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Rising carbon dioxide levels threaten to permanently disrupt vital ocean bacteria
Global warming is a recurrent Project Censored subject. Systemic changes associated with global warming threaten human welfare and all life on Earth through a multitude of different pathways. These remain largely hidden from public view. One potential pathway— directly dependent on carbon, not temperature—is through the catastrophic overproduction of Trichodesmium bacteria, which could devastate the entire marine food chain in some regions. It lives in nutrient-poor parts of the ocean, where it transforms atmospheric nitrogen into ammonium, an essential nutrient for other organisms—from algae to whales. A five-year study by researchers at the University of Southern California and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that subjecting hundreds of generations of the bacteria to predicted CO2 levels in the year 2100 caused them to evolve into “reproductive overdrive,” growing faster and producing 50 percent more nitrogen. As a result, they could consume significant quantities of scarce nutrients, such as iron and phosphorus, that other organisms need to survive. Or the Trichodesmium bacteria could drive themselves into extinction, depriving other organisms of ammonium. “Most significantly, the researchers found that even when the bacteria was returned to lower, present-day levels of carbon dioxide, Trichodesmium remained ‘stuck in the fast lane,’” Project Censored noted, a finding that one researcher described as “unprecedented in evolutionary biology.”
About this story:
For more on Project Censored, including info on purchasing the special, 40th anniversary edition of Project Censored’s book, visit projectcensored.org. Paul Rosenberg is senior editor and Terelle Jerricks is managing editor at Random Lengths News, an alternative biweekly newspaper in the Los Angeles area.
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Search engine algorithms and electronic voting machines’ potential to swing 2016 election
Social media has played an important role in recent social movements, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, but technology can potentially undermine democracy as well as empower it. In particular, search engine algorithms and electronic voting machines provide opportunities for manipulation of voters and votes. Mark Frary, in Index on Censorship magazine, describes the latest research by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology on what they call the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, or SEME. Their study of more than 4,500 undecided voters in the United States and India showed that biased search rankings “could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more” and “could be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.” In an earlier article for Politico, Epstein wrote that SEME “turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered …. [W]e believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.” Because courts have ruled that their source code is proprietary, private companies that own electronic voting machines are essentially immune to transparent public oversight, as Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis docu-
mented in their book, The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft. In 2016, about 80 percent of the U.S. electorate was expected to vote using outdated electronic voting machines that rely on proprietary software from private corporations, according to a September 2015 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. The study identified “increased failures and crashes, which can lead to long lines and lost votes” as the “biggest risk” of outdated voting equipment, while noting that older machines also have “serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today.” “From a security perspective, old software is riskier, because new methods of attack are constantly being developed, and older software is likely to be vulnerable,” Jeremy Epstein of the National Science Foundation noted. On Democracy Now! and elsewhere, Wasserman and Fitrakis have advocated for universal, hand-counted paper ballots and automatic voter registration as part of their “Ohio Plan” to restore electoral integrity. While there has been some corporate media coverage of Epstein and Robertson’s research, the transparency and reliability advantages of returning to paper ballots remain virtually unexplored and undiscussed.
Corporate exploitation of global refugee crisis masked as humanitarianism
The world is experiencing a global refugee crisis (60 million worldwide, according to a June 2015 report, 11.5 million of them Syrian). This has been covered in the corporate media—though not nearly enough to generate an appropriate response. What hasn’t been covered is the increasingly well-organized exploitation of refugees, particularly those displaced in Syria. An AlterNet article by Sarah Lazare—cited by Project Censored—warned of the World Bank’s private enterprise solution to the Syrian displacement crisis. “Under the guise of humanitarian aid, the World Bank is enticing Western companies to launch ‘new investments’ in Jordan in order to profit from the labor of stranded Syrian refugees, Lazare wrote. In a country where migrant workers have faced forced servitude, torture and wage theft, there is reason to be concerned that this capital-intensive ‘solution’ to the mounting crisis of displacement will establish sweatshops that specifically target war refugees for hyperexploitation.” A World Bank press release touted “the creation of special economic zones or SEZs,” but Project Censored noted, “Myriam Francois, a journalist and research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, told Lazare that the development of SEZs in Jordan ‘will change refugee camps from emergency and temporary responses to a crisis, to much more permanent settlements.’” The SEZ proposals, Francois said, are “less about Syrian needs and more about keeping Syrian refugees out of Europe by creating (barely) sustainable conditions within the camps, which would then make claims to asylum much harder to recognize.” Another story, by Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, described a related agreement between Turkey and the European Union to keep millions of refugees from entering Europe as “a deal between devils,” adding that Turkey has “cashed in on the people it has helped make homeless.” In addition to the $3.3 billion in EU money, Project Censored noted: Turkey has also sought admission to the European Union, and, with this, the right for 75 million Turks to enter Europe without visa restrictions as a condition for controlling its refugee population. Thus, according to Ford, Turkey has engaged in a “vast protections racket trap,” effectively agreeing to protect Europe from further incursions by “the formerly colonized peoples whose labor and lands have fattened Europe and its white settler states for half a millennium.” “Europeans will never accept Turkey into the fold, because it is Muslim and not-quite-white,” Ford concluded.
Syrian refugee camp in Suruc, Turkey. PHOTO BY RADEKPROCYK/ISTOCK
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