institute, had previously reported for Common Dreams, “a growing public banking movement is picking up momentum across the U.S.” More than 25 public bank bills were “currently active, and dozens of groups are promoting the idea,” Brown wrote in April 2019.
After California legislators enacted the state’s Public Banking Act, the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco announced plans to establish public banks.68 In November 2019, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy established a task force to create a business and operations plan for how a public bank could help meet the capital needs of the state’s small businesses, nonprofits, students, and affordable housing projects.69
From efforts to divest public employee pension funds from the fossil fuel industry and private prisons, to funding the proposed Green New Deal, and counteracting the massive, rapid shutdown of the economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, public banking has never seemed more relevant.
The year 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’s first publicly-owned state bank, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), which was established in response to a farmers’ revolt against out-of-state banks that were unfairly foreclosing on their farms. As YES! Magazine’s Ananya Garg reported, in 2018 the BND “recorded its 15th consecutive year of record profit,” with $159 million in income, $7 billion in assets, and an investment portfolio of $1.9 billion. As Ellen Brown told YES! Magazine, North Dakota was the only state that escaped the 2008 financial crisis: “It never went in the red” and it had the lowest unemployment and foreclosure rates at that time.
One aim of the Standing Rock movement—which in 2016 brought together Indigenous activists from across the nation to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline—was public and personal divestment from the big bank funding the pipeline’s development, Wells Fargo. As Ananya Garg reported for YES! Magazine, at the time of the Standing Rock protests, “many individuals were able to switch their personal accounts to nonprofit credit unions.” But credit unions typically lack “the capacity to handle the large government accounts of cities and states.” Garg described how, in 2017, the Seattle City Council voted to divest its banking services from Wells Fargo, because of the bank’s ties to the Dakota Access Pipeline. But when Seattle officials could not find an alternative institution to process the city’s $3 billion in annual revenues, Seattle was forced to return to Wells Fargo for its banking. A public bank would have provided the necessary alternative, thus bolstering divestment efforts in Seattle and throughout the nation.
In July 2019, The Hill reported on how public banking could help fund the Green New Deal, the policy proposal to address climate change and environmental deterioration. Skeptics have argued that strapped federal and state governments lack the financial resources to take on the Green New Deal’s multi-trillion-dollar costs. However, as Eric Heath explained, state banks, such as the BND, “free the financial resources needed to fund vital investments in the planet’s future.” Public banks’ mission to serve the public interest could allow them “to extend financing to projects that other banks would not consider”—not because green investments are unprofitable, but because “their profits slowly accumulate and are widely shared across a community.” A September 2019 study, published by the Northeast-Midwest Institute, recommended the adoption of public banks by all Northeast and Midwestern states, not as “a panacea” but as one important move for “addressing critical investment gaps and realigning state resources with state interests.”70
The COVID-19 pandemic’s extraordinary impact on the economy has led to somewhat wider discussion about the desirability of public banks. With the pandemic, news outlets such as The Hill and even News Corp’s MarketWatch are beginning to join pioneering outlets like YES! Magazine in covering public banking.71
With the congressional bailout package including an initial disbursement of $349 billion in forgivable loans to small businesses through the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, the CEO of the Bank of North Dakota, Eric Hardmeyer, told YES! Magazine, “The Fed seems to be thinking of everything we were thinking about two or three weeks ago.”
Recalling how President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—“a special-purpose public bank”—not only to bail out private banks, but also to finance “massive public-works and social programs, which transformed America,” Timothy Knowles and Ameya Pawar advocated following Roosevelt’s example and launching “a network of national, state and local public banks to forge a 21st-century New Deal.”72
“If cities had public banks, they would be much better equipped” to deal with budget shortfalls caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and to maintain the services and staff vital to cities’ economic recovery, Isaiah Poole and Rick Girling wrote in an editorial for The Hill. They went on to call for state and local political leaders to “use emergency powers to rapidly create public banks that can serve as key engines of a just and sustainable economic recovery.”73
No major corporate media outlets appear to have devoted recent coverage to this important and timely topic.
Christina Chen, “Nuclear vs. Climate Change: Rising Seas,” Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), September 16, 2019, https://www.nrdc.org/experts/christina-chen/nuclear-vs-climate-change-rising-seas.
Karen Charman, “Can Nuclear Power’s Deadly Waste be Contained in a Warming World?” Truthout, September 23, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/can-nuclear-powers-deadly-waste-be-contained-in-a-warming-world/.
Student Researcher: Ryan Gopar Ramirez (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University) and Daniel Kammen (UC Berkeley)
Nuclear power plants are unprepared for climate change. Rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact power plants’ infrastructure, posing increased risks of nuclear disasters, according to reports from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Truthout from September 2019.
“[I]f nuclear power is going to have a role in addressing climate change,” Christina Chen wrote in the second of a two-part NRDC report, “stronger safety and environmental regulations will be needed.” Chen’s report highlighted problems stemming from a January 2019 decision by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to weaken recommendations from its own staff to reassess the adequacy of preparations for seismic and flooding hazards at nuclear sites.
In a dissent to the NRC’s decision, one of its commissioners, Jeff Baran, wrote, “Instead of requiring nuclear power plants to be prepared for the actual flooding and earthquake hazards that could occur at their sites, NRC will allow them to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced than it is today.”
NRC staff had recommended raising safety standards in response to the ongoing Fukushima disaster, which began in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Writing for Truthout, Karen Charman reported that “nuclear reactors need an uninterrupted electricity supply to run the cooling systems that keep the reactors from melting down.” However, this requirement may be “increasingly difficult to guarantee in a world of climate-fueled megastorms and other disasters.”
As Charman noted, in the late 1980s Hans Blix, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency, promoted the role of nuclear energy as a means to combat climate change. Since then advocates for nuclear energy—including 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker and Andrew Yang—have promoted nuclear power as a clean energy source because it does not produce carbon emissions.
However, as Charman wrote, “the fact that reactors don’t emit carbon while operating doesn’t mean nuclear energy is ‘clean.’” Nuclear disasters such as the meltdown and explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the successive meltdowns and explosions at Fukushima in 2011—all of which resulted in radioactive contamination—are stark examples of what can go wrong.
Many of the world’s estimated 442 nuclear power plants operating in 2019 are located near sea level because, as Christina Chen’s article explained, “Nuclear power plants require huge amounts of water to prevent fission products in the core and spent nuclear fuel from overheating.”74 This makes nuclear power the most water-intensive energy source in terms of consumption and withdrawal per unit of energy delivered.
As Ensia, a solutions-focused media outlet, reported in 2018, more than one hundred US, European, and Asian nuclear power stations positioned just a few meters above sea level may be vulnerable to serious flooding caused by accelerating sea-level rise and increasingly frequent storm surges.75 In the United States, nine nuclear plants are located within two miles of the ocean, and a team of researchers at Stanford identified four of those reactors as vulnerable to storm surges and rising sea levels, John Vidal reported for Ensia. David Lochbaum, a former director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Ensia that, since the early 1980s, there have been more than twenty incidents of flooding recorded at US nuclear plants.
In 2019, as Greenland’s ice sheet lost an estimated 600 billion tons of water—the biggest drop in its surface mass since recordkeeping began in 1948—scientists predicted that sea levels could rise by as much as two meters by 2100.76
Tracking back to 2013, corporate news media have only sporadically addressed the potential for climate change to impact nuclear power plants. In 2013, for example, the New York Times reported that the US Department of Energy had concluded that the nation’s entire energy system was vulnerable to increasingly severe and costly weather events driven by climate change.77 However, the article did not address how rising sea levels would affect nuclear power plants. More recently, a July 2019 U.S. News & World Report article noted that, although the nuclear power sector is often depicted as being relatively resistant to unpredictable weather associated with climate change, heat waves are “punching holes in that narrative.”78 Although this report stressed the threats of rising water and air temperatures, it did not address rising sea levels.
Craig Aaron, “Journalism Needs a Stimulus. Here’s What It Should Look Like,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 24, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalism-stimulus.php.
Victor Pickard, “We Need a Media System That Serves People’s Needs, Not Corporations,” Jacobin, January 27, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/corporate-media-system-democracy.
Victor Pickard, “American Journalism is Dying. Its Survival Requires Public Funds,” The Guardian, February 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/19/american-journalism-press-publishing-mcclatchy.
Student Researcher: Veronica Vasquez (Diablo Valley College)
Faculty Advisor: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020 President Trump authorized a $2.2 trillion rescue package, which included direct payments of $1200 per adult plus $500 per child to millions of Americans, and more than $500 billion for large corporations, including the airline industry.79 Anticipating President Trump’s approval of the landmark Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Craig Aaron, the president of Free Press, wrote that the United States urgently needs a stimulus package for journalism. “In the face of this pandemic,” Aaron wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, “the public needs good, economically secure journalists more than ever.” Aaron’s organization, Free Press, determined that US journalism needs $5 billion in immediate emergency funds, and his article presented a three-pronged plan for the recovery of journalism, including a doubling of federal funds for public media, direct support for newsrooms, and new investments in journalism.
Doubling the annual federal appropriations for public media over the next two years would require an additional $930 million. “This money isn’t for Downton Abbey reruns,” Aaron wrote. Instead, for example, it could be used to extend the successful model of using public media as an educational resource while students are home from school. In California, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the local PBS affiliate, KCET, have partnered “to offer instruction over the airwaves while kids are out of school, with separate channels focused on different ages,” Aaron noted.80 A congressional appropriation of at least $200 million could expand public media’s “Ready to Learn” initiative to cover all school-aged children. Any recovery package should also include direct support for daily and weekly newsrooms, including jobs at newspapers, community papers, and alt-week-lies committed to local news coverage. Just $625 million could help retain 25,000 newsroom jobs, Aaron reported. Congress could facilitate this investment by offering deferred or no-interest business loans and tax credits, such as Aaron’s proposed Emergency Jobs for Journalism Tax Credit, which would provide outlets with $40,000 per newsroom employee hired during 2020. COVID-19, Aaron wrote, provides an opportunity to “revive and reimagine journalism’s future.” Thus, as Aaron advocated, a future stimulus bill could include $2 billion for a “First Amendment Fund” that would support “new positions, outlets, and approaches to newsgathering.”
Arguing that a “resilient and community-centered media system” is necessary to get through the pandemic, Aaron concluded, “Now is the time to act. We need significant public investments in all corners of the economy, and journalism is no exception.”
In an article published by Jacobin, media scholar Victor Pickard argued that the current US media system “naturalizes the powerful and profitable while defunding adversarial journalism.” For a media system to be “democratically governed and accessible to all,” Pickard wrote, we must “stop grasping for a technological fix or a market panacea” and “acknowledge that no entrepreneurial solution lies just around the bend.” Instead we must seek non-market alternatives. A public option for journalism, establishing permanent support for a well-funded national public media service, “could help guarantee universal access to quality news,” he wrote.
Drawing on the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s model for building alternatives to capitalism, Pickard wrote that “the most surefire way to tame and erode commercial media is to create a truly publicly owned system.” A robust public media system would require an annual budget of approximately $30 billion, Pickard reported. “That may seem large, but relative to the problem—and compared to the outlays for recent tax cuts and military expenditures—it’s actually a modest proposal,” he wrote. (Pickard’s Jacobin article appeared before Trump’s authorization of the CARES Act; the $30 billion necessary to create a truly public media system would cost less than 1.4 percent of the CARES Act expenditures.)
Without incessant commercial pressures, journalists could “practice the craft that led them to the profession in the first place.” This kind of journalism, Pickard wrote, “could devote unwavering attention to combatting social injustice,” laying bare the “social costs of policy failure and the structural roots of inequality.”
While corporate news outlets have reported the ongoing demise of newspapers and especially local news sources, they have rarely covered proposals such as Aaron’s and Pickard’s to revitalize journalism through public funding—and when they have, the coverage has tended to be slight or belittling. For example, among the very few establishment news articles to address Aaron’s piece,
“Now is the time to act. We need significant public investments in all corners of the economy, and journalism is no exception.”
Craig Aaron, president, Free Press
the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan offered a relatively tepid endorsement.81 Though corporate media have perhaps predictably afforded few positive mentions of publicly owned media, in May 2020 the Washington Post did run an editorial by Victor Pickard on the history of, and current potential for, municipal newspapers.82
Elizabeth King, “The New Green Scare,” The Progressive, October 6, 2019, https://progressive.org/magazine/the-new-green-scare-king-191001/.
Student Researcher: Rebecca Noelke (Indian River State College)
Faculty Evaluator: Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)
As scientists warn of imminent climate change, environmental welfare activists in the United States are facing growing legal penalties and a crackdown by law enforcement agencies designed to counteract environmental activism.83 Dubbed the “New Green Scare,” this resurgence of the state siding with corporations that engage in environmental exploitation is leading to mounting legal concerns for activists.
As Elizabeth King explained in an October 2019 Progressive magazine article, while the Trump administration’s corporate-friendly policies dramatically endanger the health of our environment, those who take direct action in its defense are increasingly being framed as domestic terrorists. The FBI and pro-fossil fuel politicians like Oklahoma senator James Inhofe have identified environmental activism as a significant domestic terrorism threat.
Environmental protesters often risk incarceration and drawn-out legal battles for charges such as trespassing, sabotage, burglary, and terrorism. For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, in which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sought to protect their water from the construction of the pipeline, resulted in a total of 836 criminal cases. A number of US states, including Texas and North Dakota, have enacted new laws to target environmental activists, and seven states have even instituted laws that specifically target pipeline protesters. The expansion of “critical infrastructure” laws to include pipelines puts activists who protest against such environmentally dangerous projects at risk of enhanced legal penalties.
Meanwhile, in West Virginia, activist Holden Dometrius was charged in April 2019 with a felony threat of terroristic acts for chaining himself to construction equipment being used to build the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project that “poses a major threat to the local ecology, including many endangered species,” King reported. Since then, other nonviolent Mountain Valley Pipeline protestors—who would have previously been charged with misdemeanors—are now being charged with felonies.
State-level laws to restrict eco-activism are frequently based on model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and have often been introduced by politicians with direct ties to ALEC, King wrote. Funded by conservative billionaire Charles Koch and dozens of other large corporations, ALEC is the driving force behind much of the “critical infrastructure” legislation being passed by state legislatures throughout the country.
In late March 2020, amid the coronavirus outbreak, three Republican-controlled state legislatures—in South Dakota, West Virginia, and Kentucky—passed laws criminalizing fossil fuel protests.84
While corporate media outlets are paying increased attention to topics such as climate change and the Green New Deal endorsed by some Democratic candidates in their 2020 primary election campaigns, they have generally disregarded the fact that the government is criminalizing eco-activist protest and direct action. The passage of state legislation in South Dakota, West Virginia, and Kentucky assigning criminal penalties for protests directed at pipelines and other fossil fuel facilities was largely covered by outlets outside the corporate media establishment, including HuffPost, The Hill, and the Weather Channel.85
Will Carless and Michael Corey, “To Protect and Slur,” Reveal (Center for Investigative Reporting), June 14, 2019, http://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-hate-groups-on-facebook-police-officers-trade-racist-memes-conspiracy-theories-and-islamophobia/ [Part One of a three-part series].
Nick Statt, “Hundreds of Active and Former Police Officers are Part of Extremist Facebook Groups,” The Verge, June 14, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/14/18679598/facebook-hate-groups-law-enforcement-police-officers-racism-islamaphobia.
Alex Kotch, “Facebook is Making Millions by Promoting Hate Groups’ Content,” Sludge, September 25, 2019, https://readsludge.com/2019/09/25/facebook-is-making-millions-by-promoting-hate-groups-content/.
Student Researchers: Michelle Ann Stanton and Andrea Hernandez-Chavez (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Erica Tom (Sonoma State University)
According to an investigation by Reveal, the media platform for the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, hundreds of US police officers are members of misogynistic, homophobic, racist, anti-Muslim, Confederate, or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. From a sheriff’s deputy in Missouri posting anti-Muslim rants to a Georgia officer who shared Confederate memes, “[h]undreds of active-duty and retired” officers “at every level of American law enforcement” are members of hate groups on Facebook, Will Carless and Michael Corey reported.
As Nick Statt wrote in an article published by The Verge in June 2019, “The unifying thread to all of these Facebook groups is that they are frequented and sometimes founded and operated by active and retired police officers, and that they actively recruit other police officers to join.”
This is so despite Facebook hate speech policies that ban content targeting individuals based on their race, ethnicity, or religion. Facebook also has rules against violent incitement by groups that have been known to organize and act offline.
However, as Alex Kotch reported for Sludge in September 2019, Facebook profits from promoting hate groups’ content. Based on a Sludge study of Facebook ad data, Kotch reported that, between May 2018 and September 2019, “at least 38 hate groups and hate figures, or their political campaigns, paid Facebook nearly $1.6 million to run 4,921 sponsored ads.”
According to the Sludge report, nearly $960,000 of these ad revenues could be traced to anti-immigrant groups, $542,000 was spent by anti-LGBTQ groups, and anti-Muslim groups spent nearly $70,000 on ads.
Corporate media coverage of US police involvement in hate groups has been limited. For example, an article published by the Washington Post in July 2019 addressed the topic but effectively defended Facebook by emphasizing the difficulties involved in monitoring so many private groups.86 Also in July 2019, NBC Philadelphia reported that thirteen city police officers would be removed from the force due to violent, homophobic, or racist posts on their Facebook accounts.87 These thirteen individuals were determined to be the “worst” of the 328 officers being investigated, according to the NBC Philadelphia report.
Amy Goodman and Juan González, interview with Jena Griswold, “Colorado Has One of the Highest Voter Turnouts in the Country. Here’s How They Did It,” Democracy Now!, November 5, 2019, https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/5/colorado_mail_in_voting_voter_turnout.
Student Evaluator: Kenzie Parker (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Colorado boasts “the highest percentage of eligible citizens registered to vote,” and its voter participation rates are “often the first or second for the entire nation,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told Democracy Now! in a November 2019 interview. The state’s voting measures include same-day voter registration, automatic registration with driver’s license services, the extension of voting rights to people on parole, and allowances for some seventeen-year-olds to vote in primary elections. As a result, Amy Goodman reported, Colorado is “considered an example for states needing to expand voter access at a time when Republican legislatures and statehouses across the country are attempting to suppress the vote.”
Colorado’s mail-in voting system was established “with bipartisan support” in 2013, Griswold explained. “Republican county clerks pushed [for] these reforms,” in part because the mail-in system is more efficient and less expensive than in-person voting. The mail-in voting system also supports the state’s commitment “to make sure that every eligible Coloradan’s voice is heard,” Griswold told Democracy Now! Although every registered, eligible voter receives a mail-in ballot, people can vote in person if they prefer to do so.
In 2019 the Colorado legislature passed the Colorado Votes Act—which added polling places and mail-in drop boxes throughout the state, including on the campuses of public universities and, with tribal leadership authorization, on tribal lands—and the Restore Voting Rights Parolees law, which enfranchised nearly 11,500 Coloradans on parole.88
Colorado’s voting reforms “shine in stark contrast to the voter suppression we see across this country,” Secretary of State Griswold told Democracy Now!
The COVID-19 pandemic has made mail-in voting a hot topic, especially since President Trump and other Republicans have expressed opposition to it on the spurious grounds that voting by mail is prone to fraud.89 Without endorsing that stance, the New York Times has reported skeptically on mail-in voting. For instance, an April 2020 article noted that “many, if not most, states would face daunting financial, logistical and personnel challenges to making mail balloting the norm.”90
The Washington Post featured an opinion piece by former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, advocating for the nation to adopt a mail-in voting system modeled after Colorado’s.91 The nation “can’t afford a repeat in November” of the “election chaos” experienced by Wisconsin voters in April, after the state’s Republican legislators and Supreme Court forced voters and poll workers “to risk covid-19 infection to participate in American democracy,” Hickenlooper wrote. The experience of Colorado, along with Washington and Oregon, which also use mail-in voting, “has laid the groundwork for just this moment, when mail-in voting in a national election could be vital to protecting Americans’ health—and the health of our democracy.” Responding to concerns of fraud, Hickenlooper touted Colorado’s use of “rigorous risk-limiting audits” and a centralized database to verify voters’ signatures, as well as perhaps the fundamental advantage of mailed ballots—“paper can’t be hacked,” he wrote. But beyond this opinion piece, the Washington Post—like other establishment media outlets—has not reported on Colorado’s example as a model of expanding voter access and making elections more democratic.
Fran Quigley, “Removing the Profit from Our Pills: The Case for a Public Pharma System,” Common Dreams, September 18, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/18/removing-profit-our-pills-case-public-pharma-system.
Dean Baker, “Replace Patent Monopolies with Direct Public Funding for Drug Research,” Truthout, July 1, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/replace-patent-monopolies-with-direct-public-funding-for-drug-research/.
Alan MacLeod, “Economist Dean Baker: Systemic Change Needed to Fight Big Pharma Price Gouging,” MintPress News, December 12, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/dean-baker-gilead-hiv-pofits-drug-prices/263412/.
Zain Rizvi, “Blind Spot: How the COVID-19 Outbreak Shows the Limits of Pharma’s Monopoly Model,” Public Citizen, February 19, 2020, https://www.citizen.org/article/blind-spot/.
Student Researchers: Jennifer Pope (San Francisco State University) and Amber Yang (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)
A September 2019 report by the Democracy Collaborative outlined a model for a democratic public pharmaceutical system, as Fran Quigley reported for Common Dreams. According to the report, the existing pharmaceutical industry, which depends on government-granted patent monopolies, “operates on an extractive model that contributes to inequality and increasingly produces drug shortages, inefficiency, lagging innovation, misinformation and misuse of medications, and most famously, the world’s highest drug prices.”92 Instead of piecemeal reform of existing patent and anti-trust laws or government provisions of health insurance—any of which could later be repealed—public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution offers a systemic approach to fixing Big Pharma’s most fundamental flaws, according to “Medicine for All,” the Democracy Collaborative’s report.
The Democracy Collaborative model includes plans for a national public pharmaceutical research and development institute for developing new drugs to meet public health needs; state, local, and regional public pharmaceutical manufacturers; regionally owned and operated public wholesale distributors; and engaging the US Postal Service as a partner for pharmaceutical distribution.93
As Fran Quigley wrote for Common Dreams, the foundation for these changes is “already in place” because public funding “has long been the bedrock of pharmaceutical research and development.” From 2010 to 2016, “every single one” of 210 newly approved drugs traced their origins back to taxpayer-sponsored research, Quigley reported, based on a study published by PNAS in March 2018.94
In almost every case, Dean Baker wrote in Truthout in July 2019, drugs are “cheap to manufacture,” but government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive for consumers. Both Baker’s Truthout article and a report for MintPress News by Alan MacLeod addressed the explanations for high drug prices typically made by defenders of the current system. In the existing model, “it is expensive to develop new drugs” and patent monopolies provide companies incentives to take the risks necessary to do so, Baker related. But, he wrote, there is “nothing natural” about a patent-based system for financing drug research and development. Instead, patent monopolies give drug companies “an enormous incentive to push their drugs as widely as possible.” The opioid crisis, he noted, is an extreme case of how drug companies exaggerate their drugs’ benefits and conceal their negative side effects. But, Baker wrote, “Purdue Pharma would not have been pushing OxyContin so vigorously if it were selling at generic prices.”95
The current system also leads to lost government revenues—which could otherwise be directed to healthcare and public services—through tax evasion: As revealed by the Panama Papers, in 2015 ten of the thirty US companies holding the most money offshore were pharmaceutical companies, which together held more than $506 billion in offshore accounts not subject to US taxes.96
Publicly-owned pharmaceuticals, freed from the financial demand to appease profit-hungry shareholders, would be able to focus on public health priorities, working hand-in-hand with public health departments, as they do in other countries, to assure an adequate supply of medications, priced to be accessible to the broadest array of Americans. As Fran Quigley reported for Common Dreams, Sweden, Brazil, Cuba, Thailand, and China (among others) “embrace public ownership in key components of their medicines systems,” offering working examples of what could be achieved in the United States.
Although the United States has a reputation for being “politically and culturally suspicious of public systems replacing markets,” two-thirds of Americans “support making prescription drugs public goods paid for by the federal government,” and eight in ten support “breaking patent monopolies to reduce drug prices,” Quigley reported.97
In February 2020, Public Citizen published a report showing how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limits of Big Pharma’s monopoly model. Public Citizen’s “Blind Spot” report determined that, since the 2002 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the National Institutes of Health have invested “nearly $700 million [in taxpayer funding] on coronavirus R&D.” Indeed, all six of the coronavirus clinical trials active in 2019 “depended crucially on public funding.” Although “more sustained interest in coronaviruses could have provided greater scientific understanding, and a stronger toolkit to inform the latest response,” Zain Rizvi wrote, the private sector has lagged behind in developing treatments for infectious diseases because they are “less lucrative” than medicines for chronic conditions and rare diseases. As Rizvi’s Public Citizen report concluded, the COVID-19 crisis highlights the “urgent need” for an alternative to the existing “monopoly-based model,” which prioritizes short-term corporate profits over public health.
While consistently covering partisan political disputes over prescription drug prices, corporate news media have been relatively mute in reporting on proposals to develop a public pharmaceutical alternative to Big Pharma. In particular, as of May 2020 no corporate news outlets appear to have covered the Democracy Collaborative’s “Medicine for All” report.
Devon Heinen, “Nobody to Call: The Plight of Indigenous Suicide in Alaska,” New Statesman, January 10, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/12/nobody-call-indigenous-suicides-alaska.
“Tribe Faces Suicide Crisis,” Mountain West News, July 23, 2019, https://mountainwestnews.org/rockies-today-for-tuesday-july-23-99e8bc80babc.
Claudette Commanda and Louise Bradley, “We Must Not Forget Men When We Talk about Indigenous Trauma,” The Globe and Mail, June 16, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-we-must-not-forget-men-when-we-talk-about-indigenous-trauma/.
Allison Martell, “Deaths, Bad Outcomes Elude Scrutiny at Canada’s Indigenous Clinics,” Reuters, October 24, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-health-insight/deaths-bad-outcomes-elude-scrutiny-at-canadas-indigenous-clinics-idUSKBN1X3152.
Student Researchers: Danna Henderson (First Nations University of Canada), Olivia Page (College of Marin), and Alicia Morrow (University of Regina)
Faculty Evaluators: Patricia W. Elliott (First Nations University of Canada), Susan Rahman (College of Marin), and Kehinde Olalafe (University of Regina)
From evidence of neglect at government-run clinics in Canada’s northern reserves to the tragic loss of lives in remote villages in Alaska and on reservation lands in Montana, independent news coverage helps to frame the otherwise underreported issue of Indigenous mis-treatment and suicide in historical terms, against the backdrops of settler colonialism and systemic racism that affect Indigenous people and their communities in Canada and the United States.
Indigenous suicide is a serious public health issue throughout the United States, Devon Heinen reported for the New Statesman in January 2020. In 2017 the combined suicide rate for US Indigenous peoples was 22.15 per 100,000 people, compared with an overall national average of 16.3 per 100,000 people, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, Heinen reported. In Alaska—where 229 of the 573 federally-recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages in the United States are located—the Indigenous suicide rate from 1999 to 2009 was 42.5 per 100,000 people.
In Montana, Native youths aged 11 to 24 are five times more likely to die by suicide than non-Natives, according to data from the Montana Department of Health and Human Services, Mountain West News reported in July 2019. The suicide rate for Native youths in Montana is 42.82 per 100,000 people, compared with eight suicides per 100,000 people for all people in the same age range. Mountain West News reported that, over a period of three months, the Fort Belknap Reservation had experienced a “suicide contagion,” with three suicides and an estimated fifteen additional suicide attempts prompting the Fort Belknap Indian Community Council to declare a state of emergency.
As other reports documented, suicide has devastated First Nations communities in Canada. In June 2019, Claudette Commanda and Louise Bradley reported that suicide and self-inflicted injuries are “the leading cause of death” for First Nations youth and adults up to age 44. In November 2019, the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation declared a state of emergency after a rash of suicides, and the deaths of four Indigenous men by suicide on Ochapowace First Nation led Ochapowace to declare a state of emergency in December 2019.98 While affirming “the resiliency and strength of Indigenous peoples,” Commanda and Bradley wrote that “high rates of suicide, homicide, incarceration and substance abuse born of colonial trauma illustrate the pain and suffering that Indigenous communities continue to experience.” The impacts have been especially stark for First Nations male youth, for whom the suicide rate is 126 per 100,000, they noted.
“The challenge that we face collectively,” Commanda and Bradley wrote, “is to draw a narrative thread through numbers that point to pain and hurt and give it a human voice.”
Devon Heinen’s January 2020 report for the New Statesman shows how independent investigative journalism can contribute to this aim. Heinen reported in detail on the experience of one Iñupiaq family in the aftermath of the death by suicide of Rosie Hadley, at age twenty. Drawing on extensive interviews with Hadley’s family and those who knew her—Heinen conducted 27 separate interviews over four months with Rosie’s father, Nathan Hadley—Heinen’s report provided a vivid, detailed account of Rosie’s life and the community of Buckland, population 400, in Alaska’s remote and sparsely populated Northwest Arctic Borough.99 Through its intimate investigation of one family’s experience in the context of their community, the local lack of necessary social services, and the living legacy of the region’s colonial history, Heinen’s report provides a stark insight into one aspect of Indigenous suicide as a public health issue—how, in his words, “to help people heal after losing someone close.”100
An October 2019 report by Reuters documented how government-run or -sponsored health clinics in Canada are failing to provide Indigenous communities with necessary services.
For more than nine years, the Canadian federal government has not consistently tracked, let alone investigated, poor outcomes at clinics on Indigenous reserves, Allison Martell reported. These clinics, known as nursing stations, are charged with providing basic and emergency care to about 115,000 people. Through analysis of documents,
“The challenge that we face collectively is to draw a narrative thread through numbers that point to pain and hurt and give it a human voice.”
Claudette Commanda and Louise Bradley
including internal reports and meeting notes obtained through public records requests, Martell reported that record-keeping on deaths and other “critical incidents” at the clinics has been “erratic and fragmented.” Reuters documented at least two cases—one in Ontario, and another in Manitoba—in which nursing station officials turned away apparently intoxicated patients who subsequently died. Lack of adequate official records made it “difficult” to determine whether this “has been a widespread practice,” Martell reported, but a coroner’s verdict on one of the deaths described it as the “northern protocol.”
“We are treating members of the First Nations communities as second-class citizens,” Emily Hill, a senior staff lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services, told Reuters. Martell wrote that Reuters’s findings on deadly negligence in Canada’s nursing stations came as Canada is “in the midst of a public reckoning with the legacy of settler colonization.”
Recent corporate news coverage on Indigenous suicide and other trauma associated with the destructive legacies of colonization has not been proportionate to the scope of the crisis—with only a few notable exceptions. In August 2019, for example, U.S. News & World Report published a brief Associated Press report on the Fort Belknap community’s response to suicides.101 This seven-sentence article drew heavily from previous, more substantial local reporting by the Billings Gazette. In June 2019 USA Today reported, in more detail, on Native Americans’ “increased risk of suicide,” in light of the experience of Shelby Rowe, the executive director of the Arkansas Crisis Center, after she experienced a suicide crisis herself.102 In April 2018 the New York Times published a powerful, detailed story about the Arlee Warriors, a state championship high school basketball team from Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, and its team members’ efforts to help their community deal with suicide.103
Michael Garcia Bochenek and Warren Binford, “The U.S. is Mistreating Children in Its Custody. Can International Law Help?” American Prospect, August 15, 2019, https://prospect.org/article/us-mistreating-children-its-custody-can-international-law-help.
Student Researcher: Christina Chacon Sanchez (City College of San Francisco)
Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Levinson (City College of San Francisco)
After a host of media outlets’ front-page headlines reported that thousands of immigrant children had been forcibly separated from their families by US officials, in June 2018 the Trump administration announced an end to its family separation policy, and a federal court ordered the reunification of separated families. However, as Michael Garcia Bochenek and Warren Binford reported for the American Prospect in August 2019, when they investigated US Border Patrol facilities in El Paso, Texas, in June 2019, “child after child sat before us describing when and how U.S. officials forcibly separated them from their families this year.” The report documented the deplorable conditions and emotional abuse that detained children endured—but also how international law could help to hold US officials to account for violations of children’s rights. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—which the United States helped draft between 1979 and 1989, and which it officially signed in 1995—could mobilize international pressure on the United States to address these violations, Bochenek and Binford reported.
Under US law, children should not be held in custody by Border Patrol for more than 72 hours. Beyond that time, detained children are supposed to be transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, and either reunified with family in the United States or placed in the custody of another caregiver. However, Bochenek and Binford reported that, earlier in 2019, the Border Patrol “was detaining children for more than 90 days on average, in violation of both these legal limits and the children’s rights.”
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the “most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world,” Bochenek and Binford wrote, and some of its specific terms are “now norms of customary international law,” indicative of a “global consensus” regarding all countries’ obligations to respect children’s rights. But, they also noted, “no president has ever sent [the treaty] to the Senate for ratification, the formal agreement to be bound by its terms,” making the United States the only signatory among UN member countries not to have done so.
What steps could be taken to make a strong argument that US violations of children’s rights violated US obligations under international law? One possible avenue, as Bochenek and Binford considered, is “the regular accounting every U.N. member has to make at the Human Rights Council, a process known as Universal Periodic Review.”104 In 2006 the UN General Assembly mandated the United Nations’s newly formed Human Rights Council to undertake “a universal periodic review, based on objective and reliable information, of the fulfilment by each State of its human rights obligations and commitments in a manner which ensures universality of coverage and equal treatment with respect to all States.”105
In November 2020, when the United States is next up for review, every other UN member will “be able to ask questions and make comments and recommendations on U.S. respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its voluntary commitments, and its treaty and customary international law obligations,” Bochenek and Binford wrote.106 Furthermore, during that review process, NGOs can submit information—including statements from detained children themselves—to inform those discussions.107
While noting that Universal Periodic Review is “not a court process” and that “real change” will likely have to come through domestic strategies (such as the law-suits being brought against the US government by the American Civil Liberties Union), Bochenek and Binford nonetheless asserted that there is “real value in the political pressure of regular review by other countries.” Member states of the United Nations and NGOs submitting statements could invoke the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the United States to act.
Reports of abuse of immigrant children in US detention have made headlines in the best-known US news media. For example, in July 2019, Fox News reported on inhospitable detention center conditions for migrant children.108 The article reported that, “[o]f the 2,669 children detained by the Border Patrol, 826 had been held longer than 72 hours”—though the 72-hour maximum time-frame was described by Fox News not as binding law but as “generally permitted under Customs and Border Protection standards.” Bochenek and Binford’s American Prospect article remains distinctive in highlighting how international law, including the United Nations’s Universal Periodic Review and its Convention on the Rights of the Child, could be mobilized to pressure US policymakers to reform policies that have led to cruel consequences for detained children and their families.
Stefanie Dodt, Jan Lukas Strozyk, and Dara Lind, “Pharmaceutical Companies are Luring Mexicans across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma,” ProPublica (in conjunction with ARD German TV), October 4, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/pharmaceutical-companies-are-luring-mexicans-across-the-u.s.-border-to-donate-blood-plasma.
Lauren Villagran and Stefanie Dodt, “Blood for Money,” Searchlight New Mexico (in conjunction with ARD German TV), October 22, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20200222024850/https://www.searchlightnm.org/blood-for-money.
Alan MacLeod, “Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism,” MintPress News, December 3, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/harvesting-blood-americas-poor-late-stage-capitalism/263175/.
Abby Zimet, “In Late-Stage Zombie Capitalism, the Poor are Selling Their Blood,” Common Dreams, December 9, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/12/09/late-stage-zombie-capitalism-poor-are-selling-their-blood.
Student Researchers: Tuuli Rantasalo (University of Regina), Meagan Cummins (University of Vermont), and Allegra Wu (University of Vermont)
Faculty Evaluators: Suliman Adam (University of Regina) and Rob Williams (University of Vermont)
US hospitals are currently desperate for blood donors: more than 4000 blood drives were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a March 2020 letter co-signed by the AABB, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Red Cross.109 The situation, which resulted in the loss of 130,000 anticipated donations, is unprecedented, according to Claudia Cohn, AABB’s chief medical officer and director of the blood bank at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.110
Meanwhile, international corporations that operate donation centers in the United States are buying the blood of poor people from Mexico and the United States and selling the plasma overseas.
Mexican citizens cross the border into the United States to donate their blood plasma at various donation sites established by Big Pharma, according to an October 2019 report from ProPublica. The donation centers are mainly owned by Grifols, a Spanish company that operates seventeen donation centers along the US–Mexico border; CSL, an Australian company; BPL, “an emerging player” headquartered in the United Kingdom; and GCAM Inc., a US firm with four centers along the borderlands, ProPublica reported.
“Donate” is the term these companies prefer to use, but Mexicans are selling their plasma for cash rewards, including bonuses for referring new donors. The companies attract Mexican citizens to the United States because plasma donation is illegal in Mexico, and firms know that prospective donors are likely in desperate need of extra income. “The donors, including some who say the payments are their only income, may take home up to $400 a month,” ProPublica reported, an amount that exceeds monthly salaries in border-based assembly plants and many middle-class jobs in Mexico.
Donating blood plasma repeatedly can be detrimental to donors’ health. Excessive donation can weaken the immune system, making donors more susceptible to diseases and infections. The United States provides few legal protections for donors. According to ProPublica, “Unlike other nations that limit or forbid paid plasma donations at a high frequency out of concern for donor health and quality control, the U.S. allows companies to pay donors and has comparatively loose standards for monitoring their health.” The United States is the largest supplier of blood plasma in a $21 billion global market, according to ProPublica’s report.
A 2018 study of US plasma donation centers, conducted by researchers at Case Western Reserve University and MetroHealth Medical Center, found that 57 percent of plasma donors in the study made more than a third of their monthly income (up to $250–300) by donating plasma, and 70 percent of these donors experienced side effects from donation, including weakness, bruising, dehydration, and fainting.111
Alan MacLeod of MintPress News identified paid blood donations as indicative of capitalism’s latest stage: “In a very real sense,” he wrote, “corporations are harvesting the blood of the poor, literally sucking the life out of them.” With sales of $28.6 billion in 2017, exports from the United States accounted for 70 percent of the plasma available on the international market, MacLeod reported. From 2016 to 2017, blood exports increased by more than 13 percent. While human blood is not yet sold on the futures markets, plasma increasingly is becoming a global commodity, with some of those selling their blood reporting that its value fluctuates—on some days they earn $75 for a donation, while on other days they make just $20.
A 2006 book, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell’s Tissue Economies, anticipated this phenomenon, but it has continued to develop outside the scope of establishment news coverage, with a few exceptions.112 The El Paso Times, a subsidiary of USA Today, republished a version of Villagran and Dodt’s “Blood for Money” report for Searchlight New Mexico.113 In February 2019 the New York Times reported on the “booming” plasma donation business in the United States, noting that, in 2016, blood products accounted for 1.9 percent of all American exports.114 The Times’s report drew on the Case Western Reserve/MetroHealth Medical Center study and addressed the exploitative nature of for-profit plasma donations in the United States, where the plasma for which donors are paid $30 will be worth $300 on the global market. In addition to the sources cited here, independent coverage of the topic has included reports by The Atlantic, Axios, and Latino USA, a radio program distributed by NPR.115
Jessica Corbett, “Progressives Blast New NLRB Union Elections Rule That ‘Betrays the Workers It is Meant to Protect,’” Common Dreams, December 13, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/13/progressives-blast-new-nlrb-union-elections-rule-betrays-workers-it-meant-protect.
William Lewis, “Trump Labor Board Escalates War on Workers’ Rights,” Truthout, December 21, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/trump-labor-board-escalates-war-on-workers-rights/.
Lynn Rhinehart, “Under Trump the NLRB Has Gone Completely Rogue,” The Nation, April 7, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/nlrb-workers-rights-trump/.
Student Researcher: Cem Ismail Addemir (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)
On December 13, 2019, the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the federal agency charged with enforcing labor law and overseeing union certification elections—escalated its assault against workers’ rights by abruptly changing the rules of union elections, without notice or public comment. According to a December 21, 2019, article by William Lewis in Truthout, “Starting in six months, when workers petition for an election, they must wait at least 14 business days until a pre-election hearing.”
The NLRB was created by the Wagner Act of 1935 and is charged with protecting workers’ rights to unionize and collectively bargain with employers. It consists of up to five politically appointed board members. At the moment, there are only three members of the board—all pro-business Republican lawyers.116
Under the new NLRB rules, not only must workers who have asked for a certification election wait fourteen days for a hearing, but the board also has the power to
“These changes put unions at a major disadvantage, since employers now have more time to inundate workers with anti-union propaganda in the lead-up to an election.”
postpone pre-election hearings any time they find “good cause.” After a two-week waiting period for a hearing, the scope of the bargaining unit and the eligibility of individual employees to vote in a certification election is subject to litigation. These changes put unions at a major disadvantage, since employers now have more time to inundate workers with anti-union propaganda in the lead-up to an election.
As Lewis noted, if a union looks like it might manage to win a certification vote, “the unelected NLRB now has the ability to suspend the election to resolve any ongoing disputes over the bargaining unit.” Moreover, recent changes to NLRB rules make it easier to decertify legally recognized collective bargaining units.
Though these NLRB rule changes erect yet more “legal hurdles” to workers seeking to form a union, Lewis wrote that businesses seeking to prevent their workers from unionizing “can also simply break the law.” He cited a 2019 Economic Policy Institute study that found more than 40 percent of employers in union certification elections resort to “unfair labor practices aimed at undermining electoral procedures and retaliating against pro-union workers.”117
There has been no corporate news coverage of the changes to the NLRB regulations governing union elections. Aside from articles in independent media outlets Truthout and Common Dreams, the only coverage of the NLRB’s rule changes has come from two legal news sites, Bloomberg Law and the National Law Review, that reported in detail on the NLRB’s actions and included additional information about how the new rules overturn Obama-era regulations designed to streamline union election procedures.118
Madlen Davies, Rahul Meesaraganda, and Ben Stockton, “Drug Company Reps Give Quack Doctors Fridges and Televisions to Sell Antibiotics,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 19, 2019, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-08-19/drug-company-reps-give-quack-doctors-fridges-and-televisions-to-sell-antibiotics.
Student Researcher: Allison Rott (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)
Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.
India’s unlicensed medical practitioners, known as “quack” doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. “Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous over-prescription,” a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter.
India offers free healthcare to its poor citizens, but its healthcare system has an estimated shortage of 600,000 doctors and millions of trained nurses. India’s 2.5 million quack doctors vastly outnumber its one million certified doctors. As a result, patients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical “professionals” have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics.
In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia.119 Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, “This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken.”
Although India is generally acknowledged as the epicenter of this growing global threat, there has been little coverage on the shady business practices in India by companies like Abbott and Sun Pharma. In 2017, HuffPost discussed the findings of a 2016 PLOS Medicine study on antibiotic resistance in India, but only briefly mentioned the role of pharmaceutical companies and their sales representatives, failing to identify them as a driving force in the growing problem.120 A 2019 Telegraph article identified the role of doctor shortages in the rise of antibiotic resistance, but did not discuss pharmaceutical companies as being part of the problem.121
The only substantial corporate reporting on the unethical sale of antibiotics came from a six-month investigation by the New York Times in 2016 that found pharmaceutical representatives from Abbott pressuring their India-based employees to sell to quack doctors, plainly in violation of Indian law and the company’s own ethical guidelines.122 However, the article did not make any connection between these practices and the rise of superbugs in India.
Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.123
Jessica Corbett, “‘Vision for Justice’: 117 Rights Groups Offer Roadmap to Transform US Criminal-Legal System,” Common Dreams, September 5, 2019, https://www.common-dreams.org/news/2019/09/05/vision-justice-117-rights-groups-offer-roadmap-transform-us-criminal-legal-system.
Victoria Law, “Arrest, Release, Repeat: New Report Exposes Vicious Cycle of Imprisonment,” Truthout, August 27, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/arrest-release-repeat-new-report-exposes-vicious-cycle-of-imprisonment/.
Student Researchers: Xavier Rosenberg (San Francisco State University) and Carina Ramirez (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Calling for policy solutions to dismantle the US system of criminal punishment and the inequalities and white supremacy that this system promotes and perpetuates, Alec Karakatsanis, the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and 116 other human and civil rights groups released a comprehensive fourteen-point plan to “transform the existing system into one of respect and justice,” Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams in September 2019.
The groups’ “Vision for Justice” plan advocates an expanded view of public safety, prioritizing investments in education, housing, employment, healthcare, and other public programs, guided by three core themes: ensuring equity and accountability in the criminal-legal system, building a restorative system of justice, and rebuilding communities.124 The plan’s fourteen specific recommendations—such as creating a new framework for pretrial justice, and decriminalizing poverty—are rooted in human rights and the practice of restorative justice, Corbett reported.
A study by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), released in August 2019, underscored the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform. The study, titled “Arrest, Release, Repeat: How Police and Jails are Misused to Respond to Social Problems,” showed that people imprisoned as repeat offenders are likely to be poor, unemployed, or homeless, Victoria Law reported for Truthout. Although police and jails ought to promote public safety, law enforcement is more and more frequently “called upon to respond punitively to medical and economic problems unrelated to public safety issues,” according to the PPI study.125 Consequently, people in need of medical care and social services “cycle in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need.” The study’s authors found that repeated arrests are “related to race and poverty, as well as high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders.”
According to the study, in 2017 at least 4.9 million individuals were arrested and booked, with the vast majority charged with nonviolent crimes. To better address the conditions that lead marginalized individuals to have contact with the police in the first place, the study’s authors recommended “public investments in employment assistance, education and vocational training, and financial assistance.”
As of May 2020, neither the “Vision for Justice” policy platform of the coalition of 117 rights groups nor the Prison Policy Initiative’s report on how police and jails are misused to respond to social problems appear to have received any coverage by the establishment press.
Ahmed Abdulkareem, “Human Trafficking is Booming in Yemen as the War Enters Its Fifth Year,” MintPress News, September 13, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/human-trafficking-booming-yemen-war/261818/.
Student Researcher: Carlos Alfonso Gutierrez (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Amal Munayer (Sonoma State University)
Owing to the war launched in 2015 by a US-backed coalition of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen now suffers from “a complete absence” of law and order, which has given rise to what Ahmed Abdulkareem described for MintPress News as “a black Suq (market) of human trafficking on a scale never before seen in Yemen.” Abdulkareem’s report is partly based on the accounts of seventeen Yemeni victims of human trafficking who agreed to speak to MintPress News about their ordeals.
Due to lack of educational opportunities and economic collapse, Yemeni people are literally sacrificing their bodies to provide for their families. Between 2015 and 2017, more than ten thousand cases of organ sales have been documented by the Yemen Organization for Combating Human Trafficking, a Sana’a-based NGO. Actual figures are almost certainly higher, because many cases go unreported owing to the practice being illegal, religious concerns, and the stigma of the practice in a conservative society.
In one interview, a 35-year-old man named Tawfiq described selling one of his kidneys to sustain his family. He was relatively fortunate, because many Yemenis die in the process due to illegal, unprofessional procedures. Another Yemeni, named Aisha, who was forced to sell one of her kidneys, told MintPress News that she was paid $5000, though her kidney was sold for $30,000 on the black market.
A Yemeni named Maha told MintPress News that Yemeni brokers help secure passports by contacting staff members from the Yemeni Consulate in Saudi Arabia, who work together with a dealer from the organ black market. They produce a formal medical report to make it appear that the organ is from a legal donor. This clears the way for the sale of kidneys and other organs to neighboring countries.
A Yemeni family, who asked to remain anonymous, told MintPress News how their son was kidnapped. After the body was found, an autopsy showed that the boy’s heart had been removed, presumably to be sold on the black market.
Trafficking involves not only human organs but also sexual exploitation. As Abdulkareem reported, trafficked Yemeni women are subjected to rape, violence, extreme cruelty, and other forms of coercion. Female trafficking victims who spoke to MintPress News reported being forced into prostitution networks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. From a rehabilitation center in Sana’a, one trafficking victim said that she was now afraid to return home for fear of being killed for violating her family’s honor.
As Abdulkareem reported, the blockade levied against Yemen by the Saudi Coalition since 2015 has helped human trafficking flourish. Under blockade, Yemenis are no longer able to flee violence there or able to travel to neighboring wealthy Gulf countries for work. Furthermore, although Yemen’s laws prohibit trafficking and those who are found guilty are sentenced to ten years in prison, these laws go unenforced, in part because government officials themselves appear to be directly involved in the trafficking and illegal organ sales.
Although US corporate news media have reported on forced labor, sexual exploitation, and the organ trade elsewhere in the Middle East, they appear to have devoted no specific coverage to the unprecedented scale of human trafficking taking place in Yemen.
Larry Elliott, “Wealth Tax Rise Could Raise £174bn to Tackle COVID-19, Expert Says,” The Guardian, April 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/22/wealth-tax-rise-could-raise-174bn-tackle-covid-19-expert-says.
John R. Talbott, “To Confront Coronavirus, We Need an Emergency Wealth Tax,” Truth-out, March 25, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/to-confront-coronavirus-we-need-an-emergency-wealth-tax.
Student Researcher: Weston Pollock (San Francisco State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)
From March 18 to May 14, 2020, more than 36 million US workers lost their jobs, while the wealth of US billionaires increased by more than $368 billion, an increase of 12.5 percent.126 The net worth of eight of these billionaires has increased by more than a billion dollars each.127 An Institute for Policy Studies report, “Billionaire Bonanza 2020,” recommended the establishment of a pandemic profiteering oversight committee, passage of a corporate transparency act to discourage wealth hiding, an emergency 10 percent millionaire income tax, and a wealth tax.128 Acknowledging that enacting a new tax regime on assets would be “challenging in the short term,” the report proposed an emergency 10 percent surtax on taxpayers with incomes of more than $2 million—that is, the richest 0.2 percent of Americans—which would apply not only to income from wages and salaries but also from investment returns. The proposed surtax would raise $635 billion over ten years, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated.
The UK government could raise “up to £174bn [roughly $213 billion] a year to help cope with the Covid-19 crisis if it taxed wealth at the same rate as income,” the Guardian reported in April 2020. Richard Murphy, a professor of political economy at City, University of London, determined that between 2011 and 2018, the United Kingdom taxed income at an average of just 29.4 percent, while wealth—accrued through increased housing prices and personal pensions—had been taxed at just 3.4 percent, making UK taxes highly regressive: When income and wealth are combined, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the Guardian reported, was 18 percent, much less than the 42 percent effective tax rate for the poorest 10 percent.
Murphy told the Guardian he was not campaigning for a wealth tax as such, but that the UK government could begin to cover some of the coronavirus crisis bill by picking “low-hanging fruit,” such as equalizing the tax rates on income and capital gains, reducing the annual capital gains tax allowance, and abolishing higher-rate tax reliefs for pension contributions.
In the United States, John R. Talbott reported for Truthout that at least one prominent Wall Street figure, Peter Fahey, a retired Goldman Sachs partner, supports a wealth tax to address the pandemic’s toll on the economy. Fahey called on “a core group of thoughtful, patriotic billionaires to step forward” to subject themselves to “the equivalent of a substantial wealth tax to address the Federal budget crisis that will emerge from the COVID-19 crisis.” Talbott himself advocated a “one-time 3 percent wealth tax on the top 10 percent of the wealthiest people in the world” to provide nine trillion dollars in global emergency relief funds.
Wealth tax proposals have received mixed news coverage in the corporate media. Before the pandemic, establishment news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, reported on proposals made by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the context of the 2020 Democratic primary elections.129 As the COVID-19 crisis has developed, additional outlets, including HuffPost, Bloomberg, ABC News, and the New York Times have also covered wealth tax proposals made in response to the pandemic. The pandemic is “the perfect opportunity for billionaires to justify their existence,” HuffPost reported, but two months into the coronavirus outbreak “America is still waiting for billionaire philanthropists to deliver.”130 Bloomberg published an opinion piece by a former member of the Financial Times’s editorial board, opposing a wealth tax.131 ABC News broadcast a report on the topic, featuring French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. After Piketty responded to questions about how much tax he had paid on royalties from his surprise bestseller, he told ABC that the coronavirus crisis “illustrates a virulent inequality” that could lead to the kind of wealth taxes he has advocated.132 In search of journalistic balance, ABC News also quoted from a Fox Business Network interview in which Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic advisor, asked, “Why do we have to raise taxes? . . . Let’s let people keep their own money.” In April 2020 the New York Times published an editorial by Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, advocating a 5 percent tax on the richest 5 percent of households as a means to raise up to $2 trillion in pandemic relief funds.133
Monica Kerrigan and Nelly Munyasia, “Three Years Later, Trump’s ‘Global Gag Rule’ Continues to Devastate Global Health,” Rewire.News, January 23, 2020, https://rewire.news/article/2020/01/23/three-years-later-trumps-global-gag-rule-continues-to-deva-state-global-health/.
Karen J. Coates, “The Global Gag Rule Puts a Choke Hold on Contraception,” Sierra, November–December 2019, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2019-6-november-december/protect/global-gag-rule-puts-choke-hold-contraception [first published online October 30, 2019].
Student Researcher: Madison Miller (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)
The United States’s global gag rule continues to put at risk the sexual health of women in developing countries that rely on US aid. This federal rule—formally known as the “Mexico City Policy”—blocks access to the $9 billion of US federal funding for NGOs that provide abortion counseling, referrals, or any kind of abortion services throughout the world. In the first days of the new presidential term in January 2017, the Trump-Pence administration reinstated and drastically expanded the global gag rule. Three years after the implementation of the new guidelines, women continue to be harmed, Rewire.News and other independent news outlets reported.
The global gag rule was first implemented by the Reagan administration in 1984, and has continuously been changed, repealed, and reinstated through partisan presidencies. The Trump administration has advanced the strictest policies yet, expanding its scope to include other forms of assistance from the State Department, USAID, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Defense. The federal rule forces organizations to choose between receiving global health assistance from the United States and providing comprehensive reproductive care. The current enforcement of the policy, according to the Rewire.News report, denies funding for “HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, nutrition, maternal health, family planning, and malaria.”
According to the Sierra Club, British-based NGO Marie Stopes International, which works in 37 countries to provide contraception and safe abortions, suffered a huge funding gap for continuing to provide abortion services. Karen J. Coates reported that this cut in finances will lead to an estimated “1.8 million unintended pregnancies, 600,000 unsafe abortions, and 4,600 avoidable maternal deaths.” In addition, the current terms of the gag rule are so broad that, along with defunding organizations that provide contraceptive and abortion services, many international health organizations that do not specialize in abortion or family planning are being targeted. As Coates reported, in March 2019 “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo further interpreted the rule to include subcontractors and partner organizations working with any group receiving US health aid.”
Despite the stated intentions of the Republican politicians who have supported the policy, the net effect of the global gag rule in its many incarnations from 1984 to now has, ironically, been to increase abortions and suffering. As Coates noted, “One study, published in the Lancet, followed three-quarters of a million women in 26 countries over 20 years and found that during previous impositions of the rule, abortions rose by 40 percent in the most affected regions.”134
In early 2019 US lawmakers introduced the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act. If this bill is passed, it would “permanently repeal the global gag rule and prevent future administrations from easily reimposing it via executive order.” To date, the act has yet to make it to a congressional vote.
The global gag rule has received very limited corporate media coverage. The New York Times has published a pair of articles and a Q. and A., along with a plethora of opinion pieces from 2001 to 2019 on the policy.135 The articles, however, cover the politics of the situation without helping readers to understand the policy’s impacts on global health organizations, and by extension, women throughout the world. The Washington Post covered the story in 2017 but lacked substantial detail concerning the impact the policy would have on groups like Marie Stopes International.136 The only substantial coverage of this issue apart from the Rewire.News and Sierra reports has come from other independent sources, such as KPFA and The Independent.137
“Abby Martin Banned from Speaking at US University for Refusing to Sign Pro-Israel Pledge,” teleSUR English, January 17, 2020, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Abby-Martin-Banned-From-Speaking-at-US-University--20200117-0007.html.
“Abby Martin Sues Georgia State Over Law Forcing Loyalty to Israel,” teleSUR English, February 10, 2020, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Abby-Martin-Sues-Georgia-State-Over-Law-Forcing-Loyalty-to-Israel--20200210-0019.html.
Alan MacLeod, “Journalist Abby Martin Sues State of Georgia Over Law Requiring Pledge of Allegiance to Israel,” MintPress News, February 10, 2020, https://www.mintpressnews.com/abby-martin-lawsuit-state-georgia-over-bds-law/264798/.
Sheldon Richman, “Anti-BDS Laws Violate Our Freedom,” CounterPunch, February 17, 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/17/anti-bds-laws-violate-our-freedom/.
Student Researchers: Kathleen Doyle (University of Vermont) and Troy Patton (Diablo Valley College)
Faculty Evaluators: Rob Williams (University of Vermont) and Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)
Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to end support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, was scheduled to give a keynote speech to the annual International Critical Media Literacy Conference that was to be held at Georgia Southern University on February 28 and 29, 2020. Her talk was canceled because she refused to sign a contract stating she would not support a boycott of Israel. Georgia, along with 27 other states, has enacted anti-boycott laws that prohibit state offices or agencies from doing business with any companies or individuals that boycott Israel, as teleSUR English reported. Eventually the conference at which Martin was to speak was called off entirely after numerous colleagues supported Martin in her refusal to sign the contractual pledge.
BDS is a global movement driven by citizen activists. It works to peacefully pressure corporations, universities, and cultural organizations to stop doing business with the state of Israel, with the goal of pressuring Israel to obey international law and respect the human rights of Palestinians.
Georgia’s anti-boycott legislation was passed by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature in 2016 in response to the growing influence of the BDS movement on college campuses. It requires anyone who enters into a contract with the state for more than $1000 worth of work to sign an oath swearing they will not boycott Israel.
BDS advocates argue that anti-boycott legislation, such as the laws adopted by Georgia and other states, violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. On February 10, 2020, Martin filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia’s university system, claiming that the cancelation of her speech violated her constitutionally protected right to free speech. Martin tweeted that “[w]e must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech.”
Martin’s legal action comes on the heels of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in December 2019 that permits the US government to define Judaism as both a religion and a nationality under federal law. The stated aim of the order was to more effectively allow the government to combat “anti-Semitism on college campuses.” In reality, by connecting Jewish religious identity with Israeli national identity, the new policy means any criticism of Israel’s government and their actions could be construed as an attack on the Jewish faith and labeled as “anti-Semitic.” The new classification means schools that receive federal funding could, by allowing any BDS activism or even discussion on campus, run afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which forbids those schools from discriminating on the basis of religion or national origin.
This story has received very little corporate coverage. Outside of reports from the Associated Press and Yahoo! Finance (which ran a story from PR Newswire on the topic), what traction the story has gotten has been limited to either independent news sources or news sources that specialize in Israeli/American affairs.138
Shani Saxon, “Study Links High-Suspension Schools with Incarceration Later in Life,” ColorLines, September 23, 2019, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/study-links-high-suspension-schools-incarceration-later-life.
Emily Boudreau, “School Discipline Linked to Later Consequences,” Usable Knowledge (Harvard Graduate School of Education), September 16, 2019, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/09/school-discipline-linked-later-consequences.
Leighanna Shirey, “New Study Proves Vast Benefits of Higher Education for Inmates,” Citizen Truth, June 13, 2019, https://citizentruth.org/new-study-proves-vast-benefits-of-higher-education-for-inmates/.
Student Researchers: Jacqueline Archie, Marco Corea, Gabriella Grondalski, Rowan Hamilton, Rebecca Herbert, Kiara Killelea, Ciara Lockwood, Molly McKeogh, Liam O’Sullivan, Alexandra Shore, Eleanor Sprick, Madeline Terrio, Alexander Tran, and Kirstyn Velazquez (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Faculty Advisor: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Two research studies document links between education, incarceration, and recidivism, as covered in articles published by ColorLines, Usable Knowledge, and Citizen Truth.
In September 2019, ColorLines reported that attending a school with a high suspension rate is associated with an increased likelihood of being arrested and a decreased likelihood of enrolling in a four-year college. The ColorLines article reported findings from a study titled “The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime” issued by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research.139 As Emily Boudreau reported for Harvard University’s Usable Knowledge, the study provides “some of the first causal evidence that strict schools do indeed contribute to the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.”
The study focused primarily on North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where approximately 23 percent of middle school students, the majority of whom are male students of color, are suspended annually. Researchers examined school administrative records, data on arrests and incarcerations, and college attendance records to assess how the district’s suspension policy and other factors affected later life outcomes. Andrew Bacher-Hicks, the study’s lead author, told Usable Knowledge that the study found “large negative impacts on later-life outcomes” for all students—not just those who were suspended—related to attending a school with a high suspension rate. As Emily Boudreau reported, the study’s authors recommended that school administrators and teachers “should be cautious of relying heavily on exclusionary practices” and that they should consider alternatives to suspensions, including positive reinforcement, and restorative processes for students returning to the classroom following any disciplinary action.
A RAND Corporation study emphasized the importance of higher education for prison inmates, as Leighanna Shirey reported for Citizen Truth in June 2019. Education serves as a form of rehabilitation, and access to higher education allows incarcerated individuals to develop new skills, leading to reduced recidivism, the RAND study documented.140
As Lois Davis, a senior policy researcher at RAND and leader of the study, told Citizen Truth, the study “dispelled the myths about whether or not education helps inmates when they get out. Education is, by far, such a clear winner.” She also noted that all of society benefits when incarcerated people can receive an education: “[W]hat do you want for your community?” she asked. “If you don’t rehabilitate [prison inmates], how are they going to successfully rejoin society?”
The RAND study corroborated previous research on the value of post-secondary education programs for incarcerated people. For example, the Vera Institute of Justice has found that “education is key to improving many long-term outcomes for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities—including reducing recidivism and increasing employability and earnings after release.”141
The school-to-prison pipeline has made national headlines in recent years, but establishment media have failed to cover the National Bureau of Economic Research study as important evidence that strict schools contribute to this pattern. In September 2019 the Los Angeles Times reported that schools in California have expanded their ban on “willful defiance suspensions” so that elementary and middle school students cannot be suspended for defying authority, citing the counterproductivity of such suspensions and how they are unfairly applied to Black students.142 An October 2019 article in Forbes discussed the school-to-prison pipeline and how students of color face harsher punishments than their white peers, noting, “The more time that Black and Brown children spend outside of the classroom, the more likely they are to be introduced to the criminal justice system.”143 However, neither article addressed the causal evidence documented in the study covered by ColorLines and Usable Knowledge.
Major news outlets, including the New York Times and NPR, fail to report on the positive societal effects of higher education in prisons. Instead, their orientation toward education in prisons is primarily concerned with the economics of educational programs and is centered on congressional politics. For example, in February 2018 the New York Times reported that Senate leaders might reinstate Pell grants for incarcerated students, “a move that would restore a federal lifeline to the nation’s cash-strapped prison education system.”144 More recently, in April 2019 NPR reported on how Congress was again considering legislation to make Pell grants available to incarcerated people.145 While most US prisoners are still barred from receiving Pell grants, they have been made available to a limited number of incarcerated students through the “Second Chance Pell Pilot Program”; an April 2020 Washington Post report on an expansion of the program, which Education Secretary Betsy DeVos refers to as an “experiment,” did make a passing mention of the results of the RAND study.146