The foundations of injustice favoring the 1% are everywhere and Occupy has found many suitable targets among the corporate elite. The financial and extraction sectors have been clearly located (Phillips and Soeiro, 2012).  One target hard to find is the force that propels us toward nuclear war. The potential persists for nuclear weapons to terminate much of human life immediately and to make the environment unable to support the continuation of life. Public concern, once high, has declined. Unfortunately the risk has not. The likelihood of nuclear weapons use is increasing by new weapons research and by the proliferation of drones. The hidden hand that exacerbates this danger needs to be occupied, but it first must be located.

 THE DANGER

Much of the concern over matters nuclear has been reshaped by official response to the tragedy of 9/11. Had that been an attack with just one 20 megaton bomb exploding on the surface of Columbus Circle in New York, it would have produced a hole where twenty city blocks had been, a hole deep enough to hide a 20 story building. All brick and wood frame houses within 7.7 miles would be completely destroyed. The blast waves would carry through the entire underground subway system. Up to fifteen miles from ground zero flying debris, propelled by displacement effects would cause more casualties. 200,000 separate fires would be ignited producing a firestorm with temperatures up to 1,500 degrees F. and wind velocities to 150 MPH. The fabric of water supplies, food and fuel for transportation, medical services, and electric power would be destroyed. And radiation damages that destroy and deform living things would continue for 240,000 years. Such bombs, and others still larger and more destructive, are contained in the warheads of missiles, many of them capable of delivering multiple warheads from a single launch (Pilisuk, 2008).

The Physicians for Social Responsibility released a study estimating one billion people — one-sixth of the human race — could starve over the decade following a single nuclear detonation.   A key finding was that corn production in the US would decline by an average of 10% for an entire decade, with the most severe decline (20%) in year 5. Another forecast was that increases in food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest The 925 million people in the world who are already chronically malnourished (with a baseline consumption of 1,750 calories or less per day), would be put at risk by a 10% decline in their food consumption.

These nukes are dangerous, useless and expensive. More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they cannot address today’s actual security threats. Today, there are nine nuclear powers and the dangers of nuclear proliferation are even more acute than 28 years ago. Even the hard-line defenders of nuclear weapons are scared. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn — four senior architects of the Cold War and here-to-fore ardent defenders of the theory of nuclear deterrence — calling on the United States to lead the way toward the global abolition of nuclear weapons. They describe the present state as “precarious.” and indicate no strategic need for these weapons (Schultz et al, 2011). Worse, they rely on outdated technology and are prone to accidents. Yet vast sums of taxpayer dollars are pumped into keeping them mission-ready – in a world in which they have no mission.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), released its 180-page study showing that nuclear-armed nations spend over 100 billion dollars each year assembling new warheads, modernizing old ones, and building ballistic missiles, bombers and submarines to launch them.  The United States still has about 2,500 nuclear weapons deployed and 2,600 more as backup (Rosenthal, 2011). Washington and Moscow account for 90% of all nuclear weapons.  In the 2010 New Start treaty, both countries pledged to reduce their number of deployed long-range nuclear weapons to 1,550 (from 2,200) by 2017. But both countries plan to increase nuclear spending in coming years, as they replace or upgrade aging nuclear production facilities and delivery vehicles — submarines, missiles and bombers (AFSC, 2010) This makes no sense and presses the question, “Why.”

Nuclear weapons, missile delivery systems and anti-missile defenses in Europe continue a cold war game that prevents getting rid of nuclear weapons. Most European nuclear weapon sites do not meet US security needs (Kristensen, 2012). Ending that game in Europe, would clear the way for the US and Russia to agree on unprecedented cuts to their bloated arsenals – which now represent more than 90% of the nuclear weapons on the planet. This is a critical step in ending the threat of nuclear weapons.

 THE COST

The annual Pentagon budget request conceals many expenses including those for conducting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and others related to covert operations. Homeland Security. Also absent, and to the point of this paper, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them (Hellman, 2012). Two reports, one by Brookings and another by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace confirm that world spending on nuclear weapons now surpasses 1 Trillion dollars in a decade (Blair & Brown, 2011). Some is obviously beyond any conceivable military need.

Republican Senator Tom Coburn, has called for cutting the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1,220, the ballistic missile submarine fleet to 11 from 14, and intercontinental ballistic missiles to 300 from 500. He also favors delaying the purchase of new bombers until the mid 2020s. Total savings, according to Mr. Coburn, would be at least $79 billion over the next decade. It is a sensible beginning. Next he advises that we do not modernize the B61 tactical nuclear bombs in Europe. No one can imagine that the United States would ever use a nuclear weapon on a European battlefield, and Washington is in discussions with NATO to bring them home to be dismantled. If the Europeans want to keep them for political reasons, they could pick up the tab: Savings: $1.6 billion. Actually 5 NATO countries have called for removal of all nuclear weapons from Europe, (Borger, 2012). Coburn urges a halt to construction of the new plutonium storage facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Costs have increased tenfold, and there are serious safety questions about the location — along a fault line and near an active volcano; savings: $2.9 billion.

Coburn urges a halt construction of the Energy Department’s Savannah River facility that is supposed to recycle plutonium from dismantled weapons into mox, a fuel for nuclear power plants. The sole customer for the fuel dropped the contract. Savings: $4 billion. Another $6 billion could be saved by canceling the uranium processing facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight says that with $100 million in upgrades, another facility there can do the same work.  Down-blending more of the 400 metric tons of highly enriched uranium in United States weapons stocks for sale to nuclear power plants would save another $23 billion. The administration has neglected this, while investing in programs that increase the life of nuclear warheads (Rosenthal. 2011).

Despite a White House pledge to seek a world without nuclear weapons, the 2011 federal budget for nuclear weapons research and development exceeded $7 billion and could (if the Obama administration has its way) exceed $8 billion per year by the end of this decade. This steady and growing investment stands in stark contrast to the promising U.S. rhetoric of nuclear disarmament (National Nuclear Security Administration, 2012)

If instead of this increase, we were to freeze the DoE weapons budget at current levels – a saving of $4.3 billion over five years t would permit an increase in current DoE cleanup budget by 15 percent annually for five years and provide 312,000 households with renewable energy for 20 years.

In 2011 there was a 25 percent budget increase for Stockpile Support, which translates as testing the reliability of nuclear bombs to explode as planned. Scientific reports prepared for the Pentagon have found “no evidence” that stockpiled U.S. nuclear weapons have deteriorated (Kristensen & Oelrich, 2009). According to the Federation of American Scientists (2010), the weapons are “good to go” for decades to come.  Nor is there a logical reason why one needs to know whether these weapons, (which must never be used and which the major powers have pledged to eliminate), will explode precisely at the force level originally intended.  The Livermore Laboratory was non-the less contracted to develop a National Ignition Facility tasked to replicate the effects of a detonated Hydrogen bomb so that the widely unpopular underground testing could be replaced by another means for determining the reliability of weapons in the stockpile. The work is classified so details of what has been accomplished are not known. The project, however, has not visibly produced anything usable and has extended long beyond its predicted dates for success. Its initial budget of  $1.1 billion was intended for work to be completed in 2002.  The price tag has risen to  $3.5 billion with congress dutifully adding about $450 million every year. That 25% increase in Department of Energy budget could have provided four-year scholarships for 10,432 university students.

Some of the DOE budget is absolutely needed. The Cooperative Threat Reduction and Global Threat Reduction Initiatives are critical priorities to reduce the risk of terrorists being able to acquire sufficient nuclear materials. Currently the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) monitors the amounts of weapons grade uranium in most countries (Nuclear Threat Initiative, n,d). While the US and Russia have both failed to make good faith efforts toward elimination of nuclear weapons as required by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the US has still done significant work in obtaining nuclear weapons materials from other nations before they become part of the nuclear weapons club (National Nuclear Security Administration, 2012). But geo-politically motivated efforts to restrict some nations while permitting nuclear weapons among others is a dangerous policy.  Ultimately, we will never be able to secure loose nuclear-grade material if more countries continue to produce new nuclear weapons.  The best hope for such security lies in a global nuclear disarmament campaign, spearheaded by the United States, showing a real commitment to reducing their arsenal through the ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Moreover, the separation between uses for nuclear weapons and for nuclear power is illusive. The Fukishima disaster occurred in perhaps the world’s most technically advanced nation. Norman Solomon who studied the victims of many nuclear tragedies comments, “Nuclear power — from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years — is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations” (Solomon, 2012).

Nuclear weapons go along with ways to launch them. The missile budget is within the Department of Defense.  The FY 2013 budget request is $7.750 billion to develop and deploy sensors, interceptors, and command and control systems that constitute the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) to provide U.S. homeland defense and regional missile defense for deployed forces, allies, and friends (Missile Defense Agency, 2012)

The inherent difficulty in detecting missiles already launched, distinguishing those designed as decoys from the real ones and then shooting them in space adds up to expensive research with dubious results. To assure funds, the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a non-profit educational institution, which does not reveal its donors, works to educate congress and the public of the necessity for such weapons, even while essential domestic services are squeezed. The waste has consequences.

The $800 million budgeted to develop a new nuclear-capable cruise missile would provide one year of “HeadStart” for over 95,000 children. Revoking Stockpile support entirely for just one year would save  $2 billion, enough to create more than 58,000 education-related jobs. Reducing the Navy’s Trident submarine fleet from 14 to 10 vessels would save  $1.3 billion over 10 years. This would build more than 4,500 affordable housing units (Hellman, 2012).

 CROSSING THE LINE

Continued nuclear weapons development is more than a wasteful drain on the budget and more also than a threat of large-scale disaster. The use of depleted uranium in weapons has been common over the past decades but often disregarded since the major health consequences are long term rather than immediate. Moreover, the spread of Missile and anti-missile technology increases the number of players able to plan a nuclear weapon attack.

One critical line during the cold war was the tacit understanding that nuclear bombs were not to be used. This held even during times of US repudiation of a “no first use” agreement. With research and development of tactical nuclear weapons such as the “bunker buster” and with the use of depleted uranium in weapons, the line has been blurred.

Political support has been building for an Israeli strike against a nuclear weapons threat (which according to a consensus of all US intelligence agencies does not exist).  The more credible objective is to retain political support for nuclear weapons development for a potent sector of scientific and corporate beneficiaries. Nothing would work better than an alleged victory using a smaller nuclear device to cripple deeply buried nuclear technology sites in Iran.

 DRONES

Now another technology threatens to blur a distinction between those parties large enough and sufficiently equipped to have nuclear weapons and launching devices. A multitude of groups and municipalities are able to make use of drones. The drone industry produces unmanned aircraft ranging from surveillance cameras the size of an insect, to the larger weaponized forms that have been used in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. Such use has been criticized as a violation of international law and a cause for anger toward the US. Drones have also moved society to place in which killing is no longer attributable to a soldier who did it and in which the perpetrator suffers no immediate loss.  In fact, entire interconnected systems of surveillance are being designed to operate free of human guidance (Aftergood, 2012 b).

In March, 2012 two drones performed the first ever successful test of autonomous in-flight refueling at 45,000 feet, permitting longer distance strikes. It was revealed that Sandia National Labs & Northrup have favorably assessed the feasibility of a nuclear-powered drone. Two months later, NATO ended its summit by signing a $1.7 billion deal with Northrup Grumman for its Global Hawk UAVs (unmanned aviation vehicles) to be integrated into NATO’s “Allied Ground Surveillance” system. On June 1, a liquid hydrogen-fueled Boeing spy drone called “Phantom Eye,” designed to stay aloft for four or more days at a time, completed a successful flight (Halloway, 2012; Common Dreams Staff, 2012).  Firms like L-3 WESCAM work with highly advanced imaging products available to the defense industry for Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Targeting (ISRT). Most everyone and everything can now be watched and targeted.

Like most weapon systems, drones under NATO control inspire the acquisition of drones by potential adversaries. The military has worried about this as long ago as 2005, when the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) wrote a 44-page report detailing the potential for terrorist-controlled drones. According to the IDA report, potential terrorists have considered using them. Al-Qaeda and Colombia’s FARC have both experimented with unmanned weaponry. One technology expert has noted that the U.S. needs to develop a way to disable remote drones before they are used in a terrorist attack (Koebler, 2012

Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that several regimes, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have tried to secure contracts to purchase armed drones from American providers

WHO BENEFITS? THE NUCLEAR AND SPACE CABAL

The global economy finds itself unable to tap the increasing accumulation of wealth by a corporate elite. Hence, governments at all levels are pressing for ways to sustain essential human services. In return for a promise to pass a budget for 2012, the US Congress adopted legislation requiring across the board cuts in all discretionary programs.  With health care, libraries, nutrition programs and schools being pinched, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) announced that he would be unwilling to consider any reductions to U.S. nuclear weapons spending in order to avoid budget sequestration as mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act (see GSN, June 21).  Why the special treatment?

Bill Hartung lists major players in the nuclear weapons complex as General Dynamics which contracts for Ballistic Missile Submarines along with Boeing and Northrop Grumman, lead the contractors for bombers (with Lockheed Martin which is hoping to bid on the next generation bomber). Much of the work including, nuclear weapons labs, uranium and plutonium factories and related facilities, is carried out by corporations such as BAE Systems and Babcock International in the UK, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and Bechtel in the United States, Thales and Safran in France, and Larsen & Toubro in India (ICAN report). Not to be forgotten, the University of California, has management contracts for the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories. (ICAN; Hartung, 2011, 2012)

Nuclear-armed nations spend over 100 billion dollars each year on their weapons programs. The institutions most heavily involved in financing nuclear arms makers include Bank of America, BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase in the United States; BNP Paribas in France; Allianz and Deutsche Bank in Germany; Mistubishi UJF Financial in Japan; BBVA and Banco Santander in Spain; Credit Suisse and UBS in Switzerland; and Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland in Britain. Of the 322 financial institutions identified in the report, about half are based in the United States and a third in Europe (Deen, 2012; ICAN; Hartung, 2012). A coordinated global campaign for nuclear weapons divestment is urgently needed. Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu has called for this and some banks of indicated qualms about support for world shattering work (Deen, 2012).

THE INFLUENCE OF MONEY

The top 12 nuclear weapons contractors have thrown millions of dollars at what some have called the “Doomsday Caucus” on Capitol Hill, with the biggest recipients including people like Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), who is perhaps the biggest single advocate for the nuclear weapons complex in the entire Congress. He is chair of the strategic forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee (Deen, 2012).

Nuclear weapons and expensive delivery systems have not played a central role in wars since the Second World War. They stood instead as ultimate threats permitting lower levels of destruction in the numerous wars sought to create corporate friendly allies among the nations of the world and as threats by the Soviet Union to protect its own militarily supported occupations. Large military bases marked the sphere of influence of major powers. That strategy of massive visible force is now being replaced to combat a less powerful and more dispersed set of governments and dissident groups who are more inclined to fight with asymmetrical tactics. The weapon of choice to address such enemies with a more agile set of smaller specialized units (The Lilly Pad strategy), is the drone. Drones can track people and target them without relying upon direct combat. They are one manufacturing market that is succeeding in the US. It contributes to an integrated network of information from drone and other surveillance technologies, called Trapwire .The Texas based Stratfor has led in developing this network of cameras and other surveillance tools, that the federal government is constructing as an impenetrable, inescapable theater of surveillance (Wolverton, 2012b). Most of this is going unnoticed by Americans and unreported by the mainstream media. However, TrapWire is in use at military bases around the country.  A leaked email message from Stratfor described how the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, and Pentagon have all begun using TrapWire and are “on the system now, ” as are several multi-national corporations . Part of the ‘Allied Ground Surveillance’ system includes the five Global Hawk UAVs, built by Northrup Drummond at a cost of over $1 billion. Part of the danger comes from the potential for unmanned vehicles to be both finder of targets and destroyer of them. Some models were designed to have nuclear propulsion to enable them to stay in flight for many months. Some are designed to evade air defense systems permitting the possible explosion of a very deadly weapon in a populated area (Aftergood, 2012a: Fielding, 2012).

The lead company in both surveillance and bombing drones is General Atomics which sold more than 430 Predator and Reaper drones to the Defense Department between 1994 and 2010. General Atomics CEO James Blue notes the company’s political capital in its rapid rise. In 2006 the company led all other corporations in financing lavish trips for lawmakers, their families and staff to countries from Turkey to Australia where it is fighting to get sales of its drones approved. Sales are now approved to countries throughout the world as well as to local cities in the US (Benjamin, 2012).

General Atomics is not, however, the only American defense contractor anxious to peddle the Predator-style drones to other eager governments. Northrop Grumman and other companies continue to lobby Congress and the White House to ease export restrictions on drone sales. Such wide open sales could, of course, result in the drones ultimately ending up in the hands of regimes that would use the devices to harm American interests around the globe. AeroVironment, another California company, has grown rapidly with contracts for drones ranging from 5 and one half pounds to 13 pound backpack varieties, They worklike unmanned Kamakazee fighters, detecting and then destroying targets. Raytheon has been pioneering a variety of weapons to be launched by drones (Benjamin, 2012).

The drone caucus — like the technology it promotes — is becoming increasingly important in the nation’s capitol as the government looks to unmanned vehicles to help save money on defense, better patrol the country’s borders and provide a new tool to U.S. law enforcement agencies and civilians. Its publicly stated mission includes support of policies and budgets that promote a larger, more robust national security unmanned system capability, and recognize the urgent need to rapidly develop and deploy more Unmanned Systems in support of ongoing civil, military, and law enforcement operations: “It’s definitely a powerful caucus,” said Alex Bronstein-Moffly, an analyst with First Street Research Group, a D.C.-based company that analyzes lobbying data. “It’s probably up there in the more powerful caucuses that sort of is not talked about.” And, he notes that, caucus members are well placed to influence government spending and regulations (Replogle, 2012).

Congressman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) is the co-chair of the caucus. Notably, McKeon also serves as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

It is noteworthy that the caucus includes eight members of the House Committee on Appropriations, the body that has substantial control over the federal government’s purse strings. Many of the drone caucus members are supported financially by the industry they endorse. According to Bronstein-Moffly’s data, the 58 drone caucus members received a total of $2.3 million in contributions from political action committees affiliated with drone manufacturers since 2011. Furthermore, 21 members of the drone caucus represent border states. These congressmen received about $1 million in deposits to their campaign coffers from top large drone makers in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, according to information reported by the Center for Responsive Politics and analyzed by Fronteras Desk and Investigative Newsource (Replogle, 2012; Wolverton, 2012a). For example, General Atomics is among the top three all-time campaign contributors to California Congressmen Brian Bilbray, Ken Calvert, Jerry Lewis, and Buck McKeon.

 PUTTING THE PARTS TOGETHER

Nuclear Weapons Technologies are developing along with new capacities for delivery, particularly remote delivery The staggering budget for this dangerous drift is staunchly defended by corporate lobbyists and gigantic contracts are awarded  out of public view. The lines distinguishing larger nuclear weapons from those designed for battle are being crossed and a new growth industry of drones offers many nations and non-state actors the potential to launch very destructive weapons. . The world is quickly moving toward a matrix of surveillance vehicles of unknown origin and likely soon to include nuclear weapons. This is not the world that sane people wish to hand off to our children. The corporations and the members of congress most centrally involved in these changes are known but maintain a low public profile and the financial institutions funding them are among the world’s largest and most powerful. If the 1 percent are now funding potential annihilation then the 99% should take notice. We cannot boycott nuclear weapons since they are not consumer products. But Occupy Wall Street has provided a model for going to where the money is with a large spotlight. We can pressure banks for divestiture. We can make the contributions to the informal doomsday caucus and the official drone caucus a matter of public record.

The Abolition Coalition combines some of the best informed scientists and attorneys with a network of anti-nuclear groups. We can help Occupy efforts to highlight the nuclear war and drone beneficiaries. The experiment of life on earth is too precious for us to allow it to disappear.

______________________________________________________________________

Marc Pilisuk earned his PhD in 1961 from the University of Michigan in Clinical and Social Psychology. A Professor Emeritus at the University of California, he currently serves on the faculty at the San Francisco-based Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. The Peace and Justice Studies Association has awarded Marc the 2012 Howard Zinn Award for Lifetime Achievement in Peace Studies

References

Aftergood, S. (2012, March). Secret drone technology barred by “political conditions.” Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/03/sandia_drone.html

Aftergood, S. (2012, September). Greater autonomy for unmanned military systems urged. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/09/dsb_autonomy.html

American Friends Service Committee. (2010). Toward a nuclear free future: Making sense of nuclear weapons in 2010. Retrieved from http://afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/AFSC%20Nukes%20Resources.pdf

Benjamin, M. (2012). Drone warfare: Killing by remote control. New York: OR Books.

Blair, B. G. & Brown, M. A. (2011, June). World spending on nuclear weapons surpasses $1 trillion per decade. Global Zero. Retrieved from http://www.globalzero.org/en/page/cost-of-nukes

Borger, J. (2010, February). Five NATO states to urge removal of US nuclear arms in Europe. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/22/nato-states-us-nuclear-arms-europe

Common Dreams Staff. (2012, May). Drones of its own: NATO signs deal with Northrup Grumman for ‘global surveillance capabilities.’ Common Dreams. Retrieved from https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/21

Deen, T.  (2012). Abolitionists target funders of nuclear arms industry. Inter Press Service News. Retrieved from http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/03/abolitionists-target-funds-behind-nuclear-arms-industry/

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Fielding, N. (2012, April). US draws up plans for nuclear drones. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/02/us-plans-nuclear-drones

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The post Occupying the Merchants of Death appeared first on Project Censored.

by Laurel Krause with Mickey Huff

When Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven gun shots in thirteen seconds at Kent State University (KSU) on May 4, 1970, they murdered four unarmed, protesting college students and wounded nine others. For forty-two years, the United States government has held the position that Kent State was a tragic and unfortunate incident occurring at a noontime antiwar rally on an American college campus. In 2010, compelling forensic evidence emerged showing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were the lead agencies in managing Kent State government operations, including the cover-up. At Kent State, lawful protest was pushed into the realm of massacre as the US federal government, the state of Ohio, and the Ohio National Guard (ONG) executed their plans to silence antiwar protest in America.

The new evidence threatens much more than the accuracy of accounts of the Kent State massacre in history books. As a result of this successful, ongoing Kent State government cover-up, American protesters today are at much greater risk than they realize, with no real guarantees or protections offered by the US First Amendment rights to protest and assemble. This chapter intends to expose the lies of the state in order to uncensor the “unhistory” of the Kent State massacre, while also aiming toward justice and healing, as censoring the past impacts our perspectives in the present.

The killing of protesters at Kent State changed the minds of many Americans about the role of the US in the Vietnam War. Following this massacre, there was an unparalleled national response: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed across America in a student strike of more than four million. Young people across the nation had strong suspicions the Kent State massacre was planned to subvert any further protests arising from the announcement that the already controversial war in Vietnam had expanded into Cambodia.

Yet instead of attempting to learn the truth at Kent State, the US government took complete control of the narrative in the press and ensuing lawsuits. Over the next ten years, authorities claimed there had not been a command-to-fire at Kent State, that the ONG had been under attack, and that their gunfire had been prompted by the “sound of sniper fire.” Instead of investigating Kent State, the American leadership obstructed justice, obscured accountability, tampered with evidence, and buried the truth. The result of these efforts has been a very complicated government cover-up that has remained intact for more than forty years.¹

The hidden truth finally began to emerge at the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State massacre in May 2010, through the investigative journalism of John Mangels, science writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, whose findings supported the long-held suspicion that the four dead in Ohio were intentionally murdered at Kent State University by the US government.

Mangels commissioned forensic evidence expert Stuart Allen to professionally analyze a tape recording made from a Kent State student’s dormitory window ledge on May 4, 1970, forever capturing the crowd and battle sounds from before, during, and after the fusillade.² For the first time since that fateful day, journalists and concerned Americans were finally able to hear the devastating soundtrack of the US government murdering Kent State students as they protested against the Vietnam War.

The cassette tape—provided to Mangels by the Yale University Library, Kent State Collection, and housed all these years in a box of evidence admitted into lawsuits led by attorney Joseph Kelner in his representation of the Kent State victims—was called the “Strubbe tape” after Terry Strubbe, the student who made the recording by placing a microphone attached to a personal recorder on his dormitory window ledge. This tape surfaced when Alan Canfora, a student protester wounded at Kent State, and researcher Bob Johnson dug through Yale library’s collection and found a CD copy of the tape recording from the day of the shootings. Paying ten dollars for a duplicate, Canfora then listened to it and immediately knew he probably held the only recording that might provide proof of an order to shoot. Three years after the tape was found, the Plain Dealer commendably hired two qualified forensic audio scientists to examine the tape.

But it is really the two pieces of groundbreaking evidence Allen uncovered that illuminate and provide a completely new perspective into the Kent State massacre.

First, Allen heard and verified the Kent State command-to-fire spoken at noon on May 4, 1970. The command-to-fire has been a point of contention, with authorities stating under oath and to media for forty years that “no order to fire was given at Kent State,” that “the Guard felt under attack from the students,” and that “the Guard reacted to sniper fire.”³ Yet Allen’s verified forensic evidence of the Kent State command-to-fire directly conflicts with guardsmen testimony that they acted in self-defense. 

The government claim—that guardsmen were under attack at the time of the ONG barrage of bullets—has long been suspect, as there is nothing in photographic or video records to support the “under attack” excuse. Rather, from more than a football field away, the Kent State student protesters swore, raised their middle fingers, and threw pebbles and stones and empty tear gas canisters, mostly as a response to their campus being turned into a battlefield with over 2,000 troops and military equipment strewn across the Kent State University campus.

Then at 12:24 p.m., the ONG fired armor-piercing bullets at scattering students in a parking lot—again, from more than a football field away. Responding with armor-piercing bullets, as Kent State students held a peaceful rally and protested unarmed on their campus, was the US government’s choice of action.

The identification of the “commander” responsible for the Kent State command-to-fire on unarmed students has not yet been ascertained. This key question will be answered when American leadership decides to share the truth of what happened, especially as the Kent State battle was under US government direction. Until then, the voice ordering the command-to-fire in the Kent State Strubbe tape will remain unknown.

The other major piece of Kent State evidence identified in Allen’s analysis was the “sound of sniper fire” recorded on the tape. These sounds point to Terry Norman, FBI informant and provocateur, who was believed to have fired his low-caliber pistol four times, just seventy seconds before the command-to-fire.

Mangels wrote in the Plain Dealer, “Norman was photographing protestors that day for the FBI and carried a loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model . . . five-shot revolver in a holster under his coat for protection. Though he denied discharging his pistol, he previously has been accused of triggering the Guard shootings by firing to warn away angry demonstrators, which the soldiers mistook for sniper fire.”⁴

Video footage and still photography have recorded the minutes following the “sound of sniper fire,” showing Terry Norman sprinting across the Kent State commons, meeting up with Kent Police and the ONG. In this visual evidence, Norman immediately yet casually hands off his pistol to authorities and the recipients of the pistol show no surprise as Norman hands them his gun.⁵

The “sound of sniper fire” is a key element of the Kent State cover-up and is also referred to by authorities in the Nation editorial, “Kent State: The Politics of Manslaughter,” from May 18, 1970:

The murders occurred on May 4. Two days earlier, [Ohio National Guard Adjutant General] Del Corso had issued a statement that sniper fire would be met by gunfire from his men. After the massacre, Del Corso and his subordinates declared that sniper fire had triggered the fusillade.⁶

Yet the Kent State “sound of sniper fire” remains key, according to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, who noted President Richard Nixon’s reaction to Kent State in the Oval Office on May 4, 1970:

Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman told him [of the killings] late in the afternoon. But at two o’clock Haldeman jotted on his ever-present legal pad “keep P. filled in on Kent State.” In his daily journal Haldeman expanded on the President’s reaction: “He very disturbed. Afraid his decision set it off . . . then kept after me all day for more facts. Hoping rioters had provoked the shootings—but no real evidence that they did.” Even after he had left for the day, Nixon called Haldeman back and among others issued one ringing command: “need to get out story of sniper.”⁷

In a May 5, 1970, article in the New York Times, President Nixon commented on violence at Kent State:

This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the nation’s campuses, administrators, faculty and students alike to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strong against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.⁸

President Nixon’s comment regarding dissent turning to violence obfuscated and laid full blame on student protesters for creating violence at Kent State. Yet at the rally occurring on May 4th, student protester violence amounted to swearing, throwing small rocks, and volleying back tear gas canisters, while the gun-toting soldiers of the ONG declared the peace rally illegal, brutally herded the students over large distances on campus, filled the air with tear gas, and even threw rocks at students. Twenty minutes into the protest demonstration, a troop of National Guard marched up a hill away from the students, turned to face the students in unison, and fired.

The violence at Kent State came from the National Guardsmen, not protesting students. On May 4, 1970, the US government delivered its deadly message to Kent State students and the world: if you protest in America against the wars of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, the US government will stop at nothing to silence you.

Participating American militia colluded at Kent State to organize and fight this battle against American student protesters, most of them too young to vote but old enough to fight in the Vietnam War.⁹ And from new evidence exposed forty years after the massacre, numerous elements point directly to the FBI and COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) as lead agencies managing the government operation of the Kent State massacre, including the cover-up, but also with a firm hand in some of the lead-up.

Prior to the announcement of the Cambodian incursion, the ONG arrived in the Kent area acting in a federalized role as the Cleveland-Akron labor wildcat strikes were winding down. The ONG continued in the federalized role at Kent State, ostensibly to protect the campus and as a reaction to the burning of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) building. Ohio Governor James “Jim” Rhodes claimed the burning of the ROTC building on the Kent State University campus was his reason for “calling in the guard,” yet in this picture of the burning building, the ONG are clearly standing before the flames as the building burns.¹⁰

From eyewitness accounts, the burning of the ROTC building at Kent State was completed by undercover law enforcement determined to make sure it could become the symbol needed to support the Kent State war on student protest.¹¹

According to Dr. Elaine Wellin, an eyewitness to the many events at Kent State leading up to and including May 4th, there were uniformed and plain-clothes officers potentially involved in managing the burning of the ROTC building. Wellin was in close proximity to the building just prior to the burning and saw a person with a walkie-talkie about three feet from her telling someone on the other end of the communication that they should not send down the fire truck as the ROTC building was not on fire yet.¹²

A memo to COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan ordered a full investigation into the “fire bombing of the ROTC building.” But only days after the Kent State massacre, every weapon that was fired was destroyed, and all other weapons used at Kent State were gathered by top ONG officers, placed with other weapons and shipped to Europe for use by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so no weapons used at Kent could be traced.

From these pieces of evidence, it becomes clearer that the US government coordinated this battle against student protest on the Kent State campus. Using the playbook from the Huston Plan, which refers to protesting students as the “New Left,” the US government employed provocateurs, staged incidents, and enlisted political leaders to attack and lay full blame on the students. On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, the US government fully negated every student response as they criminalized the First Amendment rights to protest and assemble.¹³

The cover-up adds tremendous complexity to an already complicated event, making it nearly impossible to fairly try the Kent State massacre in the American justice system. This imposed “establishment” view that Kent State was about “civil rights”—and not about murder or attempted murder—led to a legal settlement on the basis of civil rights lost, with the US government consistently refusing to address the death of four students and the wounding of nine.¹⁴

Even more disheartening, efforts to maintain the US government cover-up at Kent State recently went into overdrive in April 2012, when President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) formally announced a refusal to open a new probe into the wrongs of Kent State, continuing the tired 1970 tactic of referring to Kent State as a civil rights matter.¹⁵

The April 2012 DOJ letters of response also included a full admission that, in 1979, after reaching the Kent State civil rights settlement, the FBI Cleveland office destroyed what they considered a key piece of evidence: the original tape recording made by Terry Strubbe on his dormitory window ledge. In a case involving homicides, the FBI’s illegal destruction of evidence exposes their belief to be “above the law,” ignoring the obvious fact that four students were killed on May 4, 1970. As the statute of limitations never lapses for murder, the FBI’s actions went against every law of evidence. The laws clearly state that evidence may not be destroyed in homicides, even when the murders are perpetrated by the US government.

The destruction of the original Strubbe tape also shows the FBI’s intention to obstruct justice: the 2012 DOJ letters on Kent State claim that, because the original Strubbe tape was intentionally destroyed, the copy examined by Allen cannot be compared to the original or authenticated. However the original Strubbe tape, destroyed by the DOJ, was never admitted into evidence.

The tape examined by Stuart Allen, however, is a one-to-one copy of the Kent State Strubbe tape admitted into evidence in Kent State legal proceedings by Joseph Kelner, the lawyer representing the victims of Kent State. Once an article has been admitted into evidence, the article is considered authentic evidentiary material.

Worse than this new smokescreen on the provenance of the Kent State Strubbe tape and FBI efforts to destroy evidence is that the DOJ has wholly ignored or refuted the tremendous body of forensic evidence work accomplished by Allen, and verified by forensic expert Tom Owen.¹⁶ If the US Department of Justice really wanted to learn the truth about what happened at Kent State and was open to understanding the new evidence, DOJ efforts would include organizing an impartial examination of Allen’s analysis and contacting him to present his examination of the Kent State Strubbe tape. None of this has happened.

Instead, those seeking justice through a reexamination of the Kent State historical record based on new evidence have been left out in the cold. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, involved in Kent State from the very beginning as a Cleveland city council person, asked important questions in a letter to the DOJ on April 24, 2012, titled, “Analysis of Audio Record of Kent State Shooting Leaves Discrepancies and Key Questions Unaddressed”:

While I appreciate the response from the Justice Department, ultimately, they fail to examine key questions and discrepancies. It is well known that an FBI informant, Terry Norman, was on the campus. That FBI informant was carrying a gun. Eyewitnesses testified that they saw Mr. Norman brandish that weapon. Two experts in forensic audio, who have previously testified in court regarding audio forensics, found gunshots in their analysis of the audio recording. Did an FBI informant discharge a firearm at Kent State? Did an FBI informant precipitate the shootings?

Who and what events led to the violent encounter that resulted in four students dead and nine others injured? What do the FBI files show about their informant? Was he ever debriefed? Has he been questioned to compare his statement of events with new analysis? How, specifically, did the DOJ analyze the tape? How does this compare to previous analysis conducted by independent sources that reached a different conclusion? The DOJ suggested noises heard in the recording resulted from a door opening and closing. What tests were used to make that determination? Was an independent agency consulted in the process?

For more than a year, I have pushed for an analysis of the Strubbe tape because Kent State represented a tragedy of immense proportions. The Kent State shooting challenged the sensibilities of an entire generation of Americans. This issue is too important to ignore. We must demand a full explanation of the events.¹⁷

Concerned Americans may join Congressman Kucinich in demanding answers to these questions and in insisting on an independent, impartial organization—in other words, not the FBI—to get to the bottom of this.

The FBI’s cloudy involvement includes questions about Terry Norman’s relationship to the FBI, addressed in Mangels’s article, “Kent State Shootings: Does Former Informant Hold the Key to the May 4th Mystery?”:

Whether due to miscommunication, embarrassment or an attempted cover-up, the FBI initially denied any involvement with Norman as an informant.

“Mr. Norman was not working for the FBI on May 4, 1970, nor has he ever been in any way connected with this Bureau,” director J. Edgar Hoover declared to Ohio Congressman John Ashbrook in an August 1970 letter.

Three years later, Hoover’s successor, Clarence Kelley, was forced to correct the record. The director acknowledged that the FBI had paid Norman $125 for expenses incurred when, at the bureau’s encouragement, Norman infiltrated a meeting of Nazi and white power sympathizers in Virginia a month before the Kent State shootings.¹⁸

Even more telling, Norman’s pistol disappeared from a police evidence locker and was completely retooled to make sure that the weapon—used to create the “sound of sniper fire” on May 4—would not show signs of use. Indeed, every “investigation” into Kent State shows that the FBI tampered, withheld, and destroyed evidence, bringing into question government involvement in both the premeditated and post-massacre efforts at Kent State. In examining all inquiries into Kent State, an accurate investigation has never occurred, as the groups involved in the wrongs of Kent State have been investigating themselves.¹⁹

The Kent State students never had a chance against the armed will of the US government in its aim to fight wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos back in 1970. Further, the First Amendment rights to protest and assemble have shown to be only vacuous platitudes. Forty-two years later, the Obama administration echoes the original drone of the US government denying the murder of protesters, pointing only to civil rights lost. When bullets were fired on May 4th at Kent State, US government military action against antiwar protesters on domestic soil changed from a civil rights breach to acts of murder and attempted murder.

Congressman Kucinich, in an interview with Pacifica Radio after his exchanges with DOJ by May of 2012, said,

There are some lingering questions that could change the way that history looks at what happened at Kent State. And I think that we owe it to the present generation of Americans, the generation of Americans that came of age during Kent, the students on campus, we owe it to the Guardsmen, who it was said opened fire without any provocation what so ever . . . we have to get to the truth.²⁰

As long as American leadership fails to consider killing protesters a homicidal action and not just about civil rights lost, there is little safety for American protesters today, leaving the door wide open for more needless and unnecessary bloodshed and possibly the killing of American protesters again. This forty-two-year refusal to acknowledge the death of four students relates to current US government practices toward protest and protesters in America, as witnessed at Occupy Wall Street over the past year. When will it ever become legal to protest and assemble in America again? Will American leadership cross the line to kill American protesters again?²¹

In a rare editorial addressing this issue, journalist Stephen Rosenfeld of AlterNet wrote,

History never exactly repeats itself. But its currents are never far from the present. As today’s protesters and police employ bolder tactics, the Kent State and Jackson State anniversaries should remind us that deadly mistakes can and do happen. It is the government’s responsibility to wield proportionate force, not to over-arm police and place them in a position where they could panic with deadly results.²²

Though forty-two years have passed, the lessons of Kent State have not yet been learned.

No More Kent States²³

In 2010, the United Kingdom acknowledged the wrongs of Bloody Sunday, also setting an example for the US government to learn the important lessons of protest and the First Amendment. In January 1972, during “Bloody Sunday,” British paratroopers shot and killed fourteen protesters; most of the demonstrators were shot in the back as they ran to save themselves.²⁴

Thirty-eight years after the Bloody Sunday protest, British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized before Parliament, formally acknowledging the wrongful murder of protesters and apologized for the government.²⁵ The healing in Britain has begun. Considering the striking similarity in events where protesters were murdered by the state, let’s examine the wrongs of Kent State, begin to heal this core American wound, and make a very important, humane course correction for America. When will it become legal to protest in America?

President Obama, the Department of Justice, and the US government as a whole must take a fresh look at Stuart Allen’s findings in the Kent State Strubbe tape. The new Kent State evidence is compelling, clearly showing how US covert intelligence took the lead in creating this massacre and in putting together the ensuing cover-up.

As the United States has refused to examine the new evidence or consider the plight of American protest in 2012, the Kent State Truth Tribunal formally requested the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague consider justice at Kent State.²⁶

Who benefited the most from the murder of student protesters at Kent State? Who was really behind the Kent State massacre? There is really only one US agency that clearly benefited from killing student antiwar protesters at Kent State: the Department of Defense.

Since 1970 through 2012, the military-industrial-cyber complex strongly associated with the Department of Defense and covert US government agencies have actively promoted never-ending wars with enormous unaccounted-for budgets as they increase restrictions on American protest. These aims of the Pentagon are evidenced today in the USA PATRIOT Act, the further civil rights–limiting National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and new war technologies like CIA drones.

Probing the dark and buried questions of the Kent State massacre is only a beginning step to shine much-needed light on the United States military and to illuminate how the Pentagon has subverted American trust and safety, as it endeavors to quell domestic protest against war at any cost since at least 1970.

Laurel Krause is a writer and truth seeker dedicated to raising awareness about ocean protection, safe renewable energy, and truth at Kent State. She publishes a blog on these topics at Mendo Coast Current. She is the cofounder and director of the Kent State Truth Tribunal. Before spearheading efforts for justice for her sister Allison Krause, who was killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, Laurel worked at technology start-ups in Silicon Valley.

Mickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College.  He did his graduate work in history on historical interpretations of the Kent State shootings and has been actively researching the topic more since his testimony to the Kent State Truth Tribunal in New York City in 2010.

Notes

[1.] For more background on Kent State and the many conflicting interpretations, see Scott L. Bills, Kent State/May 4: Echoes Through a Decade (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1982). Of particular interest for background on this chapter, see Peter Davies, “The Burning Question: A Government Cover-up?,” in Kent State/May 4, 150–60. For a full account of Davies’s work, see The Truth About Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). For a listing of other works see Selected Bibliography on the Events of May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, http://dept.kent.edu/30yearmay4/source/bib.htm.

[2.] John Mangels, “New Analysis of 40-Year-Old Recording of Kent State Shootings Reveals that Ohio Guard was Given an Order to Prepare to Fire,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), May 9, 2010, updated April 23, 2012, http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/05/new_analysis_of_40-year-old_re.html; Interview with Stuart Allen analyzing new evidence who said of the efforts, “It’s about setting history right.” See the footage “Kent State Shootings Case Remains Closed,” CNN, added April 29, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2012/04/29/justice-department-will-not-reopen-kent-state-shootings-case.cnn.

[3.] Submitted for the Congressional Record by Representative Dennis Kucinich, “Truth Emerging in Kent State Cold Case Homicide,” by Laurel Krause, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r111%3AE14DE0-0019%3A. For a brief introduction on the history and emerging historiography of the Kent State shootings, see Mickey S. Huff, “Healing Old Wounds: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Conflicts Over Historical Interpretations of the Kent State Shootings, 1977–1990,” master’s thesis, Youngstown State University, December 1999, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?acc_num=ysu999620326.

For the official government report, see The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1970), also known as the Scranton Commission. It should be noted that the Scranton Commission stated in their conclusion between pages 287 and 290 that the shootings were “unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable” but criminal wrongdoing was never established through the courts and no one was ever held accountable for the shootings. Also, it should be noted, that the interpretation that the guard was ordered to fire conflicts with Davies’s interpretation, in note 1 here, that even though he believes there was a series of cover-ups by the government, he has not attributed malice. For more on the Kent State cover-ups early on, see I. F. Stone, “Fabricated Evidence in the Kent State Killings,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1970, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/dec/03/fabricated-evidence-in-the-kent-state-killings.

[4.] Mangels, “Kent State Tape Indicates Altercation and Pistol Fire Preceded National Guard Shootings (audio),” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), October 8, 2010, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2010/10/analysis_of_kent_state_audio_t.html.

[5.] Kent State Shooting 1970 [BX4510], Google Video, at 8:20 min., http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3727445416544720642.

[6.] Editorial, “Kent State: The Politics of Manslaughter,” Nation, April 30, 2009 [May 18, 1970], http://www.thenation.com/article/kent-state-politics-manslaughter.

[7.] Charles A. Thomas, Kenfour: Notes On An Investigation (e-book), http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/kenfour3.

[8.] John Kifner, “4 Kent State Students Killed by Troops,” New York Times, May 4, 1970, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html#article.

[9.] Voting age was twenty-one at this time, until the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1971, which lowered the voting age to eighteen, partially in response to Vietnam War protests as youth under twenty-one could be drafted without the right to vote.

[10.] It should also be noted, that Rhodes was running for election the Tuesday following the Kent shootings on a law and order ticket.

[11.] “My Personal Testimony ROTC Burning May 2 1970 Kent State,” YouTube, April 28, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ppBkB4caY0&feature=youtu.be; Freedom of Information Act, FBI, Kent State Shooting, File Number 98-46479, part 7 of 8 (1970), http://vault.fbi.gov/kent-state-shooting/kent-state-shooting-part-07-of-08/view.

[12.] The Project Censored Show on The Morning Mix, “May 4th and the Kent State Shootings in the 42nd Year,” Pacifica Radio, KPFA, 94.1FM, May 4, 2012 live at 8:00 a.m., archived online at

Show description: The May 4th Kent State Shootings 42 Years Later: Justice Still Not Served with Congressman Dennis Kucinich commenting on the DOJ’s recent refusal to reopen the case despite new evidence of a Kent State command-to-fire and the ‘sound of sniper fire’ leading to the National Guard firing live ammunition at unarmed college students May 4, 1970; Dr. Elaine Wellin, Kent State eyewitness shares seeing undercover agents at the ROTC fire in the days before, provocateurs in staging the rallies at Kent, and at Kent State on May 4th; we’ll hear from investigator and forensic evidence expert Stuart Allen regarding his audio analysis of the Kent State Strubbe tape from May 4th revealing the command-to-fire and the ‘sound of sniper fire’ seventy seconds before; and we hear from Kent State Truth Tribunal director Laurel Krause, the sister of slain student Allison, about her efforts for justice at Kent State and recent letter to President Obama..

Also see Peter Davies’ testimony about agents provocateurs and the ROTC fire cited in note 1, “The Burning Question: A Government Cover-up?,” in Kent State/May 4, 150–60.

[13.] The Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), “Volume 2: Huston Plan,” http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_vol2.htm.

[14.] Associated Press, “Kent State Settlement: Was Apology Included?,” Eugene Register-Guard, January 5, 1979, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19790105&id=xvJVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BuIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3696,963632.

[15.] Mangels, “Justice Department Won’t Reopen Probe of 1970 Kent State Shootings,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), April 24, 2012, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2012/04/justice_department_wont_re-ope.html; and kainah, “Obama Justice Dept.: No Justice for Kent State,” Daily Kos, May 2, 2012, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/02/1086726/-Justice-Dept-No-Justice-for-Kent-State.

[16.] Mangels, “New Analysis.”

[17.] Letters between the Department of Justice and Representative Dennis Kucinich, archived at the Congressman’s website, April 20 and April 24 of 2012, http://kucinich.house.gov/uploadedfiles/kent_state_response_from_doj.pdf and http://kucinich.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=292306.

[18.] Mangels, “Kent State Shootings: Does Former Informant Hold the Key to the May 4 Mystery?,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland), December 19, 2010, http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2010/12/kent_state_shootings_does_form.html.

[19.] Freedom of Information Act, FBI.

[20.] The Project Censored Show on The Morning Mix, “May 4th and the Kent State Shootings in the 42nd Year.”

[21.] Steven Rosenfeld, “Will a Militarized Police Force Facing Occupy Wall Street Lead to Another Kent State?,” AlterNet, May 3, 2012, http://www.alternet.org/rights/155270/will_a_militarized_police_force_facing_occupy_wall_street_lead_to_another_kent_state_massacre.

[22.] Ibid.

[23.] Laurel Krause, “No More Kent States,” Mendo Coast Current, April 21, 2012, http://mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/13-day-for-kent-state-peace.

[24.] Laurel Krause, “Unjustified, Indefensible, Wrong,” Mendo Coast Current, September 13, 2010, http://mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/unjustified-indefensible-wrong.

[25.] Associated Press, “Bloody Sunday Report Blames British Soldiers Fully,” USA Today, June 15, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-06-15-Bloody-Sunday-Ireland_N.htm; and Cameron’s direct quote from Henry McDonald, Owen Bowcott, and Hélène Mulholland, “Bloody Sunday Report: David Cameron Apologises for ‘Unjustifiable’ Shootings,” Guardian, June 15, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/15/bloody-sunday-report-saville-inquiry.

[26.] Laurel Krause, “To the Hague: Justice for the May 4th Kent State Massacre?,” Mendo Coast Current, May 7, 2012, http://mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/may-4th-kent-state-massacre-a-call-for-truth-justice; for more on the Kent State Truth Tribunal, see www.TruthTribunal.org.

The post Kent State: Was It about Civil Rights or 
Murdering Student Protesters? appeared first on Project Censored.

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Abstract: This study asks Who are the the world’s 1 percent power elite? And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? We examine a sample of the 1 percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth. These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations, whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of removal.We also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of money, such as insurance companies. Finally, we analyze how global networks of centralized power—the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments in their service—plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their continued concentration of wealth and power. We demonstrate how the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital in the world.

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The Occupy Movement has developed a mantra that addresses the great inequality of wealth and power between the world’s wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of us, the other 99 percent. While the 99 percent mantra undoubtedly serves as a motivational tool for open involvement, there is little understanding as to who comprises the 1 percent and how they maintain power in the world. Though a good deal of academic research has dealt with the power elite in the United States, only in the past decade and half has research on the transnational corporate class begun to emerge.[i]

Foremost among the early works on the idea of an interconnected 1 percent within global capitalism was Leslie Sklair’s 2001 book, The Transnational Capitalist Class.[ii] Sklair believed that globalization was moving transnational corporations (TNC) into broader international roles, whereby corporations’ states of orgin became less important than international argreements developed through the World Trade Organization and other international institutions. Emerging from these multinational corporations was a transnational capitalist class, whose loyalities and interests, while still rooted in their corporations, was increasingly international in scope. Sklair writes:

The transnational capitalist class can be analytically divided into four main fractions: (i) owners and controllers of TNCs and their local affiliates; (ii) globalizing bureaucrats and politicians; (iii) globalizing professionals; (iv) consumerist elites (merchants and media). . . . It is also important to note, of course, that the TCC [transnational corporate class] and each of its fractions are not always entirely united on every issue. Nevertheless, together, leading personnel in these groups constitute a global power elite, dominant class or inner circle in the sense that these terms have been used to characterize the dominant class structures of specific countries.[iii]

Estimates are that the total world’s wealth is close to $200 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 percent. To be among the wealthiest half of the world, an adult needs only $4,000 in assets once debts have been subtracted. An adult requires more than $72,000 to belong to the top 10 percent of global wealth holders, and more than $588,000 to be a member of the top 1 percent.  As of 2010, the top 1 percent of the wealthist people in the world had hidden away between $21 trillion to $32 trillion in secret tax exempt bank accounts spread all over the world.[iv] Meanwhile, the poorest half of the global population together possesses less than 2 percent of global wealth.[v] The World Bank reports that, in 2008, 1.29 billion people were living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, and 1.2 billion more were living on less than $2.00 a day.[vi] Starvation.net reports that 35,000 people, mostly young children, die every day from starvation in the world.[vii] The numbers of unnecessary deaths have exceeded 300 million people over the past forty years. Farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up 4 percent from the year before—yet, billions of people go hungry every day. Grain.org describes the core reasons for ongoing hunger in a recent article, “Corporations Are Still Making a Killing from Hunger”: while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control global food prices and distribution.[viii] Addressing the power of the global 1 percent—identifying who they are and what their goals are—are clearly life and death questions.

It is also important to examine the questions of how wealth is created, and how it becomes concentrated. Historically, wealth has been captured and concentrated through conquest by various powerful enities. One need only look at Spain’s appropriation of the wealth of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early sixteenth century for an historical example of this process. The histories of the Roman and British empires are also filled with examples of wealth captured.

Once acquired, wealth can then be used to establish means of production, such as the early British cotton mills, which exploit workers’ labor power to produce goods whose exchange value is greater than the cost of the labor, a process analyzed by Karl Marx in Capital.[ix] A human being is able to produce a product that has a certain value. Organized business hires workers who are paid below the value of their labor power. The result is the creation of what Marx called surplus value, over and above the cost of labor. The creation of surplus value allows those who own the means of production to concentrate capital even more. In addition, concentrated capital accelerates the exploition of natural resources by private entrepreneurs—even though these natural resources are actually the common heritage of all living beings.[x]

In this article, we ask: Who are the the world’s 1 percent power elite? And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? We will examine a sample of the 1 percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth. These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations, whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of removal.

We will also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of money, such as insurance companies.

Finally, we analyze how global networks of centralized power—the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments in their service—plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their continued concentration of wealth and power.

The Extractor Sector: The Case of Freeport-McMoRan (FCX)

Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is the world’s largest extractor of copper and gold. The company controls huge deposits in Papua, Indonesia, and also operates in North and South America, and in Africa. In 2010, the company sold 3.9 billion pounds of copper, 1.9 million ounces of gold, and 67 million pounds of molybdenum. In 2010, Freeport-McMoRan reported revenues of $18.9 billion and a net income of $4.2 billion.[xi]

The Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia, employs 23,000 workers at wages below three dollars an hour. In September 2011, workers went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions. Freeport had offered a 22 percent increase in wages, and strikers said it was not enough, demanding an increase to an international standard of seventeen to forty-three dollars an hour. The dispute over pay attracted local tribesmen, who had their own grievances over land rights and pollution; armed with spears and arrows, they joined Freeport workers blocking the mine’s supply roads.[xii] During the strikers’ attempt to block busloads of replacement workers, security forces financed by Freeport killed or wounded several strikers.

Freeport has come under fire internationally for payments to authorities for security. Since 1991, Freeport has paid nearly thirteen billion dollars to the Indonesian government—one of Indonesia’s largest sources of income—at a 1.5 percent royalty rate on extracted gold and copper, and, as a result, the Indonesian military and regional police are in their pockets. In October 2011, the Jakarta Globe reported that Indonesian security forces in West Papua, notably the police, receive extensive direct cash payments from Freeport-McMoRan. Indonesian National Police Chief Timur Pradopo admitted that officers received close to ten million dollars annually from Freeport, payments Pradopo described as “lunch money.” Prominent Indonesian nongovernmental organization Imparsial puts the annual figure at fourteen million dollars.[xiii] These payments recall even larger ones made by Freeport to Indonesian military forces over the years which, once revealed, prompted a US Security and Exchange Commission investigation of Freeport’s liability under the United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

In addition, the state’s police and army have been criticized many times for human rights violations in the remote mountainous region, where a separatist movement has simmered for decades. Amnesty International has documented numerous cases in which Indonesian police have used unnecessary force against strikers and their supporters. For example, Indonesian security forces attacked a mass gathering in the Papua capital, Jayapura, and striking workers at the Freeport mine in the southern highlands. At least five people were killed and many more injured in the assaults, which shows a continuing pattern of overt violence against peaceful dissent. Another brutal and unjustified attack on October 19, 2011, on thousands of Papuans exercising their rights to assembly and freedom of speech, resulted in the death of at least three Papuan civilians, the beating of many, the detention of hundreds, and the arrest of six, reportedly on treason charges.[xiv]

On November 7, 2011, the Jakarta Globe reported that “striking workers employed by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold’s subsidiary in Papua have dropped their minimum wage increase demands from $7.50 to $4.00 an hour, the All-Indonesia Workers Union (SPSI) said.”[xv] Virgo Solosa, an official from the union, told the Jakarta Globe that they considered the demands, up from the (then) minimum wage of $1.50 an hour, to be “the best solution for all.”

Workers at Freeport’s Cerro Verde copper mine in Peru also went on strike around the same time, highlighting the global dimension of the Freeport confrontation. The Cerro Verde workers demanded pay raises of 11 percent, while the company offered just 3 percent.

The Peruvian strike ended on November 28, 2011.[xvi] And on December 14, 2011, Freeport-McMoRan announced a settlement at the Indonesian mine, extending the union’s contract by two years. Workers at the Indonesia operation are to see base wages, which currently start at as little as $2.00 an hour, rise 24 percent in the first year of the pact and 13 percent in the second year. The accord also includes improvements in benefits and a one-time signing bonus equivalent to three months of wages.[xvii]

In both Freeport strikes, the governments pressured strikers to settle. Not only was domestic militrary and police force evident, but also higher levels of international involvement. Throughout the Freeport-McMoRan strike, the Obama administration ignored the egregious violation of human rights  and instead advanced US–Indonesian military ties. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who arrived in Indonesia in the immediate wake of the Jayapura attack, offered no criticism of the assault and reaffirmed US support for Indonesia’s territorial integrity. Panetta also reportedly commended Indonesia’s handling of a weeks-long strike at Freeport-McMoRan.[xviii]

US President Barack Obama visited Indonesia in November 2011 to strengthen relations with Jakarta as part of Washington’s escalating efforts to combat Chinese influence in the Asia–Pacific region. Obama had just announced that the US and Australia would begin a rotating deployment of 2,500 US Marines to a base in Darwin, a move ostensibly to modernize the US posture in the region, and to allow participation in “joint training” with Australian military counterparts. But some speculate that the US has a hidden agenda in deploying marines to Australia. The Thai newspaper The Nation has suggested that one of the reasons why US Marines might be stationed in Darwin could be that they would provide remote security assurance to US-owned Freeport-McMoRan’s gold and copper mine in West Papua, less than a two-hour flight away.[xix]

The fact that workers at Freeport’s Sociedad Minera Cerro Verde copper mine in Peru were also striking at the same time highlights the global dimension of the Freeport confrontation. The Peruvian workers are demanding pay rises of eleven percent, while the company has offered just three percent. The strike was lifted on November 28, 2011.[xx]

In both Freeport strikes, the governments pressured strikers to settle. Not only was domestic militrary and police force evident, but also higher levels of international involvement. The fact that the US Secretary of Defense mentioned a domestic strike in Indonesa shows that the highest level of power are in play on issues affecting the international corporate 1 percent and their profits.

Public opinion is strongly against Freeport in Indonesia. On August 8, 2011, Karishma Vaswani of the BBC reported that “the US mining firm Freeport-McMoRan has been accused of everything from polluting the environment to funding repression in its four decades working in the Indonesian province of Papau. . . . Ask any Papuan on the street what they think of Freeport and they will tell you that the firm is a thief, said Nelels Tebay, a Papuan pastor and coordinator of the Papua Peace Network.”[xxi]

Freeport strikers won support from the US Occupy movement. Occupy Phoenix and East Timor Action Network activists marched to Freeport headquarters in Phoenix on October 28, 2011, to demonstrate against the Indonesian police killings at Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg mine.[xxii]

Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) chairman of the board James R. Moffett owns over four million shares with a value of close to $42.00 each. According to the FCX annual meeting report released in June 2011, Moffett’s annual compensation from FCX in 2010 was $30.57 million. Richard C. Adkerson, president of the board of FCX, owns over 5.3 million shares. His total compensation in was also $30.57 million in 2010 Moffett’s and Adkerson’s incomes put them in the upper levels of the world’s top 1 percent. Their interconnectness with the highest levels of power in the White House and the Pentagon, as indicated by the specific attention given to them by the US secretary of defense, and as suggested by the US president’s awareness of their circumstances, leaves no doubt that Freeport-MacMoRan executives and board are firmly positioned at the highest levels of the transnational corporate class.

Freeport-McMoRan’s Board of Directors

James R. Moffett—Corporate and policy affiliations: cochairman, president, and CEO of McMoRan Exploration Co.; PT Freeport Indonesia; Madison Minerals Inc.; Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans; Agrico, Inc.; Petro-Lewis Funds, Inc.; Bright Real Estate Services, LLC; PLC–ALPC, Inc.; FM Services Co.

Richard C. Adkerson—Corporate and policy affiliations: Arthur Anderson Company; chairman of International Council on Mining and Metals; executive board of the International Copper Association, Business Council, Business Roundtable, Advisory Board of the Kissinger Institute, Madison Minerals Inc.

Robert Allison Jr.—Corporate affiliations: Anadarko Petroleum (2010 revenue: $11 billion); Amoco Projection Company.

Robert A. Day—Corporate affiliations: CEO of W. M. Keck Foundation (2010 assets: more than $1 billion); attorney in Costa Mesa, California.

Gerald J. Ford—Corporate affiliations: Hilltop Holdings Inc, First Acceptance Corporation, Pacific Capital Bancorp (Annual Sales $13 billion), Golden State Bancorp, FSB (federal savings bank that merged with Citigroup in 2002) Rio Hondo Land & Cattle Company (annual sales $1.6 million), Diamond Ford, Dallas (sales: $200 million), Scientific Games Corp., SWS Group (annual sales: $422 million); American Residential Cmnts LLC.

H. Devon Graham Jr.—Corporate affiliations: R. E. Smith Interests (an asset management company; income: $670,000).

Charles C. Krulak—Corporate and governmental affiliations: president of Birmingham-South College; commandant of the Marine Corp, 1995–1999; MBNA Corp.; Union Pacific Corporation (annual sales: $17 billion); Phelps Dodge (acquired by FCX in 2007).

Bobby Lee Lackey—Corporate affiliations: CEO of McManusWyatt-Hidalgo Produce Marketing Co.

Jon C. Madonna—Corporate affiliations: CEO of KPMG, (professional services auditors; annual sales: $22.7 billion); AT&T (2011 revenue: $122 billion); Tidewater Inc. (2011 revenue: $1.4 billion).

Dustan E. McCoy—Corporate affiliations: CEO of Brunswick Corp. (revenue: $4.6 billion); Louisiana-Pacific Corp. (2011 revenue: $1.7 billion).

B. M. Rankin Jr.—Corporate affiliations: board vice chairman of FCX; cofounder of McMoRan Oil and Gas in 1969.

Stephen Siegele—Corporate affiliations: founder/CEO of Advanced Delivery and Chemical Systems Inc.; Advanced Technology Solutions; Flourine on Call Ltd.

The board of directors of Freeport-McMoRan represents a portion of the global 1 percent who not only control the largest gold and copper mining company in the world, but who are also interconnected by board membership with over two dozen major multinational corporations, banks, foundations, military, and policy groups. This twelve-member board is a tight network of individuals who are interlocked with—and influence the policies of—other major companies controlling approximately $200 billion in annual revenues.

Freeport-McMoRan exemplifies how the extractor sector acquires wealth from the common heritage of natural materials—which rightfully belongs to us all—by appropriating the surplus value of working people’s labor in the theft of our commons. This process is protected by governments in various countries where Freeport maintains mining operations, with the ultimate protector being the military empire of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Further, Freeport-McMoRan is connected to one of the most elite transnational capitalist groups in the world: over 7 percent of Freeport’s stock is held by BlackRock, Inc., a major investment management firm based in New York City.

The Investment Sector: The Case of BlackRock, Inc.

Internationally, many firms operate primarily as investment organizations, managing capital and investing in other companies. These firms often do not actually make anything except money, and are keen to prevent interference with return on capital by taxation, regulations, and governmental interventions anywhere in the world.

BlackRock, based in Manhattan, is the largest assets management firm in the world, with over 10,000 employees and investment teams in twenty-seven countries. Their client base includes corporate, public, union, and industry pension plans; governments; insurance companies; third-party mutual funds; endowments; foundations; charities; corporations; official institutions; sovereign wealth funds; banks; financial professionals; and individuals worldwide. BlackRock acquired Barclay Global Investors in December of 2009. As of March 2012, BlackRock manages assets worth $3.68 trillion in equity, fixed income, cash management, alternative investment, real estate, and advisory strategies.[xxiii]

In addition to Freeport-McMoRan, BlackRock has major holdings in Chevron (49 million shares, 2.5 percent), Goldman Sachs Group (13 million shares, 2.7 percent), Exxon Mobil (121 million shares, 2.5 percent), Bank of America (251 million shares, 2.4 percent), Monsanto Company (12 million shares, 2.4 percent), Microsoft Corp. (185 million shares, 2.2 percent), and many more.[xxiv]

BlackRock manages investments of both public and private funds, including California Public Employee’s Retirement System, California State Teacher’s Retirement System, Freddie Mac, Boy Scouts of America, Boeing, Sears, Verizon, Raytheon, PG&E, NY City Retirement Systems, LA County Employees Retirement Association, GE, Cisco, and numerous others.

According to BlackRock’s April 2011 annual report to stockholders, the board of directors consists of eighteen members. The board is classified into three equal groups—Class I, Class II, and Class III—with terms of office of the members of one class expiring each year in rotation. Members of one class are generally elected at each annual meeting and serve for full three-year terms, or until successors are elected and qualified. Each class consists of approximately one-third of the total number of directors constituting the entire board of directors.

BlackRock has stockholder agreements with Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation; and Barclays Bank PLC and its subsidiaries. Two to four members of the board are from BlackRock management; one director is designated by Merrill Lynch; two directors, each in a different class, are designated by PNC Bank; two directors, each in a different class, are designated by Barclays; and the remaining directors are independent.

BlackRock’s Board of Directors

Class I Directors (terms expire in 2012):

William S. Demchak—Corporate affiliations: senior vice chairman of PNC (assets: $271 billion); J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. (2011 assets: $2.2 trillion).

Kenneth B. Dunn, PhD—Corporate and institutional affiliations: professor of financial economics at the David A. Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University; former managing director of Morgan Stanley Investment (assets: $807 billion).

Laurence D. Fink—Corporate and institutional affiliations: chairman/CEO of BlackRock; trustee of New York University; trustee of Boys Club of NY.

Robert S. Kapito—Corporate and institutional affiliations: president of BlackRock; trustee of Wharton School University of Pennsylvania.

Thomas H. O’Brien—Corporate affiliations: former CEO of PNC; Verizon Communications, Inc. (2011 revenue: $110 billion).

Ivan G. Seidenberg—Corporate and policy affiliations: board chairman of Verizon Communications; former CEO of Bell Atlantic; Honeywell International Inc. (2010 revenue: $33.3 billion); Pfizer Inc. (2011 revenue: $64 billion); chairman of the Business Roundtable; National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee; President’s Council of the New York Academy of Sciences.[xxv]

Class II Directors (terms expire in 2013):

Abdlatif Yousef Al-Hamad—Corporate and institutional affiliations: board chairman of Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (assets: $2.7 trillion); former Minister of Finance and Minister of Planning of Kuwait, Kuwait Investment Authority. Multilateral Development Banks, International Advisory Boards of Morgan Stanley, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., American International Group, Inc. and the National Bank of Kuwait.

Mathis Cabiallavetta—Corporate affiliations: Swiss Reinsurance Company (2010 revenue: $28 billion); CEO of Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. (2011 revenue: $11.5 billion); Union Bank of Switzerland-UBS A.G. (2012 assets: $620 billion); Philip Morris International Inc. (2010 revenue: $27 billion).

Dennis D. Dammerman—Corporate affiliations: General Electric Company (2012 revenue: $147 billion); Capmark Financial Group Inc. (formally GMAC); American International Group (AIG) (2010 revenue: $77 billion); Genworth Financial (2010 assets: $100 billion); Swiss Reinsurance Company (2012 assets: $620 billion); Discover Financial Services (2011 revenue: $3.4 billion).

Robert E. Diamond Jr.—Corporate and policy affiliations: CEO of Barclays (2011 revenue: $32 billion); International Advisory Board of the British-American Business Council.

David H. Komansky—Corporate affiliations: CEO of Merrill Lynch (division of Bank of America 2009) (2011 assets management: $2.3 trillion); Burt’s Bees, Inc. (owned by Clorox); WPP Group plc (2011 revenue: $15 billion).

James E. Rohr—Corporate affiliations: CEO of PNC (2011 revenue: $14 billion).

James Grosfeld—Corporate affiliations: CEO of Pulte Homes, Inc. (2010 revenue: $4.5 billion); Lexington Realty Trust (2011 assets: $1.2 billion).

Sir Deryck Maughan—Corporate and policy affiliations: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (2011 assets: $8.6 billion); former CEO of Salomon Brothers from 1992 to 1997 a Chairman of the US-Japan Business Council; GlaxoSmithKline plc (2011 revenue: $41 billion); Thomson Reuters Corporation (2011 revenue: $13.8 billion).

Thomas K. Montag—Corporate affiliations: president of Global Banking & Markets for Bank of America (2011 revenue: $94 billion); Merrill Lynch (division of Bank of America, 2009; 2011 assets management: $2.3 trillion); Goldman Sachs (2011 revenue: $28.8 billion).

Class III Directors (terms expire in 2014):

Murry S. Gerber—Corporate affiliations: executive chairman of EQT (2010 revenue: $1.3 billion); Halliburton Company.

Linda Gosden Robinson—Corporate affiliations: former CEO of Robinson Lerer & Montgomery; Young & Rubicam Inc.; WPP Group plc. (2011 revenue: $15 billion); Revlon, Inc. (2011 revenue: $1.3 billion).

John S. Varley—Corporate affiliations: CEO of Barclays (2011 revenue: $32 billion); AstraZeneca PLC (2011 revenue: $33.5 billion).

BlackRock is one of the most concentrated power networks among the global 1 percent. The eightteen members of the board of directors are connected to a significant part of the world’s core financial assests. Their decisions can change empires, destroy currencies, and impoverish millions. Some of the top financial giants of the capitalist world are connected by interlocking boards of directors at BlackRock, including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, PNC Bank, Barclays, Swiss Reinsurance Company, American International Group (AIG), UBS A.G., Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley.

A 2011 University of Zurich study, research completed by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston at the Swiss Federal Institute, reports that a small group of companies—mainly banks—wields huge power over the global economy.[xxvi] Using data from Orbis 2007, a database listing thirty-seven million companies and investors, the Swiss researchers applied mathematical models—usually used to model natural systems—to the world economy. The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them. The research created a “map” of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy. The study found that 147 companies formed a “super entity” within this map, controlling some 40 percent of its wealth. The top twenty-five of the 147 super-connected companies includes:

1. Barclays PLC*

2. Capital Group Companies Inc.

3. FMR Corporation

4. AXA

5. State Street Corporation

6. J. P. Morgan Chase & Co.*

7. Legal & General Group PLC

8. Vanguard Group Inc.

9. UBS AG

10. Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.*

11. Wellington Management Co. LLP

12. Deutsche Bank AG

13. Franklin Resources Inc.

14. Credit Suisse Group*

15. Walton Enterprises LLC

16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp

17. Natixis

18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc.*

19. T Rowe Price Group Inc.

20. Legg Mason Inc.

21. Morgan Stanley*

22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc.

23. Northern Trust Corporation

24. Société Générale

25. Bank of America Corporation*

* BlackRock Directors

Notably, for our purposes, BlackRock board members have direct connections to at least seven of the top twenty-five corporations that Vitali et al. identify as an international “super entity.” BlackRock’s board has direct links to seven of the twenty-five most interconnected corporations in the world. BlackRock’s eighteen board members control and influence tens of trillions of dollars of wealth in the world and represent a core of the super-connected financial sector corporations.

Below is a sample cross section of key figures and corporate assets among the global economic “super entity” identified by Vitali et al.

Other Key Figures and Corporate Connections within the Highest Levels of the  Global Economic “Super Entity”

Capital Group Companies—Privately held, based in Los Angeles, manages $1 trillion in assets.

FMR—One of the world’s largest mutual fund firms, managing $1.5 trillion in assets and serving more than twenty million individual and institutional clients; Edward C. (Ned) Johnson III, Chairman and CEO.

AXA—Manages $1.5 trillion in assets, serving 101 million clients; Henri de Castries, CEO AXA, and Director, Nestlé (Switzerland).

State Street Corporation—Operates from Boston with assest management at $1.9 trillion; directors include Joseph L. Hooley, CEO of State Street Corporation; Kennett F. Burnes, retired chairman and CEO of Cabot Corporation(2011 revenue: $3.1 billion).

JP Morgan/Chase (2011 assets: $2.3 trillion)—Board of directors: James A. Bell, retired executive VP of The Boeing Company; Stephen B. Burke, CEO of NBC Universal, and executive VP of Comcast Corporation; David M. Cote, CEO of Honeywell International, Inc.; Timothy P. Flynn, retired chairman of KPMG International; and Lee R. Raymond, retired CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation.

Vanguard (2011 assets under management: $1.6 trillion)—Directors: Emerson U. Fullwood, VP of Xerox Corporation; JoAnn Heffernan Heisen, VP of Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Mark Loughridge, CFO of IBM, Global Financing; Alfred M. Rankin Jr., CEO of NACCO Industries, Inc., National Association of Manufacturers, Goodrich Corp, and chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

UBS AG (2012 assets: $620 billion)—Directors include: Michel Demaré, board member of Syngenta and the IMD Foundation (Lausanne); David Sidwell, former CFO of Morgan Stanley.

Merrill Lynch (Bank of America) (2011 assets management: $2.3 trillion)—Directors include: Brian T. Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America; Rosemary T. Berkery, general counsel for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch (formerly Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc), member of New York Stock Exchange’s Legal Advisory Committee, director at Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association; Mark A. Ellman, managing director of Credit Suisse, First Boston; Dick J. Barrett, cofounder of Ellman Stoddard Capital Partners, MetLife, Citi Group, UBS, Carlyle Group, ImpreMedia, Verizon Communications, Commonewealth Scientific and Industrial Research Org, Fluor Corp, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Group.

The directors of these super-connected companies represent a small portion of the global 1 percent. Most people with assets in excess of $588,000 are not major players in international finance. At best, they hire asset management firms to produce a return on their capital. Often their net worth is tied up in nonfinancial assets such a real estate and businesses.

Analysis: TCC and Global Power

So how does the transnational corporate class (TCC) maintain wealth concentration and power in the world? The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population represents approximately forty million adults. These forty million people are the richest segment of the first tier populations in the core countries and intermittently in other regions. Most of this 1 percent have professional jobs with security and tenure working for or associated with established institutions. Approximately ten million of these individuals have assets in excess of one million dollars, and approximately 100,000 have financials assets worth over thirty million dollars. Immediately below the 1 percent in the first tier are working people with regular employment in major corporations, government, self-owned businesses, and various institutions of the world. This first tier constitutes about 30–40 percent of the employed in the core developed countries, and some 30 percent in the second tier economies and down to 20 percent in the periphery economies (sometimes referred to as the 3rd world). The second tier of global workers represents growing armies of casual labor: the global factory workers, street workers, and day laborers intermittently employed with increasingly less support from government and social welfare organizations. These workers, mostly concentrated in the megacities, constitute some 30–40 percent of the workers in the core industrialized economies and some 20 percent in the second tier and peripheral economies. This leaves a third tier of destitute people worldwide ranging from 30 percent of adults in the core and secondary economies to fully 50 percent of the people in peripherial countries who have extremely limited income opportunities and struggle to survive on a few dollars a day. These are the 2.5 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day, die by the tens of thousands every day from malnutrition and easily curible illnesses, and who have probably never even heard a dial tone.[xxvii]

As seen in our extractor sector and investment sector samples, corporate elites are interconnected through direct board connections with some seventy major multinational corporations, policy groups, media organizations, and other academic or nonprofit institutions. The investment sector sample shows much more powerful financial links than the extractor sample; nonetheless, both represent vast networks of resources concentrated within each company’s board of directors. The short sample of directors and resources from eight other of the superconnected companies replicates this pattern of multiple board corporate connections, policy groups, media and government, controlling vast global resources. These interlock relationships recur across the top interconnected companies among the transnational corporate class, resulting in a highly concentrated and powerful network of individuals who share a common interest in preserving their elite domination.

Sociological research shows that interlocking directorates have the potential to faciliate political cohesion. A sense of a collective “we” emerges within such power networks, whereby members think and act in unison, not just for themselves and their individual firms, but for a larger sense of purpose—the good of the order, so to speak.[xxviii]

Transnational corporate boards meet on a regular basis to encourage the maximunization of profit and the long-term viability of their firm’s business plans. If they arrange for payments to government officials, conduct activities that undermine labor organizations, seek to manipulate the price of commodies (e.g. gold), or engage in insider trading in some capacity, they are in fact forming conspiratorial alliances inside those boards of directors. Our sample of thirty directors inside two connected companies have influence with some of the most powerful policy groups in the world, including British–American Business Council, US–Japan Business Council, Business Roundtable, Business Council, and the Kissinger Institute. They influence some ten trillion dollars in monetery resouces and control the working lives of many hundreds of thousands of people. All in all, they are a power elite unto themselves, operating in a world of power elite networks as the de facto ruling class of the capitalist world.

Moreover, this 1 percent global elite dominates and controls public relations firms and the corporate media. Global corporate media protect the interests of the 1 percent by serving as a propaganda machine for the superclass. The corporate media provide entertainment for the masses and distorts the realities of inequality. Corporate news is managed by the 1 percent to maintain illusions of hope and to divert blame from the powerful for hard times.[xxix]

Four of the thirty directors in our two-firm sample are directly connected with public relations and media. Thomas H. O’Brien and Ivan G. Seidenberg are both on the board of Verizon Communications, where Seidenberg serves as chairman. Verizon reported over $110 billion in operating revenues in 2011.[xxx] David H. Komansky and Linda Gosden Robinson are on the board of WPP Group, which describes itself as the world leader in marketing communications services, grossing over $65 billion in 2011. WPP is a conglomerate of many of the world’s leading PR and marketing firms, in fields that include advertising, media investment management, consumer insight, branding and identity, health care communications, and direct digital promotion and relationship marketing.[xxxi]

Even deeper inside the 1 percent of wealthy elites is what David Rothkopf calls the superclass. David Rothkopf, former managing director of Kissinger Associates and deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policies, published his book Superclass: the Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, in 2008.[xxxii] According to Rothkopf, the superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the world’s population, comprised of 6,000 to 7,000 people—some say 6,660. They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet–flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world, people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid. They are 94 percent male, predominantly white, and mostly from North America and Europe. These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-8, G-20, NATO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military, the academy, nongovernmental organizations, spiritual leaders, and other shadow elites. Shadow elites include, for instance,  the deep politics of national security organizations in connection with international drug cartels, who extract 8,000 tons of opium from US war zones annually, then launder $500 billion through transnational banks, half of which are US-based.[xxxiii]

Rothkoft’s understanding of the superclass is one based on influence and power. Although there are over 1,000 billionaires in the world, not all are necessarily part of the superclass in terms of influencing global policies. Yet these 1,000 billionaires have twice as much wealth as the 2.5 billion least wealthy people, and they are fully aware of the vast inequalities in the world. The billionaires and the global 1 percent are similar to colonial plantation owners. They know they are a small minority with vast resources and power, yet they must continually worry about the unruly exploited masses rising in rebellion. As a result of these class insecurities, the superclass works hard to protect this structure of concentrated wealth. Protection of capital is the prime reason that NATO countries now account for 85 percent of the world’s defense spending, with the US spending more on military than the rest of the world combined.[xxxiv] Fears of  inequality rebellions and other forms of unrest motivate NATO’s global agenda in the war on terror.[xxxv] The Chicago 2012 NATO Summit Declaration reads:

As Alliance leaders, we are determined to ensure that NATO retains and develops the capabilities necessary to perform its essential core tasks collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security—and thereby to play an essential role promoting security in the world. We must meet this responsibility while dealing with an acute financial crisis and responding to evolving geo-strategic challenges. NATO allows us to achieve greater security than any one Ally could attain acting alone.

We confirm the continued importance of a strong transatlantic link and Alliance solidarity as well as the significance of sharing responsibilities, roles, and risks to meet the challenges North-American and European Allies face together . . . we have confidently set ourselves the goal of NATO Forces 2020: modern, tightly connected forces equipped, trained, exercised and commanded so that they can operate together and with partners in any (emphaisis added) environment.[xxxvi]

NATO is quickly emerging as the police force for the transnational corporate class. As the TCC more fully emerged in the 1980s, coinciding with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), NATO began broader operations. NATO first ventured into the Balkans, where it remains, and then moved into Afghanistan. NATO started a training mission in Iraq in 2005, has recently conducted operations in Libya, and, as of July 2012, is considering military action in Syria.

It has become clear that the superclass uses NATO for its global security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, wherby the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital anywhere in the world.[xxxvii]

Sociologists William Robinson and Jerry Harris anticipated this situation in 2000, when they described “a shift from the social welfare state to the social control (police) state replete with the dramatic expansion of public and private security forces, the mass incarceration of the excluded populations (disproportionately minorities), new forms of social apartheid . . . and anti-immigrant legislation.”[xxxviii] Robinson and Harris’s theory accurately predicts the agenda of today’s global superclass, including

—President Obama’s continuation of the police state agendas of his executive predecessors, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush;

—the long-range global dominance agenda of the superclass, which uses US/NATO military forces to discourage resisting states and maintain internal police repression, in service of the capitalist system’s orderly maintenance;

—and the continued consolidation of capital around the world without interference from governments or egalitarian social movements.[xxxix]

Furthermore, this agenda leads to the further pauperization of the poorest half of the world’s population, and an unrelenting downward spiral of wages for everyone in the second tier, and even some within the first tier.[xl] It is a world facing economic crisis, where the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security.[xli] It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to bankruptcy is to print more money through quantitative easing with trillions of new inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction requires even more spending to rebuild, a cycle that profits the TCC and its global networks of economic power. It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, and death and destruction, at home and abroad.

As Andrew Kollin states in State Power and Democracy, “There is an Orwellian dimension to the Administration’s (Bush and later Obama) perspective, it chose to disregard the law, instead creating decrees to legitimate illegal actions, giving itself permision to act without any semblances of power sharing as required by the Constitution or international law.”[xlii]

And in Globalization and the Demolition of Society, Dennis Loo writes, “The bottom line, the fundamential division of our society, is between, on the one hand, those whose interests rest on the dominance and the drive for monopolizing the society and planet’s resources and, on the other hand, those whose interests lie in the husbanding of thoses resources for the good of the whole rather than the part.”[xliii]

The Occupy movement uses the 1 percent vs. 99 percent mantra as a master concept in its demonstrations, disruptions, and challenges to the practices of the transnational corporate class, within which the global superclass is a key element in the implementation of a superelite agenda for permanent war and total social control. Occupy is exactly what the superclass fears the most—a global democratic movement that exposes the TCC agenda and the continuing theater of government elections, wherein the actors may change but the marquee remains the same. The more that Occupy refuses to cooperate with the TCC agenda and mobilizes activists, the more likely the whole TCC system of dominance will fall to its knees under the people power of democractic movements.
______________________________________

peter phillips is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and president of the Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored.

kimberly soeiro is a sociology student at Sonoma State University, library researcher, and activist.

Special thanks to Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored, and Andy Roth, associate director of Project Censored, for editing and for important suggestons for this article.

Notes

[i] For a more scholarly background on this subject, the following are required reading: C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, New York, Oxford University Press, 1956; G. Willian Domhoff, Who Rules America 6^th edition, Boston, McGraw Hill Higher Education, 2009; William Carroll, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class, Zed Books, 2010.

[ii] Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford, UK, Blackwell, 2001.

[iii] Leslie Sklair, “The Transnational Capitalist Class And The Discourse Of Globalization,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2000, http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/012sklair.htm

[iv] Tax Havens: Super-rich hiding at least $21 trillion, BBC News, July 22, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18944097

[v] Tyler Durgen, A Detailed Look At Global Wealth Distribution, 10/11/10, http://www.zerohedge.com/article/detailed-look-global-wealth-distribution.

[vi] “World Bank Sees Progress Against Extreme Poverty, But Flags Vulnerabilities,” World Bank, Press Release No. 2012/297/Dec., February 29, 2012, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23130032~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html.

[vii] Mark Ellis, The Three Top Sins of the Universe, http://www.starvation.net/.

[viii] “Corporatons are Still Making a Killing from Hunger,” April 2009, Grain, http://www.grain.org/article/entries/716-corporations-are-still-making-a-killing-from-hunger.

[ix] On the extraction of surplus-value from labor, see Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (New York and London: Penguin, 1991[1894]).

[x] See, e.g., Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martins, 1999), Chapter 6; for additional information on the Fair Share of the Common Heritage see, http://www.fairsharecommonheritage.org/.

[xi] Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders, June 15, 2011, document April 28, 2001, www.ecocumentview.com/FCX_MTG.

[xii] “Freeport Indonesia Miners, Tribesmen Defend Road Blockades,” Reuters Africa, November 4, 2011, http://af.reuters.com/article/metalsNews/idAFL4E7M410020111104.

[xiii] “Police Admit to Receiving Freeport ‘Lunch Money,’” Frank Arnaz, Jakarta Globe, October 28, 2011,

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/police-admit-to-receiving-freeport-lunch-money/474747.

[xiv] “Indonesia must investigate mine strike protest killing,” Amnesty International News, October 10, 2011, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/indonesia-must-investigate-mine-strike-protest-killing-2011-10-10; West Papua Report, November 2011, http://www.etan.org/issues/wpapua/2011/1111wpap.htm.

[xv] Camelia Pasandaran, “Striking Freeport Employees Lower Wage Increase Demands,”Jakarta Globe, | November 7, 2011, http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/striking-freeport-employees-lower-wage-increase-demands/476800.

[xvi] Alex Emery, “Freeport Cerro Verde, Workers Sign Three-Year Labor Accord,” Bloomberg News,

December 22, 2011, http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-22/freeport-cerro-verde-peru-workers-sign-three-year-labor-accord.

[xvii] Eric Bellman and Tess Stynes, “Freeport-McMoRan Says Pact Ends Indonesia Strike,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203893404577098222935896112.html.

[xviii] John Pakage, “When there is no guarantee of the security of life for the people of Papau,” West Papua Media Alerts, March 1, 2012, http://westpapuamedia.info/tag/freeport-McMoRan/.

[xix] “Reasons to go the Darwin,” The Nation (Thailand), November 30, 2011, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/Reasons-to-go-to-Darwin-30170893.html

[xxi] Karishma Vaswani, “US Firm Freeport Struggles to Escape Its Past in Papua,” BBC News, Jakarta,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14417718.

[xxii] Phoenix Arizona, October 28, 2011, Youtube report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvJxy2GvOHE.

[xxiii] BlackRock About Us: http://www2.blackrock.com/global/home/AboutUs/index.htm.

[xxiv] Data for this section is drawn for StreetInsider.com.

[xxv] Data for the corporations listed in this section comes fron the annual report at each corporation’s website. Biography information was gained from the FAX annual report to investors and online biographies for individuals wihen available.

[xxvi] Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE, October 26, 2011, http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995.

[xxvii] Willian Robinson and Jerry Harris, “Towards a Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class,” Science and Society 64, no. 1 (Spring 2000).

[xxviii] Val Burris, “Interlocking Directorates and Political Cohesion Among Corporate Elites,” American Journal of Sociology 3, no. 1 (July 2005).

[xxix] Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency: Inside the Military-Industrial Media Empire,” Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 197–220.

[xxx] Verizon Financials 2012, http://www22.verizon.com/investor/ Hoovers describes Verizon as, “the #2 US telecom services provider overall after AT&T, but it holds the top spot in wireless services ahead of rival AT&T Mobility.” Hoovers Inc. http://www.hoovers.com/company/Verizon_Communications_Inc/rfrski-1.html.

[xxxi] WPP: http://www.wpp.com/wpp/about/wppataglance/.

[xxxii] David Rothkopf, SuperClass: the Global Power Elite and the World They are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).

[xxxiii] Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). See also Censored Story #22, “Wachovia Bank Laundered Money for Latin American Drug Cartels,” in Chapter 1.

[xxxiv] David Rothkopf, Superclass, Public Address: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 9, 2008.

[xxxv] NATO: Defence Against Terrorism Programme, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-EBFFE857-6607109D/natolive/topics_50313.htm?selectedLocale=en.

[xxxvi] NATO, Summit Declaration on Defence Capabilities: Toward NATO Forces 2020, May 20, 2012, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-1CE3D0B6-393C986D/natolive/official_texts_87594.htm.

[xxxvii] For an expanded analysis of the history of US “global dominance,” see Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Celeste Vogler, “The Global Dominance Group: 9/11 Pre-Warnings & Election Irregularities in Context,” May 2, 2010, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/the-global-dominance-group/ and Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton, and Lew Brown, “The Global Dominance Group and U.S. Corporate Media,” Censored 2007 (New York: Seven Stories, 2006), 307–333.

[xxxviii] Willian Robinson and Jerry Harris, “Towards a Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class,” Science and Society 64, no. 1 (Spring 2000).

[xxxix] John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (New York: Verso, 2003).

[xl] Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, eds., The Global Economic Crisis (Montréal: Global Research Publishers, 2010).

[xli] Dennis Loo, Globalization and the Demolition of Society (Glendale, CA: Larkmead Press, 2011).

[xlii] Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,c2011), 141.

[xliii] Loo, Globalization, op cit., 357.

The post The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class appeared first on Project Censored.

Sonoma State University—Investigative Sociology Spring 2012

Peter Phillips Instructor

Courtesy of OccupySantaRosa.com

Abstract

An investigative sociology report conducted by Sonoma State University sociology students reveals the intricacy of social activism within the Occupy Santa Rosa community. The findings show three distinct core themes within the movement: Activism as the catalyst for change, collective consciousness, and community. Through protests and direct action the Occupy movement is fostering a change of ideology and values, which is affecting their communities’ collective consciousness.  Occupy seeks to awaken people to the fact that poorly regulated banks and corporations associated with Wall Street are unsustainable institutions, whose economic and political power is at direct odds with democracy in America.

Introduction

The Occupy Movement started on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, New York City and has since spread globally. The Movement as defined by Occupy Wall Street (OWS), is a leaderless opposition movement and includes people of many HYPERLINK “http://pococcupywallstreet.tumblr.com/”“colors, genders and political persuasions” (OWS, 2011). It also brings social activism and solidarity to fight against the 1%, and stands up for the 99%.

Not only has the Occupy Movement brought awareness to the issue of global inequality, but it has also strived to educate many around the world and helped encourage them to fight against the corporate greed. Since October 9, Occupy protests have taken place in over 95 cities across 82 countries with over 600 groups in the United States.  Occupy group actions have occurred on every continent.  The protests initially began with setting up camps, tents, and other means of protest such as camping with outdoor kitchens in areas such as key financial district.  The camps were set up in the first two months of protesting, while nationally coordinated police were encouraged to clear out the camps. Although most of permanent camps were forcibly removed, many cities still organized large daily demonstrations. Each Occupy group city is unique in what they are fighting for but overall, the protest is against the 1% power elite of the world.

The Occupy Movement involves a broad array of goals and its core values vary from unequal income distribution to the overarching theme, the system is broken. Our research team conducted interviews of occupiers in hopes to further find themes regarding what the occupy movement is all about.

Media and Literature Review

When Time magazine named its Person of the Year for 2011, they did so to recognize the person who had the most influence on world culture and the news in that year.  For 2011, Time named ‘the protestor’ as their person of the year.  ‘The protestor’ has been something that has come about in countries all over the world where people are standing up and fighting for what they believe in:

“Our person of the year for 2011 is the protester; the men and women around the world, particularly in the Middle East, who toppled governments, who brought a sense of democracy and dignity to people who hadn’t had it before,” Managing Editor Rick Stenger told the “Today” show. “I think speaking of the year ahead, these are folks who are changing history already and they will change history in the future.”

‘The protestors’ are trying to redefine power and are stepping up all over the world in order to change what is happening in their countries.  In the United States, Occupy Wall Street began in New York and spread over several cities throughout the U.S.  It is a group of protestors, whose goals include implementing a truly free democratic and just society where people live in harmony and respect diversity.

One known central core theme of the Occupy movement is income inequality. Income inequality is greater when differences in income between one person and another are large and widespread (Kelley & Klein, 1981, p. 1). The Occupy movement is standing up for the 99% of people who share similar income levels that are vastly below the income level of the 1%. It has been noted by Occupiers that the richest 1% of Americans own 35%~ of our nation’s wealth income while the 99% share the remaining 65%~ of the nation’s income. Occupy seeks to peacefully protest for a change to the makeup of the capitalist system.

In their book Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality (1981), Jonathan Kelley and Herbert Klein provide a definition along with certain aspects of a revolution:

“The most fundamental characteristics of a revolution are that it redistributes income, taking from the old elite and giving to the poor. It leaves those who were exploited by the old regime better off than they were before, reduces inequality between the rich and the poor, and reduces inherited privilege in the society as a whole,” (p. 191).

Similar characteristics within the Occupy Movement include, trying to reduce the exploitation of the 99%, redistributing income, while also improving the 99%’s ability to improve their economic opportunities. Revolutions can be expected to redistribute income and physical capital, making for a more equal distribution of wealth and income (Kelley & Klein, 1981, p. 184). Kelley and Klein provide an example of this in regards to the 1952 Bolivian revolution in which peasant farmers defeated the national army, took over the country capital, and redistributed wealth among the country peasants and farmers. One key ingredient present in the Bolivian revolution, not present in the Occupiers agenda to change our capitalist system, is violence. Bolivian revolutionaries created worker and civilian militias that took over as the dominant military force in the country. To obtain their goals and abolish inequality, Bolivian revolutionaries took to violent measures. Kelley and Klein believe to be the only way for a revolution to work is to do so radically and with such violent measures. According to Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality, the Occupy movement will not succeed in social change without turning to radical measures to do so.

When observing the Occupy Movement, along with income inequality, another important concept to analyze is the theory of social movements. Social movements have to do with various fundamental agents that are present within every social movement. In his book, Revolution: A Sociological Perspective, Michael S. Kimmel believes that social movements start with two main sources of motivation:

“I believe that we can identify two sources of motivation, two emotions that combined, propel people into revolutionary activity and motivate their behavior. These two emotions are despair and hope…despair and hope motivate revolutionary activity in tandem; they are mutually reinforcing emotions in a society where structural conditions might produce a revolutionary situation,” (1990, p. 12).

Despair and hope, according to Kimmel, drive people to stand up for themselves and change the inequalities that plague their lives. Kimmel stresses the importance of the two emotions -hope and disappear- and the way in which they motivate in tandem,

“Neither [hope nor despair] alone captures my image of revolutionary motivation; it is neither the grinding misery of economic poverty and political repression nor the euphoric utopian “mad inspiration” of the visionary that alone can account for revolutionary participation (Trotsky, 1930: 320). Despair may make revolutionary activity necessary, but hope transforms a rebellion or revolt into a purposive and visionary movement, one capable of transforming the social foundations of political power,” (1990, p. 12).

Kimmel believes that for revolution to be successful, hope and despair must go hand-in-hand. Despair makes hope possible, and hope makes a purposeful and visionary movement possible. The Occupy movement is one of both despair, due to the large gap in income inequality, and hope, due to the large number of protestors that have rallied in solidarity all over the country to support the same cause.

Moral, civic, and political questions of the present and past are also fundamental aspects that need to be considered when looking at a social movement. Kimmel argues that, “Revolutions have their structural roots deeply embedded in the society’s past” (1990, p. 9). Furthermore, he states that the task of the social scientist is to sort out the long-run structural causes versus the shorter-run events that set these structures in motion, and the immediate historical events that ignite the conflict (1990, p.9).

The British Student protests of 2010, along with the Arab Spring protests, and the Greek and Spanish anti-austerity protests of the “Indignados” serve as such immediate historical events that ignited the Occupy movement. Adbusters, a Canadian magazine group, initiated the call for the first Occupy protests.

In Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism, Steven Buechler explains, “Indeed, the prevailing view of social movements at a given historical moment reflects not just existing movements but also the larger socio-historical climate, the dominant sociological paradigms, and the biographies of scholars themselves,” (2000, p. 19).

This of course explains how the most important observation of a political movement is in fact the larger sociological picture of the actual movement itself. For the occupy movement it is clear that the trigger of the movement has to do with the unbalanced economic structure that plagues the American capitalistic system. Kalle Lasn and Micah White of Adbuster’s, and their pleas to their subscribers ultimately led to the first occupation in lower Manhattan in June 2011.

The Occupy Movement is a social and economic protest with a goal that involves creating a more egalitarian society. The typical sentiment among protesters is that this must be achieved by enforcing stricter regulation on the big banks and corporations on Wall Street. This idea does not go over so well with the ruling class in America; thus at times, The Movement has been repressed with police violence.

In Robert Reich’s article, “Why We Must Occupy Democracy” he examines economic disparity between the wealthy elite (who occupiers would refer to as the 1%) and points out the increasing violence. In his short but precise examination Reich makes a case for continuing the non-violent efforts put forth by the Occupy Movement. America is often touted as “The Land of the Free”, yet Reich points out that in the current climate of an economic depression Americans, specifically those who identify with the Occupy movement, are “assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed” when attempting to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly.

While these disenfranchised occupiers are seeing their rights stripped away, corporations and politicians are being afforded more rights than ever.  Recent rulings by the Supreme Court have likened corporations to people and money to speech and ended all limits on political spending.  This has allowed for what Reich calls “a revolving door between official Washington and Wall Street” and this allows those with money to play by a completely different set of rules.  Reich sees the contributions from the wealthy to Washington as an investment in their continued preferential treatment.  Reich points out that “tax rates on the super-rich are now lower than they’ve been in three decades” even as the long-term budget deficit continues to rise. Furthermore, Reich states that the 400 richest Americans have a larger total wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans and pay only an average tax rate of 17 percent.  The Wall Street bail out happened without a single string attached and those responsible for the poverty of the working-class continue to acquire greater wealth, unscathed.

Reich states, “If there’s a single core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top endangers our democracy.  With money comes political power.”  Reich believes that if democracy is to be saved, as we witness even greater equality in the distribution of wealth, than Americans have to get out there and make their voices heard.  Reich explains that it is exactly the times when one’s voice is being muffled that one must speak loudest.”

Our Research Methods

Participants: Interviews

Our research procedure included 24 interviews various members of the Occupy Movement Organizations, specifically the local Occupy Santa Rosa (OSR) group.  Each interview was loosely structured by an interview guide that was established with an inform consent followed by specific pertinent questions regarding the Occupy Movement. The interviews were also audio recorded with provided consent from the occupiers. In addition, each interview could last anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes long, depending upon how extensive the occupier answers the question. After each interview, the occupier will receive contact information if they wish to contact specific group members and/or the professor (Peter Phillips). Furthermore, our research team consists of seven individuals who conducted interviews. The interviews were conducted by two members of our research group.

After each completed interview, each group member will summarize their interviews they conducted specifically looking for key points and themes of the Occupy Movement.

Findings

Our findings were developed into three distinguishable core themes. Activism as the catalyst for change, collective consciousness, and community were the core themes identified. We used interviewee responses to help describe the core motives within the themes. These are our findings:

Activism as the Catalyst for Change

There is a strong consensus within the Occupy Movement that change can only come about through direct action.  It is the notion that people must actively involve themselves in revolution, resistance, or some form of direct action in order to make any impact.  In interviews conducted with members of the Occupy Santa Rosa (OSR) community it becomes clear that such activism can take several shapes.

Many interviewees stated they were members of what Occupy calls “working groups” in which members narrow their focus down to a specified goal.  For example, many individuals interviewed stated they were part of (or familiar with) a working group known as the “Dorothy Day” working group in which their current goal is to “legalize sleep”.  In essence, this working group is attempting to change current local legislation, which criminalizes sleeping outdoors, in one’s car, and various other public spaces.  Individuals in this working group have deemed such laws as unfair and discriminatory towards the homeless population; a population already suffering from a societal inability to have basic needs met.  Such is the view of many “occupiers”; that those who find themselves in disenfranchised populations do so because of inequality on the part of society, especially the community’s ability to take care of individual members.  The individuals interviewed do not see such missteps as the fault of an individual person, but rather of a system designed to empower few (the 1%) while leaving the majority (the 99%) with little recourse.

The Occupy Movement is self-described as a “leaderless resistance movement” (Occupy Wall Street website).  It is the Occupy Movement’s determination to operate in a truly democratic fashion, which sets it apart from other resistance movements.  It is through the general assembly (GA), which occupiers believe the culmination of such democracy is seen, “I think the general assemblies are one of the best symbols of the movement and one of the best practices of the movement because it gives people a place to enter without a big handshaking or in-taking process…” (Occupy interviewee).  Nothing in the Occupy Movement moves forward without approval from the GA, and in order for an idea or plan to be implemented there must be an 85% approval rate.

A general assembly will not be held without at least the presence of 10 individuals and currently OSR holds three GA’s per week.  Re-occurring throughout interviews with individual members of OSR were statements expressing the notion that only a true democracy can be representative of all members of society and the belief by most interviewees that the current system in America is not a true democracy and represents only the interests of the so-called 1%.

“I think the GA really is where it’s at and a large public consensus-based decision-making model is so utterly different than anything that anybody has done in our society,” (Occupy interviewee) such an idea as expressed by an OSR member seems to ring true throughout most interviews conducted.

A view often impressed upon Americans is the idea that through the electoral process America is in fact a democracy; that an individual’s “right to vote” is key in setting America apart from “the other guys”, perhaps such is a reference to third world countries and those identified as the evil and dreaded communist states.  However, in conducting interviews with members of Occupy Santa Rosa an overwhelming majority expressed beliefs to the contrary.  Most individuals interviewed stated that though they vote they do not believe their vote will make a difference in the way this country is run.  One woman interviewed stated, “I think if voting could change anything they’d make it illegal”, yet she went on to explain that she continually casts her vote.

It is as if the idea of voting as a catalyst for change is such a part of American society that one cannot part with the ritual for fear that they may hinder democracy even in light of such a strong distrust for the current system.  Another self-identified member of OSR explains that due to the way the United States’ two-party system is set up, the emergence of a third party is almost impossible and the current two-party system has not and is not interested in changing anything.  “The two parties that we have are both pro-status quo, so through voting, in the Unites States at least, you are not going to achieve anything and we have seen that with Obama, who I feel has really betrayed what he supposedly stood for.”  The individuals interviewed clearly believe it will take an assertive, proactive, “take it to the streets” form of activism to bring about change in the world.

It is important to note that all those interviewed expressed their belief that non-violent action is the route they personally and the Occupy Movement as a whole wish to take.  Though a few of the individuals interviewed expressed that they do not “morally” oppose violence, when confronted with the question of how they feel in regards to property damage as a form of activism every person interviewed saw such an act as detrimental to the Occupy Movement.  Many expressed that those who commit such acts are a “fringe” group and when one examines any instance of property damage attributed to the Occupy Movement they will see very few people involved in such acts while the majority of activists are engaging in peaceful, non-violent action.

The goal of the Occupy Movement is clearly not to re-elect Obama or any other politician.  It is to completely overhaul what is seen as a corrupt and extremely unequal system, a system that continually and progressively oppresses and disenfranchises the masses while being of benefit only to a very miniscule number of individuals.

For example, the richest 400 Americans have a larger total wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans (Reich, 2011).  The Occupy Movement has coined such descriptive terms as the 1% and the 99% in order to express the unequal distribution of wealth in America and to relay to Americans that it is the majority of us who suffer, the majority of us who are not given decision-making power.  Instead it is a small group of extremely wealthy individuals who make decisions, which affect everyone in society.  Twenty-one out of twenty-four individuals interviewed in this study stated that they would like to see individuals in their community become active in any way those individuals felt they were able to.  Expressed was the idea that each individual has certain strengths, which others may not have and if those strengths were brought together, then collectively there could be greater force given to the Occupy Movement and subsequently the ability to accomplish greater goals within the community.

Collective Consciousness

Male, OSR Treasurer, “The hope is that I can live in a less profoundly evil, alien, socially malformed, deranged society- I am not sure what that looks like… I would like to make it more decent. What we have right now is not decent; in fact it’s profoundly evil.”

One of the main themes that were found within the interviewees was that the Occupy movement was not just seeking a simple change in government or the economy but instead an overall change in ideology. Occupy activist are focused on educating and changing the overall mind-set of the people in order to effect the collective consciousness as a whole. Occupy believes we are living in a society that is completely backwards and changing just one of the many problems would do little to help. Occupy has decided that in order for real change to happen there must first be a change of people’s attitudes within society. Occupy members feel that by “waking people up” we will start to achieve goals that will bring about real change.

The idea that Occupy struggles to make its vision clear comes from people misunderstanding this demand. The opposition fails to understand what this sort of change would in fact prove. The main goal of changing the overall perception of the world takes generations to achieve, however it is clear that this is the first step for Occupy. Above anything else the direction for this movement needs to concentrate on “waking people up” which is by far the most important aspect of the cause. If Occupy can change people’s outlook on the world, then we can figure out ways to remedy the problems together.

Community

The last reoccurring theme that we found in our research was the sense of community and togetherness that the interviewees valued.  In numerous interviews conducted by our team, interviewees continued to reiterate the importance of community within Sonoma County. This sentiment along with a disdain for corporate banks has even lead some to suggest the creation of a local community bank. Within Sonoma County a sense of community may had already existed for many, but it has been the Occupy movement that is challenging people to consider what it takes to really support one’s community.

The Occupy Movement has shown that people can come together and build a sense of community.  At OSR rallies and protests the organization, Food Not Bombs would have small kitchens set up to feed everybody. This action makes a political statement, takes a stand for community, and in these pressuring economic times it helps those whom may not have access to food.  The Occupiers want a community of people who help each other, not a community of people who exploit others to make profit.

One interviewee stated that we should learn the skills we used to know in older times, and use those to trade with each other and support each other throughout the community.  “You can live on a block all your life and not know your neighbors or what they do.  It’s a nasty system that we are in.  Everyone has their skill; everyone has something they can put into it.  I hope everyone realizes they have the power to do something,” (Male, 25 years old).

In today’s society, issues such as money, religion, politics, etc. currently divide, not just Sonoma County, but also the rest of the United States.  What occupy participants are trying to influence all around the world is for people to put their differences of opinion, differences of money, differences of religions and politics aside and come together to conquer the issues at hand.  As many interviewees stated, America needs to be awakened and brought back to life.  We are currently all walking around like a bunch of “heartless zombies” either naïve or indifferent to the issues we are currently facing in this country.  “We need to turn off our TVs, walk outside, and realize what’s going on with the world before we make a huge mistake,” (Occupy Protester).

One sentiment that was shared by many of the Occupy protesters interviewed was the immediate feeling of community and belonging to something where they feel they can make a change.  Many of the participants said that they joined Occupy because they really felt they belonged there and could make a change.

A twenty-two year old male participant stated, “I think that Occupy is a form of community function.” In order to promote a sense of community, OSR has recently called upon participants to establish a daily presence in Old Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa. “Our plan is to be present from 9 am to 9 pm every day, holding signs, reaching out to our community, serving food, holding meetings and events, and building a community of struggle to free ourselves from Wall St.’s tyranny,”(OSR organizer). Many protesters have stated that community is what we have lost over the years and this is a fight to get it back. The Occupy movement is an expression of people coming together to create change.  That alone shows a growing sense of community.  The stresses of capitalism had forced us away from community, but it is now after the financial disaster on Wall Street, that we are re-envisioning what it takes to build the type of compassionate and sustainable community.

Activism within the Community: “Working Groups”

Occupy Santa Rosa coordinates direct action within the community via “Working Groups” (WG’s). The WG’s consist of Occupy members, of which many are simultaneously involved with more than one WG. Listed here is an accounting of Occupy Santa Rosa’s WG’s that are active according to the O.S.R. calendar. Included is a brief description of each WG.

Working Group                                                                   Description

Action WG Organizes direct action such as protest rallies and marches.

Comedy/Theatre WG Produces and performs street theatre, puppet shows and is   “creating a satirical website to poke fun at ourselves, and more importantly, at the 1%” (occupysantarosa.org)

Corp. are not Persons WG “The Corporations are not Persons Coalition WG is mandated to plan, promote and carry out direct action and educate the public in order to Amend the Constitution, taking away corporate rights which should be restricted to actual living humans and ensuring that money does not equal speech in our system”(occupysantarosa.org).

Dorothy Day WG                         “Combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf” (occupysantarosa.org).

Free School WG “Devoted to educational events and programs that will help build alliances across the 99% and support the creation of a just and peaceful economy” (occupysantarosa.org).

Prairie Fire WG         “Defends vital government funded social and public services   from budgets cuts, elimination and privatization. Vital defined as programs focused on the physical, mental, socio-economic, wellbeing of its citizen, and the physical environment” (Prairie Fire W.G. website).

Media & Communications WG    “Responsible for web & social media, video/radio, press, and P.R.”(occupysantarosa.org).

Media/Outreach WG “Communicates with the press, builds media networks, and does outreach into the larger community” (occupysantarosa.org).

Mediation WG Works out internal conflicts within the Occupy community.

Strategy WG Plans the strategies for Occupy’s direct action within the community.

Treasury Committee Coordinates fundraising and finances. 

Workers Committee “A working group committed to outreach into working-class communities” (occupysantarosa.org).

*Other active groups within the Occupy Santa Rosa community include the OSR band, which performs music during marches and rallies; and also the “non-violence for daily living discussion group” which meets weekly for “20 minutes of meditation, followed by 1.5 hrs of theoretical discussion, personal sharing, and inspirations on Gandhi’s Principled Non-Violence”(occupysantarosa.org) 

**Each Working Group sends 1 to 2 of their members to the weekly Spokes Council, which “serves as a forum for coordination and dialogue between all of the WG’s” (occupysantarosa.org).

Support from local Organizations

Local human rights groups in Sonoma County are actively working with OSR, helping to organize various forms of direct action within the community. One Occupy Santa Rosa member described OSR as a “Frankensteining of organizations together that might have been aligned along similar ideological or political lines”.  The Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County provides consulting for OSR and also serves as a location for some OSR Working Groups to hold meetings. Other local human rights groups that work in conjunction with OSR include, the Sonoma County Living Wage Coalition, Advocates for Social Justice of Santa Rosa, immigrant rights organizations, and also, the ACLU of Sonoma County has worked to defend the free-speech rights of OSR protesters.

Conclusion

The Occupy Movement is solidifying a social activist movement within their greater local community. Via protests and direct action, The Occupy Movement is fostering a change of ideology and values, which is affecting their communities’ collective consciousness. In order to the change the greater collective consciousness Occupy seeks to awaken people to the fact that weakly regulated banks and corporations in Wall Street are unsustainable institutions whose economic and political power is at direct odds with democracy in America. Occupy stands for a self-sustaining community, which does not exploit labor and protects its individuals and the environment. Occupy believes that the financial sector must be more strictly regulated in order to protect liberty, democracy and human rights.

Works Cited

Anderson, K. (2011, Dec. 14). Time: Person of the Year. New York Times: Retrieved from http://www.time.com.

Buechler, Steven. (2000). Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism. New York: Oxford Press.

Fligstein, Neil, and Doug McAdam. (2012). Towards a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields. American Sociological Association.

http://www.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/st/Mar11STFeature.pdf.

Kimmel, Michael S. (1990). Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Kelley, Jonathan & Herbert S. Klein. (1981). Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality. London: University of California Press.

No Author. (n.d.). Occupy Santa Rosa. Retrieved May 8, 2012, from HYPERLINK “https://www.occupysantarosa.org”https://www.occupysantarosa.org

No Author. (2012, January 15). Out mission and focus. In Prairie Fire Working Group of Santa Rosa. Retrieved May 8, 2012, from HYPERLINK “https://sites.google.com//ireworkinggroup/is-pfwg”https://sites.google.com///is-pfwg

Reich, R. (2011, November 23). Why We Must Occupy Democracy [Editorial]. Common Dreams. Retrieved from HYPERLINK “http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/24-5″http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/24-5

Thorson-Smith, Sylvia. (2011). PVJ takes a look at the “Occupy Wall Street”

movement. Network News, 5-8.

Occupy: A Social Movement for Equality and Justice  PAGE   \* MERGEFORMAT 12

The post Occupy: A Social Movement for Equality and Justice appeared first on Project Censored.

By Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” –Frederick Douglass

One continuing criticism of Project Censored is that we are a left leaning organization. Which is an interesting claim in that over 200 faculty and students from multiple disciplines and political orientations work with Project Censored each year.  Over 1,500 students have been trained in media research techniques since we began in 1976, and it would be hard to find a more mainstream, mostly Californian college student body.
Critical thinking and fact finding are not left leaning, they are the basis of democracy, and we proudly stand for the maximization of informed participatory democracy at the lowest possible level in society.  To this end, Project Censored supports social justice and media democracy in action.
The most common complaint about Project Censored is that we are more critical of powerful Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and liberals.  The second most often announced complaint that that we cover news stories that are really not “censored” or are part of some crazy conspiracy theory.
In regards to censorship our definition has been quite clear all along. Any interference with the free flow of information is censorship. Even if the interference is structural or not deliberate, it has the same impact by creating a lack of public awareness on critical issues. This means that when The New York Times chooses to cover the updates on celebrity deaths, marriages, or divorces, and ignores the ACLU’s release of military autopsy reports proving that the US was torturing prisoners to death in Iraq and Afghanistan (Censored Story #7, 2007), that is censorship.  It is censorship even if most of The New York Times journalist didn’t know about the ACLU report, they certainly should have—It was an AP release!  The ACLU report was only covered in a dozen or so newspapers (not the NYT) and went widely unnoticed.  For a story this important to go virtually unreported implies a degree of overt censorship.
Further, if journalists ignore topics related to 9/11, election fraud, electromagnetic weapons, contrail irregularities, because they might be labeled “conspiracy theorists,” that is censorship as well. Any decision to cover up, ignore, avoid, steer away from, or simply fail to investigate—even if the investigation is not fruitful— is censorship because it implies a willful choice to not cover a particular story.  Ignoring important news stories for whatever reasons is not commensurate with principles of a free press.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracies tend to be actions by small groups of individuals instead of massive collective plots by governments and corporations. However, small groups can be dangerous, especially when the individuals have significant power in huge public and private bureaucracies. However it is very unlikely that conspiracies can be interlinked in a macro way bridging the gaps between dozens of corporations and government bureaucracies. There are just too many connections for possible leaks and exposures.
Nonetheless, corporate boards of directors meet in closed rooms to plan to how best to maximize profit. If they knowingly make plans that hurt others, violate laws, undermine ethics, or show favoritism to friends, they are involved in a conspiracy. Conspiracies exit everywhere, and, yes, people do sit in rooms and conspire all the time. They may not congregate at the end of dark piers in abandoned warehouses under lights with no shades smoking cigars in trench coats mumbling and looking askance.  But conspirators do exist.  Micro-plots may well be the answer to some of the famous conspiracies theories floating in our circles of cynicism on the Internet. However, without accurate thorough investigations, we can only stew in our distrust. Critical thinking and accurate, transparent investigative research are needed to counter the emotional fraud and propaganda of speculative ideas, fear mongering, and groupthink.
The first thing that critics of investigations on 9/11, elections fraud, and any other issues do is to link all the questions—including some of the most hair-brain ideas— together in a crazy hodgepodge of irrationally that undermines legitimate investigations.  There is often a series of logical fallacies used by critics of controversial issues, which include ad hominem attacks, red herring and straw person distractions, and false dilemmas. Because many people are taken in by these irrationalities, some journalists are fearful of being labeled conspiracy theorists. To protect their careers many—especially those in corporate media— will steer their inquiries to “safer” stories.
For example, in 2007, Project Censored covered research into the events of September the 11th by Brigham Young University physics professor, Steven E. Jones. Dr. Jones concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings was implausible according to laws of physics. Jones called for an independent, international scientific investigation “guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.” Jones specifically investigated the collapse of WTC 7; a forty-seven-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint,” in the same manner as a controlled demolition late in the afternoon on September 11, 2001. WTC 7 collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. “Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?” Jones asked. “That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors—and intact steel support columns—the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass,” he explained.  “How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?” The paradox, he says, “is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses.”
To support his theory, Jones and eight other scientists conducted chemical research on the dust from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, 2009 included their research article, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.” In the abstract the authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.
Additionally, architect Richard Gage, AIA, founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, has to date amassed nearly 700 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and physics who have signed a petition calling for a new investigation of the events of 9/11 in New York.  Gage’s and Jones’ empirical research suggesting the possibility of controlled demolition have moved thousands of others to question the events of 9/11, but most in the media have either ignored their hard data, marginalized their significance, or outright attacked them.  Again, this is not the role of a free press.  If bias is unacceptable, these views should be heard and vetted fairly in an open society regardless of their ultimate outcomes and without contingency upon their popularity.
In the case of Gage and Jones, there are scientific, factual arguments that establish the clear possibility of controlled demolition of the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001, and there is zero coverage in the corporate media in the US. This is top down corporate censorship pure and simple. Even if other scientists can be found to disagree with the study, the totality of ignoring the topic inside the corporate media is absolute. It seems unlikely that corporate journalists are unaware of the research as it is listed on hundreds of websites worldwide. Yet for some reason coverage is lacking inside the corporate media.  Perhaps the mainstream science journalists leave their critical thinking skills at home and give the scientific method the day off.  Or, the real conspiracy exists within the boardrooms of the corporate mainstream media.
We asked a faculty physicist at Sonoma State University what she thought about the new research from Dr. Jones in the Open Chemical Physics Journal. She had been one of our primary critics when Jones originally spoke on our campus in 2006. At that time she said she didn’t need to read Jones’ research because she had read Popular Mechanics on the issue, a nonacademic report that has been debunked in scholarly circles. She went on to imply that she “just knew” Jones was wrong. So when presented with a peer reviewed release in an academic chemical journal, her response was that it was not one of the most prestigious journals, without going into any detail. In other words, if one doesn’t like what a scientific journal says, one can dismiss it a priori.  No debate, no open discussion required.  These are hardly principles of the academy and they are not tenets of a free press.  In fact, these tactics and practices of attack and avoidance are enemies of free thought in any democratic society.

Project Censored as Left Leaning

According to the editor of the Pasadena Weekly, Project Censored suffers from a “perceived extreme left-leaning bent that editors (us) . . . have assumed over the years in selecting, writing, and publishing its stories . . . more than anything it has been the Project’s perceived long leftward lean that has done the most damage to its overall credibility. Although the group never explicitly takes a political stance, a majority of the stories Project Censored highlights have a leftist political slant, criticizing big business, economic inequality, damage to the environment, and the Pentagon, and misdeeds of conservative politicians, among other progressive issues.”
Why covering stories about the powerful in government and big business, or environmental and inequality issues are left leaning is beyond our understanding.  It seems that this is just good journalism—the journalism that is missing in the corporate media—and could just as well be middle-leaning-journalism, right-leaning-journalism or crazy California journalism. Maybe it’s just holding those in powerful positions in society accountable for their decisions and actions, which we believe is what a free press is supposed to do. Nonetheless, we decided to examine the key stories Project Censored covered that past sixteen years during both the George W. Bush and the William Jefferson Clinton administrations. Perhaps we can detect some bias from our records.
We have examined censored news stories from both Bush and Clinton from our records. Amazingly, the similarities are very evident. Both administrations lied to support military aggression, supported policies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, spied on Americans, undermined civil liberties and violated international treaties, supported global arm sales/distribution and private mercenaries, ignored environmental issues, lobbied for unsafe industrial practices, allowed big banks and Wall Street unregulated freedoms, encouraged media consolidation and repression of open journalism.
Here are some of the stories Project Censored covered under the Clinton and Bush Presidencies. All stories are archived online at under the archives link catalogued by year.

Arms Sales/Support and Consequences

Under Clinton

Turkey Destroys Kurdish Villages with U.S. Weapons
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2000, Story #5

Source: Kevin McKiernan, “Turkey’s War on the Kurds,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April, 1999.

In 1995, the Clinton Administration recognized that the Turkish government used American arms in domestic military operations where human rights abuses occurred. In fact, Turkey has forcibly evacuated, leveled and burned more than 3,000 Kurdish villages in the past decade. Most of the atrocities, which have cost over 40,000 lives, took place during Clinton’s first term in office. As an ally of the U.S. through NATO, Turkey receives U.S. weapons, from dozens of companies, including Hughes, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Despite a horrifying report of violent abuse by Amnesty International, the State Department passed arms deals with Turkey. The war in Turkey represents the greatest use of U.S. weapons in combat anywhere in the world today.

Under Bush

U.S. Aid to Israel Fuels Repressive Occupation in Palestine
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2004, Story #24

Sources: John Steinbach, “Palestine in the Crosshairs: U.S. Policy and the struggle for Nationhood,” Covert Action Quarterly, Spring 2002, No. 72; Matt Bowles, “U.S. Aid Lifeblood of the Occupation,” Left Turn, March 4, 2002; Bob Wing, “Israel Erecting ‘Great Wall’ Around Palestine,” Wartimes, April 2003.

U.S. aid to Israel over the course of its fifty-four years of nationhood has fueled the illegal occupation of Palestinian land superceding Palestinian rights to self-government.    During the last 25 years US aid to Israel has been about 60% military aid and 40% economic aid. There is a new plan to phase out all economic aid by 2008 in order to have all the aid going to military. Israel receives about $3 billion a year in direct aid and $3 billion a year in indirect aid in the form of special loans and grants. Under the Arms Export Control Act the US can only supply weapons that are used “for legitimate self defense”. The US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits military assistance to any country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”. The Proxmire Amendment bans military assistance to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities. All three of these laws are currently being broken with aid to Israel.

Pre-War Intelligence Used to Justify Military Aggression

Under Clinton

Evidence Indicates No Pre-war Genocide in Kosovo
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2000, Story #12

Sources: Mark Cook, “William Walker: `Man With a Mission,’” Covert Action Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1999;  The Progressive Review, “My Multinational Entity, Right or Wrong,” June 1999;  Pablo Ordaz , “Spanish Police and Forensic Experts have not Found Proof of Genocide in the North of Kosovo,” El Pais, September 23, 1999.

According to the New York Times, the “turning point” to NATO’s decision to go to war against Yugoslavia occurred on January 20, 1999 when U.S. diplomat William Walker led a group of news reporters to discover a so-called Serb massacre of some 45 Albanians in Racak, Kosovo. This story made international headlines and was later used to justify the NATO bombings.
The day before the “massacre,” Serb police had a firefight with KLA rebels that was covered by an Associated Press (AP) film crew. At the end of day, the village was deserted. Then, the next day the village had been reoccupied by the KLA, and it was the KLA who initially led foreign visitors to the alleged massacre site. William Walker arrived at noon with additional journalists, and expressed his outrage at a “genocidal massacre” to the world press.
Walker’s story remains shrouded with doubt. “What is disturbing,” remarks war correspondent Renaud Girard, “is that the pictures filmed by the AP journalists radically contradict Walker’s accusations.” Challenges to Walker’s massacre story were published in Le Monde and Le Figaro: “During the night, could the UCK (KLA) have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre?” (Le Figaro). Belarussian and Finnish forensic experts were later unable to verify that a massacre had actually occurred at Racak.

Under Bush

US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq UN Report
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2004, Story #3

Source: Michael I. Niman, “What Bush didn’t want you to know about Iraq,” The Humanist and ArtVoice, March/April 2003.

Throughout the winter of 2002, the Bush administration publicly accused Iraqi weapons declarations of being incomplete. The almost unbelievable reality of this situation is that it was the United States itself that had removed over 8,000 pages of the 11,800 page original report given by Iraq to the UN. This came as no surprise to Europeans however, as Iraq had made extra copies of the complete weapons declaration report and unofficially distributed them to journalists throughout Europe. The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszetung broke the story on December 19, 2002 in an article by Andreas Zumach.
According to Niman, “The missing pages implicated twenty-four U.S.-based corporations and the successive Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. administration in connection with the illegal supplying of Saddam Hussein government with myriad weapons of mass destruction and the training to use them.” Groups documented in the original report that were supporting Iraq’s weapons programs prior to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait included:  Eastman Kodak, Dupont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, and Bechtel; U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture and Department of Defense; and nuclear weapons labs such as Lawrence-Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia.
Beginning in 1983, the U.S. was involved in eighty shipments of biological and chemical components, including strains of botulism toxin, anthrax, gangrene bacteria, West Nile fever virus, and Dengue fever virus. These shipments continued even after Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran in 1984.

Civilian Deaths in Iraq

Under Clinton

U. S. Weapons mass Destruction Linked to the Deaths of a Half-Million Children
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Top 25 Censored Stories for 1999, Story #5

Sources: Dennis Bernstein, “Made in America,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 25, 1998; Bill Blum, “Punishing Saddam or the Iraqis,” I.F. Magazine, March/April 1998; Most Rev. Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret.), “Our Continuing War Against Iraq,” Space and Security News, May 1998.

For the past seven years, the United States has supported sanctions against Iraq that have taken the lives of more Iraqi citizens than did the war itself. The sanctions imposed on Iraq are causing shortages of food, medical supplies, and medicines. Since the war ended, more than half a million children under the age of five have died. UNICEF reports that 150 children are dying every day.
The Iraqi people are being punished for their leader’s reticence to comply fully with U.S.-supported U.N. demands “to search every structure in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.” Ironically, 1994 U.S. Senate findings uncovered evidence that U.S. firms supplied at least some of the very biological material that the U.N. inspection teams are now seeking
A 1994 U.S. Senate panel report indicated that between 1985 and 1989, U.S. firms supplied microorganisms needed for the production of Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare. The Senate panel wrote: “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.

Under Bush

Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009, Story #1

Sources: Michael Schwartz, “Is the United States Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month? Or Is It More?” After Downing Street, July 6, 2007; Joshua Holland, “Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda genocide, Cambodian killing fields,” AlterNet, September 17, 2007; Luke Baker, “Iraq conflict has killed a million, says survey,” Reuters (via AlterNet), January 7, 2008; Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, “Iraq: Not our country to Return to,” Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008.

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). ORB’s research covered fifteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Those not covered include two of Iraq’s more volatile regions—Kerbala and Anbar—and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work. In face-to-face interviews with 2,414 adults, the poll found that more than one in five respondents had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, as opposed to natural cause.
Authors Joshua Holland and Michael Schwartz point out that the dominant narrative on Iraq—that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility—is ill conceived. Interviewers from the Lancet report of October 2006 (Censored 2006, #2) asked Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died. Of deaths for which families were certain of the perpetrator, 56 percent were attributable to US forces or their allies. Schwartz suggests that if a low pro rata share of half the unattributed deaths were caused by US forces, a total of approximately 80 percent of Iraqi deaths are directly US perpetrated.

Administrative Support for Big Banks And Stock Brokers

Under Clinton

New Mega-Merged Banking Behemoths = Big Risk
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1997, Story #6

Source: Jake Lewis, “The Making of the Banking Behemoths,” Multinational Monitor, June 1996.

Nineteen ninety-five was a record year of bank mergers. Chase Manhattan and Chemical bank combined to create the nation’s largest bank, with $300 billion in assets—while on the West coast, the merger of First Interstate and Wells Fargo created a new giant with over $100 billion in assets. The massive consolidation of the nation’s banking resources has resulted in 71.5 percent of U.S. banking assets being controlled by the 100 largest banking organizations, representing less than 1 percent of the total banks in the nation.
The trend toward bigger banks is creating a system whereby giant banking institutions are taking on “too big to fail” status. Indeed, a failure of any one of these new giants would have a devastating effect on the nation’s financial health. And with the Federal Reserve capping the amount that financial institutions have to pay into the government’s bank insurance fund at $25 billion, just 1.25 percent of deposits are now insured. Consequently, any bailout of one of these new megabanks would come directly from the pockets of taxpayers.
Studies have also found that banks in concentrated markets tend to charge higher rates for certain types of loans, and tend to offer lower interest rates on certain types of deposits than do banks in less concentrated markets. A 1995 study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Center for Study of Responsive Law showed that fees on checking and savings accounts increased at twice the rate of inflation from 1993 to 1995 as bank mergers moved forward.

Under Bush

Little Known Stock Fraud Could Weaken U.S. Economy
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2006, Story #18

Sources: David Hendricks, “Naked Short Selling Is A Plague For Businesses And Investors,” San Antonio Express News, March 2, 2005;  Karl Thiel, “Who’s Behind Naked Shorting?” TheMotleyFool.com, March 30, 2005; Financial Wire, Stockgate Today Series, “SEC’s Donaldson Addresses Liquidity Fraud,” September 20, 2004; and Dave Patch, “Dateline NBC Cancelled and Attorney Accuses DTCC of Cheap Thuggery,” April 7, 2005.

While the balance of supply and demand is a fairly well known principle of economic health, a related and similar relationship exists between liquidity-the availability of liquid, spendable assets such as cash, stocks and bonds-and security-the stability, endurance and trustworthiness of more long-term financial mechanisms.
The scandal coined “Stockgate” by the Financial Wire involves the abuse of a practice called “short selling.” As opposed to a traditional approach to investing in which stocks are researched and bought on the hope they will rise over the “long” term, going “short” involves a bet that a stock is about to go down in value. In a short sale, an investor sells stock that he or she technically doesn’t own. The investor borrows these shares of stock from their broker, who in turn may likely borrow the shares himself from a financial clearinghouse like a brokerage firm or hedge fund. Hoping that the price of the stock will drop, the investor is obligated to eventually “close” the short by buying back the sold shares at a hopefully lower price, thus making a profit from the fall of the stock. When the time runs out for “covering” the short and the price hasn’t dropped, the investor is forced to buy back the shares at a loss and take a financial hit. The short sale of stocks is a risky bet, usually not recommended except for speculation or hedging-to protect long-term financial positions with short-term offsets. As short-selling is a sale of stocks not owned, but loaned, it is an example of buying on margin-a category of practices whose abuses stand out clearly in many people’s minds as a significant factor in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 which ushered in the Great Depression.
Naked shorting is an illegal abuse of short selling in which investors short-sell stock that they have no intention or ability to ever cover. When allowed to occur, naked shorting drives the stock value of a company down by creating more stock shares flowing around the market than actual shares of stock that the company can back with their current earnings. Companies, their shareholders, and indeed the entire economy are hurt financially by naked shorting, as it reduces the money available to support economic growth.

Additional References:

David Sedore, “Hedge Fund Assets Frozen,” March 4, 2005, and “Hedge Fund Virtually Bare,” March 12, 2005, The Palm Beach Post-KL Financial fraud series; PrimeZone Media Network, “First American Scientific Corp. Takes Counter Measures to Stop ‘Naked Shorting’ of its Stock,” December 17, 2004.

National Security/Government Secrecy

Under Clinton

Little Known Federal Law Paves The Way for National Identification Card
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1998, Story #8

Sources:  Cyndee Parker, “National ID Card is Now Federal Law and Georgia Wants to Help Lead the Way,” Witwigo, May/June 1997; Mainstream media coverage: The New York Times, September 8, 1996, section 6; page 58, column 1; related article in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1996, page A1.
In September 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996. Buried on approximately page 650 was a section that creates a framework for establishing a national ID card for the American public. This legislation was slipped through without fanfare or publicity.
This law has various aspects: It establishes a “Machine Readable Document Pilot Program” requiring employers to swipe a prospective employee’s driver’s license through a special reader linked to the federal government’s Social Security Administration. The federal government would have the discretion to approve or disapprove the applicant for employment. In this case, the driver’s license becomes a “national ID card.”
The author of the national ID law, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), stated in a Capitol Hill magazine that it was her intention to see Congress immediately implement a national ID system whereby every American would be required to carry a card with a “magnetic strip on it on which the bearer’s unique voice, retina pattern, or fingerprint is digitally encoded.” Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX), among others, has strongly denounced the new law, calling it “an abomination, and wholly at odds with the American tradition of individual freedom.”

Under Bush

Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government
Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006, Story #1

Source: Karen Lightfoot, “New Report Details Bush Administration Secrecy,” Committee on Government Reform, September 14, 2004, online at http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/newsprint.cgi?file=/news2004/0914-05.htm.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives citizens the ability to file a request for specific information from a government agency and provides recourse in federal court if that agency fails to comply with FOIA requirements. Over the last two decades, beginning with Reagan, this law has become increasingly diluted and circumvented by each succeeding administration.
Under the Bush Administration, agencies make extensive and arbitrary use of FOIA exemptions (such as those for classified information, privileged attorney-client documents and certain information compiled for law enforcement purposes) often inappropriately or with inadequate justification. Recent evidence shows agencies making frivolous (and sometimes ludicrous) exemption claims, abusing the deliberative process privilege, abusing the law enforcement exemption, and withholding data on telephone service outages.
The Bush Administration also engages in an aggressive policy of questioning, challenging and denying FOIA requesters’ eligibility for fee waivers, using a variety of tactics. Measures include narrowing the definition of “representative of news media,” claiming information would not contribute to public understanding.
The Bush Administration has also obtained unprecedented authority to conduct government operations in secret, with little or no judicial oversight. Under expanded law enforcement authority in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department can more easily use secret orders to obtain library and other private records, obtain “sneak-and-peek” warrants to conduct secret searches, and conduct secret wiretaps.

Homeland Security And Government Spying

Under Clinton

Exposing the Global Surveillance System
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1998, Story #4

Source: Nicky Hager, “Secret Power. Exposing the Global Surveillance System,” Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), Winter 1996/1997.

For over 40 years, New Zealand’s largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), has been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region. Neither the public nor the majority of New Zealand’s top elected officials had knowledge of these activities. These procedures have operated since 1948 under a secret, Cold War-era intelligence alliance between the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-the UKUSA agreement. But in the late 1980s, the U.S. prompted New Zealand to join a new and highly secret global intelligence system. U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the world’s biggest, most closely held intelligence projects. Unlike many of the Cold War electronic spy systems, ECHELON is designed primarily to gather electronic transmissions from nonmilitary targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country.
The system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Computers at each secret station in the ECHELON network automatically search millions of messages for pre-programmed key words. For each message containing one of those key words, the computer automatically notes time and place of origin and interception, and gives the message a four-digit code for future reference.

Under Bush

Homeland Security Threatens Civil Liberty
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2004, Story #2

Sources: Alex Jones, “Secret Patriot II Destroys Remaining US Liberty,” Global Outlook, Volume 4; Frank Morales, “Homeland Defense: Pentagon Declares War on America,” Global Outlook, Winter 2003; Charles Lewis and Adam Mayle, “Justice Department Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Terrorism Act,” Center for Public Integrity online at http://publicintegrity.org.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) represents the most extensive restructuring of the U.S. government since 1947 – the year the Department of War was combined with the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force, to create the Department of Defense. The new Department of Homeland Security combines over one hundred separate entities of the executive branch, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and the Border Patrol, among others. The DHS employs over 170,000 federal workers and commands a total annual budget of $37 billion.
One DHS mandate largely ignored by the press requires the FBI, CIA, state, and local governments to share intelligence reports with the department upon command, without explanation. Civil rights activists claim that this endangers the rights and freedoms of law-abiding Americans by blurring the lines between foreign and domestic spying (as occurred during the COINTELPRO plan of the 1960s and ‘70s). According to the ACLU, the Department of Homeland Security will be “100% secret and 0% accountable
As part of Homeland Security, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 allows the government increased and unprecedented access to the lives of American citizens and represents an unrestrained imposition on our civil liberties. Wiretaps, previously confined to one phone, can now follow a person from place to place at the behest of government agents and people can now be detained on the vague suspicion that they might be a  terrorist – or assisting one. Detainees can also be denied the right to legal representation (or the right of private counsel when they are allowed to meet with their attorneys).

Private Mercenary Companies Used Around the World

Under Clinton

Mercenary Armies in Service to Global Corporations
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1999, Story #16

Sources: Pratap Chatterjee, “Mercenary Armies & Mineral Wealth,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1997, No. 62; Pratap Chatterjee, “Guarding the Multinationals,” Multinational Monitor, March 1998.

In many countries, multinational corporations have paid directly for private policing services from the local army; or have hired outside security companies to harass nationals who protest against the environmental impact of their operations. The firms involved represent a growing number of new corporate security operations around the world, linking former intelligence officers, standing armies, and local death squads.
One of these security companies is Defense Systems Limited (DSL). DSL is run by two ex-Special Air Service commandos out of London offices, across the street from Buckingham Palace. Their clients include petrochemical companies, multinational banks, embassies, nongovernmental organizations, and national and international organizations. One of DSL’s biggest contracts is with Mark Heathcote, a former M16 (British equivalent of the CIA) officer who ran operations in Argentina during the Falklands War. Heathcote is now the chief of security for British Petroleum (BP). In 1996, DSL sent a group of British personnel to train Colombian Police on BP-owned rigs. Training included lethal-weapons handling, sniper fire, and close quarter combat.
Another firm, Executive Outcomes, also offers mercenary armies to multinationals. Executive Outcomes fielded a private mercenary army in Angola in 1993, and offers high-tech security forces to corporations all over the world. In Nigeria, the Anglo-Dutch multinational Shell Corporation has been accused of causing major pollution in the Niger Delta for the last 38 years. Shell directly employs an elite detachment of Nigerian police to protect its own interests. Numerous demonstrators have been beaten and executed because of Shell operations in Nigeria.

Under Bush

Behind Blackwater Inc.
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2008, Story #7
Source: Jeremy Scahill, “Our Mercenaries in Iraq: Blackwater Inc and Bush’s Undeclared Surge,” Democracy Now! January 26, 2007, online at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232.

The company that most embodies the privatization of the military industrial complex—a primary part of the Project for a New American Century and the neoconservative revolution is the private security firm Blackwater (now called Xe). Blackwater is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, with 20,000 soldiers, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and a private intelligence division. The firm is also manufacturing its own surveillance blimps and target systems.
Blackwater is headed by a right-wing Christian-supremist and ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family has had deep neo-conservative connections. Bush’s latest call for voluntary civilian military corps to accommodate the “surge” will add to over half a billion dollars in federal contracts with Blackwater, allowing Prince to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against Muslims and others.
One of the last things Dick Cheney did before leaving office as Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush was to commission a Halliburton study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That study effectively created the groundwork for a continuing war profiteer bonanza.

Administration Support for the Chemical Industry

Under Clinton

Clinton Administration Lobbied for Retention of Toxic Chemicals in Children’s Toys
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1999, Story #9

Source: Charlie Gray, “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” Multinational Monitor, June 1998.

The Clinton Administration and the Commerce Department have lobbied on behalf of U.S. toy and chemical manufacturers against proposed new European Union (EU) restrictions, which would prevent children’s exposure to toxic chemicals released by polyvinyl chloride (PVC) toys such as teething rings. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), suggesting that the U.S. government lobbied at the behest of toymaker Mattel and chemical manufacturer Exxon, may help explain the European Commission’s rejection of the proposed emergency ban. A cable from Vernon Weaver, the U.S. Representative to the EU in Brussels, sent “heartfelt thanks” to Washington and U.S. missions in Europe for “making contact” with member state representatives of the EU Product Safety Emergencies Committee. “We are told by Exxon Chemical Europe Inc. that the input was very effective and the weigh-in was invaluable.”
Health authorities in several European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, have recommended a ban on PVC toys, such as teething rings and bath toys. The Spanish government requested action by the EU in March 1998. PVC, or polyvinyl chloride (also known as vinyl), is a common plastic that frequently contains toxic additives. The Front reports that no major U.S. retailers have taken precautionary action, chiefly because the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which is responsible for toy safety regulations, has yet to take action.

Under Bush

Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2007, Story #15

Sources: Jeff Ruch, “Chemical Industry Is Now EPA’s Main Research Partner,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, October 5, 2005; Jeff Ruch, “EPA Becoming Arm of Corporate R&D,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, October 6, 2005.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) research program is increasingly relying on corporate joint ventures, according to agency documents obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The American Chemical Council (ACC) is now EPA’s leading research partner and the EPA is diverting funds from basic health and environmental research towards research that addresses regulatory concerns of corporate funders.
Since the beginning of Bush’s first term in office, there has been a significant increase in cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) with individual corporations or industry associations. During Bush’s first four years EPA entered into fifty-seven corporate CRADAs, compared to thirty-four such agreements during Clinton’s second term.
EPA scientists claim that corporations are influencing the agency’s research agenda through financial inducements. One EPA scientist wrote, “Many of us in the labs feel like we work for contracts.” In April 2005, EPA’s Science Advisory Board warned that the agency was no longer funding credible public health research. It noted, for example, that the EPA was falling behind on issues such as intercontinental pollution transport and nanotechnology.

Attacks on Journalists

Under Clinton

Did the U.S. Deliberately Bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade?
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2001, Story #4

Sources: Joel Bleifuss, “A Tragic Mistake?” In These Times, December 12, 1999; Seth Ackerman, “Mission Implausible,” June 26, 2000, online at http://inthesetimes.com; Yoichi Shimatsu, “Reports Showing U.S. Deliberately Bombed Chinese Embassy Deliberately Ignored by U.S. Media,” Pacific News, October 20, 1999; Action Report, “NY Times on Chinese Embassy Bombing: Nothing to Report,” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, February 9, 2000, online at http://www.fair.org/activism/china-response2.html.

Elements within the CIA may have deliberately targeted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, without NATO approval, because it was serving as a rebroadcast station for the Yugoslavian army.
The London Observer and Copenhagen’s Politiken reported that, according to senior U.S. and European military sources, NATO knew very well where the Chinese embassy was located and listed it as a “strictly prohibited target” at the beginning of the war. The Observer stated that the CIA and its British equivalent, M16, had been listening to communications from the Chinese embassy routinely since it moved to its new site in 1996. The Chinese embassy was taken off the prohibited target list after NATO detected it sending Yugoslavian army signals to forces in the field. “Nearly everyone involved in NATO air operations (radio) signals command knows that the bombing was deliberate,” said Jens Holsoe of Politiken, lead investigative reporter on the news team reporting on the story.
President Clinton called the bombing a “tragic mistake” and said it was the result of a mix-up. NATO claimed that they were using old maps and got the address wrong. However, Observer reporters quoted a Naples-based flight controller who said the NATO maps that were used during the campaign had correctly identified the Chinese embassy.
A French Ministry of Defense report stated that the flight that targeted the Chinese embassy was not under NATO command, but rather an independent U.S. bombing raid. In July 1999, CIA director George Tenet testified before Congress that of the 900 sites struck by NATO during the bombing campaign, the only one targeted by the CIA was the Chinese embassy.

Under Bush

Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2006, Story #7

Sources: Steve Weissman, “Dead Messengers: How the U.S. Military Threatens Journalists,” Truthout, February 28, 2005; online at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022405A.shtml; Dahr Jamail, “Media Repression in ‘Liberated’ Land,” Inter Press Service, November 18, 2004, online at  http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26333.

According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)1, 2004 was the deadliest year for reporters since 1980, when records began to be kept. Over a 12-month span, 129 media workers were killed and 49 of those deaths occurred in the Iraqi conflict. According to independent journalist Dahr Jamail, journalists are increasingly being detained and threatened by the U.S.-installed interim government in Iraq. When the only safety for a reporter is being embedded with the U.S. military, the reported stories tend to have a positive spin. Non-embedded reporters suffer the great risk of being identified as enemy targets by the military.
The most blatant attack on journalists occurred the morning of April 8, 2004, when the Third Infantry fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad killing cameramen Jose Couso and Taras Protsyuk and injuring three others. The hotel served as headquarters for some 100 reporters and other media workers. The Pentagon officials knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of journalists and had assured the Associated Press that the U.S. would not target the building

Environmental Issues

Under Clinton

Clinton Administration Retreats on Ozone Crisis
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1995

Source: David Moberg, “Full of holes: Clinton’s retreat on the ozone crisis,” In These Times, January 24, 1994.

The ozone hole over Antarctica has continued to grow every year since its discovery in 1985 and damage to the ozone layer over heavily populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere also has been increasing rapidly. Scientists recorded all-time low levels of ozone over the United States in 1993.
The ultraviolet rays that penetrate a weakened ozone layer have been linked to increased cataracts, skin cancer, genetic damage and infectious diseases among humans — as well as reduced plant growth. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration has been moving backward on protecting the stratospheric ozone layer. This ominous precedent will encourage other industrial countries to stall on their own CFC phase-outs and puts the administration in a far weaker position to argue for an accelerated phase-out of CFCs in the developing countries where CFC production is soaring.
DuPont, the giant chemical firm that developed the first industrial CFC, had planned to halt CFC production at the end of 1994. Yet, in late 1993, EPA asked DuPont to keep making CFCs until 1996. The EPA defended its decision as a “consumer protection” measure that will make it easier for car owners to recharge their old air conditioners, which use CFCs as a cooling agent.

Under Bush
Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2005, Story #3

Sources: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “The Junk Science of George W. Bush,” The Nation, March 8, 2004; “Censoring Scientific Information,” Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, #91; Sunny Lewis, “Ranking Scientists Warn Bush Science Policy Lacks Integrity,” Environment News Service and Oneworld.net, February 20, 2004; Committee on Government Reform – Minority Staff, “Politics And Science In The Bush Administration,” Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman, August 2003, updated November 13, 2003.

Critics charge that the Bush Administration is purging, censoring, and manipulating scientific information in order to push forward its pro-business, anti-environmental agenda. In Washington, D.C. more than 60 of the nation’s top scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, and former federal agency directors, issued a statement on February 18, 2004 accusing the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific results for political ends and calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking.
Under the current administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has blacklisted qualified scientists who pose a threat to its pro-business ideology. When a team of biologists working for the EPA indicated that there had been a violation of the “Endangered Species Act” by the Army Corps of Engineers, the group was replaced with a “corporate-friendly” panel.

Media Deregulation

Under Clinton

Telecommunications Deregulation: Closing Up America’s “Marketplace of Ideas”
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1996, Story #1

Source: Ralph Nader, James Love, and Andrew Saindon, “Federal Telecommunications Legislation,” Consumer Project on Technology, July 14, 1995.

The Telecommunications Deregulation Bill, eliminates virtually all regulation of the United States communication industry. As tends to be the case with most anti-consumer legislation, the bill stealthily moved under the guise of “encouraging competition”—but will, in reality, have the opposite effect of creating huge new concentrations of media power.
The most troubling aspect of the bill allows easing-and outright elimination-of current anti-trust regulations. In what the New York Times described as “a dazzling display of political influence,” the nation’s broadcast networks scored big in the House version of the bill by successfully getting the limits on ownership eased so that any individual company can control television stations serving up to 50 percent of the country. The Senate version of the bill provides for a more modest 35 percent coverage.
The legislation also dismantles current regulations, which limit the number of radio stations that can be owned by a single company. Currently no one single company can own more than 40 stations. It also would lift the current FCC ban on joint ownership of a broadcast radio or TV license and a newspaper in the same market—allowing a single company to have 100 percent control over the three primary sources of news in a community.

Under Bush

FCC Moves to Privatize Airwaves
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2003, Story #1

Sources: Jeremy Rifkin, “Global Media Giants Lobby to Privatize Entire Broadcast System,” London Guardian, April 28, 2001 and in Media File, Autumn 2001 volume 20, #4; Brendan l. Koerner, “Losing Signal,” Mother Jones, Sept/October 2001; Dorothy Kidd, “Legal Project to Challenge Media Monopoly,” Media File, May/June 2001.

For almost 70 years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has administered and regulated the broadcast spectrum as an electronic “commons” on behalf of the American people. The FCC issues licenses to broadcasters that allow them, for a fee, to use, but not own, one or more specific radio or TV frequencies. Thus, the public has retained the ability to regulate, as well as influence, access to broadcast communications.
Several years ago, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, in their report “The Telecom Revolution: An American Opportunity,” recommended a complete privatization of the radio frequencies, whereby broadcasters with existing licenses would eventually gain complete ownership of their respective frequencies. They could thereafter develop them in markets of their choosing, or sell and trade them to other companies. The few non-allocated bands of the radio frequency spectrum would be sold off, as electronic real estate, to the highest bidders. With nothing then to regulate, the FCC would eventually be abolished. The reasoning behind this radical plan was that government control of the airwaves has led to inefficiencies. In private hands, the frequencies would be exchanged in the marketplace, and the forces of free-market supply and demand would foster the most creative (and, of course, most profitable) use of these electronic “properties.”
This privatization proposal was considered too ambitious by the Clinton administration. However, in February 2001, within months after a more “pro-business” president took office, 37 leading US economists requested, in a joint letter, that the FCC allow broadcasters to lease, in secondary markets, the frequencies they currently use under their FCC license. Their thinking was that with this groundwork laid, full national privatization would follow, and eventually nations would be encouraged to sell off their frequencies to global media enterprises.

Violations of International Treaties

Under Clinton

Planned Weapons in Space Violate International Treaty
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2000, Story #8

Sources: Karl Grossman, “US Violates World Law to Militarize Space,” Earth Island Journal, Winter/Spring 1999; Bruce K. Gagnon, “Pyramids to The Heavens Space,” Toward Freedom, September/ October 1999.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 bans the deployment of space weapons of mass destruction. Recently the U.S. Congress ignored further need of such a treaty, and approved the development of the U.S. Military’s Space Command Weapons program. This sudden shift of viewpoint coincides with the complete absence of any foreign government competition, and with the increase in the ability of the US to effectively use satellite surveillance in military campaigns. The proposed system is designed to extend control of space far beyond the outer boundaries of the Earths atmosphere. To prevent deployment of any adversarial country’s satellites, the Pentagon is well along in its research and development of an anti-satellite weapons program. The reemergence of a “Star Wars” weapon system is echoed in the words of General Joseph Ashly, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command: “It’s politically sensitive but its going to happen…we are going to fight from space and we are going to fight into space.” Concerned with the possibility of nuclear contamination of the atmosphere from satellite breakup, the European Space Agency has urged the US to utilize solar power to fuel space-military command modules.

Under Bush

Treaty Busting By the United States
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2004, Story #7

Sources: Marylia Kelly and Nicole Deller, “Rule of power or rule of law?” Connections, June 2002; John B. Anderson, “Unsigning the ICC,” The Nation, April 2002; Eamon Martin, “U.S. Invasion Proposal Shocks the Netherlands,” Ashville Global Report, June 20-26, 2002; John Valleau, “Nuclear Nightmare,” Global Outlook, Summer 2002.

The United States is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted. The Bush Administration is now outright rejecting a number of those treaties, and in doing so places global security in jeopardy as other nations feel entitled to do the same. The rejected treaties include: The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a protocol to create a compliance regime for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The U.S. is also not complying with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Commission (CWC), the BWC, and the UN framework Convention on Climate Change.
The ABM Treaty alone is a crucial factor in national security; letting Bush get away with facilitating its demise will destroy the balance of powers carefully crafted in our Constitution. The Bush Administration has no legitimate excuse for nullifying the ABM Treaty since the events that have threatened the security of the United States have not involved ballistic missiles, and none of them are in any way related to the subject matter of the ABM Treaty. Bush’s withdrawal violates the U.S. Constitution, international law, and Article XV of the ABM Treaty itself. The Bush Administration says it needs to get rid of the ABM Treaty so it can test the SPY radar on the Aegis cruisers against Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) and so that it can build a new test facility at Fort Greely, Alaska. In addition, some conservatives have willingly dismissed the ABM Treaty because it stands as the major obstacle towards development of a “Star Wars” missile defense system. Discarding treaty constraints and putting weapons in space is nothing short of pursuing absolute military superiority.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is crucial to global security because it bars the spread of nuclear weapons. The U.S. is currently in noncompliance with the NPT requirements, as demonstrated in the January 2002 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review. Moreover, critics charge that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) under construction at Livermore lab violates the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the U.S. signed in 1996 but has not ratified. The CTBT bans nuclear explosions, and its language does not contain any “exceptions allowing laboratory thermonuclear explosions.”

Some Things Never Change: Power of Elites Inside the Trilateral Commission

Under President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission
Top 25 Censored Stories for 1977, Story #1

Sources: Michael Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, 1975; The Review of the News, August 18, 1976; Gar Smith, The Berkeley Barb, July 30, 1976; Gary Allen, “Carter Brings Forth a Cabinet,” American Opinion, February 1977; W.E. Barnes, Political Analyst, San Francisco Examiner, December 12, 1976; In These Times, February 2, 1977; Noam Chomsky, “Trilateral’s RX for Crisis: Governability Yes, Democracy No,” Seven Days, February 14, 1977.

In the election year of 1976, Jimmy Carter ran a successful campaign for the presidency based on his image as an anti-establishment, peanut-farming, ex-governor of the state of Georgia. Yet, since the fall of 1973, Carter had been associated with David Rockefeller and other members of an international power elite through his association with the Trilateral Commission, one of Rockefeller’s many policy-making organizations. According to the Italian publication Europa, as cited in The Review of The News, Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a founding director of the Trilateral Commission (TLC), had agreed on Carter’s potential as our next president as far back as 1970. Supportive of Carter’s close relationship with this little-known power elite is the fact that many members of his administration have been drawn from the membership rolls of the TLC. These include: Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State; Brzezinski, National Security Adviser; W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Treasury; Harold Brown, Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State; Richard N. Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs; Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and C. Fred Bergsten, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economic Affairs. Carter’s personal choice for vice president, Walter Mondale, is also a member of the TLC.

Under President Barack Obama

Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010, Story # 22

Source:  Patrick Wood, “Obama: Trilateral Commission Endgame,” The August Review, January 30, 2009, online at http://www.augustreview.com/news_commentary/trilateral_commission/obama%3a_trilateral_commission_endgame_20090127110/.

Barack Obama has appointed no less than eleven members of the Trilateral Commission to top-level and key positions in his Administration. During Obama’s presidential campaign Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973, was Obama’s principal foreign policy advisor.
According to official Trilateral Commission membership lists, there are only 87 members from the United States (the other 337 members are from other regions). Thus, in less than two weeks since his inauguration, Obama’s appointments encompass more than 12% of Commission’s entire U.S. membership.

Conclusion

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all avenues of the truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.  It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1804

Media scholar and FreePress.net founder Robert McChesney in his work, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, wrote, “A media system set up to serve the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue cannot and does not serve the needs of the preponderance of the population . . .What types of important stories get almost no coverage in the commercial news media? The historical standard is that there is no coverage when the political and economic elites are in agreement.”
Reflecting upon the aforementioned examples of censored topics and stories, the bias of Project Censored seems to be quite simple: we promote protection of First Amendment rights in support of a truly free press, one that holds those in power, elected by the people or appointed, accountable. Investigating controversial and difficult subjects that impact society should not earn journalists and scholars the label “conspiracy theorist.” Labeling is a tactic of suppression and censorship.
Furthermore, supporting the US Constitution should not be distorted as an ideological bias of Left or Right. It is merely patriotic duty to enforce the rule of law, in so far as the law is based upon the true notions of liberty and justice for all.  Without media freedom, not only can democracy not thrive, it simply cannot exist.

Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, director of Project Censored, and President of the Media Freedom Foundation.

Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, associate director of Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation, and the Project Censored College and University Affiliates Coordinator for Media Freedom International (http://mediafreedominternational.org).

Elliot van Patten and Frances A. Capell provided research and editing assistance for this article.

References

[1] The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, ISSN: 1874-4125, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe

pp.7-31, Authors: Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen,

http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM. For more detailed, scientific discussion on these issues, including possibilities of controlled demolition, see Richard Gage andArchitects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth online at http://AE911Truth.org.

Then-President George W. Bush said to the UN in November, 2001, “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.”  Apparently, even though the eventual official story of the 9/11 Commission itself was a conspiracy theory, the press seemed to follow Bush’s lead by not looking closely at the many problems associated with the events of 9/11 (which can be viewed herehttp://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/unanswered-questions-of-9-11-july-2005/).  Even most “left-leaning” journalists refuse to honestly and openly investigate the events of 9/11 as was noted by Peter Phillips in the study “Left Progressive Media Inside the Propaganda Model,” online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/left-progressive-media-inside-the-propaganda-model/.  For more fact-based information regarding the many research problems associated with the official government theories on 9/11, see http://911truth.org.

We in a free society should be entitled to robust debate in the press.  As Thomas Jefferson stated in his 1801 inaugural address, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change it’s republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”  This is a crucial component of media democracy.

[1] Uhrich, Kevin, Pasadena Weekly, “Uncovering Project Censored,” May 18, 2006.

[1] All the stories in this chapter were published by Project Censored as part of the Top 25 Censored Stories for each year between 1976 and 2009. Included here are only brief summaries of each story example.  For more details on each, please see the Project Censored website.  The stories are accessible online athttp://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/publications/.  There, the stories are catalogued by year in their top 25 rankings.  A subject archive is available online as well at http://ringnebula.com/. All other sources not in endnotes here are in the actual text of this article with more available online in the Project archives.

[1] Thomas Jefferson quote from The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, p. 637.  Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy:  Communication Politics in Dubious Times, (New York:  The New Press, 1999, p. xiii, xviii).

The post Analysis of Project Censored: Are We a Left-Leaning, Conspiracy-Oriented Organization? appeared first on Project Censored.

In the 1950s and 60s the CIA began work to find means for influencing human cognition, emotion and behavior. Through the use of the psychological understanding of the human being as a social animal and the ability to manipulate a subject’s environment through isolation, drugs and hypnosis, US funded scientists have long searched for better means of controlling human behavior. This research has included the use of wireless directed electromagnetic energy under the heading of “Information Warfare” and “Non Lethal Weapons.” New technological capabilities have been developed in black budget projects[1] over the last few decades— including the ability to influence human emotion, disrupt thought, and present excruciating pain through the manipulation of magnetic fields. The US military and intelligence agencies have at their disposal frightful new weapons, weapons that have likely already been covertly used and/or tested on humans, both here and abroad, and which could be directed against the public in the event of mass protests or civil disturbance. Read the entire report here.

The post US ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS appeared first on Project Censored.

“When it comes to the news, the corporate view is ‘objective,’ all else is ‘propaganda.’”

—Studs Terkel

Among the most important Project Censored news stories of the past decade, one is the fact that over one million people have died because of the United States military invasion and occupation of Iraq. This, of course, does not include the number of deaths from the first Gulf War, nor the ensuing sanctions placed upon the country of Iraq that, combined, caused close to an additional two million Iraqi deaths. In the current Iraq War, beginning in March of 2003, over a million people died violently primarily from US bombings and neighborhood patrols. These were deaths in excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government. Among US military leaders and policy elites, the issue of counting the dead was dismissed before the Iraqi invasion even began. In an interview with reporters in late March of 2002 when the War on Terror was in its infancy, US General Tommy Franks stated, “You know we don’t do body counts.”(i) Fortunately, for those concerned about humanitarian costs of war and empire, others do.

In a January 2008 report, the British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reported that “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003. We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.”(ii)

The ORB report comes on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal that confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths in Iraq. A study done by Dr. Les Roberts from January 1, 2002 to March 18, 2003 put the civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A second study published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion. The 2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces.

The magnitude of these million-plus deaths and creation of such a vast refugee crisis is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces has guaranteed a monthly mass death rate of thousands of people—a carnage so severe and so concentrated as to equate it with the most heinous mass killings in world history. Further, more tons of bombs have been dropped in Iraq than all of World War II.[iii]

The American people are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in America’s name. Yet most Americans have no idea of the magnitude of the deaths and tend to believe that the deaths are only in the thousands and are primarily Iraqis killing Iraqis. Corporate mainstream media is in large part to blame.

The question then becomes, how can this mass ignorance and corporate media deception exist in the United States of America, and what impact does this have on peace and social justice movements in the country?[iv]

Truth Emergency and Media Reform

In the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has reached its end. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literal Truth Emergency. Americans cannot access the truth about the issues that most impact their lives by relying on the mainstream corporate media. A Truth Emergency is a culmination of the failures of the fourth estate to act as a truly free press. This truth emergency exists not only as a result of fraudulent elections, pseudo 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, torture camps, and doctored intelligence, but also around issues that intimately impact everyday Americans. Yet these issues are rarely reported in corporate media outlets, where a vast majority of the American people continue to turn to for news and information.

Consider that most US workers have been faced with a thirty-five year decline in real wages while the top few percent enjoy unparalleled wealth with strikingly low tax burdens, creating a vastly disparate and widening wealth distribution gap. Furthermore, the US has the highest infant mortality rate among industrialized nations, is falling behind Europe and Asia in scientific research and education, faces closing factories and schools, laid off teachers, an actual 15 percent unemployment rate, multi-trillion dollar stratospheric national debt, a crumbling infrastructure, and is seriously lacking in healthcare quality and delivery. In fact, over 50 million Americans now lack healthcare coverage resulting in the deaths of 18,000 people a year. America has entered another Gilded Age. Someone should alert the media.[v]

This Truth Emergency Movement held its first national strategy summit in Santa Cruz, California from January 25- to 27, 2008. Organizers gathered key media constituencies to devise coherent decentralized models for distribution of suppressed news, synergistic truth-telling, and collaborative strategies to disclose, legitimize, and popularize deeper historical narratives on power and inequality in the US. In sum, this truth movement is seeking to discover in this moment of Constitutional crisis, ecological peril, and widening war, ways in which top investigative journalists, whistleblowers, and independent media activists can transform the way Americans perceive and defend their world.

There is another growing national movement to address mainstream media failures and policies in government, the Free Press or Media Reform Movement. However, this movement fails to address many issues of the actual Truth Emergency. During the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) in Minneapolis, MN, Project Censored interns and faculty conducted a sociological survey designed to gauge conference participant thoughts on the status quo of the news media as well as the truthfulness of corporate media news and effectiveness of the media reform movement. The survey also sought to determine the level of belief and support in a Truth Emergency in the US and the varying degrees of support for key truth issues regardless of their coverage at the NCMR conference.

The completed survey yielded 376 randomly selected NCMR attendees out of the 3,500 people registered for the conference. The survey has a statistical accuracy of plus or minus 5 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval, in that all the people at the NCMR hold the same beliefs.

Strong support was shown for the premise of a Truth Emergency in the US. The survey asked, Has corporate media failed to keep the American people informed on important issues facing the nation? Does a Truth Emergency exist in the United States?

The response was staggering. Ninety-nine percent strongly agreed, or agreed with

the first question, and only seven percent of responders disagreed with the characterization of current events as a Truth Emergency in the US. Yet few of the events, panels, or talks at the conference reflected these concerns.

Discovering the most effective ways to chisel at the bulwark of corrupt corporate

media will require continuing thought and effort. It is clear from our survey that media democracy activists strongly support the continuing development of independent media combined with aggressive reform efforts and policy changes as part of an overall media democracy movement. Activists also believe that both reform and grassroots independent media efforts will fit within an ongoing truth emergency theme that conducts deep investigative research into critical social justice issues. One activist said, “we cannot be afraid, democracy is in the balance.”

While recognizing that this survey was done at an independent media activist “reform” conference, fully expecting a great deal of agreement on the questions, it was still amazing that there was almost total agreement for grassroots media efforts in addition to reform work (especially given that most of the emphasis of the conference was on reform of existing mainstream media rather than direct action and grassroots movement approach with an independent and public focused journalistic endeavor). In other words, it was reassuring to see support for a media movement of the people, by the people, and for the people.[vi]

One statement on the survey, that a military-industrial-media complex exists in the US for the promotion of the US military domination of the world, received an 87 percent approval rating among the sample. This result showed that research done by Project Censored about the continuing powerful global dominance group inside the US government, the US media, and the national policy structure is widely believed by participants at the NCMR. [vii]

NCMR participants also overwhelmingly believe the leadership class in the US is now dominated by a neo-conservative group of some several hundred people who share goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This Global Dominance Group, in cooperation with major military contractors, the corporate media, and conservative foundations has become a powerful long-term force in military unilateralism and US political processes.

The Global Dominance Group and Information Control

A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book on the power elite, documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military, and government elites in a centralized power structure working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement.[viii] This power has grown through the Cold War, and, after 9/11, the Global War on Terror.

The military expansionists from within the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and G. W. Bush administrations put into place solid support for increased military spending. Clinton’s model of supporting the US military industrial complex held steady defense spending and increased foreign weapons sales from 16 percent of global orders to over 63 pecent by the end of his administration. After 9/11, during the presidency of George W. Bush, defense spending and the national deficit climbed dramatically and federal authority became more concentrated. The US now spends over half of its discretionary budget on military related issues.

The Barack Obama administration is continuing the neo-conservative agenda of US military domination of the world—albeit with perhaps a kinder, gentler face. While overt torture is now forbidden for the CIA and Pentagon, and symbolic gestures like the closing of the Guantanamo prison are in evidence, a unilateral military dominance policy, expanding military budget, and wars of occupation and aggression will likely continue unabated. That has been the historical pattern.

Obama’s election brought a moment of hope for many. However, the new administration is not calling for decreased military spending, or a reversal of US military global dominance. Instead, Obama retained Robert Gates, thus making Obama the first president from an opposing party in US history to keep in place the outgoing administrations’ Secretary of Defense/War. Additionally, Obama is calling for an expanded war in Afghanistan and only minimal long-range reductions in Iraq.

Major defense contractors were seriously involved in the 2008 elections. Lockheed Martin gave $2,612,219 in total political campaign donations, with 49 percent to Democrats ($1,285,493) and 51 percent to Republicans ($1,325,159). Boeing gave $2,225,947 in 2008, with 58 percent going to Democrats, and General Dynamics provided $1,682,595 to both parties. Northrop Grumman spent over $20 million in 2008 hiring lobbyists to influence Congress, and Raytheon spent $6 million on lobbyists in the same period. In a revolving door appointment, Obama nominated William Lynn, Raytheon’s senior vice president for government operations and strategy, for the number two position in the Pentagon. Lynn was formally the Defense Department’s comptroller during the Clinton administration and was reputed to have been unable to account for over three trillion dollars in defense department spending during his administration.[ix]

The US now spends as much for defense as the rest of the world combined. At the beginning of 2009 the Global Dominance Group’s agenda is well established within higher circle policy councils and cunningly operationalized inside the US Government. They work hand in hand with defense contractors promoting deployment of US forces in over 1,000 bases worldwide.

The corporate media in the US like to think of themselves as the most accurate news reporting source of the day. The New York Times motto of “all the news that’s fit to print” is a clear example of this perspective, as is CNN’s “most trusted name in news” and Fox News Channel’s “We Report, You Decide” or “Fair and Balanced.” However, with corporate media coverage that increasingly focuses on a narrow range of celebrity updates, news from “official” government sources, and sensationalized crimes and disasters, the self-justification of being the most fit is no longer valid in the US. In fact, several studies done by Diane Farsetta at the Center for Media Democracy showed Pentagon propaganda penetration on mainstream corporate news in the guise of retired Generals as “experts” or pundits who turned out to be nothing more than paid shills for government war policy. While the Pentagon claimed this was legal, the Pentagon Inspector General’s office rescinded a report of the most recent propaganda investigation and even removed the report from its website because the office concluded the study “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.”[x]

A global dominance agenda also includes penetration into the boardrooms of the

corporate media in the US. In 2006 only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top ten media corporations in the major defense contractors on their boards of directors, including:

William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group
Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.

Given an interlocked media network, it is safe to say that big media in the United

States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. The media elite, a key

component of the Higher Circle Policy Elite in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources.

An important case of Pentagon influence over the corporate media is CNN’s

retraction of the story about US Military use of sarin (a nerve gas) in 1970 in Laos during

the Vietnam War. CNN producers April Oliver and Jack Smith, after an eight-month

investigation, reported on CNN June 7, 1998, and later in Time magazine that sarin gas

was used in Operation Tailwind in Laos, and that American defectors were targeted. The

story was based on eyewitness accounts and high military command collaboration. Under

tremendous pressure from the Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and Richard

Helms, CNN and Time retracted the story by saying, “The allegations about the use of

nerve gas and the killing of defectors are not supported by the evidence.” Oliver and

Smith were both fired by CNN later that summer. They have steadfastly stood by their

original story as accurate and substantiated. CNN and Time, under intense Pentagon

pressure, quickly reversed their position after having fully approved the release of the

story only weeks earlier. April Oliver feels that CNN and Time capitulated to the

Pentagon’s threat to lock them out of future military stories.

Even ten years later, CNN has a difficult time reporting on their own complicity with the Pentagon in creating propaganda, this time with the retired Pentagon Generals pundit scandal. The Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, which was announced in April of 2009, went to The New York Times’ David Barstow for his reporting on this very subject, yet CNN, while covering the list of Pulitzer winners, made no mention of his award or his reporting on the CNN/Pentagon connection (which was also reported by Diane Farsetta at PR Watch).[xi]

Not only is the corporate media deeply interlocked with the military industrial complex and global dominance policy elites in the US, but the media is increasingly dependent on various governmental and corporate sources of news. Maintenance of continuous news shows requires a constant feed and an ever-entertaining supply of stimulating events and breaking news bites. The twenty-four-hour news shows on MSNBC, Fox and CNN maintain constant contact with the White House, Pentagon, and public relations companies representing both government and private corporations.

Symbiotic global news distribution is a conscious and deliberate attempt by the powerful to control news and information in society. The Homeland Security Act Title II Section 201(d)(5) specifically asks the directorate to “develop a comprehensive plan for securing the key resources and critical infrastructure of the United States including information technology and telecommunications systems (including satellites) emergency preparedness communications systems.”

Media critic and historian Norman Solomon wrote in 2005, “One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media. In the process, firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.”[xii]

By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, retired colonels, generals and admirals had become mainstays in network TV studios during wartime. Language such as “collateral damage” flowed effortlessly between journalists and military men, who shared perspectives on the occasionally mentioned and even more rarely seen civilians killed by US firepower.[xiii]

In the early 1990s, Chris Hedges covered the Gulf War for the New York Times. Ten years later, he wrote, “The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort. Truth-seeking independence was far from the media agenda. The press was as eager to be of service to the state during the war as most everyone else. Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie.”[xiv] Of course, this critique is not new. I.F. Stone, the iconoclastic investigative journalist once wrote, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”[xv]

The problem then becomes more complex. What happens to a society that begins to believe such lies as truth? What happens to leaders that begin to believe, too? And what becomes of those in the society that do not believe the lies because they find facts are more of a guiding light? The run-up to the current war in Iraq concerning so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) is a grand example. It illustrates the power of propaganda in creating not only public support for an ill begotten war, but it promotes a languishing, if not outright impotent, peace movement even when fueled by truth to stop a war based on false pretences. The current war in Iraq was the most globally protested war in recorded history even before it began, and this did nothing to stop it and has done little to end it even under a now Democratic president that promised such on the campaign trail. The candidate of hope and change, with many progressive and peace groups in tow, has proven to be much of the same caliber of a leader in foreign policy that got the US into war in the first place.[xvi]

Understanding Modern Media Censorship

In order to understand modern media censorship in the US, there is a growing need to broaden its definition. The dictionary definition of direct government control of news as censorship is no longer adequate. The private corporate media in the US significantly under covers and/or deliberately censors numerous important news stories every year. A broader definition of censorship in America today needs to include any interference, deliberate or not, with the free flow of vital news information to the American people. Modern censorship can be seen as the subtle yet persistent and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story—or piece of a news story—based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers, funders, and underwriters), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).

The common theme of the most censored stories over the past few years has been the systemic erosion of human rights and civil liberties in both the US and the world at large. The corporate media ignored the fact that habeas corpus can now be suspended for anyone by order of the President. With the approval of Congress, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, allows for the suspension of habeas corpus for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While the mainstream corporate media, including the New York Times with it’s lead editorial piece published on October 19, 2006, have given false comfort that American citizens will not be the victims of the measures legalized by this Act, the law is quite clear that ‘any person’ can be targeted.[xvii]

Additionally, under the code-name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally), federally coordinated mass arrests occurring since April 2005 netted over 54,000 arrests, a majority of which were actually not violent criminals, the opposite of what was initially suggested. This unprecedented move of arresting tens of thousands of “fugitives” is the largest dragnet style operation in the nation’s history. The raids, coordinated by the Justice Department and Homeland Security, directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local and federal) and mark the first time in US history that all domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government.[xviii]

All these events are significant in a democratic society that alleges to cherish individual rights and due process of law. To have them occur is a tragedy and farce. To have a free press not report them or pretend they do not matter is the foundation of censorship today.

Are Americans Unfeeling Towards War?

The failure of the corporate media to cover moral issue raising questions like one million deaths of Iraqis is a contributing factor to a very limited public response to the war on terror being conducted around the world by the US. Even when activists do mobilize, the corporate media coverage of anti-war demonstrations has been negligible and denigrating from the start.

Linda Milazzo writes about the major anti-war march in Washington, DC on September 15, 2007: “I, along with 100,000 kindred activists, marched through the nation’s capitol where we were pretty much ignored. The minimal media we did get was distorted and untrue. When a small, sadistic band of war-hawks showed up to oppose us, the press slanted their numbers as if they equaled our own. The truth is, their numbers were one-hundreth the size of ours, although one would never know that from this deceptive headline in The Washington Post, “Dueling Demonstrations.”[xix] It’s a travesty to democracy that mainstream journalists of the so-called free press ignore the anti-war movement and serve the interests of their corporate masters in the military media industrial complex to the detriment of the nation and perhaps the world.[xx]

Not only does the corporate media disregard the anti-war movement in the US, the human costs of the war are ignored as well. An investigative research study done at Project Censored at Sonoma State University focused on news photographs appearing on the front pages of the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle during two periods, from March to December 2003 and from January 2006 to March 2007. Examining these data, the researchers asked, how frequently do front-page news photographs depict war in Afghanistan or Iraq? And, to what extent do these photos portray the human cost of those wars?

Based on content analysis of over 6,000 front-page news photos, spanning 1,389 days of coverage, researchers found that only 12.8 percent of the photos analyzed relate in some way to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A mere 3.3 percent of those front page news photos represent war’s most fundamental human cost, by depicting dead, injured, or missing humans. This research documents the enormous gap between the number of actual deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq during this time span, which numbers hundreds of thousands, and the number of deaths depicted visually, through front page photographs—just forty-eight images of human death. Researchers concluded that the human cost of war is permitted only a small marginal position on the front pages of US newspapers.[xxi]

Visuals, including news photographs, play a crucial role in how readers experience newspapers and engage the stories that they contain. For example, the Poynter Institute’s ongoing “Eyes on the News” study demonstrates that 90 percent of readers enter pages through large photographs or other visual images; running a visual element increases by three times the likelihood that the reader will read at least some of the accompanying text; and readers’ comprehension and recall increase when photographs or other visuals accompany stories.

The one-two combination of the negation of human suffering and a neglected anti-war movement contributes to an underlying belief that the 9/11 wars and occupations are justified. A Gallup poll conducted in March of 2009 indicated, “Forty-two percent of Americans now say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Afghanistan, up from 30% earlier this year and establishing a new high. Meanwhile, the 53% who say the Iraq war is a mistake is down slightly from 56% in January, and 60% last summer.” While over 50 percent of the public still believes it was a mistake to invade Iraq, 58 percent still thinks invading Afghanistan was the right thing to do.[xxii]

Further, the corporate mainstream press continues to ignore the human cost of the US war in Iraq with America’s own veterans. Veteran care, wounded rates, mental disabilities, denied or delayed VA claims, first hand accounts of soldier experiences, and more are avoided like the plague in corporate mainstream media. Short of the Walter Reed VA hospital care scandal, little has been covered. One of the most important stories missed by the corporate press was about the Winter Soldier Congressional hearings in Washington, DC. The hearings, with eyewitness testimony of US soldiers relating their experiences on the battlefield and beyond, were only covered by a scant number of major media outlets including the Boston Globe and NPR, but only in passing mention. In contrast to the virtual corporate media blackout even about American soldiers’ views of the war, the independent, listener sponsored, community Pacifica radio network covered the hearings at length.[xxiii]

Americans do care about human suffering and external wars when they are informed about what the powerful are doing. Millions of Americans voted for Barack Obama as a peace candidate. Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency in November of 2008 added to the view that something is being done to end the 9/11 wars as there were many promises on the campaign trial hoping for change of Bush administration policies. This belief that change will come belies what Obama administration actions have actually shown about war policies, especially in Afghanistan, where US troop presence is actually growing, and this belief further contributes to a lackluster anti-war movement in the US despite what the facts show.[xxiv]

The Left Progressive Press

Where the left progressive press may have covered some of the Winter Soldier issues, most did not cover the major story of Iraqi deaths. Even the left progressive media has shown limited coverage of the human costs of the 9/11 wars. In Manufacturing Consent, Wharton School of Business Professor of Political Economy Edward Herman and MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky claim that because media is firmly embedded in the market system, it reflects the class values and concerns of its owners and advertisers. According to Herman and Chomsky, the media maintains a corporate class bias through five systemic filters: concentrated private ownership; a strict bottom-line profit orientation; over-reliance on governmental and corporate sources for news; a primary tendency to avoid offending the powerful; and an almost religious worship of the market economy, strongly opposing alternative beliefs. These filters limit what will become news in society and set parameters on acceptable coverage of daily events.[xxv]

The danger of these filters is that they make subtle and indirect censorship all the more difficult to combat. Owners and managers share class identity with the powerful and are motivated economically to please advertisers and viewers. Social backgrounds influence their conceptions of what is “newsworthy,” and their views and values seem only “common sense.” Journalists and editors are not immune to the influence of owners and managers. Journalists want to see their stories approved for print or broadcast, and editors come to know the limits of their freedom to diverge from the “common sense” worldview of owners and managers. The self-discipline that this structure induces in journalists and editors comes to seem only “common sense” to them as well. Self-discipline becomes self-censorship—independence is restricted, the filtering process hidden, denied, or rationalized away.

Project Censored conducted an analysis on the top ten left progressive publications and websites coverage of key post-9/11 issues and found considerable limitations on coverage of specific stories. Based on the evidence presented it can be concluded Chomsky and Herman’s understandings may well contribute to the news story selection process inside the left liberal media as well.[xxvi]

In the case of the one millions dead Iraqis the left progressive press has shown late and limited coverage at best. The million dead number emerged in the summer of 2007 on several websites including after Downing Street, Huffington Post, Counter Punch, and Alternet. Progressive journalist stalwart Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! didn’t cover the story until February of 2008 after Reuters had it a few days before. The Nation magazine didn’t acknowledge the story until February 16, 2009 in an article by John Tirman at MIT. This underplaying and lack of reporting such a critical story on the humanitarian crisis of the US occupation by the left press in America does not bode well for a strong, public, peace movement. The US is in dire need of a media democracy movement to address Truth Emergency concerns. There are examples that could be instrumental in adopting such strategies available from the international community.

International Models of Media Democracy in Action: Venezuela

Democracy from the bottom is evolving as a ten-year social revolution in Venezuela. Led by President Hugo Chavez, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela ((PSUV) gained over 1½ million voters in the most recent elections November 23, 2008. “It was a wonderful victory,” said Professor Carmen Carrero with the communications studies department of the Bolivarian University in Caracas. “We won 81 percent of the city mayor positions and seventeen of twenty-three of the state governors,” Carrero reported.

The Bolivarian University is housed in the former oil ministry building and now serves 8,000 students throughout Venezuela. The University (Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela) is symbolic of the democratic socialist changes occurring throughout the country. Before the election of Hugo Chavez as president in 1998, college attendance was primarily for the rich in Venezuela. Today over one million, eight hundred thousand students attend college, three times the rate ten years ago. “Our university was established to resist domination and imperialism,” reported Principal (president) Marlene Yadira Cordova in an interview November 10, 2008, “We are a university where we have a vision of life that the oppressed people have a place on this planet.” The enthusiasm for learning and serious-thoughtful questions asked by students was certainly representative of a belief in the potential of positive social change for human betterment. The University offers a fully-staffed free healthcare clinic, zero tuition, and basic no-cost food for students in the cafeteria, all paid for by the oil revenues now being democratically shared by the people.

Bottom up democracy in Venezuela starts with the 25,000 community councils elected in every neighborhood in the country. “We establish the priority needs of our area,” reported community council spokesperson Carmon Aponte, with the neighborhood council in the barrio Bombilla area of western Caracas. Community radio, TV and newspapers are the voice of the people, where they describe the viewers/listeners as the “users” of media instead of the passive audiences.[xxvii]

Democratic socialism means healthcare, jobs, food, and security, in neighborhoods where in many cases nothing but absolute poverty existed ten years ago. With unemployment down to a US level, sharing the wealth has taken real meaning in Venezuela. Despite a 50 percent increase in the price of food last year, local Mercals offer government subsidized cooking oil, corn meal, meat, and powdered milk at 30-50 percent off market price. Additionally, there are now 3,500 local communal banks with a $1.6 billion dollar budget offering neighborhood-based micro-financing loans for home improvements, small businesses, and personal emergencies.

“We have moved from a time of disdain [pre-revolution—when the upper classes saw working people as less than human] to a time of adjustment,” proclaimed Ecuador’s minister of Culture, Gallo Mora Witt at the opening ceremonies of the Fourth International Book Fair in Caracas November 7. Venezuela’s Minister of Culture, Hector Soto added, “We try not to leave anyone out . . . before the revolution the elites published only 60-80 books a year, we will publish 1,200 Venezuelan authors this year . . . the book will never stop being the important tool for cultural feelings.” In fact, some twenty-five million books—classics by Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes, along with Cindy Sheehan’s Letter to George Bush—were published in 2008 and are being distributed to the community councils nationwide. The theme of the International Book Fair was books as cultural support to the construction of the Bolivarian revolution and building socialism for the twenty-first century.

In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and continuing US taxpayer financial support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy ($20 million annually), two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. The democracies of South America are realizing that the neo-liberal formulas for capitalism are not working for the people and that new forms of resource allocation are necessary for human betterment. It is a learning process for all involved and certainly a democratic effort from the bottom up.

International Models of Media Democracy in Action: Cuba

“You cannot kill truth by murdering journalists,” said Tubal Páez, president of the Journalist Union of Cuba. In May of 2008, One hundred and fifty Cuban and South American journalists, ambassadors, politicians, and foreign guests gathered at the Jose Marti International Journalist Institute to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Carlos Bastidas Arguello —the last journalist killed in Cuba. Carlos Bastidas was only twenty-three years of age when he was assassinated by Fulgencia Batista’s secret police after having visited Fidel Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Edmundo Bastidas, Carlos’ brother, told about how a river of change flowed from the Maestra (teacher) mountains, symbolized by his brother’s efforts to help secure a new future for Cuba.

The celebration in Havana was held in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which is observed every year in May. The UN first declared this day in 1993 to honor journalists who lost their lives reporting the news and to defend media freedom worldwide.

Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. In addition to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, these attacks include the blowing up of a Cuban airlines plane in 1976 resulting in the deaths of seventy-three people, the starting in 1981 of an epidemic of dengue fever that killed 158 people, and several hotel bombings in the 1990s, one of which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist.

In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.

Cuban journalists complain that the US corporate media is biased and refuses to cover the positive aspects of socialism in Cuba. Unknown to most Americans are the facts that Cuba is the number one organic country in the world, has an impressive health care system with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, trains doctors from all over the world, and has enjoyed a 43 percent increase in GDP over the past three years.

Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly, discussed bias in the US media, “how often do you see Gore Vidal interviewed on the US media?” he asked. Vidal has recently said that the US is in its ‘worst phase in history.’ Perhaps Cuba uses corporate news to excess,” he said. “Cuban journalists need to link more to independent news sources in the US.” Alarcon went on to say that Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, but that the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.

As the Cuban socialist system improves, the US does everything it can to artificially force cold war conditions by funding terrorist attacks, maintaining an economic boycott, launching a new anti-terrorism Caribbean naval fleet, and increasingly limiting US citizen travel to Cuba. It is time to reverse this cold war isolationist position, honor the Cuban people’s choice of a socialist system, and build a positive working relationship between journalists in support of media democracy in both countries.[xxviii]

Grassroots Antidotes to Corporate Media Propaganda

George Seldes once said, “Journalism’s job is not impartial ‘balanced’ reporting. Journalism’s job is to tell the people what is really going on.” Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one example of telling the people what is really going on. Health care activists know that US health insurance is an extremely large and obscenely lucrative industry with the top nine companies “earning” $93 billion in profits in 2006 alone. The health-care industry represents the country’s third-largest economic sector, trailing only energy and retail among the 1,000 largest US firms. Despite Moore’s film, and despite the fact that an overwhelming number of doctors and a majority of Americans want a single payer healthcare system for all Americans, the Obama administration, Congress, and the corporate media have been deaf to the wishes of health-care practitioners and the public will in their debate to “reform” the system. Single payer, the public is told, like impeachment before it, is not on the table no matter what the facts, no matter what the percentages of public support. This is a characteristic of a failing republic, a dysfunctional democracy.

Tens of thousands of Americans engaged in various social justice issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate, or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on issues like 9/11 truth, election fraud, impeachment, war propaganda, civil liberties/torture, the Wall Street bailouts, healthcare reform, and many corporate-caused environmental crises have been systematically excluded from mainstream news and the national conversation leading to a genuine Truth Emergency in the country as a whole.

Now, however, a growing number of activists are finally saying “enough!” and joining forces to address this truth emergency by developing new journalistic systems and practices of their own. They are working to reveal the common corporate denominators behind the diverse crises we face and to develop networks of trustworthy news sources that tell the people what is really going on. These activists know there is need for journalism that moves beyond forensic inquiries into particular crimes and atrocities, and exposes wider patterns of corruption, propaganda, and illicit political control to rouse the nation to reject a malignant corporate status quo.

Recent efforts at national media reform through micro-power community radio—similar to the 400 people’s radio stations in Venezuela—and campaign finance changes, which would mandate access for all candidates on national media, have been strongly resisted by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). NAB, considered one of the most powerful corporate lobby groups in Washington, works hard to protect over $200 billion dollars of annual advertising and the several hundred million dollars political candidates spend in each election cycle.

The Truth Emergency movement now recognizes that corporate media’s political power and its failure to meet its First Amendment obligation to keep the public informed leaves a huge task to be done. Citizens must mobilize resources to redevelop news and information systems from the bottom up. Citizen journalists can expand distribution of news via small independent newspapers, local magazines, independent radio, and cable access TV. Using the Internet, the public can interconnect with like-minded grassroots news organizations to share important stories. These changes are already in progress with more to come.

Becoming the Media: Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored International

In response to Truth Emergency conference outcomes, the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored launched an effort to both become a repository of independent news and information as well as a producer of content in what are called Validated Independent News stories vetted by college and university professors and students around the world. As corporate media continues their entertainment agenda and the PR industry—working for governments and corporations—increasingly dominates the content, we have the socio-cultural opening to transform how the public receives their news.

Project Censored believes that corporate media is increasingly irrelevant to democracy and working people in the world, and that we need to tell our own news stories from the bottom up. What better project in support of media democracy than for universities and colleges worldwide to support truth telling and validate news stories and independent news sources?

Only 5 percent of college students under thirty read a daily newspaper. Most get all their news from corporate television and increasingly from the Internet. One of the biggest problems with independent media sources on the Internet is a perception of inconsistent reliability. The public is often suspicious of the truthfulness and accuracy of news postings from non-corporate media sources. Over the past ten years, in hundreds of presentations all over the US, Project Censored staff has frequently been asked, “what are the best sources for news and whom do we trust?”

The goal of this effort is to encourage young people to use independent media as their primary sources of news and information and to learn about trustworthy news sources through the Project Censored International News Research Affiliate Program. There are currently thirty affiliate colleges and there are plans to expand college and university participation tenfold this next year. Through these institutions of higher learning, validated independent news stories can be researched by students and scholars, then written, produced and disseminated via the web. In addition to the production of validated independent news content, on any given day at the Media Freedom Foundation website, one can view enough independent news stories from RSS feeds to fill nearly fifty written pages, more than even the largest US newspapers.[xxix]

The Hope for Real Information Change

Recently, the US Senate Judiciary Committee began considering a truth and reconciliation commission as has been done in countries with troubled pasts to seek knowledge and healing over controversial or even illegal and catastrophic issues. Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy “wants Congress to convene an independent, blue-ribbon commission to poke into some of the dark secrets and possible government wrongdoing of the Bush years: the alleged torture of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, controversial warrantless wiretapping, and the politicization of the hiring and firing of federal prosecutors.” According to a recent Gallup Poll, six in ten Americans agree.[xxx] Despite such public outcry and even high-ranking mention in the Senate, it is doubtful there is political will to follow through in light of the continuing economic meltdown emanating from Wall Street echoing through Main Street. Further, President Obama has already remarked that he wants to look forward and not backward while tackling the country’s problems, insinuating that he is not interested in pursuing Bush administration crimes. Only a massive public groundswell can possibly change this, which requires an even more informed and empowered populace. After all, the facts are on their side.[xxxi]

It is up to the people to unite and oppose the common oppressors manifested in a militarist and unresponsive government along with their corporate media lapdogs and PR propagandists. Only then, when the public forms and controls its own information resources, will it become armed with the power that knowledge gives to move forward, not under reformist mindsets, but to create a new and truly vibrant democratic society that promises as well as delivers liberty, peace, and prosperity to all.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored.

Mickey Huff is an Associate Professor of History and Social Science at Diablo Valley College and Associate Director of the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored.

Notes

US General Tommy Franks, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 2002, online athttp://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/020323-attack01.htm.
[ii] Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York: Seven Stories, Press, 2008), pp. 19-25. This story is the number one censored story of the year at Project Censored for this year, archived online athttp://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/ and for the earlier casualty numbers see http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-polya070207.htm.

[iii] Mass killings from Rwanda to Darfur, from Cambodia to Viet Nam, have ranged from the hundreds of thousands to several millions, with Iraq now an easy rival in between. Watch AlterNet.org columnist Joshua Holland’s speak at Project Censored’s “Modern Media Censorship Lecture Series” from September 25, 2008, athttp://www.projectcensored.org/lectures/lecture092508/ . His article about the over one million dead in Iraq can be seen at http://www.alternet.org/images/home/splash/6words_splash.php. For more on the refugees see Dahr Jamail’s “Iraq: Not Our Country to Return To” at http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41430.

[iv] Various theories exist on the problem of the subject, from historian Rick Shenkman’s Just How Stupid Are We to historian and cultural critic Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, but few examine its affects on the peace community. For more on the issue of American historical amnesia, see Gore Vidal on Democracy Now! Athttp://www.democracynow.org/2004/5/21/gore_vidal_on_the_united_states. See also, In These Times,http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3099/the_united_states_of_amnesia/ and for a broader academic look at the issue of how Americans have become arguably the least informed, most entertained people in the modern world, reference the now classic work from the late New York University media scholar Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (New York: Viking Adult, 1985). This article hopes to shine more light on the impact of all of the aforementioned on the peace movement in general and what can be done about it. For another view of this written earlier, at the outset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, see Felix Kolb and Alicia Swords, “Do Peace Movements Matter?” Commondreams.org, May 12, 2003, online athttp://www.commondreams.org/views03/0512-08.htm.

[v] For the Institute of Medicine study on lack of healthcare related deaths see http://www.iom.edu/?id=19175; also see the study done by Peter Phillips at Sonoma State University athttp://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/practices-in-health-care/ and cited in Michael Moore’s 2007 film, Sicko. For a broader look at the Truth Emergency movement and its many facets from election fraud to 9/11, from torture to the fiscal crisis, see http://truthemergency.us/ as well as the essay on Truth Emergency by Peter Phillips and David Kubiak at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/truth-emergency-us/.

[vi] For more on the NCMR study, see Peter Phillips and Andy Roth, eds., Censored 2009, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), chapter 11, “Truth Emergency Meets Media Reform” pp. 281-295. For more on the NCMR, seehttp://freepress.net.

[vii] In addition to the Media Reform study in chapter 11 of Censored 2009 cited above, see Peter Phillips, Censored 2007, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), pp. 307-341. “The Global Dominance Group and US Corporate Media” by Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton, and Lew Brown, is online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/the-global-dominance-group/.

[viii] C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite, Oxford, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, reissue).

[ix] Peter Phillips, “Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Dominance,”http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/http-wwwprojectcensoredorg-articles-story-barack-obama-administration-c/.

[x] Diane Farsetta, Center for Media Democracy, studies on Pentagon propaganda online athttp://www.prwatch.org/pentagonpundits and http://www.prwatch.org/node/8180. Zachary Roth, Lawmaker On Withdrawn IG Report: “The American People Have Been Misled” May 6, 2009,http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/05/lawmaker_on_withdrawn_ig_report_the_american_peopl.php.

[xi] Peter Phillips, Censored 1999, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). For Operation Tailwind and CNN, see chapter 5, pp. 158-163, and http://www.putnampit.com/ppeditorialjuly18-1998.html. Glenn Greenwald, “The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV,” April 21, 2009, online athttp://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/21/pulitzer/. See previous endnote for the link to Diane Farsetta’s piece.

[xii] Norman Soloman, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex: Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective,” Extra! July/August 2005, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Quoted by Norman Soloman at http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/media/2005/07militarymedia.html. Originally published in Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, (Cambridge: Public Affairs, Perseus Group, 2002). This phenomenon goes back to journalist Louis O’Sullivan coining the phrase “Manifest Destiny’ in 1845 in the New York papers on the eve of the Mexican American War. The Hearst newspapers in New York on the run up to the Spanish American War also willingly spread false claims of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine. Edward Bernays and George Creel further used a compliant press to rouse support for US entrance in WWI and the same happened after Pearl Harbor in WWII. Each time, each source, was not interested in independent, factual reporting, rather, they were interested in being useful tools of the powerful to fulfill establishment policies. For an overview of propaganda history and US war policy as well as a deeper look at media myth making through the events of 9/11, see Mickey Huff and Paul Rea, chapter 14 in Censored 2009, “Deconstructing Deceit: 9/11, the Media, and Myth Information,” pp. 341-364, or the expanded version online athttp://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/deconstructing-deceit/.

[xv] I.F. Stone, In a Time of Torment: 1961-1967, (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 317.

[xvi] For an overview study of Iraq War propaganda, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq (New York, Tarcher Penguin, 2003), and their follow up Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq, (New York: Penguin, 2006). For reports on the continuation of war policy under President Barack Obama, see Center for Media Democracy’s John Stauber, “How Obama Took Over the Peace Movement,” http://www.prwatch.org/node/8297, and Peter Phillips, “Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Dominance,” http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/http-wwwprojectcensoredorg-articles-story-barack-obama-administration-c/.

[xvii] Peter Phillips, Censored 2008, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), pp. 35-44. Online athttp://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-no-habeas-corpus-for-any-person/ andhttp://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-bush-moves-toward-martial-law/.

[xviii] See Censored 2008, chapter 1, story 6, pp. 55-59. Also online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/6-operation-falcon-raids/. The stories mentioned here are only a few examples. For a complete up to date list of current censored stories, see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, eds., Censored 2010 , chapter 1 of this volume for the latest list of Project Censored’s most important stories missed or distorted by corporate mainstream news for 2008 and 2009. Also see the Media Freedom Foundation PNN website for year round validated independent news stories online at http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources.

[xix] Online at http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/2473-corporate-media-turned-out-for-jena-but-not-for-anti-war-heres-why.html.

[xx] Linda Milazzo, “Corporate Media Turned Out for Jena, but Not for Anti-War. Here’s Why.” Atlantic Free Press, September 23, 2007, online at http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/2473-corporate-media-turned-out-for-jena-but-not-for-anti-war-heres-why.html.

[xxi] Andrew L. Roth, Zoe Huffman, Jeff Huling, Kevin Stolle, and Jocelyn Thomas, “Covering War’s Victims: A Content Analysis of Iraq and Afghanistan War Photographs in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle,” in Censored 2008 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), pp. 253-271.

[xxii] Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., More Optimism About Iraq, Less About Afghanistan:

New high of 42% say war in Afghanistan a mistake,” March 18, 2009.

See the Gallup Poll results online at http://www.gallup.com/poll/116920/Optimism-Iraq-Less-Afghanistan.aspx.

[xxiii] For more on the Winter Soldiers, see Censored 2009, chapter 1, story 9, pp. 58-62 and online athttp://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-iraq-and-afghanistan-vets-testify/; see also chapter 12, pp. 297-319. See the KPFA radio and Corp Watch website for the coverage athttp://www.warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008.

[xxiv] Peter Phillips, “Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Dominance,”http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/http-wwwprojectcensoredorg-articles-story-barack-obama-administration-c/.

[xxv] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, 2002). For an introduction of the Propaganda Model, see chapter 1 of the work, or see a retrospective by Edward Herman online at http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20031209.htm.

[xxvi] Peter Phillips, Censored 2008, see chapter 7, “Left Progressive Media Inside the Propaganda Model,” pp 233-251, http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/left-progressive-media-inside-the-propaganda-model/.

[xxvii] Co-author, Peter Phillips, interviewed Carmon Aponte while visiting the Patare Community TV and radio station in a trip to Venezuela for a book fair in 2008. The station was one of thirty-four locally controlled community television stations and four hundred radio stations now in the barrios throughout Venezuela.

[xxviii] Co-author, Peter Phillips, attended the major journalism conference in Cuba in 2008. About his experiences there, Phillips remarked, “During my five days in Havana, I met with dozens of journalists, communication studies faculty and students, union representatives and politicians. The underlying theme of my visit was to determine the state of media freedom in Cuba and to build a better understanding between media democracy activists in the US and those in Cuba.

I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast. Over ninety municipalities in Cuba have their own locally run radio stations, and journalists report local news from every province.

During the course of several hours in each station I was interviewed on the air about media consolidation and censorship in the US and was able to ask journalists about censorship in Cuba as well. Of the dozens I interviewed all said that they have complete freedom to write or broadcast any stories they choose. This was a far cry from the Stalinist media system so often depicted by US interests.”

[xxix] For more details see the Project Censored website at /; for independent media feeds see Media Freedom Foundation at http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources; and for more on the Project Censored International Affiliates Program, see /project-censored-international-affilates-program. For more on how to become the media, see David Mathison’s work at http://bethemedia.com.

[xxx] Alex Kingsbury, “Why Sen. Patrick Leahy Wants a “Truth Commission,” U.S. News and World Report, March 4, 2009, http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/politics/2009/03/04/why-sen-patrick-leahy-wants-a-truth-commission.html.

[xxxi] Naomi Wolf, “Do the Secret Bush Memos Amount to Treason? Top Constitutional Scholar Says Yes,” Alternet.org, March 25, 2009,http://www.alternet.org/rights/133273/do_the_secret_bush_memos_amount_to_treason_top_constitutional_scholar_says_yes/.

Note: All online sources were accessed and viewed between March 25 and 31, 2009 and then reviewed and revised between May 13 and 15, 2009.

The post TRUTH EMERGENCY: INSIDE THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL MEDIA EMPIRE appeared first on Project Censored.

Hyperreality is the inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Corporate media, Fox in particular, offers news that creates a hyperreality of real world problems and issues.  Consumers of corporate television news—especially those whose understandings are framed primarily from that medium alone—are embedded in a state of excited delirium and knowinglessness.

Corporate Media hasn’t acted as a cohesive, protective “fourth estate” in several decades, instead gilding lilies such as the Iraq war, torture and the true extent of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Contemporary corporate news is best seen in a post-modern context of hyperreality. The news from US networks is based on the presentations of partially factual stories framed inside socio-emotional story lines that juxtapose “evil” with patriotism and Christian fervor. There are multiple examples of this, but we will examine two distinct cases.

The bias towards hyperreality inherent in modern media is so rampant, consumers only need turn on the TV to be exposed to the spin. Two notorious, controversial modern figures will be examined here to explain what we mean by a hyperreality of knowinglessness.  News coverage of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh are unique examples, primarily because of their perceived opposing views and their unapparent similarities.  But they are similar in that both should have little operable relevance to American policy, at least domestically, as one is an entertainer and the other is the leader of another country. They both are media personalities as well: Limbaugh claims an audience of 20 million a week,1 while Chavez hosts a telecast every Sunday through which he speaks to millions of people of Venezuela. Further, they are both strongly ideological in their pursuit of their beliefs, which seem diametrically opposed to each other.

Unfortunately, they both have ill-gotten relevance, ironically at least partially gleaned from the massive amount of attention turned to them by their press adversaries. Thisallows an opportunity for analysis: what is the public consequence of attention, be it positive or negative?

The Evilness of Hugo Chavez

Big business would be foolish to ignore the threat posed to their supply side paradigm in Venezuela, since the longer reaches of Chavez’s influence may well extend to far wealthier economies. Should the people’s revolution in Venezuela gain footholds elsewhere, it will be difficult for those same economic models to be argued against here in the US.  If a country with resources like Venezuela’s is able to offer programs and facilities of a certain quality, why can’t the US, with it’s greater resource pool, repeat the success here? Since Chavez’s social advances for the people in Venezuela run so drastically contrary to those avowed to the captains of industry in the US, any action Chavez takes is systematically vilified by the US corporate media.

Fox News has been the epicenter for demonizing Chavez. Fox is one of the largest media outlets in the US. The station features such luminaries as Glen Beck, who once called Cindy Sheehan a “tragedy slut” and discussed murdering Michael Moore2 on his program. Fox attack pieces on Chavez are uniform and systematic to the point of redundancy. In examining transcripts from Fox news regarding Chavez, we find a continued use of emotionally negative descriptive terms like authoritarian, strongman, socialist, cruel, sinister, radical, militant, and dictator.  Chavez has repeatedly over the past decade been democratically elected by a vast majority of the people in Venezuela. However, the US corporate slant on Chavez is always the same predictable negative opposition filled with emotional slanders.

After Chavez used licensing laws to shut down RCTV in Caracas, possibly because the RCTV directors were heavily involved in the conspiracy to overthrow Chavez during the coup of 2002, Fox covered the incident as if censorship had been his motivation, pushing headlines such as “Protests in Venezuela Turn Ugly.”3 The first sections of Fox’s coverage were full of rubber bullets and tear gas; as the story dwindled, Fox continued to report unsubstantiated estimates of mass protesters and increasing authoritarianism. This is the essential structure to most any news on Chavez found in the US corporate media.

Unfortunately, Fox’s coverage never really examines the origins of the protests—as in, who are the people participating?  Are they the same individuals who so violently opposed Chavez a few years prior? A poll in Venezuela conducted after the closing of RCTV actually indicated a broad ambivalence towards the closing, with some 70 percent of those polled opposed to shutting down the station; however, most people indicated it was because their favorite soap operas and other programming were being cancelled.4

Fox News and Glen Beck seem adamant about tying Obama’s administration to socialism. Chavez provides a convenient straw man through which to beat up on progressivism, socialism, and President Obama as well. In a February, 2009 in a TV piece entitled “Would You Vote for Hugo Chavez?,”5 Beck claimed that the US is “on a highway to socialism” as a result of our move to “nationali[ze] our banks.” He then proposed that, with one more bank bailout, America could be ready for a Chavez presidency. Chavez has become, for Fox, a symbol of evil. The resulting emotional knowinglessness is being used to undermine the Obama presidency.  Fox completely ignores the facts of the enormous bailouts—which had been supported by the previous Bush administration—such as those for Bear Stearns and AIG. It uses hyperreal slander to describe Chavez, linking these feelings to Obama in a purely emotional manner without using logic or facts.

Led by President Hugo Chavez, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) gained over one and half million voters in the most recent elections November 23, 2008.  Before the election of Hugo Chavez as president in 1998, college attendance was primarily for the rich in Venezuela. Today, over 1,800,000 students attend college, three times the rate ten years ago.

For the lowest-income two thirds of people in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez means health care, jobs, food, and security in neighborhoods where in many cases nothing but absolute poverty existed ten years ago. With unemployment below a US level, sharing the wealth has taken real meaning in Venezuela. Despite a 50 percent increase in the prices of food last year, local Mercals offer government subsidized cooking oil, corn meal, meat, and powered milk at 30 to 50 percent discount. Additionally, there are now 3,500 local communal banks with a $1.6 billion dollar budget offering neighborhood-based micro-financing loans for home improvements, small businesses, and personal emergencies.

In Venezuela, the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers, maintain an effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. Despite the corporate media bias and the continuing financial support to anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy ($20 million annually, paid for by US taxpayers), two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Fox has no bounds to it’s obsession with Chavez. They have run stories about his rocky divorce and child custody struggles as well as his vocal contribution to an album by artists “engaged in the Bolivarian Revolution.” Barack Obama’s greeting of Chavez at the Organization of American States meeting, and its potential diplomatic consequences, warranted Fox commentary from Karl Rove, John Bolton, Former US Ambassador to the UN, and Beck.6

There is an abundant source of negative Chavez news found on the Associated Press (AP) wires as well. AP’s stories are often close to Fox’s assertion that Venezuela is a socialist petro-fiefdom.

Chavez isn’’t without political moves;, as any leader democratically elected multiple times would have to be heavy-handed to some degree. Unfortunately, only half the story is reported in the US.  The best example of partial reporting is the coverage of Chavez’s not renewing the broadcast license of RCTV in 2006, by exercising the Law on the Social Responsibility of Radio and Television. US reporting on this was completely myopic in nature.7 Had producers and executives of an American media outlet conspired against the US Government, they most certainly would have been dealt with in far stricter terms than those applied at RCTV.  RCTV was allowed to broadcast for the remainde[??1]r of their licensing period.

After the Constitutional Reforms of 2007, US corporate media outlets began claiming Chavez had inserted language into the constitution that could make him “President for life.” Again, this was a case of the truth being stretched. The changes had only included a reform that would have allowed a possible third term for Chavez. Other nations that do not have term limits at all include Germany, the UK, and Australia, yet none of these are labeled in the US media as “dictatorships.” That 2007 reform was ironically defeated, but a newer bill, removing term limits altogether, was passed in February of 2009.

The US corporate media doesn’t likely pose much difficulty to Chavez and his democratically elected agenda—he’s been winning elections since 1998. Moreover, what Chavez does in Venezuela has very little impact on policies and circumstances in the US. But the ongoing demonization of Chavez allows for the perpetuation of a deeply embedded emotional hyperreality inside American public consciousness. A hyperreal Chavez is continually available for comparison with other contemporary issues.

US corporate media ignores many contemporary dictators. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who sits on the throne of an autocratic dictatorship under which women have essentially no rights, holds a perennial place on the “Parade’s World’s Worst Dictator” list,8 as does Hu Jintao, China’s President. Searches for each leader on Fox’s website returns a total of 806 and 888 results, respectively, from their entire database. The same search for Chavez—the democratically elected leader of a country with just three million more people than Saudi Arabia, but a fraction of China’s population—yields 2,743 pages. Saudi Arabia, home of Osama Bin Laden and fifteen of the alleged nineteen 9/11 hijackers, is portrayed as an ally to the US.

The Glory of Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh has found himself in a position of far more influence than anybody except himself could ever believe. Anointed “boss” by both the press and the right-wing lawmakers who apologize to him after contradicting his ideology, Limbaugh has taken his continued popularity as mandate and continues to push his agenda.

Limbaugh has sharpened his attack since the 2008 election, as seen during a June 4, 2009 interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity.9 Hannity treated Limbaugh as something of a moral and constitutional authority, allowing him to conduct himself in an almost pastoral way, delivering dogmatic sermons an Americanism. Limbaugh maintained the position that Barack Obama’s efforts to restore the bruised economy are tantamount to socialism and fascism. Limbaugh joked, “Fidel Castro and I (Hugo Chavez), If we’re not careful, are going to end up to the right of Obama” in reference (though the context was not related) to General Motors becoming “Government Motors.” Limbaugh went on to say, “You can keep a chart here of who’s nationalizing more, Obama or Chavez . . . it’s probably neck and neck.”

Rush Limbaugh was in the middle of a storm of exchanges between the Democrat and Republican leadership during the early spring of 2009. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel10 claimed that the radio host is “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.” “My intent was not to go after Rush—I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. . . . There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

Crooner Pat Boone11 waxes poetic in a tribute piece: “Rush Limbaugh is a patriot. Pure and simple, a patriot. I see him in the select company of other patriots like Paul Revere, Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin. Thankfully, he hasn’’t been asked to make a dying proclamation like Nathan Hale—“‘I regret that I have but one life to give for my country’—but I suspect he would, if it came to that.”

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly12 further holds Rush to be a model citizen: “One secret to Limbaugh’’s success is that he is not intimidated into appeasing the organized pressure groups that frighten so many others into platitudinous mush. He takes them all on: the radical feminists, the wacky environmentalists, the open-borders crowd, and even President George W. Bush’’s deviation from conservatism.”

Rush Limbaugh is a man of Christian values—although which congregation he attends remains a question—and believes that America is nation founded upon Christian principals.

Born in 1951 to a prominent Missouri family, young Rush was a Boy Scout but never earned a single merit badge. Perhaps to placate his parents, Limbaugh enrolled for two semesters and a summer at Southern Missouri State University; His mother told biographer Paul Colford that he had “flunked everything,”13 unable to pass even a modern ballroom dancing class. His career during the 1970’s was primarily spent as a music station DJ, moving from station to station before taking a stint as director of promotions for the Kansas City Royals in 1979. Returning to the airwaves in 1984, it wasn’t until the Reagan administration repealed the fairness doctrine that Rush was able to hit his full stride.

How and when was it that he has gained this fluency, which he purports to possess, and how does it display itself? Consider Limbaugh’s May 14, 2008 commentary from his radio program concerning the Great Depression and his choice of adversaries to defame.14 The Straw Man, a favorite tactic of Rush’s, is deployed. He Google searches some terms trying to uncover popular hits explaining the Great Depression; his search yields, predictably, an academic paper titled “The Main Causes of the Great Depression” published in 1996. Rush systematically disassembles the paper like an angry professor, not so much refuting it as ridiculing it, finally concluding that it should be checked for plagiarism against the works of Karl Marx. He goes on to claim the author, Paul Gusmorino, is “exactly wrong” after saying, “I didn’’t end up in college and have my mind polluted and brainwashed by a bunch of Marxist professors.” Unfortunately for Rush, neither had the piece’s author Gusmorino. Gusmorino, who is currently a Program Manager for Microsoft, was in tenth grade when he wrote the piece in 1996—hardly a Marxist political economy professor.

Rush Limbaugh inside the corporate media is a caricature of patriotism and Christian values. That he lacks factual understandings of socio-political circumstances doesn’t matter in a hyperreal corporate media system. Just the fact that he is openly discussed by both political parties sets forth a emotionally-based parody of specific issues and creates an excited delirium of knowinglessness.

What’s the Score Here?

Michael Savage found himself banned from the UK15 after his tone was “allegedly fostering extremism or hatred,” citing his claim that the “Qur’an . . . is a ‘book of hate.’” Yet in the US there are no such challenges of hate speakers like Limbaugh in the corporate media. The US as a society has seen an undeniable upswing in domestic extremism since the change of administrations.  Individuals associated with right-wing groups or following traditionally right-leaning causes, such as gun control or abortion, have emerged in patterns of hate-based excited deliriums.

On the night of Obama’s inauguration, “self-proclaimed white supremacist” Keith Luke was arrested following an apparent multiple rape-homicide, which left two dead and a third severely injured and raped; all his victims were black. He had been planning to end the spree with a massacre at a local synagogue’s “Bingo Night.”

Three Pittsburgh Police officers paid with their lives for Richard Poplawski’s paranoid fear that the Obama administration was going to take his guns.

Dr. George Tiller, survivor of multiple attempts on his life already, was gunned down in his own church, serving as an usher for the Sunday, May 31, 2009 service.

Just ten days later, eighty-eight-year old white supremacist, James von Brunn, took the life of a security guard and injured others after he opened fire at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. These are but the outliers that reflect a disturbing trend. Already, some are questioning the role the media may be playing.16 Perhaps it is not fair to blame corporate media for right-wing extremism, but an expanding knowinglessness is undoubtedly a contributing factor.

Without a context of factual understanding, Glenn Beck is able to say on national Fox television news that the shooting at the Holocaust Museum was openly supported by 9/11 truth people. Beck claimed17 that 9/11 truth proponents see James von Brunn as a “hero.” Beck’s statement is completely without factual merit and represents a hyperreal emotional slamming of a group already slanderously pre-labeled by the corporate media as conspiracy theorists. Beck continued his diatribe by further equating 9/11 truth with white supremacy and Al Qaeda, claiming that they all want to “destroy the country” (See Chapter Ten for an update on 9/11 issues).

Our cultural decline will continue as long as the spin that incites it is present.  The consumer body itself will eventually decide that these messages are meaningless. The ongoing decline of confidence in US corporate media is already evidence of such a reversal of belief. This becomes apparent when news—as entertainment media—follows the same paradigm as any media, which is highly cyclical and repetitious in nature: it loses appeal and the carrier eventually fails.

Meanwhile, many Americans are deeply imbedded in a state of excited delirium of knowinglessness.  Reversing this tendency is a vital part of building media democracy. Only a vibrant independent news media based in rational factually-researched news can alleviate our crisis of hyperreality.

Andrew Hobbs is a Philosophy major at Sonoma State University. Research assistance on this chapter was provided by SSU students Ian Marlowe and Kevin Gonzalez.

Notes

1 “Limbaugh’s Audience Size? It’s Largely Up in the Air,” The Washington Post, March 7, 2009.

2 The Glenn Beck Program, August 15, 2005 and May 17, 2005, respectively.

3 See http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,275912,00.html

4 “Venezuela replaces opposition TV with state network,” Reuters, May 28, 2007.

5 See http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,494065,00.html

6 Fox News Contributors, “By Greeting Hugo Chavez, Is President Obama slighting US allies?” April 21, 2009.

7 “Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs,” FAIR, May 25, 2007.

8 See http://www.parade.com/dictators/2009/

9 Fox News, “Rush Limbaugh on Hannity,” June 4, 2009.

10 “Steele to Rush: I’m Sorry,” Politico, March 2, 2009.

11 See http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=70559.

12 See http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=71100.

13 Paul D. Colford, The Rush Limbaugh Story: Talent On Loan From God: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

14 See http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_051408/content/01125111.guest.html

15 See http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/05/05/britain-banned-list050.html

16 Errol Louis, “Connect the dots of hatred . . .” New York Daily News, June 14, 2009.

17 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUTATYaIZYI&feature=related.

The post THE HYPERREALITY OF A FAILING CORPORATE MEDIA SYSTEM appeared first on Project Censored.

And You Lose Your Vote! And You Lose Your Vote! And You Lose Your Vote! It’s one thing when millions of voiceless Americans are disenfranchised in one form or another—as we saw in the Presidential elections of both 2000 and 2004—but it’s another matter altogether whenOprah’s vote gets “lost.” Now that’s a real problem. That’s what happened in November of 2008, when one of the country’s most well-known celebrities attempted to cast her vote for the Democratic Party phenomenon, whom she’d famously endorsed, and who would eventually become President—with or without Oprah’s vote.

Who knows if Oprah Winfrey’s vote was actually counted for Barack Obama? She doesn’t. She can’t. Nobody can. Oprah cast her vote, during the early voting period, presumably for Obama, on a 100 percent unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touchscreen) voting machine.

“When I voted yesterday electronically, the first vote that you vote for on the ballot is the presidential candidate,” she explained on TV,(i)breathlessly detailing her personal freakout upon discovering her selection for Obama had disappeared by the time she arrived at the e-ballot’s final “review screen.” Naturally, as most voters do, she blamed herself.

“It was my first time doing electronic, so I didn’t mark the X strong enough, or I held down too long,” she explained over audience gasps and screams. “Because then when I went back to check it, it had not recorded my presidential vote.”

Unfortunately, Oprah not alone in 2008.  An untold number of legal American voters saw their votes simply disappear into the ether on electronic voting systems. Others didn’t see it disappear. Millions of them, whether they saw the selection properly registered on the “review screen” or not, have no idea whether their vote was actually counted accurately, or even at all.

It’s 100 percent physically and scientifically impossible to know if any vote, for any candidate or initiative on any ballot, cast during any actual election, has ever been recorded accurately by a DRE voting machine. That’s just one of the “voting industry’s” dirtiest little anti-democratic secrets.  Until the human eye is capable of seeing electrons inside a computer, there remains no way to verify that the data was recorded accurately, much less recorded at all.

Incredibly enough, jurisdictions across the country continued to use these machines in 2008 anyway. Even more incredibly, the corporate media barely bothered to notice.

In Oprah’s case, while the report of her alarming tale gained enough interest to knock out my web server at BradBlog.com for several hours, and was noteworthy enough to merit a momentary blip on the crawl of the nation’s cable news outlets, it otherwise quickly disappeared. Just like her vote. The nation’s corporate media did little to find out how many other voters faced similar fates, even though the same model of voting machine that failed for her was used to cast and record millions of votes across the country.  In Chicago (Cook County, IL), the machine Oprah would have used(ii) was a Sequoia AVC Edge, the same system used in eleven states, including the swing states of Nevada, Missouri and Virginia.

Even Oprah didn’t bother to revisit the topic.  Had she done so, her starpower might have helped reform the nation’s entire, dangerously imperiled, now-almost-wholly corporatized and privatized system of “public” elections.

Sequoia was not the only private e-voting company whose mission-critical systems failed during the critical moment of their mission in 2008. All four of the major e-voting vendors—ES&S, Diebold (now calling themselves Premier), Sequoia, and Hart Intercivic—saw similar failures, similarly under- or mis-reported, on their DRE systems in state after state. And it wasn’t just touchscreen/DREs that failed either. Optical-scan systems, which allow voters to ink their selections on paper ballots, also failed to tabulate votes accurately, and sometimes not at all.

How many other legal American votes were lost and/or changed without the voters’ knowledge in 2008? Because none of them were Oprah’s, nobody actually knows.

First Worst in the Nation

In 2008 the country saw a record voter turnout throughoutone of the longest and most riveting Democratic Party primary contests in US history.

Long declared by the punditry to be the party favorite, Sen. Hillary Clinton was knocked for a loop when she faced an upset defeat from Illinois’ upstart freshman Senator Barack Obama in Iowa’s fully transparent—if often confusing, to those of us from outside the Hawkeye State—caucuses on Thursday, January 3.

The turnout in Iowa was unprecedented. Caucus-goer Kathy Barger told CNN that the room she was in was packed to the brim with a line out the door at her caucus site in Walnut, Iowa. “I don’t know how they are going to be able to fit everybody in the room, much less count the votes,” she said. [iii]

Yet within hours, the results, transparently recorded as citizens stood to cast their votes and bear witness to the counting first-hand across the state, were in. Clinton was soundly defeated, coming in third behind Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

The same pundits who had pronounced her the Democratic Party’s de facto nominee months, if not years before—including those on the Right who, oddly enough, seemed to be rooting for Hillary—quickly declared her bid for the Presidency was all but over, unless, just five days later on Tuesday, January 8 in New Hampshire’s “First in the Nation” Primary, she was able to become the new “comeback kid.”

Buoyed by his Iowa win, Obama surged in the pre-election New Hampshire polls.[iv] Rasmussen had him 8 points ahead of Clinton. CNN and Marist each favored Obama by 7 in their post-Iowa, pre-New Hampshire samplings. CBS predicted Obama by 5, and Zogby showed him up by an astounding 13 points. In all, the final average of dozens of independent pre-election polls predicted a +8.3 spread in Obama’s favor just prior to Election Day.

When New Hampshire voters headed to the polls on Tuesday to cast their votes on paper ballots, Hillary was on the ropes. Yet when the unofficial results of the election were tabulated—80 percent of them by Diebold’s AccuVote optical-scan system—Hillary Clinton would be declared the winner of the contest by 2.6 points over Obama, who quickly announced his concession before 11pm ET, before even a single Diebold-tabulated ballot had been checked for accuracy by any human being.

NBC’s Tim Russert quickly announced the results as “the most stunning upset in the history of politics.” Pundits and pollsters from across the corporate media and, disappointingly, even in the progressive blogosphere, turned tortured backflips trying to determine how they had “gone wrong” in their pre-election predictions.

Was it Clinton’s widely-reported, tearful moment at a town hall event over the weekend? Notoriously independent Granite State voters loathe to allow ‘hicks’ from Iowa to make up their minds for them? Mischievous Republicans voting for Hillary, believing her either more “conservative” than Obama, or otherwise easier to defeat in November? Could racism and the so-called “Bradley Effect[v]“”—where poll respondents answer one way to appear “politically correct,” only to vote another way when in the privacy of the voting booth—have played a part?

There were plenty of reverse-engineered explanations for the apparent remarkable come-from-behind victory for New York’s junior Senator. The trouble is, none of the explanations were actually verifiable; all were just best-guesses from the same “experts” who’d presumably gotten it so wrong in the first place (twice, if you count their wrong calls in Iowa, as well.)

All the while, as pollsters and pundits naval-gazed and second-guessed to determine how their polls and predictions could have been so terribly wrong, not one of them stopped to wonder if the reported election results were actually right. Not one.

Eighty percent of New Hampshire’s ballots were tabulated on Diebold AccuVote optical-scan systems. The other 20 percent are counted by hand, at the precincts, on Election Night, in one of the very few states where a tradition of citizen-overseen hand-counting still takes place.

Adding to the anomaly of New Hampshire’s reported results was the fact that where ballots were hand-counted, mostly in rural areas, Obama had won. In the more populated areas, where Diebold counted the votes, Clinton was reported the victor. A comparison of the hand-counted results versus the Diebold-counted results revealed they were virtually flipped, almost exactly opposite percentages of votes for Clinton and Obama. Overall, Clinton received an approximate 7 point bump (+4.5 for her, -2.5 for Obama) where machines tabulated instead of humans.

Blogger Ben Moseley analyzed the data from each town in New Hampshire in the days following the election. He noted that “the results were somewhat surprising:

[M]ore statistics from the data shows that Obama in non-Diebold towns garnering 38.7% of the vote to Clinton’s 36.2%. The results in Diebold towns show the exact opposite: Clinton with 40.7% of the vote and Obama with 36.2%. Not only are the positions swapped but the informal statistics have the second place candidate holding 36.2% in both cases, which could easily be a pure coincidence. . . . All the other numbers [are] almost exact for every candidate, even Edwards who received 17% of the vote in Diebold towns compared to 17.6% in non-Diebold towns. That still doesn’t make up for the extra 2% vote Clinton is receiving when she leads in certain towns compared to when Obama has the lead.”

There could be perfectly legitimate reasons for Obama’s popularity in the more rural areas where they hand-counted, and Clinton’s winning in the more metropolitan areas where Diebold counted the vote. I just don’t know what they are. Neither did the Wednesday morning quarterback pundits when they tried to explain them. They were, frankly, just guessing, rather than bothering to make sure the results were truly accurate.

In towns where machines were used to count, the Diebold AccuVote systems used were the very same make and model (down to the firmware) seen used to flip the results of a mock election in Leon County, Florida, in HBO’s Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy.[vi] The climax of the landmark film features a first-of-its-kind, “live” video-taped experiment, in which a computer expert exploits the flaws of the machines’ sensitive memory cards which are inserted into op-scan systems to store scanned ballot results.

In the experiment,[vii] eight paper ballots were cast in a mock election. Voters answered one simple YES or NO question: “Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?”

On camera, all eight ballots are seen as they are run through the Diebold optical-scan machine. Six voters voted “NO”; two voters voted “YES”.

Yet, when the results of the tabulation were printed by the Diebold AccuVote, they were reported as a horrifying seven “YES”; one “NO.”

The results of the mock election—held on the very same make and model of electronic tabulating system used in New Hampshire’s 2008 Primary—had been entirely flipped. Only a manual hand-count would have revealed that fact. The computer expert had hacked the memory card used in the AccuVote system and exploited a programming flaw in Diebold’s operating system to “invisibly” reverse the results of the election.

Back in New Hampshire, where the announced results of the primary had produced another sea change in the 2008 Presidential race, not a single paper ballot from among the 80 percent tallied by Diebold had been checked to assure the machines had accurately counted them. That happened even though the results of the[viii] in December of 2005, as documented in the 2006 film, had caused reverberations across the nation at the time—at least among election officials, election vendors, and those in the election integrity community. The shocking discovery that a race could be flipped with little possibility of detection vis-a-vis a simple memory card exploit led Leon County, Florida to immediately dump their Diebold op-scan system. However, no changes were made in New Hampshire, nor in most other states that also used them. This same vulnerable system would be used in the “First in the Nation” primary in January of 2008.

To make matters worse, LHS Associates, the company that exclusively sold the machines and maintained and programmed the Diebold voting systems and their memory cards in New Hampshire (and most of New England), had a disturbing, and even criminal, history.

Its Director of Sales and Marketing, Ken Hajjar, the company owner’s childhood friend, had previously been sentenced to twelve months in prison after pleading guilty to a narcotics felony. Hajjar had also come by The Brad Blog some years ago to post a profane rant in comments, resulting in Connecticut’s Secretary of State banning him from working on their voting systems. He was angry that we’d posted photos after our visit to Diebold headquarters in Allen, TX showing voting machines sitting out in the open on their loading dock, unguarded and easily tampered with, before shipment to customers.

Moreover, Hajjar had previously admitted, on air, that he and other employees frequently swapped out Diebold memory cards—the same type used by to hack the mock-election in Leon County—in the middle of elections in Connecticut, where that is illegal. He told the stunned host of “Talk Nation Radio”: “I don’t pay attention to every little law.” This was the outfit running the crucial New Hampshire election on Diebold’s hackable voting machines.

Not only pre-election polls predicted a tidy Obama win over Clinton. Same-day exit polls had predicted similarly. Pollster John Zogby, who predicted a 13-point Obama rout in the days before the race, told me via email later that week, “The actual exit poll had Obama up by 3—41 percent to 38 percent.” He characterized many of the reverse-engineered explanations for Clinton’s upset as “preposterous,” noting in particular there was “no evidence that race was an issue.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthew was also flummoxed[ix] about the full ten-point swing from independent pre-election polls to the final, mostly Diebold-reported results, and also reported on same day exit polls he’d been looking at on Tuesday afternoon indicating a “significant victory” for Obama.

On Thursday’s Hardball, following Tuesday’s primary, Matthews peppered his pollster guests to explain why “even our own exit polls, taken as people came out of voting, showed [Obama] ahead.”

“What’s going on here?” he wondered aloud.  Raw data from NBC’s exit polls, commissioned and shared by a consortium of corporate news outlets, has never been released to the public (it never is, even data from 2004, despite demands from statisticians and citizens across the nation who noted the infamous discrepancies indicating a John Kerry win over George W. Bush in state after state).

Virtually alone in the mainstream media, willing to note the disparity he’d seen with his own eyes in his company’s own internal exit data, Matthews asked questions during one show and promised viewers he would not revisit the topic after that day. He kept his promise. The exit polls were not discussed again and concerns about the results themselves almost as little. Obama never said a public word questioning any of it.

“It’s ludicrous,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s senior campaign representative, David Bright told me. “New Hampshire has the privilege of being the first in the nation. This election brings in 3 billion dollars to the economy, so you’d think a measly 70k would be part of the cost of doing business,” he told me the week following the election.

Bright was complaining about the $69,900 that New Hampshire was billing Kucinich for a complete hand-count of paper ballots in the Democratic race. As a candidate in the contest, the Ohio Congressman had standing to request such a count. “If Obama had done it, it would have been $2,000,” Bright noted, referring to state law allowing a candidate, in a close election, as Obama was, to pay just $2,000 total for a complete hand-count. The amount would have been a pittance, at the time, to the Illinois Senator. Instead, with a campaign war chest low on funds, Kucinich paid $27,000 for a partial count.

Hailing from the Buckeye State, home of 2004’s infamous election failures, Kucinich was particularly sensitive to voting machine concerns. “Ever since the 2000 election—and even before—the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted,” he said when announcing his demand for a hand-count. “This recount isn’t about who won 39 percent or 36 percent or even 1 percent . It’s about establishing whether 100 percent of the voters had 100 percent of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them. . . . It is about the integrity of the election process.”

On the Republican side, where John McCain was reported to have won handily, an obscure candidate, Albert Howard, a Michigan chauffer, also demanded a hand-count after noting that he’d seen as many as 187 votes reported for himself on C-SPAN on election night, but only forty-four votes in the final reported tally.

“My real concern is the controversial Diebold Electronic Scanning machines . . . used for 81 percent of the vote counting in New Hampshire,” he echoed Kucinich when announcing his own call for a hand-count. “I believe it is better to take action now in the first primary than later.”

Howard’s recount was largely funded by supporters of Republican candidate Ron Paul. They had long been suspicious of electronic voting systems after watching the collapse of Diebold optical-scanners used in the 2007 summer GOP Iowa straw poll. That first contest of the 2008 Presidential Election ended up requiring a hand-count of thousands of ballots.

Paul supporters were further outraged when they witnessed, on video tape, Mitt Romney supporters literally “stuffing” the Sequoia touchscreen voting systems, voting again and again and again in the December 2007 GOP straw poll in Tampa, Florida.

Romney would “win” that contest, tallying 893 votes to Paul’s 534 (his supporters vowed to only once each). The documented multiple voting by Romney supporters resulted in the local GOP chairman threatening “bodily harm” to Paul supporters if they didn’t cease their public complaints.

Albert Howard paid just less than $60,000 to see all ballots on the Republican side hand-counted.

“I’m very concerned that this is not a fully transparent process that is happening there,” said voting rights attorney John Bonifaz, legal director ofVoterAction.org, a non-partisan organization that had successfully challenged the use of electronic voting systems in many states. He had traveled to Concord to witness the “recount” after becoming concerned about the Diebold tabulation in New Hampshire.

The sensitive memory cards containing the programming and tabulation from the Diebold op-scanners, he’d learned after speaking with the NH Secretary of State and Asst. Secretary of State and their Deputy Attorney General, were “missing in action” just one week after the contested race. He was told by Secretary of State William Gardner that his office doesn’t get involved in tracking what happens to memory cards, but he believed some had already been returned to LHS Associates, and may have already been erased.

“When you have a private company counting 80 percent of the votes, and you later learn that the memory cards are unaccounted for, you have a serious question about the transparency and accountability in that process,” Bonifaz told me.

Federal law requires the retention of all election-related materials for twenty-two months following federal elections. But whether memory cards are used in DRE or optical-scan systems, anywhere in the country, those cards are routinely erased for re-use shortly after elections, making any later forensic investigation—in order to determine if a Leon County-style attack, or mere failure, may have occurred—completely impossible. Lawsuits, Bonifaz noted, are likely needed to enforce the retention of those materials.

Partisan and non-partisan election integrity advocates from around the country descended on New Hampshire’s capitol to oversee, and document on video, every step of both the Democratic and Republican hand-counts—at least those parts they were allowed to tape. Howard, in filing for his hand-count, had demanded to examine the memory cards from the voting systems and other related materials, such as voting machine poll-tapes, poll books and unvoted ballots. He was told, however, that he would not be allowed to do so. Only the hand-counting of voted paper ballots would be included in the state’s “recount.”

This became a major issue for the assembled election integrity advocates.  Examination of the memory cards and end-of-day poll tapes might offer clues to whether the precinct-based scanners showed anomalies or different numbers than those reported by state tallies.  Unvoted ballots needed counting to make certain they were accounted for, and not somehow used to stuff ballot boxes or replace legitimate votes.  The chain of custody for ballots as they were transported to the state capitol to be hand-counted needed to be secure and verified.

Videos and photographs made their way onto the Internet—though rarely into mainstream press accounts—revealing the shoddy condition of cardboard boxes of ballots which election integrity advocates were able to reach directly into, even with so-called “security seals” still intact. The “security seals” themselves were, as seen on video, easily peeled off and restored without leaving a trace of tampering behind. The boxes of ballots were transported from towns across the state back to Concord by two state employees who called themselves Butch and Hoppy. There was virtually no oversight during that transport, and boxes were sometimes left in the open in the counting room at night during the several weeks of hand-counting.

New Hampshire’s Secretary of State Gardner is officially a Democrat, though by the 2008 Primary he’d been in office for sixteen terms, approved time and again by the Republican-majority legislature for most of those years. Despite his experience, he seemed wholly unprepared to handle the new generation of election integrity advocates who—wizened since the days of 2004—came armed with video cameras and demanding both answers and transparency in every step of the process. His consistent deer-in-the-headlights expression caught on camera by citizen activists only heightened concern about what quickly revealed itself as an horrifically sloppy process—at least to those bothering to pay attention. Stories in the mainstream press, however, painted a very different picture.

“We requested that unvoted ballots be counted, but they’re not being counted,” Manny Krasner, Kucinich’s local attorney overseeing the counting complained in frustration when I spoke with him following a front page story in the Concord Monitor[x] quoting some of The Brad Blog’s critical coverage of the hand-count. The paper described Krasner, however, as saying only that he “hadn’t seen anything suspicious.”

The paper quoted Gardner in response to advocates on the ground, complaining about a lack of transparency. They wrote: “‘If this isn’t transparent . . .’ Gardner said, raising his eyebrows and gesturing to the tables of counters and observers. ‘What could we do to make it more transparent!’”

The Union Leader editorialized[xi] on New Hampshire’s behalf with rosiest-of-scenarios: “Whatever the recount’s results, Gardner has opened the process to observers so there can be no question about the integrity of the count. Doubters on both sides should let this settle the issue. If they question Gardner’s integrity, then we’ll know for sure not to trust anything else they have to say.”

Problems of all sorts were discovered during Kucinich’s partial count. In addition to hundreds of ballots discovered miscounted by the Diebold machines, public records requests for trouble reports from Election Day indicated problems such as “Printout indicated 550 ‘blank voted’ ballots which indicated that bad pens were used” in the town of Stratham; “Corrupt Count” in the town of Lebanon; “P/U [pickup] 3rd Bad Machine per John S.” (likely a reference to LHS’ John Silvestro) in Manchester.

“If it wasn’t 550 ballots, but just 55 or so in some places, would they even have seen it and known to recount ALL of the ballots” on Election Night? BlackBoxVoting.org’s Bev Harris wondered after reviewing the trouble reports.

In the actual hand-count, in ward after ward, the Diebold op-scans had been found to have miscounted enormous numbers of ballots for almost all candidates. In Nashua’s Ward 5, for example, Hillary Clinton had received 1,030 votes according to Diebold, but according to the hand-tally, she received just 959, an error rate of 7.4 percent. John Edwards had also been over-tallied by Diebold at the same precinct. His actual results were 7.42 percent lower upon manual-examination, while Barack Obama gained just 5 votes at that ward (a .73 percent error rate).

Secretary of State Gardner and the friendly local papers downplayed the problems. They had good reason (billions of them, in fact) to paint that rosy scenario in hopes of retaining their “First in the Nation” status. Where Clinton might have lost thirty votes in one precinct, but gained twenty-nine votes in another, Gardner and the newspaper would report: “Minor discrepancies in recount, Clinton’s tally off by just 1 vote.”

The Eagle-Tribune opined,[xii] on Martin Luther King Day of all days, “It doesn’t matter” that machines failed to count every vote. The Democratic Party hand-count was part of a “conspiracy theory” and “destructive to Americans’ confidence in the democratic process.” They said Kucinich had “abused” the state’s recount law and “corroded public confidence in the electoral process . . . without a care for the damage he is doing to the country.”

The Eagle-Tribune didn’t mention Republican Albert Howard’s similar demand, which also found tally problems across the board for all candidates. But by the time he received his full count, following Kucinich’s partial count, the media had moved on to the next contests between the revitalized Clinton and the upstart sensation Obama.

As Kucinich’s counting funds ran out, he lodged a letter of complaint with Secretary of State Gardner, charging “significant percentage variances in four voting districts” in one county alone, and detailed miscounts of 10.6 percent here, 4.9 percent there, 7.5 percent over there. And that was just in the few areas he could afford to have counted. He requested Gardner use his “constitutional authority to order a complete and accurate recount of all ballots in the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Primary election.”

Instead, the next day, the Nashua Telegraph reported[xiii] Gardner as saying Kucinich was “satisfied at the integrity of the recount, and it has concluded. . . . The recount revealed no evidence of irregularities in cities and towns that used electronic voting machines.”

The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, passed in the wake of the Florida 2000 election debacle, allocated nearly $4 billion for states to “upgrade” their voting equipment to electronic systems. The legislation also specified a maximum allowable error rate of 0.0002 percent for those systems. That the results tallied by Diebold’s AccuVote systems in New Hampshire—the same model that was set to be used in upcoming elections in the days and months ahead in dozens of states across the country in the landmark 2008 Presidential election—far exceeded that maximum allowable rate by magnitude simply didn’t matter. The state’s local media didn’t want to report it, for fear of making “First in the Nation” New Hampshire look bad; the national media were more interested in making all-new predictions, based on all-new pre-election polls, whether or not they would be right or wrong again, for the unprecedented horse race galloping full speed ahead towards November.

When The Brad Blog and a handful of other independent, alternative media outlets and election integrity-focused sites covered the goings-on in the Granite State, we were derided, not just by the expected sources, but even from supposedly progressive outlets typically more sympathetic to issues of transparency and questions of election integrity.
Concerns about what had happened in New Hampshire needed to be painted as little more than stuff and nonsense by some, whether in pre-emptive defensiveness of Hillary Clinton, or the Democratic Party in general, or the state of New Hampshire, or out of the oft-heard, if wholly unsubstantiated, concern that voters might withdraw from the process should their confidence in its legitimacy be questioned in any way. Scrutinization of the process, in the wake of Tim Russert’s “most stunning upset in the history of politics,” was denounced as “conspiracy theory” bunk; “fringe elements were marginalized for allegedly suggesting “Hillary Clinton had stolen the New Hampshire Primary.” Never mind there were no such suggestions from serious critics of the New Hampshire process. Had the election in fact been “stolen” there were any number of potential “suspects”—including known election gamers, such as Karl Rove—who would have had a keen interest in seeing Clinton revive her bid for the Democratic nomination.

Even on Daily Kos, one of the most popular progressive-leaning websites, someone writing pseudonymously under the name of “DHinMI” the day after the election posted a front page article[xiv] headlined, “Enough with the ‘Diebold Hacked the NH Primary’ Lunacy.” The writer misdirected readers in attempting to “debunk” concerns by stating “New Hampshire has no touchscreen voting.  None.” Since paper ballots are used in New Hampshire, the pseudonymous writer argued, nobody would be foolish enough to hack the tabulators. “The incentive for hacking them is not very great,” the writer argued, because the culprit would be discovered if they did. “If Tuesday’s results really were the likely result of malfeasance, the Obama and Edwards campaigns would be raising holy hell.  They would be seeking a recount, and investigation of the voting, and they would be doing it because they saw the irregularities in the vote results.”

“DHinMI” had a short memory, already having forgotten the 2004 “irregularities in the vote results” in Ohio (and elsewhere) when John Kerry (and his running mate John Edwards) failed to either “seek a recount” or “raise holy hell” of any sort.

Other usually progressive sights deferred to the Daily Kos’ “debunking”[xv] of concerns about New Hampshire results before a single Diebold-counted ballot had been examined to assure any of them had been tabulated accurately. “There aren’t any serious irregularities in the results of Tuesday’s Democratic primary,” the Daily Kos writer pronounced in no uncertain terms. “New Hampshire has an excellent reputation for running clean elections.”

What “DHinMI” didn’t announce to readers is that he was Dana Houle, until only recently the Chief of Staff for New Hampshire’s Democratic US Congressman Paul Hodes.

As the dust settled and the Primary cycle moved on to other states, New Hampshire’s reputation as “First in the Nation” would remain largely intact. The Granite State could look forward to doing it all over again in four years, and seeing “billions of dollars” (as Kucinich’s representative had complained) once again pour into the state’s coffers in support of the kickoff of the 2012 Presidential Primary campaign.

Whether “paper or plastic,” it doesn’t matter. Without full transparency and citizen oversight of every aspect of elections, legitimate questions will persist, and democracy will remain in peril.

America Flips Out, Media Barely Notices, Parties Barely Care

While concerns about electronically tabulating paper ballots on oft-failing, insecure optical-scan systems would go underappreciated and underinvestigated by the mainstream media, electronic touchscreen voting systems (DREs) would be of moderately passing notice to the nation’s news outlets in the weeks and months following New Hampshire.

Failure after failure in primary after primary and state after state plagued the 2008 election. Where Oprah Winfrey’s problem received a modest moment of coverage, similar occurrences across the country on virtually every make and model of machinery from every vendor would receive little more than a blip of coverage, quickly downplayed as nothing but a “calibration issue” that could be handled with a quick maintenance procedure by election officials or employees of voting machine vendors.

Never mind that study after study by states such as Ohio, California, Colorado and others, and academic institutions such as Princeton and the University of California, had found virtually every electronic system highly vulnerable to error and/or manipulation, particularly if sensitive memory cartridges were accessed while in election-ready mode.  Yet the solution to touchscreen “vote-flipping” across the nation would be a quick, hands-on technical adjustment—or so argued the bulk of officials and vendors, whose careers and company solvency depended on minimizing such failures as little more than “glitches,” “hiccups,” “snags,” and “snafus,” as they were almost always downplayed in the media.

Whether marginalized or not, the failures were extraordinarily widespread in 2008, just as they were in 2004 (and in 2006), after which little was done before all would all be repeated again in the next Presidential election.

Some progress, one could argue, had been made in the intervening four years. At least reported occurrences of failures and vote flips were not as immediately dismissed as “conspiracy theories” that never actually happened, as they’d been frequently characterized in 2004. By 2008 enough citizens had become aware of known, documented problems with DRE voting, so reports were taken somewhat more seriously. And it didn’t hurt that many grassroots outlets such as Video the Vote had sprung up to document polling place problems, nearly instantaneously, by citizens armed with video cameras.

There were many notable failures on touchscreen systems even before early voting for the General Election kicked off. For example, in Horry County, South Carolina, in the Republican Presidential Primary held entirely on ES&S iVotronc touchscreen voting systems just days after the New Hampshire election, all machines in the county failed to fire up at all when the polls opened at 7:00 am.

As CNN reported[xvi] that afternoon, “Workers have been giving out paper ballots but at least one precinct has run out of envelopes to seal them in (not a sign of turnout—they had just 23 such ballots on hand).” Untold numbers of voters were sent away unable to vote at all, local news outlets reported. “Everyone is being turned away,” concerned voter Steve Rabe complained to News13, “There are no paper ballots. We were just turned away along with many of our neighbors. We were told to check back later . . . in the rain. This is a crisis.”

Tom Reynold wrote in, “I voted by paper ballot at the Socastee library and saw them run out of those while I was there at 10 am. I went to the Forestbrook precinct with a neighbor, picked up some paper ballots there and took them to the Socastee library. They told me they had ‘turned away’ 20 voters in the time I was gone! Turned away?! That’s not supposed to happen according to the Horry county elections commission.”

“All over the county,” it had been reported by evening, voters used scraps of paper, notebook paper, and even paper towels as ballots before officials were able to get most of the unverifiable touchscreens working around noon. The county would be forced to hand-count thousands of pieces of paper to determine results of the election that night.

Before the Democratic primary in the same state the following week, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight would report on the meltdown and discuss the matter as an illustration of problems inherent in “paperless electronic voting machines.” CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim neglected to note in her report, however, that even if South Carolina’s DREs had “paper trail” printers, they would have been of no use since the machines failed to fire up at all, so they couldn’t have printed out so-called “voter-verifiable paper audit trails” featured on certain DRE models.

Given the disaster the week before, Democrats, in advance of their primary the next Saturday, instructed voters to print out sample ballots at home before going to the polls, just in case the massive failure of the Republican Primary was repeated. The machines “worked” the following week, even though it would still be 100 percent impossible to know if any machine succeeded in recording anybody’s vote accurately.

Three days later, in Palm Beach County, Florida’s primary (yes, ground zero for the 2000 Presidential paper ballot battle, prompting the hasty move to e-voting systems), Rush Limbaugh himself encountered problems with his touchscreen vote “when the screen seemed to freeze or ‘stick’ on the list of presidential candidates.” The Palm Beach Post blog[xvii] reported Limbaugh’s description to listeners on his widely-syndicated radio show.

“I hit ‘next’ and it didn’t go there,” Limbaugh explained, before he then hit the ‘back’ button and “got my candidate page again with the vote already recorded there.”

“So I said ‘hmmmmm, I wonder if this is going to count twice.’” He unclicked his candidate, selected it again and hit “Next” a second time, and saw his selection properly on the review screen. “I don’t know if I voted twice,” Limbaugh told listeners. “Probably not,” he guessed, not knowing for certain, of course, if his vote would count even once.

The following week, in New Jersey, on the February 5 “Super Tuesday,” Democratic Governor John Corzine “was unable to vote . . . at his designated polling site in Hoboken because the voting machines were not working,” as AP reported.[xviii] He was delayed for forty-five minutes when the AVC Advantage DRE systems, made by Sequoia, failed to start up, making it impossible to vote—not unlike what had happened to voters in South Carolina two weeks earlier. “The big question is why did this polling place not have any provisional ballots,” ABC 7 asked[xix] that day, noting “lots of people were obviously turned away” during the pre-work morning crush at the polls.

That same day, over at Daily Kos—the same site which pooh-poohed concerns about New Hampshire, and even purged users and diaries raising concerns about the 2004 election years earlier—a report[xx] was posted from a diarist noting her husband’s selection “reset” from Obama to Clinton, several times, on New Jersey’s touchscreen machines before he was able to push “the vote button” without it flipping back to Clinton.

The couple’s experience would become commonplace, repeated again and again, at polling place after polling place, in state after state, as the election ‘glitched,’ ‘hiccupped,’ ‘snagged,’ and ‘snafud’ towards November 3.

As early voting began in October, so too did nearly nonstop reports through Election Day of votes flipping and/or disappearing on DRE voting machines. As in previous years, the flips were almost always from Democratic candidates to others.  A few examples:

In Jackson County, WV, Virginia Matheney told the Sunday Gazette-Mail: [xxi]“When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain.” Others in the same precinct reported identical experiences on their ES&S iVotronics DREs. Who knows how many others didn’t notice, or didn’t report it.
In Putham County, WV, Martha Louise Harrington reported a similar problem with the same machines: “I was very cautious to put my fingernail in the middle of the square. I hit it in the square to vote for Obama. Immediately, it went to McCain.”
In Nashville (Davidson County), TN, Patricia Earnhardt—ironically, the Executive Producer of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, a documentary film focused on the dangers of touchscreen voting—saw her own ES&S iVotronic vote flip from Obama to Green Party Candidate Cynthia McKinney: “I touched ‘Obama’ for president & nothing lit up. I touched 2 or 3 more times & still nothing lit up. I called the poll worker back over to tell him I was having a problem. He said I just needed to touch it more lightly. I tried it 2 or 3 more times more lightly with the poll worker watching & still nothing lit up. The poll worker then touched it for me twice—nothing lit up. The third time he touched the Obama button, the Cynthia McKinney space lit up!” she emailed me, as reported on The Brad Blog at the time.
(In yet another irony, akin to Earnhardt’s—one that would momentarily light up the Internet with headlines such as “Election Integrity Journalist Sees Own Votes Flipped”—four of twelve of my own votes would be misprinted by the e-voting system in Los Angeles County during California’s June 2008 state primary.)

On Hilton Head Island (Beaufort County), SC, Nancy Roe discovered that races were missing on the review screen of her ES&S iVotronic touchscreen: “I’m real political, so I checked the ballot. If I had only given it a quick glance and punched ‘vote,’ I never would’ve known,” she told the Island Packet.[xxii] She solved the problem by voting with a paper ballot.
In Berkeley County, WV, again on the ES&S iVotronic, Roger Bolozier told poll workers when he tried to vote “straight Democratic ticket. But it switched my vote to Republican candidates five different times.” He was “concerned about a lot of people who might not notice or people who might be intimidated.”
In Palo Pinto County, TX, residents reported the by then too-familiar tale of problems with the ES&S iVotronic. Lona Jones told theMineral Wells Index:[xxiii] “When I cast an early vote at Palo Pinto County Courthouse, my vote was switched from Democrat to Republican right in front of my face—twice!” Teresa Crosier, an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters had the same problem when she tried to vote straight party Democratic “and it came up straight party, Republican party.”
Back in WV, the problems on the ES&S systems continued, as the Sunday Gazette-Mail reported[xxiv] in late October, in at least six different counties (Jackson, Putnam, Berkeley, Ohio, Monongalia, and Greenbrier). And just one day after she’d held a press conference to discuss problems with ES&S vote-flipping in the state, West Virginia’s Secretary of State Betty Ireland actually presented an “award of merit” to ES&S vice-President Gary Greenhalgh, “a pioneer in the use of technology in the election process.” As ES&S’s vice president of sales, Wired reported,[xxv] Greenhalgh “helped the company win a $17 million contract to supply machines to West Virginia in 2005 and was the company’s point person for dealing with election officials.” It was the perfect illustration of our e-voting vendor/election official logrolling nightmare in a nutshell.
To the credit of Adams County, CO’s Clerk and Recorder Karen Long, a Diebold touchscreen system that had flipped votes from a Democratic candidate to a Republican was removed from service and quarantined, rather than allow it to be dangerously “recalibrated” in the middle of the election. But only after it happened to the Democratic state Representative who had tried to vote for herself, only to see it flipped to her opponent. “I always just trusted the machines, and it opened my eyes,” state Rep. Mary Hodge told the Colorado Independent.[xxvi]
Had anyone bothered to pay attention to Dan Rather’s breathtaking investigative HDNet report, “The Trouble with Touch Screens,” in the summer of 2006, they might have expected these problems, particularly from ES&S machines. Rather detailed nearly non-existent quality control in the Filipino sweatshop where many of them were built. Election officials may not have noticed Rather’s exposé, however, since not a single mainstream media outlet bothered to note, much less offer follow-up reportage on his award-worthy investigative report.

Even had those officials bothered to notice, most of them were, by then, so deeply in denial and/or millions of dollars into their commitment to the machines and private vendors who sold and serviced them, that dumping them for another likely-as-unreliable system was no longer an option—not if they wished to hold an election that year and continue their careers in the election industry thereafter.

Democrats Nowhere to Be Found

The Democratic Party—clearly with much to lose from the now-familiar pattern of e-voting systems adversely affecting attempted votes for their own candidates—was also in denial.

Just prior to the general election, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro A. Cortes fought tooth and nail—even in court—against providing “emergency paper ballots” at polling places. Only a federal court challenge from voting rights advocates and the NAACPforced the state to offer at least a few paper ballots at the precincts, in case of machine failures. Earlier in the year, just before the make-or-break Pennsylvania Primary, election reform journalist Jake Soboroff asked officials[xxvii] if they had concerns about DRE systems used virtually across the entire state. Democratic Governor Ed Rendell dismissed Soboroff, admitting he “didn’t know enough about it to answer” before pointing to state and federal approval of the machines (the same ones found insecure, inaccurate, and hackable by one state test after another by then).

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter summed up the thinking of so many elected officials on the issue of voting machines by telling Soboroff, “I just got elected on them last year,” so how bad could they be?

Subsequently and predictably there were major problems on Election Day in Pennsylvania, particularly in Philadelphia, that April. All the while, Democrats, including the Obama campaign, had long been singing their familiar 2004 refrain: ‘If anything goes wrong at the polls this year, we’ll have thousands of attorneys on the ground, ready to take care of it.’ Apparently, as in 2004, they were just kidding.

The day before the 2008 General Election, The Brad Blog reported on hundreds of incidents called into Obama’s election protection hotline in Nevada as detailed in their incident report database code-named “Atlas Voter Protection.” In one incident after another during the state’s early voting period, machines failed to turn on, candidate names were reported missing and so-called “voter-verifiable paper audit trail” printers failed to work on the state’s Sequoia DRE systems.

The Obama/DNC attorneys declined to demand any of the failed systems be removed from service, or that voters be given paper ballots to record votes instead. Rather, the entire matter was kept quiet, the information never shared with the public.

Earlier in the year, citizen journalist Michael Richardson and I had broken the story of the illegal certification and use of Nevada’s Sequoia DRE “paper trail” system in 2004 by then Secretary of State Dean Heller (now a US Congressman, elected on his own machines in 2006.) Heller publicly lied about machine failures as they were being tested by the US Election Assistance Commission’s woeful certification process.  He also lied about them being federally certified when he first used them in 2004, in violation of state law. The EAC, responsible for overseeing all such certification and testing of e-voting systems at the federal level, not only looked the other way, but actually colluded in helping Heller use the uncertified machines illegally. When notified, neither the new Democratic Secretary of State nor the mainstream media in Nevada batted an eyelash.  (Our complete investigative report was published as a chapter in Mark Crispin Miller’s 2008 Loser Take All, a compilation of similar election failures). Heller’s illegally certified machines would fail again during the 2008 cycle, as neither Obama nor the Democrats nor the mainstream media seemed to care.

There was, of course, reason for everyone to be concerned, particularly about voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. The company had been on the verge of bankruptcy and hostile takeover all year, and—though they had told federal investigators that they had divested from Smartmatic, their Venezuelan-owned, Hugo Chavez-tied parent company, in late 2006, after a hue and cry from Republicans—all of their systems’ Intellectual Property rights had secretly remained under the ownership of the Venezuelan firm.

In May of 2008, The Brad Blog reported the exclusive story of Sequoia’s lie to federal investigators, including company CEO Jack Blaine’s admission on a company-wide phone call that they didn’t own the IP rights to their own products—Smartmatic still did. We also detailed his lies-by-omission to Chicago officials—who’d just purchased the company’s touchscreens (the ones to be used by Oprah)—concerned the divestiture had been “a sham transaction designed to fool regulators.” It was, indeed. But again, the corporate media failed to notice, and Sequoia was able to invoke claims of IP violations while arguing against independent examinations of their machines in a New Jersey court case after their touchscreens misreported vote totals on Super Tuesday, and in DC, where thousands of “phantom votes” appeared on the city’s optical-scan systems in their September primary.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

While many Democrats were ultimately satisfied with the outcome of the 2008 elections, they were a mess nonetheless. Rather than the machinery of American democracy improving since 2002’s Help America Vote Act, democracy continued to disappear as corporate control solidified and citizens became farther removed from the ability to oversee their own elections.

The media, however, happily distracted the American people from the those issues. While offering wall-to-wall coverage of the GOP’s “ACORN Voter Fraud” hoax, real cases of disenfranchising voter registration fraud, revealed by the arrest of the head of the company hired by California’s GOP to register voters, was barely reported. (Had I not, myself, during an appearance on Fox News, noted the arrest, it seems unlikely the cable “news” channel would have reported it at all.)

While evidence-free allegations of Democratic “voter fraud” made headlines, the well-documented case of Ann Coulter’s actual voter fraudin Florida was almost entirely ignored.

The story of record turnout would eclipse stories of illegally purged voter rolls in state after state, as the same private voting machine companies who’d performed so abysmally with voting machines were given state contracts to computerize voter rolls.

While Republicans fought for photo ID requirements at polls, nuns, veterans, minorities, students, and the elderly who had no state-issued ID were turned away, disenfranchised, robbed of their rights.

While the media obsessed over Norm Coleman’s challenge to Al Franken’s victory in Minnesota’s razor-thin US Senate Race—featuring the most transparent, painstakingly accurate post-election recount in the history of the nation (thankfully, they had paper ballots and bothered to count them!) —few noticed when a citizen transparency project discovered hundreds of ballots deleted without notice by Diebold’s optical-scan system in Humboldt County, CA. The company admitted the problem had been known since 2004.

While easily debunked Republican conspiracy theories of Franken ballots appearing “mysteriously” in an election director’s car were echoed again and again, the corporate media took little notice of a small plane crash killing the GOP’s top IT guru, Mike Connell, after he’d allegedly been threatened by Karl Rove weeks earlier when subpoenaed to testify about GOP election fraud in 2004. (See Chapter 1 for details on The Brad Blog’s Project Censored Award-winning coverage of the Connell story.)

California’s investigation of Humboldt’s deleted ballots revealed that Diebold/Premiere’s audit log system was in violation of federal voting system standards. E-voting audit logs had been pointed to by vendors for years as insurance that any mischief could easily be spotted by reviewing the supposedly indestructible logs. As the state investigation revealed, however, Diebold’s audit log system allowed deletion of ballots without notice; misdated and mis-time-stamped entries, and featured a “clear” button allowing complete deletion of all audit log records with a single mouse-click.

A Diebold/Premier spokesman admitted,[xxviii] during a CA Secretary of State hearing in March of 2009, that the flaws in the Diebold GEMS audit log exist in every version of its tabulation software—the same software used in thirty-one states across the nation and, yes, in the state of New Hampshire, where our 2008 nightmares began.

But in the end, the story that would continue to be the most under-reported was the quiet, nearly-complete takeover of our public democracy by private corporations, paving the way for so many of those nightmares. VotersUnite.org’s Ellen Theisen warned in a critical, if largely ignored, August, 2008 report that “Vendors are Undermining the Structure of US Elections.”

As we approached the 2008 general election, the structure of elections in the United States—once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public—had become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public. Most local officials charged with running elections are now unable to administer elections without the equipment, services, and trade-secret software of a small number of corporations.
Our dependence on vendor support has left our election structure vulnerable to corporate decisions that are not in the public interest, corporate profiteering, and claims of trade secrecy for information that is essential to public oversight of elections.

Theisen adds ominously, “If the vendors withdrew their support for elections now, our election structure would collapse.”

In Humboldt County, California , after the discovery that Diebold/Premier’s system deleted ballots without notice in March of 2009, the company quietly sent two letters to the county, unilaterally “terminating” them.

“Premier has chosen to terminate the County’s right to use Premier’s GEMS software upon certification of your upcoming May 2009 election,” one letter stated. Humboldt would no longer be allowed to use the voting system, which the county had already decided to abandon following discovery of the ballot deletions.

The second letter gave Humboldt ninety days to uninstall the company’s voter registration software, which the county had no problems with. The vindictive letter informed the company was “terminating its relationship with the County” in all regards, sending Humboldt scrambling for another voter registration system—likely from another private vendor—even as they were amidst ensuring accuracy and accessibility for all voters in their May 2009 state special election.

In 2010, a national census year, elections across the nation will help determine the political balance of power for the next decade as Congressional districts are re-drawn and re-apportioned to match new census numbers. Those in power after the crucial 2010 elections will draw the boundaries set to affect elections and power in this nation for at least the next ten years. Those elections will be almost wholly run by four private for-profit companies, accountable to virtually no one.

Unless the media do their job by stepping up to report these matters, helping to force election officials, elected officials and law enforcement to do their jobs, the citizens—the rightful owners of those elections—will be able to do little about it.

Is anybody paying attention to the man behind the curtain yet?

Friedman, Brad, Video: Oprah Sees Own Presidential Vote Dropped By Touch-Screen Voting Machine, October 21, 2008, http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6603.
[ii] See http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/map.php?state=Illinois&county=Cook&ec=allall&year=2008.

[iii] See http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/03/iowa.caucuses/index.html.

[iv] Real Clear Politics, January 8, 2008,http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/nh/new_hampshire_democratic_primary-194.html.

[v] Wikipedia, Bradley Effect, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect.

[vi] See http://hackingdemocracy.com/.

[vii] Susan Pynchon, “Around the States: The Harri Hursti Hack and its Importance to our Nation,” Florida Fair Elections Coalition, January 21, 2006, http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=820&Itemid=113.

[viii] Latest Investigations from Black Box Voting, December 13, 2005, http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/15595.html.

[ix] Brad Friedman and Chris Matthews, “Raw EXIT POLL Data ‘Indicated Significant Victory’ for Obama in NH,” January 10, 2008,http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5535.

[x] Dorgan, Lauren, “One Ballot at a Time,” January 18, 2008, Concord Monitor,http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080118/FRONTPAGE/801180340.

[xi] “The recount: Kucinich goes for answers,” NewHampshire.com, January 21, 2008,http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=The+recount%3A+Kucinich+goes+for+answers&articleId=8813e51e-89a1-4cc1-a917-f39324575beb.

[xii] “Our view: Recount won’t change New Hampshire result, The Eagle-Tribune online, January 21, 2008,http://www.eagletribune.com/puopinion/local_story_021103319?keyword=topstory+page=1.

[xiii] Kevin Landrigan, “Paul Backers Paid for GOP Recount,” Nashua Telegraph, January 24, 2008,http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080124/NEWS08/143908662/-1/news08.

[xiv] Dana Houle, “Enough With the ‘Diebold Hacked the NH Primary’ Lunacy,” Daily Kos, January, 9, 2008,http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/10/02623/2264/85/434176.

[xv] Josh Marshall, “Enough,” Talking Points Memo, January 10, 2008,http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/063292.php.

[xvi] “South Carolina primary plagued by bad voting machines, snow,” CNNPolitics.com, January 19, 2008,http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/19/south.carolina.gop/index.html?iref=newssearch.

[xvii] “Rush Limbaugh has Trouble Voting,” PlanBeachPost.com, January 29, 2008,http://www.postonpolitics.com/2008/01/rush-limbaugh-has-trouble-voting/.

[xviii] “Corzine can’t vote because of poll problems,” Associated Press, February 05, 2008,http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/corzine_cant_vote_because_of_p.html.

[xix] “McCain, Hillary Win in NJ, Polling Problems Earlier in the Day,” ABC, Feburary 6, 2008,http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/politics&id=5936011.

[xx] “Trying to Vote for Obama, Machine Resets to Clinton in NJ,” Daily Kos, February 5, 2008,http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/5/123158/7065/255/450294.

[xxi] Paul Nyden, “Some early W.Va. Voters Angry over Switched Votes,” WVGazette.com, October 18, 2008,http://wvgazette.com/News/200810170676.

[xxii] Renee Dudley, “Machine Ballots Omit Candidates’ Names,” Island Packet October 22, 2008, ,http://www.islandpacket.com/news/local/story/645376.html.

[xxiii] See http://www.mineralwellsindex.com/local/local_story_298161535.html.

[xxiv] Paul Nyden, “Voting Machine Complaints Continue,” WVGazette.com, October 27, 2008,http://wvgazette.com/News/200810270020?page=1&build=cache.

[xxv] Kim Zetter, “W. Virginia Gives E-Voting VP an Award While Machines Malfunction,” Wired.com,http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/w-virginia-give/.

[xxvi] Ernest Luning, “Adams County ‘Quarantines’ Machine that Switched Candidate’s Vote,” The Colorado Independent, October 29, 2009, http://coloradoindependent.com/13187/adams-county-quarantines-machine-that-switched-candidates-vote.

[xxvii] “PA Officials: No Trouble With Touchscreens,” Why Tuesday?, April 17, 2998,http://www.whytuesday.org/2008/04/17/pa-officials-no-trouble-with-touchscreens/.

[xxviii] Kim Zetter, “Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure; State Vows Inquiry,” Wired.com, March 17, 2009,http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/diebold-admits/.

The post ELECTION 2008: VANISHING VOTES, DISAPPEARING DEMOCRACY AND MEDIA MISDIRECTION appeared first on Project Censored.

From March 16-22, 2009, the World Water Council (WWC) presented the fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey.  Boasting participation by over 33,000 people from around the globe, the WWC heralded the Forum as “the world’s biggest ever water-related event.” Nonetheless, as detailed in Chapter 1, the World Water Forum, and its competing Peoples’ Water Forum, ranks prominently among 2008-2009’s most under-reported news stories.

The dearth of US coverage should surprise even the most jaundiced critics of America’s corporate media.  At least four episodes from the Forum not only fit conventional definitions of newsworthiness, but also contrasted sharply with the Forum’s declared theme, “Bridging Divides for Water.” Thus, most Americans probably do not know that:

- Turkish police forces shot water cannons to disperse protesters outside the forum.  Water cannons, they subsequently explained, were more cost-effective than tear gas.

Turkish police disperse demonstrators with water cannons outside the World Water Forum, Istanbul, March 18, 2009.

- Though the Forum’s official program heralded “more diverse participation mechanisms,” in Istanbul the World Water Council refused to allow the President of the United Nation’s General Assembly a public audience.  President Miguel d’Escoto has been an outspoken critic of water privatization.

- At the Forum’s inaugural event, two activists representing International Rivers unfurled a banner reading “No Risky Dams” in peaceful protest.  Ann Kathrin Schneider and Payal Parekh were immediately detained, arrested and subsequently deported after being charged with “manipulating the public opinion.”

Activists at the opening ceremony of the Forum, subsequently arrested for “manipulating public opinion.”

Of course, since its inception in 1996, the World Water Forum has constituted an ongoing attempt to manipulate public opinion, specifically regarding the desirability, if not the inevitability, of privatized water as both a commodity, and, in the words of the World Water Council’s President, Loïc Fauchon, “a strategic resource.” Though President Fauchon has publicly advocated that the “human right to water should be formally, constitutionally recognized in every country across the globe,” his business interests— including his long-standing affiliation with Eaux de Marsielle, the subsidiary of two multinational French water corporations—undermine his claim’s credibility.

- Finally, many Americans would be surprised to learn that in Istanbul, the United States joined China and several other countries in opposing a declaration of the right to water.  Instead, the Forum concluded that access to water was a “basic need.”

As Maude Barlow, a senior advisor to the President of the UN General Assembly noted, the distinction between a right and a basic need is not simply semantic:  “[Y]ou cannot trade or sell a human right or deny it to someone on the basis of an inability to pay.”[ii]

This chapter aims to remedy the corporate media’s inadequate coverage of the World Water Forum by examining:

the significance of water control as a means of power;
the history, organization, and aims of the World Water Council;
the significance of Turkey as the host site of the fifth World Water Forum; and
what concerned citizens can do to support alternatives to the WWC and its utilitarian belief of water as nothing more than commodity and strategic resource.
These four themes’ significance stems in part from the fact that, on one hand, according to World Health Organization figures, 1.4 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack access to sanitation; and on the other hand, the battle over privatization of water hinges on different conceptions of accountability:- Advocates of water privatization—including the majority of invited participants in the World Water Forum—ultimately place their faith in markets, and they understand accountability as a matter of corporate entities’ responsibilities to theirshareholders.  In this view, water is a commodity.

- By contrast, advocates of water as a basic human right seek recognition of water as a public trust, so that accountability for its management, delivery, and use ultimately resides in local communities.  In this view, water is not a commodity, but a commons, belonging to and equally shared by all.  In Water Wars, Vandana Shiva writes, “Water is a commons because it is the ecological basis of all life and because its sustainability and equitable allocation depends on cooperation among community members.”[iii]

Under What Conditions Is Water Control A Source Of Power?

When World Water Council President Fauchon describes water as a “strategic resource,” he is, to some extent, correct.  As Donald Worster and other scholars of water control demonstrate, in arid environments control of water is a source of both economic wealth and political power.[iv] Thus, in Rivers of Empire Worster argues that,

Control over water has again and again provided an effective means of consolidating power in human groups—led, that is, to the assertion by some people of power over others.  Sometimes that outcome was unforeseen, a result no one really sought but dire necessity seemed to require.  In other places and times, the concentration of power within human society that comes from controlling water was a deliberate goal of ambitious individuals, one they pursued even in the face of protest and resistance.

To explain how water control contributes to the consolidation of power, Worster develops the concept of hydraulic society, which he defines as “a social order based on the intensive, large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting.”[v]

Worster then identifies three distinct modes of hydraulic society, defining each mode in terms of its (1) scale of water works, (2) managerialauthority, and (3) goals.  He characterizes the most developed form of hydraulic society, the “capitalist-state mode,” in terms of:

1.  large scale, technologically advanced water works;

2.  controlled by an “iron-triangle” of bureaucratic planners, elected officials and corporate agriculture;

3.  with the aim of “rational, calculating, unlimited accumulation of private wealth.”

This social order is flawed for two fundamental and intertwined reasons, Worster argues.  First, the consolidation of power that occurs in the capitalist-state mode of water control is counter-democratic.  Though the iron triangle of elites must contend with one another, overall their rule is resistant to traditional democratic checks and balances.  “Democracy cannot survive,” Worster writes, “where technical expertise, accumulated capital, or their combination is allowed to command.”[vi] Second, hydraulic societies risk “environmental vulnerabilities,” including the problems of water quantity, water quality, and the degradation of ecological communities.

For Worster, hydraulic society’s twin threats to democracy and the environment suggest what a sustainable alternative to the capitalist-state mode of water control must look like:

[T]he promotion of democracy, defined as the dispersal of power into as many hands as possible, is a direct and necessary, though perhaps not sufficient, means to achieve ecological stability. . . . [D]espite so much rhetoric to the contrary, one cannot have life both ways—cannot maximize wealth and empire and maximize freedom and democracy too.

Worster’s point about the ultimate incompatibility of wealth and empire, on one hand, and freedom and democracy, on the other, is essential to understanding the World Water Forum and the ambitions of those who created it.

What Is The World Water Council?

Who established the World Water Council?  According to the WWC’s website, the Council “was established in 1996 in response to increasing concern from the global community about world water issues.” The passive construction— “was established”—proves significant here.  A subsequent page elaborates only somewhat, revealing that the Council was established “on the initiative of renowned water specialists and international organizations.”

Suez and Veolia, two of the world’s largest private water corporations, are accurately described as “water specialists” and “international organizations.” It is not clear from the WWC’s website whether Suez and Veolia created the World Water Council, but a look beneath the surface of the Council’s webpage reveals the extent to which these two corporations constitute the prime movers of the WWC.[vii] The Council’s President, Löic Fauchon, is also President of Groupe des Eaux de Marseille, which Veolia and a Suez subsidiary jointly own.  Compagnie Générale des Eaux, a subsidiary of Veolia, has employed the WWC’s alternate president, Charles-Louis de Maud’huy, since 1978.

Moreover, the WWC’s Board of Governors is composed primarily of individuals and institutions that fit closely with Worster’s model of the bureaucratic planners who constitute one third of the ruling iron triangle.  The Council’s board members represent countries, corporations and organizations that actively promote, and/or stand to benefit financially from, water privatization.[viii]

Among the Board of Governors, even Green Cross International (GCI)—an environmental education organization, and the lone board member that appears to represent civil society—advocates private financing and management of water according to market principles.  GCI’s founding president and honorary board member, Mikhail Gorbachev, has publicly stated that corporations are “the only institutions” with the intellectual and financial potential to solve the world’s water problems.[ix]

The World Water Council has risen to prominence partly by filling a vacuum in governance.  In 1947, when the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it did not include water as a human right.  World leaders did not perceive a human rights dimension to water at the time.  As an unintended consequence, water policy today has shifted from “the UN and governments toward institutions and organizations that favor the private water companies and the commodification of water.”[x]

However, as Aldo Leopold observed in his famous land ethic essay, ethical criteria evolve over time.[xi] Leopold advocated an evolving land ethic that would counter a strictly utilitarian conception of land as property by enlarging “the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” In this view,

a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided.  It tends to ignore, and thus eventually eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning.

Building on Leopold’s ethical vision, Sandra Postel and others advocate the development of a water ethic:

Instead of asking how we can further control and manipulate rivers, lakes, and streams to meet our ever-growing demands, we would ask instead how we can best satisfy human needs while accommodating the ecological requirements of freshwater ecosystems.  It would lead us, as well, to deeper questions of human values, in particular how to narrow the wide gap between the haves and have-nots while remaining within the bounds of what a healthy ecosystem can sustain.[xii]

Despite Leopold and Postel’s eloquence, not to mention the concerted efforts of local communities and the global justice movement, the World Water Council and its supporters continue to promote a market-based, utilitarian approach to the world’s water crisis.  Perhaps no nation in the world today more clearly exemplifies the extremes of treating water as commodity than Turkey, the host nation of the fifth World Water Forum.

Why Meet In Turkey?

Under the leadership of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), the government of Turkey is currently undertaking what may be “the most sweeping water privatization program in the world.”[xiii] The government not only wants to privatize the nation’s drinking water supply and delivery systems, but also the water itself.  Such a transformation would be unprecedented in modern history, since the proposal entails the sale of not only the rights to use of the water, which has been commonplace since water was first treated as a commodity, but in fact the water itself.  The conventional legal distinction between rights to use of the water and ownership of the water itself would be overturned by Energy and Natural Resources Minister Hilmi Güler’s plan to sell at least a dozen rivers, including the Euphrates and Tigris, to private companies for up to forty-nine years.[xiv]

Officials estimated that privatizing the nation’s water would generate $3 billion in revenues for the government.  Notably, in addition to opposition from Turkish agriculturalists, two articles of the national constitution (articles 43 and 168) reserve control of natural resources and their operating rights to the state.  As of the March 2009, the Turkish government has not succeeded in modifying articles 43 and 168 of its constitution to implement sales of the nation’s rivers and lakes.  Nonetheless, one can imagine that the World Water Council looked favorably on Turkey as a host nation for its 2009 Forum, given the AKP’s audacious proposal to sell the nation’s water to private corporations.

In addition to the Turkish government’s evident support for the World Water Council’s privatization agenda, at least four of the ten Forum Sponsors listed in the Istanbul 2009 program are Turkish-based multinational corporations with vested interests in water privatization:

1.  Cengiz Holding, a conglomerate of twelve companies, established in 1987, is currently constructing four major dams with hydroelectric power plants, as well as two additional dams and three irrigation canals in Turkey;

2.  Nurol, a construction conglomerate founded in the 1966, includes dams and hydroelectric power plants, irrigation and drainage systems, and water supply and sewage systems among its infrastructure projects;

3.  BM Holding A.S., established in 1972, is now building at least six large-scale dams and/or hydropower plants in Turkey; and

4.  Enerjisa, an electricity provider established in 1996, aims to control ten percent of the Turkish market by 2015; Enerjisa is owned jointly by the Sabanci Group, one of Turkey’s leading industrial and financial conglomerates, and Verbund, an Austrian-based hydro-power producer.

A fifth sponsor of the 2009 World Water Forum, Grundfos, is a Danish multi-national that produces water pumps and pumping systems.  Each of these five sponsors clearly has business interests in alignment with the World Water Council’s agenda.

Finally, Turkey is strategically situated relative to Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Israel, four Middle Eastern states that loom large in contemporary global politics.  One recent example will serve to illustrate this point.  In April 2009, Iraq’s Water Resources Minister, Abdul-Latif Jamal Rasheed, accused Turkey and Iran of contributing to Iraq’s growing water shortages.  Minister Rasheed blamed dams and reservoirs on the Tigris and Euphrates, both of which originate in Turkey, and called for Iraq to receive a “sufficient and fair share of water” from the rivers.[xv]

Of course, the 2009 World Water Forum brought together not only a global elite ambitious to consolidate its members’ wealth and power by promoting water privatization as the only viable response to the world’s water crisis, but also activists intent on challenging this agenda.  Those who would concentrate wealth and power by privatizing water met with protest, resistance, and a positive alternative vision in Istanbul.

At the meeting’s conclusion, Maude Barlow spoke on behalf of the alternative People’s Water Forum, telling “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, “It’s no longer about the World Water Forum . . . [N]ow it’s about us and our vision.  The World Water Forum is bankrupt.  They’re bankrupt of ideas.  They’re bankrupt of money, frankly. And they have nothing to offer but what’s failed . . . It’s been a transfer of power.”

Advocates of water as a human right will aim to consolidate that transfer of power during the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Many expect water issues, including the ongoing public-private debate, to feature prominently in Copenhagen, when the world’s leaders gather to update the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

What Can You Do?

If you are reading a chapter about water in Censored 2010, chances are you already cast a wary eye on bottled water, take shorter showers, and avoid pouring your used motor oil down the storm drain.  So what else can you do to link arms with members of the global justice movement who gathered in Istanbul to resist the privatization of water and to promote the establishment of water as a basic human right?  Here are six activities to engage you in the global effort for water justice.

1.  Inform yourself about local and global water issues. In addition to the books cited in this chapter, each of which is worth reading, independent film makers have now produced a number of excellent documentaries on water issues, including:

- Flow (directed by Irena Salina, 2008), http://www.flowthefilm.com/.

- Thirst (Alan Snitow & Deborah Kaufman, 2004), http://www.pbs.org/pov/thirst/ and

http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/thirst.html.

- Dead in the Water (Neil Docherty, 2004), http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/deadinthewater/index.html.

- The Dammed (Franny Armstrong, 2003; originally titled Drowned Out),

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/dammed/index.html and

http://www.spannerfilms.net/?lid=16.

- Cadillac Desert (Jon Else, 1997),http://web.archive.org/web/20030212083841/www.kteh.org/cadillacdesert/home.html.

2.  Become Watershed Literate.  A watershed encompasses all the land surface that collects and drains water to a single exit point.[xvi] After exploring the length of the Colorado River, in 1890 John Wesley Powell encouraged the US Congress to organize the settlement of the American West on the basis of watersheds, a recommendation Congress ignored.[xvii] More than 100 years later, advocates of ecologically sustainable communities are adapting and extending Powell’s vision.  The Occidental Arts and Ecology Water Institute is one of the leaders in promoting watershed literacy. See http://oaecwater.org.

3.  Harvest Rainwater. Turn water scarcity into abundance by learning how to design and implement simple water harvesting systems for the home and yard. As an example of rainwater harvesting’s potential, Brad Lancaster calculates that the average annual rainfall for the desert city of Tucson (population approaching one million) exceeds the city’s current municipal water use, suggesting that, at least, all residential outdoor water needs could be met by rainwater harvesting, reducing the city’s pumping of groundwater and reliance on imported Colorado River water.[xviii]

See http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/. And for an immediate, and conscious-changing start, place a bucket in your shower to catch the water flow while you wait for the warm water.  Carry the bucket to the yard to water flowers or vegetables.

4.  Advocate for a Clean Water Trust.  In the US, urge your congressional representatives to create a Clean Water Trust Fund.  Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer organization, challenges corporate control and abuse of food and water. Seehttp://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/trust-fund.

5.  Call for water as a basic human right. Join the grassroots movement for water democracy by urging the United Nations to establish a covenant on the right to water.

See http://www.blueplanetproject.net/ andhttp://www.article31.org/.

6.  Demand better coverage of water issues from corporate media, and support independent media that do provide informative, useful reports. Submit letters to the editor and opinion pieces on water issues, local and global.  Give kudos when journalists and news organizations provide good coverage.  Keep them honest when they fail to do so.

Andrew L. Roth has taught Sociology courses focused on water issues at UCLA, Pomona College, and Sonoma State University.  He was Associate Director of Project Censored from 2006-2008.  He now lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he harvests rainwater and continues to advocate for water justice.

Notes
For Ann Kathrin Schneider’s account seehttp://www.alternet.org/bloggers/schneider/132725/why_i_was_deported_from_turkey/.

[ii] Maude Barlow, “Making Water a Human Right,” in Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan (San Francisco: Alternet Books, 2008), p. 181.

[iii] Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), p. 24.

[iv] Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).  See also Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, revised edition, (New York: Penguin, 1993).

[v] Worster extends Karl Wittfogel’s original conception “hydraulic society” as a distinct type of social order.  Wittfogel (1896-1988) drew on Karl Marx, Max Weber and the emerging Frankfurt School to understand the relationships among nature, technology, and society. Wittfogel raised the profound question that Worster’s study pursues: “How, in the remaking of nature, do we remake ourselves?” (p. 30).

[vi] Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman reiterate Worster’s point:  “The concept of democracy itself is being challenged by multinational corporations that see Americans not as citizens, but merely as customers.  They don’t see government as something of, by, and for the people, but as a market to be entered for profit.” Snitow and Kaufman, “The New Corporate Threat to Our Water,” in Water Consciousness, op cit, p. 45.

[vii] Jeff Conant’s award-winning Alternet reports emphasized the corporate foundations of the World Water Council’s leadership.

[viii] Unfortunately, the WWC website lists the Board of Governors membership for April 2006.  Though dated, the available roll call nonetheless provides a clear picture of the Council’s driving interests.

[ix] Barlow, “Making Water a Human Right,” Water Consciousness, op cit, p. 181.

[x] Ibid, p. 179.

[xi] Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” pp. 201-226 in Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

[xii] Sandra L. Postel, “Why We Need a Water Ethic,” in Water Consciousness, op cit, t p. 188.  See also Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

[xiii] See, for example, Olivier Hoedeman and Orsan Senalp’s “Turkey Plans to Sell Rivers and Lakes to Corporations,” Alternet, April 23, 2008, http:/www.alternet.org/story/83304/.  This story should probably have been awarded a Project Censored prize in 2007-2008.

[xiv] See http://www.globalwaterintel.com/archive/8/9/general/the-puzzle-of-turkish-river-privatisation.html.

[xv] “Blackwater bowing out; Va. Firm will protect US diplomats in Iraq,” Arizona Daily Star, April 2, 2009: A2.  Notably the information on the Iraqi minister’s complaint against Turkey and Iran was effectively buried at the end of the headline story about the private security firm, Blackwater.

[xvi] Brock Dolman, “Watershed Literacy: Restoring Community and Nature,” in Water Consciousness, op cit, p. 101.

[xvii] See Worster, Rivers of Empire, op cit, pp. 138-143.

[xviii] Brad Lancaster, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond (Tucson: Rainsource Press, 2008), pp. 18-19.

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