Laura Flanders | The Nation

Don’t take your eyes of Chicago yet. The NATO protests may be over, but city politics are heating up. Chicago’s Public School teachers are negotiating a new contract, and an impasse could lead to the first teachers strike in the city since 1987. The target of the teachers’ ire is Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and a regimen of change that dates back to the days of now Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. A strike before November? Teachers say they are ready for it. Their union is under new leadership and new allies, like Progress Illinois and Occupy Chicago, are at their back. Immediately following the NATO protests, the CTU is holding what it says will be a historic rally and march on the city Board of Education.

Like teachers across the country, the Chicago Teachers Union has come under attack for years. Schools have seen layoffs, new standardized tests and no end of complaints about performance. (Some of the best—and the worst—public schools in the state are in Chicago.) Now Mayor Emmanuel and his superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard are demanding (among other things) a roughly 20 percent longer school day and a new, merit-based pay system—along with a 2 percent pay raise. It’s not enough to win over the Chicago Teachers Union. In fact, it has fired them up, and their allies too.

Back in December an Occupy inspired “mic-check” of a Board of Education meeting held up business for hours.. On Wednesday, May 23rd, thousands of teachers plan to march with their allies to the Board of Education after school,. All rumors to the contrary, the CTU say they’re not holding a vote on a strike -- not yet. They are showing their strength. A new state law requires a fact-finding review and a 75 percent vote to authorize a strike, and the CTU say their informal polls show they have that and more. Their contract expires June 30.

Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey, who was elected in 2010 with a slate of new leaders, said at a press conference Tuesday, “There is no funding for a longer day.” The CTU has put forward its own reform plan, which includes infrastructure improvements, smaller classes and more professional development. “There are 160 schools with no libraries,” noted Sharkey, even as “the city is opening sixty new charter schools.”

Sharkey’s comments echoed those of Chicago teacher Jennifer Johnson, who addressed the Labor Notes conference in the city earlier this month. Johnson teaches history at Lincoln Park High School in North Chicago, a diverse public neighborhood school that also has selective enrollment. Johnson’s father and grandfather were both teachers. She loves her job, but she’ll strike if she has to, she told me. It’d be “doing justice” to her pupils.

The “Age Wave” is upon us. It is estimated that every eight seconds another American turns 65. As is already clear to many, elder care is the crisis we have no plan for. Add housing to the mix of existing concerns about care, health and retirement security and you have a disaster looming—which is why it’s crazy to threaten the largest source of unsubsidized housing still affordable for the middle class—especially when those middle-class retirees are your clients.

At least that’s what a group of retirees had it in mind to tell billionaire property baron (and Romney supporter) Sam Zell when they flew into Chicago from around the country to attend the annual shareholder meeting of one of Zell’s companies, Equity Life Style Properties (ELS), last week.

“This was our one chance in the year to tell Zell and his board how the company’s policies are affecting real people,” said Ishbel Dickens of the Manufactured Home Owners Association of America (MHOAA), who helped organize the residents’ action May 8. But she and most of the residents were excluded from the meeting, and Sam Zell himself stayed away.

“I bought a share so I could tell Sam Zell that that we need to have a conversation regarding the company’s treatment of its own clients,” Pam Bournival of Florida told the press afterwards. “I came all the way from Sarasota Florida, to attend and have a voice…. but I’ll be back next year.”

ELS owns hundreds of manufactured home communities that cater to senior citizens. The seniors who live in ELS communities have bought their homes, but they rent the plot on which their houses stand. Since Zell started buying up manufactured home communities, he has made millions by cutting services and raising rent. For retirees like Bournival, or Helen Honeycutt, who came to Chicago from an ELS community in Los Osos, California, acquisition by Zell has turned what she thought was a well-planned retirement in a rent-controlled community into an insecure experience that threatens her nest-egg home.

“When we paid $85,000 for a manufactured home fourteen years ago, we were looking to have no mortgage, low overhead and a lifestyle we could afford,” Honeycutt told me in Chicago. When ELS bought the property ten years ago, they started hiking rents and pressuring the county to eliminate rent control.

“Now I live in constant fear that the county will give up the fight against Sam Zell’s deep-pocket lawsuits and we’ll be priced out,” explains Honeycutt. ELS says their tenants can move if they don’t like it. “But my home is a 1,900-square-foot triple-wide. It’s old. I can’t move it two feet.”

Honeycutt has good cause to be concerned. In Santa Cruz, ELS sued so many times to rescind the prevailing rent control ordinance that the city finally gave way even after prevailing in court, reportedly to avoid further litigation costs. Now, “fair market rents” established by ELS for the local DeAnza Home Park are up from $400–$600 to $1,700, even $5,000 per month for ocean-front properties. Bob Lamonica, a DeAnza resident, can’t move his $300,000 home and he fears he’d never be able to sell it. “Potential buyers won’t buy when they realize they will have to pay $60,000 a year rent on top of the house itself,” Lamonica explained.

According to the Center for Community Change (CCC), one of the groups that brought the retirees to Chicago, “In the past eight years more than 25 families have lost all their equity.… A few have sold for $25,000. Others, after not being able to sell, have had to walk away from their home after signing over their home to ELS for $1.00.”

It’s bad news for the family, for the local community and for the country as a whole. According to MHOAA, about 2.9 million households own their own home and rent land in 56,000 manufactured-home communities. For seniors, the properties are particularly attractive and the communities are typically close-knit and caring; some even have healthcare assistants living on site. Replacing year-round middle-class tenants with affluent vacation homeowners breaks up the communities, changes their atmosphere and throws more seniors into crisis, onto their families or even onto the state.

“The managing arm of ELS evicts; the sales arm sells at a profit. Profiting is one thing. Racketeering is another,” said LaMonica. “Sam Zell should be beyond this.”

Sam Zell’s not famous for his moral compass. To the contrary, he’s most well known for his involvement in bankrupting the Tribune Media Company and sacrificing the pensions of Tribune workers along the way. He’s a master at the big-dollar deal that doesn’t involve too much of his own cash. According to Forbes magazine, Zell is also the sixty-eighth wealthiest man in America, worth $4.9 billion. ELS made over $300 million profit last year.

In addition to suing cities over rent-control measures in California and other states, he has funded a statewide ballot to end rent control entirely. He has backed Eric Cantor, contributed $70,000 to the Restore Our Future Super PAC, which is supporting Mitt Romney, and he has given $100,000 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC.

“He’s spending money on right-wing candidates who think Social Security should not exist in America. How is that good for your customer base?” said Kevin Borden of CCC.

That’s another thing the retirees wanted to ask Sam Zell. But perhaps even for the man who’s called himself “Grave Dancer,” “Granny-Gouger” was one moniker too many.

“He can run, but he can’t hide,” said Bill Dempsy, of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The UFCW members’ pension fund has hundreds of shares in ELS. “We have a simple message for the Zells of the world who are used to doing whatever they want behind close doors. Zell was hiding today from his shareholders, but he can’t hide anymore.”

Last week’s action in Chicago was part of the same “99 Power” campaign of shareholder actions that brought thousands of protestors to the Charlotte, North Carolina, meeting of Bank of America on May 10.

“The idea is, these boards are up in their towers looking at ledgers, not realizing there are names attached,” said Lamonica. “Coming here today is to remind them, that there are human beings involved.”

ELS corporate relations officer Martina Lenders didn’t respond to a reporter’s request for a comment from ELS or Sam Zell.

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, antiwar and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the United States. A new publication from the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.

From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created as he is by the movement’s political impact.

We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide,” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility—in worker cooperatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

Let’s start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we’re in, historically?

There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that, but it’s a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalist economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift—a striking shift—from production to financialization.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession, and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more, or course); the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this….

And politically…?

Again there are differences, In Europe there’s an dangerous growth of ultra-xenophobia, which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe…and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he said the social contract’s dead; we finally got rid of it.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private concentrated spending, but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas. It was understood by the ad industry in 2008, they gave Barack Obama their marketing award of the year. This year it’s barely a pretense.

The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It’s in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super-rich and the corporate sector. They can’t get votes that way, so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It’s always been there, but it’s rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the religious right, but basically it’s the extreme religious population. The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It’s been increasing since 1980, but now it’s a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party, so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women’s rights.… The US is a country [in which] 80 percent of the population thinks the Bible was written by God. About half think every word is literally true. So it’s had to appeal to that—and to the nativist population, the people that are frightened, have always been.… It’s a very frightened country, and that’s increasing now with the recognition that the white population is going to be a minority pretty soon, “they’ve taken our country from us.” That’s the Republicans. There are no more moderate Republicans. They are now the centrist Democrats. Of course the Democrats are drifting to the right right after them. The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that’s not their concern.

You describe Occupy as the first organized response to a thirty-year class war…

It’s a class war, and a war on young people too.… that’s why tuition is rising so rapidly. There’s no real economic reason for that. It’s a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.

Are comparisons to Arab Spring useful?

One point of similarity is they’re both responses to the toll taken by the neolib programs. They have a different effect in a poor country like Egypt than a rich country like the US. But structurally somewhat similar In Egypt, the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund]: the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was [that] for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and, meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption.

We have a structural analogue here—in fact the same is true in South America—some of the most dramatic events of the last decade (and we saw it again in Cartagena a couple of weeks ago), Latin America is turning towards independence for the first time in 500 years. That’s not small. And the Arab Spring was beginning to follow it. There’s a counterrevolution in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) countries beating it back, but there were advances. In South America [there were] substantial ones and that’s happening in the Arab Spring and it has a contagious effect—it stimulated the Occupy movement and there are interactions.

In the media, there was a lot of confusion in the coverage of Occupy. Is there a contradiction between anarchism and organization? Can you clarify?

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists’ movements assumed that there’d be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on. Actually, one piece of the media confusion has a basis because there really are two different strands in the Occupy movement, both important, but different.

One is policy-oriented: what policy goals [do we want.] Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They’re all very important, and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but, to some extent, action on these issues.

The other part is just creating communities—something extremely important in a country like this, which is very atomized. People don’t talk to each other. You’re alone with your television set or Internet. But you can’t have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call “secondary organizations,” places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don’t do it alone. The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important. And maybe that’s what’s causing the media confusion… because it’s both.

Is that why the same media that routinely ignore violence against women, played up stories about alleged rape and violence at OWS camps?

That’s standard practice. Every popular movement that they want to denigrate they pick up on those kind of things. Either that, or weird dress or something like that. I remember once in 1960s, there was a demonstration that went from Boston to Washington and TV showed some young woman with a funny hat and strange something or other. There was an independent channel down in Washington—sure enough, showed the very same woman. That’s what they’re looking for. Let’s try to show that it’s silly and insignificant and violent if possible, and you get a fringe of that everywhere.

To pay attention to the actual core of the movement—that would be pretty hard. Can you concentrate, for example, on either the policy issues or the creation of functioning democratic communities of mutual support and say, Well, that’s what’s lacking in our country that’s why we don’t have a functioning democracy—a community of real participation. That’s really important. And that always gets smashed.

Take say, Martin Luther King. Listen to the speeches on MLK Day—and it’s all “I have a dream.” But he had another dream, and he presented that in his last talk in Memphis just before he was assassinated. In which he said something about how he’s like Moses. He followed the lines of the biblical story. He knew he wouldn’t get there, but his people—the poor, the suffering—would finally. So he hoped. The promised land was policies and developments which would deal with the poverty and repression, not racial, but the poor people’s movement. Right after [the assassination] there was a march. [King] was going to lead it. Coretta Scott King led it. It started in Memphis went through the South to the different places where they’d fought the civil rights battle and ended up in Washington, DC, and they had a tent city, Resurrection Park, and security forces were called in by the liberal Congress. The most liberal Congress in memory. They broke in in the middle of the night smashed up Resurrection Park and drove them out of the city. That’s the way you deal with popular movements that are threatening…

Thinking of Memphis, where Dr. King was supporting striking sanitation workers, what are your thoughts on the future of the labor movement?

The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back. They had to hold off during the war, but right after it began immediately. Taft-Hartley was 1947, then you get a huge corporate propaganda campaign a large part if it directed at labor unions: why they’re bad and destroy harmony and amity in the US. Over the years that’s had an effect. The labor movement recognized what was going on far too late. Then it picked up under Reagan.

Reagan pretty much informed employers that they were not going to employ legal constraints on breaking up unions (they weren’t not strong, but there were some) and firing of workers for organizing efforts I think tripled during the Reagan years.

Clinton came along; he had a different technique for breaking unions, it was called NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. Under NAFTA there was again a sharp increase in illegal blocking of organizing efforts. You put up a sign—We’re going to transfer operations to Mexico.… It’s illegal, but if you have a criminal state, it doesn’t make a difference.

The end result, is, private sector unionization is down to practically 7 percent. Meanwhile, the public sector unions have kind of sustained themselves [even] under attack, but in the last few years, there’s been a sharp [increase in the] attack on public sector unions, which Barack Obama has participated in, in fact. When you freeze salaries of federal workers, that’s equivalent to taxing public sector people…

And attacks on collective bargaining?

Attacks on collective bargaining in Wisconsin [are part of] a whole range of attacks because that’s an attack on a part of the labor movement that was protected by the legal system as a residue of the New Deal and Great Society and so on.

So do unions have a future?

Well, it’s not worse than the 1920s. There was a very lively active militant labor movement in the late part of the nineteenth century, right through the early part of twentieth century. [It was] smashed up by Wilson and the red scares. By the 1920s right-wing visitors from England were coming and just appalled by the way workers were treated. It was pretty much gone. But by 1930s it was not only revived, it was the core element of bringing about the New Deal. The organization of the CIO and the sit-down strikes which were actually terrifying to management because it was one step before saying, “OK, goodbye, we’re going to run the factory.” And that was a big factor in significant New Deal measures that were not trivial but made a big difference

Then, after the war, starts the attack, but it’s a constant battle right though American history. It’s the history of this country and the history of every other country too, but the US happens to have an unusually violent labor history. Hundreds of workers getting killed here for organizing at a time that was just unheard of in Europe or Australia…

What is the number-one target of power today in your view? Is it corporations, Congress, media, courts?

The media are corporations so… It’s the concentrations of private power which have an enormous, not total control but enormous influence over Congress and the White House and that’s increasing sharply with sharp concentration of private power and escalating cost of elections and so on…

As we speak, there are shareholder actions taking place in Detroit and San Francisco. Are those worthwhile, good targets?

They’re ok, but remember, stock ownership in the US is very highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it’s like the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more protest inside the Communist Party but it’s not democracy. It’s not going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they’re mostly symbolic. Why not stakeholder action? There’s no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

But you hear it all the time that under law, the CEO’s required to increase dividends to shareholders.

It’s kind of a secondary commitment of the CEO. The first commitment is raise your salary. One of the ways to raise your salary sometimes is to have short-term profits, but there are many other ways. In the last thirty years there have been very substantial legal changes to corporate governance so by now CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That’s one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They’re similar societies and it’s bad enough there, but here we’re in the stratosphere.) There’s no particular reason for it. Stakeholders—meaning workers and community—the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management, but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry ?

Worker co-ops are a growing movement. One question that I hear is—will change come from changing ownership if you don’t change the profit paradigm?

It’s a little like asking if shareholder voting is a good idea, or the Buffet rule is a good idea. Yes, it’s a good step, a small step. Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have well-known inherent inefficiencies. They’re very destructive. The obvious one, in a market system, in a really functioning one, whoever’s making the decisions doesn’t pay attention to what are called externalities, effects on others. I sell you a car, if our eyes are open we’ll make a good deal for ourselves but we’re not asking how it’s going to affect her [over there]. It will, there’ll be more congestion, gas prices will go up, there will be environmental effects and that multiplies over the whole population. Well, that’s very serious.

Take a look at the financial crisis. Ever since the New Deal regulation was essentially dismantled, there have been regular financial crises and one of the fundamental reasons, it’s understood, is that the CEO of Goldman Sachs or CitiGroup does not pay attention to what’s called systemic risk. Maybe you make a risky transaction and you cover your own potential losses, but you don’t take into account the fact that if it crashes it may crash the entire system. Which is what a financial crash is.

The much more serious example of this is environmental impacts. In the case of financial institutions when they crash, the taxpayer comes to the rescue, but if you destroy the environment no one is going to come to the rescue…

So it sounds as if you might support something like the Cleveland model where the ownership of the company is actually held by members of the community as well as the workers…

That’s a step forward, but you also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems. Take the most advanced case: Mondragón. It’s worker-owned, it’s not worker-managed, although the management does come from the workforce often, but it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America, and they do things that are harmful to the society as a whole, and they have no choice. If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.

Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people to a conception of themselves and society in which you’re only after your own good, not the good of others and that’s extremely harmful.

Have you ever had a taste of a non-market system—had a flash of optimism—Oh, this is how we could live?

A functioning family for example, and there are bigger groups, cooperatives are a case in point. It certainly can be done. The biggest I know is Mondragón, but there are many in between and a lot more could be done. Right here in Boston in one of the suburbs about two years ago, there was a small but profitable enterprise building high-tech equipment. The multinational who owned the company didn’t want to keep it on the books so they decided to close it down. The workforce and the union, UE [United Electrical Workers], offered to buy it, and the community was supportive. It could have worked if there had been popular support. If there had been an Occupy movement then, I think that could have been a great thing for them to concentrate on. If it had worked you would have had another profitable, worker-owned and worker-managed profitable enterprise. There‘s a fair amount of that already around the country. Gar Alperovitz has written about them, Seymour Melman has worked on them. Jonathan Feldman was working on these things.

There are real examples and I don’t see why they shouldn’t survive. Of course they’re going to be beaten back. The power system is not going to want them any more than they want popular democracy any more than the states of the Middle East and the West are going to tolerate the Arab Spring.… They’re going to try to beat it back.

They tried to beat back the sit-in strikes back in the 1930s. What we forget is entire communities turned out to support those strikes. In Flint, cordons of women stood between the strikers and the police.

Go back a century to Homestead, the worker-run town, and they had to send in the National Guard to destroy them.

Trayvon Martin. Can you talk for a few minutes about the role of racism and racial violence in what we’ve been talking about? Some people think of fighting racism as separate from working on economic issues.

Well you know, there clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African-American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African-American communities is almost zero. The history is striking. You take a look at the history of African-Americans in the US. There’s been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before North/South compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefited from it. It lasted for about twenty years, the big growth period in the ’50s and ’60s, so a black man could get a job in an auto plant and buy a house and send his kids to college and kind of enter into the world but by the ’70s it was over.

With the radical shift in the economy, basically the workforce which is partly white but also largely black, they basically became superfluous. Look what happened, we recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1980s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially redoing what happened after Reconstruction. That’s the history of African-Americans—so how can any one say there’s no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it’s worse than that…

Talk about media. We often discern bias in the telling of a particular story, but I want you to talk more broadly about the way our money media portray power, democracy, the role of the individual in society and the way that change happens…

Well, they don’t want change to happen…. They’re right in the center of the system of power and domination. First of all the media are corporations, parts of bigger corporations, they’re very closely linked to other systems of power both in personnel and interests and social background and everything else. Naturally, they tend to be reactionary.

But they sort of give us a clock. If change hasn’t happened in ten minutes, it’s not going to happen.

Well that’s a technique of indoctrination. That’s something I learned from my own experience. There was once an interview with Jeff Greenfield in which he was asked why I was never asked onto Nightline. He gave a good answer. He said the main reason was that I lacked concision. I had never heard that word before. You have to have concision. You have to say something brief between two commercials.

What can you say that’s brief between two commercials? I can say Iran is a terrible state. I don’t need any evidence. I can say Qaddafi carries out terror. Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it’s one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can’t say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you mean. They’ve never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That’s exactly what’s cut out. Concision is a technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic.

What about media’s conception of power? Who has it, who doesn’t have it and what’s our role if we’re not say, president or CEO.

Well, not just the media but pretty much true of academic world, the picture is we the leading democracy in the world, the beacon of freedom and rights and democracy. The fact that democratic participation here is extremely marginal, doesn’t enter [the media story]. The media will condemn the elections in Iran, rightly, because the candidates have to be vetted by the clerics. But they won’t point out that in the United States [candidates] have to be vetted by high concentrations of private capital. You can’t run in an election unless you can collect millions of dollars.

One interesting case is right now. This happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam—the worst atrocity in the post-war period. Killed millions of people, destroyed four countries, total horror story. Not a word. It didn’t happen because “we” did it. So it didn’t happen.

Take 9/11. That means something in the United States. The “world changed” after 9/11. Well, do a slight thought experiment. Suppose that on 9/11 the planes had bombed the White House… suppose they’d killed the president, established a military dictatorship, quickly killed thousands, tortured tens of thousands more, set up a major international terror center that was carrying out assassinations , overthrowing governments all over the place, installing other dictatorships, and drove the country into one of the worst depressions in its history and had to call on the state to bail them out Suppose that had happened? It did happen. On the first 9/11 in 1973. Except we were responsible for it, so it didn’t happen. That’s Allende’s Chile. You can’t imagine the media talking about this.

And you can generalize it broadly. The same is pretty much true of scholarship—except for on the fringes—it’s certainly true of the mainstream of the academic world. In some respects critique of the media is a bit misleading [because they’re not alone among institutions of influence] and of course, they closely interact.

Twenty-six years after the meltdown at Chernobyl, the legacy of the 1986 explosion lives on.

"It is a disaster that left a 30-kilometre uninhabitable exclusion zone, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and still threatens the lives of tens of thousands," writes Greenpeace today.

All these years and a triple meltdown at Fukushima later, the industry and its supporters have yet to learn.

"The nuclear industry still hasn't realized or admitted that its reactors are unsafe. Reactors are vulnerable to any unforeseen combination of technological failures, human errors and natural disasters. That puts the tens of millions of people living near the worlds more than 400 reactors at risk."  Write Greenpeace's Justin McKeating.

To get a sense of just what those tens of millions live at risk of, take a look at these photographs by award winning photographer Paul Fusco. Earlier this month I had a the honor of participating in the fourth Schuneman Symposium held at the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. Among the speakers was Fusco, an extraordinary MAGNUM photographer who traveled to the Ukraine to see the legacy of Chernobyl after twenty years. Fusco expected to stay two weeks. He stayed for two months, following parents, children, nurses and cancer patients.

"It changed my life. I couldn't leave. It was so immense in its implications. There is so much damage to so many people in so many ways…" says Fusco.

Yet his extraordinary photographs, which you can see here in a short promotional slideshow, aren't printed in US papers. They're like his pictures of US military funerals, his current project, which is called Bitter Fruit. "The pictures are printed a lot in Europe. Never here," Fusco told the Scripps students. "Why do you think that is?"