No news is bad news

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored for 13 years, says he’s finished with reform. It’s impossible, he said recently, to try to get major news-media outlets to deliver relevant news stories that serve to strengthen democracy.

“I really think we’re beyond reforming corporate media,” said Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored. “We’re not going to break up these huge conglomerates. We’re just going to make them irrelevant.”

Every year since 1976, Project Censored has spotlighted the most significant news stories that were largely ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream press. Now the group is expanding its mission—to promote alternative news sources. But it continues to report the biggest national and international stories that the major media ignored. Here’s this year’s list. An unabridged version of this story can be found at www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009.

1. Congress sells out to Wall Street

The total tab for the Wall Street bailout, including money spent and promised by the U.S. government, works out to an estimated $42,000 for every man, woman and child, according to American Casino, a documentary about subprime lending and the financial meltdown. The predatory lending free-for-all, the emergency pumping of taxpayer dollars to prop up megabanks and the lavish bonuses handed out to Wall Street executives in the aftermath are all issues that have dominated news headlines.

But another twist in the story received scant attention from the mainstream news media: the unsettling combination of lax oversight from national politicians with high-dollar campaign contributions from financial players.

In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, the financial sector spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates, and the Republican and Democratic parties.

Wall Street’s spending spree on political contributions coincided with a weakening of federal banking regulations, which in turn created a recipe for the astronomical financial disaster that sent the global economy reeling.

2. De facto segregation deepening in public education

Latinos and African-Americans attend more segregated public schools today than they have in four decades, professor Gary Orfield notes in “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge,” a study conducted by UC Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Project. Orfield’s report used federal data to highlight deepening segregation in public education by race and poverty.

About 44 percent of students in the nation’s public-school system are people of color, and this group will soon make up the majority of the population in the United States. Yet this racial diversity often isn’t reflected from school to school. Instead, two out of every five African-American and Latino youths attend schools Orfield characterizes as “intensely segregated,” composed of 90 percent to 100 percent people of color.

For Latinos, the trend reflects growing residential segregation. For African-Americans, the study attributes a significant part of the reversal to ending desegregation plans in public schools nationwide. Schools segregated by race and poverty tend to have much higher dropout rates, more teacher turnover, and greater exposure to crime and gangs, placing students at a major disadvantage in society. The most severe segregation is in Western states.

3. Somali pirates: the untold story

Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa were like gold for mainstream news outlets this past year. Stories describing surprise attacks on shipping vessels, daring rescues and cadres of ragtag bandits extracting multimillion-dollar ransoms were all over the airwaves and front pages.

But even as the pirates’ exploits around the Gulf of Aden captured the world’s attention, little ink was devoted to factors that made the Somalis desperate enough to resort to piracy in the first place: the dumping of nuclear waste and rampant overfishing in their coastal waters.

In the early 1990s, when Somalia’s government collapsed, foreign interests began swooping into unguarded coastal waters to trawl for food—and venturing into unprotected Somali territories to cheaply dispose of nuclear waste. Those activities continued with impunity for years. The ramifications of toxic dumping hit full force with the 2005 tsunami, when leaking barrels were washed ashore, sickening hundreds and causing birth defects in newborn infants. Meanwhile, the uncontrolled fishing harvests damaged the economic livelihoods of Somali fishermen and eroded the country’s supply of a primary food source. That’s when the piracy began.

4. North Carolina’s nuclear nightmare

The Shearon Harris nuclear plant in North Carolina’s Wake County isn’t just a power-generating station. The Progress Energy plant, located in a backwoods area, bears the distinction of housing the largest radioactive-waste storage pools in the country. Spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants are transported there by rail, then stored beneath circulating cold water to prevent the radioactive waste from heating.

The hidden danger, according to investigative reporter Jeffery St. Clair, is the looming threat of a pool fire. Citing a study by Brookhaven National Laboratory, St. Clair highlighted in Counterpunch the catastrophe that could ensue if a pool were to ignite. A possible 140,000 people could wind up with cancer. Contamination could stretch for thousands of square miles. And damages could reach an estimated $500 billion.

Shearon Harris’ track record is pocked with problems requiring temporary shutdowns of the plant and malfunctions of the facility’s emergency-warning system. When a study was sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission highlighting the safety risks and recommending technological fixes to address the problem, St. Clair noted, a pro-nuclear commissioner successfully persuaded the agency to dismiss the concerns.

5. United States fails to protect consumers against toxics

Two years ago, the European Union enacted a bold new environmental policy requiring close scrutiny and restriction of toxic chemicals used in everyday products. Invisible perils such as lead in lipstick, endocrine disruptors in baby toys and mercury in electronics can threaten human health. The European legislation aimed to gradually phase out these toxic materials and replace them with safer alternatives.

The story that has gone unreported by mainstream American news media is how this game-changing legislation might affect the United States, where chemical corporations use lobbying muscle to ensure comparatively lax oversight of toxic substances. As global markets shift to favor safer consumer products, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is lagging in its own scrutiny of insidious chemicals.

As investigative journalist Mark Schapiro pointed out in Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, the EPA’s tendency to behave as if it were beholden to big business could backfire in this case, placing U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage because products manufactured here will be regarded with increasing distrust.

Economics aside, the implications of loose restrictions on toxic products are chilling: Just one-third of the 267 chemicals on the EU’s watch list have ever been tested by the EPA, and only two are regulated under federal law.

6. As economy shrinks, D.C. lobbying grows

In 2008, as the economy tumbled and unemployment soared, Washington lobbyists working for special interests were paid $3.2 billion—more than any other year on record. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests spent a collective $32,523 per legislator, per day, for every day Congress was in session.

One event that triggered the lobbying boom, according to CRP director Sheila Krumholz, was the federal bailout—with the federal government ensuring that the lobbyists got a piece of the pie. Ironically, some of the first in line were the same players who helped precipitate the nation’s sharp economic downturn by engaging in high-risk, speculative lending practices.

“Even though some financial, insurance and real-estate interests pulled back last year, they still managed to spend more than $450 million as a sector to lobby policymakers,” Krumholz noted. “That can buy a lot of influence, and it’s a fraction of what the financial sector is reaping in return through the government’s bailout program.”

Topping the list was the health sector, which spent $478.5 million lobbying Congress last year. A close runner-up was the finance, insurance and real-estate sector, spending $453.5 million. Pharmaceutical companies plunked down $230 million, electric utilities spent $156.7 million, and oil and gas companies paid lobbyists $133.2 million.

7. Obama’s controversial defense appointees

President Barack Obama’s appointments to the Department of Defense have raised serious questions among critics who’ve studied their track records. Many of the defense appointees have controversial histories and conflicts of interest due to close ties to defense contractors.

Obama’s decision to retain Robert Gates, secretary of defense under President George W. Bush, marks the first time in U.S. history that a president has opted to keep a defense secretary of an outgoing opposing party in power.

Gates, a former CIA director, has faced criticism for allegedly spinning intelligence reports for political means. In Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, author and former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman described him as “the chief action officer for the Reagan administration’s drive to tailor intelligence reporting to White House political desires.”

Critics are also uneasy about the appointment of Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, who formerly served as a senior vice president at defense giant Raytheon Company and was a registered lobbyist for Raytheon until July 2008. Lynn, who previously served as Pentagon comptroller under the Clinton administration, came under fire during his confirmation hearing for “questionable accounting practices.” Under Lynn’s leadership, the Defense Department was unable to properly account for $3.4 trillion in financial transactions made over the course of several years.

8. Big business cheats the IRS

The Cayman Islands and Bermuda are magnets for Bank of America, Citigroup, American International Group and 11 other financial giants that were the beneficiaries of the federal government’s 2008 Wall Street bailout. The offshore oases provide safe harbors to stash cash out of the reach of Uncle Sam.

According to a Government Accountability Office 2008 report, which was largely ignored by the news media, 83 of the top publicly held U.S. companies, including some receiving substantial portions of federal bailout dollars, have operations in tax havens that allow them to avoid paying their fair share to the Internal Revenue Service. The report also spotlighted the activities of Union Bank of Switzerland, which has helped wealthy Americans to use tax schemes cheat the IRS out of billions.

“The problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, told Bloomberg News. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

9. United States connected to white phosphorous strikes in Gaza

In mid-January, as part of a military campaign, the Israel Defense Forces fired several shells that hit the headquarters of a United Nations relief agency in Gaza City, destroying provisions for basic aid, like food and medicine.

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

The attack on the relief-agency headquarters is just one example of a civilian structure that researchers discovered had been hit during the January air strikes.

Human Rights Watch said the IDF’s use of white phosphorous and indiscriminate attacks on civilians violates international law. The United Nations agreed. In September, it released a fact-finding report on human-rights violations in Gaza that stated, “In many cases it has found that acts entailing individual criminal responsibility have been committed. In all of these cases the Mission has found that there is sufficient information to establish the objective elements of the crimes in question.”

Israel refused to participate in the U.N. investigation. Despite the fact that the United States was a primary source of funding and weaponry for Israel’s military campaign, the report was largely ignored by the mainstream media.

10. Ecuador says it won’t pay illegitimate debt

When President Rafael Correa announced that Ecuador would default on its foreign debt in December 2008, he didn’t say it was because the Latin American country was unable to pay. Rather, he framed it as a moral stand: “As president, I couldn’t allow us to keep paying a debt that was obviously immoral and illegitimate,” Correa told an international news agency. The news was mainly reported in financial publications, and the stories tended to quote harsh critics who characterized Correa as an extreme leftist with ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

But there’s much more to the story. The announcement came in the wake of an exhaustive audit of Ecuador’s debt, conducted under Correa’s direction by a newly created debt audit commission. The unprecedented audit documented hundreds of allegations of irregularity and illegality in the decades of debt collection from international lenders. Although Ecuador had made payments exceeding the value of the principal since the time it initially took out loans in the 1970s, its foreign debt had nonetheless swelled to levels three times as high due to extraordinarily high interest rates. With a huge percentage of the country’s financial resources devoted to paying the debt, little was left over to combat poverty in Ecuador.

Ecuador eventually agreed to a restructuring of its debt at about 35 cents on the dollar. Nonetheless, the move served to expose deficiencies in the World Bank system, which provides little recourse for countries to resolve disputes over potentially illegitimate debt.