Featured Work
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Former tobacco industry spokesman Tom Lauria
by Anne Landman
Old tobacco industry PR flacks don't go away, they just defend different products for money. So it is with former Tobacco Institute spokesman Thomas Lauria, who is now defending bottled water. Seems benign enough. After all, fighting for water -- albeit in an over-commercialized, overpriced and polluting form -- instead of cigarettes would seem to be an improvement for Lauria. But just as he battled efforts to educate people about the health hazards of secondhand smoke, Lauria is now battling efforts to educate people about the hoax that is bottled water. Read more of this item here.
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Recent blogs from CMD
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Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren has been a strong and consistent critic of the failures of the Home Affordable Modification Program in her position on the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout. She's also been a strong advocate for consumers through the entire bailout mess. Tell President Obama to put Warren to work by appointing her as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by signing our petition today!
by Steve Horn
A year and a half after his November 4, 2008 election, the progressive left is, rightfully, up in arms over the lack of integrity President Barack Obama has shown across the gamut of burning contemporary political issues. These include, but are not limited to issues such as war, health care, secrecy, warrantless wiretapping, and environmental issues, among many others. Read the rest of this item here.
by Anne Landman The "Save America Foundation" is putting on conferences around the country that it promotes as "Constitutional Conventions." John Michael Chambers, the Save America Foundation's founder and spokesman, is telling local press that these events are intended to "stress the Constitution, not current politics," but Chambers is stingy on the details.
These so-called "Constitutional Conventions" are really part of a wave of hysterical fear and scapegoating currently sweeping the country, and the “Save America Foundation” has overtones of an apocalyptic cult that relies on fear to motivate susceptible audiences. John Michael Chambers, the Clearwater, Florida radio talk show host and financial planner who founded the group, believes the United States is being overtaken by a “New World Order” perpetrated by “elitists.” Read the rest of this item here.
by Steve Horn
The home page of T. Boone Pickens' "Pickens Plan" is emblematic of the oil industry's aggressive push to drill for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale basin. The page [http://www.pickensplan.com/act/ greets visitors with the blaring headline, "WE MUST BREAK AMERICA’S ADDICTION TO FOREIGN OIL. The Pickens Plan will do it, but we need your help." In the age of the perpetual War on terrorism, politicians, pundits and other U.S. demagogues have successfully used fear as a bargaining chip. Fear-mongering is a method of Orwellian thought control. In this example, Pickens equates foreign oil with evil, similar to the Bush Administration's Orewellian logic regarding American's position in the world: "You're either with us, or you're with the enemy." Bush put forth a false paradigm of absolute good versus absolute evil. |
In the news from CMD
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In a July 31, 2010 opinion-editorial, w: David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, excoriates modern Republicans, and particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for claiming the party's current economic doctrines as rooted in traditional GOP financial philosophy. Stockman was closely tied to the development of the w:Reaganomics ideology, but now he points to massive failures by Republicans -- while they were in power -- to assure that financial accounts were balanced in government, international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the affairs of private businesses and households. Stockman points to a list of misguided Republican actions that have led the country to economic disaster ...Read the rest of this item here.
AMC's Emmy-award winning TV show "Mad Men" depicts advertising executives in the 1960s, including their ubiquitous smoking, which occurs in practically every scene in every show. Now "Mad Men" is holding a celebrity auction on E-Bay in which it will sell off a walk-on role in the show to benefit lung cancer research and treatment at the City of Hope National Medical Center. The online auction starts on August 12 and will run for ten days. Read the rest of this item here.
Health insurance companies are continuing to charge double-digit increases in premium rates, even though profits are skyrocketing and executives are raking in generous pay packages. While people struggle to afford health insurance and employers struggle to stay in business, insurance executives are giving themselves "huge raises," according to Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a coalition of advocacy groups that released a report about the situation. Read the rest of this item here. |
Projects for citizen editors
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Help Us Keep SourceWatch's Article on BP Up to Date
Information about BP's PR and spin is gushing forth every day, almost as thick and fast as the oil is spewing into the Gulf. With all the information being discovered aboutBP and its corporate (mis)behaviors, we're having a hard time keeping the SourceWatch article about BP up to date with all the news. Have you heard or read something about BP's corporate spin, lobbying, flim-flamming, stonewalling, or other efforts to influence regulatory agencies, legislators or public perception? Record them in SourceWatch's article about the company.
Here's How You Can Help: Please cite authoritative sources for any information you add. If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about how to contribute, what SourceWatch is all about, and how to cite references. 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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Editor's pick of the week
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 The Koch Industries-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is attacking a regional greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program organized by the ten northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont are all participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first mandatory, market-based effort in the U.S. to reduce climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. The states organized RGGI as a reaction to the U.S. Senate's inability to pass a climate bill. RGGI sets an energy-sector carbon cap for participating states, and then auctions off the rights to product emissions. AFP will protest at the first event where the program will auction off allowable emissions, and is claiming the auctions are "secretive," which is untrue; information about them is posted to a public web site, and there is even an RSS feed to get information about them. AFP is also calling the program a "stealth energy tax" and claims that the program will lead to drastically higher energy bills. Read more of this item here.
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Popular Articles over the Past Week
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SourceWatch's home page is the top landing page in this website. Our new Total Wall Street Bailout Cost reporting is a top page along with our new financial crisis clearinghouse. Our article on Citizens United is also a top page as is Corporate social responsibility. The article on Existing U.S. Coal_Plants remains a popular page, and the articles on Propaganda techniques and Think tanks are also among SourceWatch's most popular articles.
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Editors' Pick of the Week
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A Washington Post writer took bait thrown out by a fake Congressional candidate with a Twitter account. Jonathan Capehart, who writes a political opinion column in the Post, responded to a Tweet by Republican Representative Jack Kimble of California's 54th Congressional District. Kimble wrote, "Check the budget, Bush fought 2 wars w/o costing taxpayers a dime." Capehart responded by describing Kimble's statement as a "stunning bit of fiscal ignorance" and analyzing the country's budget and fiscal problems. The only problem was, California only has 53 Congressional districts, and Jack Kimble is a fake member of Congress who is running a fake re-election campaign. Kimble has a Twitter account page crammed full of corporate logos. He has a blog called "Kimble's Corner", where he keeps his "constituents" up to date about his magnificent wins in fake debates.
PBS's "Spillcam" helps people track what's going on in the Gulf:
One of the first things BP did after oil started gushing into the Gulf was to spray more than 1.1 million gallons of a dispersant with the optimistic name "Corexit" onto the oil. Then BP hired Louisiana fishermen and others to help with cleanup and containment operations. About two weeks later, over seventy workers fell sick, complaining of irritated throats, coughing, shortness of breath and nausea. Seven workers were hospitalized on May 26. BP officials speculated that their illnesses were due to food poisoning or other, unrelated reasons, but others pointed out how unlikely these other causes were, since the sick workers were assigned to different locations. Read more of this item here.
In other news, BP has purchased search terms relating to the Gulf oil spill disaster on Google, Yahoo and Bing, a move some say is designed to limit the public's exposure to news reporting about BP's oil catastrophe. BP confirmed that it has bought search terms like "oil spill," "gulf oil," "offshore oil," "Louisiana coast spill" and "oil cleanup," on the top three search engines, so that when people perform searches on these terms, a link to BP's corporate page about the spill (www.BP.com/OilSpillNews) appears up at the top of the page. The result appears with a line that says, "Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill; Learn More about How BP is Helping." Read more of this item here.
Now that it is recovering some of the oil pouring out of the massive leak at the bottom of the Gulf's floor, BP has found another way to try to repair its reputation: the company announced that it has created a new wildlife fund that will benefit from any profits BP makes selling the recovered oil. "BP is committed to protecting the ecosystems and wildlife on the Gulf Coast," said BP CEO Tony Hayward, while making the announcement about the fund. A press release about the fund crows, "The creation of the wildlife fund is the latest example of BP's commitment to help the gulf coast states and their residents." How much money can we expect BP to spend on beleaguered animals? Like other estimates BP has made recently, the company admitted it cannot predict the amount. When asked the question, Hayward issued a statement that simply said, "We believe these funds will have a significant positive impact on the environment." BP collected 14,800 barrels of oil on June 7, and the current price of crude oil front month futures are $72 per barrel. Proceeds from oil recovered from skimming operations will also go into the fund. What Hayward failed to mention, though, is that under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, BP is required by law to fund clean up and restoration of wildlife in the Gulf damaged by its operations.
BP's spill plan lists walruses among wildlife to be protected in the Gulf, but no walruses live in the Gulf.Last year the federal government approved a 582-page, site-specific regional spill plan for the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Sounds comprehensive, right? It turns out the plan was filled with glaring errors, blatant omissions and wildly false assumptions -- and won approval from the government anyway. BP's response plan included references to wildlife like walruses, sea lions and seals, none of which live in the Gulf, indicating parts of the plan may have been lifted from a site plan for Alaska. It contains spill scenarios in which beaches remain pristine, fish, marine mammals and birds are spared and water quality is just a passing concern -- and those are projections for a spill ten times worse than calculations for the the current disaster. The plan lists Professor Peter Lutz as a national wildlife expert to contact in the event of a spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but he died in 2005. It contains the names and telephone number of marine life specialists at Texas A&M University, but the names and numbers are wrong. It lists the numbers for offices of the marine mammal stranding network in Louisiana and Florida, but they are no longer in service. The plan underestimates the dangers posed by an uncontrolled underwater blowout, and overstates BP's ability to deal with one. Two senators -- Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat and Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat -- are seeking a criminal investigation into the company's claims of preparedness to deal with such a catastrophe. For more information click here: More on BP's Gulf Walrus "Plan"
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