News & Articles

“Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idea that “knowledge is power” is not exactly a new one but it remains as true today as it did centuries ago when the general idea popped up as far back as biblical times. Mankind’s existence on this planet has often faced adversity, but in this day and age we face threats that are becoming increasingly complex and it’s those who are at the wheel who are mostly responsible for the world’s plight. The thought that our world is being run by money and corporate interests is a little overwhelming but the first step in creating a world of equality, health and peace is knowing about what is happening. While corporate interests control food, money and knowledge, the governments that we pay for not only look the other way but go as far as to aid them. It is up to us to at least recognize what is happening around us. The following is a number of issues published by Project Censored, a media research program that was founded in 1976. It brings in the critiques and views of scholars and writers about under reported and censored issues. We picked out a number of their top censored stories and added some commentary on them as the world moves so fast that there has already been developments on them. We also added a few of our own.
[When it comes to governments helping corporate interests and looking the other way, there are few examples that are as good as Monsanto. The link is undeniable as there are numerous members of Congress, Senators and officials with the FDA, USDA and EPA that have worked with or still have dealings with Monsanto. This brings us to the first issue.]

Widespread GMO Contamination: Did Monsanto Plant GMOs Before USDA Approval?
By Cassandra Anderson and Anthony Gucciardi

Monsanto introduced genetically modified alfalfa in 2003—a full two years before it was  deregulated, according to recently released evidence. Global Research reported that a letter from Cal/West Seeds indicated that “evidence of contamination was withheld and the USDA turned a blind eye to proof of contamination,” thus allowing widespread GMO contamination of GMO-free crops. The Cal/West Seeds letter to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) stated they found the Roundup Ready gene in foundation production lots seeds in 2005: according to the letter, the GMO-contaminated foundation seed originated in 2003 from a field in Solano County, California. The letter stated, “Cal/West Seeds had zero access to Roundup Ready seed at that time; therefore we assume the contamination originated from an external source.”
Alfalfa is a perennial plant that grows for more than two years and may not need to be replanted each year like annuals. As a perennial, it is exceptionally vulnerable to contamination. This genetically modified alfalfa could quickly spread to crops across the US, threatening the integrity of organic products—including organic meat and dairy products, if those animals are fed alfalfa believed to be GMO-free, but are in fact carrying Monsanto’s patented genetically modified trait.
In 2010, the USDA released a Final Environmental Impact Statement that acknowledged awareness of the GMO alfalfa spreading its traits to non-GMO alfalfa as far back as 2003. Not only was the USDA aware of the scandal, but the agency also deregulated genetically modified alfalfa with full awareness of the environmental dangers and contamination concerns.
[The following segment deals with fracking and how the government, namely the GOP, has pushed to cover up the harmful chemicals that go along with it from public knowledge. Just last week three Republican senators in North Carolina made efforts to introduce a bill that would make it a felony to disclose information about the chemicals.]

Pennsylvania Law Gags Doctors to Protect Big Oil’s “Proprietary Secrets”
By Kate Sheppard

In communities affected by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” people understand that this process of drilling for natural gases puts the environment and their health at risk. In February 2013, legislators in Pennsylvania—a state on the forefront of a national debate over fracking—passed a law that requires oil companies to disclose the identity and amount of chemicals used in fracking fluids to health professionals who request the information so that they can diagnosis or treat patients who may have been exposed to hazardous chemicals. However, as Kate Sheppard reported for Mother Jones, a provision in the new bill requires those health professionals to sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they will not disclose that information to anyone else—not even their own patients. The companies deem the chemical ingredients used in the process as “proprietary secrets.”
The crucial provision gagging doctors was added after the bill was introduced, so many lawmakers did not recognize the broad, problematic alterations to the proposed law. Pennsylvania State Senator Daylin Leach told Mother Jones, “The importance of keeping it as proprietary secret seems minimal when compared to letting the public know what chemicals they and their children are being exposed to.”

An addendum to the Mother Jones report noted that Patrick Henderson, the energy executive for Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, said that others’ interpretation of the law is inaccurate. Doctors will still be allowed to share information with their patients. However, Kate Sheppard reported, “the actual terms of the confidentiality agreements have not yet been drafted, and there seems to be pretty wide confusion in the state about what exactly the bill as signed into law would mean.”
Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has pressed oil companies to voluntarily provide information about fracking fluids, but the industry has largely rebuffed those appeals.
[While a lot of this information is indeed pretty bleak, there are cases where the people have rose above those who seemingly hold on to power, and by power we mean money. Iceland took the exact opposite approach of the United States and rather than allow their country to be leeched off of by money hungry bankers, they put them in jail like the way most people who steal are treated.]

The Power of Peaceful Revolution in Iceland
By Alex Pietrowski

Iceland is experiencing one of the greatest economic comebacks of all time, reported Alex Pietrowski.
After privatization of the nation’s banking sector, completed in 2000, private bankers borrowed $120 billion (ten times the size of Iceland’s economy), creating a huge economic bubble that doubled housing prices and made a small percentage of the country’s population exceedingly wealthy. When the bubble burst, the bankers left the nation on the verge of bankruptcy and its citizens with an unpayable debt.
In October 2008, Iceland’s people took to the streets in response to the economic crisis caused by the banksters. Over a span of five months, the main bank of Iceland was nationalized, government officials were forced to resign, the old government was liquidated, and a new government was established. By March 2010, Iceland’s people voted to deny payment of the 3,500 million debt created by the bankers, and about 200 high-level executives and bankers responsible for the economic crisis in the country were either arrested or faced criminal charges.
In February 2011, a new constitutional assembly settled in to rewrite the tiny nation’s constitution, which aimed to avoid entrapment by debt-based currency foreign loans. In 2012, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development expected Iceland’s economy to outgrow the euro and the average for the developed world.
The world is a more dangerous place for journalists. Journalists are increasingly at risk of being killed or imprisoned for doing their jobs, a situation that imperils press freedom. From 2011 to 2012, the number of journalists behind bars because of their work increased from 53 to 232, and the 70 journalists killed in the line of duty during 2012 represents a 43 percent increase, compared with 2011, according to a study by the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ). Over the past two decades, a journalist is killed once every eight days.
[While those controlling the way we live leave countless hungry while those at the top make more money than they could ever hope to spend, sometimes people hit a breaking point. Those in less developed countries especially feel the effects of the inequality that exists on a global scale. In the United States it is interesting to see that law enforcement has become increasingly militarized and one can’t help but wonder if they are getting ready for something.]

Food Riots: The New Normal?
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Reduced land productivity, combined with elevated oil costs and population growth, threaten a systemic, global food crisis. Citing findings from a study by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published by the Royal Society, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed identified the links among intensifying economic inequality, debt, climate change, and fossil fuel dependency to conclude that a global food crisis is now “undeniable.”
“Global food prices have been consistently higher than in preceding decades,” reported Ahmed, leading to dramatic price increases in staple foods and triggering food riots across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. The crux of this global phenomenon is climate change: severe natural disasters including drought, flood, heat waves, and monsoons have affected major regional food baskets. By mid-century, Ahmed reported, “world crop yields could fall as much as 20–40 percent because of climate change alone.”
Industrial agricultural methods that disrupt soil have also contributed to impending food shortages. As a result, Ahmed reported, global land productivity has “dropped significantly,” from 2.1 percent during 1950–90 to 1.2 percent during 1990–2007.
By contrast with Ahmed’s report, corporate media coverage of food insecurity has tended to treat it as a local and episodic problem. For example, an April 2008 story in the Los Angeles Times covered food riots in Haiti, which resulted in three deaths. Similarly, a March 2013 New York Times piece addressed how the loss of farmland and farm labor to urbanization contributed to rising food costs in China. Corporate media have not connected the dots to analyze how intensifying inequality, debt, climate change, and consumption of fossil fuels have contributed to the potential for a global food crisis in the near future.
[There are few images as disturbing as a uranium baby. While the United States went to war with Iraq under the Bush regime, Operation Iraqi Freedom screwed their country up pretty bad in many ways. Perhaps the saddest is the long term effects that warfare in the area has had on the people who live there.]

Journalism Under Attack Around the Globe
By Roy Greenslade

The CPJ also published a Risk List, identifying the ten countries worldwide where press freedom suffered the most in 2012. Notably, half of the nations on the Risk List—Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Ecuador—“practice some form of democracy and exert significant influence on a regional or international stage.”
“When journalists are silenced, whether through violence or laws, we all stand to lose because perpetrators are able to obscure misdeeds, silence dissent, and disempower citizens,” said CPJ deputy director Robert Mahoney.
The CPJ has been a leader in advocating for full implementation of a five-year-old UN resolution calling for protection of journalists in conflict zones, in order to guarantee a free and safe press. Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the freedom to “impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,” making freedom of press a transnational right.
The New York Times ran a story on the CPJ report on February 15, 2013, noting the alarming rise in the number of journalists killed and imprisoned during 2012. However, the Times’ report did not address the possible UN resolution or freedom of press as a transnational right.
Dave Lindorff, of ThisCantBeHappening!, writes that “the incidence of journalists killed by US forces in recent US conflicts has been much, much greater than it ever was in earlier wars, such as the one in Vietnam, or in Korea or World War II,” begging the question of whether some of the deaths have been “deliberate, perhaps with the intent of keeping journalists in line.”
[If we have failed to convince you that corporate interests are well above any sense of democracy or human rights, this next segment shines a little more light on the subject.]

The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects
By Sarah Morrison

High levels of lead, mercury, and depleted uranium are believed to be causing birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer for people living in the Iraqi cities of Basra and Fallujah. Researchers have claimed that the United States bombings of Basra and Fallujah are to blame for this rapidly increasing health crisis.
A recent study showed more than 50 percent of babies born in Fallujah have a birth defect, while one in six pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. While there is no conclusive evidence to show that US military attacks directly caused these health problems among Iraqi citizens, the immense increase of birth defects and miscarriages after the attacks has been enough to concern a number of researchers.
Military officials continue to dodge questions about the attacks, and about use of depleted uranium in particular, while maintaining silence about the health crisis. Instead, the US government has dismissed the reports as controversial and baseless.
[In this day and age everyone has the potential to be a journalist but being a journalist can land someone in jail or even dead. It’s not uncommon to see police confiscate gear and beat journalists for observing a protest and embedded journalists abroad face almost as much danger from the “good guys” as they do from the militant natives.]

Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance
By Kevin Zeese

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), branded as a trade agreement and negotiated in unprecedented secrecy, is actually an enforceable transfer of sovereignty from nations and their people to foreign corporations.
As of December 2012, eleven countries were involved—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States—with the possibility of more joining in the future due to inclusion of an unusual “docking agreement.”
While the public, US Congress, and the press are locked out, 600 corporate advisors are meeting with officials of signatory governments behind closed doors to complete text for the world’s biggest multinational trade agreement, which aims to penalize countries that protect their workers, consumers, or environment.
Leaked text from the thirty-chapter agreement has revealed that negotiators have already agreed to many radical terms, granting expansive new rights and privileges for foreign investors and their enforcement through extrajudicial “investor-state” tribunals. Through these, corporations would be given special authority to dispute laws, regulations, and court decisions. Foreign firms could extract unlimited amounts of taxpayer money as compensation for “financial damages” to “expected future profits” caused by efforts to protect domestic finance, health, labor, environment, land use, and other laws they claim undermine their new TPP privileges.

There is almost no progressive movement or campaign whose goals are not threatened, as vast swaths of public-interest policy achieved through decades of struggle are targeted. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, reported that once this top-secret TPP is agreed to, its rules will be set in stone. No rule can be changed without all countries’ consent to amend the agreement. People of the world will be locked into corporate domination.

[While there is an increase of obesity in America, there are a growing number who are struggling just to find a way to feed themselves. The following segment is somewhat outdated because President Obama signed a bill cutting $8.7 billion in food stamps earlier this year. So much for “big government” when it comes to a meal for those in need.]

A Fifth of Americans Go Hungry
By Mike Ludwig

An August 2012 Gallup poll showed that 18.2 percent of Americans lacked sufficient money for needed food at least once over the previous year. To make matters worse, the worst drought in half a century impacted 80 percent of agricultural lands in the country, increasing food prices. Despite this, in 2012, Congress considered cutting support for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)— the official name of its food stamp program—as part of the 2013 Farm Bill.
Proposed Senate cuts would cost approximately 500,000 households about ninety dollars a month in nutritional assistance. Proposed cuts in the House of Representatives would go much further than the ones in the Senate, and would have removed at least 1.8 million people from SNAP. Republicans controlling the House have been eager to cut spending and were the primary supporters of food stamp cuts.
Opponents have expressed concern over the harm the cuts would cause to society’s more vulnerable members, including seniors, children, and working families. Rising food prices would hit Southern states the hardest, while Mountain-Plains and Midwest states would be least affected. Despite all the food hardship, the National Resources Defense Council reported that 40 percent of food in the country goes to waste.
[Everything is getting more expensive and although a rise in the minimum wage is on the way, it couldn’t come fast enough and it will barely scratch the surface on the issue of inequality. The reason that the poor will keep getting poorer is that nearly every facet in the way the system works is rigged to make the rich richer.]

Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent
By Ellen Brown

A stunning 35 to 40 percent of everything we buy goes to interest. As Ellen Brown reported, “That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street.” In her report, Brown cited the work of Margrit Kennedy, PhD, whose research in Germany documents interest charges ranging from 12 percent for garbage collection, to 38 percent for drinking water, and 77 percent for rent in public housing.  Kennedy found that the bottom 80 percent pay the hidden interest charges that the top 10 percent collect, making interest a strongly regressive tax that the poor pay to the rich.
Drawing on Kennedy’s data, Brown estimated that if we had a financial system that returned the interest collected from the public directly to the public, 35 percent could be lopped off the price of everything we buy.  To this end, she has advocated direct reimbursement. According to Brown, “We could do it by turning the banks into public utilities and their profits into public assets. Profits would return to the public, either reducing taxes or increasing the availability of public services and infrastructure.”
[With all that money going to the extremely wealthy it at least gets taxed and “trickles back” down, right? If only that were the case. Not only have they claimed nearly the entire pie, even the crumbs must be kept out of the mouths of anyone else. If you’ve ever wondered “if the whole world is in debt, then where did the money go?” this may be the answer to that question. Visit http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock to see how much debt the world is in currently. As we type this, it is nearing $53.4 trillion.]

Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Trillions in Tax Havens
By Carl Herman

The global 1 percent hold twenty-one to thirty-two trillion dollars in offshore havens in order to evade taxes, according to James S. Henry, the former chief economist at the global management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. Based on data from the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and 139 countries, Henry found that the top 1 percent hid more than the total annual economic output of the US and Japan combined. For perspective, this hidden wealth is at least seven times the amount—$3 trillion—that many estimates suggest would be necessary to end global poverty.
If this hidden wealth earned a modest rate of 3 percent interest and that interest income were taxed at just 30 percent, these investments would have generated income tax revenues between $190 and $280 billion, according to the analysis.
Domestically, the Federal Reserve reported that the top seven US banks hold more than $10 trillion in assets, recorded in over 14,000 created “subsidiaries” to avoid taxes.
Henry identified this hidden wealth as “a huge black hole in the world economy that has never before been measured,” and noted that the finding is particularly significant at a time when “governments around the world are starved for resources, and we are more conscious than ever of the costs of economic inequality.”
[So far we’ve shared some depressing and scary issues that the world faces today. The thing that is most scary is that while the media is on the front lines of the information that you get, the problem is that much of the media is tied into the corporate structure. Again, the following is somewhat dated because the whistleblower Edward Snowden did manage to not only get the attention of the media, but the world. The Washington Post must of learned their lesson of ignoring stories involving the government hiding information from its people because they won a Pulitzer prize for taking a part in revealing what Snowden had to share. Media attention about government spying increased drastically after Snowden gave up everything to tell us about the dealings of the NSA.]

Bradley Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media
By Kevin Gosztola

In February 2013, United States military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning confessed in court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, saying he wanted the information to become public “to make the world a better place” and that he hoped to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military in (US) foreign policy.” The 700,000 released documents revealed a multitude of previously secret crimes and acts of deceit and corruption by US military and government officials.
According to Manning’s testimony in February 2013, he tried to release the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs through conventional sources. In winter 2010, he contacted the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Politico in hopes that they would publish the materials. Only after being rebuffed by these three outlets did Manning begin uploading documents to WikiLeaks. Al Jazeera reported that Manning’s testimony “raises the question of whether the mainstream press was prepared to host the debate on US interventions and foreign policy that Manning had in mind.”
Indeed, US corporate media have largely shunned Manning’s case, not to mention the importance of the information he released. When corporate media have focused on Manning, this coverage has often emphasized his sexual orientation and past life, rather than his First Amendment rights or the abusive nature of his imprisonment, which includes almost three years without trial and nearly one year in “administrative segregation,” the military equivalent of solitary.
In his February 2013 court appearance, Manning pled guilty to twelve of the twenty-two charges against him, including the capital offense of “aiding and abetting the enemy.” He faces the possibility of a life sentence without parole. His severe treatment is a warning to other possible whistleblowers.

The Reader’s Picks

Gogebic Taconite President Bill Williams Faces Environmental Charges in Spain

While the Gogebic Taconite project in Northern Wisconsin has caught media attention for the company using an unlicensed out of state military style security company there seemed to be little to no coverage of Gogebic Taconite’s President Bill Williams track record in other countries.
Williams faces charges for violating Spanish environmental law stemming from mismanagement of an open pit mine in southern Spain that polluted groundwater. Williams had a part in the mine from 2006 to 2011 but has not been charged until earlier in 2014.
Williams’ charges are reminiscent of Tony Hayward the Environmental Advisor for BP in charge during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He was fired but gained a similar job with Glencore, a major backer of Polymet, which is a company working to put mines throughout Northern Minnesota.

Police Brutality and Disregard for People’s Rights

Do you remember Rodney King? While there was certainly police brutality before King was beaten without mercy with batons by a handful of officers the incident grabbed National attention and played a role in massive riots after the officers were let off the hook. One thing that is the same today is that officers are still being let off the hook or receive laughably light sentences for some fairly serious offenses including vicious violence, sexual assault and murder. This has become so common in our society that it seems that we’ve become desensitized to what a big problem this is.
What makes this topic even more unnerving is that even when law enforcement steps out of line it is the victims of the police who end up with charges in court. Take for example 25-year-old Cecily McMillan. While she asserts that an officer grabbed her breast so hard that it left a bruise, she reacted instinctively when she resisted and elbowed an officer during an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2012 leading to charges. On Monday, May 19, 2014, she was sentenced to three months behind bars with two weeks credit for time served. She will also be placed on five years of probation when she gets out.
A similar local incident is the altercation between Superior Police Officer, George Gothner, and Natasha Lancour. The incident happened on January 5 and it took nearly a week before the media got ahold of it. Outside of Keyport Lounge Gothner grabbed Lancour and threw her against his squad car. Lancour reaches out in a defensive manner against Gothner and pushes his face away. The action was met with a barrage of closed fist punches to her face and head which she required hospitalization for. While Gothner was placed under investigation, Lancour faced assault charges which were eventually dropped to disorderly conduct. The question remains if the charges would have been lessened if local media had not got ahold of the story.   
 
Protests Everywhere and No One Cares

While Miley Cyrus shakes her ass, Justin Bieber acts like a little douche bag and people obsess over the NFL draft, media blackouts overlook protests both in the United States and worldwide. While paying attention to unrest in a land far away might be less fun than watching a celebrity’s career come crashing down around them, it’s important to know that not only are these things happening in the world, they are purposefully being covered up.
In Venezuela protests have been going on for four months. The protests are largely being organized by students against crime and inflation which they blame on capitalism. The protests have been met with widespread arrests and human rights abuses which seem to just intensify matters even more and it has been called one of the largest anti-government protests the country has ever faced.
Venezuelan government has all but shut down media coverage of the protests and has gone as far as disabling people’s ability to access social media. Journalists can be jailed under a variety of laws that prohibits coverage that goes against the government. Since the protests are against the government, covering them is also against it.
What is interesting is when there are underreported protests about media distortion such as in Italy. Recently hundreds of Italians protested in Rome concerning misinformation about the crisis in the Ukraine. Actual coverage of protests and conflict in the Ukraine is largely from social media.