Censored 2014 (13 page)
Authors: Mickey Huff
65.
Daniel Simpson, “Why I Made Stuff Up for the
New York Times,”
RoughGuideDarkSide.com, September 3, 2012,
http://www.roughguidedarkside.com/2012/09/03/why-1-made-stuff-up-for-the-new-york-times/
. See also Daniel Simpson, “FAQ: A Rough Guide to the Dark Side,” July 13, 2012, YouTube.com,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2czK3CrebfY
Plutocracy, Poverty, and
Prosperity
James F. Tracy
Censored #2
Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Trillions in Tax Havens
Carl Herman, “1% Hide $21 Trillion and US Big Banks Hide $10 Trillion; Ending World poverty: $3 Trillion,”
Washington's Blog,
July 24, 2012,
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/i-hide-21-trillion-us-big-banks-hide-10-trillion-ending-world-poverty-3-trillion.html
.
James S. Henry, “The Cost of Offshore Revisited,” Tax Justice Network, July 2012,
http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf
.
Student Researcher:
Lyndsey Casey (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator:
Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Censored #3
Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance
Kevin Zeese, “Obama's âEmployment Creation' Program: Massive Outsourcing of American Jobs,” Global Research, September 10, 2012,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-employment-creation-program-massive-outsourcing-of-american-jobs/5304005
.
Lori Wallach, “Breaking â08 Pledge, Leaked Trade Doc Shows Obama Wants to Help Corporations Avoid Regulations,”
Democracy Now!,
June 14, 2012,
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/14/breaking_08_pledge_leaked_trade_doc
.
Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: This Is What Corporate Governance Looks Like,”
Truthout,
November 20, 2012,
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12857-the-trans-pacific-partnership-this-is-what-corporate-governance-looks-like
.
Lori Wallach, “Can a âDracula Strategy' Bring Trans-Pacific Partnership into the Sunlight?,”
Yes! Magazine,
November 21, 2012,
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/can-dracula-strategy-bring-trans-pacific-partnership-into-sunlight
.
Student Researcher:
Kyndace Safa (College of Marin)
Community Researcher:
Tricia Boreta
Faculty Evaluators:
Susan Rahman (College of Marin); Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)
Censored #6
Billionaires' Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality
George Monbiot, “Bang Goes the Theory,”
Monbiot.com
, January 14, 2013,
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/14/bang-goes-the-theory/
.
Student Researcher:
Paige Fischer (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator:
Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Censored Story #8
Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent
Ellen Brown, “It's the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World,” Global Research, November 8, 2012,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/its-the-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-the-world/5311030
. Originally posted at Web of Debt, November 8, 2012,
http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/its-the-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-the-world/
.
Student Researcher:
Cooper Reynolds (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator:
Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Censored Story #13
A Fifth of Americans Go Hungry
Mike Ludwig, “Millions Go Hungry as Congress Considers Food Stamp Cuts and Drought Threatens Crops,”
Truthout,
August 23, 2012,
http://truth-out.org/news/item/11067-millions-go-hungry-as-congress-considers-food-stamp-cuts-and-drought-threatens-crops
.
Student Researcher:
Noah Tenney (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator:
Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)
Censored #23
Transaction Tax Helps Civilize Wall Street and Lower the National Debt
George Zornick, “Financial Transactions Tax Introduced AgainâCan It Pass This Time?,”
Nation,
February 28, 2013,
http://www.thenation.com/blog/173134/financial-transactions-tax-intro-duced-again-can-it-pass-time
.
“Lawmakers Introduce Targeted Wall Street Trading Tax,”
Albany Tribune,
February 28, 2013,
http://www.albanytribune.com/28022013-lawmakers-introduce-targeted-wall-street-trading-tax
.
Gregory Heires, “As the Misguided $1.4 Trillion Cuts Begin, a Wall Street Tax Looks Like a No-Brainer,”
Reader Supported News,
March 7, 2013,
http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/16370-as-the-misguided-14-trillion-cuts-begin-a-wall-street-tax-looks-like-a-no-brainer
.
Helene Fouquet and Adria Cimino, “French Lawmakers Pass Trading Transaction Tax,”
Bloomberg Businessweek,
August 1, 2012,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-31/french-law-makers-pass-budget-bill-including-transaction-tax
.
Student Researcher:
Marisa Soski (San Francisco State University)
Faculty Evaluator:
Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)
Over the past four decades, the wealth controlled by a small transnational elite has gradually increased and now amasses at a spectacular pace. In 2012, the world's 100 wealthiest people became $241 billion richer and are presently worth a total $1.9 trillion.
1
In the shadow of such opulence, however, close to 870 million of the world's inhab-itantsâroughly one in eightâsuffer from “chronic undernourishment,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
2
In the US alone, over 200,000 families fell below the poverty line in 2011, a demarcation underneath which 10.4 million familiesâor 47.5 million Americansânow exist. In other words, close to one-third of all working families in the US lack the very basic resources to make ends meet. In contrast, as the Working Poor Families Project reported, “higher income families receive a [much] larger share of income relative to families at the bottom of the income distribution.”
3
The news generated by corporate media all too frequently fail to capture the magnitude of this profound crisis. Because such media are first and foremost concerned with mesmerizing constituents of a lucrative advertising demographic, they seldom focus on poverty and economic inequalityâthe root causes of the street crime regularly highlighted in the local papers and broadcast news.
Further, since Americans often lack a genuine historical compass and are regularly bombarded with an array of bizarre and horrific reports purporting to be news, they are unlikely to recognize that things haven't always been this way. Indeed, from a historic perspective such socioeconomic conditions seem a world away from the widely held notion of prosperity America once exemplified. For example, in the period immediately following World War II through the early 1970s, the average US family saw its annual income grow in accord with the gross domestic product (GDP).
In addition, most households carried little debt and credit purchases were hardly the routine occurrence or affirmation of lifestyle they have become today. The greater degree of economic enfranchisement and equality was largely due to a very different political-economic arrangement that included higher rates of unionization and greater tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations that provided for the emergence and growth of a distinct middle classâa taken-for-grant-ed American institution that is now increasingly a thing of the past.
“The experience of the two postwar eras is a story of two entirely different societies,” economics writer Robert Kuttner explained.
The first era was one of broadly shared gains. Between 1947 and 1973, productivity rose by 103.5 percent and median family income rose by almost exactly the same amount, 103.9 percent. But between 1973 and 2003 productivity rose by 71.3
percent, while median family income rose by just 21.9 percent. Factor out the extra hours worked by wives, and median family income rose scarcely at all.
4
Between 2000 and 2006 American worker productivity increased by close to 20 percent yet wages paid to workers in nonsupervisory roles remained stagnant.
5
And, as
Censored
story #13, below, suggests, since 2007 the US has been in an economic tailspin not experienced since the Great Depression.
These dramatic changes can be further explained through a sociological lens by considering the closely intertwined elements of social class and economic institutions. Beginning in the 1970s, the United States and many of those constituting the “power elite” or “governing class”âchronicled by political sociologists C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff, a half-century ago
6
âhad begun to unilaterally abandon their implicit pact with working people. The captains of industry that roved the halls of government and the Pentagon, while holding sway in the boardrooms of major corporations, vigorously fought unionization, promoted a wasteful armaments industry, and started the long process of exporting the country's manufacturing base overseasâan undertaking that has since rendered America a shadow of its former self.
Within the scope of human affairs, the economy's foremost ide-ational doppelgangers are political thought and public opinion. In order to change the nation's political economy, key individuals articulating the wishes of influential quarters within the governing class understood that any program to shift wealth upward must be accompanied by a far-reaching ideological campaign. In 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a detailed memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., chairman of the Chamber of Commerce's education committee. In it, Powell urged an ambitious campaign to contest what he saw as a wide-scale espousal of liberal and leftist precepts and ideas on college campuses, in mass media, and elsewhere throughout America's opinion-generating apparatus.
Powell argued that those concerned with defending the capitalist system must regain the higher ground in academe especially, thereby influencing the broader field of ideas. In his view, the Chamber of
Commerce should advocate for the inclusion of free-market-minded scholars within the formal academy and even consider setting up think tanks promoting free enterprise-friendly concepts. “Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term,” Powell wrote.
Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term. The first essential is to establish the staffs of eminent scholars, writers and speakers, who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing and the speaking. It will also be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public.
7
With neoliberal tenets now commonplace throughout the business community and broader culture, Powell's then seemingly improbable plan has been fully realized. Further abetted by the increasing sophistication and scope of information technology, the power elite that once confined themselves to the nation-state have become a truly global phenomenon.
8
Unlike their human counterparts, rendered finite through modest economic means and everyday drudgery, the supranational global overlords defy time and space, flying above perceived reality while cloaking themselves in the widely propagated myth of free market capitalism. “Their companies are transnational but they are transcendent,” historian David Noble declared. “They have overcome their mortality, the constraints of space and time, the particulars of place and the moment. Thus they live in their godliness, their virtual divinity, the culmination of a thousand years of earnest expectation.”
9
The plans they have for humanity and other life on Earth, suggested in byzantine financial maneuverings and all-encompassing trade deals, portend a continued global transformation in accord with their visionâexclusive corporate control over the Earth's broad expanse of material and human resources.
In their examination of the 1 percent, Project Censored's Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro pointed to the worldwide “superclass,” an idea, developed by David Rothkopf, designating an international elite whose constituents exert their power through wealth and posi
tion or, to a lesser degree, cultural, scientific, or artistic talent and contributions frequently appropriated by the superelites.
10
Like the globe-trotting
Ãbermensch
described by Noble, “the superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the population,” Phillips and Soeiro explain, or 6,000 to 7,000 people.
They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet-flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world. . . . They are 94 percent male, predominantly white, and mostly from North America and Europe. [They] are the people setting the agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO.
11
Through their intricate monetary designs and international accords, those comprising this superclass and their immediate subordinates symbolically coordinate much of our material existence. Such a predicament could not be possible without a severely censored news media that keeps the broader public from knowing the frequency and degree to which it is methodically swindled.
This year's top Censored stories addressing “Plutocracy, Poverty, and Prosperity” suggest the increasingly close relationship between information and economic inequality. Indeed, as the methods for transferring wealth upward are further perfected, and as the walls and bars of economic imprisonment thicken, the news and information that might illuminate such processes are largely purged from the public mind, thereby deterring the possibilities for collective action and meaningful reform encompassed in, for example, the recent Occupy movement. Yet because most of the large media outlets that Americans rely on for their news are owned, managed, and overseen by corporate board members constituting the 1 percent, it is not surprising that important news of their repeated con games and criminality is trivialized or ignored altogether.
