News & Politics > Briefs
edited by Lorna Tychostup

All the News You’ll Never Read

It’s “Project Censored” time again, another glaring reminder that the mass media simply isn’t doing its job. Following its mission to “stimulate responsible journalists to provide more mass media coverage of under-covered issues and to encourage the general public to demand mass media coverage of those issues or to seek information from other sources,” Project Censored compiles and reviews under-reported stories from around the country. Here are this year’s Top Five Censored Stories:

1. The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance
The us plan for total global domination—as put forth in a report by the Project for a New American Century (pnac) and described by the Sunday Herald’s Neil Mackay as “drawn up for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and Lewis Libby”—advocated the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, and other current foreign policy objectives, long before the attacks of 9/11. It describes the need for a “new Pearl Harbor” to persuade the American public to accept the acts of war and aggression the administration wants to carry out. “This American grand strategy” must be advanced for “as long into the future as possible,” the report states, and calls for the us to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” as a “core mission.” [Editor’s note: Chronogram was the first publication in the country to reprint Neil Mackay’s exposure of the pnac in October, 2002.]
Sources: The Sunday Herald, by Neil Mackay (9/15/02), Harper’s (10/02), Mother Jones (3/03), Pilger.com (12/12/02)

2. Homeland Security Threatens Civil Liberties
While the installation of the Patriot Act, and its second coming—Patriot Act II (leaked to the press in February 2003)—were covered in the mainstream media, some of the highly dangerous and precedent-setting components of both acts have received little or no coverage. For example: “Under section 501 a us citizen engaging in lawful activity can be picked off the streets or from home and taken to a secret military tribunal with no access to or notification of a lawyer, the press or family.” This would be considered justified if the agent “inferred from the conduct” suspicious intention.
Sources: Global Outlook (Winter 2003), Rense.com (2/11/03), Center for Public Integrity (publicintegrity.org)
Corporate Media partial coverage: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (5/11/03), Tampa Tribune (3/28/03), Baltimore Sun (2/21/03)

3. us Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq un Report
The media failed to report the Bush administration’s removal of an enormous 8,000 pages from the 11,800-page report submitted by the Iraqi government to the un Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. These pages report on how the us had supplied chemical and biological components and building blocks for wmd, and implicate not only Reagan and Bush administration officials and the us Departments of Energy and Agriculture, but also such major corporations as Bechtel, Eastman Kodak, and Dupont.
Sources: Humanist and ArtVoice (March/April 2003), first covered by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

4. Rumsfeld's Plan to Provoke Terrorists
The American media failed to report on the secret armies the Pentagon has been developing around the world. “The Pro-active, Preemptive Operations Group” (or “Pee-Twos”) will carry out secret missions designed to “stimulate reactions” among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts that would then expose them to “counterattack” by us forces, Chris Floyd wrote for Counterpunch.
Source: CounterPunch (11/1/02)

5. The Effort to Make Unions Disappear
The war on terrorism is a convenient boon for conservatives, as it makes it easier for employers and the government to repress organized labor in the name of national security. For example, Bush used “national security” reasons to force striking International Longshore and Warehouse Union members back to work in the San Francisco Bay Area in October of 2002.

A full list of the top 10 Censored Stories, as well as 15 runner-ups as complied by Project Censored, can be found at www.projectcensored.org.

—Lorna Tychostup

CEO Pay Raises Tied to Largest Layoffs

Released in early September, “Executive Excess 2003: ceos Win, Workers and Taxpayers Lose,” the tenth annual ceo pay report by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, found that companies with the biggest layoffs, most underfunded pensions, and that moved offshore to avoid us taxes rewarded their ceo’s the biggest pay raises in 2002.

Among 365 large corporations surveyed by Business Week, the median ceo salary rose last year by 6 percent, to $3.7 million. But at the 50 companies with the most announced layoffs, salaries skyrocketed 44 percent, to $5.1 million. At the 30 companies with the greatest shortfall in their employees’ pension funds, ceos made 59 percent more than the median salary.

At the 30 companies with the greatest shortfall in their employees’ pension funds, ceos made 59 percent more than the median ceo in Business Week’s survey. Congress fueled runaway ceo pay and helped us companies avoid paying their fair share of taxes by blocking proposed stock option reforms 10 years ago. Many corporations have boosted reported profits by not counting stock options as an expense in their financial statements to shareholders. Those very same corporations do deduct the value of stock option exercises from their corporate tax returns, reducing their tax burden. Between 1997 (the year that a proposal to require expensing of stock options would have taken effect) and 2002, 350 leading firms received an estimated $3.6 billion in tax deductions based on their ceos filling their pockets with $9 billion in option gains. A new proposal to require expensing of options is now under consideration.

This lost federal revenue is about the same amount as the combined 2003 budget deficits of seven of the top 10 largest states (Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and Georgia). It also approximates the amount by which spending on Medicaid in all 50 states exceeded budgeted amounts in 2003. Corporate taxes’ share of federal taxes dropped from 12 percent in 1996 to 8.7 percent in 2001.

At the 24 Fortune 500 companies with the most subsidiaries in offshore tax havens, median ceo pay over the 2000 to 2002 period was $26.5 million—87 percent more than the $14.2 million median three-year pay at firms surveyed by Business Week.

While the median ceo salary rose six percent in 2002, remuneration for chief executives at the 50 companies with the most layoffs jumped 44 percent last year. The top layoff leader in terms of layoff numbers is Carly S. Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard. She fired 25,700 workers in 2001, and saw her pay rise 231 percent, from $1.2 million in 2001 to $4.1 million in 2002.

The top layoff leader by percentage pay increase is AOL/Time Warner’s Gerald M. Levin, who presided over 4,380 layoffs in 2001. Levin’s pay increased a staggering 1,612 percent, from $1.2 million in 2001 to $21.2 million in 2002.

The highest paid layoff leader was Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, who took home over $71 million in 2002, a $34.7 million raise, even though he was forced out in disgrace mid-year. In 2001, Tyco laid off 11,300 workers. The top 50 layoff leaders cut a total of 465,252 jobs in 2001.

Between 1990 and 2002, average ceo pay rose 279 percent, far more than the 46 percent increase in worker pay, which was just 8 percent above inflation. ceo pay dramatically outpaced the performance of the S&P 500, which rose 166 percent in the same period, as well as the 93 percent rise in corporate profits.

The ceo-worker pay gap was 281-to-1 in 2002, nearly seven times greater than the 1982 ratio of 42-to-1.

—Brian Mahoney
Source: www.unitedforafaireconomy.com