Occupy the Dam: Brazil’s Indigenous Uprising
This article is re-posted from Yes Magazine.
Last month, hundreds of indigenous demonstrators began dismantling a dam in the heart of Brazil’s rainforest to protest the destruction it will bring to lands they have loved and honored for centuries. The Brazilian government is determined to promote construction of the massive, $14 billion Belo Monte Dam, which will be the world’s third largest when it is completed in 2019. It is being developed by Norte Energia, a consortium of ten of the world’s largest construction, engineering, and mining firms set up specifically for the project.
The Belo Monte Dam is the most controversial of dozens of dams planned in the Amazon region and threatens the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Amazonian people, plants, and animals. Situated on the Xingu River, the dam is set to flood roughly 150 square miles of already-stressed rainforest and deprive an estimated 20,000 people of their homes, their incomes, and—for those who succumb to malaria, bilharzia, and other diseases carried by insects and snails that are predicted to breed in the new reservoir—their lives. Moreover, the influx of immigrants will bring massive disruption to the socioeconomic balance of the region. People whose livelihoods have primarily depended on hunting and gathering or farming may suddenly find themselves forced to take jobs as manual laborers, servants, and prostitutes.
History has shown again and again that dams in general wreak havoc in areas where they are built, despite promises to the contrary by developers and governments. Hydroelectric energy is anything but “clean” when measured in terms of the excruciating pain it causes individuals, social institutions, and local ecology. The costs—often hidden—include those associated with the privatization of water; the extinction of plants that might provide cures for cancer, HIV, and other diseases; the silting up of rivers and lakes; and the disruption of migratory patterns for many species of birds.
The indigenous cultures threatened by the Belo Monte Dam, including those of the Xikrin, Juruna, Arara, Parakanã, Kuruaya and Kayapó tribes, are tied to the land: generations have hunted and gathered and cultivated the same areas for centuries. They—as well as local flora and fauna—have suffered disproportionately from the effects of other hydroelectric dams, while rarely gaining any of the potential benefits. Now they are fighting back.
Indigenous leaders from these groups have asked the Brazilian government to immediately withdraw the installation license for Belo Monte. They demand a halt to work until the government puts into place “effective programs and measures to address the impacts of the dam on local people.” They point out that a promised monetary program to compensate for the negative impacts of the mega-dam has not yet been presented in local villages; also, that a system to ensure small boat navigation in the vicinity of the cofferdams, temporary enclosures built to facilitate the construction process, has not been implemented. Without such a system, many will be isolated from markets, health care facilities, and other services. The cofferdams have already rendered much of the region’s water undrinkable and unsuitable for bathing. Wells promised by the government and Norte Energia have not yet been drilled. The list of grievances goes on and on and is only the latest in a very old story of exploitation of nature and people in the name of “progress.” Far too often, this has meant benefiting only the wealthiest in society and business.
Yet here in the backcountry of Brazil, there is a difference: the makings of a new story. The indigenous people’s occupation of the dam garnered international attention, connecting their situation to other events across the globe—the Arab Spring, democratic revolutions in Latin America, the Occupy Movement, and austerity strikes in Spain and other European nations. Brazil’s indigenous protesters have essentially joined protesters on every continent who are demanding that rights be restored to the people.
Stories take time to evolve. This one—the story of people awakening on a global level to the need to oppose and replace exploitative dreams—is still in its beginning phase. And the first chapter has been powerful, elegant, and bold.
A few years ago I was invited, with a group, to Ladakh, a protectorate of India, to meet with the Dalai Lama. Among a great deal of sage advice he offered was the following: “It is important to pray and meditate for peace, for a more compassionate and better world. But if that is all you do, it is a waste of time. You also must take actions to make that happen. Every single day.”
It is time for each and every one us to follow that advice.
Opposing the Belo Monte Dam project provides an opportunity for you and me to honor those words, and those leading resistance to it can help us understand the importance of looking around—in our neighborhoods as well as globally—to determine what else we can do to change the story.
This article by James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya is re-posted from Dissident Voice.
One of the most significant political developments in recent US history has been the virtually unchallenged rise of the police state. Despite the vast expansion of the police powers of the Executive Branch of government, the extraordinary growth of an entire panoply of repressive agencies, with hundreds of thousands of personnel, and enormous public and secret budgets and the vast scope of police state surveillance, including the acknowledged monitoring of over 40 million US citizens and residents, no mass pro-democracy movement has emerged to confront the powers and prerogatives or even protest the investigations of the police state.
In the early fifties, when the McCarthyite purges were accompanied by restrictions on free speech, compulsory loyalty oaths and congressional ‘witch hunt’ investigations of public officials, cultural figures, intellectuals, academics and trade unionists, such police state measures provoked widespread public debate and protests and even institutional resistance. By the end of the 1950’s, mass demonstrations were held at the sites of the public hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in San Francisco (1960) and elsewhere, and major civil rights movements arose to challenge the racially segregated South, the compliant Federal government, and the terrorist racist death squads of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (1964) ignited nationwide mass demonstrations against the authoritarian-style university governance.
The police state incubated during the first years of the Cold War was challenged by mass movements pledged to retain or regain democratic freedoms and civil rights.
Key to understanding the rise of mass movements for democratic freedoms was their fusion with broader social and cultural movements: democratic freedoms were linked to the struggle for racial equality; free speech was necessary in order to organize a mass movement against the imperialist US Indo-China wars and widespread racial segregation; the shutting down of Congressional ‘witch hunts’ and purges opened up the cultural sphere to new and critical voices and revitalized the trade unions and professional associations. All were seen as critical to protecting hard-won workers’ rights and social advances.
In the face of mass opposition, many of the overt police state tactics of the 1950’s went ‘underground’ and were replaced by covert operations; selective state violence against individuals replaced mass purges. The popular pro-democracy movements strengthened civil society and public hearings exposed and weakened the police state apparatus, but it did not go away. However, from the early 1980’s to the present, especially over the past 20 years, the police state has expanded dramatically, penetrating all aspects of civil society while arousing no sustained or even sporadic mass opposition.
The question is why has the police state grown and even exceeded the boundaries of previous periods of repression and yet not provoked any sustained mass opposition? This is in contrast to the broad-based pro-democracy movements of the mid to late 20th century. That a massive and growing police state apparatus exists is beyond doubt: one simply has to look up the published records of personnel (both public agents and private contractors), the huge budgets and scores of agencies involved in internal spying on tens of millions of American citizens and residents. The scope and depth of arbitrary police state measures taken include arbitrary detention and interrogations, entrapment, and the blacklisting of hundreds of thousands of US citizens. Presidential fiats have established the framework for the assassination of US citizens and residents, military tribunals, detention camps, and the seizure of private property.
Yet as these gross violations of the constitutional order have taken place and as each police state agency has further eroded our democratic freedoms, there have been no massive “anti-Homeland Security” movements, no campus Free Speech movements. There are only the isolated and courageous voices of specialized ‘civil liberties’ and constitutional freedoms activists and organizations, which speak out and raise legal challenges to the abuse, but have virtually no mass base and no objective coverage in the mass media.
To address this issue of mass inactivity before the rise of the police state, we will approach the topic from two angles.
We will describe how the organizers and operatives have structured the police state and how that has neutralized mass responses.
We will then discuss the ‘meaning’ of non-activity, setting out several hypotheses about the underlying motives and behavior of the ‘passive mass’ of citizens.
The Concentric Circles of the Police State
While the potential reach of the police state agencies covers the entire US population, in fact, it operates on the basis of ‘concentric circles’. The police state is perceived and experienced by the US population according to the degree of their involvement in critical opposition to state policies. While the police state theoretically affects ‘everyone’, in practice it operates through a series of concentric circles. The ‘inner core’, of approximately several million citizens, is the sector of the population experiencing the brunt of the police state persecution. They include the most critical, active citizens, especially those identified by the police state as sharing religious and ethnic identities with declared foreign enemies, critics or alleged ‘terrorists’. These include immigrants and citizens of Arab, Persian, Pakistani, Afghan and Somali descent, as well as American converts to Islam.
Ethnic and religious “profiling” is rife in all transport centers (airports, bus and train stations, and on the highways). Mosques, Islamic charities and foundations are under constant surveillance and subject to raids, entrapment, arrests, and even Israeli-style ‘targeted’ assassinations.
The second core group, targeted by the police state, includes African Americans, Hispanics, and immigration rights activists (numbering in the millions). They are subject to massive arbitrary sweeps, round-ups and unlimited detention without trial as well as mass indiscriminate deportations.
After the ‘core groups’ is the ‘inner circle’ which includes millions of US citizens and residents, who have written or spoken critically of US and Israeli policy in the Middle East, expressed solidarity with the suffering of the Palestinian people, opposed US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or have visited countries or regions opposed to US empire building (Venezuela, Iran, South Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, etc.). Hundreds of thousands of these citizens have their telephone, e-mail, and internet communications under surveillance; they have been targeted in airports, denied passports, subject to ‘visits’ and to covert and overt blacklisting at their schools and workplaces.
Activists engaged in civil liberties groups, lawyers, and professionals, leftists engaged in anti-imperialist, pro-democracy and anti-police state activities and their publications are on ‘file’ in the massive police state labyrinth of data collecting on ‘political terrorists’. Environmental movements and their activists have been treated as potential terrorists – with their own family members subjected to police harassment and ominous ‘visits’.
The ‘outer circle’ includes, community, civic, religious, and trade union leaders and activists who in the course of their activity interact with or even express support for core and inner circle critics and victims of police state violations of due process. The ‘outer circle’ numbering a few million citizens are ‘on file’ as ‘persons of interest’, which may involve monitoring their e-mail and periodic ‘checks’ on their petition signing and defense appeals.
These ‘three circles’ are the central targets of the police state, numbering upward of 40 million US citizens and immigrants who have not committed any crime. For having exercised their constitutional rights, they have been subjected to various degrees of police state repression and harassment.
The police state, however, has ‘fluid boundaries’ about whom to spy on, whom to arrest and when — depending on whatever arouses the apparatchiks ‘suspicion’ or desire to exercise power or please their superiors at any given moment.
The key to the police state operations of the US in the 21st century is to repress pro-democracy citizens and pre-empt any mass movement without undermining the electoral system, which provides political theater and legitimacy. A police state ‘boundary’ is constructed to ensure that citizens will have little option but to vote for the two pro-police state parties, legislatures and executives without reference to the conduct, conditions and demands of the core, inner and outer circle of victims, critics and activists. Frequent raids, harsh public ‘exemplary’ punishment and mass media stigmatization transmit a message to the passive mass of voters and non-voters that the victims of repression ‘must have been doing something wrong’ or else they would not be under police state repression.
The key to the police state strategy is to not allow its critics to gain a mass base, popular legitimacy, or public acceptance. The state and the media constantly drum the message that the activists’ ‘causes’ are not our (American, patriotic) ‘causes’; that ‘their’ pro-democracy activities impede ‘our’ electoral activities; their lives, wisdom and experiences do not touch our workplaces, neighborhoods, sports, religious and civic associations. To the degree that the police-state has ‘fenced in’ the inner circles of the pro-democracy activists, they have attained a free hand and uncontested reach in deepening and extending the boundaries of the authoritarian state. To the degree that the police state rationale or presence has penetrated the consciousness of the mass of the US population, it has created a mighty barrier to the linking of private discontent with public action.
Hypothesis on Mass Complicity and Acquiescence with the Police State
If the police-state is now the dominant reality of US political life, why isn’t it at the center of citizen concern? Why are there no pro-democracy popular movements? How has the police state been so successful in ‘fencing off’ the activists from the vast majority of US citizens? After all, other countries at other times have faced even more repressive regimes and yet the citizens rebelled. In the past, despite the so-called ‘Soviet threat’, pro-democracy movements emerged in the US and even rolled back a burgeoning police state. Why does the evocation of an outside ‘Islamic terrorist threat’ seem to incapacitate our citizens today? Or does it?
There is no simple, single explanation for the passivity of the US citizens faced with a rising omnipotent police state. Their motives are complex and changing and it is best to examine them in some detail.
One explanation for passivity is that precisely the power and pervasiveness of the police state has created deep fear, especially among people with family obligations, vulnerable employment and with moderate commitments to democratic freedoms. This group of citizens is aware of cases where police powers have affected other citizens who were involved in critical activities, causing job loss and broad suffering and are not willing to sacrifice their security and the welfare of their families for what they believe is a ‘losing cause’ – a movement lacking a strong popular base and with little institutional support. Only when the protest against the Wall Street bailout and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movements against the ‘1%’ gained momentum, did this sector express transitory support. But as the Office of the President consummated the bailout and the police-state crushed the ‘Occupy’ encampments, fear and caution led many sympathizers to withdraw timidly back into passivity.
The second motive for ‘acquiescence’ among a substantial public is because they tend to support the police state, based on their acceptance of the anti-terror ideology and its virulent anti-Muslim-anti-Arab racism, driven in large part by influential sectors of pro-Israel opinion makers. The fear and loathing of Muslims, cultivated by the police state and mass media, was central to the post-9/11 build-up of Homeland Security and the serial wars against Israel’s adversaries, including Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and now Syria with plans for Iran. Active support for the police state peaked during the first 5 years post-9/11 and subsequently ebbed as the Wall Street-induced economic crisis, loss of employment, and the failures of government policy propelled concerns about the economy far ahead of support for the police state. Nevertheless, at least one-third of the electorate still supports the police state, ‘right or wrong’. They firmly believe that the police state protects their ‘security’; that suspects, arrestees, and others under watch ‘must have been doing something illegal’. The most ardent backers of the police state are found among the rabid anti-immigrant groups who support arbitrary round-ups, mass deportations, and the expansion of police powers at the expense of constitutional guarantees.
The third possible motive for acquiescence in the police state is ignorance: those millions of US citizens who are not aware of the size, scope, and activities of the police state. Their practical behavior speaks to the notion that ‘since I am not directly affected it must not exist’. Embedded in everyday life, making a living, enjoying leisure time, entertainment, sports, family, neighborhoods and concerned only about household budgets … This mass is so embedded in their personal ‘micro-world’ that it considers the macro-economic and political issues raised by the police state as ‘distant’, outside of their experience or interest: ‘I don’t have time’, ‘I don’t know enough’, ‘It’s all ‘politics’ … The widespread apoliticism of the US public plays into its ignoring the monster that has grown in its midst.
Paradoxically as some peoples’ concerns and passive discontent over the economy has grown, it has lessened support for the police state as well as having lessened opposition to it. In other words the police state flourishes while public discontent is focused more on the economic institutions of the state and society. Few, if any, contemporary political leaders educate their constituency by connecting the rise of the police state, imperial wars and Wall Street to the everyday economic issues concerning most US citizens. The fragmentation of issues, the separation of the economic from the political and the divorce of political concerns from individual ones, allow the police state to stand ‘above and outside’ of the popular consciousness , concerns and activities.
State-sponsored fear mongering on behalf of the police state is amplified and popularized by the mass media on a daily basis via propagandistic-‘news’, ‘anti-terrorist’ detective programs, Hollywood’s decades of crass anti-Arab, Islamophobic films. The mass media portrayal of the police state’s naked violations of democratic rights as normal and necessary in a milieu infiltrated by ‘Muslim terrorists’, where feckless ‘liberals’(defenders of due process and the Bill of Rights) threaten national security, has been effective.
Ideologically, the police state depends on identifying the expansion of police powers with ‘national security’ of the passive ‘silent’ majority, even as it creates profound insecurity for an active, critical minority. The self-serving identification of the ‘nation’ and the ‘flag’ with the police state apparatus is especially prominent during ‘mass spectacles’ where ‘rock’, schlock and ‘sports’ infuse mass entertainment with solemn Pledges of Allegiance to uphold and respect the police state and busty be-wigged young women wail nasally versions of the national anthem to thunderous applause. Wounded ‘warriors’ are trotted out and soldiers rigid in their dress uniforms salute enormous flags, while the message transmitted is that police state at home works hand in hand with our ‘men and women in uniform’ abroad. The police state is presented as a patriotic extension of the wars abroad and as such both impose ‘necessary’ constraints on citizen opposition, public criticism, and any real forthright defense of freedom.
Conclusion: What is to be done?
The ascendancy of the police state has benefited enormously from the phony bi-partisan de-politicization of repressive legislation, and the fragmentation of socio-economic struggles from democratic dissent. The mass anti-war movements of the early 1990’s and 2001-2003 were undermined (sold-out) by the defection of its leaders to the Democratic Party machine and its electoral agenda. The massive popular immigration movement was taken over by Mexican-American political opportunists from the Democratic Party and decimated while the same Democratic Party, under President Barack Obama, has escalated police state repression against immigrants, expelling millions of Latino immigrant workers and their families.
Historical experience teaches us that a successful struggle against an emerging police state depends on the linking of the socio-economic struggles that engage the attention of the masses of citizens with the pro-democracy, pro-civil liberty, ‘free speech’ movements of the middle classes. The deepening economic crisis, the savage cuts in living standards and working conditions and the fight to save ‘sacred’ social programs (like Social Security and Medicare) have to be tied in with the expansion of the police state. A mass social justice movement, which brings together thousands of anti-Wall Streeters, millions of pro-Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid recipients with hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers will inevitably clash with the bloated police-state apparatus. Freedom is essential to the struggle for social justice and the mass struggle for social justice is the only basis for rolling back the police state. The hope is that mass economic pain will ignite mass activity, which, in turn, will make people aware of the dangerous growth of the police state. A mass understanding of this link will be essential to any advance in the movement for democracy and people’s welfare at home and peace abroad.
Forty-Five years ago hundreds of people participated in what the news media referred to as a race riot in Grand Rapids.
On July 25th, 1967, Grand Rapids police officers arrested several Black youth, when they pulled them over believing they were in a stolen vehicle. One source says that the officers may have used excessive force in dealing with the Black youth, according to an eyewitness account.
News reports on the first day of the uprising never mention the police abuse. Instead the headlines read that, “gangs threaten a riot” and “S. Division beset by young mob.” In fact, most of the Grand Rapids Press coverage focused on the property damage and police arrests, but never on the motives of those who took action.
The first editorial on July 26 at least acknowledges that people in Grand Rapids may have acted in part due to the riot that began on July 25th in Detroit. However, the Press editorial then uses harsh words to condemn those who participated in the Grand Rapids uprising.
The editorial says that, “The great majority in the Negro Community is law-abiding.” This statement alone reflects contempt for anyone who acts outside officially sanctioned behavior.
The editorial goes on to say that, “the lawless behavior of a few Negro citizens has made a mockery of civil rights and that everything that has been done up to this point to improve the Negro’s social and economic standing has been a waste of time, money and effort.” It is as if the civil rights movement consisted of what the White government did for Black people, as if the Freedom Struggle didn’t really exist.
Lastly, the editorial says, “there must be no compromising with the forces of disorder.” The Press editorial writer makes his bias known by saying that anyone arrested should be treated as a criminal and nothing else.
The Grand Rapids Police, along with other area cops and the Michigan State Police made it a point to arrest anyone they could get their hands on who was either engaged in actions they deemed unlawful, even those who violated the curfew that was put in effect on the evening of the 25th.
According to a report put out by the Grand Rapids City Planning Department, there were a total of 320 arrests made over a two-day period. The report, Anatomy of a Riot, stated that 49% of those who were arrested had a prior arrest record, thus the implication that those involved were prone to “criminal behavior.”
The area where the uprising occurred was 131 to the west, Hall street to the south, Wealthy to the north and Lafayette to the east.
Besides the data contained within the report, Anatomy of a Riot spent a great deal of time making pronouncements about living conditions of the Black community, but in a contemptuous way. The report acknowledges high unemployment rates and that many of the households are led by females. “These are families without an adult male to give support, love and guidance to the children.”
What the report does not really address, nor the news coverage, was the legitimate grievances of many of those who took action between July 25 and July 27.
It is important to note that this uprising in Grand Rapids was not an isolated incident. In 1967, there were 40 “riots” across the US and numerous since 1965, including Watts and the uprisings in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. King. However, because the bulk of the uprisings took place in 1967, the federal government did commission a study to investigate the cause(s) of the “riots.”
The report, known as the Kerner Report, does acknowledge the grievances of those who rose up. The report identifies three levels of intensity, each with their own list of grievances:
First Level of Intensity:
1. Police practices
2. Unemployment and underemployment
3. Inadequate housing
Second Level of Intensity:
1. Inadequate education
2. Poor recreational facilities and programs
3. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms
Third Level of Intensity:
1. Disrespectful white attitudes
2. Discriminatory administration of justice
3. Inadequacy of federal programs
4. Inadequacy of municipal services
5. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices
6. Inadequate welfare programs
As was mentioned before, most of the news coverage focused on what the GR Press often referred to as lawless behavior, such as property destruction and looting as is evidenced by the photos they printed.
However, it should be noted that most of the fires that were set were of vacant or deteriorated buildings that were owned by White people. One could certainly argue that these buildings were targeted as a means of protesting against the constant exploitation of the Black community by White landlords. A former pastor in the neighborhood where the uprising took place told this writer that there were several houses and an old barn near his church on Buckley street that were set on fire and that these were buildings clearly targeted because of how the landlord treated the Black tenants.
Another interesting aspect of the 1967 uprising in Grand Rapids, was the role played by a group of Black Youth who were part of what was called Operation Task Force. This was a program operating out of the old Sheldon Complex, made up of mostly Black high school student athletes who were tasked with walking the neighborhoods and talking to people to get a sense of what people’s needs were.
When the uprising began, these students in the Task Force were asked to help “calm down” the Black youth who were enraged. Ironically, some of these students were physically assaulted by police officers who did not known that the students were actually cooperating with them. Several GR Press articles were printed over the two-day period about the task force, with one headline reading. “Negro Youths calm crowd.”
On July 27, the Grand Rapids Press ran an interesting story, one that reflected the dominant culture’s fear about urban Blacks. The July 27 story was based on calls the Press writer made to people in communities near Grand Rapids, communities that were almost exclusively White.
A woman from Ionia said, “We heard they were coming here on Tuesday. We all had our guns ready if we had to.” Another White woman in Lowell was quoted as saying, “I think it is terrible. They are destroying their own property – hurting their own cause.” A resident of Saranac stated, “It is a terrible thing to say, too, but authorities should open fire on them, do something drastic to wake them up.” A man from Holland agreed with serious force being used against those rioting. He stated, “The troops should have orders to stop them anyway necessary.”
These statements clearly demonstrate the entrenched White Supremacist attitudes of the day. According to the Anatomy of a Riot report, there were calls from people on the west side of Grand Rapids who wanted to “volunteer as vigilantes” during the uprising. In fact, the report notes that some White people were arrested during the uprising, because they were in violation of the firearms ban that was put in place.
In the aftermath of the 1967 uprising in Grand Rapids there were calls for increased funding for urban youth programs and some concerns about housing conditions, especially of the properties owned by White absentee landlords. Years later there was a new condo project built in the heart of where the uprising took place, between Jefferson and Lafayette, but within a year they built a brick wall around that development to keep out undesirables.
Today, the Sheldon Complex is gone, replace by a government social services facility and a new development project is underway in the Wealthy/Division area. This new development project is forcing people of color out of the neighborhood, which is one tactic in minimizing the possibility of any future uprisings.
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Why Don’t American Cities Burn?, by Michael Katz – An interesting look at how Americans have dealt with urban poverty over the past 50 years. The author uses his own experience in Philadelphia as a springboard for assessing the rest of the country around how policy makers have dealt with poverty, particularly in poor Black neighborhoods. Katz looks at the institutional racism and class warfare waged against Black Americans since WWII and how urban planners have responded to the race rebellions of the 1960s and 70s. The author argues that since the mid 1970s there have only been 2 “race riots” in the US, once in Miami and the 1992 LA riots. Katz observes that in many countries around the world, even in European countries, people who are faced with harsh economic conditions have no problem rising up against the system. The US political and business community have been able to redirect or co-opt urban rage in recent decades, so much so that the very idea of a riot has been eliminated as a legitimate tactical response to the debilitating effects of urban poverty. Katz argues that urban Blacks have either been forced into the Criminal Justice system or cycled into the market-driven and social service programs that put the focus on individual uplift. A valuable resource for those who want a radically different perspective on urban planning outside officially sanctioned models.
Cool Capitalism, by Jim McGuigan – Marx always said that Capitalism will find ways to be resilient and avoid greater public scrutiny. One way that the dominant economic system has done this has been to use culture as a mechanism for marketing. The author argues that Capitalism has been selling “cool” since the 1950s, but that it really took off with the counter-cultural movements in the 1960s. While there were plenty of people challenging the system, capitalism figured out a way to use the anti-establishment sentiment and make money off of it, a trend that continues til today. Cool Capitalism is an interesting mix of economic and social theory that presents solid historical analysis about the ways in which capitalism has morphed in recent decades. The section that takes a look at the role of art in cool capitalism was valuable, as was the critique of Richard Florida’s creative class slight of hand. Cool Capitalism is an important contribution to understanding how the dominant economic system continues to assimilate and undermine counter-cultural trends in order to survive.
Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, by Antonia Juhasz – Black Tide is a strong indictment of BP, the oil industry and the US government complicity in one of the worst single environmental disasters in US history. Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil and contributor to the blog Oil Change International, has provided us with a scathing account of what the media dubbed Deepwater Horizon. Juhasz looks at how and why the pipeline broke, the human and wildlife body count, the impact the oil spill has had on the fishing community, the spineless response by BP, the oil industry and the Obama administration. Juhasz meticulously documents these environmental crimes and the inherent criminal nature of how oil companies influence policy that will not only maintain massive oil extraction in the US, but the likely future oil disasters that the oil industry factors into its ongoing disregard for ecosystems. Unpleasant, but necessary reading for anyone who truly cares about the future of life on this planet.
The Pipe (DVD) – The Pipe is a powerful film about a community’s fight along the coast of Ireland against the multinational company Shell. Nearly a decade ago Shell discovered natural gas off the coast of Ireland, which led to plans to build a pipeline from the sea to the land, where a refining station would be placed. The people of one small community in Ireland said no to this proposal and are still fighting those plans. The film covers years of legal struggle, civil disobedience and direct action against Shell. The film deals with the internal struggles of the villagers and how it can divide or galvanize people to stand up for what is right. The film shows ordinary people putting their lives on the line to protect their homes, their land and their families.
Yesterday, the Diocese of Grand Rapids unveiled a statue of Bishop Frederic Baraga, a nineteenth century catholic clergyman that some are now pushing for sainthood.
Baraga, according to some sources, founded a mission in what would become Grand Rapids, but his real legacy is the work he did in the northern part of Michigan and the UP.
Much of the news coverage of the statue ceremony states that Baraga did a great deal of missionary work amongst the Ojibway. The statue of Baraga has several bronze tablets around its perimeter, with one of them stating that Baraga created an Ojibway-English dictionary, “that is still in use today.”
While Baraga comes across in the media and church accounts as a saintly man, there is something that is glaringly missing from what function the bishop played in the colonization of the Great Lakes region.
What has come to be the acceptable norm in the US is that those who do missionary work are highly respectable individuals. However, the fundamental nature of missionary work is to not only convert people to your beliefs, but to automatically denounce the existing spiritual traditions of those you mean to convert.
More importantly, Baraga’s interaction with the Ojibway people also paved the way for genocidal policies that Europeans have implemented over the past 150 years in this area.
Those policies include the outright killing of Native people, stealing Native lands, forced relocation and taking Native children from their communities to put them in boarding schools, something the Catholic Church did in Michigan. The history of these boarding schools included denying Native children to speak their language, dress in traditional clothing, subjected to Christian teaching and also physical and sexual abuse, as is well documented in Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools.
This is the legacy of Bishop Baraga, however well intentioned he was, since his committed to converting the Ojibway paved the way for the harsh policies that followed.
Native American scholar George Tinker, author of the book Missionary Conquest: The Gospels and Native American Genocide, refers to Christian missionaries to Native Nations as “partners in genocide.”
Tinker goes on to describe the significance of White missionaries this way:
Told from an Indian perspective, the story is far less entertaining and much less endearing. Pain and devastation become dominant elements as Indian anger erupts to the surface. Indeed, today the white missionary, both in the historical memory of Indian people and in the contemporary experience, has become a frequent target of scorn in most segments of the Indian world. Many implicitly recognize some connection between Indian suffering and the missionary presence, even as they struggle to make sense not only of past wrongs, but also of the pain of contemporary Indian experience. The pain experienced by Indians today is readily apparent in too many statistics that put Indians on the top or bottom of lists. For instance, Indian people suffer the lowest per capita income of any ethnic group in the US, the highest teenage suicide rate, a 60% unemployment rate, and a scandalously low longevity that remains below sixty years for both men and women.
Not surprising, such commentary did not accompany the unveiling of the Baraga statue yesterday. The lack of this kind of critical voice or perspective reflects how deeply ingrained the dominant culture, a culture of conquest, is in this country and this community.
The celebration of the unveiling of the statue of Bishop Baraga not only legitimizes what was been done to Native communities, it normalizes and sanitizes the history of genocide in the Americas.
This article by Glen Ford is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
When a high U.S. government official says Africa is “the new frontier,” it’s time for everyone that cares about the continent to watch out, because something really dangerous is afoot. A top guy in the D.E.A. recently described Africa as the “new frontier” where Washington hopes to embed commando-style teams of specially vetted police for an American-run war on drugs, similar to U.S. operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. And we all know how those U.S. so-called anti-drug operations turned out. We should add to the list Colombia and Afghanistan, the world capitals of cocaine and heroin, respectively.
According to mythology, everything King Midas touched turned to gold. It appears the United States has the Narcotics Touch; everything the Americans touch turns to dope. American allies in the developing world quickly become narco-states.
The pattern has not changed in 60 years, since the Italian and French mafias were rewarded with international drug franchises in return for their assistance against socialists and communists. Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle became the center of the global heroin trade during the Vietnam War – a project of the CIA. When the U.S. shifted its focus to suppressing leftist movements in Latin America, cocaine became the region’s biggest export. The United States has never waged war against drugs – quite the opposite. Washington rewards its political friends with drug franchises and monopolies, in return for service to American corporate interests. That’s why most of America’s friends in the developing world are criminal regimes.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is most proud of its work in Honduras, where a U.S.-backed coup overthrew a mildly leftist government during President Obama’s first year in office. The Americans now roam the country like they own it, in joint operations with the same soldiers and national police that continue to kill and brutalize peasant, student and worker organizations. The joint drug operations, which have succeeded in killing at least four innocent Mosquito Indians, including two pregnant women, will undoubtedly result in a march larger drug trade under the tight control of the military, police and wealthy landowners allied with the Americans. That’s how the American Narco Touch works. The endless phony War on Drugs is a tool of U.S. policy, designed to subvert foreign governments and societies. The drug trade never gets smaller.
Now it’s Africa’s turn. Washington has its eyes on Liberia and Ghana, where it plans to train elite police units after first “vetting” their personnel – a euphemism for making sure that the commandos are willing to act as de facto U.S. operatives. You can be sure that Liberia and Ghana will soon emerge as hubs of the African drug trade – just as happened in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America. With Washington’s “vetted” operatives in charge of the African drug networks, the U.S. will vastly increase its ability to buy influence among the greedy classes all across the continent, both in and out of uniform. Just as in Colombia and Honduras and Panama and Guatemala, the Drug Wars become indistinguishable from the War on Terror, which used to be called the War on Communism. It’s really a war against the poor.
Yesterday, Ban Fracking Barry County announced a new committee, Citizens Against Drilling on Public Land (CADPL), has formed to unite citizens and groups throughout Michigan against the auction of public land for oil and gas development.
Although the committee is against fracking, its sole purpose is to oppose these biannual DNR auctions, and as such can appeal to a larger number of groups that do not deal directly with fracking. The committee is using two strategies to confront the DNR – first, to get lots of signatures on the attached petition to deliver to the DNR in person.
Second, to get organizations to sign on as a part of this “coalition,” and then present a list of organizations that oppose the auction to the DNR. Something that is not commonly known (and of course, not well advertised) is that before each DNR auction, there is a meeting to confirm that the auction will happen, where public comment is allowed. The date of this meeting has not yet been announced. CADPL’s goal would be to present the list of organizations and petition signatures at that meeting.
So, what can you do?
1. Get petitions signed!
You can download a petition at http://www.scribd.com/doc/100857047/Frack-Petition
2. Email cadplmich@gmail.com if you are a part of or know of any organizations that you think would sign on to our mission.
3. Write to your local papers and raise awareness about this auction! It is easy for this corruption to continue when know one knows it’s happening! Make people aware that our public state land is being sold to rich private industry for oil and gas development. Emailcadplmich@gmail.com if you need some talking points.
It was also announced today that the Michigan DNR will be holding another public auction of land on October 24 in Lansing, with potentially 125,000 acres going up for auction.
It is not known at this point if another protest will be organized like the one in May, but we will keep you posted on any new developments or meetings to determine additional strategies.
New Study Looks at Youtube & News
This information is re-posted from the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake registering 9.0 on the Richter scale struck the coast of northeastern Japan, triggering a tsunami that would kill more than 18,000 people and leave an estimated $180 billion in damage. The news media worldwide provided extensive coverage of the disaster and its aftermath, but millions of people also turned to the web to learn about the event on the video sharing website YouTube. [1]
In the seven days following the disaster (March 11-18), the 20 most viewed news-related videos on YouTube all focused on the tragedy-and were viewed more than 96 million times.
What people saw in these videos also represented a new kind of visual journalism. Most of that footage was recorded by citizen eyewitnesses who found themselves caught in the tragedy. Some of that video was posted by the citizens themselves. Most of this citizen-footage, however, was posted by news organizations incorporating user-generated content into their news offerings. The most watched video of all was shot by what appeared to be fixed closed-circuit surveillance camera at the Sendai airport.
The disaster in Japan was hardly a unique case. Worldwide YouTube is becoming a major platform for viewing news. In 2011 and early 2012, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five out of 15 months, according to the company’s internal data.
What is the nature of news on YouTube? What types of events “go viral” and attract the most viewers? How does this agenda differ from that of the traditional news media? Do the most popular videos on YouTube tend to be videos produced by professional news organizations, by citizens or by political interest groups or governments? How long does people’s attention seem to last?
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism examined 15 months’ worth of the most popular news videos on the site (January 2011 to March 2012)[2]-some 260 different videos in all-by identifying and tracking the five most-viewed videos each week located in the “news & politics” channel of YouTube, analyzing the nature of the video, the topics that were viewed most often, who produced them and who posted them.[3]
The data reveal that a complex, symbiotic relationship has developed between citizens and news organizations on YouTube, a relationship that comes close to the continuous journalistic “dialogue” many observers predicted would become the new journalism online. Citizens are creating their own videos about news and posting them. They are also actively sharing news videos produced by journalism professionals. And news organizations are taking advantage of citizen content and incorporating it into their journalism. Consumers, in turn, seem to be embracing the interplay in what they watch and share, creating a new kind of television news.
At the same time, clear ethical standards have not developed on how to attribute the video content moving through the synergistic sharing loop. Even though YouTube offers guidelines on how to attribute content, it’s clear that not everyone follows them, and certain scenarios fall outside those covered by the guidelines. News organizations sometimes post content that was apparently captured by citizen eyewitnesses without any clear attribution as to the original producer. Citizens are posting copyrighted material without permission. And the creator of some material cannot be identified. All this creates the potential for news to be manufactured, or even falsified, without giving audiences much ability to know who produced it or how to verify it.
Among the key findings of this study:
- The most popular news videos tended to depict natural disasters or political upheaval-usually featuring intense visuals. With a majority of YouTube traffic (70%) outside the U.S., the three most popular storylines worldwide over the 15-month period were non-U.S. events. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami was No. 1 (and accounted for 5% of all the 260 videos), followed by elections in Russia (5%) and unrest in the Middle East (4%).
- News events are inherently more ephemeral than other kinds of information, but at any given moment news can outpace even the biggest entertainment videos. In 2011, news events were the most searched term on YouTube four months out of 12, according to YouTube’s internal data: the Japanese Earthquake, the killing of Osama bin Laden, a fatal motorcycle accident, and news of a homeless man who spoke with what those producing the video called a “god-given gift of voice.” Yet over time certain entertainment videos can have a cumulative appeal that will give them higher viewership.
- Citizens play a substantial role in supplying and producing footage. Morethan a third of the most watched videos (39%) were clearly identified as coming from citizens. Another 51% bore the logo of a news organization, though some of that footage, too, appeared to have been originally shot by users rather than journalists. (5% came from corporate and political groups, and the origin of another 5% was not identified.)
- Citizens are also responsible for posting a good deal of the videos originally produced by news outlets. Fully 39% of the news pieces originally produced by a news organization were posted by users. (The rest of the most popular news videos of the last 15 months, 61%, were posted by the same news organizations that produced the reports.) As with other social media, this has multiple implications for news outlets. Audiences on YouTube are reshaping the news agenda, but they are also offering more exposure to the content of traditional news outlets.
- The most popular news videos are a mix of edited and raw footage. Some pundits of the digital revolution predicted that the public, free to choose, would prefer to see video that was unmediated by the press. The most viewed news videos on YouTube, however, come in various forms. More than half of the most-viewed videos, 58%, involved footage that had been edited, but a sizable percentage, 42%, was raw footage. This mix of raw and edited video, moreover, held true across content coming from news organizations and that produced by citizens. Of videos produced by news organizations, 65% were edited, but so were 39% of what came from citizens.
- Personalities are not a main driver of the top news videos. No one individual was featured in even 5% of the most popular videos studied here-and fully 65% did not feature any individual at all. Within the small segment of popular videos that are focused on people, President Barack Obama was the most popular figure (featured in 4% of the top videos worldwide). These ranged from speeches posted in their entirety to satirical ads produced by his political opponents.
- Unlike in traditional TV news, the lengths of the most popular news videos on YouTube vary greatly. The median length of the most popular news videos was 2 minutes and 1 second, which is longer than the median length of a story package on local TV news (41 seconds) but shorter than the median length on national network evening newscasts (2 minutes and 23 seconds). But the variation in the length of the YouTube videos stands out even more. While traditional news tends to follow strict formulas for length, the most popular news videos on YouTube were fairly evenly distributed-from under a minute (29%), one to two minutes (21%), two to five minutes (33%) and longer than five (18%).[4]
The news viewership on YouTube is probably still outpaced by the audience for news on conventional television worldwide. While those top 20 tsunami videos were viewed 96 million times worldwide the week of the disaster, for instance, more people almost certainly watched on local and national television around the globe. Twenty-two million people on average watch the evening news on the three broadcast channels each night in the United States alone, and larger numbers watch local TV newscasts.
But YouTube is a place where consumers can determine the news agenda for themselves and watch the videos at their own convenience-a form of “on demand” video news. In the case of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, audience interest continued for weeks. The disaster remained among the top-viewed news subjects for three straight weeks. Based on the most viewed videos each week listed by YouTube, it was also the biggest news story on the site for 2011.
For the news industry, the growth of YouTube and other video sharing sites represent a significant opportunity and also a challenge. News producers can use the site to grow their audience, find citizen-created videos, build their brand and generate revenue. At the same time, video-sharing sites are yet another platform they must understand-and to which they must adapt. For its part, YouTube (owned by Google) is developing partnerships with news organizations, including with the news service Reuters, in which the site provides Reuters with money to produce content unique to YouTube. But Company executives say they have no intention of getting into content creation, or moving into the news business. “YouTube is acting as a catalyst for the creation of new original content, by providing funds to content producers as advances against ad revenue,” YouTube’s News Manager Olivia Ma explains.[5] By whatever description, however, YouTube is becoming an important platform by which people acquire news.
Seven years after it was developed by three former employees of PayPal, the reach of YouTube is enormous. The video sharing site is now the third most visited destination online, behind only Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook, based on data compiled by Netcraft, a British research service. According to the company’s own statistics, more than 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The site gets over 4 billion video views a day. Slightly under a third of those, 30%, come from the United States.
YouTube has also become a part of the lives of most Americans. Fully 71% of adults have used sites like YouTube or Vimeo at some time, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. That is up from 66% in 2010. And 28% visit them daily.
Bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, YouTube has moved from being a repository of videos to becoming a force that is investing in content creation (if not doing the creation themselves). In 2007, the company created a Partner Program, which shares revenues with content creators in order to encourage the production of more creative content. That program now has more than 1 million partners in 27 countries, including news organizations such as CBS, the BBC and National Geographic. In addition, the company has given direct grants to a smaller group of news content producers as a further way of promoting new ideas and production models.
So far, the approach from news organizations has been a blend of participation and resistance. Many news outlets have developed their own YouTube channels and are avidly posting content. The Associated Press, for example, created its channel in 2006 and now boasts more than 250,000 followers and more than a billion views of its videos. (A user becomes a follower of a YouTube channel by hitting the ‘subscribe’ button, which places updates from that channel on the user’s homepage.) The New York Times’ news channel has more than 78,000 followers while Russia Today has more than 280,000. Some news services, such as ABC News, put on YouTube many of the same stories that appear on their television channel.
Other news organizations have chosen a more cautious approach, including taking steps to keep content off the platform. One method for this is through a service offered within YouTube’s Content ID software. Partners of this program can send any of their copyrighted material to YouTube and have it blocked if it gets posted. (The Content ID program, with more than 3,000 members, also has other features companies can take part in such as revenue sharing.) [6]
Some content producers have combined both approaches, posting their own content but also blocking it from being viewed in certain countries. They may choose to do this for copyright preferences or to prevent certain content from being viewed in countries that might consider it culturally insensitive.
Some non-news organizations, including governments, have also attempted to restrict the availability of their content on YouTube, mostly for political reasons. In March 2009, for example, the government of Bangladesh blocked access to the site entirely after a recording of a private meeting between the Prime Minister and army officers was uploaded.The incident occurred two days after an attempted mutiny by border guards left more than 70 people dead. Government officials insisted it was in the country’s “national interest” to block the site and more videos might worsen the tense situation. China, Libya, Pakistan and Iran have also all attempted at one point or another to block YouTube content.
The evolving government and media policies toward YouTube make understanding the nature of what news content is on the site and which is most popular all the more important.
Footnotes
[1] According to the Project’s News Coverage Index, which measures the news agenda of the mainstream media, 57% of the newshole on radio, television, online and in print was devoted to the event the first week it happened. The NCI measures the content of more than 50 news outlets. Newshole is the time on cable, network and radio and space on newspaper front pages and in the top five stories on news websites
[2] PEJ tracked 295 news videos on YouTube during the 15-month period. However, 35 videos were removed from the site for a variety of reasons before the examination was completed, resulting in the overall sample of 260 videos.
[3] As with many settings on YouTube and other social networks, it is up to the person posting the video to choose the categoriztion or channel where each post will appear on the site. This study examines the most popular videos in the “news & politics” category of YouTube. What one person might categorize as “news and politics” another person might label as “science and entertainment” or “tech.” YouTube does not do any reclassifying on its own. One story not categorized as news was Kony2012, which called for action against Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. The video was posted in March 2012 and viewed more than 76 million times on YouTube in 10 days. But since it was labeled as “nonprofits & activism” it did not appear in the YouTube News and Politics channel and therefore is not part of the analysis. (Click here for a detailed report by the Pew Research Center about the attention surrounding the Kony2012 video.)
[4] In comparison, the vast majority (76%) of packages on national network news were between 2 and 5 minutes. Less than 1% were longer than 5 minutes and 5% were under a minute.
[5] PEJ email correspondence, 6/28/2012.
US Poverty Rate Reaching 50-Year High
This article is re-posted from Common Dreams. Editor’s note: We have noted the high levels of poverty in the Grand Rapids area in general and children living in poverty. However, the issue of poverty is often overlooked and comparatively gets very little coverage to all the news about the “new development” in Grand Rapids.
Poverty in the U.S. is on track to be at its highest level in 50 years, according to analysis collected by the Associated Press. Meanwhile, social safety nets are being pulled out from under those in need, leaving them in a spiral downward with little hope of escape.
The consensus of the more than dozen economists and think tanks the AP surveyed, both left- and right-leaning, was that the poverty level — 15.1 percent in 2010 — would reach as high as 15.7 percent for 2011. Even the 2010 figures represent a record breaking number. The Census Bureau states that “the number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million) is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.”
A mere tenth of a percent increase to 15.2 percent would make the poverty level match 1983’s rate, which was the highest since1965, AP reports.
Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research says that “a rise in the poverty rate is the entirely predictable result of a high unemployment rate and cutbacks in various forms of government support” and sees little chance of a change in course.
“The real tragedy is that this economic collapse was totally preventable before the fact and it could be quickly overcome even now with the right policies. However, in both cases there is not the political will. The interest groups that dominate U.S. politics are just fine with the current situation,” Baker stated.
The safety net allowing some to scrape by are at risk, with unemployment insurance, food stamps and welfare getting cut. But Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy, tells the AP, “The issues aren’t just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy.”
Edelman, author of So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America, also highlighted the problem of low-wage jobs affecting poverty when he spoke to Bill Moyers in June. “[W]hat I’m worried about is the longer term continuance of this plethora of low-wage jobs. “Of the inability of people at the bottom, and not just the poor, I’m talking about the whole lower half. The way the median wage absolutely stagnated beginning 1973. The economy grew over the last 40 years basically doubled in size. And the entire lower half got none of that. The median wage went up 7 percent in 40 years. A fifth of a percent a year,” Edelman said during his interview with Moyers.
Graphic from Demos on poverty in the U.S.:
Gushing over fracking ignores climate crisis
This article by Neil deMause is re-posted from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
One of the difficulties of reporting on climate change is its incremental nature: It’s hard to expect every media mention of someone driving a car or running an air conditioner to include a note about its effects on the environment. Yet even when the climate impacts of an action are unambiguous and central to a story, reporters all too often avoid the subject.
Take the natural-gas extraction technique of hydraulic fracturing (Extra!, 2/12). Better known as “fracking,” the process involves cracking open underground rock layers containing oil and gas deposits by blasting them with a high-pressure chemical slurry. Of the many troubling side effects of fracking—which run from groundwater contamination to increased earthquake activity—one of the most worrisome is its impact on climate change.
Any drilling for fossil fuels means more carbon will eventually be released into the atmosphere, but fracking’s effect on climate is compounded by the fact that the drilling process can create huge methane leaks: A study by Cornell scientists Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea estimated that fracked wells leak 40 to 60 percent more methane than conventional wells (Scientific American, 1/20/12). Because methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, the National Center for Atmos-pheric Research has estimated that at these levels of leakage, switching from oil to natural gas consumption would significantly worsen global warming over the next several decades (Climate Progress, 9/9/11).
Outside of scientific and environmental media, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find any discussion of the climate change risk in fracking coverage, much of which has instead followed the fossil fuel industry’s line that the technique is the first step to a future of cheap energy.
In an article on the spread of fracking to Europe and China, for example, Time magazine (5/21/12) cited the International Energy Agency as predicting that “the world could be entering a golden age of gas, in which inexpensive natural gas replaces coal as the electricity source of choice.” Aside from a brief mention of concerns over groundwater contamination by the chemicals used in fracking—listed as one of the “obstacles” to more widespread adoption of the technology—no downsides were noted, while increased mining of natural gas was discussed as a way for smaller countries to become energy-independent of oil-rich nations. “Fracking,” concluded Time’s Bryan Walsh, “is here to stay.”
USA Today (5/15/12) was even more optimistic about a fracked future, running a front-page story headlined “U.S. Energy Independence Is No Longer Just a Pipe Dream,” that raved about the glorious future that will result from fracked natural gas. The advent of fracking in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the paper reported, has transformed a “once-sleepy chunk of north-central Pennsylvania” into the star of “an emerging national energy rush,” with companies rushing to move to town and new hotels in the works. The paper went on to list what it called “an improbable-sounding litany of good things” that could result from fracked wells—from falling gas prices to independence from foreign oil to an economic boom that would (according to one report) create 3.6 million new jobs—but failed to mention a single environmental concern.
Meanwhile, an enthusiastic ABC World News report (5/10/12) on “new drilling techniques [that] find oil in your backyard” avoided even saying the name hydraulic fracturing (though a longer Web report did). Instead, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviewed Kansas farmers whose oil royalties “could be” as much as $500,000 a month. At the end of the segment, Alfonsi displayed a map of frackable sites, gushing that there could be “2 trillion barrels of oil in our backyards.” To which Diane Sawyer replied: “Hope it’s in your backyard!”—and then urged viewers to consult a map on the ABC News website to see if fracking riches could be theirs, too.
Reports like these faithfully echo the talking points of the fossil fuel industry: The American Petroleum Institute’s fracking page states confidently, “Shale energy is the answer. It creates jobs, stimulates the economy and provides a secure energy future for America.”
Other media outlets have been more cautious about proclaiming a glorious fracking future: The Associated Press (5/20/12) noted that while some New York farmers look longingly at the lucrative drilling leases that have gone to their neighbors in fracking-friendly Pennsylvania, others worry about well-water contamination and the destruction of farmland for mining roads and pipelines. But even lengthy series on the fracking controversy, such as the New York Times’ ongoing “Drilling Down” (starting 2/26/11) and NPR’s “The Fracking Boom: Missing Answers” (5/14–17/12), have focused solely on the problems of groundwater and air pollution without touching on climate questions.
One rare exception was an NPR Morning Edition story (5/17/12) by Elizabeth Shogren that followed a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who discovered a huge plume of methane north of Denver, ultimately tracing it to new fracking wells in northeastern Colorado. “We need to know a lot about methane itself, which is natural gas, if we’re worried about climate change,” energy consultant Sue Tierney told Shogren. “Fifty years from now, are we really going to be wondering if we really screwed up because we went on this big gas boom?” It’s a question that the media should be asking now, not half a century on.
