by Mickey Huff
Student Researcher: Kyndace Safa (College of Marin)
Community Researcher: Tricia Boreta
Faculty Evaluators: Susan Rahman (College of Marin); Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)
Censored #6
Billionaires’ Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality
George Monbiot, “Bang Goes the Theory,” Monbiot.com, January 14, 2013, http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/14/bang-goes-the-theory/.
Student Researcher: Paige Fischer (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Censored Story #8
Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent
Ellen Brown, “It’s the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World,” Global Research, November 8, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/its-the-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-the-world/5311030. Originally posted at Web of Debt, November 8, 2012, http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/its-the-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-the-world/.
Student Researcher: Cooper Reynolds (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
Censored Story #13
A Fifth of Americans Go Hungry
Mike Ludwig, “Millions Go Hungry as Congress Considers Food Stamp Cuts and Drought Threatens Crops,” Truthout, August 23, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/11067-millions-go-hungry-as-congress-considers-food-stamp-cuts-and-drought-threatens-crops.
Student Researcher: Noah Tenney (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)
Censored #23
Transaction Tax Helps Civilize Wall Street and Lower the National Debt
George Zornick, “Financial Transactions Tax Introduced Again—Can It Pass This Time?,” Nation, February 28, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/blog/173134/financial-transactions-tax-intro-duced-again-can-it-pass-time.
“Lawmakers Introduce Targeted Wall Street Trading Tax,” Albany Tribune, February 28, 2013, http://www.albanytribune.com/28022013-lawmakers-introduce-targeted-wall-street-trading-tax.
Gregory Heires, “As the Misguided $1.4 Trillion Cuts Begin, a Wall Street Tax Looks Like a No-Brainer,” Reader Supported News, March 7, 2013, http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/16370-as-the-misguided-14-trillion-cuts-begin-a-wall-street-tax-looks-like-a-no-brainer.
Helene Fouquet and Adria Cimino, “French Lawmakers Pass Trading Transaction Tax,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 1, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-31/french-law-makers-pass-budget-bill-including-transaction-tax.
Student Researcher: Marisa Soski (San Francisco State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)
Over the past four decades, the wealth controlled by a small transnational elite has gradually increased and now amasses at a spectacular pace. In 2012, the world’s 100 wealthiest people became $241 billion richer and are presently worth a total $1.9 trillion.1 In the shadow of such opulence, however, close to 870 million of the world’s inhab-itants—roughly one in eight—suffer from “chronic undernourishment,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.2
In the US alone, over 200,000 families fell below the poverty line in 2011, a demarcation underneath which 10.4 million families—or 47.5 million Americans—now exist. In other words, close to one-third of all working families in the US lack the very basic resources to make ends meet. In contrast, as the Working Poor Families Project reported, “higher income families receive a [much] larger share of income relative to families at the bottom of the income distribution.”3
The news generated by corporate media all too frequently fail to capture the magnitude of this profound crisis. Because such media are first and foremost concerned with mesmerizing constituents of a lucrative advertising demographic, they seldom focus on poverty and economic inequality—the root causes of the street crime regularly highlighted in the local papers and broadcast news.
Further, since Americans often lack a genuine historical compass and are regularly bombarded with an array of bizarre and horrific reports purporting to be news, they are unlikely to recognize that things haven’t always been this way. Indeed, from a historic perspective such socioeconomic conditions seem a world away from the widely held notion of prosperity America once exemplified. For example, in the period immediately following World War II through the early 1970s, the average US family saw its annual income grow in accord with the gross domestic product (GDP).
In addition, most households carried little debt and credit purchases were hardly the routine occurrence or affirmation of lifestyle they have become today. The greater degree of economic enfranchisement and equality was largely due to a very different political-economic arrangement that included higher rates of unionization and greater tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations that provided for the emergence and growth of a distinct middle class—a taken-for-grant-ed American institution that is now increasingly a thing of the past.
“The experience of the two postwar eras is a story of two entirely different societies,” economics writer Robert Kuttner explained.
The first era was one of broadly shared gains. Between 1947 and 1973, productivity rose by 103.5 percent and median family income rose by almost exactly the same amount, 103.9 percent. But between 1973 and 2003 productivity rose by 71.3 percent, while median family income rose by just 21.9 percent. Factor out the extra hours worked by wives, and median family income rose scarcely at all.4
Between 2000 and 2006 American worker productivity increased by close to 20 percent yet wages paid to workers in nonsupervisory roles remained stagnant.5 And, as Censored story #13, below, suggests, since 2007 the US has been in an economic tailspin not experienced since the Great Depression.
These dramatic changes can be further explained through a sociological lens by considering the closely intertwined elements of social class and economic institutions. Beginning in the 1970s, the United States and many of those constituting the “power elite” or “governing class”—chronicled by political sociologists C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff, a half-century ago6—had begun to unilaterally abandon their implicit pact with working people. The captains of industry that roved the halls of government and the Pentagon, while holding sway in the boardrooms of major corporations, vigorously fought unionization, promoted a wasteful armaments industry, and started the long process of exporting the country’s manufacturing base overseas—an undertaking that has since rendered America a shadow of its former self.
Within the scope of human affairs, the economy’s foremost ide-ational doppelgangers are political thought and public opinion. In order to change the nation’s political economy, key individuals articulating the wishes of influential quarters within the governing class understood that any program to shift wealth upward must be accompanied by a far-reaching ideological campaign. In 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a detailed memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., chairman of the Chamber of Commerce’s education committee. In it, Powell urged an ambitious campaign to contest what he saw as a wide-scale espousal of liberal and leftist precepts and ideas on college campuses, in mass media, and elsewhere throughout America’s opinion-generating apparatus.
Powell argued that those concerned with defending the capitalist system must regain the higher ground in academe especially, thereby influencing the broader field of ideas. In his view, the Chamber of Commerce should advocate for the inclusion of free-market-minded scholars within the formal academy and even consider setting up think tanks promoting free enterprise-friendly concepts. “Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term,” Powell wrote.
Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term. The first essential is to establish the staffs of eminent scholars, writers and speakers, who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing and the speaking. It will al
so be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public.7
With neoliberal tenets now commonplace throughout the business community and broader culture, Powell’s then seemingly improbable plan has been fully realized. Further abetted by the increasing sophistication and scope of information technology, the power elite that once confined themselves to the nation-state have become a truly global phenomenon.8 Unlike their human counterparts, rendered finite through modest economic means and everyday drudgery, the supranational global overlords defy time and space, flying above perceived reality while cloaking themselves in the widely propagated myth of free market capitalism. “Their companies are transnational but they are transcendent,” historian David Noble declared. “They have overcome their mortality, the constraints of space and time, the particulars of place and the moment. Thus they live in their godliness, their virtual divinity, the culmination of a thousand years of earnest expectation.”9 The plans they have for humanity and other life on Earth, suggested in byzantine financial maneuverings and all-encompassing trade deals, portend a continued global transformation in accord with their vision—exclusive corporate control over the Earth’s broad expanse of material and human resources.
In their examination of the 1 percent, Project Censored’s Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro pointed to the worldwide “superclass,” an idea, developed by David Rothkopf, designating an international elite whose constituents exert their power through wealth and position or, to a lesser degree, cultural, scientific, or artistic talent and contributions frequently appropriated by the superelites.10 Like the globe-trotting Übermensch described by Noble, “the superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the population,” Phillips and Soeiro explain, or 6,000 to 7,000 people.
They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet-flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world. . . . They are 94 percent male, predominantly white, and mostly from North America and Europe. [They] are the people setting the agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO.11
Through their intricate monetary designs and international accords, those comprising this superclass and their immediate subordinates symbolically coordinate much of our material existence. Such a predicament could not be possible without a severely censored news media that keeps the broader public from knowing the frequency and degree to which it is methodically swindled.
This year’s top Censored stories addressing “Plutocracy, Poverty, and Prosperity” suggest the increasingly close relationship between information and economic inequality. Indeed, as the methods for transferring wealth upward are further perfected, and as the walls and bars of economic imprisonment thicken, the news and information that might illuminate such processes are largely purged from the public mind, thereby deterring the possibilities for collective action and meaningful reform encompassed in, for example, the recent Occupy movement. Yet because most of the large media outlets that Americans rely on for their news are owned, managed, and overseen by corporate board members constituting the 1 percent, it is not surprising that important news of their repeated con games and criminality is trivialized or ignored altogether.
Censored Story #2: Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Trillions in Tax Havens
Despite their already exorbitant wealth, the world’s richest institutions and individuals have sheltered $21 trillion and $10 trillion respectively—a total $31 trillion—in offshore tax havens and in over 14,000 funding entities to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The figure is more than the total annual GDP of the US and Japan combined, Carl Herman reported.12
An especially important observation in the report is that while this gigantic fortune parked in various accounts fortifies the wherewithal of the extraordinarily privileged, it simultaneously impedes economic productivity and the real potential for eradicating world poverty that kills one million children per month. Indeed, researchers estimate that such poverty could be ended for one to three trillion dollars. Further, curbing poverty through development aid and investment tends to reduce the rate of population growth and would thus diminish such loss of life.
Over the past two decades, Herman wrote, “more human beings have died from preventable poverty than from all wars, murders, and violent deaths of any kind in all human history.” Nonetheless, the US government has failed to uphold the promise to end global poverty made at the 1990 World Summit for Children. This abdication of responsibility might be considered alongside the wanton misuse of American military forces overseas and those profiting from such murder and destruction—many of whom are the same entities allowed to float their riches offshore with impunity.
In reality, there is a profound inverse correlation between such economic imbalances—a heaven and hell dichotomy of sorts reflected in the apparent transcendence of the lavish Hyde Park penthouse, the villa in Monaco, the private jet, versus the bottomless despair and misery of the sub-Saharan farmer driven off his land, or the Chinese sweatshop employee made to work and live in squalor for close to nothing. To be sure, much of the foundation for such increasingly bleak boundaries may be found in the wherewithal to shelter oneself from taxation as much as in the broad and elaborate trade agreements forged by global elites behind closed doors.
Censored Story #3: Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance
Modernity is characterized by a system of representative governance capable of articulating and exerting the popular will while preserving the basic constitutional rights and freedoms of all citizens. In this way, the inordinate power of corporations may be held in check, thereby providing a more level economic playing field for all.
In many ways, C. Wright Mills’s theoretical model of a power elite remains applicable to today’s condition, where over half a century of movement through revolving doors—some of which now go to lobbying firms—have brought about an almost thoroughly corporatized state that acts mostly on behalf of its intercontinental masters. As plans for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) suggest, however, the now familiar public-private coziness at the national level may be merely the end of the beginning. “What makes the TPP unique,” Andrew Gavin Marshall wrote,
is not simply the fact that it may be the largest “free trade agreement” ever negotiated, nor even the fact that only two of its roughly twenty-six articles actually deal with “trade,” but that it is also the most secretive trade negotiations in history, with no public oversight, input, or consultations.13
Incorporating the US, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia, the TPP became a priority for the Obama administration when it took office in 2009. Yet the true power interests that are intimately involved in shaping the massive pact include about 600 corporations that stand to profit enormously once the deal is sealed.
While the TPP was initially conceived as a counterbalance to China’s economic might, it has been redesigned “to be a structure on to which other nations, including possibly South Korea and eventually even China, could be bolted,” Asian Development Bank’s Iwan Azis observed.14
The TPP predictably received rave reviews from major transnationals and their lobby groups, yet many independent observers found the accord unsettling at best. In May 2012, over thirty legal scholars from nations falling under TPP provisions signed a letter to US Trade Representative Ron Kirk stating their “profound concern and disappointment at the lack of public participation, transparency and open government processes in the negotiations.” Along these lines, leading international trade lawyer Gary Horlick remarked, “This is the least transparent trade negotiation I have ever seen.”15
Kevin Zeese at Global Research wrote that the TPP will be a logical extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that displaced several hundred thousand US manufacturing jobs, increased income inequality, and threw up additional barriers to worker unionization
16 Yet among the TPP’s most ominous features is its expansion of an already functioning corporate-controlled court system that gives major transnationals the ability to sue governments for any lost profits incurred while adhering to the environmental, health, and worker safety laws protecting the natural resources and citizenry of host countries. As with most international trade deals, this requirement will also tend to further transfer governments’ autonomy over their own affairs to corporate elites accountable to no one but their shareholders17
Censored Story #6: Billionaires’ Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality
As suggested in Censored story #2, the world’s richest individuals and institutions are busy giving taxation authorities the slip in part because over the past few years alone they’ve simply become much wealthier. This is largely the manifestation of the very neoliberal policies—cutting taxes on the rich, accelerated deregulation and privatization, reducing social programs, relaxing laws protecting workers—they have since the late 1970S steadfastly promoted through sponsorship of endowed university professorships and “free market”-oriented think tanks that Lewis Powell called for in 1971.
George Monbiot has argued that the neoliberal economic programs test-piloted forty years ago by Latin American dictatorships and proffered with the underlying notion that economic growth would arise through lower taxes and a more “flexible” labor force have had the exact opposite effect.18 The undermining of postwar economic policies—which had reined in elites, compelled a broader distribution of wealth, and created a more robust working class with consistently rising incomes—opened the ground for elites to advocate trimming government and scaling back unions as means to unparalleled growth and decreased unemployment.
The results have been spectacular for the 1 percent. Yet for the overwhelming majority they have been disastrous. The loss of unionized jobs has contributed to wage suppression in most every occupation while “free trade” deals such as NAFTA and the impending TPP brought geo-economic forces to bear on workers. “As wages stagnated,” Monbiot contended, “people supplemented their incomes with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware.”19 Even though the consequences have in-tensified wealth accumulation among an infinitesimally small stratum, citizens remain largely unaware of the extent to which they are fleeced, quite literally on an everyday basis.