THE TOP CENSORED STORIES AND MEDIA ANALYSIS OF 2018–19

1.

Justice Department’s Secret FISA Rules for Targeting Journalists

Trevor Timm, “Revealed: The Justice Dept’s Secret Rules for Targeting Journalists with FISA Court Orders,” Freedom of the Press Foundation, September 17, 2018, https://freedom.press/news/revealed-justice-depts-secret-rules-targeting-journalists-fisa-court-orders/, republished by Common Dreams, September 17, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/09/17/revealed-justice-depts-secret-rules-targeting-journalists-fisa-court-orders.

Ramya Krishnan, “Targeting Journalists under FISA: New Documents Reveal DOJ’s Secret Rules,” Knight First Amendment Institute (Columbia University), September 17, 2018, https://knightcolumbia.org/news/targeting-journalists-under-fisa-new-documents-reveal-dojs-secret-rules.

Cora Currier, “Government Can Spy on Journalists in the U.S. Using Invasive Foreign Intelligence Process,” The Intercept, September 17, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/09/17/journalists-fisa-court-spying/.

Jessica Corbett, “The US Government’s Secret Rules for Spying on Journalists are ‘Terrifying,’” MintPress News, September 18, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/journalists-govenment-surveillance/249471/.

“US Can Spy on Journalists Domestically Using FISA Warrants, Declassified Guidelines Show,” RT, September 19, 2018, updated September 20, 2018, https://www.rt.com/usa/438785-fisa-spying-journalists-declassified/.

Student Researcher: Andrea Blado (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Brent Mortensen (Healdsburg High School) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

A pair of 2015 memos, from former attorney general Eric Holder to the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, show how the government could use court orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor the communications of journalists and news organizations. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit challenging the lack of disclosure that request yielded.¹⁸

Since 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has processed requests by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for electronic surveillance, physical searches, and other forms of investigative actions for foreign intelligence purposes. Holder’s pair of memos spell out the circumstances for processing FISA applications that target “known media entities” or “known members of the media.” As Cora Currier reported for the Intercept, the secret rules “apply to media entities or journalists who are thought to be agents of a foreign government, or, in some cases, are of interest under the broader standard that they possess foreign intelligence information.” Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney with the Knight Institute, told the Intercept, “There’s a lack of clarity on the circumstances when the government might consider a journalist an agent of a foreign power.” For example, because RT America registered with the Department of Justice as a “foreign agent” in November 2017,19 reporters working for RT America—and their sources—could be subject to FISA court-ordered surveillance. For its part, RT reported that the details specified in the memos suggested that it was “highly likely” that both the Trump and Obama administrations had surveilled journalists that they considered to be “foreign agents.”

The revealed memos raise three “concerning” questions about the government’s surveillance of news organizations and journalists, according to Trevor Timm, director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. First, how many times have FISA court orders been used to target journalists, and are any journalists currently under investigation? Second, why did the Justice Department keep these rules secret when it updated its “media guidelines” in 2015? And, third, is the Justice Department using FISA court orders—along with the FBI’s similar rules for targeting journalists with national security letters (NSLs)—to “get around the stricter ‘media guidelines’”?²⁰

Historically, the First Amendment has limited surveillance of journalists, as well as efforts to determine their sources. As Cora Currier reported for the Intercept, in January 2015, after the Obama administration secretly seized phone records from the Associated Press and named a Fox News reporter as a co-conspirator in a leak case, Attorney General Eric Holder revised the set of procedures, known as the “media guidelines,” for when government officials could subject journalists to surveillance. Though the secret 2015 memos specify that FISA applications must be presented to the attorney general or the deputy attorney general for approval before they are submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the memos allow for exceptions and, as Trevor Timm and others noted, FISA rules are “much less stringent” than the Justice Department’s media guidelines for obtaining subpoenas, court orders, and warrants against journalists. The procedures governing FISA surveillance and national security letters allow government officials to circumvent the media guidelines’ requirements that the information sought is “essential” to a successful investigation, that “reasonable alternative attempts” have been made to obtain the information, and that the government inform the journalist and negotiate with them.

Although reporters are probably aware that they may be subject to surveillance, their sources may not be. The unredacted portions of the Justice Department memos do not specify how to handle information that is gathered, or how to mitigate risks posed by exposing journalists’ sources.

Corporate news outlets reported little to nothing in September 2018 when the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Knight First Amendment Institute made public the two secret memos on targeting journalists and news organizations. In Spring 2019, a flurry of news stories and editorials, triggered partly by the Mueller Report, focused on Carter Page—a petroleum industry consultant who served as Donald Trump’s foreign-policy adviser during his 2016 presidential election campaign.21 In October 2016, the FBI had wiretapped Page under authority of a FISA warrant based on evidence that he was operating as a foreign agent on behalf of Russia.²² However, controversy over the use of a FISA warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser has done nothing at all to raise awareness of the threats posed by FISA warrants that target journalists and news organizations.

Ramya Krishnan, the staff attorney for the Knight Institute, summarized the stakes: “National security surveillance authorities confer extraordinary powers. The government’s failure to share more information about them damages journalists’ ability to protect their sources, and jeopardizes the newsgathering process.”

2.

Think Tank Partnerships Establish Facebook as Tool of US Foreign Policy

Adam Johnson, “Media Ignore Government Influence on Facebook’s Plan to Fight Government Influence,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), May 21, 2018, https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-government-influence-on-facebooks-plan-to-fight-government-influence/.

Elliott Gabriel, “Facebook Partners with Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to ‘Protect Democracy,’” MintPress News, May 22, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/facebook-partners-hawkish-atlantic-council-nato-lobby-group-protect-democracy/242289/.

Jake Johnson, “‘Alarming’: Facebook Teams Up with Think-Tank Funded by Saudi Arabia and Military Contractors to ‘Protect’ Democracy,” Common Dreams, May 18, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/05/18/alarming-facebook-teams-think-tank-funded-saudi-arabia-and-military-contractors.

Jonathan Sigrist, “Facebook Censorship and the Atlantic Council,” Global Research, October 14, 2018, https://www.globalresearch.ca/facebook-censorship-and-the-atlantic-council/5656896.

Kevin Reed, “Facebook’s Partnership with the Atlantic Council,” World Socialist Web Site, September 8, 2018, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/08/atla-s08.html.

Alan MacLeod, “That Facebook Will Turn to Censoring the Left Isn’t a Worry—It’s a Reality,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), August 22, 2018, https://fair.org/home/that-facebook-will-turn-to-censoring-the-left-isnt-a-worry-its-a-reality/.

Alan MacLeod, “Facebook’s New Propaganda Partners,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), September 25, 2018, https://fair.org/home/facebooks-new-propaganda-partners/.

Kevin Gosztola, “How CNN Led Facebook to Censor Pages of Russia-Backed Video Company and Manufactured News Story,” Shadowproof, February 16, 2019, https://shadowproof.com/2019/02/16/cnn-manufactured-story-about-russia-video-company-facebook-censorship/.

Alexander Rubinstein, “How a Small Team of Journalists Overcame Neocon-Cheered Facebook Censorship,” MintPress News, March 1, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/how-a-small-team-of-journalists-overcame-neocon-cheered-facebook-censorship/255789/.

Student Researchers: Mikhaela Alcasabas (Sonoma State University), Cem Ismail Addemir (North Central College), and Troy Patton (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluators: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University), Steve Macek (North Central College), and Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

Under the guise of fighting “fake news” and protecting US democracy from “foreign influence,” in 2018 social media giant Facebook established partnerships with the Atlantic Council, a NATO-sponsored think tank, and with two US government creations from the Cold War era, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. As a number of independent news organizations reported, despite lofty rhetoric about safeguarding Western democracies, these partnerships have resulted in what amounts to state censorship, with Facebook serving as a tool of US foreign policy.

On May 17, 2018, Facebook announced that it would join forces with the Atlantic Council in order to “identify emerging threats and disinformation campaigns around the world” and to “fight abuse on our platform.”²³ According to Facebook’s director of global politics and government outreach, Katie Harbath, the partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab would “increase the number of ‘eyes and ears’ we have working to spot potential abuse on our service—enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.”²⁴

As Jake Johnson reported for Common Dreams, “While Facebook’s statement fawned over the Atlantic Council’s ‘stellar reputation,’ critics argued that the organization’s reliance on donations from foreign oil monarchies and American plutocrats puts the lie to the project’s stated mission of shielding the democratic process from manipulation and abuse.”

The Atlantic Council is a Washington, DC–based think tank funded by the US Department of State, the US Navy, Army, and Air Force, and major multinational corporations—including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, global asset management firms and banks, and top military contractors. According to a 2014 New York Times article, between 2008 and 2013 “at least 25 countries” donated tens of millions of dollars to the council.25 Its conservative-leaning board of directors includes former CIA directors, retired US generals, and hawkish former State Department officials like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice. In a May 2018 article, FAIR’s Adam Johnson noted that, although there is “some diversity of opinion” within the Atlantic Council, “it is within a very limited pro-Western ideological framework—a framework that debates how much and where US military and soft power influence should be wielded, not if it should in the first place.”

As Johnson wrote, it is troubling that Facebook would rely on advice from an organization that has advocated on behalf of Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of its previous funders, and which presented former President George W. Bush—who was directly responsible for “the illegal invasion of Iraq that killed between 500,000 and a million people”—a Distinguished International Leadership award.

In the name of fighting the scourge of “fake news,” Facebook altered its proprietary algorithms in ways that significantly reduced traffic to progressive websites such as Common Dreams and Slate.26 Without formal warning, Facebook shut down left-wing, Venezuela-linked Facebook pages such as teleSUR English and Venezuelanalysis (although both were reinstituted after protests about their removal). In October 2018, numerous independent news outlets reported on what Jonathan Sigrist, writing for Global Research, described as “one of the greatest Facebook account and page purges” in the platform’s troubled history. In total, Sigrist reported, 559 pages and 251 personal accounts were “instantly removed” in the name of fighting “fake news” and “Russian propaganda.” Many of the pages and accounts that Facebook took down, Sigrist wrote, were “political (often leftist), anti-war, independent journalists and media outlets” that had been targeted in 2016 by PropOrNot, the website endorsed by the Washington Post but subsequently discredited.²⁷

In September 2018, FAIR’s Alan MacLeod detailed how Facebook planned to join forces with “two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI),” allegedly in an effort to combat “fake news.”

The NDI and the IRI were both established under an umbrella organization called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a nonprofit created by the US Congress in 1983 to influence politics and elections in developing countries. Facebook’s collaboration with these organizations is especially concerning because, as MacLeod wrote, both organizations have “aggressively pursued regime change against leftist governments overseas.” In the 1980s, the NDI worked to destabilize the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the IRI supported the attempted 2002 coup d’état against Venezuela’s socialist president Hugo Chávez.

As MacLeod reported in September 2018, Facebook had also been “anxious to better curate what Brazilians saw on their feeds in the run-up to their presidential elections.” Fifty-two percent of Brazilians get their news from Facebook, MacLeod noted. The company’s new partnerships with the Atlantic Council and the two NED propaganda outfits gives the US government—which has a long history of meddling in Brazilian politics—yet another means of exerting influence over Brazil’s democracy.

There has been very little corporate news coverage of Facebook’s partnerships with US government propaganda organizations. As of January 31, 2019, one of the only articles on the topic in the establishment press was a Reuters report that MacLeod referenced in his piece.28 That article briefly discussed the history of the IRI and the NDI but made no mention of either the blackouts of teleSUR English and Venezuelanalysis, or how Facebook’s new algorithms have reduced traffic to leftist and progressive news sites. CNN, Fox News, and NBC News have provided offhand coverage, with only the most basic information, but none have framed Facebook’s actions in terms of censorship. Reports by FAIR and independent news outlets, including Common Dreams, MintPress News, and Global Research, address the core issue: In partnership with Facebook, powerful organizations are working to control the flow of information to best reflect their interests, with little in the way of public scrutiny.

Facebook has also partnered with establishment news organizations in efforts to discredit independent news outlets and ban their social media pages. In February 2019, CNN published a report on Facebook’s decision to ban the “In the Now” video channel and three of its offshoots, “Soapbox,” “BackThen,” and “Waste-Ed”—each of which is run by or associated with Maffick Media—because, according to CNN’s report, “the pages pushing the videos do not disclose that they are backed by the Russian government.”²⁹ CNN told a tale of videos intended to undermine American democracy, targeted to millennials on Facebook.

However, as Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof and Alexander Rubinstein of MintPress News subsequently disclosed, what CNN’s article failed to report was that CNN misreported the facts, using its manufactured version of the story as a pretext for calling on Facebook to remove the pages used to share those videos. CNN’s own report conceded that the banned pages “appear to have fallen into a gray area for Facebook.” Although the pages sharing the videos “do not include information about their links to the Russian government,” CNN reported, Facebook pages “were not previously required” to do so.

As Gosztola and Rubinstein reported, CNN sought to substantiate its story by enlisting the support of the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund. The CNN story quoted Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Nimmo—whose credibility has been called into question—told CNN that Russian-affiliated outlets claim to be editorially independent, but nonetheless routinely “boost Kremlin narratives, especially those which portray the West negatively.” Maffick, Nimmo told CNN, “may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.”30

The German Marshall Fund had identified Maffick as a potential foreign news outlet, due to its connection with the Russian media organization RT (formerly Russia Today), and registered concerns about Maffick Media to CNN. In turn, CNN began to investigate by contacting Maffick employees, and were granted a lengthy interview with “In the Now” journalist Rania Khalek and Maffick Media’s chief operating officer, J. Ray Sparks. Despite being provided with evidence of editorial independence and transparent funding sources, CNN contacted Facebook about Maffick Media; and despite finding no rulebreaking on Maffick’s part, Facebook quickly removed the pages in question, in what MintPress News described as “indirect government censorship.”

Facebook eventually reinstated the banned Maffick pages, Rubinstein reported. But Maffick employees believe that Facebook still needs to be more transparent, and they have called for the social media platform to establish consistent requirements that apply to all pages for disclosing funding sources.

3.

Indigenous Groups from Amazon Propose Creation of Largest Protected Area on Earth

Jessica Corbett, “Calling for ‘Corridor of Life and Culture,’ Indigenous Groups from Amazon Propose Creation of Largest Protected Area on Earth,” Common Dreams, November 21, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/21/calling-corridor-life-and-culture-indigenous-groups-amazon-propose-creation-largest.

Jonathan Watts, “Amazon Indigenous Groups Propose Mexico-Sized ‘Corridor of Life,’” The Guardian, November 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/21/amazon-indigenous-groups-propose-mexico-sized-corridor-of-life.

Student Researcher: Robert Andreacchi (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

Sweeping development throughout the Amazon rainforest is an abiding concern for indigenous groups. The Amazon’s extraordinary biodiversity is being destroyed for profits and political gain. In response, an alliance of some five hundred indigenous groups from nine countries, known as COICA—the Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin—is planning to safeguard a “sacred corridor of life and culture” covering more than 700,000 square miles, an area about the size of Mexico. The alliance presented its Bogota Declaration, outlining “the principles and joint vision of the indigenous confederations to protect the Amazon rainforest by using a traditional and holistic perspective,” at the 14th UN Biodiversity Conference, held in Egypt in November 2018.³¹

A report for Common Dreams quoted Tuntiak Katan, the alliance’s vice president, who called the Amazon rainforest “the world’s last great sanctuary for biodiversity” and said, “It is there because we are there. Other places have been destroyed.”

The alliance aims to protect biodiversity in the “triple-A” corridor that spans the Andes mountains, the Amazon, and the Atlantic Ocean. This region faces challenges from agribusiness, mining, and the global climate crisis. But members of the alliance also aim to address territorial rights. As Common Dreams reported, they “don’t recognize modern national borders created by colonial settlers.” Katan, COICA’s vice president, observed, “We know the governments will try to go over our heads.” He said, “This is nothing new for us. We have faced challenges for hundreds of years.”

New right-wing leaders in Brazil and Colombia threaten to undermine COICA’s plans. In October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro, who is now Brazil’s president, indicated that he would only stay in the Paris climate agreement if Brazil was guaranteed sovereignty over indigenous land and the “triple-A” region. Juan Carlos Jintiach of COICA told Common Dreams that Bolsonaro’s comments about environmental and indigenous issues are especially concerning because three-fourths of the environmental defenders assassinated in 2017 were indigenous leaders, and opposition to agroindustry is “the main cause for assassination of our leaders.” Observing that indigenous peoples and communities “face costly and difficult processes to legalize their lands,” while corporations “obtain licenses with ease,” Jintiach called for Bolsonaro to obey all laws and ensure the rights and safety of the people of Brazil.

Although the corporate and independent press have covered right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro’s intent to undermine indigenous rights in order to open Amazonian land for development, the coverage has almost entirely ignored COICA’s proposal to create the world’s largest protected area. For example, in January 2019 the New York Times covered Bolsonaro’s order to transfer responsibility for certifying indigenous territories as protected lands to the business-friendly Ministry of Agriculture.32 This otherwise detailed article made no mention of COICA’s proposal for a sanctuary. In March 2019, the Times ran an article on efforts by indigenous groups to resist Bolsonaro’s policies, but the Times positioned the article as an opinion piece rather than a news report.³³ The penultimate paragraph of that article included one sentence on the coalition of indigenous groups proposing an Amazon sanctuary, noting simply that Bolsonaro’s election “calls into question the fate” of their proposal; this sentence linked to the Guardian’s November 2018 report.

4.

US Oil and Gas Industry Set to Unleash 120 Billion Tons of New Carbon Emissions

David Turnbull, “Report: U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion Threatens to Unleash Climate Pollution Equivalent to Nearly 1,000 Coal Plants,” Oil Change International, January 16, 2019, http://priceofoil.org/2019/01/16/report-u-s-oil-and-gas-expansion-threatens-to-unleash-climate-pollution-equivalent-to-nearly-1000-coal-plants/.

Jake Johnson, “With US ‘Drilling Towards Disaster,’ Report Warns Anything Less Than Urgent Green New Deal will be ‘Too Little, Too Late,’” Common Dreams, January 16, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/16/us-drilling-towards-disaster-report-warns-anything-less-urgent-green-new-deal-will.

Student Researcher: Tommy Hunt (City College of San Francisco)

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Levinson (City College of San Francisco)

The US oil and gas industry has the potential to “unleash the largest burst of new carbon emissions in the world” through 2050, according to a January 2019 report from Oil Change International, an organization that works to expose the true costs of fossil fuels and advocates for clean energy.

Oil Change International’s coverage is based on a study, “Drilling Towards Disaster,” produced in collaboration with 350.org, Amazon Watch, the Center for Biological Diversity, Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace USA, and a dozen other organizations.34 According to the report, new US oil and gas development could enable 120 billion tons of new carbon pollution, the equivalent to “the lifetime CO2 emissions of nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants.”

Between now and 2030, the United States is likely to account for 60 percent of the world’s projected growth in oil and gas production. According to Kelly Trout, one of the report’s coauthors, the findings present “an urgent and existential emergency for lawmakers in the United States at all levels of government.”

The “Drilling Towards Disaster” report highlights a five-point agenda for what policymakers must do to check climate change, including, for example, banning new leases or permits for new fossil fuel exploration, production, and infrastructure; ending subsidies and other public finance for the fossil fuel industry; and championing a Green New Deal to promote transition to 100 percent renewable energy.

Asserting that there is “no more time to waste,” another of the report’s coauthors, Lorne Stockman, noted that, although the Trump administration and fossil fuel backers “portray climate change as a false choice between the economy and the environment,” their actions “favor an irresponsible and outdated fossil fuel sector over a clean energy sector that has proven it can deliver on jobs, economic growth, and reliable cheap energy.”

References to Oil Change International’s “Drilling Towards Disaster” report have been limited to independent media outlets.³⁵ Corporate news outlets have not covered the report’s release or its findings, including its prediction of 120 billion tons of new carbon pollution or its five-point checklist to overhaul fossil fuel production in the United States. Instead, much of the corporate news media’s coverage of carbon emissions has focused more narrowly on President Trump’s proposal to amend existing emissions standards for passenger cars and light trucks and to establish new standards for future cars and trucks.36 Although such coverage highlighted the stakes of Trump’s proposal to weaken fuel-efficiency standards—the proposal “could be his most consequential climate-policy rollback yet,” one New York Times report stated³⁷—framing carbon emissions in terms of pollution from cars and trucks does not convey the extent of the problem. Instead, that frame effectively excludes from coverage the scope of new fossil fuel exploration, production, and extraction that led Oil Change International to characterize the potential for massive new carbon emissions as an “existential emergency” for US lawmakers.

5.

“Modern Slavery” in the United States and around the World

Edward Helmore, “Over 400,000 People Living in ‘Modern Slavery’ in US, Report Finds,” The Guardian, July 19, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/us-modern-slavery-report-global-slavery-index.

Student Researcher: Hogan Reed (University of Vermont)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (University of Vermont)

According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 403,000 people in the United States were living in conditions of “modern slavery” in 2016.³⁸ As the Guardian reported, the Global Slavery Index defines “modern slavery” broadly to include forced labor and forced marriage.

The Global Slavery Index (GSI) is produced by the Walk Free Foundation, an organization that combines research and direct engagement to influence governments and businesses to address modern slavery as a human rights issue. The GSI draws on national surveys, reports from other agencies, such as the United Nations’s International Labour Organization, and databases of people who have been assisted in trafficking cases.

According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 40.3 million people were living in modern slavery in 2016, with females comprising the majority of the victims (71 percent). The index found the highest levels of modern slavery in North Korea, where an estimated 2.6 million people—or one-tenth of the population—are victims of modern slavery.

Andrew Forrest, one of Walk Free’s cofounders, told the Guardian that the prevalence of modern slavery in the United States was “truly staggering” and “only possible through a tolerance of exploitation.” The GSI noted that forced labor occurred “in many contexts” in the United States, including in agriculture, among traveling sales crews, and—as recent legal cases against GEO Group, Inc. have revealed—as the result of compulsory prison labor in privately owned and operated detention facilities contracted by the Department of Homeland Security.³⁹

The report further noted that migrants—and especially migrant women and children—are “particularly vulnerable” to modern slavery in the United States due to a variety of factors, including immigration status, lack of familiarity with US employment protections, and the fact that migrants often work in jobs that are “hidden from the public view and unregulated by the government.” In addition, the report noted, “Increasingly restrictive immigration policies have further increased the vulnerability of undocumented persons and migrants to modern slavery.”40

As the Guardian reported, according to the GSI, the estimate of 403,000 people enslaved in the United States actually understates the country’s role in contributing to global slavery, because the United States imports many products—including laptop computers, mobile phones, clothing, fish, cocoa, and timber—that are “at risk of being produced through forced labor.”

The GSI made specific recommendations for how the US government could address modern slavery. These recommendations included stronger legislation to raise the minimum age for marriage to eighteen in all states, criminalizing forced marriage, and prohibiting criminalization of child victims of trafficking; improved support for victims, including training for officials who connect them with services; and standardizing data collection and developing a central repository to make national estimates of the prevalence of modern slavery “more feasible.”⁴¹

The 2018 report showed a surprisingly high prevalence of modern slavery in developed nations, but a universal legal definition of “modern slavery” has yet to be established. As the Guardian reported, other anti-exploitation groups raised questions about the Walk Free Foundation’s definition of slavery and its methodology for determining the numbers of affected people. For example, in a recent issue of Anti-Trafficking Review, an expert on international trafficking law, Anne Gallagher, argued that “universal, reliable calculation of the size of the problem, while an important goal to strive for, is not yet possible,” due to a lack of shared definitions, standards, and measurement tools.⁴²

Apart from the Guardian article, the 2018 Global Slavery Index received limited coverage in the New York Times, and by CNN and CBS News.⁴³ The Times’s coverage highlighted the case of a former North Korean slave who is now a student at Columbia University, leaving details about the prevalence of slavery in the United States to the article’s later paragraphs. CNN noted that the report listed the United States as “a world leader” in addressing forced labor in supply chains, while CBS News reported that “the U.S. does better than most countries in tackling the issue.” In March 2019 a Forbes article that reported on the United Nations’s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade drew on data from the Global Slavery Index, but also noted “limitations” to the data on modern slavery.44

6.

Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Sex Trafficking Criminalized for Self-Defense

Mariame Kaba, “Black Women Punished for Self-Defense Must be Freed from Their Cages,” The Guardian, January 3, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/03/cyntoia-brown-marissa-alexander-black-women-self-defense-prison.

Amy Goodman, “There are Thousands of Cyntoia Browns: Mariame Kaba on Criminalization of Sexual Violence Survivors,” Democracy Now!, January 10, 2019, https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/10/there_are_thousands_of_cyntoia_browns.

Kellie C. Murphy, “Beyond Cyntoia Brown: How Women End Up Incarcerated for Self Defense,” Rolling Stone, January 28, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/cyntoia-brown-beyond-other-cases-775874/.

Olivia Exstrum, “Child Sex-Trafficking Victims Face Decades behind Bars for Killing Their Abusers. That Could End Soon,” Mother Jones, May 9, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/05/cyntoia-brown-sara-kruzan-sex-trafficking-abuse-legislation/.

Student Researcher: Jaidene Samiec (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The case of Cyntoia Brown—who was sentenced in 2004, at age 16, to life in prison for killing a man who bought her for sex and raped her—garnered the support of A-list celebrities and received widespread news coverage. In January 2019, after Brown had served fifteen years in prison, Tennessee governor Bill Haslam granted her clemency, describing her case as “tragic and complex” and citing “the extraordinary steps Ms. Brown has taken to rebuild her life.”⁴⁵

In contrast to the spate of news coverage from establishment outlets, which focused on Brown’s biography and the details of her case, independent news organizations—including the Guardian, Democracy Now!, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones—stood out by reporting that cases like Brown’s are all too common. Victims of sex trafficking and sexual violence are often prosecuted for acts of self-defense. In a January 2019 interview, Mariame Kaba, the cofounder of Survived and Punished, an organization supporting survivors of violence who have been criminalized for self-defense, told Democracy Now!, “There are thousands of Cyntoia Browns in prison.”

In an article published by the Guardian in January 2019, Kaba wrote that multiple studies indicate “between 71% and 95% of incarcerated women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner,” and many have experienced “multiple forms of physical and sexual abuse” in childhood and as adults, a pattern that experts have described as the “abuse-to-prison” pipeline. On Democracy Now!, Kaba referred to activist Susan Burton, another incarcerated survivor, who has argued that the system essentially works to “incarcerate trauma” when sexually-abused victims are sentenced to prison for self-defense.

Tracing contemporary attitudes toward women of color defending themselves against sexual abuse back to myths that arose in the 19th century during slavery, Kaba noted in her Guardian article that black women “have always been vulnerable to violence” in the United States and “have long been judged as having ‘no selves to defend.’” Today, she wrote, self-defense laws that are “interpreted generously” when applied to white men threatened by men of color are often interpreted “very narrowly” when women of color and gender nonconforming people invoke them in domestic violence and sexual assault cases.

While Cyntoia Brown’s case eventually received national attention, the public remains unaware of many more stories like hers because establishment news outlets seldom treat them as newsworthy. For example, in 2012, Marissa Alexander was convicted in Florida of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, when she used a gun (which she was licensed to own) to fire a single warning shot into the air to deter her abusive husband. In a pretrial hearing, the judge ruled that the state’s “stand-your-ground” law did not apply to Alexander’s defense because she did not “appear afraid.” As Kaba reported in her Guardian article, a jury found Alexander guilty after just twelve minutes of deliberation. Alexander was sentenced to a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. In January 2017, after two years of house arrest and three years of incarceration, Alexander was freed through what Kaba described as “good lawyering and a national participatory legal defense organizing campaign.”

Responding in part to publicity generated by Cyntoia Brown’s case, lawmakers in Congress and three states have proposed legislation that would “overhaul how courts treat juvenile sex trafficking victims tried as adults for committing crimes against their abusers,” Mother Jones reported in May 2019. Under existing state and federal laws, juvenile victims who commit serious crimes, such as murder, are often tried in adult courts—without considering that victims of sex trafficking may resort to violence in efforts to escape their situation. Historically, the trauma experienced by victims of sex trafficking “has not been well understood and hasn’t been taken into account when deciding the cases of victims who commit crimes,” Olivia Exstrum reported for Mother Jones.

Citing research on how the trauma of being sex trafficked can affect decision-making, especially by young people, the legislation in process in Congress and in Nevada, Arkansas, and Hawaii would have judges consider the effect of trauma on offenders’ conduct and would give courts the authority to ignore mandatory minimum sentencing requirements in such cases. James Dold, the founder of the nonprofit Human Rights for Kids, which helped draft the model legislation, told Mother Jones that, to his knowledge, this is the first time that legislation at the federal or state level has sought to address defendants who have been victims of juvenile sex trafficking.

A 2019 United Nations report, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, found that human trafficking continues to rise.46 According to the report, “Most of the victims detected globally are trafficked for sexual exploitation,” and the “vast majority” of those victims are female.

Corporate news organizations provided considerable coverage of Cyntoia Brown’s clemency. However, many of those reports treated Brown’s case in isolation, emphasizing her biography or the advocacy on her behalf by celebrities such as Rihanna, Drake, LeBron James, and Kim Kardashian West.⁴⁷ On January 17, 2019, the New York Times published an article on how Brown’s case had inspired “a push for juvenile criminal justice reform” in Tennessee, where she had been convicted and served her sentence.⁴⁸ Although this report noted that Brown was “a teenage trafficking victim,” it focused on the sentencing of people who were minors when they committed crimes, rather than on sex trafficking or sexual violence as circumstances that lead some minors to engage in acts of self-defense that result in criminal prosecution. An NBC News report took a similar tack, emphasizing age (“young people tried in adult courts”) and race (“one of many young black women and girls who land in the criminal justice system”) without acknowledging either sex trafficking and sexual violence as factors that often lead to violent acts of self-defense, or racial inequalities in courts’ interpretations of “stand-your-ground” laws when victims act to protect themselves.49

Reports that did link Cyntoia Brown’s case to broader patterns of sexual violence and sex trafficking were often filed as opinion pieces, rather than news stories, by corporate news media, as was one exceptionally detailed piece, written by Andrea Powell and published by NBC News.⁵⁰ Powell, the founder and executive director of Karana Rising, a nonprofit that supports survivors of human trafficking, explained how credibility bias and racial stereotypes work against many survivors of sex trafficking when they are tried for “crimes they were forced to commit in self-defense or at the hands of their traffickers.” Girls with histories of juvenile detention, sexual abuse, or running away from foster placements may be seen as less credible, she explained, while racial stereotypes underlie beliefs about girls of color being “less innocent and more sexually mature than their white peers.”

Noting that the “history of child victims of sex trafficking being arrested as prostitutes or worse runs deep in the American criminal justice system,” Powell wrote that, instead of arresting child victims, “we need to legally treat them as traumatized children in need of services.” Powell pointed to New York State’s “Safe Harbor” law, which protects and offers immunity to minors involved in any form of commercial sex, and HOPE Court of Washington, DC, which provides a special court program and direct services for youth survivors of commercial sex exploitation. Lastly, she noted that the best solution, “a controversial one,” is to stop treating sex workers as criminals: “By treating all sex workers as criminals, we end up criminalizing sex trafficking victims.”

7.

Flawed Investigations of Sexual Assaults in Children’s Immigrant Shelters

Michael Grabell, Topher Sanders, and Silvina Sterin Pensel, “In Immigrant Children’s Shelters, Sexual Assault Cases are Open and Shut,” ProPublica, December 21, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/05/cyntoia-brown-sara-kruzan-sex-trafficking-abuse-legislation/.

Caitlin Owens, Stef W. Kight, and Harry Stevens, “Thousands of Migrant Youth Allegedly Suffered Sexual Abuse in U.S. Custody,” Axios, February 26, 2019, updated February 27, 2019, https://www.axios.com/immigration-unaccompanied-minors-sexual-assault-3222e230-29e1-430f-a361-d959c88c5d8c.html.

Student Researchers: Austin Barcus, Maria Granados, Angel Palominos, and Carina Ramirez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (Sonoma State University)

Hundreds of police reports document allegations of sexual assaults in immigrant children’s shelters since the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America began in 2014, according to a December 2018 report by ProPublica. The report, based on six months of research that included reviewing internal documents obtained through public records requests, revealed “a largely hidden side of the shelters—one in which both staff and other residents sometimes acted as predators.” ProPublica noted that these shelters have received $4.5 billion in government funding for housing and other services.

ProPublica’s review of hundreds of police reports showed that, “again and again,” police were “quickly—and with little investigation—closing the cases, often within days, or even hours.” The number of cases of sexual assaults of immigrant children in shelters is likely greater than ProPublica could document, as records from shelters in Texas, “where the largest number of immigrant children are held,” could not be obtained due to state laws in Texas that ban child abuse reports from being made public.

Noting “startling lapses” in how federal and state authorities investigated allegations of sexual assaults, ProPublica reported that, in many cases, responding officers filed brief information reports without investigating incidents as potential crimes. Because immigrant children in detention are frequently moved, a child could be moved out of the investigating agency’s jurisdiction in just a few weeks, often without warning, even when an investigator wanted to pursue a case. When children are released, parents or relatives may be reluctant to seek justice, avoiding contact with law enforcement because they are undocumented or living with someone who is.

A February 2019 article, based on Department of Health and Human Services documents given to Axios by Congressman Ted Deutch, appears to corroborate ProPublica’s findings. As Axios reported, “From October 2014 to July 2018, the HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement received 4,556 complaints, and the Department of Justice received 1,303 complaints” of sexual abuse against unaccompanied minors in US government custody. Of the cases reported to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in that time period, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reported that other minors were perpetrators in 851 cases and adult staff accounted for 178 allegations of sexual abuse. The Axios article noted that the type of perpetrator was only known for cases that the ORR reported to the DOJ.

This topic has received some corporate news coverage, including reports by CBS News and the New York Times.51 However, in contrast with ProPublica’s coverage, those reports have not highlighted shortcomings in investigations of alleged sexual abuse or the lack of support for survivors following their abuse. The New York Times article, which provided substantial coverage, acknowledged that documents showing the number of sexual abuse complaints in government-funded detention facilities were “first reported by Axios.” USA Today published an article by Michael Grabell and Topher Sanders, based on their ProPublica report.52

8.

US Women Face Prison Sentences for Miscarriages

Naomi Randolph, “What Losing Roe Would Mean for Women of Color,” Ms. Magazine, January 22, 2019, https://msmagazine.com/blog/2019/01/22/losing-roe-mean-women-color/.

Student Researcher: Abby Ehrler (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

Many people fear that the new Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, stripping women of their right to choose whether or not to procure an abortion. But there is more at stake, according to Naomi Randolph in a 2019 Ms. Magazine article: pregnant women could face a higher risk of criminal charges for miscarriages or stillbirths, due to lawmakers in numerous states enacting laws that recognize fetuses as people, separate from the women carrying them.

One example that Randolph provided is in Alabama, where voters recently passed a measure that “endows fetus’ with ‘personhood’ rights for the first time, potentially making any action that impacts a fetus a criminal behavior with potential for prosecution.” Collectively, laws like Alabama’s have resulted in hundreds of American women facing prosecution for the outcome of their pregnancies.

In Arkansas, Anne Bynum was convicted of “concealing a birth” when she delivered a stillborn child at her home in 2015, per an Arkansas statute that leaves women vulnerable to conviction if they wait even a minute before contacting authorities.⁵³ In Mississippi, Rennie Gibbs faced murder and subsequently manslaughter charges at age sixteen after delivering a stillborn child.⁵⁴ Although experts advised that drugs were not the cause of the baby’s death, the jury concluded she had “willfully, and feloniously” killed the child by using drugs.

The cases all vary in detail, but the commonality is women losing their rights if they are thought to be endangering a fetus. Commenting on efforts to charge women for any conduct that could conceivably endanger their pregnancies, in 2016 Lynn Paltrow, the director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the Guardian, “We have gone and created a unique, gender-based crime, where the action actually requires a pregnancy to be a crime.”55

As Randolph detailed, this especially hurts women of color and low-income women, due to their lack of access to contraceptives, abortion, and treatment for mental health conditions or addiction. She added that they are also “most likely to lack the resources necessary to avoid incarceration, or to pay the fines and fees to get out of jail once they’re locked up.”

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the criminalization of miscarriages could become an even bigger problem. The Trump administration has been combative to women’s reproductive rights from day one. As Naomi Randolph explained, proposed policy changes to the Affordable Care Act would “allow employers to deny women no-cost birth control based on their religious and ‘moral’ beliefs.” This followed proposals to change Title X, which could limit funding to family planning services like Planned Parenthood. The research shows that if access to birth control is diminished, the rates of unintended pregnancies will rise. Trump’s conservative Supreme Court Justice appointee Brett Kavanaugh is believed likely to provide the fifth vote necessary to striking down Roe v. Wade. If that happens, women may not only face prosecution for seeking out abortions, but could also lose basic protections when they are pregnant and parenting.

The New York Times is the only corporate source that has discussed this topic. However, the Times has only touched on it in opinion pieces—including, notably, a feature from December 2018 titled “A Woman’s Rights”⁵⁶—rather than as a topic featured in headlines and news stories. This issue has mainly been covered by independent news sources such as Ms. Magazine and Rewire.News.

9.

Developing Countries’ Medical Needs Unfulfilled by Big Pharma

Julia Kollewe, “Big Pharma ‘Failing to Develop Urgent Drugs for Poorest Countries,’” The Guardian, November 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/20/big-pharma-who-failing-to-develop-urgent-drugs-for-poorest-countries.

Student Researcher: Brandon Grayson (College of Marin)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (College of Marin)

The world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have “failed to develop two-thirds of the 139 urgently needed treatments in developing countries,” the Guardian reported in November 2018. The Guardian’s coverage was based on a report by the Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF),57 a nonprofit organization that analyzes access to essential medicines such as infant vaccines for cholera and single-dose oral treatments for syphilis. An estimated two billion people globally lack access to urgently needed medicines.

The Access to Medicine Foundation’s 2018 report monitored the availability of medications produced by 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies to lower- and middle-income countries. Of the 139 drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests identified as urgently needed by the World Health Organization (WHO), 91 have not been developed by any of the pharmaceutical firms tracked by the report. Sixteen of WHO’s prioritized diseases have “no projects at all,” the Guardian reported.

The Access to Medicine Foundation’s executive director, Jayasree K. Iyer, told the Guardian, “There have been massive improvements in global health in the past decades, with all major pharmaceutical companies taking action. To close the gaps that remain, a greater diversity of companies must get involved and stay engaged for the long haul.”

The report highlighted the need for pharmaceutical companies to provide better access to existing cancer treatments, reflecting the rising impact of cancer in low- and middle-income countries. Noting that “[p]rogress in global health is not inevitable,” the report found that in some countries mortality rates were stagnating or worsening. In 2017, for example, non-communicable diseases accounted for 73.4 percent of deaths, an increase of 22.7 percent since 2007.⁵⁸

Only four companies—GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and Merck—are carrying out nearly two-thirds of the most urgently needed research and development projects, a “fragile” situation, according to Iyer. She explained to the Guardian that a “retreat by even one of these players would have a significant impact.”

The AMF’s report also highlighted 45 best and innovative practices that could “help raise the level of standard practice” and “achieve greater access to medicine.”59

In an effort to mobilize investors to pressure pharmaceutical companies to make more medicines available in developing countries, the foundation presented the findings of its report to 82 global investors at events in London, New York, and Tokyo.⁶⁰ As of April 2019, Access to Medicine reported that 90 major investors had pledged support for its research and signed its investor statement since the release of the 2018 Access to Medicine Index in November 2018.⁶¹

With the exception of a November 2018 article by Reuters, news of the Access to Medicine Index’s findings appears to have gone unreported in the corporate press.⁶²

10.

Pentagon Aims to Surveil Social Media to Predict Domestic Protests

Nafeez Ahmed, “Pentagon Wants to Predict Anti-Trump Protests Using Social Media Surveillance,” Motherboard (Vice), October 30, 2018, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x3g4x/pentagon-wants-to-predict-anti-trump-protests-using-social-media-surveillance.

Student Researcher: Margaret Tabb (University of Vermont)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (University of Vermont)

The Pentagon aims to use social media surveillance “to preempt major anti-government protests in the US,” Nafeez Ahmed reported for Motherboard in October 2018. While the Pentagon has been funding Big Data research to determine how social media surveillance can help predict the outbreak of conflict, terrorism, and civil unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, Ahmed reported that “the Pentagon isn’t just interested in anticipating surprises abroad. The research also appears to be intended for use in the US homeland.” Ahmed’s Motherboard report is based on recently published research, official government documents, and patent filings.

A study titled “Social Network Structure as a Predictor of Social Behavior: The Case of Protest in the 2016 US Presidential Election” examined the use of social media in anti-Trump protests after the 2016 presidential elections. Funded by the US Army Research Laboratory, the study concluded that post-elections protests could have been predicted by analyzing millions of American citizens’ Twitter posts.63 “Civil unrest is associated with information cascades or activity bursts in social media, and these phenomena may be used to predict protests,” the study concluded. “Failure to predict an unexpected protest may result in injuries or damage.” As Ahmed summarized, “This pivotal finding means that extensive real-time monitoring of American citizens’ social media activity can be used to predict future protests.” However, his report noted that, in its current form, the tracking software used is not entirely accurate.

Ahmed’s report highlighted official government documents focused on domestic surveillance, including an updated doctrine on “homeland defense” issued by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 2018.⁶⁴ The new doctrine, Ahmed reported, “underscores the extent to which the Trump administration wants to consolidate homeland defense and security under the ultimate purview of the Pentagon.” According to the document, the Department of Defense must be active in, and central to, almost all homeland affairs. This is achieved, Ahmed reported, “by interlinking homeland security indelibly with ‘homeland defense,’” where the latter is defined as a US military function, thus institutionalizing what Ahmed described as “seamless” Pentagon support for “homeland security” operations, including operations in the event of a domestic “insurrection.” “This is the first time that an ‘insurrection’ has been described using the phrase ‘homeland defense,’ implying that the response would come under Pentagon jurisdiction,” Ahmed wrote.

Ahmed’s report also investigated the significance of two patents originally filed in 2013. One of the patents, approved in February 2018, is for a system to track and predict social events using “amplified signals extracted from social media.” The second patent, partially approved in October 2017, is for technology that uses social network analysis to infer the locations of social media users. “Although these technologies were developed under the Obama administration,” Ahmed wrote, “it appears their use is being accelerated by the Trump administration.”

According to Ahmed’s Motherboard report, “Taken in tandem with the US military’s sudden interest in predicting anti-Trump protests after the 2016 elections, the Pentagon’s upgraded homeland defense doctrine seems to be part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to prepare for domestic civil unrest in coming months and years.”

As of May 2019, Project Censored’s review of this story found no corporate news coverage of the Pentagon’s program to preempt anti-government protests by surveilling social media content.

11.

Ukrainian Fascists Trained US White Supremacists

Max Blumenthal, “Blowback: An Inside Look at How US-Funded Fascists in Ukraine Mentor US White Supremacists,” MintPress News, November 19, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-backed-fascist-azov-battalion-in-ukraine-is-training-and-radicalizing-american-white-supremacists/251951/.

Whitney Webb, “FBI: Neo-Nazi Militia Trained by US Military in Ukraine Now Training US White Supremacists,” MintPress News, November 9, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/fbi-neo-nazi-militia-trained-by-us-military-in-ukraine-now-training-us-white-supremacists/251687/.

Rebecca Kheel, “Congress Bans Arms to Ukraine Militia Linked to Neo-Nazis,” The Hill, March 27, 2018, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis.

Student Researcher: Tanner J. Swann (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluator: Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

While the Trump administration has fought to keep nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen from traveling to the United States for fear that they are terrorists, domestic white supremacists who avow violence travel freely between the United States and the Ukraine, where they train with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion militia, according to reports from MintPress News and The Hill.

A federal criminal rioting complaint, filed in Los Angeles in 2018, included an affidavit stating that four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion.⁶⁵ The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Max Blumenthal reported for MintPress News.

According to Blumenthal, although RAM’s “crude neo-Nazi ideology” has been on display at rallies and in well-publicized street battles, media coverage of RAM has “glossed over the group’s attraction to a burgeoning trans-Atlantic conglomeration of white supremacists” centered in Ukraine and, specifically, the Azov Battalion.

Blumenthal quoted Ivan Katchanovski, a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, who said that Azov’s military experience and weapons give it “the ability to blackmail the government and defend themselves politically against any opposition.” Noting that fascist organizations in Ukraine are stronger “than in any other country in the world,” Katchanovski said that the Azov Battalion have threatened to overthrow the Ukrainian government if it “will not advance an ideology similar to theirs.”

As Whitney Webb reported for MintPress News, the Azov Battalion’s prominence is “the direct result of U.S. government policy toward Ukraine.” In the name of combatting “Russian aggression,” the United States has supported Ukraine’s military with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of security and programmatic and technical assistance—despite, as Webb reported, a “merging of Azov Battalion with the Ukrainian government.” This aid “has repeatedly found its way to the Azov Battalion,” she wrote.

In March 2018, Congress banned the arming of the Azov Battalion, as The Hill’s Rebecca Kheel reported. Three previous House bills had included a ban on US aid to Ukraine funding the Azov Battalion, Kheel wrote, “but the provision was stripped out before final passage each year.” In 2018, however, the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that was signed into law stipulated that “none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Affirming that white supremacy and neo-Nazism are “unacceptable and have no place in our world,” Representative Rohit Khanna of California told The Hill he was “very pleased that the recently passed omnibus [bill] prevents the U.S. from providing arms and training assistance to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine.”

According to The Hill’s report, “It’s unclear how much, if anything, from the United States has gone to Azov in the past.” But Kheel pointed out that online posts from 2017 by the militia’s news service showed Azov Battalion members testing US-made grenade launchers. Those posts were subsequently deleted, and the Ukrainian National Guard insisted that Azov does not possess the grenade launchers.

Although the omnibus spending bill ended direct US funding of the Azov Battalion, the United States still helps to arm the Ukrainian military. As Kheel reported, “The omnibus [bill] includes about $620.7 million in aid for Ukraine, including $420.7 million in State Department and foreign operations funds and $200 million in Pentagon funds.” Webb’s MintPress News article noted that, although US funds can no longer support the Azov Battalion, it “continues to receive arms from U.S. allies such as Israel.”

In March 2018, ABC News reported on the US sale of anti-tank missiles to the Ukraine, but the article made no mention of the Azov Battalion’s connections with Ukraine’s military or government, or the role of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in those organizations.66 In May 2019, MSNBC produced a three-minute video, “‘Breaking Hate’ Extreme Groups at Home and Abroad,” that reported on the failed attempt by Andrew Oneschuk, a teen living at home with his parents, to join the Azov Battalion.⁶⁷ MSNBC’s video provided scant detail about Azov and made no mention of prior reports on US white supremacists training with them.

12.

New 5G Network Spurs Health Concerns

Cindy L. Russell, “5 G Wireless Telecommunications Expansion: Public Health and Environmental Implications,” Environmental Research, Vol. 165 (August 2018), 484–95, published online April 11, 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29655646.

Jody McCutcheon, “Frightening Frequencies: The Dangers of 5G,” Eluxe Magazine, May 2018, https://eluxemagazine.com/magazine/dangers-of-5g.

Jason Plautz, “Grassroots Coalition Asks FCC to Slow 5G Expansion over Health Concerns,” Smart Cities Dive, September 24, 2018, https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/grassroots-coalition-asks-fcc-to-slow-5g-expansion-over-health-concerns/532992.

Joel M. Moskowitz, “Scientists and Doctors Demand Moratorium on 5G,” Electromagnetic Radiation Safety, April 26, 2018, https://www.saferemr.com/2017/09/5G-moratorium12.html.

Conan Milner, “Resistance to 5G: Roadblock to a High Tech Future or Warning of a Serious Health Risk?” Epoch Times, November 9, 2018, updated November 12, 2018, https://www.theepochtimes.com/resistance-to-5g-roadblock-to-a-high-tech-future-or-warning-of-a-serious-health-risk_2705116.html.

Nicole Karlis, “Why Public Health Experts are Worried about 5G, the Next Generation of Cell Network,” Salon, December 4, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/12/03/why-public-health-experts-are-worried-about-5g-the-next-generation-of-cell-network.

Martin L. Pall, “Wi-Fi is an Important Threat to Human Health,” Environmental Research, Vol. 164 (July 2018), 405–416, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935118300355.

Student Researcher: Jamie Wells (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

The prevalence of wireless technologies has spawned a telecommunications revolution that increasingly exposes the public to broader and higher frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum as we transmit data through a variety of devices. The telecom industry is promoting the replacement of the current cellular network, known as 4G, with a new generation of higher frequency 5G wavelengths to power the “Internet of Things,” promising faster data processing, amazing new gadgets, and a lifestyle that mirrors science fiction. However, 5G will require a massive telecommunications network with many more wireless antennas, resulting in greater radiofrequency radiation (RFR) and increased health risks.

In an article published in Environmental Research, Cindy Russell wrote that, because this is the first human generation to experience “cradle-to-grave lifespan exposure” to high levels of human-made microwave radiofrequencies, the “true health consequences” of exposure will not be known for years or decades. Her article documented a range of questions regarding the safety of RFR in 2G, 3G, and 4G wireless technologies and it recommended precaution in the rollout of 5G technology.

RFR exposure has been classified as a potential 2B carcinogen, according to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, and research has indicated that use of mobile phones could contribute to the formation of brain tumors. Other studies have concluded that RFR exposure is associated with DNA breaks (related to cancer), oxidative damage (which can lead to tissue deterioration and premature aging), disruption of cell metabolism, increased blood–brain barrier permeability, melatonin reduction (which can lead to insomnia), and many other illnesses and conditions.68

The effects of 5G technology on humans and the environment have been subject to fewer studies than the effects of 5G’s predecessors, as Russell and other experts have noted. The addition of this 5G radiation to an already complex mix of lower frequencies will likely contribute to negative public health outcomes—both physically and mentally. The new 5G technology utilizes high-frequency millimeter waves (MMW), which give off the same dose of radiation as airport scanners. Continuous exposure to transmitters in close proximity to homes and workplaces may pose serious risks.

Yael Stein of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University is a strong critic of the new 5G network. As Jody McCutcheon reported in an article for Eluxe Magazine, Stein has raised concerns about the adverse effects of MMW on human skin. In a July 2016 letter to the Federal Communications Commission, Stein advocated against 5G millimeter wave technology, noting that, with adoption of it, we should expect “more of the health effects currently seen with RF/microwave frequencies including many more cases of hypersensitivity (EHS), as well as many new complaints of physical pain and a yet unknown variety of neurologic disturbances.”69 The Eluxe article noted that the Department of Defense “already uses a crowd-dispersal method called the Active Denial System, in which MMWs are directed at crowds to make their skin feel like it’s burning.”

5G technology is not only bad for humans, it harms plant and animal life as well. Eluxe reported that one study found low-intensity MMW exposure causes stress responses in the cells of wheat shoots, which could have consequences for human food supplies. The 5G infrastructure would also pose a threat to our planet’s atmosphere. The implementation of this massive telecom network will require the deployment of many short-lifespan satellites propelled by hydrocarbon rocket engines. Another study cited by Eluxe found that launching these rockets will give off enough carbon to pollute global atmospheric conditions.

There is little or no substantive corporate media coverage of 5G health concerns. A May 2018 CBS News report observed that US wireless companies anticipate installing 300,000 new antennas, “roughly equal to the total number of cell towers built over the past three decades,” to support new 5G networks.⁷⁰ CBS reported that this has caused “outrage and alarm in some neighborhoods, as antennas go up around homes.” Yet CBS’s coverage made no mention of the coalition of 52 grassroots organizations, Americans for Responsible Technology, that has called on the Federal Communications Commission to delay deployment of 5G infrastructure due to “emerging science linking exposure to RF microwave radiation with serious biological harm,” as Jason Plautz reported for Smart Cities Dive.

Instead, corporate news reports have focused on the proposed benefits of 5G—including, for example, faster data speeds, 3D imaging, and investment opportunities—while emphasizing lack of consensus among experts regarding any attendant health risks. This tendency can be seen in a November 2018 CNN article, “Federal Health Agencies Disagree over Link between Cell Phone Radiation and Cancer,” which reported on “confusion and controversy” regarding science in a split between the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.71

Furthermore, corporate media often frame their stories in terms provided by the technology industry. For example, a February 2019 Washington Post article was based almost entirely on a report from the technology conglomerate Cisco, which indicated that the United States will only remain ahead of China and other nations in implementing 5G technology through “deregulation and policies favorable to the industry.”⁷² The only factors “complicating the picture,” according to Cisco and the Washington Post, were “ongoing concerns about the security of networking equipment from companies such as China’s Huawei.” That article made no mention whatsoever of health or environmental risks associated with the corporate race for 5G supremacy.

13.

Corporate Food Brands Drive Massive Dead Zone in Gulf of Mexico

Reynard Loki, “Corporate Food Brands Drive the Massive Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico,” Truthout, August 28, 2018, https://truthout.org/articles/corporate-food-brands-driving-the-massive-dead-zone-in-gulf-of-mexico/.

Oliver Milman, “‘Dead Zone’ in Gulf of Mexico Will Take Decades to Recover from Farm Pollution,” The Guardian, March 22, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/22/dead-zone-gulf-of-mexico-decades-recover-study.

Student Researcher: Adriana Babicz (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the result of water polluted with manure and fertilizer runoff from major beef-producing states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Dead zones are areas in a body of water that lack sufficient oxygen to support marine life. Covering approximately 8,000 square miles, the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone is about the size of New Jersey and ranks as the world’s second-largest, surpassed only by the dead zone in the Gulf of Oman. As the Guardian and Truthout reported, the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone continues to grow because big food companies lack sustainability policies to prevent environmental pollution, including especially animal waste and fertilizer runoff from industrial farms.

As Reynard Loki wrote for Truthout, a study by Mighty Earth, an environmental action group, found that the largest fast food, grocery, and food service companies in the United States are “helping to drive one of the nation’s worst human-made environmental disasters.” In a survey of 23 major brands—including Target, McDonald’s, Subway, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods—Mighty Earth found that none have policies requiring “even minimal environmental protections from meat suppliers.”73 Mighty Earth’s study, “Flunking the Planet,” gave all but one of the companies a failing grade overall for environmental safeguards after considering the sources of animal feed, the processing of animals’ manure, and overall greenhouse gas emissions. (Walmart earned a D-grade, based on its commitment to reducing supply chain emissions through its Project Gigaton initiative.)

“By not requiring environmental safeguards from its meat suppliers, the world’s largest natural and organic foods supermarket—and most of its big-brand counterparts in the retail food industry, like McDonald’s, Subway and Target—are sourcing and selling meat from some of the worst polluters in agribusiness, including Tyson Foods and Cargill,” Truthout reported. Mighty Earth’s study noted that the main source of water contamination is runoff from industrial farms that produce animal feed. The five largest meat companies “dominate” the supply chain, Mighty Earth reported, and bear “primary responsibility for driving the negative impacts as well as delivering solutions at scale.”⁷⁴

The runoff of nitrogen from chemical fertilizers poses nearly impossible challenges for the restoration of marine life in the Gulf. A study published in Science in April 2018 found that, even if all current nitrogen runoff was stopped, the Gulf would take “about 30 years to recover,” according to the Guardian.⁷⁵ One of the Science study’s coauthors, Nandita Basu, an associate professor of environmental sciences at the University of Waterloo, likened the challenge to going on a diet: “you can’t expect results right away,” she told the Guardian. A marine scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Denise Breitburg, observed that the study “shows we need a scientific strategy and can’t expect instant results, but we know what needs to be done to improve things.”

As Mighty Earth reported in its study, big brand food retailers fail to use their influence to encourage more sustainable practices. According to Mighty Earth’s report, companies like Walmart, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, and Burger King “have the power to set and enforce standards requiring better farming practices from suppliers.” Mighty Earth recommended that food companies require meat suppliers to implement sustainable feed sourcing, responsible manure management, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and that these changes should be made with time-bound targets and should be verified by third-party audits, with progress reported to the public on a regular basis.76

Corporate news coverage has largely focused on the scale of the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone and its consequences—rather than on its causes, including industrial agriculture and corporate irresponsibility. In August 2017, CBS News discussed the size of the dead zone and interviewed fishermen who witnessed large decreases in fish populations at popular fishing spots.⁷⁷ In August 2017, the Washington Post published an article on dead zones around the world.⁷⁸ National Geographic published a substantive article on the topic the same month.⁷⁹ The findings and recommendations from Mighty Earth’s “Flunking the Planet” study appear to have gone entirely unreported by the corporate press.

14.

FBI Surveilled Peaceful Climate Change Protesters

Adam Federman, “Revealed: FBI Kept Files on Peaceful Climate Change Protesters,” The Guardian, December 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/fbi-climate-change-protesters-iowa-files-monitoring-surveillance-.

Sarah Lazare and Simon Davis-Cohen, “Fossil Fuel Companies are Enlisting Police to Crack Down on Protesters,” In These Times, April 16, 2019, http://inthesetimes.com/article/21821/fossil-fuel-companies-back-critical-infrastructure-bills-pipeline-protests.

Student Researcher: Melissa Reed (College of Marin)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (College of Marin)

After three participants in a nonviolent protest at a BP oil refinery in Indiana were arrested in May 2016, the FBI opened a file on them, the Guardian reported in December 2018. The Indiana event was part of 350.org’s Break Free from Fossil Fuels campaign, which engaged more than 30,000 people on six continents in what it described as the largest coordinated act of civil disobedience in the fight against climate change. Like Jonas Magram, Thom Krystofiak, and Inga Frick in Indiana, many of those nonviolent protestors were arrested for trespassing, or for blocking rail access to refineries.

As Adam Federman reported for the Guardian, “The FBI is prohibited from investigating groups or individuals solely for their political beliefs but has been criticized in the past for treating non-violent civil disobedience as a form of terrorism.” The subject of the FBI file on Magram, Krystofiak, and Frick is categorized by the FBI as a “Sensitive Investigative Matter,” a label, Federman explained, that often refers to cases involving political organizations which “therefore require a higher level of scrutiny.” One of the FBI documents, catalogued by the agency as part of a related domestic terrorism case and obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, stated that “350.org are referenced in multiple investigations and assessments for their planned protests and disruptions.”

Federman wrote that in 2015 the Guardian revealed that the FBI had “violated its own rules” by failing to obtain the approval required to conduct its investigation into Texas activists campaigning against the Keystone XL pipeline.80 That investigation, Federman summarized, continued for more than a year and “swept up numerous activists including one who later learned he was on a US government watchlist for domestic flights.”

Mike German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice and a former FBI agent, told the Guardian that FBI tracking of the three people arrested for civil disobedience in Indiana was “quite troubling.” Absent information suggesting a planned act of violence, German said, there was little justification for creating such a file. The founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, told the Guardian, “Trying to deal with the greatest crisis humans have stumbled into shouldn’t require being subjected to government surveillance.” However, McKibben observed, “when much of our government acts as a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, it may be par for the course.”

An April 2019 report published by In These Times suggests the extent to which the oil industry seeks to enlist state government and to co-opt local law enforcement in order to protect itself from opposition. Sarah Lazare and Simon Davis-Cohen reported that in at least seven states “the oil industry has backed critical infrastructure bills that criminalize pipeline protests.”

Drawing lessons from the protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, fossil fuel industry associations began urging state lawmakers to support legislation that would define trespassing on energy plants and pipelines as felonies, Lazare and Davis-Cohen reported. The industry has publicly “supported, lobbied for, or testified on behalf of” critical infrastructure bills in Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Industry-based bills have passed in Iowa, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, and no fewer than eleven critical infrastructure bills have been introduced in 2019. Lazare and Davis-Cohen noted that fifteen people who protested the Bayou Bridge Pipeline were facing felony charges, punishable by as much as five years in prison and fines of $1,000, under Louisiana’s new law. The model legislation for the critical infrastructure bills was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

In effect, Lazare and Davis-Cohen wrote, the oil industry is “working with the government to redefine criminality and then using that definition to lock up its opponents.”

Lazare and Davis-Cohen also reported that the line between police and privately-hired security guards is “blurring.” In 2013, for example, Kinder Morgan hired off-duty police officers from a Pennsylvania department to “deter protests” in order to avoid “costly delays” at a controversial gas pipeline construction site.81 As the Earth Island Journal reported, “The company requested that the officers, though officially off-duty, be in uniform and marked cars.”⁸² More recently, Lazare and Davis-Cohen reported that some of the arrests in the Bayou Bridge Pipeline protests were made by off-duty police officers hired as guards by Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for building the pipeline.

Referencing the Guardian’s reporting on FBI surveillance of activists who protested the Keystone XL pipeline or participated in the 350.org Break Free from Fossil Fuels campaign, Lazare and Davis-Cohen noted antecedents in the bureau’s COINTELPRO program, which targeted the Black Power and American Indian movements in the 1950s and 1960s because of their revolutionary potential. “Sectors of the growing climate movement, with their goal of upending one of the world’s most powerful industries, likely stir similar fears—a sign of their effectiveness,” Lazare and Davis-Cohen wrote.

As of May 2019, the corporate media have provided no coverage of the issues raised in Adam Federman’s Guardian report or Sarah Lazare and Simon Davis-Cohen’s article for In These Times.

15.

Trump Administration Threatens Endangered Species Act

Charles Pekow, “On Thin Ice: Will the Endangered Species Act Survive the Trump Administration?” Earth Island Journal, Spring 2019, http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/on-thin-ice-endangered-species-act-trump-administration.

Student Researcher: Madi Jones (College of Western Idaho)

Faculty Evaluator: Michelle Mahoney (College of Western Idaho)

The Endangered Species Act (ESA)—which currently protects more than 1,600 native plant and animal species in the United States and its territories—is “increasingly challenged by an administration that has little patience for laws and regulations that help protect our lands and wildlife,” Charles Pekow wrote in an article published by Earth Island Journal in Spring 2019. In the two years since Donald Trump became president, Pekow reported, “at least 80 bills” seeking to undermine the ESA or remove species from the list have been introduced in Congress, and key federal agencies charged with implementing the ESA have proposed revisions to weaken vital elements of it.

For a little over a decade, according to the Earth Island Journal’s report, conservationists have fought to protect Pacific walruses under the Endangered Species Act. Protection for the walrus under the ESA was first proposed in 2008; in 2011, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) suggested that the Pacific walrus was threatened and endangered. But in October 2017, the Trump administration concluded that the Pacific walrus did not warrant listing. The FWS under Trump appointees explained that “impacts of the effects of climate change on the Pacific walrus population are based on speculation, rather than reliable prediction,” Pekow reported. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has sued the Trump administration over the decision, and that lawsuit is still pending.83

According to the CBD, since 1996 more than four hundred pieces of legislation have been proposed seeking to dismantle critical species protections. As Pekow reported, legislators often include these proposals as “riders to must-pass spending bills.” Gray wolves in the Rocky Mountains lost protections this way after passage of a 2011 budget rider. However, as Pekow wrote, “The most critical blow to the Act has come from the federal agencies charged with implementing the ESA”: the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages plants, wildlife, and inland fisheries, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which oversees ocean-going fish and marine mammals. In July 2018, the two agencies jointly proposed that species designated as “threatened” should no longer automatically receive the same protections as those designated as “endangered.” In other words, Pekow summarized, “there would be no automatic prohibitions on the harming or killing of plants and animals designated ‘threatened.’” The agencies also proposed overturning a provision of the ESA that restricts consideration of economic impacts when determining whether a species needed protection. The proposals would make it more difficult to add new species to the list and, Pekow noted, environmentalists fear that changes would also make it easier to delist species because their habitats are desirable to industry.

Beyond Pekow’s detailed report for Earth Island Journal, the Trump administration’s decision not to list the Pacific walrus has received limited coverage in other news outlets, including USA Today and the Chicago Tribune; National Geographic and Popular Science have also provided coverage.⁸⁴ The Guardian published a more in-depth piece on the topic in October 2017.⁸⁵

The broader topic of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the ESA has not been prominently reported, though in July 2018 the Washington Post published a reasonably detailed report on the joint proposal by the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to strip the ESA of key provisions.⁸⁶

The following month, the Post also published an opinion piece by David Bernhardt, who was deputy secretary of the interior at the time. In “The Greatest Good for Endangered Species,” Bernhardt advocated a “modern vision of conservation” employing “federalism, public–private partnerships and market-based solutions to achieve sound stewardship.”87 Bernhardt wrote that the Trump administration “found room for improvement in the administration” of the ESA, which currently “places unnecessary regulatory burden on our citizens without additional benefit to the species.” The Post failed to inform its readers of Bernhardt’s background as a former lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry or of what one independent news outlet described as his “long track record of trying to weaken wildlife protections in favor of more extraction.”⁸⁸

16.

Underwater Avalanches Heighten Risks of Oil Catastrophes

Ian R. MacDonald, “Underwater Mudslides are the Biggest Threat to Offshore Drilling, and Energy Companies Aren’t Ready for Them,” The Conversation, March 11, 2019, https://theconversation.com/underwater-mudslides-are-the-biggest-threat-to-offshore-drilling-and-energy-companies-arent-ready-for-them-111904.

Ian MacDonald, “Are American Oil Platforms Prepared for Underwater Avalanches?” Pacific Standard, March 11, 2019, https://psmag.com/environment/are-oil-platforms-ready-for-underwater-avalanches.

Student Researcher: Thanh Nguyen (College of Western Idaho)

Faculty Evaluator: Michelle Mahoney (College of Western Idaho)

As bad as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was, “the worst-case scenario” for an oil spill catastrophe is not losing control of a single well, as occurred in the BP disaster. Instead, “[m]uch more damage would be done if one or more of the thousand or so production platforms that now blanket the Gulf of Mexico were destroyed without warning by a deep-sea mudslide,” Ian R. MacDonald reported for The Conversation in March 2019. Underwater mudslides could leave “a tangled mess of pipes buried under a giant mass of sediments,” a scenario that oil company managers are not prepared to handle. In such a situation, the discharge could not be stopped with caps or plugs, and oil “might flow for decades.”

As MacDonald reported, one instance of this type of catastrophe has already happened. A well located off the coast of Louisiana owned by Taylor Energy has been leaking oil since 2004. Government regulators and energy companies, MacDonald wrote, “should be doing much more to prevent such catastrophes at other sites.”

Earthquakes are one trigger for deep-sea mudslides. The probability of mudslides in the Gulf of Mexico is high, due to regular seismic activity in the area. Studies to identify unstable slopes would improve our understanding of the seabed and potentially reduce the risks, MacDonald wrote.

Corporate media—including the Washington Post, CNN, and Newsweek—have covered the Taylor Energy disaster off the coast of Louisiana.89 However, MacDonald’s report for The Conversation, also reprinted in Pacific Standard, is distinctive for its detailed explanation of how underwater mudslides pose systemic threats for drilling operations throughout the Gulf of Mexico, and not only at the Taylor Energy site.

17.

More Than 25 Percent of Formerly Incarcerated People are Unemployed

Alfonso Serrano, “Out of Prison, Out of Jobs: Unemployment and the Formerly Incarcerated,” ColorLines, July 10, 2018, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/out-prison-out-jobs-unemployment-and-formerly-incarcerated.

Prison Policy Initiative, “New Report Calculates the First Unemployment Rate for Formerly Incarcerated People: 27 Percent, Highest since Great Depression,” San Francisco Bay View, September 29, 2018, https://sfbayview.com/2018/09/new-report-calculates-the-first-unemployment-rate-for-formerly-incarcerated-people-27-percent-highest-since-great-depression/.

Student Researcher: Briana Earls (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Mutombo M’Panya (Sonoma State University)

A 2018 report from the Prison Policy Initiative found that people released from prison are disproportionally discriminated against in the pursuit of work. The study—by Lucius Couloute, at the time a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Massachusetts, and Daniel Kopf, a reporter for Quartz—found that an average of 27 percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed.⁹⁰ That figure, Couloute and Kopf wrote, is greater than “the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression,” when the unemployment rate reached nearly 25 percent.

Their study, “Out of Prison & Out of Work,” drew on statistics from the 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics’s National Former Prisoner Survey data—the most recent available data—and showed that the unemployment rate for the five million formerly incarcerated people living in the United States was more than 27 percent, compared to 5.8 percent for the general population. (“Contemporary unemployment rates may differ,” Couloute and Kopf wrote, “but we are confident that formerly incarcerated people are still substantially disadvantaged compared to the general public.”)

Their report found that blacks, Hispanics, and women faced the most significant disadvantages in the search for work after leaving prison. From the 2008 data, 39 percent of Hispanic women, 27 percent of Hispanic men, 44 percent of black women, 35 percent of black men, 23 percent of white women, and 18 percent of white men faced unemployment after being released from prison. The numbers document what the study’s authors described as a “prison penalty” that puts formerly incarcerated people—and especially blacks, Hispanics, and women—at disadvantages when it comes to finding work. (Couloute and Kopf acknowledged that “prison alone” does not account for high unemployment rates among formerly incarcerated people, but observed that “a wealth of data suggests that going to prison does negatively affect labor market outcomes.”)

Couloute and Kopf also found that formerly incarcerated people were more likely to be actively looking for work than the general population. Their analysis showed 93 percent of formerly incarcerated people were either employed or actively looking for work, compared to 84 percent of the general population. Couloute and Kopf summarized, “Formerly incarcerated people want to work. Their high unemployment rate reflects public will, policy, and practice—not differences in aspirations.”

The Prison Policy Initiative study also reported “promising policy choices available to lawmakers at each level of government” to help formerly incarcerated people gain employment, including implementation of a temporary basic income upon release, a short-term economic investment that would result in long-term cost savings; the expungement of criminal records, taking into account offense type and length of time since sentencing, so that prison sentences do not result in “perpetual punishment”; and banning of employer discrimination, potentially under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, owing to racially disproportionate incarceration rates.

Despite the Prison Policy Initiative’s study being what Couloute and Kopf described as “the first ever estimate” of unemployment among formerly incarcerated people in the United States, their findings appear to have received nearly no coverage in the establishment press. In July 2018, the editorial board of the Southern California News Group produced an editorial, “No One Benefits When Formerly Incarcerated People Can’t Get a Job,” that provided a reasonably detailed summary of the study, including its recommendations. A number of local newspapers belonging to the group, including the Orange County Register, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and Pasadena Star-News, published the editorial.91 Otherwise, relatively limited coverage of what Couloute and Kopf termed the “prison penalty” has left out the study’s findings and recommendations.

In August 2018, USA Today published an opinion piece on former inmates’ experiences, which mentioned in passing that “[u]nemployment among former inmates is 27%” without citing the Prison Policy Initiative’s study or discussing its recommendations.⁹² A March 2018 CNN article reported that, in 2014, as many as 1.9 million formerly incarcerated people were out of work, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.⁹³ Noting that many former inmates lack “relevant skills and work experience,” the article also reported that employers are often reluctant to hire former inmates: “More than 60% of employers,” CNN reported, “say they would ‘probably not’ or ‘definitely not’ be willing to hire an ex-offender.”⁹⁴

18.

Humanitarian Groups Promote Solutions to Extreme Violence in West Africa

Obi Anyadike, “Countering Militancy in the Sahel,” New Humanitarian, February 26, 2019, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/in-depth/countering-militancy-sahel.

Student Researchers: Alyssa Lash, Caroline Lussier, and Erica Rindels (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Evaluator: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

In February 2019, the New Humanitarian published an overview of the “causes and humanitarian consequences of violent extremism in West Africa.” The organization’s report on extreme violence in northeast Nigeria, northern Cameroon, north and central Mali, and southern Niger was the result of a year of fieldwork in those areas, surveying not only the violence but also sustainable peace efforts based on the interconnected roles of economics, politics, and faith in sparking militancy and, potentially, creating peace. The detailed report covered root causes, recruitment, motivations, security forces, attempts to reduce the ranks of fighters, and the reintegration of former fighters.

Peer pressure, community identity, and the impact of trauma and humiliation from security forces play a huge role in recruitment. A United Nations Development Programme study found that the arrest or killing of family members was “the tipping point” in recruitment decisions for 70 percent of jihadists.95 The power of faith provides a significant motivation for these groups as well, helping, for example, to frame conflict in ways that create a narrative and meaning for militants.

When it comes to identifying jihadists or potential recruits, security forces are not doing their best work, the study found. Arrests of suspected jihadists are often arbitrary and brutal, instead of the result of properly conducted police work. This causes people to be more fearful of the security services, instead of building trust in them. Amnesty and demobilization schemes provide better options, but they tend to be hampered by lack of funding and poor administration.

With extreme violence impacting many regions in West Africa, it is perhaps surprising that there are so few news articles on the topic in US establishment media. In April 2016, the Huffington Post published an article on why people join Nigeria’s Boko Haram.⁹⁶ The Washington Post ran a similar article in April 2016.⁹⁷ West Africa’s humanitarian crises receive more regular coverage from nonprofit organizations such as Oxfam International, which has released multiple articles on the “forgotten crisis” in West Africa.⁹⁸

19.

Censorship of Al Jazeera Documentary Exposes Influence of Pro-Israel Lobby

Asa Winstanley and Ali Abunimah, “‘National Security’ Cited as Reason Al Jazeera Nixed Israel Lobby Film,” Electronic Intifada, June 4, 2018, https://electronicintifada.net/content/national-security-cited-reason-al-jazeera-nixed-israel-lobby-film/24566.

Asa Winstanley, “Al Jazeera Denies Qatari Emir Censored Israel Lobby Film,” Electronic Intifada, October 10, 2018, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/al-jazeera-denies-qatari-emir-censored-israel-lobby-film.

“Watch the Film the Israel Lobby Didn’t Want You to See,” Electronic Intifada, November 2, 2018, https://electronicintifada.net/content/watch-film-israel-lobby-didnt-want-you-see/25876.

Amir Tibon, “Parts of Censored Al Jazeera Documentary on D.C. Israel Lobby Leaked,” Haaretz, August 30, 2018, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/in-depth/countering-militancy-sahel.

Ben Norton, interview with Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal, “Leaked Clips from Censored Documentary on Israel Lobby Reveal Attacks on US Activists,” Real News Network, September 10, 2018, https://therealnews.com/stories/leaked-clips-from-censored-documentary-on-israel-lobby-reveal-attacks-on-us-activists.

Max Blumenthal, “Censored Documentary Exposes Israel’s Attack on Black Lives Matter,” MintPress News, September 7, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/black-lives-matter-israel-the-lobby/248917/.

Student Researcher: Gabrielle Kreidie (Drew University)

Faculty Evaluator: Lisa Lynch (Drew University)

A documentary film that aimed to expose Israel’s covert influence campaign in the United States has been leaked to the media after the government of Qatar pulled it from Al Jazeera, a media outlet Qatar funds. In August 2018, excerpts of the censored documentary were leaked and later published by a number of online independent media outlets, including the Electronic Intifada, France’s Orient XXI, and Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar.

An undercover reporter for Al Jazeera became an intern at the Israel Project, a pro-Israeli organization in Washington, DC, in order to research and document what a November 2018 Electronic Intifada article summarized as “the efforts of Israel and its lobbyists to spy on, smear and intimidate US citizens who support Palestinian human rights, especially BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

One clip showed Julia Reifkind, then an employee of the Israeli embassy, discussing the Israeli government “giving our support” to front groups “in that behind-the-scenes way,” and describing the use of fake Facebook profiles to infiltrate campus activist groups that support Palestine. In another segment, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, Jacob Baime, described how that group coordinated with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a semi-covert government agency that previous reports linked to a global campaign targeting the BDS movement.99 Baime also described using anonymous websites to target activists, citing Canary Mission, an anonymous smear site targeting student activists, as “a good example.” In another leaked excerpt, a group of students with fellowships from the right-wing Hoover Institution explained that their participation in a pro-Israeli demonstration was “astroturfing,” a term used to describe the masked sponsorship of activism intended to give the appearance of grassroots advocacy.

The pro-Israel lobby successfully pressured the Qatari government not to release the Al Jazeera documentary. In June 2018, the Electronic Intifada reported, a Qatari government official stated that the film’s release would be indefinitely delayed due to “national security” concerns.

As Haaretz reported in August 2018, the Qatari government censored the documentary as part of its effort “to win the support of major Jewish American organizations.” Since 2017, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates placed Qatar under partial blockade, Qatar has “intensified its lobbying efforts in the United States, in hopes of convincing the Trump administration to support it” in its dispute with the Saudis and the UAE, Amir Tibon reported. In that effort, Qatar has “invested millions of dollars” to court right-wing Jewish American organizations that support Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. In exchange for censoring the Al Jazeera documentary, Haaretz reported, Qatar sought public messages of support by those groups.

In September 2018, Max Blumenthal reported that the censored Al Jazeera film also documented how Israeli operatives and US lobbyists coordinated efforts to recruit established black civil rights activists as pro-Israel proxies and to discredit the Movement for Black Lives after August 2016, when that activist coalition issued a platform that characterized Israel as an “apartheid state” and affirmed support for the BDS movement in response.

As of May 2019, the corporate news media appear to have entirely ignored Qatar’s censorship of the Al Jazeera documentary and the evidence it provided of Israel’s covert influence campaign in the United States.

20.

Scientists Accelerate Coral Reef Regrowth with Electricity

Alice Klein, “Divers are Attempting to Regrow Great Barrier Reef with Electricity,” New Scientist, September 20, 2018, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2180369-divers-are-attempting-to-regrow-great-barrier-reef-with-electricity/.

Mike Wehner, “Letting Coral Reefs Die Will Actually Cost Us More Than Saving Them,” BGR, June 14, 2018, https://bgr.com/2018/06/14/coral-reef-cost-recovery-effort/.

Student Researcher: Adam May (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Mackenzie Zippay (Sonoma State University)

The conservation group Reef Ecologic is using electrical currents to stimulate regrowth of damaged coral reefs, Alice Klein reported for New Scientist in September 2018. Coral reefs are crucial components of ocean ecosystems around the world, and damage to them from climate change and destructive fishing practices has been widely reported. Damaged coral regrows slowly, and rising ocean temperatures lead to bleaching that can cause entire reef systems to collapse permanently. As Klein reported, researchers have found that laying metal frames over damaged reefs and then running electric current through those frames draws in minerals that allow coral to grow up to four times faster than it otherwise would.

The technique is currently being used by conservationists with Reef Ecologic to restore sections of coral on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that were badly affected by mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017. The same technique has previously proven successful on reefs in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia, Klein wrote.

A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Communications found that across the world’s 71,000 kilometers (44,000 miles) of reef coastlines, coral reefs “reduce the annual expected damages from storms by more than $4 billion.”100 A research team at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Cantabria in Spain estimated that coral reefs provide the United States, including the US territory of Puerto Rico, with $94 million in flood protection benefit each year. Reefs, the study’s authors concluded, “provide a substantial first line of coastal defense and should be better managed for this benefit.”

In June 2018, USA Today covered the study that determined the economic value of coral reef conservation,¹⁰¹ but the corporate media have not done a good job of reporting the latest science on coral reef restoration. A December 2018 New York Times article focused on a study led by researchers at James Cook University in Australia, which found that the nation’s 2016 heat wave killed many of the Great Barrier Reef’s most heat-sensitive corals and “selected for the corals that could handle higher ocean temperatures.”¹⁰² The study, the Times concluded, “provides a measure of hope that coral reefs may be able to survive as oceans warm over the coming decades.” A July 2018 report in the New York Times, “Beauty and Bleakness: The Efforts to Conserve Coral Reefs,” featured lavish photographs, by Alexis Rosenfeld, of coral reefs and reef restoration efforts around the world. One of Rosenfeld’s photographs published by the Times depicted restoration workers in diving gear, laying “metal foundations in the Maldives in the hopes that new coral will grow,” but made no mention of Reef Ecologic’s Great Barrier Reef project.¹⁰³ In 2015, the BBC reported on efforts in Indonesia to use electrically-charged metal frames to rejuvenate coral damaged by human activity;¹⁰⁴ and in 2016 the Smithsonian featured an extended article on the same Indonesian project.¹⁰⁵

21.

Court Ruling Provides “Blueprint” to Reform Excessive, Discriminatory Policing in Schools

Mike Males, “California Decision Aims to End Aggressive Policing in Schools,” YES! Magazine, February 14, 2019, https://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/california-decision-aims-to-end-aggressive-policing-in-schools-20190214.

David Washburn, “Stockton Unified Settles State Complaint over Discriminatory Policing Practices,” EdSource, January 22, 2019, https://edsource.org/2019/stockton-unified-settles-state-complaint-over-discriminatory-policing-practices/607559.

Student Researcher: Vinca Rivera-Perez (College of Marin)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (College of Marin)

It is no wonder that school districts feel pressure to protect children. Between January 2015 and March 2019, there were 97 school shootings in 31 states that ended in the deaths of 94 people. Yet in January 2019, a state court in California ordered the Stockton Unified School District to rein in its use of “school resource officers” to protect students. The order was the result of a three-year investigation, conducted by the California Department of Justice, that revealed “widespread abuses” by police in Stockton schools, including “use of excessive force, unconstitutional and ‘random and suspicionless’ search and seizure procedures using dogs and pat-downs, and frequent arrests targeting even the youngest students,” according to YES! Magazine. The procedures often resulted in students “being treated like criminals for misconduct typical of schoolchildren, especially those with disabilities,” Mike Males reported. He characterized the final judgment, issued by Sacramento’s Superior Court, as “unprecedented in strength and scope” and “a blueprint for reforming other districts that suffer from overpolicing.”

The California Justice Department’s investigation showed the district had turned thousands of minor student misbehaviors—commonplace in any school—into criminal offenses, disproportionately affecting black, Latino, and disabled students. School police overused handcuffs and restraints on students and conducted random and unannounced searches of students’ belongings using police dogs, while school officials engaged in searches that violated students’ rights to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. In many cases, overreactions by undertrained officers created escalations that led to student arrests.

A May 2015 analysis of state crime statistics by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice revealed that in a district with around 40,000 students—94 percent of whom are people of color—Stockton’s school officers had arrested more than 1,800 students on criminal charges in 2012.106 That included 182 students who were age nine or younger, a rate 37 times higher than all other law enforcement agencies in California.

Analyzing incident reports, Justice Department investigators found that the district and its police systematically discriminated against black and Latino students when referring them to law enforcement and making arrests. As David Washburn reported for EdSource, investigators found that black students aged ten and over were 148 percent more likely to be arrested than other students, while Latino students aged ten and over were 124 percent more likely to be arrested than other students.

A January 1989 shooting at a Stockton elementary school left six people dead and led to the development of the district’s use of armed school resource officers, YES! Magazine reported. But instead of protecting Stockton campuses from intruders, “these officers quickly turned to criminalizing the district’s students.” As fears that every school is at risk of a shooting drive demands to arm teachers, Males noted that “school resource officers painted as ‘mentors’ may seem a reasonable middle ground.” However, in practice, school resource officers are often “bullies in blue,” as the American Civil Liberties Union concluded in a multistate analysis.¹⁰⁷

Noting that while the Stockton school district was under state investigation school arrests dropped by 75 percent, YES! Magazine described the court’s decision as a “major milestone.” The court’s January 2019 ruling requires the district to establish clear policies and procedures for how and when administrators refer students to law enforcement, to reform use-of-force policies and practices, to ensure that searches or seizures conform with constitutional standards, and to hire a trained disability coordinator at the police department to ensure compliance with disability discrimination laws. It also requires Stockton schools to end officer arrests of students for disciplinary issues that do not constitute “a major threat to school safety.”¹⁰⁸ The district will also be required to provide a list of arrested students so that their records can be expunged. The Justice Department will monitor the district for five years to ensure that it complies with the court’s requirements.

The California decision to end aggressive policing in Stockton’s schools received coverage in local news outlets, but little in the way of national attention.109 Mike Males’s report for YES! Magazine was distinctive in highlighting that the court’s final 26-page judgment could provide a model for other school districts throughout the country to follow as a way of addressing excessive and often discriminatory policing in schools.

22.

Violence Rises after End of Mandated Monitoring in California’s Juvenile Detention Centers

Samantha Michaels, “Use of Force in California State Juvenile Detention Facilities Has Jumped Threefold since Court Monitoring Ended,” Mother Jones, February 21, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/02/use-of-force-in-california-state-juvenile-detention-facilities-has-jumped-threefold-since-court-monitoring-ended/.

Student Researchers: Citlali Mendoza, Kyle Slobodnik, Lauren Axberg, Molly Regin, and Nyia Roberts (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (Sonoma State University)

What has changed in the three years since court-mandated monitoring of California’s juvenile detention centers ended? As Samantha Michaels reported for Mother Jones, despite some good news—such as an overall decrease in the numbers of incarcerated youth—the situation is still “pretty grim,” and violence in the state’s juvenile detention centers has worsened significantly since court oversight ended. Mother Jones’s coverage was based on a February 2019 report, “Unmet Promises,” by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.110

Until 2016, California’s Division of Juvenile Justice was under court-mandated monitoring as part of a settlement in a lawsuit that charged the agency for abuse of detainees and failure to provide adequate medical care or rehabilitation. In early 2016, the agency was commended for groundbreaking improvements in its treatment and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders.

Since mandated reporting ended, however, the likelihood of a juvenile being assaulted has increased by 49 percent, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice’s report. Similarly, reported use-of-force incidents involving staff that were out of compliance with the agency’s policies rose by 45 percent; and staffers sometimes tried to cover up their alleged misbehavior. Furthermore, the number of attempted suicides has risen since mandated monitoring ended, from three between August 2015 and July 2016 to 28 since 2016. Lack of response by staff to detainees’ medical needs decreases trust and worsens trauma for youth who, in many cases, already live with the effects of previous trauma.

The California Report, produced by KQED, an NPR-affiliate in San Francisco, also covered the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice’s report on use of force in California’s juvenile detention facilities.¹¹¹ Otherwise, establishment media outlets have failed to report this story.

23.

New Programs Make School Food Systems More Equitable

Korsha Wilson, “What School Lunches Have to Do with Fixing Wealth Inequality,” YES! Magazine, November 13, 2018, https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/what-school-lunches-have-to-do-with-fixing-wealth-inequality-20181113.

“Nationwide Campaign Calls on Aramark, Compass Group, and Sodexo to Reform Unjust Business Practices, Invest in Real Food,” Friends of the Earth, September 4, 2018, https://foe.org/news/nationwide-campaign-calls-aramark-compass-group-sodexo-reform-unjust-business-practices-invest-real-food/.

Lindsay Oberst, “Why School Lunches in America are Unhealthy and 10 Ways You Can Take Action to Improve Them,” Food Revolution Network, August 29, 2018, https://foodrevolution.org/blog/school-lunch-in-america/.

Student Researcher: Diana Mayorga (City College of San Francisco)

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Levinson (City College of San Francisco)

School lunches are big business. As Korsha Wilson reported for YES! Magazine in November 2018, school districts nationwide spend a total of approximately three billion dollars annually on food contracts, most of which are with corporate food suppliers. As Beth Hopping, cofounder of the Food Insight Group, told YES! Magazine, “The wealth in the food system is concentrated in the hands of a few and has been extracted at the expense of the earth and people.” Now, however, organizations such as the Farm to School Network and Wholesome Wave are working to make the food systems that supply schools more equitable.

New programs not only connect school children with local farms, they also create jobs in the community, and keep money in the community to support on-campus gardens and farm-fresh meals. A study in Georgia found that for every dollar the program spent, two dollars stayed in the state, instead of leaving to be invested in a large food company, YES! Magazine reported.

To succeed, however, organizations must adhere to local, state, and federal policies that often serve to benefit large, private food companies. “There’s a lot of underground scaffolding that keeps our food systems the way that they are,” Hopping told YES! Magazine. The goal is to rebuild that system “in a way that works for communities.”

To address these challenges, some organizations have created regional farm-to-institution “hubs.” These hubs employ trained personnel to clean and process local farm produce, meat, and dairy, which then go to schools, hospitals, and universities. These hubs also increase the community’s number of skilled employees.

In 2018 Trump signed the US farm bill, legislation that sets policies for the agricultural industry. New provisions in the bill should make it easier for schools to work with local farms and buy their food locally. The hope is that these provisions will create equity for farms owned by women and people of color, and provide more nourishing food to underserved communities.

In September 2018, a grassroots alliance of ranchers, fishers, farmworkers, students, and environmental advocates, organized as the Community Coalition for Real Meals, called on the nation’s three largest food service management companies—Aramark, Compass Group, and Sodexo—to shift from exclusive relationships with Big Food corporations to greater investments in real food that supports producers, communities, and the environment, Friends of the Earth reported. “Even though it flies below the radar screen, the cafeteria industry perpetuates major inequities in the world. But people are waking up,” said Anim Steel, director of Real Food Challenge. “These big cafeteria corporations are going to have to make some fundamental changes if they want to satisfy this generation of students who are connecting the dots between their foodservice providers and problems in society.”

As of May 2019, the corporate media appear to have entirely ignored the story of how communities across the United States are working to make school food systems more equitable.

24.

Class Explains Millennials’ “Stunted” Economic Lives

Victor Tan Chen, “Adulting While Poor,” Dissent, Fall 2018, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/adulting-while-poor-millenial-homeownership.

Student Researcher: Jordan Watts (University of Vermont)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (University of Vermont)

While pundits and politicians explain downward mobility among millennials in terms of that generation’s unrealistic expectations, indulgent spending, and antipathy toward adulthood, sociologist Victor Tan Chen explained that the Great Recession “stunted millennials’ economic lives at a critical age” and that class inequalities—not “lousy values”—best explain many millennials’ poor economic prospects. “Thanks in part to the country’s widening income gap,” Chen wrote, “the picture of ‘how millennials are doing’ is dramatically different depending on which segment of the population you happen to be looking at.”

Defining class by income and education, with the working class making less than the median household and not possessing a four-year degree, Chen cited research showing that millennials who lack college degrees are more likely to be renting than those with degrees, and that working-class young adults are less likely to change residences than their better-educated peers.

Chen cited research that found four out of ten Americans in their early twenties get help from their parents to pay living expenses—evidence of what he described as a “private safety net.” Young people increasingly depend on their parents’ savings to transition into independent adulthood, but class inequalities mean that private safety nets benefit millennials from wealthier families more than millennials from families with lesser means. Pundits’ calls for millennials to stop being lazy, dependent, and spineless, Chen wrote, are “tinged by class, whether they acknowledge it or not.”

The solutions that Chen proposed focus on public policy. Specifically, Chen pointed to countries—such as Denmark and Sweden—with social safety nets, including housing subsidies, education benefits, unemployment compensation, universal medical care, and job training programs and apprenticeships. “What distinguishes millennials,” Chen concluded, “is how thoroughly their generation has been shaped by America’s stark and growing class inequality.”

By contrast, establishment news coverage of millennials’ economic (mis)fortunes, in outlets such as CNBC and USA Today, has omitted class as an explanation for the decreased incomes millennials receive in comparison to their parents, opting instead to speculate about the apparently decreased desirability of home ownership.112 In February 2017, the New York Times reported that “about 40 percent of 22-, 23- and 24-year-olds receive some financial assistance from their parents for living expenses,” but the article did not frame millennials’ lack of economic mobility in terms of class inequalities.¹¹³

25.

Google Screenwise: Consenting to Surveillance Capitalism

Sydney Li and Jason Kelley, “Google Screenwise: An Unwise Trade of All Your Privacy for Cash,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 1, 2019, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/google-screenwise-unwise-trade-all-your-privacy-cash, republished by Common Dreams, February 4, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/04/google-screenwise-unwise-trade-all-your-privacy-cash.

Dami Lee, “Google Also Monitored iPhone Usage with a Private App,” The Verge, January 30, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18204064/apple-google-monitoring-phone-usage-screenwise-meter.

Student Researcher: Fabrice Nozier (Drew University)

Faculty Evaluator: Lisa Lynch (Drew University)

Google has further blurred the lines between market research and corporate invasion of privacy with the introduction of Google Opinion Rewards, a survey app for Android and iOS users that allows them to earn “rewards.” In exchange, Google gets access to the phone screens and web browser windows of the app’s users. Rather than fooling regular users into acceding to secretive corporate “research” behind lengthy terms and conditions or hidden app permissions, Google disguises the overseeing function of Opinion Rewards as “metering”—a “funny word for surveillance,” Sydney Li and Jason Kelley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported.

The app’s users earn from ten cents to $1.00 per survey, or an estimated $50–100 per year. Dozens of third-party blog posts and YouTube videos targeted at Opinion Rewards users share the best ways to earn quick money in large sums from the program. The questionable ethics behind Opinion Rewards, however, does not lie in the legitimacy of the program’s payments, as users are “rewarded” through the trusted online company PayPal, but in the exchange that Google offers.

Opinion Rewards is segmented into two services, “Surveys App” and “Audience Measurement.” The first is an app, available for download on both the Google Play Store and the App Store, that encourages users to complete surveys ranging “from opinion polls, to hotel reviews, to merchant satisfaction surveys.”¹¹⁴ The second, more dystopian option requires registered households to install the Screenwise mobile app and web extension which monitors internet usage. Google also encourages, but does not require, the installation of their “TV Meter,” which monitors television usage through a built-in mic and an Opinion Rewards router and further tracks internet usage.

In January 2019, Google disabled the iOS version of the app because it violated Apple’s distribution policies; but Google Opinion Rewards continues to be available to Android users, who have installed it more than ten million times as of July 2019, according to Google Play.115

Although it has been widely reported that corporate giants such as Google and Facebook seek to track our every move, listen to our conversations, access our smartphones’ cameras, and even collect our Social Security numbers without our permission, Google’s Opinion Rewards marks a change in corporate surveillance, with responsibility for opting-in shifted onto the surveilled users in exchange for 20-dollar gift cards and other “rewards.”

In February 2019, the New York Times published an editorial that reported on Google and Facebook paying people to download apps that track their phone activity and usage habits, and called for the Federal Trade Commission to “become the privacy watchdog that this era so desperately needs” and urged new laws to “lay down basic guarantees of privacy that won’t require you to wade through hundreds of thousands of words of legalese.”¹¹⁶ Apart from the Times’s editorial, the corporate media has neglected to cover how Google’s push to “meter” the market contributes to mass surveillance.

Notes

1. 1.

   Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008 [first published in 1920]), 7.

2. 2.

   Ibid., 6, 2; see also 37.

3. 3.

   Ibid., 6.

4. 4.

   Ibid.

5. 5.

   Ibid., 42–43.

6. 6.

   Ibid., 59.

7. 7.

   For more specific detail on the review process that Project Censored undertakes to reach this judgment, see the “Note on Research and Evaluation of Censored News Stories,” below.

8. 8.

   When those who control the news “arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable,” Lippmann wrote. “Public opinion is blockaded.” Ibid., 6.

9. 9.

   Ibid., 28.

10. 10.

    Andy Lee Roth, comp. and ed., Introduction to “The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2016–17,” in Censored 2018: Press Freedoms in a “Post-Truth” World, eds. Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017), 31–37, 33; and Andy Lee Roth, comp. and ed., Introduction to “The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2017–18,” in Censored 2019: Fighting the Fake News Invasion, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018), 37–40, 39.

11. 11.

    Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 34.

12. 12.

    Reflecting on the effectiveness of US propaganda in promoting public support for the country’s entry into World War I, Lippmann quoted with approval Frank I. Cobb, editor of the crusading New York World, who observed that millions of Americans “were willing to die for their country, but not willing to think for it.” Cobb, quoted in Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 4.

13. 13.

    Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 38.

14. 14.

    Ibid., 53.

15. 15.

    For information on how to nominate a story, see “How to Support Project Censored” at the back of this volume.

16. 16.

    Validated Independent News stories are archived on the Project Censored website at https://www.projectcensored.org/category/validated-independent-news.

17. 17.

    For a complete list of the Project’s judges and their brief biographies, see the acknowledgments at the back of this volume.

18. 18.

    “As Leak Investigations Surge, Our New Lawsuit Seeks the Trump Admin’s Guidelines on Surveillance of Journalists,” Freedom of the Press Foundation, November 29, 2017, https://freedom.press/news/lawsuit-seeks-government-guidelines-surveillance-journalists-leak-investigations-surge/.

19. 19.

    Jack Stubbs and Ginger Gibson, “Russia’s RT America Registers as ‘Foreign Agent’ in U.S.,” Reuters, November 13, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-media-restrictions-rt/russias-rt-america-registers-as-foreign-agent-in-u-s-idUSKBN1DD25B.

20. 20.

    On the use of national security letters, see Cora Currier, “Secret Rules Make It Pretty Easy for the FBI to Spy on Journalists,” The Intercept, January 31, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/secret-rules-make-it-pretty-easy-for-the-fbi-to-spy-on-journalists-2/.

21. 21.

    See, for example, John Fritze, “Trump Calls for Release of Classified Documents Tied to Russia Probe in Fox News Interview,” USA Today, March 27, 2019, updated March 28, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/27/donald-trump-release-classified-docs-tied-start-russia-probe/3295161002/; Liam Brennan, “The Truth about ‘Spying’ on the Trump Campaign,” New York Times, May 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/trump-campaign-spying-fbi-russia-.html; and John Solomon, “Steele’s Stunning Pre-FISA Confession: Informant Needed to Air Trump Dirt before Election,” The Hill, May 7, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/442592-steeles-stunning-pre-fisa-confession-informant-needed-to-air-trump-dirt.

22. 22.

    Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo, “Court Approved Wiretap on Trump Campaign Aide over Russia Ties,” New York Times, April 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/politics/carter-page-fisa-warrant-russia-trump.html. Subsequent coverage, by CNN, reported that Page “had been the subject of a secret intelligence surveillance warrant since 2014,” according to unnamed US officials. See Evan Perez, Pamela Brown, and Shimon Prokupecz, “One Year into the FBI’s Russia Investigation, Mueller is on the Trump Money Trail,” CNN, August 4, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/03/politics/mueller-investigation-russia-trump-one-year-financial-ties/index.html.

23. 23.

    Quoted in Elliott Gabriel, “Facebook Partners with Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to ‘Protect Democracy,’” MintPress News, May 22, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/facebook-partners-hawkish-atlantic-council-nato-lobby-group-protect-democracy/242289/.

24. 24.

    Quoted in Kevin Reed, “Facebook’s Partnership with the Atlantic Council,” World Socialist Web Site, September 8, 2018, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/08/atla-s08.html.

25. 25.

    Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore, “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,” New York Times, September 6, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html.

26. 26.

    For the impact of Facebook’s policies on Slate, see Will Oremus, “The Great Facebook Crash,” Slate, June 27, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/facebooks-retreat-from-the-news-has-painful-for-publishers-including-slate.html; see also Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, “How Facebook Screwed Us All,” Mother Jones, March/April 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/how-facebook-screwed-us-all/.

27. 27.

    For a summary of criticism of PropOrNot, see Lloyd Grove, “Washington Post on the ‘Fake News’ Hot Seat,” Daily Beast, December 9, 2016, updated April 13, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/washington-post-on-the-fake-news-hot-seat; on the Washington Post’s subsequent efforts to distance itself from PropOrNot, see Andrew Beaujon, “Washington Post Appends Editor’s Note to Russian Propaganda Story,” Washingtonian, December 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/12/07/washington-post-appends-editors-note-russian-propaganda-story/.

28. 28.

    Joseph Menn, “Facebook Expands Fake Election News Fight, but Falsehoods Still Rampant,” Reuters, September 19, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-elections/facebook-expands-fake-election-news-fight-but-falsehoods-still-rampant-idUSKCN1LZ2XY.

29. 29.

    Donie O’Sullivan, Drew Griffin, Curt Devine, and Atika Shubert, “Russia is Backing a Viral Video Company Aimed at American Millennials,” CNN, February 18, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/tech/russia-facebook-viral-videos/index.html.

30. 30.

    Ibid. On Nimmo’s questionable record as a reliable source, see Jeb Sprague and Max Blumenthal, “Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media ‘Just the Beginning,’ Says Top Neocon Insider,” MintPress News, October 24, 2018, https://www.mintpressnews.com/facebook-censorship-of-alternative-media-just-the-beginning-says-top-neocon-insider/250967/. Sprague and Blumenthal noted that Nimmo “embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin ‘influence accounts.’ Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.”

31. 31.

    Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA), “From Amazon Leaders to World Leaders: We Call for an Ambitious Post-2020 Agreement that Heals Our Mother Earth,” Common Dreams, November 21, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2018/11/21/amazon-leaders-world-leaders-we-call-ambitious-post-2020-agreement-heals-our.

32. 32.

    Ernesto Londoño, “Jair Bolsonaro, on Day 1, Undermines Indigenous Brazilians’ Rights,” New York Times, January 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/americas/brazil-bolsonaro-president-indigenous-lands.html.

33. 33.

    Carol Giacomo, “Brazil’s New President Threatens ‘the Lungs of the Planet,’” New York Times, March 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/opinion/brazil-rain-forest.html.

34. 34.

    Kelly Trout and Lorne Stockman, “Drilling Towards Disaster: Why U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion is Incompatible with Climate Limits,” Oil Change International, January 2019, http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2019/01/Drilling-Towards-Disaster-Web-v3.pdf.

35. 35.

    Mose Buchele, “Report Says Texas’ Oil and Gas Boom Could Spell Climate ‘Disaster,’ KUT (NPR, Austin, TX), January 17, 2019, https://www.kut.org/post/report-says-texas-oil-and-gas-boom-could-spell-climate-disaster; Justin Mikulka, “The Fracking Industry’s Flaring Problem May be Worse Than We Thought,” DeSmogBlog, January 29, 2019, https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/29/fracking-industry-gas-flaring-problem; and Andrea Germanos, “Climate Crisis be Damned, ‘Shale Revolution’ Poised to Make US Net Exporter of Oil in Three Years,” Common Dreams, March 11, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/11/climate-crisis-be-damned-shale-revolution-poised-make-us-net-exporter-oil-three.

36. 36.

    E.g., Brad Plumer, “How Big a Deal is Trump’s Fuel Economy Rollback? For the Climate, Maybe the Biggest Yet,” New York Times, August 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/climate/trump-climate-emissions-rollback.html; Tony Barboza, “Rolling Back Fuel Economy Standards Could Mean Bigger Cars—and Less Progress on Climate Change,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fuel-economy-impacts-20180406-story.html.

37. 37.

    Plumer, “How Big a Deal is Trump’s Fuel Economy Rollback?”

38. 38.

    “The Global Slavery Index 2018,” Walk Free Foundation, July 2018, 180, https://downloads globalslaveryindex.org/ephemeral/GSI-2018_FNL_180907_Digital-small-p-1562169871.pdf.

39. 39.

    “Country Studies: United States,” Global Slavery Index 2018, July 2018, https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country-studies/united-states/.

40. 40.

    Ibid.

41. 41.

    Ibid.

42. 42.

    Anne T. Gallagher, “What’s Wrong with the Global Slavery Index?” Anti-Trafficking Review, No. 8 (April 2017), 90–112, http://www.antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/article/view/228/216.

43. 43.

    Satoshi Sugiyama, “Report Finds Surprisingly High Rate of Slavery in Developed Countries,” New York Times, July 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/modern-slavery-report.html; Mark Tutton, “Modern Slavery in Developed Countries More Common Than Thought,” CNN, July 19, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/19/world/global-slavery-index-2018/index.html; and Kate Gibson, “‘Modern Slavery’ Ensnares Estimated 400,000 Americans,” CBS News, August 3, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/modern-slavery-ensnares-an-estimated-400000-americans/.

44. 44.

    Ewelina U. Ochab, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Modern Day Slavery,” Forbes, March 23, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2019/03/23/the-transatlantic-slave-trade-and-the-modern-day-slavery/#5144db912e55.

45. 45.

    Mallory Gafas and Tina Burnside, “Cyntoia Brown is Granted Clemency after Serving 15 Years in Prison for Killing Man Who Bought Her for Sex,” CNN, January 8, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/us/tennessee-cyntoia-brown-granted-clemency/index.html.

46. 46.

    “Human Trafficking Cases Hit a 13-Year Record High, New UN Report Shows,” UN News, January 29, 2019, https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/01/1031552.

47. 47.

    See, e.g., Christine Hauser, “Cyntoia Brown is Granted Clemency after 15 Years in Prison,” New York Times, January 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/cyntoia-brown-clemency-granted.html; Gafas and Burnside, “Cyntoia Brown is Granted Clemency”; Lisa Respers France, “Celebs Celebrate Cyntoia Brown Clemency Decision,” CNN, January 8, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/08/entertainment/celebs-cyntoia-brown/index.html.

48. 48.

    Christine Hauser, “Cyntoia Brown Inspires a Push for Juvenile Criminal Justice Reform in Tennessee,” New York Times, January 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/cyntoia-brown-tennessee-criminal-justice.html.

49. 49.

    Natelegé Whaley, “Cyntoia Brown Has Been Granted Clemency. But What’s Next for Others Like Her?” NBC News, January 9, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cyntoia-brown-has-been-granted-clemency-what-s-next-others-n956866.

50. 50.

    Andrea Powell, “Cyntoia Brown’s Clemency Must Begin a #MeToo Movement for Unacknowledged Sex Trafficking Survivors,” THINK (NBC News), January 8, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/cyntoia-brown-s-clemency-must-begin-metoo-movement-unacknowledged-sex-ncna956101">.

51. 51.

    “Arizona Shelter Shut in Latest Case of Alleged Migrant Child Abuse,” CBS News, October 10, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arizona-shelter-shut-in-latest-case-of-alleged-migrant-child-abuse/; Matthew Haag, “Thousands of Immigrant Children Said They were Sexually Abused in U.S. Detention Centers, Report Says,” New York Times, February 27, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/immigrant-children-sexual-abuse.html.

52. 52.

    Michael Grabell and Topher Sanders, “Immigrant Youth Shelters: ‘If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine,’” USA Today, July 27, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/27/immigrant-children-detention-crime/853470002/.

53. 53.

    The Editorial Board, “How My Stillbirth Became a Crime,” Part 7 of “A Woman’s Rights,” New York Times, December 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/28/opinion/stillborn-murder-charge.html.

54. 54.

    Jessica Mason Pieklo, “Murder Charges Dismissed in Mississippi Stillbirth Case,” Rewire.News, April 4, 2014, https://rewire.news/article/2014/04/04/murder-charges-dismissed-mississippi-stillbirth-case/.

55. 55.

    Molly Redden, “Jailed for Ending a Pregnancy: How Prosecutors Get Inventive on Abortion,” The Guardian, November 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/22/abortion-pregnancy-law-prosecute-trump.

56. 56.

    The Editorial Board, “A Woman’s Rights,” New York Times, December 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/28/opinion/pregnancy-women-pro-life-abortion.html.

57. 57.

    “2018 Access to Medicine Index,” Access to Medicine Foundation, November 20, 2018, https://www.accesstomedicineindex.org/publications/2018-access-to-medicine-index.

58. 58.

    Ibid., 10.

59. 59.

    Ibid., 9.

60. 60.

    “Goldman Sachs & UBS to Co-Host Investor Launches of 2018 Access to Medicine Index,” Access to Medicine Foundation, November 5, 2018, https://accesstomedicinefoundation.org/news/goldman-sachs-ubs-to-co-host-investor-launches-of-2018-access-to-medicine-index.

61. 61.

    “UBS Asset Management: 90th Investor to Endorse the Access to Medicine Index,” Access to Medicine Foundation, April 19, 2019, https://accesstomedicinefoundation.org/news/ubs-asset-management-90th-investor-to-endorse-the-access-to-medicine-index.

62. 62.

    Ben Hirschler, “Big Pharma Leaves Big Gaps: Drugmakers Urged to Do More for Poor,” Reuters, November 20, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-pharmaceuticals-poor/big-pharma-leaves-big-gaps-drugmakers-urged-to-do-more-for-poor-idUSKCN1NP1FS.

63. 63.

    Molly Renaud, Rostyslav Korolov, David Mendonça, and William Wallace, “Social Network Structure as a Predictor of Social Behavior: The Case of Protest in the 2016 US Presidential Election,” Recent Developments in Data Science and Intelligent Analysis of Information (XVIII International Conference on Data Science and Intelligent Analysis of Information), August 5, 2018, 267–78, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-97885-7_27.

64. 64.

    “Homeland Defense,” Joint Publication 3-27, Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 10, 2018, https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_27.pdf.

65. 65.

    United States of America v. Robert Paul Rundo, Robert Boman, Tyler Laube, and Aaron Eason, United States District Court, Central District of California, October 20, 2018, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/421-robert-rundo-complaint/0f1e76cdeef814133f24/optimized/full.pdf.

66. 66.

    Conor Finnegan, “US Announces Sale of Anti-Tank Missiles to Ukraine over Russian Opposition,” ABC News, March 1, 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-announces-sale-anti-tank-missiles-ukraine-russian/story?id=53450406.

67. 67.

    Christian Picciolini, “‘Breaking Hate’ Extreme Groups at Home and Abroad,” Breaking Hate, MSNBC, May 10, 2019, https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-originals/watch/-breaking-hate-extreme-groups-at-home-and-abroad-59379781503.

68. 68.

    For Project Censored’s previous coverage of these findings, see John Michael Dulalas, Bethany Surface, Kamila Janik, Shannon Cowley, Kenn Burrows, and Rob Williams, “How Big Wireless Convinced Us Cell Phones and Wi-Fi are Safe,” in Censored 2019: Fighting the Fake News Invasion, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories, 2018), 48–52, https://www.projectcensored.org/4-how-big-wireless-convinced-us-cell-phones-and-wi-fi-are-safe/; and Julian Klein, Casey Lewis, Kenn Burrows, and Peter Phillips, “Accumulating Evidence of Ongoing Wireless Technology Health Hazards,” in Censored 2015: Inspiring We the People, eds. Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 62–64, https://www.projectcensored.org/14-accumulating-evidence-ongoing-wireless-technology-health-hazards/.

69. 69.

    Yael Stein, “Letter to the FCC from Dr. Yael Stein MD in Opposition to 5G Spectrum Frontiers,” Environmental Health Trust, July 9, 2016, https://ehtrust.org/letter-fcc-dr-yael-stein-md-opposition-5g-spectrum-frontiers/.

70. 70.

    “5G Service is Coming—and so are Health Concerns over the Towers that Support It,” CBS News, May 29, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/5g-network-cell-towers-raise-health-concerns-for-some-residents/.

71. 71.

    Debra Goldschmidt and Jacqueline Howard, “Federal Health Agencies Disagree over Link between Cell Phone Radiation and Cancer,” CNN, November 1, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/01/health/cell-phone-radiation-cancer-nih-fda/index.html.

72. 72.

    Brian Fung, “The Race to 5G Wireless Tech is On. A Report Finds Americans May Have an Early Lead,” Washington Post, February 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/19/race-g-wireless-tech-is-report-finds-americans-have-an-early-lead/.

73. 73.

    Sarah Brickman, Ben Crair, and Lucia von Reusner, “Flunking the Planet: Scoring America’s Food Companies on Sustainable Meat,” Mighty Earth, August 2018, http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Flunking-the-Planet-Americas-Leading-Food-Companies-Fail-on-Sustainable-Meat.pdf.

74. 74.

    “Flunking the Planet: America’s Leading Food Companies Fail on Sustainable Meat,” Mighty Earth, undated [August 2018], http://www.mightyearth.org/meat-scorecard.

75. 75.

    See K.J. Van Meter, P. Van Cappellen, and N.B. Basu, “Legacy Nitrogen May Prevent Achievement of Water Quality Goals in the Gulf of Mexico,” Science, Vol. 360 No. 6387 (April 27, 2018), 427–30.

76. 76.

    Brickman, Crair, and von Reusner, “Flunking the Planet,” 4, 18.

77. 77.

    “Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is ‘Largest’ Ever Recorded in U.S.,” CBS News, August 16, 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gulf-of-mexico-largest-dead-zone-ever-measured-fertilizer/.

78. 78.

    Jenna Gallegos, “The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is Larger Than Ever. Here’s What to Do about It,” Washington Post, August 4, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/08/04/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-larger-than-ever-heres-what-to-do-about-it/.

79. 79.

    Casey Smith, “New Jersey-Size ‘Dead Zone’ is Largest Ever in Gulf of Mexico,” National Geographic, August 2, 2017, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/gulf-mexico-hypoxia-water-quality-dead-zone/.

80. 80.

    Paul Lewis and Adam Federman, “Revealed: FBI Violated Its Own Rules while Spying on Keystone XL Opponents,” The Guardian, May 12, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/12/revealed-fbi-spied-keystone-xl-opponents.

81. 81.

    Adam Federman, “Kinder Morgan Paid Pennsylvania Police Department to ‘Deter Protests,’” Earth Island Journal, May 21, 2015, http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/kinder_morgan_paid_pennsylvania_police_department_to_deter_protests/.

82. 82.

    Ibid.

83. 83.

    See Ryan Shannon, “Lawsuit Targets Zinke’s Secretive Program Undermining Wildlife Protection,” Center for Biological Diversity, November 8, 2018, https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2018/endangered-species-11-08-2018.php.

84. 84.

    Doyle Rice, “25 Species, Including Pacific Walrus, Denied Endangered Protection by Trump Administration,” USA Today, October 4, 2017, updated October 5, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2017/10/04/trump-administration-denies-endangered-species-protection-pacific-walrus-and-two-dozen-oth-25-specie/732704001/; Dan Joling, “As Sea Ice Melts, Some Say Walruses Need to be Protected as Threatened Species,” Chicago Tribune, October 13, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/science/ct-sea-ice-melts-walrus-protection-20181013-story.html; Simon Worrall, “‘Extreme Conservation’ in the Most Hostile Places on Earth,” National Geographic, September 28, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/09/arctic-conservation-species-climate-change-warming-book-talk/; Amelia Urry, “The Fate of Future Endangered Species Could Hinge on a Semantic Argument,” Popular Science, July 30, 2018, https://www.popsci.com/endangered-species-act-future-walruses.

85. 85.

    Oliver Milman, “Walruses Face ‘Death Sentence’ as Trump Administration Fails to List Them as Endangered,” The Guardian, October 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/04/walrus-endangered-species-trump-administration.

86. 86.

    Darryl Fears, “Plan Strips Endangered Species Act of Key Provisions,” Washington Post, July 20, 2018, A14; published online as “Endangered Species Act Stripped of Key Provisions in Trump Administration Proposal” on July 19, 2018, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2018/07/19/endangered-species-act-stripped-of-key-provisions-in-trump-administration-proposal/.

87. 87.

    David Bernhardt, “The Greatest Good for Endangered Species,” Washington Post, August 10, 2018, A17; published online as “At Interior, We’re Ready to Bring the Endangered Species Act Up to Date” on August 9, 2018, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/at-interior-were-ready-to-bring-the-endangered-species-act-up-to-date/2018/08/09/2775cd8e-9a96-11e8-b55e-5002300ef004_story.html.

88. 88.

    See Hannah Rider, “David Bernhardt’s War on Wildlife,” Westwise (Medium), March 29, 2019, https://medium.com/westwise/david-bernhardts-war-on-wildlife-105860cfef2b.

89. 89.

    Darryl Fears, “A 14-Year-Long Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Verges on Becoming One of the Worst in U.S. History,” Washington Post, October 21, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-14-year-long-oil-spill-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-verges-on-becoming-one-of-the-worst-in-us-history/2018/10/20/f9a66fd0-9045-11e8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html; A.J. Willingham, “An Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard of Could Become One of the Biggest Environmental Disasters in the US,” CNN, October 24, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/23/us/taylor-energy-oil-largest-spill-disaster-ivan-golf-of-mexico-environment-trnd/index.html; Daniel Moritz-Rabson, “14-Year-Long Oil Spill in Gulf Coast Likely to Become Worst in U.S. History,” Newsweek, October 22, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/14-year-oil-spill-become-worst-us-history-1181872.

90. 90.

    Lucius Couloute and Daniel Kopf, “Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among Formerly Incarcerated People,” Prison Policy Initiative, July 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/outofwork.html.

91. 91.

    See, for example, The Editorial Board, “No One Benefits When Formerly Incarcerated People Can’t Get a Job,” Orange County Register, July 16, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/07/16/no-one-benefits-when-formerly-incarcerated-people-cant-get-a-job/.

92. 92.

    Chandra Bozelko and Ryan Lo, “As Prison Strikes Heat Up, Former Inmates Talk about Horrible State of Labor and Incarceration,” USA Today, August 25, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/spotlight/2018/08/25/nationwide-prison-strikes-labor-inmates-policing-usa/1085896002/.

93. 93.

    Johnny Taylor, “How Businesses Can Help Reduce Recidivism,” CNN, March 20, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/opinions/businesses-can-reduce-recidivism-opinion-taylor/index.html.

94. 94.

    Ibid. The CNN article attributed the 60 percent figure to a 2002 study sponsored by the Institute for Research on Poverty, based on survey data collected between 1992 and 1994.

95. 95.

    “Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment,” United Nations Development Programme, 2017, http://journey-to-extremism.undp.org/en/reports.

96. 96.

    Charlotte Alfred, “Why People Join Nigeria’s Boko Haram,” HuffPost, April 16, 2016, updated January 7, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boko-haram-recruitment-tactics_n_571265afe4b06f35cb6fc595.

97. 97.

    Hilary Matfess, “Here’s Why So Many People Join Boko Haram, Despite Its Notorious Violence,” Washington Post, April 26, 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/04/26/heres-why-so-many-people-join-boko-haram-despite-its-notorious-violence/.

98. 98.

    See, e.g., “West Africa: The Plights of a Forgotten Crisis,” Oxfam International, undated, https://www.oxfam.org/en/west-africa-plights-forgotten-crisis [accessed May 2, 2019].

99. 99.

    Asa Winstanley, “Meet the Spies Injecting Israeli Propaganda into Your News Feed,” Electronic Intifada, January 24, 2018, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/meet-spies-injecting-israeli-propaganda-your-news-feed.

100. 100.

     Michael W. Beck, Iñigo J. Losada, Pelayo Menéndez, Borja G. Reguero, Pedro Díaz-Simal, and Felipe Fernández, “The Global Flood Protection Savings Provided by Coral Reefs,” Nature Communications, Vol. 9, Article no. 2186 (2018), June 12, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04568-z.

101. 101.

     Doyle Rice, “Coral Reefs Save Billions of Dollars Worldwide by Preventing Floods,” USA Today, June 12, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/06/12/coral-reefs-save-billions-dollars-worldwide-preventing-floods/695056002/.

102. 102.

     Kendra Pierre-Louis, “Scientists Find Some Hope for Coral Reefs: The Strong May Survive,” New York Times, December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/climate/coral-reefs-natural-selection.html.

103. 103.

     Ania Bartkowiak, “Beauty and Bleakness: The Efforts to Conserve Coral Reefs,” New York Times, June 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/lens/beauty-and-bleakness-the-efforts-to-conserve-coral-reefs.html.

104. 104.

     Katie Silver, “Could Electric Biorocks Save Coral Reefs?” BBC, May 7, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150506-why-we-should-electrify-the-ocean.

105. 105.

     Steve Baragona, “This Coral Restoration Technique is ‘Electrifying’ a Balinese Village,” Smithsonian, May 25, 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/coral-restoration-technique-electrifying-balinese-village-180959206/.

106. 106.

     Michael Males, “Stockton, San Bernardino School District Officers Have Arrested over 90,000 Youths,” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, May 2015, http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/final_childcrime-stockton_supplement.pdf.

107. 107.

     Megan French-Marcelin and Sarah Hinger, “Bullies in Blue: The Origins and Consequences of School Policing,” American Civil Liberties Union, April 2017, https://www.aclu.org/report/bullies-blue-origins-and-consequences-school-policing.

108. 108.

     [Proposed] Final Judgment, The People of the State of California, ex. rel. Xavier Becerra, Attorney General of the State of California v. Stockton Unified School District, Superior Court of the State of California, County of Sacramento, undated, marked received January 18, 2019, online at the Office of the Attorney General, State of California Department of Justice, at https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/filed-proposed-final-judgment.pdf.

109. 109.

     See, for example, Sawsan Morrar, “Stockton Schools Reach Settlement with State over Discrimination Allegations,” Sacramento Bee, January 24, 2019, https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article224973715.html.

110. 110.

     Maureen Washburn and Renee Menart, “Unmet Promises: Continued Violence & Neglect in California’s Division of Juvenile Justice,” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, February 2019, http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/unmet_promises_continued_violence_and_neglect_in_california_division_of_juvenile_justice.pdf.

111. 111.

     Marisa Lagos, “State Juvenile Justice Facilities are Failing Kids, Report Finds,” The California Report, KQED (San Francisco), February 19, 2019, https://www.kqed.org/news/11727255/state-juvenile-justice-facilities-are-failing-kids-report-finds.

112. 112.

     “Millennials are Falling Behind Their Boomer Parents,” CNBC, January 13, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/13/millennials-are-falling-behind-their-boomer-parents.html; “Millennials Earn 20% Less Than Boomers Did at Same Stage of Life,” USA Today, January 13, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/01/13/millennials-falling-behind-boomer-parents/96530338/.

113. 113.

     Quoctrung Bui, “A Secret of Many Urban 20-Somethings: Their Parents Help with the Rent,” New York Times, February 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/upshot/a-secret-of-many-urban-20-somethings-their-parents-help-with-the-rent.html.

114. 114.

     “Google Opinion Rewards,” Google, undated, https://surveys.google.com/google-opinion-rewards/ [accessed June 29, 2019].

115. 115.

     Dami Lee, “Google Disables App that Monitored iPhone Usage in Violation of Apple’s Rules,” The Verge, January 30, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18204350/google-screenwise-app-ios-apple-violation; “Google Opinion Rewards,” Google Play, July 8, 2019, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks.

116. 116.

     The Editorial Board, “How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent,” New York Times, February 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/internet-facebook-google-consent.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/internet-facebook-google-consent.html.