Major stories not told this year....

A Dramatic Wake up Call on Climate Change Monika Bauerlein

This year may turn out to have been a watershed in the biggest story of our age — the enormous shift in global climate. It was a year of record weather events, from freak storms across the US to record floods in Europe and lethal typhoons in Asia. It was also the year when the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dramatic wake-up call, reporting that CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than it’s been in a million years and that within our children’s lifetimes, the oceans may rise a full three feet.

Supreme Court Overturns Key Provision in Voting Rights Act Ari Berman

The most underreported story of 2013 was the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. It was the most wrongheaded voting rights decision in a century, since the Court upheld poll taxes and literacy tests in Giles v. Harris in 1903. John Roberts’s ruling invalidating Section 4 of the VRA means that the states with the worst history of voter discrimination in the United States no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. As a result, onerous laws that were previously blocked by the federal courts, such as Texas’s voter ID law, immediately went into effect while new states like North Carolina rushed to enact even more flagrantly discriminatory measures. Yet far too many in the mainstream media have ignored the ramifications of the decision and have not paid attention to the disturbing spread of Jim Crow 2.0.

Obama’s Relative Silence After Texas Plant Explosion Mike Elk

The failure of the Obama administration to use the explosion at a fertilizer company in West, Texas, which killed 15, to launch a major public campaign to reform deeply flawed workplace safety laws has been seriously underreported. Following the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 miners, Obama used his remarks at the workers’ memorial to call for increased workplace safety measures, which ultimately failed in the House. But three years later, Obama did not even mention the plant’s long history of breaking workplace safety laws at the memorial commemorating the workers and firefighters who were killed in the West, Texas explosion. It was just another mass killing of Americans with no serious political will behind it to create changes.

US Military’s “Pivot to Africa” Tom Engelhardt

The US military is moving into Africa was barely reported this year. In 2013, there was endless media coverage of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” because the administration assured one and all that it was so crucially important (though the actual pivot consisted of little indeed). In the meantime, no one talked about the importance of the US military’s “pivot to Africa.” In Africom’s Gigantic Small Footprint could help define our global military future in a big way.

US Negotiates Major Trade Agreement Simon Johnson

The US is on the verge of signing a major trade agreement, with big implications for business, finance and jobs. This is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), about which there has been relatively little media coverage – although this Washington Post article does a nice job of explaining what is at stake. Approving or amending this trade deal will be a major issue for Congress in early 2014. You should become better informed and put pressure on your congressional representative. Left to their own devices, they will likely just wave this through.

Tax Writers Promise 50 Years of Secrecy for Senators’ Suggestions Mattea Kramer

The wealthiest Americans and corporations enjoy deep tax savings because our tax code is riddled with loopholes that cost the federal government trillions of dollars annually. But this summer Senate finance leaders promised senators 50 years of secrecy for stating which loopholes they want kept in the tax code. That gave them license to stand up for special interests instead of their constituents – and that’s outrageous. We must not allow taxes to be cloaked in secrecy or treated as the third rail of our democracy. Getting rid of loopholes is a crucial move toward a federal government that has the money to invest in job creation, education and scientific research, among many other priorities.

America’s War on Youth Maya Schenwar

While a variety of media have touched on the corporatization of school systems and the shutting down of impoverished schools, there’s been a marked dearth of coverage of the interconnections between the various forms of violence hitting youth from all sides. Rania Khalek tracked the connections between rising prison budgets and atrophying education funding, Victoria Law has chronicled the criminalization of poor youth of color fed into the juvenile “justice” system, I have pointed to the devaluation of the lives of prisoners’ children through the severing of mother-baby bonds at birth and Michael Corcoran has analyzed corporate media’s complicity in demonizing youth for their poverty and unemployment. All the while, Henry Giroux has demonstrated how the interwoven forces of market-driven politics, surveillance, criminalization and overarching authoritarianism have produced a culture that increasingly renders young people “disposable.”