jawfish

Project Censored Unveils the News
john posted in politics & culture on October 25th, 2005

If what you don’t know won’t hurt you, then switch back to I Love Lucy reruns.
A media-watch group called Project Censored maintains a list of news that has been ignored in the press. Whether you agree with all their choices or their priorities or not, you’ll find items in the list worth discussion.

Here’s a few from them:

Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government - a report shows how the administration attacks the process of open government at every turn.

Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency - Iran switches to euros from dollars. No doubt there will be a lot of smoke blown about this - people in the administration who worry about it will still claim it’s nothing. Petrodollar issues, like the Chinese ownership of vast amounts of US government debt ( another poorly covered topic ), will have wide impacts. I don’t claim to understand what will happen, but the sheer size of the numbers means something is going on. We should be paying attention. Project Censored thinks the change to euros is affecting US belligerence toward Iran more than the nuclear issue.

The Real Oil for Food Scam - The US was aware and complicit in criminal arrangements to sell Iraqi oil far below market prices, and then used Kofi Annan’s nepotism and the UN’s own sloppiness or outright criminality as a cover.

Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy - Working with wink-and-a-nod regulators, coal companies are expanding their strip mining practices, and many new coal-fired power plants are planned. Huh? Global warming anyone? Hello? Acid rain, silted rivers, dead countryside? Anybody out there?

Here are some of my own:

Nuclear power generation is returning - For the first time in many years new plants are being considered for the US. Attacking the problem of global warming probably requires nukes to supplement sustainable sources ( want to disagree? write a comment ) but we still have no working system to deal with power-plant nuclear waste. In spite of our present vulnerability to much-feared terrorism at the existing power plants, we still store waste locally instead of in the national repository.

Terrorist Nuclear Weapons - If indeed sophisticated groups of international terrorists exist, with large financial resources, a terrorist nuclear attack is far more dangerous than any other threat. Citizens can’t know what the overall terrorist threat actually is, because their government will spin it up or down as needed to stay in power. When the government claims the threat is high, it probably means we are relatively safer, because this means the boffins in power feel safe enough to allow themselves to look threatened. Conversely a government that is under attack will downplay the threat in order to look stronger.

What citizens can know is the magnitude of a type of attack. An attack from known epidemics or chemical weapons could be bad, maybe worse than 9/11 in loss of life, but still well within the range of everyday dangers like automobiles and cigarettes. A small nuke detonated in Manhattan would not only kill and maim orders of magnitude more people than 9/11, it would close the rest of the New York area. That migration would make Katrina look like a dope-slap. It is really too horrible to contemplate, yet its very magnitude makes it the most important item on the anti-terrorism agenda, and therefore the subject we should investigate. Are the CIA and the various other spooks doing everything possible to keep stray nukes off the market? We don’t seem to have done well with Pakistan or North Korea.

Neo-Cons Want to “Drown Government in the Bathtub” - There is a substantial body of writing by Neo-Con leaders, and they have some very controversial positions, far out of even today’s right-shifted mainstream. There is good evidence that the Bush administration is proceeding with their recommendations for tax reform, regulation, environmental policy, and deficit spending, yet almost zero news or analyst coverage.

Bush Appearances are Staged - From so-called press conferences in the White House, to campaign town meetings, to photo ops among relief workers, the President can’t be trusted to speak freely or meet the citizenry. Each event is scripted even down to controlling the citizens present and the questions asked. This man works for us on our payroll, shouldn’t he be subject to some tough questions?