Two research studies document links between education, incarceration, and recidivism, as covered in articles published by ColorLines, Usable Knowledge, and Citizen Truth.

In September 2019, ColorLines reported that attending a school with a high suspension rate is associated with an increased likelihood of being arrested and a decreased likelihood of enrolling in a four-year college. The ColorLines article reported findings from a study titled “The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime” issued by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research. As Emily Boudreau reported for Harvard University’s Usable Knowledge, the study provides “some of the first causal evidence that strict schools do indeed contribute to the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.”

The study focused primarily on North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where approximately 23 percent of middle school students, the majority of whom are male students of color, are suspended annually. Researchers examined school administrative records, data on arrests and incarcerations, and college attendance records to assess how the district’s suspension policy and other factors affected later life outcomes. Andrew Bacher-Hicks, the study’s lead author, told Usable Knowledge that the study found “large negative impacts on later-life outcomes” for all students—not just those who were suspended—related to attending a school with a high suspension rate. As Emily Boudreau reported, the study’s authors recommended that school administrators and teachers “should be cautious of relying heavily on exclusionary practices” and that they should consider alternatives to suspensions, including positive reinforcement, and restorative processes for students returning to the classroom following any disciplinary action.

A RAND Corporation study emphasized the importance of higher education for prison inmates, as Leighanna Shirey reported for Citizen Truth in June 2019. Education serves as a form of rehabilitation, and access to higher education allows incarcerated individuals to develop new skills, leading to reduced recidivism, the RAND study documented.

As Lois Davis, a senior policy researcher at RAND and leader of the study, told Citizen Truth, the study “dispelled the myths about whether or not education helps inmates when they get out. Education is, by far, such a clear winner.” She also noted that all of society benefits when incarcerated people can receive an education: “[W]hat do you want for your community?” she asked. “If you don’t rehabilitate [prison inmates], how are they going to successfully rejoin society?”

The RAND study corroborated previous research on the value of post-secondary education programs for incarcerated people. For example, the Vera Institute of Justice has found that “education is key to improving many long-term outcomes for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities—including reducing recidivism and increasing employability and earnings after release.”

The school-to-prison pipeline has made national headlines in recent years, but establishment media have failed to cover the National Bureau of Economic Research study as important evidence that strict schools contribute to this pattern. In September 2019 the Los Angeles Times reported that schools in California have expanded their ban on “willful defiance suspensions” so that elementary and middle school students cannot be suspended for defying authority, citing the counterproductivity of such suspensions and how they are unfairly applied to Black students. An October 2019 article in Forbes discussed the school-to-prison pipeline and how students of color face harsher punishments than their white peers, noting, “The more time that Black and Brown children spend outside of the classroom, the more likely they are to be introduced to the criminal justice system.” However, neither article addressed the causal evidence documented in the study covered by ColorLines and Usable Knowledge.

Major news outlets, including the New York Times and NPR, fail to report on the positive societal effects of higher education in prisons. Instead, their orientation toward education in prisons is primarily concerned with the economics of educational programs and is centered on congressional politics. For example, in February 2018 the New York Times reported that Senate leaders might reinstate Pell grants for incarcerated students, “a move that would restore a federal lifeline to the nation’s cash-strapped prison education system.” More recently, in April 2019 NPR reported on how Congress was again considering legislation to make Pell grants available to incarcerated people. While most US prisoners are still barred from receiving Pell grants, they have been made available to a limited number of incarcerated students through the “Second Chance Pell Pilot Program”; an April 2020 Washington Post report on an expansion of the program, which Education Secretary Betsy DeVos refers to as an “experiment,” did make a passing mention of the results of the RAND study.

Shani Saxon, “Study Links High-Suspension Schools with Incarceration Later in Life,” ColorLines, September 23, 2019, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/study-links-high-suspension-schools-incarceration-later-life.

Emily Boudreau, “School Discipline Linked to Later Consequences,” Usable Knowledge (Harvard Graduate School of Education), September 16, 2019, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/09/school-discipline-linked-later-consequences.

Leighanna Shirey, “New Study Proves Vast Benefits of Higher Education for Inmates,” Citizen Truth, June 13, 2019, https://citizentruth.org/new-study-proves-vast-benefits-of-higher-education-for-inmates/.

Student Researchers: Jacqueline Archie, Marco Corea, Gabriella Grondalski, Rowan Hamilton, Rebecca Herbert, Kiara Killelea, Ciara Lockwood, Molly McKeogh, Liam O’Sullivan, Alexandra Shore, Eleanor Sprick, Madeline Terrio, Alexander Tran, and Kirstyn Velazquez (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Advisor: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The post #25. Studies Document Links between Education, Incarceration, and Recidivism appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to end support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, was scheduled to give a keynote speech to the annual International Critical Media Literacy Conference that was to be held at Georgia Southern University on February 28 and 29, 2020. Her talk was canceled because she refused to sign a contract stating she would not support a boycott of Israel. Georgia, along with 27 other states, has enacted anti-boycott laws that prohibit state offices or agencies from doing business with any companies or individuals that boycott Israel, as teleSUR English reported. Eventually the conference at which Martin was to speak was called off entirely after numerous colleagues supported Martin in her refusal to sign the contractual pledge.

BDS is a global movement driven by citizen activists. It works to peacefully pressure corporations, universities, and cultural organizations to stop doing business with the state of Israel, with the goal of pressuring Israel to obey international law and respect the human rights of Palestinians.

Georgia’s anti-boycott legislation was passed by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature in 2016 in response to the growing influence of the BDS movement on college campuses. It requires anyone who enters into a contract with the state for more than $1000 worth of work to sign an oath swearing they will not boycott Israel. 

BDS advocates argue that anti-boycott legislation, such as the laws adopted by Georgia and other states, violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. On February 10, 2020, Martin filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia’s university system, claiming that the cancelation of her speech violated her constitutionally protected right to free speech. Martin tweeted that “[w]e must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech.”

Martin’s legal action comes on the heels of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in December 2019 that permits the US government to define Judaism as both a religion and a nationality under federal law. The stated aim of the order was to more effectively allow the government to combat “anti-Semitism on college campuses.” In reality, by connecting Jewish religious identity with Israeli national identity, the new policy means any criticism of Israel’s government and their actions could be construed as an attack on the Jewish faith and labeled as “anti-Semitic.” The new classification means schools that receive federal funding could, by allowing any BDS activism or even discussion on campus, run afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which forbids those schools from discriminating on the basis of religion or national origin. 

This story has received very little corporate coverage. Outside of reports from the Associated Press and Yahoo! Finance (which ran a story from PR Newswire on the topic), what traction the story has gotten has been limited to either independent news sources or news sources that specialize in Israeli/American affairs.

“Abby Martin Banned from Speaking at US University for Refusing to Sign Pro-Israel Pledge,” teleSUR English, January 17, 2020, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Abby-Martin-Banned-From-Speaking-at-US-University–20200117-0007.html.

“Abby Martin Sues Georgia State Over Law Forcing Loyalty to Israel,” teleSUR English, February 10, 2020, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Abby-Martin-Sues-Georgia-State-Over-Law-Forcing-Loyalty-to-Israel–20200210-0019.html.

Alan MacLeod, “Journalist Abby Martin Sues State of Georgia Over Law Requiring Pledge of Allegiance to Israel,” MintPress News, February 10, 2020, https://www.mintpressnews.com/abby-martin-lawsuit-state-georgia-over-bds-law/264798/.

Sheldon Richman, “Anti-BDS Laws Violate Our Freedom,” CounterPunch, February 17, 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/17/anti-bds-laws-violate-our-freedom/.

Student Researchers: Kathleen Doyle (University of Vermont) and Troy Patton (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluators: Rob Williams (University of Vermont) and Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

The post #24. Silenced in Savannah: Journalist Abby Martin Challenges Georgia’s BDS “Gag Law” appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The United States’s global gag rule continues to put at risk the sexual health of women in developing countries that rely on US aid. This federal rule—formally known as the “Mexico City Policy”—blocks access to the $9 billion of US federal funding for NGOs that provide abortion counseling, referrals, or any kind of abortion services throughout the world. In the first days of the new presidential term in January 2017, the Trump-Pence administration reinstated and drastically expanded the global gag rule. Three years after the implementation of the new guidelines, women continue to be harmed, Rewire.News and other independent news outlets reported.

The global gag rule was first implemented by the Reagan administration in 1984, and has continuously been changed, repealed, and reinstated through partisan presidencies. The Trump administration has advanced the strictest policies yet, expanding its scope to include other forms of assistance from the State Department, USAID, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Defense. The federal rule forces organizations to choose between receiving global health assistance from the United States and providing comprehensive reproductive care. The current enforcement of the policy, according to the Rewire.News report, denies funding for “HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, nutrition, maternal health, family planning, and malaria.” 

According to the Sierra Club, British-based NGO Marie Stopes International, which works in 37 countries to provide contraception and safe abortions, suffered a huge funding gap for continuing to provide abortion services. Karen J. Coates reported that this cut in finances will lead to an estimated “1.8 million unintended pregnancies, 600,000 unsafe abortions, and 4,600 avoidable maternal deaths.” In addition, the current terms of the gag rule are so broad that, along with defunding organizations that provide contraceptive and abortion services, many international health organizations that do not specialize in abortion or family planning are being targeted. As Coates reported, in March 2019 “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo further interpreted the rule to include subcontractors and partner organizations working with any group receiving US health aid.”

Despite the stated intentions of the Republican politicians who have supported the policy, the net effect of the global gag rule in its many incarnations from 1984 to now has, ironically, been to increase abortions and suffering. As Coates noted, “One study, published in the Lancet, followed three-quarters of a million women in 26 countries over 20 years and found that during previous impositions of the rule, abortions rose by 40 percent in the most affected regions.”

In early 2019 US lawmakers introduced the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act. If this bill is passed, it would “permanently repeal the global gag rule and prevent future administrations from easily reimposing it via executive order.” To date, the act has yet to make it to a congressional vote.

The global gag rule has received very limited corporate media coverage. The New York Times has published a pair of articles and a Q. and A., along with a plethora of opinion pieces from 2001 to 2019 on the policy. The articles, however, cover the politics of the situation without helping readers to understand the policy’s impacts on global health organizations, and by extension, women throughout the world. The Washington Post covered the story in 2017 but lacked substantial detail concerning the impact the policy would have on groups like Marie Stopes International. The only substantial coverage of this issue apart from the Rewire.News and Sierra reports has come from other independent sources, such as KPFA and The Independent.

Monica Kerrigan and Nelly Munyasia, “Three Years Later, Trump’s ‘Global Gag Rule’ Continues to Devastate Global Health,” Rewire.News, January 23, 2020, https://rewire.news/article/2020/01/23/three-years-later-trumps-global-gag-rule-continues-to-devastate-global-health/.

Karen J. Coates, “The Global Gag Rule Puts a Choke Hold on Contraception,” Sierra, November–December 2019, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2019-6-november-december/protect/global-gag-rule-puts-choke-hold-contraception [first published online October 30, 2019].

Student Researcher: Madison Miller (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post #23. “Global Gag Rule” Continues to Compromise Women’s Health around World appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

From March 18 to May 14, 2020, more than 36 million US workers lost their jobs, while the wealth of US billionaires increased by more than $368 billion, an increase of 12.5 percent. The net worth of eight of these billionaires has increased by more than a billion dollars each. [Note: These eight billionaires, identified by Inequality.org as “pandemic profiteers,” are Jeff Bezos (Amazon), MacKenzie Bezos (Amazon), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), John Albert Sobrato (Silicon Valley real estate), Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX), Joshua Harris (Apollo Global Management), and Rocco Commisso (Mediacom). See Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, and Sophia Paslaski, “Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers,” Institute for Policy Studies, April 23, 2020, https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza-2020/.]

An Institute for Policy Studies report, “Billionaire Bonanza 2020,” recommended the establishment of a pandemic profiteering oversight committee, passage of a corporate transparency act to discourage wealth hiding, an emergency 10 percent millionaire income tax, and a wealth tax. Acknowledging that enacting a new tax regime on assets would be “challenging in the short term,” the report proposed an emergency 10 percent surtax on taxpayers with incomes of more than $2 million—that is, the richest 0.2 percent of Americans—which would apply not only to income from wages and salaries but also from investment returns. The proposed surtax would raise $635 billion over ten years, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated.

The UK government could raise “up to £174bn [roughly $213 billion] a year to help cope with the Covid-19 crisis if it taxed wealth at the same rate as income,” the Guardian reported in April 2020. Richard Murphy, a professor of political economy at City, University of London, determined that between 2011 and 2018, the United Kingdom taxed income at an average of just 29.4 percent, while wealth—accrued through increased housing prices and personal pensions—had been taxed at just 3.4 percent, making UK taxes highly regressive: When income and wealth are combined, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the Guardian reported, was 18 percent, much less than the 42 percent effective tax rate for the poorest 10 percent. 

Murphy told the Guardian he was not campaigning for a wealth tax as such, but that the UK government could begin to cover some of the coronavirus crisis bill by picking “low-hanging fruit,” such as equalizing the tax rates on income and capital gains, reducing the annual capital gains tax allowance, and abolishing higher-rate tax reliefs for pension contributions. 

In the United States, John R. Talbott reported for Truthout that at least one prominent Wall Street figure, Peter Fahey, a retired Goldman Sachs partner, supports a wealth tax to address the pandemic’s toll on the economy. Fahey called on “a core group of thoughtful, patriotic billionaires to step forward” to subject themselves to “the equivalent of a substantial wealth tax to address the Federal budget crisis that will emerge from the COVID-19 crisis.” Talbott himself advocated a “one-time 3 percent wealth tax on the top 10 percent of the wealthiest people in the world” to provide nine trillion dollars in global emergency relief funds.

Wealth tax proposals have received mixed news coverage in the corporate media. Before the pandemic, establishment news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, reported on proposals made by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the context of the 2020 Democratic primary elections. As the COVID-19 crisis has developed, additional outlets, including HuffPost, Bloomberg, ABC News, and the New York Times have also covered wealth tax proposals made in response to the pandemic. The pandemic is “the perfect opportunity for billionaires to justify their existence,” HuffPost reported, but two months into the coronavirus outbreak “America is still waiting for billionaire philanthropists to deliver.” Bloomberg published an opinion piece by a former member of the Financial Times’s editorial board, opposing a wealth tax. ABC News broadcast a report on the topic, featuring French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. After Piketty responded to questions about how much tax he had paid on royalties from his surprise bestseller, he told ABC that the coronavirus crisis “illustrates a virulent inequality” that could lead to the kind of wealth taxes he has advocated. In search of journalistic balance, ABC News also quoted from a Fox Business Network interview in which Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic advisor, asked, “Why do we have to raise taxes? . . . Let’s let people keep their own money.” In April 2020 the New York Times published an editorial by Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, advocating a 5 percent tax on the richest 5 percent of households as a means to raise up to $2 trillion in pandemic relief funds.

Larry Elliott, “Wealth Tax Rise Could Raise £174bn to Tackle COVID-19, Expert Says,” The Guardian, April 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/22/wealth-tax-rise-could-raise-174bn-tackle-covid-19-expert-says.

John R. Talbott, “To Confront Coronavirus, We Need an Emergency Wealth Tax,” Truthout, March 25, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/to-confront-coronavirus-we-need-an-emergency-wealth-tax.

Student Researcher: Weston Pollock (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

The post #22. An Emergency Wealth Tax to Confront Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Owing to the war launched in 2015 by a US-backed coalition of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen now suffers from “a complete absence” of law and order, which has given rise to what Ahmed Abdulkareem described for MintPress News as “a black Suq (market) of human trafficking on a scale never before seen in Yemen.” Abdulkareem’s report is partly based on the accounts of seventeen Yemeni victims of human trafficking who agreed to speak to MintPress News about their ordeals.

Due to lack of educational opportunities and economic collapse, Yemeni people are literally sacrificing their bodies to provide for their families. Between 2015 and 2017, more than ten thousand cases of organ sales have been documented by the Yemen Organization for Combating Human Trafficking, a Sana’a-based NGO. Actual figures are almost certainly higher, because many cases go unreported owing to the practice being illegal, religious concerns, and the stigma of the practice in a conservative society.

In one interview, a 35-year-old man named Tawfiq described selling one of his kidneys to sustain his family. He was relatively fortunate, because many Yemenis die in the process due to illegal, unprofessional procedures. Another Yemeni, named Aisha, who was forced to sell one of her kidneys, told MintPress News that she was paid $5000, though her kidney was sold for $30,000 on the black market.

A Yemeni named Maha told MintPress News that Yemeni brokers help secure passports by contacting staff members from the Yemeni Consulate in Saudi Arabia, who work together with a dealer from the organ black market. They produce a formal medical report to make it appear that the organ is from a legal donor. This clears the way for the sale of kidneys and other organs to neighboring countries.

A Yemeni family, who asked to remain anonymous, told MintPress News how their son was kidnapped. After the body was found, an autopsy showed that the boy’s heart had been removed, presumably to be sold on the black market.

Trafficking involves not only human organs but also sexual exploitation. As Abdulkareem reported, trafficked Yemeni women are subjected to rape, violence, extreme cruelty, and other forms of coercion. Female trafficking victims who spoke to MintPress News reported being forced into prostitution networks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. From a rehabilitation center in Sana’a, one trafficking victim said that she was now afraid to return home for fear of being killed for violating her family’s honor.

As Abdulkareem reported, the blockade levied against Yemen by the Saudi Coalition since 2015 has helped human trafficking flourish. Under blockade, Yemenis are no longer able to flee violence there or able to travel to neighboring wealthy Gulf countries for work. Furthermore, although Yemen’s laws prohibit trafficking and those who are found guilty are sentenced to ten years in prison, these laws go unenforced, in part because government officials themselves appear to be directly involved in the trafficking and illegal organ sales.

Although US corporate news media have reported on forced labor, sexual exploitation, and the organ trade elsewhere in the Middle East, they appear to have devoted no specific coverage to the unprecedented scale of human trafficking taking place in Yemen.

Ahmed Abdulkareem, “Human Trafficking is Booming in Yemen as the War Enters Its Fifth Year,” MintPress News, September 13, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/human-trafficking-booming-yemen-war/261818/.

Student Researcher: Carlos Alfonso Gutierrez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Amal Munayer (Sonoma State University)

The post #21. The Scourge of Human Trafficking in Yemen appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Calling for policy solutions to dismantle the US system of criminal punishment and the inequalities and white supremacy that this system promotes and perpetuates, Alec Karakatsanis, the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and 116 other human and civil rights groups released a comprehensive fourteen-point plan to “transform the existing system into one of respect and justice,” Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams in September 2019.

The groups’ “Vision for Justice” plan advocates an expanded view of public safety, prioritizing investments in education, housing, employment, healthcare, and other public programs, guided by three core themes: ensuring equity and accountability in the criminal-legal system, building a restorative system of justice, and rebuilding communities. The plan’s fourteen specific recommendations—such as creating a new framework for pretrial justice, and decriminalizing poverty—are rooted in human rights and the practice of restorative justice, Corbett reported.

A study by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), released in August 2019, underscored the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform. The study, titled “Arrest, Release, Repeat: How Police and Jails are Misused to Respond to Social Problems,” showed that people imprisoned as repeat offenders are likely to be poor, unemployed, or homeless, Victoria Law reported for Truthout. Although police and jails ought to promote public safety, law enforcement is more and more frequently “called upon to respond punitively to medical and economic problems unrelated to public safety issues,” according to the PPI study. Consequently, people in need of medical care and social services “cycle in and out of jail without ever receiving the help they need.” The study’s authors found that repeated arrests are “related to race and poverty, as well as high rates of mental illness and substance use disorders.”

According to the study, in 2017 at least 4.9 million individuals were arrested and booked, with the vast majority charged with nonviolent crimes. To better address the conditions that lead marginalized individuals to have contact with the police in the first place, the study’s authors recommended “public investments in employment assistance, education and vocational training, and financial assistance.”

As of May 2020, neither the “Vision for Justice” policy platform of the coalition of 117 rights groups nor the Prison Policy Initiative’s report on how police and jails are misused to respond to social problems appear to have received any coverage by the establishment press.

Jessica Corbett, “‘Vision for Justice’: 117 Rights Groups Offer Roadmap to Transform US Criminal-Legal System,” Common Dreams, September 5, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/05/vision-justice-117-rights-groups-offer-roadmap-transform-us-criminal-legal-system.

Victoria Law, “Arrest, Release, Repeat: New Report Exposes Vicious Cycle of Imprisonment,” Truthout, August 27, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/arrest-release-repeat-new-report-exposes-vicious-cycle-of-imprisonment/.

Student Researchers: Xavier Rosenberg (San Francisco State University) and Carina Ramirez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

The post #20. A Comprehensive Framework for Transforming the Criminal-Legal System appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.

India’s unlicensed medical practitioners, known as “quack” doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. “Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous overprescription,” a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter.

India offers free healthcare to its poor citizens, but its healthcare system has an estimated shortage of 600,000 doctors and millions of trained nurses. India’s 2.5 million quack doctors vastly outnumber its one million certified doctors. As a result, patients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical “professionals” have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics. 

In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia. Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, “This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken.”

Although India is generally acknowledged as the epicenter of this growing global threat, there has been little coverage on the shady business practices in India by companies like Abbott and Sun Pharma. In 2017, HuffPost discussed the findings of a 2016 PLOS Medicine study on antibiotic resistance in India, but only briefly mentioned the role of pharmaceutical companies and their sales representatives, failing to identify them as a driving force in the growing problem. A 2019 Telegraph article identified the role of doctor shortages in the rise of antibiotic resistance, but did not discuss pharmaceutical companies as being part of the problem.

The only substantial corporate reporting on the unethical sale of antibiotics came from a six-month investigation by the New York Times in 2016 that found pharmaceutical representatives from Abbott pressuring their India-based employees to sell to quack doctors, plainly in violation of Indian law and the company’s own ethical guidelines. However, the article did not make any connection between these practices and the rise of superbugs in India. 

Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.

Madlen Davies, Rahul Meesaraganda, and Ben Stockton, “Drug Company Reps Give Quack Doctors Fridges and Televisions to Sell Antibiotics,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 19, 2019, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-08-19/drug-company-reps-give-quack-doctors-fridges-and-televisions-to-sell-antibiotics.

Student Researcher: Allison Rott (North Central College) 

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College) 

The post #19. Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

On December 13, 2019, the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the federal agency charged with enforcing labor law and overseeing union certification elections—escalated its assault against workers’ rights by abruptly changing the rules of union elections, without notice or public comment. According to a December 21, 2019, article by William Lewis in Truthout, “Starting in six months, when workers petition for an election, they must wait at least 14 business days until a pre-election hearing.”

The NLRB was created by the Wagner Act of 1935 and is charged with protecting workers’ rights to unionize and collectively bargain with employers. It consists of up to five politically appointed board members. At the moment, there are only three members of the board—all pro-business Republican lawyers.

Under the new NLRB rules, not only must workers who have asked for a certification election wait fourteen days for a hearing, but the board also has the power to postpone pre-election hearings any time they find “good cause.” After a two-week waiting period for a hearing, the scope of the bargaining unit and the eligibility of individual employees to vote in a certification election is subject to litigation. These changes put unions at a major disadvantage, since employers now have more time to inundate workers with anti-union propaganda in the lead-up to an election.

As Lewis noted, if a union looks like it might manage to win a certification vote, “the unelected NLRB now has the ability to suspend the election to resolve any ongoing disputes over the bargaining unit.” Moreover, recent changes to NLRB rules make it easier to decertify legally recognized collective bargaining units.

Though these NLRB rule changes erect yet more “legal hurdles” to workers seeking to form a union, Lewis wrote that businesses seeking to prevent their workers from unionizing “can also simply break the law.” He cited a 2019 Economic Policy Institute study that found more than 40 percent of employers in union certification elections resort to “unfair labor practices aimed at undermining electoral procedures and retaliating against pro-union workers.”

There has been no corporate news coverage of the changes to the NLRB regulations governing union elections. Aside from articles in independent media outlets Truthout and Common Dreams, the only coverage of the NLRB’s rule changes has come from two legal news sites, Bloomberg Law and the National Law Review, that reported in detail on the NLRB’s actions and included additional information about how the new rules overturn Obama-era regulations designed to streamline union election procedures.

Jessica Corbett, “Progressives Blast New NLRB Union Elections Rule That ‘Betrays the Workers It is Meant to Protect,’” Common Dreams, December 13, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/13/progressives-blast-new-nlrb-union-elections-rule-betrays-workers-it-meant-protect.

William Lewis, “Trump Labor Board Escalates War on Workers’ Rights,” Truthout, December 21, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/trump-labor-board-escalates-war-on-workers-rights/.

Lynn Rhinehart, “Under Trump the NLRB Has Gone Completely Rogue,” The Nation, April 7, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/nlrb-workers-rights-trump/.

Student Researcher: Cem Ismail Addemir (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post #18. Trump Labor Board Assaults Workers’ Rights appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

US hospitals are currently desperate for blood donors: more than 4000 blood drives were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a March 2020 letter co-signed by the AABB, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Red Cross. The situation, which resulted in the loss of 130,000 anticipated donations, is unprecedented, according to Claudia Cohn, AABB’s chief medical officer and director of the blood bank at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.

Meanwhile, international corporations that operate donation centers in the United States are buying the blood of poor people from Mexico and the United States and selling the plasma overseas. 

Mexican citizens cross the border into the United States to donate their blood plasma at various donation sites established by Big Pharma, according to an October 2019 report from ProPublica. The donation centers are mainly owned by Grifols, a Spanish company that operates seventeen donation centers along the US–Mexico border; CSL, an Australian company; BPL, “an emerging player” headquartered in the United Kingdom; and GCAM Inc., a US firm with four centers along the borderlands, ProPublica reported. 

“Donate” is the term these companies prefer to use, but Mexicans are selling their plasma for cash rewards, including bonuses for referring new donors. The companies attract Mexican citizens to the United States because plasma donation is illegal in Mexico, and firms know that prospective donors are likely in desperate need of extra income. “The donors, including some who say the payments are their only income, may take home up to $400 a month,” ProPublica reported, an amount that exceeds monthly salaries in border-based assembly plants and many middle-class jobs in Mexico. 

Donating blood plasma repeatedly can be detrimental to donors’ health. Excessive donation can weaken the immune system, making donors more susceptible to diseases and infections. The United States provides few legal protections for donors. According to ProPublica, “Unlike other nations that limit or forbid paid plasma donations at a high frequency out of concern for donor health and quality control, the U.S. allows companies to pay donors and has comparatively loose standards for monitoring their health.” The United States is the largest supplier of blood plasma in a $21 billion global market, according to ProPublica’s report.

A 2018 study of US plasma donation centers, conducted by researchers at Case Western Reserve University and MetroHealth Medical Center, found that 57 percent of plasma donors in the study made more than a third of their monthly income (up to $250–300) by donating plasma, and 70 percent of these donors experienced side effects from donation, including weakness, bruising, dehydration, and fainting.

Alan MacLeod of MintPress News identified paid blood donations as indicative of capitalism’s latest stage: “In a very real sense,” he wrote, “corporations are harvesting the blood of the poor, literally sucking the life out of them.” With sales of $28.6 billion in 2017, exports from the United States accounted for 70 percent of the plasma available on the international market, MacLeod reported. From 2016 to 2017, blood exports increased by more than 13 percent. While human blood is not yet sold on the futures markets, plasma increasingly is becoming a global commodity, with some of those selling their blood reporting that its value fluctuates—on some days they earn $75 for a donation, while on other days they make just $20. 

A 2006 book, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell’s Tissue Economies, anticipated this phenomenon, but it has continued to develop outside the scope of establishment news coverage, with a few exceptions. The El Paso Times, a subsidiary of USA Today, republished a version of Villagran and Dodt’s “Blood for Money” report for Searchlight New Mexico. In February 2019 the New York Times reported on the “booming” plasma donation business in the United States, noting that, in 2016, blood products accounted for 1.9 percent of all American exports. The Times’s report drew on the Case Western Reserve/MetroHealth Medical Center study and addressed the exploitative nature of for-profit plasma donations in the United States, where the plasma for which donors are paid $30 will be worth $300 on the global market. In addition to the sources cited here, independent coverage of the topic has included reports by The Atlantic, Axios, and Latino USA, a radio program distributed by NPR.

Stefanie Dodt, Jan Lukas Strozyk, and Dara Lind, “Pharmaceutical Companies are Luring Mexicans across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma,” ProPublica (in conjunction with ARD German TV), October 4, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/pharmaceutical-companies-are-luring-mexicans-across-the-u.s.-border-to-donate-blood-plasma.

Lauren Villagran and Stefanie Dodt, “Blood for Money,” Searchlight New Mexico (in conjunction with ARD German TV), October 22, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20200222024850/https://www.searchlightnm.org/blood-for-money.

Alan MacLeod, “Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism,” MintPress News, December 3, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/harvesting-blood-americas-poor-late-stage-capitalism/263175/.

Abby Zimet, “In Late-Stage Zombie Capitalism, the Poor are Selling Their Blood,” Common Dreams, December 9, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/12/09/late-stage-zombie-capitalism-poor-are-selling-their-blood.

Student Researchers: Tuuli Rantasalo (University of Regina), Meagan Cummins (University of Vermont), and Allegra Wu (University of Vermont)

Faculty Evaluators: Suliman Adam (University of Regina) and Rob Williams (University of Vermont)

The post #17. International Plasma Market Profits from US and Mexico’s Poorest appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

After a host of media outlets’ front-page headlines reported that thousands of immigrant children had been forcibly separated from their families by US officials, in June 2018 the Trump administration announced an end to its family separation policy, and a federal court ordered the reunification of separated families. However, as Michael Garcia Bochenek and Warren Binford reported for the American Prospect in August 2019, when they investigated US Border Patrol facilities in El Paso, Texas, in June 2019, “child after child sat before us describing when and how U.S. officials forcibly separated them from their families this year.” The report documented the deplorable conditions and emotional abuse that detained children endured—but also how international law could help to hold US officials to account for violations of children’s rights. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—which the United States helped draft between 1979 and 1989, and which it officially signed in 1995—could mobilize international pressure on the United States to address these violations, Bochenek and Binford reported.

Under US law, children should not be held in custody by Border Patrol for more than 72 hours. Beyond that time, detained children are supposed to be transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, and either reunified with family in the United States or placed in the custody of another caregiver. However, Bochenek and Binford reported that, earlier in 2019, the Border Patrol “was detaining children for more than 90 days on average, in violation of both these legal limits and the children’s rights.”

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the “most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world,” Bochenek and Binford wrote, and some of its specific terms are “now norms of customary international law,” indicative of a “global consensus” regarding all countries’ obligations to respect children’s rights. But, they also noted, “no president has ever sent [the treaty] to the Senate for ratification, the formal agreement to be bound by its terms,” making the United States the only signatory among UN member countries not to have done so.

What steps could be taken to make a strong argument that US violations of children’s rights violated US obligations under international law? One possible avenue, as Bochenek and Binford considered, is “the regular accounting every U.N. member has to make at the Human Rights Council, a process known as Universal Periodic Review.” In 2006 the UN General Assembly mandated the United Nations’s newly formed Human Rights Council to undertake “a universal periodic review, based on objective and reliable information, of the fulfilment by each State of its human rights obligations and commitments in a manner which ensures universality of coverage and equal treatment with respect to all States.”

In November 2020, when the United States is next up for review, every other UN member will “be able to ask questions and make comments and recommendations on U.S. respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its voluntary commitments, and its treaty and customary international law obligations,” Bochenek and Binford wrote. [Note: In their August 2019 American Prospect article, Bochenek and Binford reported that the United States was due for Universal Periodic Review in May 2020. As of that date, however, the Universal Periodic Review website states that the United States will undergo review in November 2020. See “Timeline for UPR Engagement in the Current Cycle: United States,” UPR Info, undated, https://www.upr-info.org/en/review/United-States (accessed May 18, 2020).] Furthermore, during that review process, NGOs can submit information—including statements from detained children themselves—to inform those discussions. [Note: As of May 2020, the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, Planned Parenthood, and the US Human Rights Network had submitted statements. See “Civil Society and Other Submissions: Timeline for UPR Engagement in the Current Cycle: United States,” UPR Info, undated, https://www.upr-info.org/en/review/United-States/Session-36—May-2020/Civil-society-and-other-submissions (accessed May 18, 2020).]

While noting that Universal Periodic Review is “not a court process” and that “real change” will likely have to come through domestic strategies (such as the lawsuits being brought against the US government by the American Civil Liberties Union), Bochenek and Binford nonetheless asserted that there is “real value in the political pressure of regular review by other countries.” Member states of the United Nations and NGOs submitting statements could invoke the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the United States to act.

Reports of abuse of immigrant children in US detention have made headlines in the best-known US news media. For example, in July 2019, Fox News reported on inhospitable detention center conditions for migrant children. The article reported that, “[o]f the 2,669 children detained by the Border Patrol, 826 had been held longer than 72 hours”—though the 72-hour maximum timeframe was described by Fox News not as binding law but as “generally permitted under Customs and Border Protection standards.” Bochenek and Binford’s American Prospect article remains distinctive in highlighting how international law, including the United Nations’s Universal Periodic Review and its Convention on the Rights of the Child, could be mobilized to pressure US policymakers to reform policies that have led to cruel consequences for detained children and their families.

Michael Garcia Bochenek and Warren Binford, “The U.S. is Mistreating Children in Its Custody. Can International Law Help?” American Prospect, August 15, 2019, https://prospect.org/article/us-mistreating-children-its-custody-can-international-law-help.

Student Researcher: Christina Chacon Sanchez (City College of San Francisco)

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Levinson (City College of San Francisco)

The post #16. International Law Could Hold US Accountable for Violating Detained Immigrant Children’s Rights appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

From evidence of neglect at government-run clinics in Canada’s northern reserves to the tragic loss of lives in remote villages in Alaska and on reservation lands in Montana, independent news coverage helps to frame the otherwise underreported issue of Indigenous mistreatment and suicide in historical terms, against the backdrops of settler colonialism and systemic racism that affect Indigenous people and their communities in Canada and the United States.

Indigenous suicide is a serious public health issue throughout the United States, Devon Heinen reported for the New Statesman in January 2020. In 2017 the combined suicide rate for US Indigenous peoples was 22.15 per 100,000 people, compared with an overall national average of 16.3 per 100,000 people, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, Heinen reported. In Alaska—where 229 of the 573 federally-recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages in the United States are located—the Indigenous suicide rate from 1999 to 2009 was 42.5 per 100,000 people. 

In Montana, Native youths aged 11 to 24 are five times more likely to die by suicide than non-Natives, according to data from the Montana Department of Health and Human Services, Mountain West News reported in July 2019. The suicide rate for Native youths in Montana is 42.82 per 100,000 people, compared with eight suicides per 100,000 people for all people in the same age range. Mountain West News reported that, over a period of three months, the Fort Belknap Reservation had experienced a “suicide contagion,” with three suicides and an estimated fifteen additional suicide attempts prompting the Fort Belknap Indian Community Council to declare a state of emergency.

As other reports documented, suicide has devastated First Nations communities in Canada. In June 2019, Claudette Commanda and Louise Bradley reported that suicide and self-inflicted injuries are “the leading cause of death” for First Nations youth and adults up to age 44. In November 2019, the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation declared a state of emergency after a rash of suicides, and the deaths of four Indigenous men by suicide on Ochapowace First Nation led Ochapowace to declare a state of emergency in December 2019. While affirming “the resiliency and strength of Indigenous peoples,” Commanda and Bradley wrote that “high rates of suicide, homicide, incarceration and substance abuse born of colonial trauma illustrate the pain and suffering that Indigenous communities continue to experience.” The impacts have been especially stark for First Nations male youth, for whom the suicide rate is 126 per 100,000, they noted.

“The challenge that we face collectively,” Commanda and Bradley wrote, “is to draw a narrative thread through numbers that point to pain and hurt and give it a human voice.”

Devon Heinen’s January 2020 report for the New Statesman shows how independent investigative journalism can contribute to this aim. Heinen reported in detail on the experience of one Iñupiaq family in the aftermath of the death by suicide of Rosie Hadley, at age twenty. Drawing on extensive interviews with Hadley’s family and those who knew her—Heinen conducted 27 separate interviews over four months with Rosie’s father, Nathan Hadley—Heinen’s report provided a vivid, detailed account of Rosie’s life and the community of Buckland, population 400, in Alaska’s remote and sparsely populated Northwest Arctic Borough. [Note: As one of Heinen’s sources—Bree Swanson, a social services administrator—explained, the Northwest Arctic tribal health region was the worst region for Indigenous suicide in Alaska from 2012 to 2015. Swanson identified generational trauma as one risk factor. Noting that colonization in the mainland United States was “hundreds of years old,” Swanson said it is “more recent” in Alaska. “We’re talking grandparent generation,” Swanson told New Statesman.] Through its intimate investigation of one family’s experience in the context of their community, the local lack of necessary social services, and the living legacy of the region’s colonial history, Heinen’s report provides a stark insight into one aspect of Indigenous suicide as a public health issue—how, in his words, “to help people heal after losing someone close.”

[Note: For another instance of the power with which in-depth investigative journalism can convey the challenges faced by determined Indigenous families and communities confronting violence, see Eilís Quinn, “Death in the Arctic,” Eye on the Arctic, December 14, 2018, https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic-special-reports/death-nunavik-quebec-arctic-canada/#home. Quinn reported the story of the violent death Robert Adams, a nineteen-year-old Inuk from Northern Quebec, and his father’s struggle for access to mental health services, coroner’s services, and the Inuit justice system. In January 2020, “Death in the Arctic” won the silver medal at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. “Eye on the Arctic report Death in the Arctic Wins Prize at Canadian Online Publishing Awards,” Eye on the Arctic, January 13, 2020, https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2020/01/13/eye-on-the-arctic-report-death-in-the-arctic-wins-prize-at-canadian-online-publishing-awards-copa-justice-journalism-nunavik/.]

An October 2019 report by Reuters documented how government-run or -sponsored health clinics in Canada are failing to provide Indigenous communities with necessary services. For more than nine years, the Canadian federal government has not consistently tracked, let alone investigated, poor outcomes at clinics on Indigenous reserves, Allison Martell reported. These clinics, known as nursing stations, are charged with providing basic and emergency care to about 115,000 people. Through analysis of documents, including internal reports and meeting notes obtained through public records requests, Martell reported that record-keeping on deaths and other “critical incidents” at the clinics has been “erratic and fragmented.” Reuters documented at least two cases—one in Ontario, and another in Manitoba—in which nursing station officials turned away apparently intoxicated patients who subsequently died. Lack of adequate official records made it “difficult” to determine whether this “has been a widespread practice,” Martell reported, but a coroner’s verdict on one of the deaths described it as the “northern protocol.”

“We are treating members of the First Nations communities as second-class citizens,” Emily Hill, a senior staff lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services, told Reuters. Martell wrote that Reuters’s findings on deadly negligence in Canada’s nursing stations came as Canada is “in the midst of a public reckoning with the legacy of settler colonization.”

Recent corporate news coverage on Indigenous suicide and other trauma associated with the destructive legacies of colonization has not been proportionate to the scope of the crisis—with only a few notable exceptions. In August 2019, for example, U.S. News & World Report published a brief Associated Press report on the Fort Belknap community’s response to suicides. This seven-sentence article drew heavily from previous, more substantial local reporting by the Billings Gazette. In June 2019 USA Today reported, in more detail, on Native Americans’ “increased risk of suicide,” in light of the experience of Shelby Rowe, the executive director of the Arkansas Crisis Center, after she experienced a suicide crisis herself. In April 2018 the New York Times published a powerful, detailed story about the Arlee Warriors, a state championship high school basketball team from Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, and its team members’ efforts to help their community deal with suicide.

Devon Heinen, “Nobody to Call: The Plight of Indigenous Suicide in Alaska,” New Statesman, January 10, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/12/nobody-call-indigenous-suicides-alaska.

“Tribe Faces Suicide Crisis,” Mountain West News, July 23, 2019, https://mountainwestnews.org/rockies-today-for-tuesday-july-23-99e8bc80babc.

Claudette Commanda and Louise Bradley, “We Must Not Forget Men When We Talk about Indigenous Trauma,” The Globe and Mail, June 16, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-we-must-not-forget-men-when-we-talk-about-indigenous-trauma/.

Allison Martell, “Deaths, Bad Outcomes Elude Scrutiny at Canada’s Indigenous Clinics,” Reuters, October 24, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-health-insight/deaths-bad-outcomes-elude-scrutiny-at-canadas-indigenous-clinics-idUSKBN1X3152.

Student Researchers: Danna Henderson (First Nations University of Canada), Olivia Page (College of Marin), and Alicia Morrow (University of Regina)

Faculty Evaluators: Patricia W. Elliott (First Nations University of Canada), Susan Rahman (College of Marin), and Kehinde Olalafe (University of Regina)

The post #15. Indigenous Trauma and Suicide an Enduring Legacy of Colonialism appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

A September 2019 report by the Democracy Collaborative outlined a model for a democratic public pharmaceutical system, as Fran Quigley reported for Common Dreams. According to the report, the existing pharmaceutical industry, which depends on government-granted patent monopolies, “operates on an extractive model that contributes to inequality and increasingly produces drug shortages, inefficiency, lagging innovation, misinformation and misuse of medications, and most famously, the world’s highest drug prices.” Instead of piecemeal reform of existing patent and anti-trust laws or government provisions of health insurance—any of which could later be repealed—public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution offers a systemic approach to fixing Big Pharma’s most fundamental flaws, according to “Medicine for All,” the Democracy Collaborative’s report.

The Democracy Collaborative model includes plans for a national public pharmaceutical research and development institute for developing new drugs to meet public health needs; state, local, and regional public pharmaceutical manufacturers; regionally owned and operated public wholesale distributors; and engaging the US Postal Service as a partner for pharmaceutical distribution.

As Fran Quigley wrote for Common Dreams, the foundation for these changes is “already in place” because public funding “has long been the bedrock of pharmaceutical research and development.” From 2010 to 2016, “every single one” of 210 newly approved drugs traced their origins back to taxpayer-sponsored research, Quigley reported, based on a study published by PNAS in March 2018.

In almost every case, Dean Baker wrote in Truthout in July 2019, drugs are “cheap to manufacture,” but government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive for consumers. Both Baker’s Truthout article and a report for MintPress News by Alan MacLeod addressed the explanations for high drug prices typically made by defenders of the current system. In the existing model, “it is expensive to develop new drugs” and patent monopolies provide companies incentives to take the risks necessary to do so, Baker related. But, he wrote, there is “nothing natural” about a patent-based system for financing drug research and development. Instead, patent monopolies give drug companies “an enormous incentive to push their drugs as widely as possible.” The opioid crisis, he noted, is an extreme case of how drug companies exaggerate their drugs’ benefits and conceal their negative side effects. But, Baker wrote, “Purdue Pharma would not have been pushing OxyContin so vigorously if it were selling at generic prices.” [Note: On Big Pharma’s “documented history” of dangerous and illegal misbranding, and its multi-billion dollar expenditures to influence doctors’ prescribing decisions, also see Brown, “Medicine for All,” 19.]

The current system also leads to lost government revenues—which could otherwise be directed to healthcare and public services—through tax evasion: As revealed by the Panama Papers, in 2015 ten of the thirty US companies holding the most money offshore were pharmaceutical companies, which together held more than $506 billion in offshore accounts not subject to US taxes.

Publicly-owned pharmaceuticals, freed from the financial demand to appease profit-hungry shareholders, would be able to focus on public health priorities, working hand-in-hand with public health departments, as they do in other countries, to assure an adequate supply of medications, priced to be accessible to the broadest array of Americans. As Fran Quigley reported for Common Dreams, Sweden, Brazil, Cuba, Thailand, and China (among others) “embrace public ownership in key components of their medicines systems,” offering working examples of what could be achieved in the United States. 

Although the United States has a reputation for being “politically and culturally suspicious of public systems replacing markets,” two-thirds of Americans “support making prescription drugs public goods paid for by the federal government,” and eight in ten support “breaking patent monopolies to reduce drug prices,” Quigley reported. [Note: A September 2019 New Republic article noted that the public is “mad as hell about drug prices” and cited the results of March 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, which found that 79 percent of respondents believed drug prices were unreasonable, 80 percent attributed that partly to drug company profits, and 89 percent—including 85 percent of Republicans—favored making it easier for generics to come to market. See Libby Watson, “Democrats’ Drug Price Bill May be Dead on Arrival,” New Republic, September 20, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/155140/democrats-drug-price-bill-may-dead-arrival.]

In February 2020, Public Citizen published a report showing how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limits of Big Pharma’s monopoly model. Public Citizen’s “Blind Spot” report determined that, since the 2002 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the National Institutes of Health have invested “nearly $700 million [in taxpayer funding] on coronavirus R&D.” Indeed, all six of the coronavirus clinical trials active in 2019 “depended crucially on public funding.” Although “more sustained interest in coronaviruses could have provided greater scientific understanding, and a stronger toolkit to inform the latest response,” Zain Rizvi wrote, the private sector has lagged behind in developing treatments for infectious diseases because they are “less lucrative” than medicines for chronic conditions and rare diseases. As Rizvi’s Public Citizen report concluded, the COVID-19 crisis highlights the “urgent need” for an alternative to the existing “monopoly-based model,” which prioritizes short-term corporate profits over public health. 

While consistently covering partisan political disputes over prescription drug prices, corporate news media have been relatively mute in reporting on proposals to develop a public pharmaceutical alternative to Big Pharma. In particular, as of May 2020 no corporate news outlets appear to have covered the Democracy Collaborative’s “Medicine for All” report.

Fran Quigley, “Removing the Profit from Our Pills: The Case for a Public Pharma System,” Common Dreams, September 18, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/18/removing-profit-our-pills-case-public-pharma-system.

Dean Baker, “Replace Patent Monopolies with Direct Public Funding for Drug Research,” Truthout, July 1, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/replace-patent-monopolies-with-direct-public-funding-for-drug-research/.

Alan MacLeod, “Economist Dean Baker: Systemic Change Needed to Fight Big Pharma Price Gouging,” MintPress News, December 12, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/dean-baker-gilead-hiv-pofits-drug-prices/263412/.

Zain Rizvi, “Blind Spot: How the COVID-19 Outbreak Shows the Limits of Pharma’s Monopoly Model,” Public Citizen, February 19, 2020, https://www.citizen.org/article/blind-spot/.

Student Researchers: Jennifer Pope (San Francisco State University) and Amber Yang (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

The post #14. The Case for a Public Pharmaceutical System appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Colorado boasts “the highest percentage of eligible citizens registered to vote,” and its voter participation rates are “often the first or second for the entire nation,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told Democracy Now! in a November 2019 interview. The state’s voting measures include same-day voter registration, automatic registration with driver’s license services, the extension of voting rights to people on parole, and allowances for some seventeen-year-olds to vote in primary elections. As a result, Amy Goodman reported, Colorado is “considered an example for states needing to expand voter access at a time when Republican legislatures and statehouses across the country are attempting to suppress the vote.”

Colorado’s mail-in voting system was established “with bipartisan support” in 2013, Griswold explained. “Republican county clerks pushed [for] these reforms,” in part because the mail-in system is more efficient and less expensive than in-person voting. The mail-in voting system also supports the state’s commitment “to make sure that every eligible Coloradan’s voice is heard,” Griswold told Democracy Now! Although every registered, eligible voter receives a mail-in ballot, people can vote in person if they prefer to do so.

In 2019 the Colorado legislature passed the Colorado Votes Act—which added polling places and mail-in drop boxes throughout the state, including on the campuses of public universities and, with tribal leadership authorization, on tribal lands—and the Restore Voting Rights Parolees law, which enfranchised nearly 11,500 Coloradans on parole.

Colorado’s voting reforms “shine in stark contrast to the voter suppression we see across this country,” Secretary of State Griswold told Democracy Now!

The COVID-19 pandemic has made mail-in voting a hot topic, especially since President Trump and other Republicans have expressed opposition to it on the spurious grounds that voting by mail is prone to fraud. Without endorsing that stance, the New York Times has reported skeptically on mail-in voting. For instance, an April 2020 article noted that “many, if not most, states would face daunting financial, logistical and personnel challenges to making mail balloting the norm.”

The Washington Post featured an opinion piece by former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, advocating for the nation to adopt a mail-in voting system modeled after Colorado’s. The nation “can’t afford a repeat in November” of the “election chaos” experienced by Wisconsin voters in April, after the state’s Republican legislators and Supreme Court forced voters and poll workers “to risk covid-19 infection to participate in American democracy,” Hickenlooper wrote. The experience of Colorado, along with Washington and Oregon, which also use mail-in voting, “has laid the groundwork for just this moment, when mail-in voting in a national election could be vital to protecting Americans’ health—and the health of our democracy.” Responding to concerns of fraud, Hickenlooper touted Colorado’s use of “rigorous risk-limiting audits” and a centralized database to verify voters’ signatures, as well as perhaps the fundamental advantage of mailed ballots—“paper can’t be hacked,” he wrote. But beyond this opinion piece, the Washington Post—like other establishment media outlets—has not reported on Colorado’s example as a model of expanding voter access and making elections more democratic.

Amy Goodman and Juan González, interview with Jena Griswold, “Colorado Has One of the Highest Voter Turnouts in the Country. Here’s How They Did It,” Democracy Now!, November 5, 2019, https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/5/colorado_mail_in_voting_voter_turnout.

Student Evaluator: Kenzie Parker (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

The post #13. Lessons from Colorado’s Voting System appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

According to an investigation by Reveal, the media platform for the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, hundreds of US police officers are members of misogynistic, homophobic, racist, anti-Muslim, Confederate, or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. From a sheriff’s deputy in Missouri posting anti-Muslim rants to a Georgia officer who shared Confederate memes, “[h]undreds of active-duty and retired” officers “at every level of American law enforcement” are members of hate groups on Facebook, Will Carless and Michael Corey reported.

As Nick Statt wrote in an article published by The Verge in June 2019, “The unifying thread to all of these Facebook groups is that they are frequented and sometimes founded and operated by active and retired police officers, and that they actively recruit other police officers to join.”

This is so despite Facebook hate speech policies that ban content targeting individuals based on their race, ethnicity, or religion. Facebook also has rules against violent incitement by groups that have been known to organize and act offline.

However, as Alex Kotch reported for Sludge in September 2019, Facebook profits from promoting hate groups’ content. Based on a Sludge study of Facebook ad data, Kotch reported that, between May 2018 and September 2019, “at least 38 hate groups and hate figures, or their political campaigns, paid Facebook nearly $1.6 million to run 4,921 sponsored ads.”

According to the Sludge report, nearly $960,000 of these ad revenues could be traced to anti-immigrant groups, $542,000 was spent by anti-LGBTQ groups, and anti-Muslim groups spent nearly $70,000 on ads.

Corporate media coverage of US police involvement in hate groups has been limited. For example, an article published by the Washington Post in July 2019 addressed the topic but effectively defended Facebook by emphasizing the difficulties involved in monitoring so many private groups. Also in July 2019, NBC Philadelphia reported that thirteen city police officers would be removed from the force due to violent, homophobic, or racist posts on their Facebook accounts. These thirteen individuals were determined to be the “worst” of the 328 officers being investigated, according to the NBC Philadelphia report.

Will Carless and Michael Corey, “To Protect and Slur,” Reveal (Center for Investigative Reporting), June 14, 2019, http://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-hate-groups-on-facebook-police-officers-trade-racist-memes-conspiracy-theories-and-islamophobia/ [Part One of a three-part series].

Nick Statt, “Hundreds of Active and Former Police Officers are Part of Extremist Facebook Groups,” The Verge, June 14, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/14/18679598/facebook-hate-groups-law-enforcement-police-officers-racism-islamaphobia.

Alex Kotch, “Facebook is Making Millions by Promoting Hate Groups’ Content,” Sludge, September 25, 2019, https://readsludge.com/2019/09/25/facebook-is-making-millions-by-promoting-hate-groups-content/.

Student Researchers: Michelle Ann Stanton and Andrea Hernandez-Chavez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Erica Tom (Sonoma State University)

The post #12. Police Officers Implicated in Online Hate Groups as Facebook Profits appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As scientists warn of imminent climate change, environmental welfare activists in the United States are facing growing legal penalties and a crackdown by law enforcement agencies designed to counteract environmental activism.⁸³ Dubbed the “New Green Scare,” this resurgence of the state siding with corporations that engage in environmental exploitation is leading to mounting legal concerns for activists. [Note: For prior Project Censored coverage of this topic, see Melissa Reed and Susan Rahman, “FBI Surveilled Peaceful Climate Change Protestors,” in Censored 2020: Through the Looking Glass, eds. Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2019), 55–58, https://www.projectcensored.org/14-fbi-surveilled-peaceful-climate-change-protesters/; and Sverre Tysl and Scott Suneson, “Terror Act Against Animal Activists,” in Censored 2008: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006–07, eds. Peter Phillips and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 109–114, https://www.projectcensored.org/20-terror-act-against-animal-activists/.]

As Elizabeth King explained in an October 2019 Progressive magazine article, while the Trump administration’s corporate-friendly policies dramatically endanger the health of our environment, those who take direct action in its defense are increasingly being framed as domestic terrorists. The FBI and pro-fossil fuel politicians like Oklahoma senator James Inhofe have identified environmental activism as a significant domestic terrorism threat. 

Environmental protesters often risk incarceration and drawn-out legal battles for charges such as trespassing, sabotage, burglary, and terrorism. For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, in which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sought to protect their water from the construction of the pipeline, resulted in a total of 836 criminal cases. A number of US states, including Texas and North Dakota, have enacted new laws to target environmental activists, and seven states have even instituted laws that specifically target pipeline protesters. The expansion of “critical infrastructure” laws to include pipelines puts activists who protest against such environmentally dangerous projects at risk of enhanced legal penalties. 

Meanwhile, in West Virginia, activist Holden Dometrius was charged in April 2019 with a felony threat of terroristic acts for chaining himself to construction equipment being used to build the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project that “poses a major threat to the local ecology, including many endangered species,” King reported. Since then, other nonviolent Mountain Valley Pipeline protestors—who would have previously been charged with misdemeanors—are now being charged with felonies.

State-level laws to restrict eco-activism are frequently based on model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and have often been introduced by politicians with direct ties to ALEC, King wrote. Funded by conservative billionaire Charles Koch and dozens of other large corporations, ALEC is the driving force behind much of the “critical infrastructure” legislation being passed by state legislatures throughout the country.

In late March 2020, amid the coronavirus outbreak, three Republican-controlled state legislatures—in South Dakota, West Virginia, and Kentucky—passed laws criminalizing fossil fuel protests.

While corporate media outlets are paying increased attention to topics such as climate change and the Green New Deal endorsed by some Democratic candidates in their 2020 primary election campaigns, they have generally disregarded the fact that the government is criminalizing eco-activist protest and direct action. The passage of state legislation in South Dakota, West Virginia, and Kentucky assigning criminal penalties for protests directed at pipelines and other fossil fuel facilities was largely covered by outlets outside the corporate media establishment, including HuffPost, The Hill, and the Weather Channel.

Elizabeth King, “The New Green Scare,” The Progressive, October 6, 2019, https://progressive.org/magazine/the-new-green-scare-king-191001/.

Student Researcher: Rebecca Noelke (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluator: Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

The post #11. New Green Scare: Law Enforcement Crackdown on Environmental Activism appeared first on Project Censored.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.