Eugene weekly., November 21, 2012, Page 14, Image 14

part-owned by all members and whose revenue is shared
equitably among members. One billion people worldwide
now work in co-ops.
The Year of the Cooperative is not the only good-news
story discussed by Project Censored this year. In Chapter
4, Yes! Magazine’s Sarah Van Gelder lists “12 ways the
Occupy movement and other major trends have offered
a foundation for a transformative future.” They include
a renewed sense of “political self-respect” and fervor to
organize in the U.S., debunking of economic myths such
as the “American dream” and the blossoming of economic
alternatives such as community land trusts, time banking
and micro-energy installations.
They also include results achieved from pressure
on government, like the delay of the Keystone Pipeline
project, widespread efforts to override the U.S. Supreme
Court’s Citizens United ruling, the removal of dams in
Washington state after decades of campaigning by Native
American and environmental activists and the enactment
of single-payer health care in Vermont.
As Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed writes in the book’s
foreword, “The majority of people now hold views about
Western governments and the nature of power that would
have made them social pariahs 10 or 20 years ago.”
Citing polls from the corporate media, Ahmed writes:
“The majority are now skeptical of the Iraq War; the
majority want an end to U.S. military involvement in
Afghanistan; the majority resent the banks and fi nancial
sector, and blame them for the fi nancial crisis; most people
are now aware of environmental issues, more than ever
before, and despite denialist confusion promulgated by
fossil fuel industries, the majority in the U.S. and Britain
are deeply concerned about global warming; most people
are wary of conventional party politics and disillusioned
with the mainstream parliamentary system.”
“In other words,” he writes, “there has been a massive
popular shift in public opinion toward a progressive
critique of the current political economic system.”
And ultimately, it’s the public — not the president and
not the corporations — that will determine the future.
There may be hope after all. Here’s Project Censored’s Top
10 list for 2013:
1. SIGNS OF AN EMERGING POLICE STATE
President George W. Bush is remembered largely for
his role in curbing civil liberties in the name of his “war
on terror.” But it’s President Obama who signed the
2012 NDAA, including its clause allowing for indefi nite
detention without trial for terrorism suspects. Obama
promised that “my administration will interpret them
to avoid the constitutional confl ict” — leaving us adrift
if and when the next administration chooses to interpret
them otherwise. Another law of concern is the National
Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order that
Obama issued in March 2012. That order authorizes the
president, “in the event of a potential threat to the security
of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure
the availability of adequate resources and production
capability, including services and critical technology, for
national defense requirements.” The president is to be
advised on this course of action by “the National Security
Council and Homeland Security Council, in conjunction
with the National Economic Council.” Journalist Chris
Hedges, along with co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky
and Daniel Ellsberg, won a case challenging the NDAA’s
indefi nite detention clause on Sept. 1, when a federal judge
blocked its enforcement, but her ruling was overturned on
Oct. 3, so the clause is back.
2. OCEANS IN PERIL
Big banks aren’t the only entities that our country has
deemed “too big to fail.” But our oceans won’t be getting a
bailout anytime soon, and their collapse could compromise
life itself. In a haunting article highlighted by Project
Censored, Mother Jones reporter Julia Whitty paints a
tenuous seascape — overfi shed, acidifi ed, warming —
and describes how the destruction of the ocean’s complex
ecosystems jeopardizes the entire planet, not just the 70
percent that is water. Whitty compares ocean acidifi cation,
caused by global warming, to acidifi cation that was one
of the causes of the “Great Dying,” a mass extinction 252
million years ago. Life on earth took 30 million years to
recover. In a more hopeful story, a study of 14 protected
and 18 non-protected ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea
showed dangerous levels of biomass depletion. But it also
showed that the marine reserves were well-enforced, with
fi ve to 10 times larger fi sh populations than in unprotected
areas. This encourages establishment and maintenance of
more reserves.
3. U.S. DEATHS FROM FUKUSHIMA
An airborne plume of toxic fallout fl oated to the U.S.
after Japan’s tragic Fukushima nuclear disaster on March
11, 2011. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
found radiation levels in air, water and milk that were
hundreds of times higher than normal across the U.S. One
month later, the EPA announced that radiation levels had
declined, and they would cease testing. But after making
a Freedom of Information Act request, journalist Lucas
Hixson published emails revealing that on March 24,
2011, the task of collecting nuclear data had been handed
off from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the
Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear industry lobbying
group. And in one study that got little attention, scientists
Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman found that in the
period following the Fukushima meltdowns, 14,000 more
deaths than average were reported in the U.S., mostly
among infants. Later, Mangano and Sherman updated the
number to 22,000.
4. FBI AGENTS RESPONSIBLE FOR
TERRORIST PLOTS
We know that FBI agents go into communities such
as mosques, both undercover and in the guise of building
relationships, quietly gathering information about
individuals. This is part of an approach to fi nding what the
FBI now considers the most likely kind of terrorists, “lone
wolves.” Its strategy: “seeking to identify those disgruntled
few who might participate in a plot given the means and the
opportunity. And then, in case after case, the government
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14
November 21, 2012 • eugeneweekly.com
provides the plot, the means and the opportunity,” writes
Mother Jones journalist Trevor Aaronson. The publication,
along with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC-
Berkeley, examined the results of this strategy, 508 cases
classifi ed as terrorism-related that have come before the
U.S. Department of Justice since the 9/11 terrorist attacks
of 2001. In 243 of these cases, an informant was involved;
in 49 cases, an informant actually led the plot. And “with
three exceptions, all of the high-profi le domestic terror
plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.”
5. FEDERAL RESERVE LOANED TRILLIONS
TO MAJOR BANKS
The Federal Reserve, the U.S.’s quasi-private central
bank, was audited for the fi rst time in its history this year.
The audit report states, “From late 2007 through mid-2010,
Reserve Banks provided more than a trillion dollars … in
emergency loans to the fi nancial sector to address strains in
credit markets and to avert failures of individual institutions
believed to be a threat to the stability of the fi nancial
system.” These loans had signifi cantly less interest and
fewer conditions than the high-profi le TARP bailouts, and
were rife with confl icts of internet. Some examples: the
CEO of JP Morgan Chase served as a board member of the
New York Federal Reserve at the same time that his bank
received more than $390 billion in fi nancial assistance from
the Fed. William Dudley, who is now the New York Federal
Reserve president, was granted a confl ict of interest waiver
to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at
the same time the companies were given bailout funds. The
audit was restricted to Federal Reserve lending during the
fi nancial crisis. On July 25, 2012, a bill to audit the Fed
again, with fewer limitations, authored by Rep. Ron Paul,
passed the House of Representatives. HR459 expected to
die in the Senate, but the movement behind Paul and his
calls to hold the Fed accountable, or abolish it altogether,
seem to be growing.
6. SMALL NETWORK OF CORPORATIONS
RUN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Reporting on a study by researchers from the Swiss
Federal Institute in Zurich didn’t make the rounds nearly
enough, according to Censored 2013. They found that, of
43,060 transnational companies, 147 control 40 percent
of total global wealth. The researchers also built a model
visually demonstrating how the connections between
companies — what it calls the “super entity” — work.
Some have criticized the study, saying control of assets
doesn’t equate to ownership. True, but as we clearly saw
in the 2008 fi nancial collapse, corporations are capable
of mismanaging assets in their control to the detriment of
their actual owners. And a largely unregulated super entity
like this is vulnerable to global collapse.
7. THE INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE
COOPERATIVE
Can something really be censored when it’s straight
from the U.N.? According to Project Censored evaluators,
the corporate media underreported the U.N. declaring 2012
to be the International Year of the Cooperative, based on
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