THE TOP FIVE CENSORED STORIES 2016

The presentation of the Top 5 stories of 2016 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed 235 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 221 college students and 33 professors from 18 college and university campuses that participate in our affiliate program.

1. US Military Forces Deployed in Seventy Percent of World’s Nations

If you throw a dart at a world map and do not hit water, Nick Turse reported for TomDispatch, the odds are that US Special Operations Forces “have been there sometime in 2015.” According to a spokesperson for Special Operations Command (SOCOM), in 2015 Special Operations Forces (SOF) deployed in 147 of the world’s 195 recognized nations, an increase of eighty percent since 2010. “The global growth of SOF missions has been breathtaking,” Turse wrote.

As SOCOM commander General Joseph Votel told the audience of the Aspen Security Forum in July 2015, more SOF troops are deployed to more locations and are conducting more operations than at the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars. In Turse’s words, “Everyday, in around 80 or more countries that Special Operations Command will not name, they undertake missions the command refuses to talk about.”

Calculated in 2014 constant dollars, the SOCOM budget has more than tripled since 2001, when funding totaled three billion dollars. By 2015, SOCOM funding had risen to nearly ten billion dollars. That figure, Turse noted, did not include additional funding from specific military branches, which SOCOM estimated to amount to another eight billion dollars annually, or other undisclosed sums that were not available to the Government Accountability Office.

Every day, Turse wrote, “America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations.” The majority of these are training missions, “designed to tutor proxies and forge stronger ties with allies.” Training missions focus on everything from basic rifle marksmanship and land navigation to small unit tactics and counterterrorism operations. For example, between 2012–2014, Special Operations Forces carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as many as sixty-seven countries per year. Officially, JCETs are devoted to training US forces, but according to a SOCOM official interviewed by Turse, these missions also “foster key military partnerships with foreign militaries” and “build interoperability between U.S. SOF and partner-nation forces.” JCETs, Turse wrote, “are just a fraction of the story” when it comes to multinational overseas training operations. In 2014, Special Operations Forces organized seventy-five training operations in thirty countries, a figure projected to increase to ninety-eight exercises by the end of 2015, according to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense.

In addition to training, Special Operations Forces also engage in “direct action.” Counterterrorism missions, including what Turse described as “low-profile drone assassinations and kill/capture raids by muscled-up, high-octane operators,” are the specific domains of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces, such as the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force.

Africa has seen the greatest increase in SOCOM deployments since 2006. In that year, just 1 percent of special operators deployed overseas went to Africa. As of 2014, that figure had risen to 10 percent. In the Intercept, Turse reported on the development by US forces of the Chabelley Airfield in the east African nation of Djibouti. “Unbeknownst to most Americans and without any apparent public announcement,” Turse wrote in October 2015, “the U.S. has recently taken steps to transform this tiny, out-of-the-way outpost into an ‘enduring’ base, a key hub for its secret war, run by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), in Africa and the Middle East.” Chabelley, he reported, has become “essential” to secret US drone operations over Yemen, southwest Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and parts of Ethiopia and southern Egypt. Aerial images of Chabelley taken between April 2013 and March 2015 testify to the significant expansion of the base and the presence of drones, though officials refused to respond to questions about the number and types of drones based there. As Turse summarized, “The startling transformation of this little-known garrison in this little-known country is in line with U.S. military activity in Africa, where, largely under the radar, the number of missions, special operations deployments, and outposts has grown rapidly and with little outside scrutiny.” (For previous Project Censored coverage of US military operations in Africa, see Brian Martin Murphy, “The ‘New’ American Imperialism in Africa: Secret Sahara Wars and AFRICOM,” in Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times.)

If, as Turse reported, SOCOM has “grown in every conceivable way from funding and personnel to global reach and deployments” since 9/11, has its expansion resulted in significant success? In an October 2015 report for the Nation, Turse reported skepticism from a number of experts in response to this question. According to Sean Naylor, the author of Relentless Strike, a history of Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC operations are “a tool in the policymaker’s toolkit,” not a “substitute for strategy.” JSOC may have had an impact on the history of Iraq—where its forces captured Saddam Hussein, killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, and “eviscerated” Al Qaeda in Iraq—but, as Turse wrote, impacts are not the same as successes. Similarly, Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and author of Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, told Turse, “As far back as Vietnam … the United States military has tended to confuse inputs with outcomes. Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped, or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress made. Today, tallying up the number of countries in which Special Operations forces are present repeats this error.”

Corporate media have not covered the massive expansion of Special Operations Forces around the globe, much less raised critical questions about whether these missions result in meaningful accomplishments. The increase that has taken place over the past five to ten years is not “breaking” news, and so it has gone all but completely unreported by the corporate press. Instead, the global presence of US military personnel is typically treated as the unspoken background for more dramatic reports of specific military operations or policy decisions. Thus, for example, in October 2015, Time magazine ran a graphic documenting “places with some of the most significant number” of US military personnel stationed “in over 150 countries across the world.” However, the Time map of the world featured just nine points—none of which were located in Africa—and the entire graphic ran as a sidebar to the primary story, about President Obama’s announcement to maintain the current number of troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016, which reversed his earlier plan to withdraw most military personnel by the end of his presidency.

 

Nick Turse, “A Secret War in 135 Countries,” TomDispatch, September 24, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176048/.
Nick Turse, “The Stealth Expansion of a Secret US Drone Base in Africa,” Intercept, October 21, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/10/21/stealth-expansion-of-secret-us-drone-base-in-africa/.
Nick Turse, “American Special Operations Forces Have a Very Funny Definition of Success,” Nation, October 26, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/american-special-operations-forces-have-a-very-funny-definition-of-success/.
Student Researchers: Scott Arrow (Sonoma State University) and Bri Silva (College of Marin)
Faculty Evaluators: Robert McNamara (Sonoma State University) and Susan Rahman (College of Marin)

2. Crisis in Evidence-Based Medicine

In April 2015, the Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, wrote, “Something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.” Describing the upshot of a UK symposium held that month on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, Horton summarized the “case against science”: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming.”

Horton is not the first editor of a prominent medical journal to raise these concerns. In 2009, Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, made comparable claims in an article for the New York Review of Books: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Countering the pharmaceutical industry’s undue influence on the medical profession, Angell concluded, would require “a sharp break from an extremely lucrative pattern of behavior.” Horton’s Lancet editorial echoed Angell’s assessment: “Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative.”

No biomedical study better epitomizes the corruption and conflicts of interest noted by insider critics like Angell and Horton than Study 329, a now notorious clinical trial published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2001. Study 329 reported that paroxetine—marketed by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK) as Paxil in the US and as Seroxat in the UK—was safe and effective for treating depressed children and adolescents. A GSK marketing campaign built on the published study, touting the drug’s “remarkable efficacy and safety,” led to doctors prescribing Paxil to more than two million US children and adolescents by the end of 2002.

However, within a year of the original report, the US Food and Drug Administration declared Study 329 a “failed trial” because further evidence indicated that adolescents prescribed the drug to treat depression fared no better than those on a placebo. In 2003, UK drug regulators instructed doctors not to prescribe Seroxat to adolescents. In 2012, in what the US Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history,” GSK paid a three billion dollar fine to resolve its liability over fraud allegations and failure to report safety data.

In 2015 the BMJ published a major reanalysis of GSK’s Study 329. Charlie Cooper of the Independent reported that the reanalysis—conducted by an international team of researchers from Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK, and based on thousands of pages of newly available GSK data—“starkly” contradicted the original report’s claims. Furthermore, Cooper noted, the reassessment of Study 329 marked “a milestone in the medical community’s campaign to open up clinical trial data held by pharmaceutical companies to independent scientific scrutiny.”

As Sarah Boseley reported for the Guardian, the reanalysis of Study 329 found that paroxetine’s beneficial effects were far less, and its harmful effects far greater, than the original study reported. In particular, by examining the full set of clinical trials data, the researchers who conducted the reassessment found that eleven of the 275 children and adolescents on the drug developed suicidal or self-harming behavior. The original study had acknowledged only five of these cases. David Healy, a psychiatry professor and one of the reassessment’s coauthors, observed, “This is a very high rate of kids going on to become suicidal. It doesn’t take expertise to find this. It takes extraordinary expertise to avoid finding it.” Boseley’s report also documented renewed calls for the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to retract the original GSK study, whose lead author was Martin Keller of Brown University. Peter Doshi, the BMJ’s associate editor, observed, “It is often said that science self-corrects. But for those who have been calling for a retraction of the Keller paper for many years, the system has failed.” Neither the journal’s editors, nor any of the paper’s twenty-two listed authors have intervened to correct the record, and none of the authors have been disciplined, Doshi noted.

Nevertheless, as documented by Charlie Cooper for the Independent and Sarah Boseley of the Guardian, the reanalysis of the complete set of original clinical trials data for Study 329 is the first major success of a new open data initiative known as Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT), which has been promoted by the BMJ. As Cooper reported, “The BMJ’s final judgment on the infamous ‘Study 329’ represents a symbolic victory for the burgeoning ‘open data’ movement in health.” RIAT is part of a broader movement to force pharmaceutical companies to make all of their data available for independent scientific scrutiny. The AllTrials campaign, which calls for open publication of all clinical trials results, now has the backing of over 600 medical and research organizations, Cooper reported. Boseley’s Guardian article quoted BMJ editor in chief Fiona Godlee, who said that the reanalysis of Study 329 showed “the extent to which drug regulation is failing us.” Godlee called for independent rather than industry funded and managed clinical trials, as well as legislation “to ensure that the results of all clinical trials are made fully available” to third-party scrutiny. Both news stories noted the cooperation of GlaxoSmithKline in making the original data available for reanalysis. GSK posted 77,000 pages of de-identified case reports from the trial on a website—though, it should be noted, the company was obliged to do so under the terms of their settlement.

Richard Horton’s Lancet editorial received no coverage in the US corporate press. The Washington Post featured one story on the reanalysis of the original paroxetine study. The article provided a great deal of information about the misrepresentation of the original study—including, for instance, that the discrepancy between the original report and the BMJ reanalysis was partly due to “the miscoding of a serious suicide attempt as ‘emotional lability,’ a temporary condition that involves uncontrollable episodes of crying.” However, the Washington Post report made only passing mention of the open data movement and did not identify any of the specific initiatives (such as RIAT or AllTrials) by name. Otherwise, the corporate press ignored the reassessment of the paroxetine study.

In May 2014, President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. Although it requires federal agencies to make data—including funding sources for clinical trials—publicly available, the DATA Act’s requirements do not apply to privately funded biomedical research.

Richard Horton, “What is Medicine’s 5 Sigma?,” Lancet 385, no. 9976, April 11, 2015, http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf.
Charlie Cooper, “Anti-Depressant was Given to Millions of Young People ‘After Trials Showed It was Dangerous’,” Independent, September 16, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/anti-depressant-was-given-to-millions-of-young-people-after-trials-showed-it-was-dangerous-10504555.html.
Sarah Boseley, “Seroxat Study Under-Reported Harmful Effects on Young People, Say Scientists,” Guardian, September 16, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/16/seroxat-study-harmful-effects-young-people.
Student Researchers: Joshua Gill-Sutton and Adaeze Iroka (San Francisco State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

3. Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Threaten to Permanently Disrupt Vital Ocean Bacteria

Imagine a car heading toward a cliff’s edge with its gas pedal stuck to the floor. That, Robert Perkins wrote, is a metaphor for “what climate change will do to the key group of ocean bacteria known as Trichodesmium,” according to a study published in the September 2015 issue of Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Southern California and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Trichodesmium is found in nutrient-poor parts of the ocean, where it converts nitrogen gas into material that can be used by other forms of life. From algae to whales, all life needs nitrogen to grow. Reporting for the Guardian, Emma Howard quoted Eric Webb, one of the study’s researchers, who explained how the process of “nitrogen fixation” makes Trichodesmium “the fertilising agent of the open ocean.”

The study tested the effects of elevated levels of carbon dioxide by subjecting hundreds of generations of Trichodesmium bred over a five-year period to CO2 levels predicted for the year 2100 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Responding to increased ocean acidification, the bacteria went into “reproductive overdrive,” Howard reported, evolving to grow faster and to produce 50 percent more nitrogen. One consequence of this is that Trichodesmium could consume significant quantities of nutrients that are in limited supply in the ocean, such as iron and phosphorous, leaving other organisms that depend on the same nutrients without enough to survive. Alternatively, Trichodesmium might consume nutrients at a rate that would lead to its own extinction, leaving other organisms without the nitrogen that the bacteria makes available. Either way, the effects of elevated CO2 levels on the bacteria could trigger catastrophic effects up the marine food chain.

Most significantly, the researchers found that even when the bacteria was returned to lower, present-day levels of carbon dioxide, Trichodesmium remained “stuck in the fast lane,” a finding that Webb described as “unprecedented in evolutionary biology.” The study’s lead author, David Hutchins, observed, “Losing the ability to regulate your growth rate is not a healthy thing … The last thing you want is to be stuck with these high growth rates when there aren’t enough nutrients to go around. It’s a losing strategy in the struggle to survive.”

The next stages of the team’s research involve studying the DNA of Trichodesmium to better understand “how and why the irreversible evolution occurs,” Perkins reported.
In addition to the coverage noted here, the Nature Communications study was reported by Grist, Reuters, and, in the corporate press, by the Washington Post.

Robert Perkins, “Climate Change Will Irreversibly Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive,” USC News (University of Southern California), September 1, 2015, https://news.usc.edu/85742/climate-change-will-irreversibly-force-key-ocean-bacteria-into-overdrive/.
Emma Howard, “Climate Change Will Alter Ocean Bacteria Crucial to Food Chain—Study,” Guardian, September 2, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/02/climate-change-will-alter-ocean-micro-organisms-crucial-to-food-chain-say-scientists.
Student Researcher: Ally Spero (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Carmen Works (Sonoma State University)

4. Search Engine Algorithms and Electronic Voting Machines Could Swing 2016 Election

From search engine algorithms to electronic voting machines, technology provides opportunities for manipulation of voters and their votes in ways that could profoundly affect the results of the 2016 election. In the US, the 2012 presidential election was won by a margin of just 3.9 percent; and, historically, half of US presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent. These narrow but consequential victory margins underscore the importance of understanding how secret, proprietary technologies—whether they are newly developing or increasingly outdated—potentially swing election results.

Mark Frary, in Index on Censorship, describes the latest research by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology on what they call the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). Their research focuses on the powerful role played by the secret algorithms (including Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank) that determine the contents of our Internet search results and social media news feeds.

Epstein and Robertson studied over 4,500 undecided voters in the US and India, using randomized, controlled, double-blind methods, with research subjects who matched as closely as possible each country’s electorate. “The results,” Frary reported, “were shocking.” Epstein and Robertson showed that biased search rankings “could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more.” The effect could be greater than 20 percent in some demographic groups, and—perhaps most significantly—this search-ranking bias “could be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.”

In an earlier article for Politico, Epstein wrote that the Search Engine Manipulation Effect “turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered … We believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.”
Epstein described how the study’s measures—including research subjects’ trust, liking, and voting preferences—“all shifted predictably” based on information provided by a Google-like search engine that he and Robertson created, which they called Kadoodle. In one of the experiments, Epstein and Robertson documented SEME with real voters during an actual election campaign: In a study involving 2,000 eligible undecided voters in India’s 2014 Lok Sabha election, they found that “search engine rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.”

Predictably, Google challenged these findings. As Frary reported, a senior vice president at Google, Amit Singhal, responded in Politico, “There is absolutely no truth to Epstein’s hypothesis that Google could work secretly to influence election outcomes. Google has never ever re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment.” However, as Frary duly noted, “Singhal specifically says ‘re-ranked’ rather than ‘ranked.’ What he means by this is that the algorithm decides on the ranking of search results and that no one goes in and manipulates them afterwards. Google’s stated mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ should perhaps have a caveat—‘as long as our algorithm decides you should see it.’”

Hidden algorithms shape online content in significantly different ways from more widely recognized concerns about editorial censorship on television and in print. On TV and in print, Frary observed, “there is a person at the heart of the decision process … We can imagine how commissioning editors think, but the algorithms behind Facebook and Google are opaque.” This concern has led Emily Bell, a journalism professor at Columbia University, to observe, “If there is a free press, journalists are no longer in charge of it. Engineers who rarely think about journalism or cultural impact or democratic responsibility are making decisions every day that shape how news is created and disseminated.”

When filtering is financially motivated, secret, and beyond our control, Robert Epstein told Index on Censorship, “we should be extremely concerned.” Online filtering on massive platforms such as Google and Facebook, he warned, is “rapidly becoming the most powerful form of mind control that has ever existed.”

More than 75 percent of online searches in the US are conducted on Google—in other countries Google’s share of Internet searches is as high as 90 percent; some 1.5 billion individuals, political parties, businesses, and other organizations now use Facebook. Epstein and Robertson are now researching how to counter SEME. “We found the monster; now we’re trying to figure out how to kill it,” Epstein wrote in his Politico article. These efforts hinge in part on eroding public trust in Google, including our willingness to accept whatever our search results present to us as fact.

As Frary reported, Facebook, Google, and others are “highly secretive about how their algorithms work.” Electronic voting machines present similar challenges, as Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis document in their book, The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft. “Electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations … And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary,” Wasserman told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in February 2016.

In 2016, about 80 percent of the US electorate will vote using outdated electronic voting machines that rely on proprietary software from private corporations, according to a September 2015 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Forty-three states are using machines that will be at least ten years old in 2016; in fourteen states, machines will be fifteen or more years old. The Brennan Center study identified “increased failures and crashes, which can lead to long lines and lost votes” as the “biggest risk” of outdated voting equipment, while noting that older machines also have “serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today.”

“From a security perspective,” Jeremy Epstein of the National Science Foundation noted, “old software is riskier, because new methods of attack are constantly being developed, and older software is likely to be vulnerable.” Virginia recently decertified an electronic voting system used in twenty-four of its precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to “record voting data or inject malicious data”. The investigation also raised concerns over the AccuVote-TSx machine, which is used in over twenty states. In 2014, voters in Virginia Beach observed that when they selected one candidate, the machine would register their selection for a different candidate, due to an “alignment problem.”

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! asked Wasserman how voters using electronic voting machines could be sure that their votes are counted. He told her, “They can’t be. You cannot verify an electronic voting machine … The proprietary software prevents the public from getting access to the actual vote count.” In a March 2016 article on the Free Press website, Fitrakis and Wasserman wrote that the “veracity of outcomes” in electoral races for the offices of president, US Congress, governorships, state legislatures, county commissioners, and others “will vary from state to state based on the whims and interest of those in charge of the electronic tallies.”

On Democracy Now! and elsewhere, Wasserman and Fitrakis have advocated universal, hand-counted paper ballots and automatic voter registration as part of their “Ohio Plan” to prevent stripping and flipping in US elections.
Corporate media outlets including CNNMoney, Fortune, and the Washington Post provided some coverage of Epstein and Robertson’s research. In May 2016, the Huffington Post published an article by actor and activist Tim Robbins, titled “We Need to Fix Our Broken Election System.” “Every broken machine, every disenfranchised voter, every discrepancy between the exit polls and the final results,” Robbins wrote, suggests “malfeasance” and “leads to more and more disillusionment that results in less and less voters.”

Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico, August 19, 2015 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548.
Mark Frary, “Whose World are You Watching? The Secret Algorithms Controlling the News We See,” Index on Censorship 44, no. 4 (December 2015), 69–73. (Extract available via: http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/44/4/69.extract)
Lawrence Norden and Christopher Famighetti, “America’s Voting Machines at Risk,” Brennan Center for Justice (New York University School of Law), September 15, 2015, https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/americas-voting-machines-risk.
Harvey Wasserman, interview by Amy Goodman, “Could the 2016 Election be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?” Democracy Now!, broadcast February 23, 2016, transcript, http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Is the 2016 Election Already being Stripped & Flipped?,” Free Press, March 31, 2016, http://freepress.org/article/2016-election-already-being-stripped-flipped.
Student Researchers: Brandy Miceli (San Francisco State University) and Amanda Woodward (University of Vermont)
Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Rob Williams (University of Vermont)

5. Corporate Exploitation of Global Refugee Crisis Masked as Humanitarianism
 
According to a June 2015 United Nations report, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. The UN report indicated that during 2014 one out of every 122 people was a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker; and over half of these refugees were children. (For previous Project Censored coverage of the global refugee crisis, see “Global Forced Displacement Tops Fifty Million,” Censored story #14 in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line.)

While Syrian refugees account for the largest number (an estimated 11.5 million people), other places such as Colombia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia have large refugee populations that remain largely unreported. According António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at the time of the report, “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before.”

Although the extent of the global refugee crisis has been covered in the corporate media (including, for example, the New York Times and the Washington Post), the exploitation of refugees has been less well covered. In February 2016, Sarah Lazare published an article on AlterNet that warned of the World Bank’s private enterprise solution to the Syrian displacement crisis. “Under the guise of humanitarian aid,” Lazare wrote, “the World Bank is enticing Western companies to launch ‘new investments’ in Jordan in order to profit from the labor of stranded Syrian refugees. In a country where migrant workers have faced forced servitude, torture and wage theft, there is reason to be concerned that this capital-intensive ‘solution’ to the mounting crisis of displacement will establish sweatshops that specifically target war refugees for hyper-exploitation.”

According to a World Bank press release by its president, Jim Yong Kim, “We are exploring the creation of special economic zones (SEZs), and encouraging investments in municipal projects and labor-intensive work.” According to World Bank materials, the goal is to help alleviate hardships faced by refugees in Jordan by developing five SEZs along the Syrian border. “We are using a holistic approach to addressing the refugee influx through private sector development,” Lazare quoted one World Bank spokesperson as saying. However, as Lazare also noted, despite her multiple attempts to obtain more information from the World Bank on the proposed SEZs, specific details remained scant; furthermore, she reported, the history of Jordan’s existing special economic zones (operated under a variety of names) is marred by human trafficking, torture, and wage theft, “often in the service of U.S. companies.”

“At a time of mass human displacement from ongoing wars,” Lazare wrote, “we should be asking hard questions about the political implications of encouraging Western companies to target and profit from the labor of people violently uprooted from their homes.” The World Bank program “raises deeper questions about the global responsibility to address the large-scale human harm the West played a role in unleashing” in Syria. Myriam Francois, a journalist and research associate at SOAS, University of London, told Lazare that the development of SEZs in Jordan “will change refugee camps from emergency and temporary responses to a crisis, to much more permanent settlements.” The SEZ proposals, Francois said, are “less about Syrian needs and more about keeping Syrian refugees out of Europe by creating (barely) sustainable conditions within the camps which would then make claims to asylum much harder to recognize.”

Describing an agreement between Turkey and the European Union to keep millions of refugees from entering Europe as “a deal between devils,” Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report said that Turkey has “cashed in on the people it has helped make homeless.” As Al Jazeera reported, Turkey accepted $3.3 billion from the European Union (EU) “in return for checking the flow of refugees across the Aegean Sea.” Turkey reportedly asked for double that amount to cover the costs of dealing with the refugees. Earlier in March 2016, European Council president Donald Tusk had warned refugees from Asia and Africa, “Do not come to Europe … It is all for nothing.”

Noting that “the great bulk of Turkey’s refugees are victims of Turkey’s role in the war against Syria, in alliance with Europe and the United States and the royal oil aristocrats of the Persian Gulf,” Ford described human trafficking in Turkey as “on a scale not seen since the Atlantic slave trade.”

In addition to the EU money, Turkey has also sought admission to the European Union—and, with this, the right for 75 million Turks to enter Europe without visa restrictions—as a condition for controlling its refugee population. Thus, according to Ford, Turkey has engaged in a “vast protections racket trap,” effectively agreeing to protect Europe from further incursions by “the formerly colonized peoples whose labor and lands have fattened Europe and its white settler states for half a millennium.” However, Ford concluded, “Europeans will never accept Turkey into the fold, because it is Muslim and not-quite-white.”

Corporate exploitation of the global refugee crisis is underreported in the popular and corporate press, and often subject to distorted pro-business coverage, as in a September 2015 Wall Street Journal article on the number of small businesses and large corporations that are finding ways to profit from the flood of migrants. Unlike Lazare’s AlterNet report, the Journal’s coverage dealt only with Syrians who had managed to migrate to European countries. According to the Journal, private equity groups across Europe were pursuing a new investment opportunity with “promising organic and acquisitive growth potential,” the management of camps and services for refugees. “The margins are very low,” the article quoted Willy Koch, the retired founder of the Swiss company ORS Service AG. “One of the keys is, certainly, volume.”

Sarah Lazare, “World Bank Woos Western Corporations to Profit from Labor of Stranded Syrian Refugees,” AlterNet, February 24, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/labor/world-bank-woos-western-corporations-profit-labor-stranded-syrian-refugees.
Glen Ford, “Turkey and Europe: Human Trafficking on a Scale Not Seen since the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Black Agenda Radio, Black Agenda Report, broadcast March 8, 2016, transcript, http://www.blackagendareport.com/turkey_europe_human_trafficking.
Student Researchers: Mark Nelson (Sonoma State University), Sean Donnelly (Citrus College), and Elizabeth Ramirez (College of Marin)
Faculty Evaluators: Anne Donegan (Santa Rosa Junior College), Andy Lee Roth (Citrus College), and Susan Rahman (College of Marin)