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Letters: Signed, sealed, delivered, your views
CU HAMPERS STRUGGLE AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE
With regards to CU’s Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit, I applaud the university for bringing in the brilliant Robin Wall Kimmerer to talk about her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Her talk drew a full house to the Boulder eater on Dec. 1. e book was assigned as a “One Read” for the entire university community. In a pre-talk slide show, CU said the book “invites us to consider our relationship with the natural world and imagine futures of repair and restoration.” It’s a shame that CU’s administration hasn’t understood its assigned reading. e university may be “imagining a future of repair and restoration,” but right here, right now, the university is creating a future of despair and degradation by proceeding with its plan to pave over the largest remaining wetlands on the Front Range. CU’s action will hamper our struggle against the climate crisis by destroying a major carbon sink, will ravage the dwelling places of several endangered species, will increase the risk of ood damage when we get a 500-year ood, and will make impossible the restoration that was originally envisioned for this property (editor’s note: the CU South project).
According to an article in the Daily Camera, CU Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano says, “I want to work on solutions that I can make decisions about.” Well, Mr. DiStefano, you have that chance. Re-read the chapter on “ e Honorable Harvest.” en make the decision that doesn’t reek of breathtaking hypocrisy.
Chris Ho man/Boulder
DIVESTMENT ISN’T ENOUGH
Divesting its fossil fuel holdings would show CU is serious about addressing global climate change and pollution, but it will do little to change the continuing buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. ese are valuable income sources and will be gobbled up by others in our entrepreneurial economy, and the university is more a corporate business than a socially responsible public institution. e focus for now should be on reducing its climate footprint, something its South Campus expansion ignores completely.
Robert Porath/Boulder
SUPPORT A RENTER’S TAX CREDIT
A ordable housing is one of the biggest problems in America (Boulder Weekly, “When no home is a ordable, where do you live?” Dec. 1, 2022). e good news is that Colorado voters passed some relief to build more housing and provide mortgage assistance. Another initiative in Congress has been a renters’ tax credit, modeled after the Child Tax Credit (championed by Sen. Michael Bennet and hopefully to be renewed this month). Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have both proposed this kind of legislation for renters. Colorado voters can help by asking those who represent them to pass both of these initiatives, that will not only slow rising homelessness, but provide ladders out of poverty for millions of families.
Willie Dickerson/Snohomish, Washington
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The billionaire’s press dominates censorship beat
Project Censored’s list of the year’s most under-reported stories show one pattern dominating all others this year
by Paul Rosenberg, senior editor, Project Censored
Since its founding in 1976, Project Censored has been focused on stories that aren’t censored in the authoritarian government sense, but in a broader sense re ective of what a functioning democracy should be, censorship de ned as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method — including bias, omission, underreporting or self-censorship — that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.” It is, after all, the reason that journalism enjoys special protection in the First Amendment.
Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. is new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as FAANG — Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Net ix, and Google (Alphabet). ere are multiple patterns to be found in the list of Project Censored’s stories, and these di erent patterns have much to tell us about the forces shaping what remains hidden. But the dominance of billionaire control truly is remarkable. It shows how profoundly the concentration of corporate wealth and power in the hands of so few distorts everything we see — or don’t — in the world around us every day.
is piece has been edited for length. You can nd a version with all 10 of Project Censored’s top stories online at boulderweekly.com
Globally, the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies of $11 million per minute, primarily from lack of liability for the externalized health costs of deadly air pollution (42%), damages caused by extreme weather events (29%), and costs from tra c collisions and congestion (15%). And two-thirds of those subsidies come from just ve countries: the United States, Russia, India, China and Japan. ese are key ndings from a study of 191 nations published by the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, in September 2021, that were reported in e Guardian and Treehugger the next month, but have been ignored in the corporate media.
No national government currently prices fossil fuels at what the IMF calls their “e cient price” — covering both their supply and environmental costs. “Instead, an estimated 99% of coal, 52% of road diesel, 47% of natural gas, and 18% of gasoline are priced at less than half their e cient price,” Project Censored notes.
“E cient fuel pricing in 2025 would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 36% below baseline levels, which is in line with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees, while raising revenues worth 3.8% of global GDP and preventing 0.9 million local air pollution deaths,” the IMF report states. e G7 nations had previously agreed to scrap fossil fuel subsidies by 2025, but the IMF found that subsidies have increased in recent years, and will continue increasing.
“Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies could lead to higher energy prices and, ultimately, political protests and social unrest,” Project Censored notes. “But, as e Guardian and Treehugger each reported, the IMF recommended a ‘comprehensive strategy’ to protect consumers — especially low-income households — impacted by rising energy costs, and workers in displaced industries.”
Wage Theft: U.S. Businesses Suffer Few Consequences for Stealing Millions from Workers Every Year
In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute released a study saying that just one form of wage theft — minimum wage violations — costs U.S. workers an estimated $15 billion annually, impacting some 17% of low-wage workers.
One reason it’s so rampant is that companies are seldom punished, as Alexia Fernández Campbell and Joe Yerardi reported for the Center for Public Integrity in May 2021, drawing on 15 years of data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. “ e agency ned only about one in four repeat o enders during that period. And it ordered those companies to pay workers cash damages — penalty money in addition to back wages — in just 14% of those cases,” they wrote. In addition, “ e division often lets businesses avoid repaying their employees all the money they’re owed. In all, the agency has let more than 16,000 employers get away with not paying $20.3 million in back wages since 2005.”
We’re talking about some major companies: Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle K Stores were among “the worst o enders,” they reported.
“Wage theft includes a range of illegal practices, such as paying less than minimum wage, withholding tips, not paying overtime, or requiring workers to work through breaks or o the clock. It impacts service workers, low-income workers, immigrant and guest workers, and communities of color the most,” Project Censored explains.
Wage theft also includes worker misclassi cation as independent contractors — long the case with port truckers, and more recently gig workers.
Lack of resources is largely to blame for the lax enforcement, Project Censored explains: “As of February 2021, the Wage and Hour Division employed only 787 investigators, a proportion of just one investigator per 182,000 workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. For comparison, in 1948, the division employed one investigator per 22,600 workers, or eight times the current proportion.”
Project Censored notes that the Wage eft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act of 2022, if passed, would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to protect workers from wage theft.
EPA Withheld Reports on Dangerous Chemicals
In January 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, stopped releasing legally required disclosures about chemicals that present a “substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” ey had previously been posted in a searchable public database called ChemView.
In November 2021, e Intercept’s Sharon Lerner reported the EPA had received “at least 1,240 substantial risk reports since January 2019, but only one was publicly available. e suppressed reports documented “the risk of chemicals’ serious harms, including eye corrosion, damage to the brain and nervous system, chronic toxicity to honeybees, and cancer in both people and animals,” Lerner wrote.
“ e reports include noti cations about highly toxic poly uoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, chemical compounds that are known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they build up in our bodies and never break down in the environment,” Project Censored notes. “ e Environmental Working Group explains that ‘very small doses of PFAS have been linked to cancer, reproductive and immune system harm, and other diseases. For decades, chemical companies covered up evidence of PFAS’ health hazards.’”
It wasn’t just the public that was kept in the dark, Lerner reported: “ e substantial risk reports have not been uploaded to the databases used most often by risk assessors searching for information about chemicals, according [to] one of the EPA scientists… ey have been entered only into an internal database that is di cult to access and search. As a result, little — and perhaps none — of the information about these serious risks to health and the environment has been incorporated into the chemical assessments completed during this period.”
In January 2022, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led a lawsuit to compel EPA to disclose the reports, following up on an earlier public records request which, the National Law Review reported, was “built upon information reported in a November 2021 article in e Intercept.” Just weeks later, EPA announced it would resume posting the reports in ChemView.
At Least 128 Members of Congress Invested in Fossil Fuel Industry
At least 100 U.S. representatives and 28 U.S. senators have nancial interests in the fossil fuel industry.
In November and December of 2021, Davie Moore reported in Sludge that 74 Republicans, 59 Democrats, and one independent have fossil fuel industry investments, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats in both chambers. e top ten House investors are all Republicans. But it’s quite di erent in the Senate, where two of the top three investors are Democrats, and Democrats’ total investments, $8,604,000, are more than double the Senate Republicans’ total of $3,994,126. Topping the list is Joe Manchin (West Virginia), with up to $5.5 million of fossil fuel industry assets, while John Hickenlooper (Colorado) is third, with up to $1 million.
“Most signi cantly, many hold key seats on in uential energy-related committees,” Project Censored notes. Senators include Manchin, chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Tina Smith (D-MN), chair of the Agriculture Subcommittee on Rural Development and Energy, and Tom Carper (D-DE), chair of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works.
In the House, Project Censored explains, “nine of the 22 Republican members of the Energy and Commerce Committee are invested in the fossil fuel industry.
Dark Money Interference in U.S. Politics Undermines Democracy
e same group of conservative dark money organizations that opposed President Joe Biden’s
Supreme Court nomination — Judicial Crisis Network [JCN], e 85 Fund and their a liated groups — also funded entities that played a role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to a report by the watchdog group Accountable.US. ey’re closely linked to Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society, with money coming from Donors Trust (a dark-money group backed by the Koch network) and the Bradley Foundation.
“ ese dark money groups not only funded Leo’s network of organizations to the sum of over $52 million in 2020, but also funded entities in 2020 that played a role in the insurrection to the sum of over $37 million,” Accountable.US reported.
While there has been coverage of dark money spending on Supreme Court nominations, Igor Derysh at Salon was alone in reporting the related involvement in Jan. 6.
Just one group, JCN, spent $2.5 million “before Biden even named his nominee” Ketanji Brown Jackson, Derysh reported, “accusing Biden of caving in to leftists by promising a ‘Supreme Court nominee who will be a liberal activist.’” On the other hand, “JCN spent tens of millions helping to con rm Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, according to Open Secrets, and launched a $25 million e ort to con rm Justice Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 election.”
More disturbingly, “Donors Trust has funneled more than $28 million to groups that pushed election lies or in some way funded the rally ahead of the Capitol riot,” while “members of the Federalist Society played key roles in Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election,” including attorney (and former visiting CU professor) John Eastman, architect of Trump’s plan to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), who led the objections to the certi cation of Trump’s loss after the riot, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led a lawsuit to throw out election results in key states, e ectively overturning Biden’s victory. In addition, 13 of the 17 other Republican attorneys general who joined Paxton’s suit were also Federalist Society members.
Corporate Consolidation Causing Record Infl ation in Food Prices
As Food and Water Watch reported in Nov 2021, “while the cost of meat shot up, prices paid to farmers actually declined, spurring a federal investigation.” at investigation is ongoing, but meat conglomerates Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Smith eld Foods and JBS have paid over $225 million to settle related civil suits in the poultry, beef and pork markets. at’s just part of the problem. A July 2021 joint investigation by Food and Water Watch and e Guardian reported “a handful of ‘food giants’
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— including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Conagra, Unilever and Del Monte — control an average of 64% of sales of 61 popular grocery items,” Project Censored notes. ree companies own 93% of carbonated soft drink brands; while another three produce 73% of the cereals on o er, and a single company, PepsiCo, owns ve of the most popular dip brands — 88% of the market. Altogether, “four rms or fewer controlled at least 50% of the market for 79% of the groceries,” e Guardian reported.
It’s not just producers: “In an October 2021 article for Common Dreams, Kenny Stancil documents that food producers, distributors, and grocery store chains are engaging in pandemic pro teering and taking advantage of “decades of consolidation, which has given a handful of corporations an ever-greater degree of market control and with it, the power to set prices,” according to research by the Groundwork Collaborative.
As for grocers, “Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the country, cited rising in ation as the reason for hiking prices in their stores even as they cut worker pay by 8%” in 2020, Project Censored notes. Kroger’s CEO earned 909 times what the median worker earned, and “the company spent $1.498 billion on stock buybacks between April 2020 and July 2021 to enrich its shareholders,” the Groundwork Collaborative reported.
“One of the most common in ation scapegoats, supply chain problems, is itself a consequence of consolidation,” Project Censored notes. “Just three global alliances of ocean shippers are responsible for 80% of all cargo... ese shippers raked in “nearly $80 billion in the rst three quarters of 2021, twice as much as in the entire 10-year period from 2010 to 2020,” by increasing their rates as much as tenfold.
Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets
In November 2021, for MintPress News, Alan MacLeod examined more than 30,000 individual grants from the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and found it had donated “more than $319 million to fund news outlets, journalism centers and training programs, press associations, and speci c media campaigns, raising questions about con icts of interest and journalistic independence,” Project Censored notes.
“Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors myriad in uential foreign organizations, including the BBC, e Guardian, e Financial Times and e Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera,” he reported.
“MacLeod’s report includes a number of Gates-funded news outlets that also regularly feature in Project Censored’s annual Top 25 story lists, such as the Solutions Journalism Network ($7.2m), e Conversation ($6.6m), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism ($1m), and ProPublica ($1m),” Project Censored notes. “Direct awards to news outlets often targeted speci c issues, MacLeod reported. For example, one grant earmarked $2.3 million for e Texas Tribune ‘to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.’ As MacLeod noted, given Bill Gates’ advocacy of the charter school movement — which undermines teachers’ unions and e ectively aims to privatize the public education system — ‘a cynic might interpret this as planting pro-corporate charter school propaganda into the media, disguised as objective news reporting.’”
Paul Rosenberg is a Los Angeles, California-based writer, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Salon and Al Jazeera English. ©Random Lengths News, a division of Beacon Light Press, 2022.
