-Caveat Lector-
From the "Project Censored" yearbooks:
Among the Top Ten Censored Stories of 1995:
CLOSING UP AMERICA'S 'MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS'
SOURCE: CONSUMER PROJECT ON TECHNOLOGY, 7/14/95, "Federal
Telecommunications Legislation: Impact on Media Concentration" by
Ralph Nader, James Love, and Andrew Saindon.
America's "marketplace of ideas," upon which our democracy
rests, began shutting its doors in the summer of 1995. The
harbinger of the bad news for the public was aptly titled the
Telecommunications Deregulation Bill, which moved through both
houses of Congress. As the name implies, the 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 NY Times described as "a dazzling display of
political influence," 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. The new legislation would remove the limits completely
-- allowing one company to own every AM and FM radio station in
the United States! 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.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader warned, "Congress is moving
the law in the wrong direction, toward greater concentration [of
power] and fewer choices for consumers, all under the guise of
'greater competition.' Laws and rules that limit cross-ownership
and concentration not only enhance competition, a putative goal
of the new legislation, but they also serve important
non-economic goals, by promoting a greater diversity of
programming, and enhancing opportunities for local ownership."
Nader also said the predictable result of placing even
greater power in the hands of fewer giant media moguls will be
less diversity, more pre-packaged programming, and fewer checks
on political power. "That these provisions are being included in
legislation that is being sold as pro-competitive is particularly
galling."
Also galling was the major media's almost complete and utter
avoidance of the "monopoly ownership" factor in their reporting
of the bill's progress in Congress. The threat to the nation's
"marketplace of ideas" from mega-media monopolies has been a
nomination to Project Censored several times in the past.
THE BUDGET DOESN'T HAVE TO BE BALANCED ON THE BACKS OF THE POOR
SOURCE: PUBLIC CITIZEN, Jul/Aug 1995, "Cut Corporate
Welfare: Not Medicare" by John Canham-Clyne.
Congress could go a long way toward balancing the budget by
2002 without slashing Medicare, Medicaid, education, and social
welfare. In fact, the Washington-based Center for the Study of
Responsive Law has identified 153 federal programs that benefit
wealthy corporations but cost taxpayers $167.2 billion annually.
For comparative purposes, federal support for food stamps,
housing aid, and child nutrition costs $50 billion a year.
An analysis by "Public Citizen" reveals how Congress could
balance the budget by cutting "aid to dependent corporations."
The federal budget and tax codes are rife with huge subsidies to
business -- the sums involved make traditional "pork barrel"
spending look like chicken feed.
"Public Citizen" President Joan Claybrook said the budget
axe always misses subsidies for the wealthiest and most powerful
U.S. corporations.
"The proposed $250 billion, or 15 percent cut in Medicare,
demands serious sacrifice from the more than 80 percent of
seniors with incomes below $25,000 -- yet big corporations on the
public dole are not asked to sacrifice at all."
Following are some examples of corporate welfare that miss
the Congressional budget axe:
DIRECT SUBSIDIES:
Under the Market Promotion Program, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture in 1993 gave $75 million for overseas product
advertising, including $500,000 to advertise Campbell's soup and
$10 million to promote beer, wine, and liquor.
INDIRECT SUBSIDIES:
The Forest Service, for example, spends $100 million
annually building more than 340,000 miles of access roads through
national forests to assist timber companies' logging operations.
BAILOUTS:
From Lockheed and Chrysler to the S&L industry, the bigger
the failure, the more likely Uncle Sam will save it. The most
recent example is the so-called "Mexican peso bailout" -- more of
a bailout for American banks, Wall Street, and wealthy
individuals who made bad investments in Mexican bonds.
BELOW MARKET AND GUARANTEED LOANS:
The federal government loans businesses money at
below-market interest rates, or offers the credit of the U.S.
government as a guarantee to a lender if a business opportunity
should go sour.
INSURANCE:
Limiting the liability of certain businesses is a nuclear
time bomb; the Price-Anderson Act makes it likely that almost the
entire cost of a Chernobyl-style nuclear catastrophe would be
shifted to taxpayers or the victims.
TAX EXPENDITURES:
The largest of all corporate welfare programs are specially
targeted tax loopholes and provisions in the tax code. Citizens
for Tax Justice identified $412 billion in potential savings over
five years by closing just 10 tax loopholes.
TRADE BARRIERS:
For example, U.S. government trade quotas on imported sugar
cost the taxpayer virtually nothing but cost consumers over $1.4
billion a year in higher sugar prices.
GIVEAWAYS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY FOR PRIVATE USE:
Tens of millions of dollars annually fund research contracts
to develop new drugs, aircraft for NASA, and weapons systems for
the Department of Defense.
CHILD LABOR IN THE U.S. IS WORSE TODAY THAN DURING THE 1930s
SOURCE: SOUTHERN EXPOSURE, Fall/Winter 1995, "Working in
Harm's Way," by Ron Nixon
Every day, children across America are working in
environments detrimental to their social and educational
development, their health and even their lives.
In 1992, a National Institute of Occupational Safety and
Health (NIOSH) report found that 670 youths aged 16 to 17 were
killed on the job from 1980 to 1989. A second NIOSH report found
that more than 64,100 children went to the emergency room for
work-related injuries in 1992.
Seventy percent of these deaths and injuries involved
violations of state labor laws and the Fair Labor Standards Act
(FLSA), the federal law which prohibits youths under 18 from
working in hazardous occupations.
These numbers are a conservative estimate since even the
best figures underestimate the number of working children by 25
to 30 percent.
As of yet, there is no comprehensive national data
collection system that accurately tracks the number of working
youth, nor their occupation, where they work, or how many are
injured or killed on the job.
Of the estimated five million youth in the work force,
thousands are injured, even killed, because several barriers
continue to prevent them from being adequately protected in the
workplace.
A patchwork of inefficient data collection systems fail to
monitor the total number, much less the well being, of youth in
the workplace. Enforcement of the FLSA is lax. Cultural beliefs
about the worth of work for children are strong. And, various
PACs lobby successfully to keep child labor laws from being
strengthened, and, in many cases, to weaken existing laws.
"Child labor today is at a point where violations are
greater than at any point during the 1930s," said Jeffrey Newman
of the National Child Labor Committee, an advocacy group founded
in 1904.
Violations are occurring today on farms and businesses
around the country. Farm owners beat the system by allowing their
entire family, including the children, to work under one person's
social security number or by hiring a farm contractor who, on the
books, counts as only one employee (while the contractors then
hire whomever they wish).
Businesses aren't worried about the child labor violations
that they commit because the laws are rarely enforced. One report
found that the average business could expect to be inspected once
every 50 years or so. Inspectors spend only about five percent of
their time looking into child labor problems.
Even when companies are inspected and violations are found,
the maximum penalty of $10,000 per violation is rarely enforced.
Lobbying efforts by various business trade organizations are
making congressional reform nearly impossible. In the nation's
capital, money talks, and both the National Restaurant
Association (NRA) and the Food Marketing Institute (FMI)
(representing areas where many child labor violations occur),
speak persuasively with their generous contributions to potential
supporters of their agenda. The restaurant industry alone has
given $1.3 million to Republican candidates in recent years;
House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been a favorite of both the NRA
and the FMI. Since 1991, Gingrich has received more than $27,000
from both PACs.
THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE INTERNET
SOURCE: THE NATION, 7/3/95, "Keeping On-Line Speech Free:
Street Corners in Cyberspace," by Andrew L. Shapiro
You may not have noticed, but the Internet, one of the
hottest news stories of 1995, was essentially sold last year.
The federal government has been gradually transferring the
backbone of the U.S. portion of the global computer network to
companies such as IBM and MCI as part of a larger plan to
privatize cyberspace. But the crucial step was taken on April
30, when the National Science Foundation shut down its part of
the Internet, which began in the 1970s as a Defense Department
communications tool. That left the corporate giants in charge.
Remarkably, this buyout of cyberspace has garnered almost no
protest or media attention, in contrast to every other
development in cyberspace such as the Communications Decency Act,
and cyberporn. What hasn't been discussed is the public's right
to free speech in cyberspace. What is obvious is that speech in
cyberspace will not be free if we allow big business to control
every square inch of the Net.
Given the First Amendment and the history of our past
victories in fighting for freedom of expression, it should be
clear how important public forums in cyberspace could be -- as a
way of keeping on-line debate robust and as a direct remedy for
the dwindling number of free speech spaces in our physical
environment.
There already are warning signs about efforts to limit
on-line debate.
In 1990, the Prodigy on-line service started something of a
revolt among some of its members when it decided to raise rates
for those sending large volumes of e-mail. When some subscribers
protested, Prodigy not only read and censored their messages, but
it summarily dismissed the dissenting members from the service.
There are at least three fundamental ways that speech in
cyber-space already is less free than speech in a traditional
public forum:
First, cyberspeech is expensive, both in terms of initial
outlay for hardware and recurring on-line charges. For millions
of Americans, this is no small obstacle, especially when one
considers the additional cost of minimal computer literacy.
Second, speech on the Net is subject to the whim of private
censors who are not accountable to the First Amendment.
Commercial on-line services, such as America Online and
Compuserve, like Prodigy, have their own codes of decency and
monitors to enforce them.
Third, speech in cyberspace can be shut out by unwilling
listeners too easily. With high-tech filters, Net users can
exclude all material from a specific person or about a certain
topic, enabling them to steer clear of "objectionable" views,
particularly marginal political views, very easily.
If cyberspace is deprived of true public forums, we'll get a
lot of what we're already used to: endless home shopping,
mindless entertainment and dissent-free talk. If people can avoid
the unpalatable issues that might arise in these forums, going
on-line will become just another way for elites to escape the
very nonvirtual realities of injustice in our world. As the
"wired" life grows exponentially in the coming years, we'll all
be better off if we can find that classic free speech street
corner in cyberspace.
As the supreme Court said in Turner Broadcasting v. FCC
(1994), "Assuring that the public has access to a multiplicity of
information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest
order, for it promotes values central to the First Amendment."
RUSSIA INJECTS EARTH WITH NUKE WASTE
SOURCE: SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL, 11/21/94, "Russia injects earth
with nuke waste"; NEW YORK TIMES, 11/21/94, "Poison in the Earth:
A special report; Nuclear Roulette for Russia: Burying
Uncontained Waste" by William J. Broad.
For more than three decades, the Soviet Union and now Russia
secretly pumped billions of gallons of atomic waste directly into
the earth and, according to Russian scientists, the practice
continues today.
The scientists said that Moscow had injected about half of
all the nuclear waste it ever produced into the ground at three
widely dispersed sites, all thoroughly wet and all near major
rivers. The three sites are at Dimitrovgrad near the Volga River,
Tomsk near the Ob River, and Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei River.
The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea and the Ob and Yenisei flow
into the Arctic Ocean.
The injections violate the accepted rules of nuclear waste
disposal, which require it to be isolated in impermeable
containers for thousands of years. The Russian scientists claim
the practice is safe because the wastes have been injected under
layers of shale and clay, which in theory cut them off from the
Earth's surface.
But the wastes at one site already have leaked beyond the
expected range and "spread a great distance," the Russians said.
They did not say whether the distance was meters or kilometers or
whether the poisons had reached the surface.
They began injecting the waste as a way to avoid the kind of
surface-storage disasters that began to plague them in the 1950s.
But by any measure, the injections were one of the Cold War's
darkest secrets.
The amount of radioactivity injected by the Russians is up
to three billion curies. By comparison, the accident at the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant released about 50 million curies of
radiation, mostly in short-lived isotopes that decayed in a few
months. The accident at Three Mile Island discharged about 50
curies. The injected wastes include cesium-137, with a half life
of 30 years, and strontium-90, with a half life of 28 years and a
bad reputation because it binds readily with human bones.
The Russians are now working with the U.S. Department of
Energy to try to better predict how far and fast the radioactive
waste is likely to spread through aquifers.
At best, the Russian waste may stay underground long enough
to be rendered largely harmless by the process of radioactive
decay. At worst, it might leak to the surface and produce
regional calamities in Russia and areas downstream along the
rivers.
If the radioactivity spreads through the world's oceans,
experts say, it might prompt a global rise in birth defects and
cancer deaths.
THE BROKEN PROMISES OF NAFTA
SOURCES: COVERT/ACTION QUARTERLY, Fall 1995, "NAFTA's
Corporate Con Artists" by Sarah Anderson and Kristyne Peter, and
MOTHER JONES, Jan/Feb 1995, "A Giant Spraying Sound" by Esther
Schrader.
The promises of prosperity that the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would bring the USA and Mexico were most
loudly proclaimed by USA*NAFTA, a pro-NAFTA business coalition.
The USA*NAFTA coalition promised that the free trade pact would
be all things to all people.
It would improve the environment, reduce illegal immigration
by raising Mexican wages, deter international drug trafficking,
and most importantly, create a net increase in high-paying U.S.
jobs.
Now, some two years after the agreement became law,
USA*NAFTA's own members are blatantly breaking the coalition's
grand promises. Many of the firms --that only a short time ago
were extolling the benefits of NAFTA for U.S. workers and
communities--have cut jobs, moved plants to Mexico, or continued
to violate labor rights and environmental regulations in Mexico.
An analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies revealed how
the original promises are being broken in Mexico: while the
standard of living may be better for the wealthy, there's been a
30 percent increase in the number of Mexicans emigrating to the
U.S.; the peso devaluation of December 1994 cut the value of
their wages by as much as 40 percent (making them far less able
to buy U.S. goods today than they were before NAFTA); interest
rates on credit cards climbed above 100%; retail sales in
Mexico's three largest cities have dropped by nearly 25%.
The continuing economic crisis in Mexico is expected to
cause the loss of two million jobs in 1995, and economic
desperation is blamed for the 30 percent increase in arrests by
U.S. border patrols between January and May 1995.
NAFTA's promises to U.S. workers also have been broken: the
Department of Labor's NAFTA Transitional Adjustment Assistance
program reported that 35,000 U.S. workers qualified for
retraining between January 1, 1994, and July 10, 1995, because of
jobs lost to NAFTA. A University of Maryland study estimates that
more than 150,000 U.S. jobs were cut in 1994 as a result of
increased consumer imports from Mexico.
And since the peso devaluation in December 1994, the U.S.
trade surplus with Mexico has turned into a deficit expanding
from $885 million in May 1994 to $6.9 billion a year later,
wiping out any basis for claiming that NAFTA is a net job creator
for U.S. workers.
And, finally, an investigative piece by Mother Jones
revealed that the environmental impact of NAFTA has been as
severe as the economic impact. While government officials
promised that NAFTA would reduce the level of pesticides coating
Mexico's fields, just the opposite has occurred.
The competition that NAFTA has set off between growers may
actually increase the amount of pesticides used on Mexican crops.
In fact, since NAFTA, Mexican growers are spraying more toxic
pesticides on fruits, vegetables, and workers. Responsibility for
pesticide use lies not only with Mexican growers but also with
their U.S. agribusiness partners. The Mother Jones investigation
also revealed that these companies, which supply capital to more
than 40 percent of large-scale agribusiness in Mexico, distribute
produce that has been sprayed with pesticides not permitted for
use in the United States.
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