Once upon a time, the American people cared enough about the extreme actions against our Constitution by the National Security state, that we forced a President's resignation because he had abused his power under national security, and forced our Congress to investigate the national security state's excesses, in an attempt to bring the alphabet soup of federal agencies charged with protecting our national security to heel. Then, as America's working and middle classes' quality of life began to deteriorate in the late 1970's, our interest shifted from watching the watchdogs to keeping our heads above water.
Carl Jensen and Project Censored put out a compendium of the Project Censored's annual top ten stories for the first twenty years of its existence in 1997, appropriately titled 20 Years of Censored News. I pulled it off my bookshelf the other day, and discovered that many of the concerns of censored, or at least under-reported, news reporting in the period 1976-1995 are the same ones that we are experiencing today:
The #2 story in 1976 was the potential corporate control of DNA, and their use in genetically modified plants and animals. The #4 story concerned the manipulation of oil prices by U.S. companies during the 1973 OPEC embargo. The #7 story concerned the unnecessary deaths of employees in order to not interfere with corporate profits.
The #1 story in 1977 was the myth of black progress, a story that reverberates today with so many young black men going to prison. The #7 story was about the cost benefits of safe and environmentally friendly workplaces. The #10 story was the untold side of illegal immigration.
The #1 story in 1978 was the dangers of nuclear power plants (this was a year before Three Mile Island). The #6 story was the search for dangerous dams, an important part of our nation's infrastructure. The #9 story was questioning whether sugar and chemical additives in our diets were responsible for the rise in not only physical but mental illness in the United States.
The #1 story in 1979 concerned the exploitation of Third World nations by American corporations. The #4 story was the operation of dangerous Third World sweat shops by American electronics firms. The #9 story was about the most powerful "secret" lobby in Washington, D.C., the Business Roundtable.
The #2 story in 1980 was about the National Security Agency's (NSA) monitoring every piece of message traffic in the world: cable, wireless, satellite, telephone; coded, uncoded, or scrambled; private, business, diplomatic or military; the only difference between now and then is that there was no Internet in 1980, and today the NSA has the cover of the Patriot Act to monitor that information. The #10 story was about the continuing poisoning of our water and land by companies spilling transported chemicals, or burying them in the ground either for disposal or to release trapped minerals. These corporate atrocities were the forerunners of the Keystone XL pipeline, the coal-slurry dump sites, and the use of fracking to release trapped petroleum and natural gas, which have taken up headlines for the last several years.
I could go on, but you should read them for yourself. If they don't make you angry, check your pulse: you're either dead or comatose.
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