Weapons of Mass Distraction

6. Russian plutonium lost over Chile and Bolivia.

Karl Grossman, "Space Probe Explodes, Plutonium Missing," CovertAction Quarterly, spring 1997. On November 17, 1996, when the U.S. Space Command announced that Russia’s Mars ’96 space probe, carrying a half-pound of deadly plutonium, would crash-land in Australia, President Clinton and the mass media responded immediately. Clinton phoned Australian Prime Minister John Howard and offered "the assets the U.S. has in the Department of Energy" to deal with any radioactive contamination. Later that day the U.S. Space Command revised its account and mistakenly announced the probe had fallen into the Pacific. Following suit, a number of U.S. media outlets reported the probe had crashed "harmlessly" into the ocean. On November 29, 11 days later, the U.S. Space Command changed its mind yet again: "It changed not only where but also when the probe fell — not off South America but on Chile and Bolivia, and not on November 17 but the night before," Grossman reports. This time, there were no calls from the president, and the U.S. government did little to help locate and recover the radioactive canisters. "You can clearly see the double standard," a Houston aerospace engineer told CAQ. "Australia got a phone call from Clinton; Chile got a 2-week-old fax from somebody." Grossman says the mainstream media were likewise "blasé" about the implications for Latin America; The New York Timesburied the story in a World News Brief. Some suspected that NASA didn’t want too much attention paid to the crash because it might have affected the agency’s already controversial plan to load a record 72.3 pounds of plutonium on its Cassini probe, which it launched in October 1997.

7. Norplant experiments in Third World lead to forced use in United States.

Jennifer Washburn, "The Misuses of Norplant: Who Gets Stuck?," Ms., November-December 1996. Rebecca Kavoussi, "Norplant and the Dark Side of the Law," Washington Free Press, March-April 1997. Joseph D’Agostino, "BBC Documentary Claims That U.S. Foreign Aid Funded Norplant Testing on Uninformed Third World Women," Human Events, May 16, 1997. Low-income women in the United States and the Third World have been unwitting targets of a U.S. policy to control birth rates through the use of the drug implant Norplant, according to three stories identified by Project Censored. Human Eventsreports that a 1995 BBC documentary accused the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) of using uninformed women in Bangladesh, Haiti and the Philippines for tests of Norplant’s effectiveness. Norplant, a synthetic version of a female hormone, is intended to prevent pregnancy for five years. It has been linked with debilitating side effects, and the implant can only be removed through surgery — at a cost far beyond the reach of low-income women. In the United States, as Jennifer Washburn discovered, state Medicaid agencies often cover the cost of Norplant insertion but don’t cover removal before the full five years. Although Medicaid policy may cover early removal when it is determined to be "medically necessary," medical necessity is determined by the provider and the Medicaid agency, not the patient. "Most people in this country probably believe that reproductive coercion is a thing of the past," Washburn said. "But as my article demonstrates, there are innumerable ways that coercion continues in America." Norplant’s side effects have led to the filing of more than 400 lawsuits representing more than 50,000 women against Wyeth-Ayerst, the maker of Norplant.

8. Little-known law paves way for national ID card.

Cyndee Parker, "National ID Card Is Now Federal Law and Georgia Wants To Help To Lead the Way," Witwigo, May-June 1997. We can thank our own Senator Dianne Feinstein for this scandal. According to Cyndee Parker, Feinstein wrote the law that creates a framework for establishing a national identification-card system. The law, buried in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996, established a "Machine Readable Document Pilot Program." Under the proposed system, according to Parker, the driver’s license would become a national ID card. Employers would have document readers that would be linked to the federal Social Security Administration. When a prospective employee’s driver’s license is passed through the reader, the federal government would have the discretion to approve or reject the applicant for employment. Parker reported that Feinstein told a Capitol Hill magazine that it was her intention to see Congress immediately implement a national identity system whereby every American is required to carry a card with a "magnetic strip on it on which the bearer’s unique voice, retina pattern or fingerprint is digitally encoded."

9. Mattel cuts U.S. jobs to open sweatshops in other countries.

Eyal Press, "Barbie’s Betrayal: The Toy Industry’s Broken Workers," The Nation, December 30, 1996. Anton Foek, "Sweatshop Barbie: Exploitation of Third World Labor," The Humanist, January-February 1997. For many workers around the world, the Barbie doll has become a symbol of the economic havoc wreaked by NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. Mayor Richard Riordan helped bring this story to fruition when, as a member of the board at Mattel in 1984, he pressed to shift U.S. operations to Mexico. In the process, 800 jobs were lost in Southern California. Eyal Press told the story of Dennis Mears, a Mattel factory worker in Medina, New York, who was laid off after working at the same plant for 23 years. Meanwhile, Press wrote, Delfina Rodriguez, an employee at a Mattel affiliate in Tijuana, was forced to quit or go to jail after being suspected of organizing for workers’ rights. "Behind the glitter of FAO Schwarz and Toys ‘R’ Us, the toy industry is a showcase for the injustices at the heart of the unregulated global economy," Press wrote. "In 1973 more than 56,000 Americans worked in U.S. toy factories. Today that figure is down to 27,000 as billion-dollar companies like Mattel earn record profits by relocating to countries where workers lack basic rights . . ."