Featured Work
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In one month, one million Americans are slated to lose their unemployment insurance, and millions more will follow. Why? When reckless Wall Street gambling collapsed the global economy, Congress stepped in and quickly extended unemployment insurance, food stamps and other support programs for millions of Americans, extending the benefits once more until February 28, 2010, in the hopes by that time the economy would pick up and start creating new jobs. But that hasn't been the case. People are still hurting, and the jobs haven't materialized.
Tell Congress to take swift action to renew unemployment insurance now. Click here to send a letter to your member of Congress.
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Recent blogs from CMD
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The "Yes Men" Punk Davos Man Every year, the biggest boosters of the "neoliberal" economic policy agenda of deregulation, unfettered global trade and strict International Monetary Fund (IMF) rules for poor countries convene at Davos, Switzerland, to pat each other on the back, even though these policies have almost brought the world to ruin. This year, the heads of the biggest U.S. financial firms failed to make the meeting. Fortunately, the famous pranksters, the Yes Men, were tracking events at Davos and jumped in to help with some of the "we have changed our ways" analysis the world was anxious to hear. They unveiled a fake World Economic Forum (WEF) Webpage, accompanied by paper and video press releases from some of the luminaries that frequently attend the forum. They also they issued an apology in the form of a press release for Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein.
- Mary Bottari discusses President Obama's rhetoric in This Week in Banking: Root Canals, Rhetoric or Real Reform? The debate over banks and banking came front and center this week. In his toughest language yet, President Barack Obama vowed to veto financial reform legislation that is not tough enough on Wall Street. "The lobbyists are already trying to kill it," Obama told Congress in his State of the Union address. "Well, we cannot let them win this fight. And if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform, I will send it back." The President's rhetoric offers an important measure of progress. Now we can be assured that the political elite are paying attention to the poll numbers showing an unprecedented anger at the big banks and the Wall Street bailouts. Democrats are starting to figure out if they don't take up this populist message and run with it in November, the Republicans will. Read more here.
- Lisa Graves blogs about Bob McDonnell, Human Wallpaper and the Stagecraft of the Response to the State of the Union, saying "As I watch the response to the State of the Union address, I cannot help but notice that Virginia's new governor, Bob McDonnell, in his response to the President's speech, has continued the George W. Bush PR stagecraft in setting the scene for his remarks. Like tokens, he has four supporters strategically positioned behind him to fit in the television screen: an African American woman, a white male soldier, an Asian man, and a young woman." Read more here.
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In the news from CMD
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- Journalists Hooked on Same Health Care Sources, Such as Jonathan Gruber Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review writes, "Jonathan Gruber is an economist from MIT. Jonathan Oberlander is a political scientist from the University of North Carolina. Both are health policy experts and, from what we can tell, both know their stuff. But the press has counted on Gruber rather than Oberlander to give gravitas to their stories.." Lieberman points out that "... [T]he media relies way too much on the same sources, who utter the same thing again and again to different news outlets. The problem with this, of course, is that a particular view of the world spreads widely, perhaps reinforcing that view as the correct one -- which it may or may not be, depending on the facts and on which side of the river you call home."
- Corporations Flexing Political Muscle The Supreme Court's decision in the citizens United case is already having an effet. Donations are surging into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as corporations start outspending political parties on lobbying and advertising. In 2009, the Chamber raked in $144.5 million, compared to the RNC's $71.6 million and the DNC's $97.9 million, and for the first time, the lobbying and grassroots advertising budgets of the Chamber have exceeded those of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Chamber, a powerful advocate for big business, is organized as a 501-c-6, and does not have to disclose its donors. Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican campaign finance lawyer and partner in the Patton Boggs law firm who supports the CU decision, went so far as to say that he believes the political parties are "threatened by extinction."
- Wall Street Fights Back A group of pinstriped traders, upset with the bank-bashing rhetoric emanating from Washington, launched a Wall Street defense campaign the same morning that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was being grilled by Congress. According to Crain’s business magazine, the traders vowed to fight against further bank regulation and defend their right to “create wealth for the people.” Read more here.
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NPR Includes Trash-Talk in Obituary for Howard Zinn After progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, 2010, National Public Radio (NPR) ran an unusual obituary on its January 28 All Things Considered news program. Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, two of Zinn's well-known friends, offered overviews of his life and legacy. But NPR's remembrance also included darkly insulting comments from conservative pundit David Horowitz: "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," Horowitz said. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse." Horowitz called Zinn's famous book, A People's History of the United States, "a travesty." When NPR covered the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., a figure as strongly admired on the right as Zinn was on the left, NPR aired fully six different segments about his life and legacy -- none of which included denigrating comments from critics who opposed him. So far, NPR has not explained why it featured David Horowitz trashing of the late Howard Zinn in its commemorative piece, when its extensive eulogizing of William F. Buckley included no critical guests.
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Editor's pick of the week
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Corporation Runs for Congress
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Murray Hill, Inc. is a Maryland public relations and advertising firm that announced at the end of January, 2010 that it intends to run for office as a Republican in Maryland's 8th Congressional District. The company announced its candidacy shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark January, 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case that corporations have the same political and free-speech rights as U.S. citizens. Murray Hill, Inc., is selling mugs and T-Shirts with the political slogan, "Corporations are people, too!"
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Popular Articles over the Past Week
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SourceWatch's article on Xe, the private security company former known as Blackwater, remains the top article, followed by articles on Global warming skeptics and the Bilderberg Group, "an informal secretive transatlantic council of key decision makers." Close behind is the CoalSwarm article on Existing U.S. Coal Plants, and articles on Corporate Social Responsibility, Propaganda, Private Military Corporations and Think tanks.
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Projects for citizen editors
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Help us fill our new category! SourceWatch has started a new category for the Tea Party Movement, which emerged in 2009. This movement is disparate with many tendencies and groups, from grassroots populist volunteers to powerful, corporate-funded right wing lobby groups like Freedom Works. It shares an opposition to Democratic liberalism and the Barack Obama administration. The new category includes politicians who are supported, or who have endorsed, or who benefit from the movement, such as Scott Brown, but who do not necessarily self-identify with it. This category also includes media who promote the movement and its objectives, like Fox News, and media that have produced good investigations or analysis of it. To see our list of articles in this category so far, click on this link to go to the category. See anything that is missing? If so, please find the articles currently on SourceWatch that you think should be included in this category, and add the tag [[Category:Tea Party Movement]] to the bottom of them. You can also start a new article by doing a search on the name of the missing person or group. When you get the page saying there is no article of that name yet, click on the red link to the new name and start typing! Be sure to add the [[Category:Tea Party Movement]] tag to the bottom, to make certain it appears on the list.
If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information here, here, and here. Hold onto your hat, have fun, and thanks for your help!
If you would like to help in other ways, please take a look at some of our earlier citizen journalism projects here.
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What they're saying about SourceWatch
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"The folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have done incredible work documenting fake grassroots ("astroturf") groups. Here, they're helping protects the rights of all Americans to exercise their right to vote. They are completely non-partisan. These guys are the real deal." Craig Newmark, Craig's List
"A truly impressive project based on cutting edge web technology." David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
"The troublemakers at the Center for Media and Democracy, for example, point to dozens of examples of "greenwashing," which they defined as the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government or even a non-government organization to sell a product, a policy" or rehabilitate an image. In the center's view, many enterprises labeled green don't deserve the name.—Jack Shafer, "Green Is the New Yellow: On the excesses of 'green' journalism", Slate, July 6, 2007.
"As a journalist frequently on the receiving end of various PR campaigns, some of them based on disinformation, others front groups for undisclosed interests, [CMD's SourceWatch] is an invaluable resource."—Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire
"Thanks for all your help. There's no way I could have done my piece on big PR and global warming without the CMD [Center for Media and Democracy] and your fabulous websites."—Zoe Cormier, journalist, Canada
"The dearth of information on the [U.S.] government [lobbying] disclosure forms about the other business-backed coalitions comes in stark contrast to the data about them culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents and posted by SourceWatch, a website that tracks advocacy groups." Jeanne Cummings, 'New disclosure reports lack clarity", Politico, April 29, 2008.
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Additional stories from CMD
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- Openly Gay Owner of Indiana PR Company Invited to Attend State of the Union Address The White House has invited a special guest to attend President Obama's State of the Union address: Trevor Yager, the openly gay founder and co-owner of TrendyMinds, a successful advertising and public relations firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana. The President will feature the agency for its growth and charitable contributions in 2009, and as an example of a business that has benefited from White House policies. TrendyMinds grew by over 200 percent during 2009, doubled the number of people it employs, gained 15 new accounts and awarded $50,000 worth of in-kind work to eight nonprofits, all at a time when many businesses were barely scraping by, or going out of business entirely. Huffington Post Editor Bill Browning attributes TrendyMinds' success to the Obama administration's "welcoming climate for small business, including many initiatives under the Recovery Act." TrendyMinds is a National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) certified gay-owned business. The NGLCC submitted Yager's name to the White House as a possible guest for the speech. First Lady Michelle Obama chose Yager and his business to attend the talk.
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