In a November 2021 Progressive magazine article, reporter Helen Christophi revealed that Brian P. Haughton, a former member of multiple racist skinhead bands and a past leader in the neo-Nazi movement, now holds an important counterterrorism position in the Department of Justice. Haughton serves as a law enforcement coordinator for domestic counterterrorism in the Middle Atlantic Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network of the Department of Justice’s Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS).

Michael German, a Brennan Center fellow who investigates neo-Nazis, told Christophi that it is “highly unlikely” that RISS or similar federal employers would have missed Houghton’s neo-Nazi ties while conducting a background check. As Christophi reported, many other white supremacists likely hold powerful positions in law enforcement agencies, especially since neo-Nazi leaders are encouraging their followers to take jobs in the police or military.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Haughton played drums with the Arresting Officers, an influential neo-Nazi band, which was named for the belief that arresting officers had the best jobs since they could assault people of color. He also had connections to members of the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi gang that robbed twenty-two Midwest banks in the mid-1990s and is suspected of having helped to fund the Oklahoma City bombing. Haughton’s involvement in the Nazi skinhead scene ended around January 1995, when he joined the Philadelphia Police Department, where he worked until December 2017.

Although Haughton’s ideological commitments could have changed since his days as a skinhead, Frank Meeink, a former neo-Nazi leader who knew Haughton and now conducts hate crime trainings, said, “I’m sure he still has these beliefs. You don’t join the cops being racist and then get un-racist.”

Georgetown law professor Vida Johnson told Christophi that police departments are overwhelmingly conservative and white and often give the benefit of the doubt to job applicants with racist or bigoted pasts. “Police underestimate white people as threats,” Johnson said. German, the Brennan Center fellow, observed that a white supremacist “couldn’t prosper in law enforcement agencies if the prosecutors didn’t go along with it, if the judges didn’t go along with it, if the government didn’t go along with it.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has long been aware that white supremacists are infiltrating law enforcement agencies. In 2006, the Bureau disclosed that white supremacists were getting jobs as police officers in order to access intelligence and weapons training. And, in 2015, an FBI counterterrorism policy directive referenced “active links” between white supremacists and law enforcement officials. However, there is little evidence that law enforcement leadership did much in response to these revelations.

Although NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, have reported on former or current police officers with ties to white supremacist organizations being charged in connection with the January 6 storming of the Capitol, only the Progressive appears to have reported on the alarming case of the neo-Nazi inside the DOJ.

Helen Christophi, “The Lone Wolf in the Henhouse,” The Progressive, November 18, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

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The Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America (CWA), the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), and other women’s groups leading the opposition to the Equal Rights Act (ERA) and the Equality Act are funded by dark money from a variety of right-wing interest groups, Truthout reported in March 2022. Julia Peck, Ansev Demirhan, and Alyssa Bowen wrote that the anti-feminist legacy of Phyllis Schlafly, who pioneered resistance to the ERA back in 1977, “very much lives on” through the Eagle Forum, the CWA, and the IWF. Today, these groups are using transphobia as a new tactic to mobilize opposition to the ERA, a policy designed to guarantee equal rights for all US citizens regardless of sex, and the Equality Act, which would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

As Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen explained, “dark money”—funding used to influence policy, elections, and other significant political decisions whose precise donors are kept hidden from the public—“gives corporations and the wealthy undue sway in politics with little accountability.” Many of the funders of the Eagle Forum are unknown, Truthout reported, but the Eagle Forum and its related Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund have received “tens of thousands over the years from the Bradley Foundation and Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, which are both massive foundations with deep connections to the far right.”

Between 2010 and 2013, the CWA (and its partner organization, the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee) received more than $11 million from groups associated with billionaire Charles Koch, including Freedom Partners, the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and TC4 Trust. The IWF, which began as Women for Clarence Thomas, also has links to the Koch brothers and the Bradley Foundation. According to the most recent IRS filings of the IWF and its partner organization, the Independent Women’s Voice, the two groups received more than $4.75 million from these organizations since 2014.

Peck, Demirhan, and Bowen reported that anti-ERA groups such as the Eagle Forum, CWA, and IWF are “riding the recent wave of transphobia.” Many of the nation’s recently proposed anti-trans bills are rooted in erroneous and hateful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, much like the Eagle Forum’s opposition to the ERA. For example, in October 2021, a senior policy analyst at the IWF, Inez Stepman, told members of a House committee that the ERA would put women’s physical safety at risk, highlighting an unsubstantiated claim that cisgender women are at a higher risk for violence when incarcerated with trans women. Yet, as Truthout documented, most incarcerated trans people are detained in facilities that align with the sex they were assigned at birth, and in fact, trans women imprisoned with men experience “high rates of extreme violence.”

In the last year, sources such as the Washington Post, NBC News, and the New York Times have covered the recent rise in anti-trans legislation in the United States. However, the corporate press has completely neglected dark money groups’ continued support for conservatives leading the charge against the Equality Act and ERA.

Julia Peck, Ansev Demirhan, and Alyssa Bowen, “Dark Money ‘Women’s Groups’ Are Using Anti-Trans Scaremongering to Oppose ERA,” Truthout, March 22, 2022.

Student Researcher: Mia Wood (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Amber Yang (San Francisco State University)

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Last introduced in 2020, the EARN IT Act (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act) is back—and more threatening to online freedom of expression than before, according to recent independent news reports.

The EARN IT Act of 2022 aims to hold tech companies responsible for the online spread of child pornography. As Mathew Ingram reported for the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), the Act would establish a national commission to develop “best practices for the elimination of child sex-abuse material (CSAM).” Under the act, “online platforms hosting such material would lose the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives electronic service providers immunity from prosecution for most of the content that is posted by their users,” the CJR reported.

The EARN IT Act could significantly impact freedom of expression on the internet far beyond its stated aim of policing child pornography. The CJR report quoted Riana Pfefferkorn, a research fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who wrote that the act will result in companies “overzealously censoring lots of perfectly legal user speech just in case anything that could potentially be deemed CSAM might be lurking in there.” The human rights organization Article 19 warned that the EARN IT Act would encourage platforms to engage in “overbroad censorship of online speech,” targeting especially content created by “diverse communities, including LGBTQ individuals, whose posts are disproportionately labeled as sexually explicit.”

The proposed Act would actually “undermine the fight against child predation online,” Kir Nuthi reported for Slate in February 2022. Noting the “delicate constitutional balance that allows online platforms to voluntarily search for illicit and illegal material and report it to authorities without violating the Fourth Amendment,” Nuthi wrote that the EARN IT Act could “end up giving criminals a way to challenge their convictions for child sexual abuse material.” Nuthi added that, of course, it is “already a criminal offense to produce or distribute child sexual abuse content.”

Because encryption is a potential red flag for CSAM content, the CJR reported, the EARN IT Act will likely pressure platforms to stop offering end-to-end encryption. In 2020, Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society had characterized the then-current version of the EARN IT Act as a means to “ban end-to-end encryption without actually banning it.” The revised version of the legislation has “doubled-down” on anti-encryption, according to Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn. But strong encryption is vital to many online users, especially members of marginalized communities. According to a 2020 analysis by the ACLU’s Kate Ruane, “Strong encryption can be vital to many in the LGBTQ community who rely on the internet to access a support network, seek resources to combat discrimination and abuse, and find doctors and treatment to assist with transition, HIV prevention, and other health concerns.” Ruane noted that encryption also provides crucial safeguards for domestic violence victims, protest organizers, and journalists protecting confidential sources.

Since early 2022, the EARN IT Act has received limited coverage from major corporate newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. A February 2022 editorial in the Washington Post reported on the bill’s “dangerous tradeoffs,” noting that concerns raised by privacy and speech advocates—including threats to end-to-end encryption and legitimate free expression—“have some merit.” A February 2022 report in the Wall Street Journal noted opposition to the EARN IT Act by “a coalition comprising more than 60 privacy and human-rights groups” but emphasized a positive consensus between Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including Leslie Graham (R-SC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

Mathew Ingram, “A Resurrected Bill Troubles Digital Rights Advocates and Journalists,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 17, 2022.

Kir Nuthi, “The EARN IT Act Would Give Criminal Defendants a Get-out-of-Jail-Free Card,” Slate, February 11, 2022.

Student Researcher: Lily Callow (Saint Michael’s College)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (Saint Michael’s College)

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The May 11, 2022, murder of Palestinian reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, evidently by Israeli soldiers, while she was covering one of their routine raids on a West Bank refugee camp sent ripples through journalistic circles and garnered extensive corporate press coverage. However, when it comes to repression of Palestinian media, Abu Akleh’s killing is just the tip of the iceberg. Palestinian journalists routinely face harassment by Israeli defense forces, and the world’s leading social media platforms have been quick to suspend, block, and restrict users who post pro-Palestinian content, including journalists.

Since 2020, twenty-six Palestinian journalists based in the West Bank have been imprisoned for attempting to cover Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. According to an April 5, 2022, report by Yuval Abraham in the Intercept, Palestinian journalists who post footage or comment on Israel’s use of force are often placed in administrative detention for months at a time and experience harsh interrogations without ever being charged. After serving months of jail time, detainees are typically forced into entering guilty plea deals offered by Israeli military prosecution in order to be released.

Often, Palestinian journalists’ social media posts are used against them by Israeli authorities. As Abraham detailed, journalist Hazem Nasser filmed a clash between Palestinians and Israelis that occurred on May 10, 2021, within the West Bank territory. He was confronted by Israeli soldiers on his way home, detained at a checkpoint, and then subjected to repeated interrogations about the incident for a month. In June, he was charged with incitement. The evidence of incitement presented in court consisted of some of Nasser’s old Facebook posts rather than any of his journalism.

Between May 6 and May 18, 2021, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, 7amleh, documented 500 cases of digital rights violations targeting Palestinians. These are cases in which social media platforms deleted stories, hid hashtags, and restricted or completely suspended accounts, often at the request of Israel’s “Cyber Unit.” Of those 500 violations, half involved Instagram and a third involved Facebook, both owned by social media giant Meta.

During spring 2021, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists took to social media to condemn the evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Subsequently, activists who condemned the evictions and journalists who covered them faced account suspensions and restrictions on social media, Nadda Osman reported for Middle East Eye. Mona Shtaya of 7amleh told Osman that these restrictions were part of a longstanding pattern: “Annually there are tens of thousands of requests that the Israeli cyber unit [sends] to social media companies in an attempt to silence Palestinians. The number of requests is increasing annually. In 2019 Israel made 19,606 requests from the cyber unit to social media companies regarding content takedowns.”

Repression of Palestinian speech online could soon get much worse. In a January 18, 2022, article for the Jordan Times, Ramzy Baroud revealed that Israel’s minister of justice, Gideon Sa’ar, is pushing legislation known as the “Facebook Law.” The legislation would grant Israeli courts broad powers to remove online content deemed to be “inflammatory” or harmful to the security of the state from social media or “any website at all.” Although the law ostensibly prohibits all violent, hateful rhetoric posted online, the Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition and the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council issued a statement opposing the legislation on the grounds that it would be used in a discriminatory manner and ultimately “increase the muzzling of Palestinian voices and advocacy for the Palestinian cause on social media platforms.”

Although Abu Akleh’s murder was widely covered, the systematic repression of Palestinian journalists and the silencing of Palestinian expression on social media has been largely ignored by the establishment press. The arrest of dozens of Palestinian journalists detailed in Abraham’s Intercept article never made it onto the corporate news media’s radar. There have been scattered reports in the corporate press about censorship of Palestinian activists on social media. The Washington Post published a May 2021 article about Palestinians being blocked on social media. The same month NBC News reported on Palestinian accusations of censorship against social media platforms. ABC News ran an October 2021 story about leaked Facebook documents recording its employees’ concerns about restrictions on content about Palestine. With the exception of publications focused specifically on Israel or the Middle East, there has been no discussion in the corporate media of Israel’s so-called “Facebook Law.”

Yuval Abraham, “Israel Charges Palestinian Journalists with Incitement––For Doing Their Jobs,” The Intercept, April 5, 2022.

Nadda Osman, “Sheikh Jarrah: Activists Raise Concerns Over Deleted Social Media Content,” Middle East Eye, May 7, 2021.

Ramzy Baroud, “How Israel’s ‘Facebook Law’ Plans to Control All Palestinian Content Online,” Jordan Times, January 18, 2022.

Student Researchers: Eli Rankin (Saint Michael’s College) and Cem Ismail Addemir (Illinois State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Rob Williams (Saint Michael’s College) and Steve Macek (North Central College)

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Joint military and industry efforts to develop new ocean technologies and infrastructure—which engineers and advocates call the “smart ocean”—will have lethal consequences for whales, significantly undermining their “indispensable role” in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate catastrophe, Koohan Paik-Mander reported in December 2021.

Whales “enable oceans to sequester a whopping 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year,” Paik-Mander wrote. But “year-round, full-spectrum military practices” undertaken by the US Department of Defense have “fast-tracked us toward a cataclysmic environmental tipping point.”

Whales have a symbiotic relationship with phytoplankton, which form the base of marine food webs. As whales dive and surface, their movements act as pumps, “bringing essential nutrients from the ocean depths” to the surface, “where sunlight enables phytoplankton to flourish and reproduce,” Paik-Mander explained. This photosynthesis promotes carbon sequestration and oxygen production. “More whales mean more phytoplankton, which means more oxygen and more carbon capture,” she summarized. An increase of 1 percent in phytoplankton productivity due to whale activity would “capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees,” according to a 2019 report published in the International Monetary Fund magazine Finance & Development.

The “smart ocean” envisioned by engineers and in the process of being weaponized by the US military depends on sonar, which can be lethal for whales. A March 2022 report in Science found that sonar triggers “the same fear response” in many whale species as calls emitted by killer whales, “their most terrifying predators.”  In attempts to escape the perceived threat, many whales stop feeding, flee for their lives, or strand themselves in groups on beaches.

The developing “Internet of Underwater Things” will dramatically expand the scope of sonar use. Until now, sonar has been used primarily for military purposes, but data networks using sonar and laser transmitters will “saturate the ocean with sonar waves” to enhance civilian and military communications, according to Paik-Mander. The Department of Defense’s Joint All Domain Command and Control system will interface with this sonar data network to connect aircraft, ships, and submarines in service of “satellite-controlled war,” Paik-Mander wrote. The Pentagon has already sought bids from companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google to manage the program’s data storage cloud.

The Independent Media Institute project Local Peace Economy produced Paik-Mander’s report, which was first published at BuzzFlash and subsequently republished by a number of independent outlets, including CounterPunch, Monthly Review, and Socialist Project. As early as 2017, Project Censored reported on the toll of US Navy training on marine wildlife. A number of news outlets have covered scientific reports on the role of whales in capturing carbon and mitigating climate change. But Paik-Mander’s report is unusual in establishing how catastrophic declines in whale populations due to ongoing naval exercises will be worsened by the development of underwater data networks for both military and civilian applications, to the ultimate detriment of the world’s climate.

Koohan Paik-Mander, “Whales Will Save the World’s Climate—Unless the Military Destroys Them First,” BuzzFlash (via the Independent Media Institute’s Local Peace Economy project), December 13, 2021.

Student Researcher: Jensen Giesick (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Amber Yang (San Francisco State University)

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Facebook’s policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” (DIO) has become “an unaccountable system that disproportionately punishes certain communities,” Sam Biddle reported for the Intercept in October 2021. The policy, he reported, includes a “blacklist” of more than 4,000 people and groups, “including politicians, writers, charities, hospitals, hundreds of music acts, and long-dead historical figures.” The list, which Facebook employs some 350 specialists to maintain, is not public—despite calls for its release by legal scholars, activists, and Facebook’s own oversight board, the Intercept reported.

The DIO policy not only bans specific individuals and groups from Facebook, it also selectively restricts “what other Facebook users are allowed to say about the banned entities,” Biddle reported. The rules are “a serious risk to political debate and free expression,” Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Intercept.

Facebook’s DIO consists of three tiers of banned users. Tier 1, the most strictly limited group, includes alleged terror, hate, and criminal groups and their members. Facebook defines “terror” as “organizing or advocating for violence against civilians” and hate as “repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against” people with protected characteristics. The terrorist category comprises 70 percent of Tier 1 and “overwhelmingly consists of Middle Eastern and South Asian organizations and individuals,” Biddle reported. Most of the entities listed in Facebook’s terrorism category come “directly from” a government sanctions list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Facebook does not permit users to express “anything deemed to be praise or support about groups and people in this tier, even for nonviolent activities,” Biddle wrote.

Tier 2 includes “Violent Non-State Actors,” such as rebels who engage in violence targeting governments rather than civilians. Facebook users, Biddle reported, “can praise groups in this tier for their nonviolent actions but may not express any ‘substantive support’ for the groups themselves.” Tier 3 consists of groups that engage in hate speech but not violence, that might soon become violent, or that violate the DIO policies repeatedly. This tier includes what Facebook calls “Militarized Social Movements,” such as right-wing US anti-government militias. As Biddle noted, prohibitions on posts about predominantly white anti-government militias in the US are “far looser” than those on groups and individuals categorized as terrorists. Facebook uses terms such as “terrorist” and “Militarized Social Movement” in ways that make them “proxies” for racial and religious identities, Biddle reported, “raising the likelihood that Facebook is placing discriminatory limitations on speech.”

With Biddle’s report, The Intercept published a reproduction of Facebook’s full list, with only minor edits. In addition to numerous right-wing militias, the 100-page document lists a number of progressive-left organizations, such as the Elmer Geronimo Pratt Gun Club, which opposes police use of “no-knock” warrants and supports families of people murdered by the police, in addition to advocating for Black people’s right to self-defense.

In October 2021, Fox Business and Newsweek ran articles on Facebook’s DOI list, based on the Intercept’s original report. The same month the Wall Street Journal ran a similar article, though it made no mention of the Intercept report. The Wall Street Journal article emphasized the perspectives of Facebook spokespersons, one of whom assured the Journal that Facebook had “confronted our toughest problems head-on.”

Sam Biddle, “Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organizations,’” The Intercept, October 12, 2021.

Student Researcher: Jensen Giesick (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Amber Yang and Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

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In a November 2021 article for The Conversation, Sonja Klinsky outlined how and why poorer regions are disproportionately affected by climate change. Wealthier nations, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, release roughly 100 times the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions as many African countries, yet the responsibility for undoing this damage has long fallen on the shoulders of the most vulnerable victims of climate change.

Fossil fuels release carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, where it lingers for hundreds of years. CO₂ locks in heat, and its gradual buildup warms the planet, leading to the melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and catastrophic natural disasters such as wildfires and floods. But the primary emitters of carbon are often not the ones bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. As sea levels rise, people in small island countries, such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, will struggle to survive. In 2019, according to a Quartz Africa report by Tawanda Karombo in 2021, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Niger all experienced drastic, unpredictable changes in temperature and precipitation, causing food shortages, economic disasters, and hundreds of avoidable fatalities. “Many of these countries and communities bear little responsibility for the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. At the same time, they have the fewest resources available to protect themselves,” Klinsky observed.

Only 5 percent of the world’s population was responsible for 36 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2015. The impoverished half of the global population accounted for less than 6 percent of all emissions in that period. But because greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, it is misleading to consider only a twenty-year window. According to Klinsky, since the 1750s, the United States has emitted 29 percent of all global CO₂ emissions, or 457 billion tons, while the entire continent of Africa has emitted only 3 percent, or 43 billion tons.

The 2015 Paris Climate Accords included a lofty promise by the United States to address the needs of low-income countries that suffer the disastrous effects of climate change. The United States guaranteed that industrialized nations would contribute $100 billion a year to tackle climate change, beginning in 2020. However, they missed the mark that year and again in 2021. Even $100 billion, should it ever materialize, would not be sufficient to address the catastrophic impact of climate change in the Global South. According to Karombo, Zimbabwe required $1.1 billion to rebuild from just a single cyclone in 2019. And Mozambique has been experiencing average annual losses of about $440 million from cyclone-related floods.

Corporate outlets such as Time and the New York Times have started reporting on environmental racism in the United States. Missing from this coverage, however, is the US role in speeding up the effects of climate change in the Global South. Last year, Project Censored’s #4 story concerned the outsize contribution of the US and the Global North to the burgeoning climate crisis. This broad topic is on our list once again, because corporate media still are not reporting on the situation in full; in particular, they are not covering adequately the egregious role played by the United States.

Sonja Klinsky, “Climate Change Is a Justice Issue—These 6 Charts Show Why,” The Conversation, November 3, 2021.

Tawanda Karombo, “These African Countries Are Among the World’s Worst Hit by Climate Change,” Quartz Africa, January 27, 2021, updated December 1, 2021.

Student Researcher: Lena Anderson (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

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The world’s most popular social media apps and platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok—collect users’ data and employ it to target them with tailored advertising. This sort of “surveillance advertising” has become a ubiquitous and extremely profitable practice. As Lee Fang reported for the Intercept in February 2022, the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now seeking to regulate the collection of user data. But lobbyists for online advertisers and their big media clients are pushing back.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group that represents media outlets utilizing digital advertising, has strenuously opposed FTC efforts to restrict the collection and monetization of user data. As Fang wrote, the IAB represents CNN, the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, Fox News, and “dozens of other media companies.”

The IAB argues that targeted advertising—and, by extension, the siphoning of user data—has become necessary due to declining revenues from print sales and subscriptions. Surveillance advertising sales have soared for most media conglomerates over the past decade as traditional ad sales have shrunk. Non-digital advertising revenue decreased from $124.8 billion in 2011 to $89.8 billion in 2020, while digital advertising revenue rose from $31.9 billion to $152.2 billion in the same period, according to Pew Research.

A 2019 study by privacy researchers Timothy Libert and Reuben Binns found that “the democratic role of the press is being undermined by reliance on the ‘surveillance capitalism’ funding model.” They concluded that “news sites are more reliant on third-parties than non-news sites, user privacy is compromised to a greater degree on news sites, and privacy policies lack transparency in regards to observed tracking behaviors.”

The personal information collected by online media is typically sold to aggregators, such as BlueKai (owned by Oracle) and OpenX, that exploit user data—including data describing minors—to create predictive models of users’ behavior, which are then sold to advertising agencies. The covert nature of surveillance advertising makes it difficult for users to opt out. For example, the New York Times Company’s privacy policy openly states, “We don’t currently respond to [browser-based ‘Do Not Track’] signals.”

The user information collected by media sites also enables direct manipulation of public perceptions of political issues, as famously happened when the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica tapped into personal data from millions of Facebook users to craft campaign propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election. The mass transfer of user data to third-party aggregators also makes it virtually impossible to ensure that such data collection does not violate existing regulations protecting child privacy online. Indeed, the FTC fined OpenX $2 million in December 2021 for illegal collection of minors’ location in violation of the commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule. Major news outlets chose not to cover the story, Fang wrote, because “they would have had to acknowledge an awkward reality,” that they also use (or have used) OpenX to place targeted ads of their own.

In July 2021, President Biden issued an executive order on competition that included a directive for the FTC to develop rules regarding the “surveillance of users.” In December 2021, the activist group Accountable Tech petitioned the FTC to prohibit surveillance advertising altogether. In response, the commission has begun crafting and taking public comments on regulations designed to rein in online data collection by digital advertisers. As Fang reported, the IAB responded by demanding that the FTC oppose any ban on surveillance ads, claiming that thousands of media outlets would be hurt by such a ban. According to OpenSecrets, the IAB spent $160,000 on lobbying efforts in 2021, much of it related to proposed legislation restricting the collection and exploitation of online personal data.

The corporate media have reported the FTC’s openness to new rules limiting the collection and exploitation of user data, but have generally not drawn attention to IAB lobbying against the proposed regulations. For example, in September 2021, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post ran articles on Accountable Tech’s petition and the FTC’s consideration of new regulations governing surveillance advertising. However, neither outlet discussed IAB, its lobbying on this issue, or the big media clients the organization represents.

Lee Fang, “Major Media Outlets That Use Invasive User Tracking Are Lobbying Against Regulation,” The Intercept, February 1, 2022.

Student Researcher: Christian Vogt (Saint Michael’s College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robert Williams (Saint Michael’s College)

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Across the United States, Republican lawmakers are pushing legislation modeled after a policy authored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that makes it illegal to compel nonprofit organizations to disclose the identity of their donors. In a June 2021 article for Sludge, Donald Shaw explained how these bills create a loophole allowing wealthy individuals and groups to pass “dark money” anonymously to 501(c) organizations which in turn can make independent expenditures to influence elections (or contribute to other organizations that make independent political expenditures, such as Super PACs), effectively shielding the ultimate source of political funds from public scrutiny. “These bills are about making dark money darker,” Aaron McKean, legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, told Shaw.

As Shaw outlined, ALEC “brings together corporate activists, lobbyists, and state lawmakers to partner up on the crafting of rightwing legislation and other initiatives.” The organization is commonly referred to as a “corporate bill mill” and has crafted other controversial laws, such as Stand Your Ground.

Legislation inspired by the ALEC bill that makes possible the silent transfer of political funds has been proposed, has passed, or is currently pending in Oklahoma, Arizona, Mississippi, Utah, West Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Florida. In South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem, whose first gubernatorial campaign was supported by a Super PAC that received $95,000 in dark money donations, signed a version of the ALEC bill into law in early 2021. As Sludge reported on February 19, 2021, the South Dakota law passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the Republican-dominated state legislature, despite the fact that, in 2016, voters passed a ballot measure requiring disclosure of “the identity of donors who give more than $100 to organizations for the purpose of political expenditures,” a requirement the legislature repealed a year later.

The impact of ALEC’s model policy has extended beyond state legislatures. In a March 2022 article for Sludge, Shaw documented that the federal omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2022 contained a rider exempting political groups that declare themselves “social welfare organizations” from reporting their donors, and another preventing the Securities and Exchange Commission from “requiring corporations to publicly disclose more of their political and lobbying spending.”

Moreover, according to a May 2021 article from OpenSecrets, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senator Mike Braun (R-IN), and forty-three other Republican senators have announced their support for the “Don’t Weaponize the IRS Act,” which would prevent the IRS from requiring that 501(c)(4) nonprofits disclose their top donors.

Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, a series of court rulings, Republican-backed laws, and executive orders has progressively insulated political spending by corporations and wealthy individuals from government regulation and reporting requirements. However, Democratic politicians and good government organizations have begun to push back, often citing bipartisan support for stronger enforcement of campaign finance laws and transparency in elections. On April 27, 2021, thirty-eight Democratic senators sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig urging them to roll back an anti-disclosure rule put in place by the Trump Administration. In addition, the Democrats’ comprehensive voting-rights bill, the For the People Act, would have compelled the disclosure of all contributions by individuals who surpass $10,000 in donations in a given reporting period. The bill was passed by the House but died in the Senate.

The Washington Post reported on Democrats pressuring the Biden administration to repeal Trump-era dark money rules, but made no mention of the wave of state laws designed to outlaw dark money disclosures. The Associated Press reported on Governor Noem’s defense of the South Dakota law shielding dark money donors, but failed to discuss ALEC’s model bill or the other states considering similar legislation. Outside of local reports appearing in regional papers such as the Tampa Bay Times, there has been little acknowledgment in the establishment press of the stream of ALEC-inspired bills passing through state legislatures that seek to keep the source of so much of the money spent to influence elections hidden in the shadows.

Alyce McFadden, “GOP Bill Would Codify IRS Rule Hiding ‘Dark Money’ Donors,” OpenSecrets, May 27, 2021.

David Moore, “Florida Republican Introduces ALEC Bill to Protect Dark Money in Politics,” Sludge, February 25, 2022.

Donald Shaw, “Laws Preventing Dark Money Disclosure Are Sweeping the Nation,” Sludge, June 15, 2021.

Donald Shaw, “Noem Bill Would Make Dark Money Disclosure Illegal,” Sludge, February 19, 2021.

Donald Shaw, “Omnibus Bill Contains Dark Money Riders,” Sludge, March 10, 2022.

Student Researcher: Zach McNanna (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

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In late 2017, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then under the direction of Mike Pompeo, seriously considered plans to kidnap or assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a September 2021 Yahoo News investigation. The Yahoo News report featured interviews with more than thirty former US officials, eight of whom detailed US plans to abduct Assange and three of whom described the development of plans to kill him. According to one former official, discussions of kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration. Yahoo News described the plans as “part of an unprecedented CIA campaign” against Assange and WikiLeaks. “There seemed to be no boundaries,” according to the former senior counterintelligence official.

Potential scenarios proposed by the CIA and Trump administration officials included crashing into a Russian vehicle carrying Assange in order to grab him, shooting the tires of an airplane carrying Assange in order to prevent its takeoff, and engaging in a gun battle through the streets of London. US officials asked “their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed,” Yahoo News reported, on the basis of testimony by one former senior administration official. Senior CIA officials went so far as to request “sketches” or “options” detailing methods to kill Assange.

Some of the former officials interviewed by Yahoo News dismissed the planning as far-fetched. It was “unhinged and ridiculous,” according to one former CIA official; another former senior counterintelligence official characterized the discussions as “just Trump being Trump.” Nevertheless, at least one senior official noted that there were discussions of “whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal.”

According to a 2020 Grayzone report, UC Global—a Spanish-based private security company hired by Ecuador to protect its London embassy, where Assange was living—spied on Assange and his contacts for the United States. Its targets included Assange’s legal team, US journalists, a US member of Congress, and the Ecuadoran diplomats whom UC Global had been hired to protect.

US plans to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange have received little to no establishment news coverage in the United States, other than scant summaries by Business Insider and The Verge, and tangential coverage by Reuters, each based on the original Yahoo News report. An October 2021 New York Times article made passing reference to the CIA’s plot to kidnap or kill Assange, but noted this extraordinary point only as part of the argument made by Assange’s lawyers to oppose his extradition to the United States. The story received more coverage in the United Kingdom, including reports in the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and the Independent. Al Jazeera ran an extensive story addressing the question, “Why isn’t the CIA’s plan to kidnap Julian Assange making more headlines?” Among US independent news outlets, Democracy Now! featured an interview with Michael Isikoff, one of the Yahoo News reporters who broke the story, and Jennifer Robinson, a human rights attorney who has been advising Julian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010. Rolling Stone and The Hill also published articles based on the original Yahoo News report.

Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff, “Kidnapping, Assassination and a London Shoot-Out: Inside the CIA’s Secret War Plans Against WikiLeaks,” Yahoo News, September 26, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated more than $319 million to fund news outlets, journalism centers and training programs, press associations, and specific media campaigns, raising questions about conflicts of interest and journalistic independence, Alan MacLeod reported for MintPress News in November 2021. “Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation Grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and to belong to a press association funded by Gates,” MacLeod wrote.

Based on examination of more than 30,000 individual grants, MacLeod reported that the Gates Foundation provides funding for “many of America’s most important news outlets”—including NPR (which has received $24.6 million in Gates funding), NBC ($4.3M), CNN ($3.6M), and the Atlantic ($1.4M)—and “a myriad of influential foreign organizations”—such as the Guardian ($12.9M), Der Spiegel ($5.4M), Le Monde ($4M), BBC ($3.6M), El País ($3.9M), and Al Jazeera ($1M). MacLeod’s report includes a number of Gates-funded news outlets that also regularly feature in Project Censored’s annual Top 25 story lists, such as the Solutions Journalism Network ($7.2M), The Conversation ($6.6M), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism ($1M), and ProPublica ($1M) in addition to the Guardian and the Atlantic.

Direct awards to news outlets often targeted specific issues, MacLeod reported. For example, CNN received $3.6 million to support “journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world,” according to one grant.

Another grant earmarked $2.3 million for the Texas Tribune “to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.” As MacLeod noted, given Bill Gates’s advocacy of the charter school movement—which undermines teachers’ unions and effectively aims to privatize the public education system—“a cynic might interpret this as planting pro-corporate charter school propaganda into the media, disguised as objective news reporting.”

In addition to cause-focused grants, the Gates Foundation has also provided $12 million to directly fund press and journalism associations. One organization, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents more than 200 outlets, received $3.2 million in Gates Foundation funding.

Additional Gates Foundation funds help to train journalists around the world “in the form of scholarships, courses, and workshops,” MacLeod reported. Given Gates’s known interests in the fields of education, health, and global development, the influence of Gates Foundation money on the training of journalists who will go on to work in those fields is another way that, in MacLeod’s words, the Gates Foundation maintains a “low profile” with “long tentacles.”

Although the Gates Foundation has often been lauded for its philanthropy, critics have warned about the ability of Bill Gates and other billionaires to use their extraordinary wealth to influence news and set the public agenda. From the acquisition of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, the wealthy Amazon founder, to Elon Musk’s stake in Twitter, tech billionaires increasingly wield “clear and obvious forms of media influence,” MacLeod wrote. (The publication of the MintPress News report predated the news that Musk sought to buy Twitter, a development that would only underscore the concerns raised by MacLeod.)

Noting that receiving Gates Foundation money does not make any media outlet “irredeemably corrupt,” MacLeod nonetheless warned that Gates’s money does introduce “a glaring conflict of interest whereby the very institutions we rely on to hold accountable one of the richest and most powerful men in the planet’s history are quietly being funded by him.”

No major corporate news outlets appear to have covered this issue. Independent journalist Matt Taibbi discussed it with Joe Rogan a few weeks after the publication of MacLeod’s report. The Grayzone republished the original MintPress News report, and Blaze Media published a story based on the MintPress story. As far back as 2011, the Seattle Times published an article investigating how the Gates Foundation’s “growing support of media organizations blurs the line between journalism and advocacy.”

Alan MacLeod, “Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets,” MintPress News, November 15, 2021.

Student Researcher: Reagan Haynie (Loyola Marymount University)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

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Corporate consolidation is a main driver of record inflation in food prices, despite claims by media pundits and partisan commentators to the contrary. As the economy attempts to shake off the lingering impacts of COVID-19 and Americans struggle to stretch their dollars, many have blamed supply chain disruptions and the Biden administration’s stimulus package for soaring prices. However, in an October 2021 article for Common Dreams, Kenny Stancil documents that food producers, distributors, and grocery store chains are engaging in pandemic profiteering and taking advantage of “decades of consolidation, which has given a handful of corporations an ever-greater degree of market control and with it, the power to set prices.”

Stancil’s article reported on new research by the Groundwork Collaborative that suggested price gouging was rampant in America’s oligopoly-controlled food industry. In a paradigmatic case, the beef industry is simultaneously among the most consolidated and the most impacted by inflation. The study found that with only four conglomerates controlling 80 percent of the market, the cost of beef had risen a startling 12 percent since 2020. The egg industry also saw a dramatic increase in prices that sparked investigations and lawsuits across the country.

Record profits for food producers and grocers during the pandemic have raised questions about why these companies continue to shortchange their customers and employees. Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the country, cited rising inflation as the reason for hiking prices in their stores even as they cut worker pay by 8 percent. Yet, as Stancil explained, Kroger’s CEO publicly gloated that “a little bit of inflation is always good for business,” a motto that many corporations seemed to adopt while making attempts to conceal high profit margins since the start of the pandemic.

A joint investigation by Food and Water Watch and the Guardian provides new details on the “market dominance” of the largest US food producers. In a July 2021 article for the Guardian, Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova, and Alvin Chang reported that a handful of “food giants”—including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Conagra, Unilever, and Del Monte—control an average of 64 percent of sales of sixty-one popular grocery items. Amanda Starbuck, a policy analyst at Food and Water Watch, told the Guardian, “It’s a system designed to funnel money into the hands of corporate shareholders and executives while exploiting farmers and workers and deceiving consumers about choice, abundance and efficiency.”

As an example of market consolidation and the illusion of consumer choice, the Guardian noted that three companies own 93 percent of carbonated soft drink brands; 55 percent of the market share in canned corn is controlled by four firms; and PepsiCo owns five of the most popular dip brands, including Tostitos, Lay’s, and Fritos, controlling 88 percent of the market. Despite supermarket aisles full of shelves stacked with different breakfast cereals, just three companies—General Mills, Kellogg, and Post—produce 73 percent of the cereals on offer. As for grocery stores themselves, Starbuck told the Guardian that supermarket mergers have eliminated smaller grocers and regional chains, and the nation has “roughly one-third fewer grocery stores today than we did 25 years ago.”

A report for the American Prospect by Rakeem Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, and David Dayen revealed that one of the most common inflation scapegoats, supply chain problems, is itself a consequence of consolidation. They argued that corporate-controlled supply chains were designed for “maximum profit rather than reliably getting things to people,” ensuring that “the problems that arose in the pandemic folded in on themselves.” Just three global alliances of ocean shippers are responsible for 80 percent of all cargo, allowing them to charge a premium even as delivery times soared during the pandemic. These shippers raked in “nearly $80 billion in the first three quarters of 2021, twice as much as in the entire ten-year period from 2010 to 2020,” by increasing their rates as much as tenfold.

The establishment press has covered the current wave of inflation exhaustively, but only rarely will discuss the market power of giant firms as a possible cause, and then usually only to reject it.

After the Biden administration identified consolidation in the meat industry as a cause of price increases in September 2021, the corporate media were overwhelmingly dismissive, treating administration attempts to link inflation to consolidation as a rhetorical move meant to distract from conservative critiques of Biden’s stimulus program. One New York Times article, from January 2022, attempted to debunk consolidation as a factor in inflation, reasoning that “consolidation has been high for years, but inflation has been low for decades.” Another Times piece briefly touched on consolidation’s role but went on to blame “broken supply chains and high demand for goods from consumers still flush with government-provided cash,” and foregrounded perspectives from business lobbying groups such as the Meat Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce. None of these articles presented the sort of detailed exploration provided by the American Prospect or the Guardian on the ways market structures and corporate power might contribute to rising food prices.

To its credit, in May 2022 the Times did publish an incisive commentary by the Groundwork Collaborative’s executive director, Lindsay Owens, arguing that giant corporations are “using the cover of inflation to raise prices and increase profits” and pointing out that in industries such as meatpacking and shipping, “pricing power comes from concentrated market power.” In the same month, Forbes published a lengthy editorial by sustainable food advocate Errol Schweizer criticizing oligopolistic food companies for using the pandemic to reap windfall profits. But these isolated opinion pieces were far outnumbered by the hundreds, even thousands, of reports and analyses by commercial media outlets that blamed everything but oligopolistic price gouging for the rising cost of groceries.

Brett Wilkins, “New Report on ‘Grocery Cartels’ Details Exploitive Retailer Monopolies,” Common Dreams, November 15, 2021.

David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud, “How We Broke the Supply Chain,” American Prospect, January 31, 2022.

Kenny Stancil, “Corporate Greed the ‘Real Culprit Behind Rising Prices,’ Researchers Say,” Common Dreams, October 14, 2022.

Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova, and Alvin Chang, “Revealed: The True Extent of America’s Food Monopolies, and Who Pays the Price,” The Guardian, July 14, 2021.

Student Researchers: Mack Parlatore (North Central College) and Ethan Reiderer (Saint Michael’s College)

Faculty Evaluators: Steve Macek (North Central College) and Rob Williams (Saint Michael’s College)

The post #6 Corporate Consolidation Causing Record Inflation in Food Prices appeared first on Project Censored.

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Conservative dark money organizations opposing President Biden’s Supreme Court nomination also helped fuel conspiracy theories of election fraud after the 2020 election, as Igor Derysh reported for Salon in March 2022. Derysh summarized a recent report from the watchdog group Accountable.US, which revealed that organizations such as Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the Federalist Society, and the 85 Fund had previously donated millions of dollars to groups involved in the January 6 Capitol riot. These same organizations, among others, were also responsible for funding vicious attack ads on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, arguing that Democrats were using Jackson as a pawn to promote a “woke agenda.”

“It should worry us all that the groups leading the fight against Biden’s historic nomination of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court are tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection and efforts to undermine confidence in the 2020 election,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told Salon. “With American institutions and our democracy itself under constant attack from every direction, the importance of Judge Jackson’s swift and successful confirmation cannot be overstated.”

The influence of dark money—political spending by organizations that are not required to disclose their donors—presents a major challenge to the swift functioning of the judicial nomination and confirmation process, and the US government as a whole. In contrast to direct contributions to candidates, parties, and issue campaigns, which must be disclosed to the public, dark money contributions purposely hide donors’ names from public view. As a result, dark money deeply influences political decisions in favor of select individuals’ or groups’ agendas rather than in support of the public’s best interests.

According to a 2020 report by OpenSecrets, JCN also invested millions of dollars to help confirm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Most recently, dark money groups, including JCN, were heavily involved in the 2020 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, donating money to politicians such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who were key players in advancing Judge Barrett’s confirmation. Critics called Judge Barrett’s confirmation process unusually quick, making the interference of dark money all the more unsettling.

“Those wins [by dark money organizations] often come at the expense of regular Americans, stripping away protections for minority voters, reproductive rights, the environment, public health, and workers,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote in a February 2022 Washington Post op-ed. “And they often degrade our democracy: greenlighting gerrymandering, protecting dark money, and suppressing the vote.”

Conservative dark money groups constitute a multimillion-dollar spider web. According to Accountable.US, the organization Donors Trust, supported by the Koch network, contributed at least $20 million to several groups that challenged the validity of the 2020 election That same year, Donors Trust also gave more than $48 million to the 85 Fund, then more than $700,000 to the Federalist Society. In 2019 and 2020, the Bradley Foundation donated more than $3.5 million to groups connected to Leonard Leo, co-chairperson of the Federalist Society. Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board, aided Trump’s effort to get Georgia’s Secretary of State to assist in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

The role of dark money in politics, including opposition to Biden’s Supreme Court nomination of Judge Jackson, has been a noteworthy topic in corporate media as recently as February 2022. However, coverage has focused on the political tensions erupting from Judge Jackson’s nomination and dark money influence on previous Supreme Court nominations, largely ignoring the presence of dark money backing Trump’s claims of voter fraud or supporting those implicated in the Capitol riot.

More recently, Republican and Democratic senators sparred over dark money alliances during Judge Jackson’s confirmation hearings, according to NBC News. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) warned of “the troubling role [that] far left dark money groups” such as Demand Justice “have played in this administration’s judicial selection process.” Meanwhile, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) scoffed at Republican lawmakers’ supposed concern over dark money, given that they have long pushed to protect laws that allow donors to make major campaign donations without disclosing their identities.

In January 2022, the New York Times tracked the scale of dark money spending in the 2020 election, focusing on many new Democratic efforts to utilize dark money, in comparison to previous years when Democrats actively campaigned against the presence of dark money in politics In February 2022, Business Insider highlighted the surge in dark money donations from advocacy groups used to fight Judge Jackson’s nomination and confirmation process. Op-eds featured in both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post covered the discussion of dark money during Judge Jackson’s confirmation hearings. A March 2022 Mother Jones report discussed JCN’s influence on conservative politics and federal judicial nominations, and how dark money discourse played out shortly after Biden nominated Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court. However, none of the articles featured in the corporate press covered dark money supporting Trump’s Big Lie, the impact such funding had on promoting and reinforcing anti-democratic ideology, or the ramifications of how such dark money spending erodes public trust in government and the election process.

Igor Derysh, “Dark-Money Groups Fighting Biden’s Supreme Court Pick Also Funded Big Lie, Capitol Riot,” Salon, March 8, 2022.

Student Researcher: Kira Levenson (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Evaluator: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The post #5 Dark Money Interference in US Politics Undermines Democracy appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.

A series of Sludge articles written by David Moore in November and December of 2021 reported that at least 100 US Representatives and twenty-eight US Senators have financial interests in the fossil fuel industry.

According to Moore, some seventy-four Republicans, fifty-nine Democrats, and one Independent have interests in the fossil fuel industry. In both chambers, more Republicans than Democrats are invested in the industry, and the ten most heavily invested House members are all Republicans. However, the first- and third-most-invested senators, Joe Manchin (WV), who owns up to $5.5 million worth of fossil fuel industry assets, and John Hickenlooper (CO), who owns up to $1 million, are Democrats. Additionally, Senate Democrats own up to $8,604,000 in fossil fuel assets, more than double the Senate Republicans’ $3,994,126 in fossil fuel assets. Aside from Senator Manchin, and Representative Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN), who owns up to $5.2 million worth of stock in oil and gas pipelines, many of the other deeply invested congressional leaders are Texas Republicans, including Representative Van Taylor, who owns up to $12.4 million worth of fossil fuel assets.

Besides directly owning stock or industry assets, members of Congress also profit from the fossil fuel industry in other ways. For example, as Julia Rock and Andrew Perez reported in a September 2021 article for Jacobin, the household of Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) received at least $938,987 from the fossil fuel industry in 2019 and 2020 through her husband’s employment as a consultant for Terra Energy Partners, an oil and gas company that drills on federal lands. Boebert initially failed to report her husband’s income as a fossil fuel consultant on her 2019 congressional financial disclosure forms.

Many of these congressional leaders hold seats on influential energy-related committees. In the Senate, Manchin is chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Tina Smith (D-MN) chairs the Agriculture Subcommittee on Rural Development and Energy, Tom Carper (D-DE) is chair of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, and Susan Collins (R-ME) and Bill Haggerty (R-TN) both serve on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, to name some of the most prominent senators.

In the House, members serving on influential committees include Boebert, who serves on the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Armstrong owns up to $10.6 million in fossil fuel assets, including hundreds of oil and gas wells. Nine of the twenty-two Republican members of the Energy and Commerce Committee are invested in the fossil fuel industry.

As Project Censored detailed in the #4 story on the Top 25 list two years ago, these individuals’ personal financial interests as investors often conflict with their obligation as elected legislators to serve the public interest. Senator Manchin cut the Clean Electricity Performance Program, a system that would phase out coal, from President Biden’s climate bill, and Representative Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) delayed passage of the Democrats’ budget bill when it included a clean-energy standard, according to Moore’s December 29, 2021, article for Sludge.

The fossil fuel industry is deeply entrenched in Washington, lobbying to influence policy on crucial issues such as the transition to carbon-neutral energy and green infrastructure. According to OpenSecrets, the oil and gas industries spent $119.3 million on lobbying in 2021. During the 2020 election cycle, the fossil fuel industry gave more than $40 million to congressional candidates, including $8.7 million to Democrats and $30.8 million to Republicans according to another OpenSecrets report.

Moore highlighted why these conflicts of interest are so deadly in his December 29, 2021, article: “In May, the International Energy Agency laid out an ultimatum to policy makers: for the world to have a 50/50 chance at reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, no new fossil fuel developments can be approved, starting immediately.” And, yet, as Moore explained, production of oil and gas is projected to grow 50 percent by 2030 without congressional action. The fact that so many lawmakers have invested considerable sums in the fossil fuel industry makes it extremely unlikely that Congress will do much to rein in oil and gas production.

As of May 21, 2022, no corporate outlets had covered the full extent to which members of Congress are financially invested in the fossil fuel industry. Sludge ran a similar analysis of congressional fossil-fuel industry investments in 2020; that report also garnered no corporate coverage. There have been only two articles by Business Insider that are tangentially related to members of Congress holding stocks in fossil fuel companies. But only the independent media have detailed the exact dollar amounts that our legislators have sunk into the oil and gas business. Corporate news outlets have only reported on the fact that clean energy proposals are stalled in Congress, not the financial conflicts of interest that are the likely cause of this lack of progress.

David Moore, “Senators Cling to Fossil Fuel Stocks as World Heats Up,” Sludge, November 5, 2021.

David Moore, “GOP Rep Picks up Millions in Pipeline Stock,” Sludge, December 10, 2021.

David Moore, “At Least 100 House Members Are Invested in Fossil Fuels,” Sludge, December 29, 2021.

Julia Rock and Andrew Perez, “Lauren Boebert’s Anti-Climate Legislation Is a Self-Enrichment Scheme,” Jacobin, September 13, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

The post #4 At Least 128 Members of Congress Invested in Fossil Fuel Industry appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.

Since January 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has received more than 1,200 legally required disclosures about chemicals that present a “substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” All but one of EPA’s reports on these chemicals have been withheld from the public, as reported by Sharon Lerner in a November 2021 Intercept article.

According to Lerner, EPA received at least 1,240 substantial risk reports since January 2019, but only one was publicly available. The undisclosed reports documented “serious harms, including eye corrosion, damage to the brain and nervous system, chronic toxicity to honeybees, and cancer in both people and animals” as well as environmental risks.

The reports include notifications about highly toxic polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemical compounds that are known as “forever chemicals” because they build up in our bodies and never break down in the environment. The Environmental Working Group explains that “very small doses of PFAS have been linked to cancer, reproductive and immune system harm, and other diseases. For decades, chemical companies covered up evidence of PFAS’ health hazards.”

Chemical companies are required by law to provide EPA with any evidence that a chemical may pose a “substantial risk” to public health or the environment. It had been EPA’s regular practice to publish these “section 8(e)” reports, named for a section of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), in a searchable public database called ChemView. EPA typically posted hundreds of these reports per year but quietly discontinued this practice in early 2019. In response to questions from the Intercept, EPA blamed its inaction on resource and staffing constraints initiated during the Trump administration.

Even internally, EPA’s own staff had difficulty accessing the substantial risk reports, according to two EPA scientists, because they had not been uploaded to the databases most used by chemical risk assessors. “As a result, little—and perhaps none—of the information about these serious risks to health and the environment has been incorporated into the chemical assessments completed during this period,” Lerner reported. “Basically, they are just going into a black hole,” according to one EPA whistleblower Lerner interviewed. “We don’t look at them. We don’t evaluate them. And we don’t check to see if they change our understanding of the chemical.”

Claiming confidential trade secrets and intellectual property rights, chemical companies have long resisted policies that promote public disclosure. Lerner conveyed that “close observers of the industry believe that pressure from companies that held this [stance] was likely what led the Trump EPA to decide to stop publicly posting the reports.” As Eve Gartner, an Earthjustice attorney quoted in the Intercept article, stated, “It is not easy to keep selling your chemicals when people know they likely cause cancer or other serious disease.”

A few legal and industry-related publications have focused on a lawsuit filed in January 2022 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) to compel EPA to disclose TCSA section 8(e) reports. E. A. Crunden of E&E News first reported that PEER filed the complaint after EPA failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about the missing reports. However, Crunden reported, “EPA has committed to posting real-time information for industry members regarding the chemical approval process for their products, even as sharing the 8(e) reports has fallen by the wayside.” Kyla Bennett, PEER’s science policy director, who previously worked for EPA, told Crunden, “It is incredible that EPA has funds to post real-time data about the regulatory status of new chemicals for industry’s convenience but does not have funds to alert workers and consumers about substantial health and environmental hazards of these same chemicals.”

Despite the concerns expressed by the EPA whistleblowers, the concealment of 8(e) substantial risk reports to appease chemical industry pressure has been mostly ignored by the corporate media. Apart from “EPA Exposed,” the Intercept’s extensive nine-part investigation of EPA’s dangerous conduct, toxic culture, and tendency to yield to industry pushback, only a handful of niche publications have reported on the matter. Bloomberg Law covered the story in December 2021, citing the Intercept’s reporting. However, the article downplayed the role of chemical industry pressure, instead pointing out that “businesses might need the information to decide whether to purchase a chemical, design an alternative, or improve its health and safety measures.”

Notably, the National Law Review reported on January 8, 2022, that PEER’s original Freedom of Information Act request was “built upon information reported in a November 2021 article in The Intercept.” PEER’s subsequent lawsuit asked the court “to enter an order declaring that EPA wrongfully withheld requested documents and to issue a permanent injunction directing EPA to disclose all wrongfully withheld documents.”

Just weeks after PEER’s complaint was filed, EPA announced in a press release on February 3, 2022, that it would resume publishing 8(e) substantial risk reports in ChemView. Clearly, independent journalism contributed significantly to this outcome. Had it not been for the work of investigative journalist Sharon Lerner at the Intercept, EPA whistleblowers would not have had a platform to share concerns that ultimately led the agency to resume these critical public disclosures.

Sharon Lerner, “EPA Withheld Reports of Substantial Risk Posed by 1,240 Chemicals,” The Intercept, November 1, 2021.

E. A. Crunden, “EPA’s Failure to Disclose Chemical Health Risks Draws Ire,” E&E News, January 5, 2022.

Student Researcher: Zach McNanna (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post #3 EPA Withheld Reports on Dangerous Chemicals appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.

Thousands of US companies illegally underpay workers yet are seldom punished for doing so, Alexia Fernández Campbell and Joe Yerardi reported for the Center for Public Integrity in May 2021. Since its initial report, the Center has documented extensively that employers who “illegally underpay workers face few repercussions, even when they do so repeatedly. This widespread practice perpetuates income inequality, hitting lowest-paid workers hardest.”

Wage theft includes a range of illegal practices, such as paying less than minimum wage, withholding tips, not paying overtime, or requiring workers to work through breaks or off the clock. It impacts service workers, low-income workers, immigrant and guest workers, and communities of color the most, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s “Cheated at Work” series, published from May 2021 to March 2022. An Economic Policy Institute study from 2017 found that just one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations—costs US workers an estimated $15 billion annually and impacts an estimated 17 percent of low-wage workers.

Based on their independent analysis of fifteen years of reports from the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, Campbell and Yerardi concluded that companies engaging in wage theft “have little incentive to follow the law.” In 2019 alone, the Department of Labor cited more than 8,500 employers for stealing approximately $287 million from workers. Major US corporations—including Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle K Stores—are among “the worst offenders,” Campbell and Yerardi reported.

The labor department’s Wage and Hour Division, which is charged with investigating federal wage-theft complaints, “rarely penalizes repeat offenders,” Campbell and Yerardi explained. Between October 2005 and September 2020, the agency fined “only about one in four repeat offenders.” In just 14 percent of the documented cases, companies were ordered to pay workers cash damages, and since 2005, the agency has allowed more than 16,000 employers to avoid paying more than $20 million owed in back wages.

Lack of resources at the federal level is blamed for lax enforcement. As of February 2021, the Wage and Hour Division employed only 787 investigators, a proportion of just one investigator per 182,000 workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, Campbell and Yerardi noted. For comparison, in 1948 the division employed one investigator per 22,600 workers, or eight times the current proportion. Insufficient federal enforcement is “especially problematic” for workers in states that lack their own enforcement agencies: some fourteen states “lack the capacity to investigate wage theft claims or lack the ability to file lawsuits on behalf of victims,” according to the 2017 Economic Policy Institute report.

Strong state and local laws can help to protect workers and could offset weak federal enforcement. Campbell and Yerardi’s report mentioned local successes in Chicago (2013), Philadelphia (2016), and Minneapolis (2019), for example. But, as the reporters also noted, workers’ rights advocates continue to seek federal reforms, appealing to Congress to allocate funding to double the number of federal investigators. Terri Gerstein observed in May 2021, writing for the Economic Policy Institute, that in lieu of federal enforcement, and in response to “widespread, entrenched, and often egregious violations of workplace laws, an increasing number of district attorneys and state attorneys general have been bringing criminal prosecutions against law-breaking employers.”

Nonetheless, wage theft appears to be on the rise. A September 2021 study by One Fair Wage and the University of California, Berkeley, Food Labor Research Center found that 34 percent of workers in the service sector reported experiencing more violations of their rights—including wage theft—in 2021, compared to 2020. Some 35 percent of surveyed service workers reported that tips plus additional wages did not bring them up to their state’s minimum wage, and 46 percent reported that employers did not compensate “time and a half” for working overtime.

Since May 2021, a handful of corporate news outlets, including CBS News, covered or republished the Center for Public Integrity’s report on wage theft. Corporate coverage tends to focus on specific instances involving individual employers, but otherwise pays little attention to wage theft as a systemic social problem or to anemic federal enforcement. For example, a September 2021 NBC News report framed wage theft cases as “disputes” involving “dueling claims that are difficult to verify.” Verifying systemic wage theft has become easier, however, thanks to the Center for Public Integrity’s March 2022 decision to make the data and code used in their yearlong “Cheated at Work” investigation available to the public.

The story may gain more traction now that Congress is starting to pay attention. In May 2022, US House lawmakers introduced H.R. 3712, known as the “Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act of 2022,” which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to protect workers from wage theft, according to Ariana Figueroa of the Virginia Mercury. Minnesota congressperson Ilhan Omar said, “It is clear more DOL [Department of Labor] funding and additional federal reforms are needed in our localities in order to protect our most vulnerable workers.”

Alexia Fernández Campbell and Joe Yerardi, “Ripping off Workers without Consequences,” Center for Public Integrity, May 4, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Advisor: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

The post #2 Wage Theft: US Businesses Suffer Few Consequences for Stealing Millions from Workers Every Year appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.

A comprehensive study of 191 nations, published by the International Monetary Fund in September 2021, found that globally the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies of $11 million per minute, the Guardian and Treehugger reported in October 2021. Fossil fuel companies received $5.9 trillion in subsidies in 2020, with support projected to rise to $6.4 trillion by 2025, according to the IMF report.

Some of these subsidies are direct, including government policies that reduce prices (representing 8 percent of total fossil fuel subsidies) and provide tax exemptions (6 percent). But the biggest benefits to fossil fuel companies include what the IMF report calculated as indirect subsidies, including lack of liability for the health costs of deadly air pollution (42 percent), damages caused by extreme weather events linked to global warming (29 percent), and costs resulting from traffic collisions and congestion (15 percent).

In effect, fossil fuel companies do not cover the damages their products cause, thereby artificially reducing the costs of fuels and leaving governments and taxpayers to pay the indirect costs. [Note: For one report on the deadly consequences of air pollution in the United States, much of which is driven by reliance on fossil fuels, see Lylla Younes, Ava Kofman, Al Shaw, Lisa Song, and Maya Miller, “Poison in the Air,” ProPublica, November 2, 2021.]

As Eduardo Garcia reported for Treehugger, when government taxes on fossil fuels produce inadequate revenues, the consequences include a combination of higher taxes in other areas, increased government deficits, and decreased spending on public goods.

Pricing fossil fuels to cover both their supply and environmental costs would result in what the IMF study called the “efficient price” for fossil fuels. However, as the IMF found, not one national government currently prices fossil fuels at their efficient price. Instead, an estimated 99 percent of coal, 52 percent of road diesel, 47 percent of natural gas, and 18 percent of gasoline are priced at less than half their efficient price.

These subsidies are not evenly distributed across the globe. Just five countries—the United States, Russia, India, China, and Japan—are responsible for two-thirds of global fossil fuel subsidies. In the United States, the IMF estimated that the US government provided $730 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuel companies in 2020. According to a July 2021 study by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Earth Track, continued US subsidies and exemptions “could increase the profitability of new oil and gas fields by more than 50% over the next decade,” with nearly all of the subsidies serving to increase companies’ profits. If Congress were to stop providing tax breaks to the industry, the drilling of new oil wells in the US would decrease by about 25 percent, according to a September 2021 E&E News report citing an estimate by the industry’s American Exploration & Production Council.

The IMF study behind this independent reporting explained that “underpricing of fossil fuels is still pervasive across countries and is often substantial.” As the Guardian reported, ending fossil fuel subsidies would “prevent nearly a million deaths a year from dirty air and raise trillions of dollars for governments.”

“It’s critical that governments stop propping up an industry that is in decline,” Mike Coffin, a senior analyst at Carbon Tracker, told the Guardian. Necessary change “could start happening now, if not for government’s entanglement with the fossil fuels industry in so many major economies,” added Maria Pastukhova of E3G, a climate change think tank. In September 2021, Oil Change International announced that more than 200 civil society organizations from more than forty countries called on international leaders to end public finance for coal, oil, and gas. Laurie van der Burg of Oil Change International noted, “It’s an utter disgrace that rich countries are still spending more public money on fossil fuels than on climate [protection] finance.”

Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies could lead to higher energy prices and, ultimately, political protests and social unrest. But, as the Guardian and Treehugger each reported, the IMF recommended a “comprehensive strategy” to protect consumers—especially low-income households—impacted by rising energy costs, and workers in displaced industries. As Ipek Gençsü told the Guardian, public information campaigns would be essential to counter popular opposition to subsidy reforms. He said ending fossil fuel subsidies could allow governments to redistribute savings “in the form of healthcare, education and other social services.”

As of May 2022, no corporate news outlets had reported on the IMF’s report, though a few industry publications such as Power Technology have done so. In November 2021, the New York Times published an opinion piece focused on the claim by John Kerry, US special envoy for climate change, that government fossil fuel subsidies that artificially lower the price of coal, oil, and gas are “a definition of insanity.” But the Times’ coverage was framed as opinion, and the editorial did not address the significant indirect subsidies identified in the IMF study, as reported by the Guardian and Treehugger. In January 2022, CNN published an article that all but defended fossil fuel subsidies. CNN’s coverage emphasized the potential for unrest caused by rollbacks of government subsidies, citing “protests that occasionally turned violent.”

Damian Carrington, “Fossil Fuel Industry Gets Subsidies of $11M a Minute, IMF Finds,” The Guardian, October 6, 2021.

Eduardo Garcia, “Fossil Fuel Companies Receive $11 Million a Minute in Subsidies, New Report Reveals,” Treehugger, October 21, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

The post #1 Fossil Fuel Industry Subsidized at Rate of $11 Million per Minute appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Project Censored.