The Most Censored Stories of the Year (featuring the Editors of Project Censored)
Episode 229: Rumble with Michael Mooreby Michael Moore
Feb. 3, 2022
Mickey Huff & Andy Lee Roth of Project CensoredFriends,
Today on Rumble, I talk with Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored, an organization who, since 1976, has each year compiled a list of stories ignored or covered up by the corporate media. They also act as advocates for journalists and those who must fight to bring us the truth.
Learn more about Project Censored's vital work at
www.projectcensored.orgBuy Project Censored's
"The State of the Free Press 2022"And listen to Mickey's radio show/podcast
"The Project Censored Show"If you have not read my Substack letter about what we can do to
Free Leonard Peltier, please do so, share it, and contact President Biden urging he grant Peltier clemency.
Also, I started off Black History Month by sharing one of the songs on my Pandemic Playlist, the 2016 hip-hop hit "White Privilege II," by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, featuring Jamila Woods. It’s a complicated, audacious track that wrestles with our (white people’s) own white privilege and complicity in an America that is not equal for everyone.
Read my comments here (which include a chance meeting with Chris Rock).
Music:
Pink Floyd - "Us and Them"******************
#1. Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americansby Project Censored
November 9, 2021
More than 1.1 million seniors in the federal government’s Medicare program could die prematurely over the next decade because they will be unable to afford the high prices of their prescription medications, according to a November 2020 study issued by the West Health Policy Center, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research group, and Xcenda, the research arm of AmerisourceBergen, a drug distributor. As Kenny Stancil reported for Common Dreams, West Health projects that, with the continuation of current drug pricing trends, “cost-related nonadherence” will become “a leading cause of death in the U.S., ahead of diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and kidney disease” by 2030.
According to the West Health/Xcenda study, the rising cost of prescription medicines will lead to an estimated 112,000 premature deaths annually, due to elderly Americans being unable to afford necessary medications, a situation referred to as “cost-related nonadherence.” Explaining that “medication adherence” is a term used to describe how well patients follow healthcare professionals’ instructions for taking medications, the study stated, “unaffordable drug prices can significantly impair medication adherence.” As medicines become increasingly expensive, patients skip doses, ration prescriptions, or quit treatment altogether. According to the president of the West Health Policy Center, Timothy Lash, “One of the biggest contributors to poor health, hospital admissions, higher healthcare costs and preventable death is patients failing to take their medications as prescribed.”
A separate study, published in March 2020 by JAMA, one of the leading peer-reviewed medical journals, found that list prices on branded pharmaceutical products in the United States increased by 159 percent from 2007 to 2018. The high cost of medicine will raise Medicare expenses by an estimated $17.7 billion each year from 2021 to 2031, the West Health/Xcenda study reported. Established in 1965, Medicare is the national health insurance program that serves as the primary provider for Americans aged 65 and older.
The West Health/Xcenda study examined the impact of cost-related nonadherence on the general Medicare population, with a focus on five medical conditions that “significantly affect seniors and for which effective pharmaceutical treatments are available,” including several types of heart disease, chronic kidney disease, and type 2 diabetes.
Medicare beneficiaries are responsible for 25 percent of a prescription drug’s cost, until their expenses reach the out-of-pocket maximum. For this reason, “even with Medicare insurance, what seniors pay is linked to a drug’s price,” and patients are likely to experience “a significant increase” in their prescription costs as drug companies continue to raise list prices, according to the West Health/Xcenda study. A June 2021 AARP study found that, between 2019 and 2020, the retail prices for 260 widely-used brand name prescription drugs increased by 2.9 percent, more than twice the general inflation rate of 1.3 percent. AARP reported that, “[f]or the average older American taking 4.7 prescription drugs per month, the annual cost of therapy would have been more than $31,000 for 2020”—a figure that exceeded the median annual income for individual Medicare beneficiaries in 2019 ($29,650).
Stancil’s Common Dreams report reviewed policy changes that could lower the cost of prescription drugs and “curb the power of Big Pharma, resulting in far fewer avoidable deaths.” The West Health/Xcenda study recommended that limits on drug price increases and empowering Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies on behalf of patients could prevent 93,900 deaths per year and reduce Medicare spending by $475.9 billion by 2030. As a model for policymakers, the study pointed specifically to the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act (H.R. 3), which had been passed by House Democrats in December 2019 but was stalled in the Senate by Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell at the time of the Common Dreams report. Since then, the newly elected president, Joe Biden, has declined to include Medicare negotiation in his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan proposal, but House Democrats, led by Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), have reintroduced the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act.
Soaring prescription drug costs have been widely reported by corporate news outlets. Corporate coverage typically highlights the rising costs of the most expensive branded medications, as exemplified by a January 2021 CBS News report. In April 2019, the New York Times reported that Americans had “borrowed an estimated $88 billion over the last year to pay for health care,” according to a survey conducted by West Health and Gallup. But corporate news outlets appear to have entirely ignored the subsequent West Health/Xcenda study on the consequences of rising drug prices for elderly Americans enrolled in Medicare. In May 2021, Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, and David Mitchell, the founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs, co-authored an opinion piece for The Hill, advocating for H.R. 3, the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, and cited figures about preventable deaths from the West Health/Xcenda study.
The public’s understanding of the debate surrounding H.R. 3 and other proposed legislation designed to control inflation in prescription drug prices ought to be informed by accurate information about the grim repercussions of continuing the status quo. Sadly, the corporate media have failed to provide the public with such information for far too long, and the consequences could turn out to be deadly for millions of seniors.
Kenny Stancil, “High Drug Prices Could Result in Premature Deaths of More Than 1.1 Million Seniors in Next Decade: Analysis,” Common Dreams, November 23, 2020.
Student Researcher: Silvia Morales (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)
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#2. Journalists Investigating Financial Crimes Threatened by Global Elitesby Project Censored
November 9, 2021
In November 2020 the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC) released “Unsafe for Scrutiny,” a report about the threats faced by journalists investigating the financial misconduct that lets ‘dirty money’ flow through the world’s most powerful banks. As Spencer Woodman detailed in an article for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the report reveals that global elites have been abusing their intimidating legal and financial powers by targeting reporters with defamation lawsuits, “cease and desist” letters, social media smear campaigns, trolling, verbal harassment, and even occasionally physical violence. Yet, as Woodman underscored, the report concluded that legal threats “are chief among the types of harassment facing journalists conducting financial investigations.” The harassment faced by investigative journalists looking into financial crimes has a chilling effect on reporting about corruption and, ultimately, infringes the public’s right to know about the money laundering, bribery, theft of public funds, and other illicit acts carried out (or facilitated) by wealthy banks, government officials, and corporate leaders.
Sponsored in part by the Justice for Journalists Foundation, the FPC’s study was based on a survey of investigative reporters from all around the world, many of whom had worked on cross-border financial crime investigations such as the multi-year investigations into the financial records leaked in the Panama Papers or the FinCEN Files. Responses from 63 investigative journalists working in 41 countries indicated that a vast majority had faced threats and harassment during their investigations into financial crimes. Susan Coughtrie, project director at the Foreign Policy Centre, told Woodman that the large-scale transnational investigations conducted by these reporters exposed “explosive insights into how political and business elites, as well as organised crime groups, all over the world get away with financial crime and corruption.”
The report found that wealthy individuals and corporations involved in financial corruption often resort to legal action against underfunded investigative journalists as a tactic to thwart their research into corruption. These frivolous suits, known as “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or SLAPPs, are said to “create a similar chilling effect on media freedom to more overt violence or attack,” according to the FPC’s study. More than 70 percent of respondents to the FPC survey reported being subjected to threats of legal action against them. The report also noted that these legal threats are often communicated in secret, in letters from lawyers marked “private and confidential” intended to intimidate journalists into shielding the action from public view. One journalist working full-time in Africa who responded to the survey explained that “[t]hreats of legal action, especially in the UK[,] where court processes themselves are often prohibitively expensive, has forced me to be increasingly vigilant in terms of sustaining the facts and claims in a story.”
According to Woodman, the United Kingdom, with its plaintiff-friendly defamation laws, “was, by far, the most frequent country of origin for legal threats, FPC found.” Unlike Canada, Australia, and certain US states, the United Kingdom has not passed anti-SLAPP legislation, making its courts an attractive venue for elites seeking to use the law to bully journalists into silence.
In a May 8, 2021 column in the Guardian that mentioned the FPC report, Nick Cohen discussed how the United Kingdom’s costly court system has turned it into “the censorship capital of the democratic world.” As evidence, he pointed to the case of a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, Catherine Belton. In April 2020, Belton published Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West, a book that traces how Vladimir Putin and his inner circle consolidated their grip on political power in Moscow and looted much of the country’s wealth in the process. As Cohen explained, in response, a host of Putin’s super-wealthy associates are now bombarding Belton with one lawsuit after another. According to Cohen, “Rosneft, the Kremlin-dominated oil producer (market capitalisation circa $75bn) whose chief executive, president and chairman, Igor Sechin, began his rise to power as Vladimir Putin’s secretary in the 1990s, has lodged an action for libel.” Belton is likewise being sued by Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, for what he claims are “false and defamatory” statements in the book. The owner of Russia’s largest private bank, Mikhail Fridman, and at least two other Russian oligarchs are also bringing libel suits against Belton over Putin’s People.
The Foreign Policy Centre report additionally found that the intimidation and harassment faced by investigative journalists like Belton often goes well beyond lawsuits or legal threats. As Woodman explained in his article on the study, “60% of respondents working in sub-Saharan Africa [. . .] and 50% of respondents from North Africa and the Middle East region reported threats of physical attack.” Moreover, the report revealed that a significant number of financial corruption reporters have experienced on- and off-line surveillance, hacking of their social media accounts, questioning by authorities, denial of journalistic credentials, and blacklisting.
Tragically, powerful individuals being investigated for corruption have sometimes turned to murder to prevent further probing into their illicit acts. The fatal October 16, 2017 car bombing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who reported on the Panama Papers and corruption in Malta, struck fear into the hearts of many journalists working to expose rampant financial misconduct. In February 2018, Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak, who was investigating tax fraud and embezzlement among Slovak businessmen, was shot to death in a village not far from Bratislava, a city in which he’d recently investigated suspicious real estate transactions. According to FPC’s report, an additional thirty reporters from Brazil, Russia, India, Ukraine, Mexico, and other countries who were researching financial corruption have been murdered since 2017.
While a number of larger corporate news outlets such as the BBC, BuzzFeed, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal have publicized the findings of investigative journalists digging into wrongdoing by the world’s most powerful banks and wealthy individuals, virtually no corporate media attention has been given to the threats faced by journalists doing the digging. In addition to Woodman’s ICIJ article and Cohen’s column, the “Unsafe for Scrutiny” report was the focus of a November 2, 2020 article in the Guardian and a brief November 6, 2020 report on Voice of America. OpenDemocracy, the UK-based independent, nonprofit news site, also published a short commentary on the report. To date, however, no major commercial newspaper or broadcast outlet in the United States has so much as mentioned the FPC’s report.
Threats to journalists are not only detrimental to individual reporters, they also undermine freedom of the press and jeopardize the health of democratic polities that rely on that freedom to keep corruption from spreading like wildfire. This story deserves far more attention than it has received.
Spencer Woodman, “Threats, Violence, Trolling, and Frivolous Lawsuits Used to Silence Journalists Investigating Financial Crimes, Survey Finds,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, November 2, 2020.
Michael W. Hudson, Dean Starkman, Simon Bowers et al., “Global Banks Defy U.S. Crackdowns by Serving Oligarchs, Criminals and Terrorists,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, September 20, 2020, updated December 22, 2020.
Nick Cohen, “Are Our Courts a Playground for Bullies? Just Ask Catherine Belton,” The Guardian, May 8, 2021.
Student Researcher: Zach McNanna (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)*****************
#3. Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Workers’ Rightsby Project Censored
November 9, 2021
3. Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Workers’ Rights
After the United States went into lockdown in spring 2020, millions of people were designated ‘essential workers’—individuals who were expected to continue laboring at their jobs as meatpackers, teachers, janitors, delivery drivers, nurses, or grocery store clerks, at the potential cost of their lives. In response, thousands of wildcat strikes erupted to challenge dangerous working conditions and confront chronically low wages for these essential positions. This wave of wildcat strikes has continued and reached remarkable levels in the United States, as documented by Mike Elk from the labor news website Payday Report. Elk created a continuously updated COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map, which had identified 1,100 wildcat strikes as of March 24, 2021, many of which the corporate media have chosen to ignore.
Traditionally, workers who strike belong to unions and only go on strike after discussing the possibility within their local (and sometimes national) unions and then taking a vote. Wildcat strikes are a different matter; they occur when workers without unions, or without explicit approval by the unions that do represent them, collectively stop working. Most wildcat strikes last for only a few days, though they often result in employers making some concessions to workers’ demands.
Throughout our unprecedented national health crisis, employers have relentlessly pushed to cut workplace costs. Many unauthorized work stoppages throughout the nation have been over appalling actions by employers who put workers at risk; some of the many outrageous actions by employers that essential workers were expected to simply accept included skimping on protective gear that could prevent workers from contracting the coronavirus, and attempting to cut workers’ ability to receive healthcare. In one instance, as Mike Elk of Payday Report detailed in a July 23, 2020 article, seven hundred healthcare workers in Santa Rosa, California went on strike because their hospital lacked sufficient personal protective equipment to keep employees safe, and management warned employees that their insurance fees would be doubled if they wanted continued coverage for their families. Another example that Elk covered in the same article took place in St. Joseph, Missouri, where 120 sheet metal workers went on strike due to management’s repeated attempts to cut their healthcare benefits during the pandemic. As Michael Sainato from the Guardian reported, the Trump administration failed to issue federal mandates that employers take specific steps to keep workers safe from COVID-19, allowing employers to implement the government’s health and safety guidance as they pleased.
In some cases, workers have engaged in wildcat work stoppages to advance long-standing demands for higher wages, leveraging their increased bargaining power during the pandemic to wrest pay concessions from employers. In May 2020, workers at fifty McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, and other fast food restaurants and coffee shops throughout the state of Florida staged a day-long strike for higher pay and better protective equipment. Similarly, in April 2021, employees at Peet’s Coffee & Tea locations in the Chicago area staged a coordinated work stoppage together with the Fight for $15 campaign to demand workplace protections and quarantine pay.
Another important and underreported force driving the massive wave of wildcat strikes this past year has been Black and Brown workers using digital technologies to organize collective actions as a way to press some of the demands for racial justice raised by Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protestors. As Mike Elk explained in a July 8, 2020 article for Payday Report, in June 2020 “the U.S. saw more than 600 strikes or work stoppages by workers in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. . . . Payday [Report] estimates that the strike and work stoppages total [that the Strike Wave Interactive Map has identified] is likely a severe underestimation as many non-union Black and Brown workers are now calling out en masse to attend Black Lives Matter protests without it ever being reported in the press or on social media.” Elk observed that many Black and Brown workers believe white labor leaders fail to understand organizing strategies that are nontraditional, such as using social media platforms to create a viral movement: “Scores of Black and Brown workers say that this failure is yet another indicator of how the overwhelming[ly] white leadership of organized labor struggles to understand the organizing of Black and Brown workers.”
Corporate media have largely avoided reporting on the burgeoning wildcat protests in the United States. While local and regional newspapers and broadcast news outlets have reported on particular local actions, corporate news coverage has failed to report the strike wave as a wave, at no time connecting the dots of all the individual, seemingly isolated work stoppages and walkouts to create a picture of the overarching trend. Thus, the one-day strikes by fast food and coffee shop workers discussed above were covered only by national restaurant trade publications and local news outlets. No national corporate newspapers or broadcast news operations bothered to report on these unprecedented coordinated actions.
It is telling that the most in-depth discussion of the COVID-19 strike wave in the nation’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, was not a news report at all but an opinion piece, published March 30, 2020, by Steven Greenhouse, arguing that businesses’ refusal to provide workers with gloves, masks, and other protections against the virus had “set off a burst of walkouts, sickouts and wildcat strikes.” A few other New York Times articles made fleeting references to wildcat strikes, including one that briefly noted several impromptu strikes at Amazon warehouses. Outlets such as USA Today, the Washington Post, and Fox News have yet to run a single story on the wildcat strikes sweeping the nation. Overall, the establishment media’s scattered, scant coverage has rendered invisible the remarkable work of the working-class Black and Brown activists who are largely responsible for this wave of protests.
The sole exception to the corporate media’s blackout on the year-long strike wave occurred during a brief period in August 2020 when Vox, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all suddenly decided to cover wildcat strikes, but only of one particular kind—specifically, those involving highly-paid athletes on pro basketball and baseball teams. The players walked out against the terms of their contracts to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by Wisconsin police, and the corporate media coverage of US strikes swiftly ended once the players returned later that same week.
“COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map,” Payday Report, March 2020, updated continuously.
Michael Sainato, “Strikes Erupt as US Essential Workers Demand Protection Amid Pandemic,” The Guardian, May 19, 2020.
Mike Elk, “700 CA. Hospital Workers Strike—UNC May Strike Over Reopening—Sheet Metal Strike in Missouri,” Payday Report, July 23, 2020.
Mike Elk, “How Black & Brown Workers are Redefining Strikes in the Digital COVID Age,” Payday Report, July 8, 2020.
Student Researcher: Cem Ismail Addemir (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)
Illustration by Anson Stevens-Bollen.
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#6. Canary Mission Blacklists Pro-Palestinian Activists, Chilling Free Speech Rightsby Project Censored
November 9, 2021
Pro-Palestinian activism—including the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that works to peacefully pressure Israel to obey international law and respect Palestinians’ human rights—has become a contentious testing ground for activists’ rights and free-speech policies, especially on US college and university campuses.
For an October 2020 article published by the Intercept, Murtaza Hussain interviewed a handful of pro-Palestinian activists who have been targeted by Canary Mission, an anonymously-run website, established in 2015, that seeks to publicly discredit critics of Israel as “terrorists” and “anti-Semites.” As Hussain wrote, “Canary Mission is difficult to describe as anything other than a blacklist.” One activist told the Intercept that Canary Mission has proven “very powerful in silencing people and making them think free speech is not their right. It instills a powerful sense of fear and paranoia.”
Although conservatives decry the development of “cancel culture” and alleged progressive intolerance, “when it comes to Israel-Palestine, full-blown authoritarian coercion, like the blacklisting carried out by Canary Mission, is already well entrenched,” Hussain wrote. Both US and Israeli government agencies have used information from Canary Mission to question pro-Palestinian student activists, according to previous reports (see, e.g., Alex Kane, “The FBI is Using Unvetted, Right-Wing Blacklists to Question Activists about Their Support for Palestine,”
The Intercept, June 24, 2018; and Noa Landau, “Official Documents Prove: Israel Bans Young Americans Based on Canary Mission Website,”
Haaretz, October 4, 2018, updated October 18, 2018).
For many otherwise unknown activists, a Canary Mission profile is their most visible online presence. “It’s the first thing that comes up when you Google my name, the claim that I’m a terrorist supporter and an extremist,” one former activist on Palestinian issues told the Intercept. The activists Hussain interviewed—some of whom asked to remain anonymous “for fear of suffering further consequences from speaking out”—described how Canary Mission’s blacklist affected their employment opportunities, immigration status, freedom to travel, and mental health.
Beyond Canary Mission, a variety of pro-Israel organizations that seek to suppress pro-Palestinian activism have pursued litigation against chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University, San Francisco State University, and the City University of New York, Lexi McMenamin reported in March 2021 for The Nation.
McMenamin’s article spotlighted a complaint filed by David Abrams, director of the Zionist Advocacy Center, against UCLA, demanding that the university release the names of speakers who participated in the 2018 National Students for Justice in Palestine conference, which UCLA’s SJP chapter hosted. The student organizers of the UCLA event had coordinated with university officials “to preserve the anonymity of speakers, in order to prevent them from being put on no-fly-lists, potentially denied entry to other countries, or contacted by the FBI over their organizing work,” The Nation reported. For his part, Abrams sought release of the anonymous speaker’s names, which he claimed as information that should be available to him under the California Public Records Act, so that he could use them to “investigate terrorism.”
In March 2021 a California judge denied Abrams’s petition, noting that disclosure of the SJP speakers’ names “would violate their rights to freedom of association, anonymous speech, and privacy.”
Furthermore, in May 2021 a federal judge ruled that the state of Georgia cannot compel groups or individuals who contract with public entities to disavow support for the BDS movement against Israel. As Project Censored has previously reported, Abby Martin, a journalist and an advocate of BDS, brought suit against the state of Georgia and officials at Georgia Southern University after she was barred from speaking at a critical media literacy conference hosted by the university, for refusing to pledge that she would not boycott Israel. In his ruling, US District Court Judge Mark Cohen wrote that the state law “places an unconstitutional incidental burden on speech” and was “more offensive to the First Amendment” than comparable statutes previously ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, because the Georgia statute “burdens speech exclusively for those who hold particular political beliefs.” [However, the judge also ruled that specific individual defendants named in Martin’s lawsuit could not be held liable for their enforcement of the law.]
Heightened violence in Israel/Palestine in May 2021 has focused attention on powerful pro-Israel media biases in US news coverage (e.g., Gregory Shupak, “Israel/Palestine Coverage Presents False Equivalency between Occupied and Occupier,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), May 18, 2021), but Canary Mission and legal efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian activism have nonetheless received minimal corporate news coverage. In January 2019 the New York Times featured an opinion piece by Michelle Alexander that compared Canary Mission to the McCarthyite tactics used during the Cold War against suspected Communists; and two news articles in the Times, dating back to 2018, made passing mention of Canary Mission, as a “shadowy organization.” In February 2019 the Washington Post published an opinion article, by Mairav Zonszein, which mentioned Canary Mission, alongside the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), StandWithUs, and Christians United for Israel, as “parts of the pro-Israel lobby” asserting that support for the BDS movement is anti-Semitic. Aside from this coverage, major establishment news outlets have provided no substantive reports on the role played by Canary Mission and other pro-Israel organizations in stifling the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestinian activists.
Murtaza Hussain, “The Real Cancel Culture: Pro-Israel Blacklists,” The Intercept, October 4, 2020.
Lexi McMenamin, “Protecting Pro-Palestine Activists Can Feel Almost Impossible—but These Students Succeeded,” The Nation, March 16, 2021.
Student Researcher: Miranda Morgan (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Allison Ford (Sonoma State University)
Illustration by Anson Stevens-Bollen.
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#9. Police Use Dogs as Instruments of Violence, Targeting People of Colorby Project Censored
November 9, 2021
9. Police Use Dogs as Instruments of Violence, Targeting People of Color
An investigation conducted by several independent news outlets coordinated by the Marshall Project lays bare mounting evidence of extensive and disproportionate deployment of police dogs against people of color.
“It felt like I was being eaten,” recounted Joseph Malott, a 22-year-old Black student who was mauled by a police dog moments after deflecting a tear gas canister, away from himself and allegedly toward officers, in June 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest in California. Later that night, Malott became one of the approximately 3,600 Americans per year sent to the emergency room for severe bite injuries sustained during altercations with police K-9s. Although men and women of just about every age and ethnicity in all fifty states have been subjected to violent K-9 incidents, a series of 13 linked reports, titled “Mauled: When Police Dogs are Weapons,” produced by AL.com, IndyStar, the Invisible Institute, and the Marshall Project, suggests Black men have been inordinately targeted. [USA Today partnered with the Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar, and the Invisible Institute on two of the 13 reports in the “Mauled” series: See Maurice Chammah and Abbie VanSickle, “She Went Out for a Walk. Then Drogo the Police Dog Charged,” The Marshall Project, October 15, 2020, also published as Maurice Chammah and Abbie VanSickle, “She Went Out for a Walk, Then Drogo the Police Dog Charged,” USA Today, October 15, 2020; and “‘A Dog Can be Trained to be Anti-Black’: A New Film Highlights Historical Use of Canines against Black People,” The Marshall Project, June 23, 2021.]
According to Bryn Stole and Grace Toohey’s February 2021 report, the rate of police K-9 bites in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a majority-Black city of 220,000 residents, averages more than double that of the next-ranked city, Indianapolis; and nearly one-third of the police dog bites are inflicted on teenage men, most of whom are Black. Overall, between 2017 and 2019, Baton Rouge police dogs bit at least 146 people. Fifty-three of those people were 17 years old or younger. A majority of the dog-bite victims were Black, and most of them were unarmed and suspected by police of nonviolent crimes such as driving a stolen vehicle or burglary.
Stole and Toohey recounted the stories of two Black teens, neither suspected of violent or serious crimes, who were hunted and mauled by Baton Rouge police K-9s in June and October of 2019 after attempting to run or bike away from officers. Lester (a minor whose last name was not revealed to protect his anonymity) and Charles Carey, respectively 14 and 17 years old when attacked, will grow up with physical and mental scars from the attacks they sustained. As Abbie VanSickle, Challen Stephens, Ryan Martin, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, and Andrew Fan reported in October 2020, medical researchers have found that police dog attacks are “more like shark attacks than nips from a family pet” due to the aggressive training police dogs undergo. The Baton Rouge Police Department gives K-9 officers nonspecific leeway to release dogs based on officers’ assessments of “the severity of the crime” and whether “the suspect poses an immediate threat,” Stole and Toohey reported in February 2021.
As the October 2020 report by VanSickle and her colleagues noted, “Police dogs have a highly charged history in the United States, especially in the South, where they were used against enslaved people and, in the 1960s, civil rights protesters.”
Though the Black Lives Matter movement has significantly raised public awareness of police using disproportionate force against people of color, police K-9 violence has received strikingly little attention from corporate news media. One might expect horrific stories, including cases in which “[a] woman’s scalp was torn in California; a man’s vocal cords were damaged in Colorado; [and] an Arizona man’s face was ripped off,” as Ashley Remkus reported in an October 2020 installment of the “Mauled” investigation, to be undeniably newsworthy. Nevertheless, corporate coverage has been limited. To its credit, the Washington Post published a front-page story on the topic, in November 2020, which cited the Marshall Project’s reporting.77 [On September 2, 2020, the Washington Post published an article, Tyler D. Parry’s “Police Still Use Attack Dogs against Black Americans,” that provided historical perspective on the racist aspects of contemporary police dog attacks, but this story only appeared on the Post’s website and not in print.] In October 2020, USA Today published an article on police dogs and excessive force, authored by the Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah and Abbie VanSickle, the same day that it was published by the Marshall Project. An August 2020 NBC News report covered the Salt Lake City Police Department’s suspension of its police K-9 program, after video circulated of a police dog biting a Black man who was kneeling on the ground with his hands held up. Otherwise, coverage appears to have been limited to local news outlets (e.g., Danielle Leigh, Grace Manthey, and John Kelly, “Eyewitness News Investigation Finds Use of Police Dogs Causing Serious Injury, Death Even When Suspects Weren’t Combative,” ABC7 (Los Angeles), December 24, 2020; and WBRZ Staff, “BRPD Revising Policy for Chasing Juvenile Suspects with Police Dogs,” WBRZ (ABC, Baton Rouge), February 12, 2021.)
In April 2021, Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy announced that the Marshall Project’s “Mauled: When Police Dogs are Weapons” investigation had been selected as a finalist for the Center’s 2021 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Bryn Stole and Grace Toohey, “The City Where Police Unleash Dogs on Black Teens,” The Marshall Project, February 12, 2021.
Abbie VanSickle and Challen Stephens, “Police Use Painful Dog Bites to Make People Obey,” The Marshall Project, December 14, 2020.
Abbie VanSickle, Challen Stephens, Ryan Martin, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, and Andrew Fan, “When Police Violence is a Dog Bite,” The Marshall Project, October 2, 2020.
Ashley Remkus, “We Spent a Year Investigating Police Dogs. Here are Six Takeaways,” The Marshall Project, October 2, 2020.
Student Researchers: Ian M. Williams and Jason Medrano (North Central College)
Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)
Illustration by Anson Stevens-Bollen.
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#19. European Demand for Biomass Energy Propels Destruction of US Forestsby Project Censored
November 9, 2021
Planet of the Humanswritten, produced and directed by Jeff Gibbs
Produced by Ozzie Zehner
Executive Producer: Michael Moore
Co-Producers: Valorie Gibbs, Christopher Henze, David Paxson
copyright 2020 Huron Mountain Films LLC
Released: April 21, 2020
19. European Demand for Biomass Energy Propels Destruction of US Forests
Driven by demand in European Union countries, the southern United States is now the world’s largest producer and exporter of the wood pellets used to produce biomass energy, Danna Smith reported for Truthout in September 2020. Despite popular beliefs that solar and wind power are its main sources of renewable energy, the European Union (EU) sources nearly 60 percent of its renewable energy from biomass. Championed as a renewable source of energy, biomass energy uses plants, wood, and waste materials as sources of heating or power. However, as Smith reported, in many European countries the carbon costs of imported wood are not considered. As a result, the true costs of biomass energy are not widely understood.
As Smith explained in her article, many European nations, including the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Denmark, are increasingly relying on biomass electricity, with the unintended consequence of “speeding up carbon emissions, pollution and forest destruction.” The shift has led many to see forests as fuel, encouraging the cutting of timber for the production of wood pellets.
The deforestation that began in Europe has now arrived in the United States, as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) documented in a June 2019 report, “Global Markets for Biomass Energy are Devastating U.S. Forests.” According to the NRDC report, Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet manufacturer, engages in logging practices that have ravaged “iconic” wetlands forests in the southwest United States to produce pellets that are shipped to utility companies such as Drax Power in the United Kingdom and Ørsted in Denmark.
Anticipating this crisis, in January 2018, a group of 784 scientists warned the EU Parliament that cutting down forests for bioenergy increases carbon pollution. Biomass energy releases more carbon per unit of energy generated than coal or gas release, they reported. The scientists also warned that logging degrades forests as a natural form of flood control.
The “voracious European demand” for wood pellets has put forests and communities in the southern United States at increased risk of toxic air pollution and catastrophic flooding, Smith reported. In recent years, the southern coastal plain that includes North and South Carolina, southern Georgia and Alabama, and northern Florida, has been subjected to “some of the most devastating and costly flooding events in the world,” Smith reported, noting that these events have had “disproportionate impacts to low-income, rural communities of color.”
Many of the communities most affected by the devastation are now fighting back. In North Carolina, for example, local leaders and residents coordinated to oppose plans by Enviva to expand production at three of its facilities in that state. In Alabama a similar coalition formed to oppose Enviva’s plans to construct a new wood pellet production facility in Epes, Alabama, the first of four such plants the company hopes to establish in the state.
In May 2020 the European Union announced that it would reassess its biomass policies as part of its broader biodiversity action plan. As Smith reported, this reassessment could lead to the discontinuation of the use of wood as a source of EU biomass energy, and it might also lead to more accurate accounting for carbon emissions from imported biomass sources.
This issue has received little in the way of recent corporate news coverage. Credit is due to the New York Times for publishing an in-depth April 19, 2021 article by Gabriel Popkin and Erin Schaff that explored the impact of wood pellet production for export to Europe on one community in North Carolina. The article accurately described the forces driving Europe’s demand for pellets and noted that “[m]any scientists have long been skeptical of biomass’s climate benefits” because the policies European nations have adopted to combat climate change “fail to account for the carbon losses caused by cutting down trees to burn them.” But even Popkin and Schaff’s excellent article engaged in a bit of false balance by providing a platform for specious arguments from Enviva’s in-house scientists about why burning pellets should be “considered carbon neutral.” Sadly, Popkin and Schaff’s article appears to be the lone substantive corporate media report on this topic since at least 2015.
By contrast, environmental news sites have devoted considerable space to analyzing the burgeoning wood pellet industry in the Southeast, the factors driving its growth, and the severe climatic repercussions of burning wood as an energy source. For instance, in July 2020, Saul Elbein wrote an in-depth account for environmental news outlet Mongabay of Enviva’s wood pellet plants and their likely environmental consequences. On February 15, 2021, Mongabay followed up Elbein’s article with a report from Justin Catanoso about hundreds of scientists and economists calling on the countries of the world not to burn forests as fuel. A few weeks later, Mongabay published an article by Catanoso about a move by the Netherlands to limit subsidies for “biomass-for-heat” plants. It is worth noting that both Danna Smith’s Truthout article and the Mongabay series predate Popkin and Schaff’s New York Times piece, though the coverage provided by the independent outlets went unmentioned in the Times.
Danna Smith, “Europe Drives Destruction of US Forests in the Name of Fighting Climate Change,” Truthout, September 21, 2020.
Student Researcher: Tai Lam (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Allison Ford (Sonoma State University)
Illustration by Anson Stevens-Bollen.