Featured Work from the Center for Media and Democracy
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by Mary Bottari
On Tuesday, the shareholders of Marshall and Ilsley (M&I) Bank of Wisconsin "voted" to give $71 million in bonuses to failed executives as part of an acquisition deal. "Voted" may not be the right word, since CEO Mark Furlong opened and closed the meeting within the span of five minutes, allowing no discussion and no questions from the dozen or so shareholders in the room. Furlong has apparently learned Robert's Rules of Order from his friend, Governor Scott Walker and the rest of the gang in the Wisconsin Capitol. Read the rest of this item here.
by Mary Bottari
More than 1,000 activists descended on JPMorgan Chase's annual shareholder meeting Tuesday, according to community organizers present at the event, to demand action on the company's foreclosure practices and call for an end to the company's investment in a company promoting genocide in Darfur. Neighborhood activists, religious leaders, outraged homeowners and political activists presented the company's shareholders with stories of alleged abuse and neglect by JPMorgan Chase, particularly from Chase's mortgage wing, according to activists present at the event, who provided the Huffington Post with several photos. The shareholder meeting and demonstration were held at a JPMorgan Chase building in Columbus, Ohio -- a city ravaged by the foreclosure crisis and heavy unemployment. Read the rest of this item here.
by Wendell Potter
For several years now, insurance companies have been "purging" small business accounts they no longer consider profitable enough or that their underwriters believe pose too much risk. I became familiar with"purging" (yes, that's the actual word insurance executives use internally) toward the end of my career as an industry PR man. Virtually unknown outside of a few executive suites until I disclosed it in testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in June 2009, the practice is most prevalent at the big, for-profit insurance companies -- the ones that are under the gun to meet investors' profit expectations every three months. Along with "rescinding" (cancelling) the policies of individuals who become seriously ill, purging small businesses that employ workers who get sick is a tried-and-true way of meeting Wall Street's expectations. Read the rest of this item here.
by Jill Richardson
The nation's major sustainable food writers and bloggers will converge on Monterey, California in May for an incredible, invitation-only sustainable food conference. The event, Monterey Bay Aquarium's Cooking for Solutions, which those who attend say is spectacular, has a new sponsor this year: Kellogg Garden Products. Yes, that Kellogg Garden Products. The very same company that has contaminated "organic" school gardens in Los Angeles with sewage sludge. The company's Chief Sustainability Officer, Kathy Kellogg Johnson, has a knack for befriending "green" organizations and using them to promote her toxic, misleadingly-labeled products to unsuspecting gardeners. In this case, she's listed as a "Silver Sponsor." How much did her company pay to give her such a nice platform, sitting on a panel with Grist's sustainable food writer, Tom Philpott, and telling an all-media audience about the sustainability of Kellogg Garden Products? Read the rest of this item here.
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Recent Articles from PRWatch.org
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by Jennifer Page
The week of April 10-16 saw the layoff of every public school teacher in Detroit, and the initial fruition of the highly-contested bill that allows emergency financial managers to have unconditional control over a city in a financial emergency. The city of Benton Harbor, Michigan, declared to be in a financial emergency by Governor Rick Snyder, now knows that, according the Snyder, the voter's voice doesn't really matter anymore. Joseph Harris, the city's new Emergency Financial Manager (EFM), dismantled the entire government, only allowing city boards and commissions to call a meeting to order, approve of meeting minutes and adjourn a meeting. The law that allows Harris to "exercise any power or authority of any office, employee, department, board, commission, or similar entity of the City, whether elected or appointed," was passed in March after the urging of Governor Snyder, and despite thousands of protesters who came to the Lansing capitol throughout February and March. Read the rest of this item here.
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SourceWatch Articles and Related News
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Our SourceWatch Article Tracks the Backdoor Bailout by the Fed
Our Financial Crisis feature tracks the total cost of the Wall Street bailout, beyond the TARP. Learn more about loans and guarantees to the Big Banks and other spending by federal agencies not counted in the TARP. For example, did you know that $4.72 trillion was disbursed and $1.93 trillion is still outstanding (owed) and another $13.86 trillion maximum is at risk? Our bailout figures tell the whole story, and we also put the bailout in context, comparing it with other bailouts in U.S. history and contrasting it with numbers from the ongoing foreclosure and unemployment crises.
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Popular SourceWatch Articles
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Editors' Pick of the Week
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by Rebekah Wilce
Koch Industries ranks in the top ten of the Toxic 100 list of the Political Economy Research Institute, which identifies the top U.S. air polluters among the world's largest corporations based on their chronic human health risk. Koch Industries is included in the list as the parent corporation of a diversity of industrial facilities that process and distribute fossil fuels, paper, wood products and synthetic fibers. The pollution from these facilities has a significant effect on the natural environment and on human health. The Center for Media and Democracy decided to take a look at the record of Koch Industries in Wisconsin, where CMD is located. Read the rest of this item here.
 Harold Camping, president of Family Radio, Inc.
The world is scheduled to end on May 21, 2011. At least that's the hysteria being spread by Harold Camping, the 89 year-old fundamentalist Christian radio preacher and president of Family Radio, Inc., based in Oakland, California. Camping claims to have calculated that on May 21, Jesus Christ will return to Earth and save his true believers. With the help of his media network and legions of donors who have fallen for his PR blitz, Camping has managed to turn what might ordinarily be an obscure and silly, cult-like religious claim into a huge, multimillion-dollar global PR campaign aimed at spreading fear that he hopes will get people "to search for the truth according to God's Will." Read more of this item here.
Scholastic, Inc., a leading publisher and distributor of children's books and teaching materials, agreed to stop selling a coal industry-sponsored curriculum that it has distributed to 66,000 fourth grade teachers since 2009. The curriculum was sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, which represents the interests of the coal mining industry. A May 11, 2011 New York Times story labeled the coal industry-created curriculum "unfit" for fourth graders because it failed to mention the negative aspects of coal mining and burning on human health and the environment, like removal of Appalachian mountaintops, toxic waste discharge, sulfur dioxide, mercury and arsenic discharges, lung disease and mining accidents. Read the rest of this item here.
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Projects for Citizen Journalists
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The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has been in the news lately for filing very broad Freedom of Information Act requests for all emails and communications from professors who teach in labor relations programs at Michigan's major public universities. The Mackinac Center is seeking copies of all emails that include such words and phrases as “Scott Walker,” “Wisconsin,” “Madison,” “Maddow,” (as in Rachel Maddow) and “any other emails dealing with the collective bargaining situation in Wisconsin” from January 1 to March 25, 2011. Who is the Mackinac Center, and what are they trying to accomplish with these current efforts against labor relations professors? What have you seen, and what have you read? Contribute the information to SourceWatch's article on the Mackinac Center for Public Policy 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 do Walmart, FOX News, and Koch Brothers have in common? |
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