There are two issues from yesterday we will bring forward today and that centers on the hidden network of twitter and bloggers that suddenly appear for candidates Wall Street runs as both Bush neo-cons and Clinton/Obama neo-liberals. The article below spoke of this network for a neo-conservative candidate against a Tea Party-----SANTELLI-----and we see the location as Chicago. University of Chicago is the top neo-liberal university outside of the northeast Ivy Leagues and indeed it ground zero for all of this social media capture for citizens identified to be that 5% to the 1% in all population groups. Breaking this network is critical in reversing the hold Wall Street has on our government so we need to work hard to create REAL social Democratic and REAL conservative Republican media and as voters we need to know when these pop-up networks appear.
I knew right away when Black Lives Matter popped up from nowhere----that is how national media described it-----that is was part of this underground network of
bloggers and twitter feeds. Wall Street and national media made their 'civil rights' leaders from this network just as Santelli gained his popularity.
This network pops out for all that 5% to the 1% candidates and is made to look populist----grassroots. Many citizens here in Baltimore knew Deray McKesson was not their candidate even as national media tried hard to sell him to underserved voters. Kwame Rose came from that BLM movement as a Wall Street player given lots of media time around the nation and he went right to being that captured media reporter----REAL NEWS where he interviews his candidate for Mayor of Baltimore----Catherine PUGH---CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA candidate Wall Street wanted for Baltimore.
THIS IS HOW ALL OUR PUBLIC POLICY DISCUSSIONS ARE CAPTURED TO CLINTON NEO-LIBERALISM----THIS HIDDEN NETWORK OF BLOGGERS AND TWITTER FEEDS GIVING US WHAT MEDIA CALLS 'POPULIST CANDIDATES' WHO THEN SIMPLY REPEAT THE SAME TALKING POINTS.
This is how Obama came out of nowhere in 2008-----and he made it to the Illinois state assembly because he built these networks during community organizing in underserved communities POSING SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE while being 1% Wall Street.
ALL OF THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING BEING DONE IN US CITIES ARE TIED TO ORGANIZATIONS PUSHING WALL STREET PUBLIC POLICY----BE AWARE AND KNOW THE LANGUAGE AND PEOPLE ATTACHED TO CANDIDATES
Playboy dips a toe into investigative journalismMegan McArdle
Mar 2, 2009
Business
Like The Atlantic?
'Thanks to the "tea party" campaign, as the article notes, Santelli's value has suddenly soared. If you look at the scores of blogs and fake-commenters on blogs (for example, Daily Blog, a slick new blog launched in January which is also based in Chicago) all puff up Santelli like he's the greatest journalist in America, and the greatest hero known to mankind. Daily Bail, like so much of this "tea party" machine, is "headquartered nearby" to Santelli, that is, in Chicago. With Odom, the Sam Adams Alliance, and the whole "tea party" nexus: "Rick, this message is to you. You are a true American hero and there are no words to describe what you did today except your own. Headquartered nearby, we will be helping the organization in whatever way possible."
It's not difficult to imagine how Santelli hooked up with this crowd. A self-described "Ayn Rand-er," one of Santelli's colleagues at CNBC, Lawrence Kudlow, played a major role in both FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth'.
Wall Street players are made left-leaning heroes and then media allows them the only air time or they are the ones made media reporters. This gives us the only route to public policy talking points which are always MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD IN REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES. Below we see the headlines for a Georgia media outlet and below that is a New York Times top election columnist FiveThirtyEight----who always comes closest in his predictions----
HE KNOWS THIS NETWORK AND KNOWS THE FIX.
This is a long article---please just glance through to see how media builds a candidate------
Can DeRay Mckesson Turn 330,000 Twitter Followers Into 20,000 Votes?
Posted: Monday, April 11, 2016 GEORGIA WORLD
*******************
'McKesson’s candidacy isn’t an “act of progress” but “an act of co-optation and repression,” Marissa Jenae Johnson, co-founder of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter, told Al Jazeera America right after Mckesson entered the race'.
Can DeRay Mckesson Turn 330,000 Twitter Followers Into 20,000 Votes?
By Carl Bialik
Filed under Local Elections
Published Apr 11, 2016 New York Times FiveThirtyEight
DeRay Mckesson poses for a selfie with students from Wide Angle Youth Media at the Waverly Branch library in Baltimore, March 23, 2016.
Carl Bialik
DeRay Mckesson was standing alone, in a hallway outside the Turner Learning Commons auditorium at the University of Baltimore, checking his phone. He was 30 minutes from appearing on stage with three of the other long-shot Democratic candidates in the crowded Baltimore mayoral race. The leading candidates in the race had debated here the day before in a well-attended and televised forum. This Wednesday morning undercard forum had almost as many candidates and moderators as voting-age members of the audience.
On Twitter, Mckesson, 30, is the most prominent voice in a grass-roots movement to ensure that black lives matter. But at this stage of the race, in late March, he’d been struggling to gain an audience in his campaign to be mayor of his hometown, where he’d filed to run at the deadline in February, surprising other candidates and many of his activist allies. He was fighting criticism that he is a carpetbagger: a creature largely of Twitter and of the places other than Baltimore where he has protested and rallied. Fewer than 1 percent of voters in the most recent Baltimore Sun poll of the race had said they were going to vote for him. He had about a month to change thousands of minds.
Although he has spent most of the last year and a half as an activist, helping to build the Black Lives Matter movement, he has a credible case as an uber-wonk. Campaign Zero’s detailed policy proposals include a push for better data on people killed by police officers. His first job, which he started in 2007, was with Teach for America at a Brooklyn middle school teaching math, and while he’s not a quant, he can speak that language. He later worked as an HR executive for the public-school systems of Baltimore and Minneapolis. His statements at forums and meet-and-greets in the mayoral campaign include recitals of stats he has absorbed about adult illiteracy and about the effect of long commutes. His 26-page platform, informed by advice from local experts, is impressively detailed, more so than most other candidates’. It includes charts showing where Baltimore stands on important measures and specifies where he’d like the city to go.
But this is a noticeably wonky slate of candidates in a wonky race focused on audits and processes as much as personality and biography. In forums last month, candidates said they’d improve the city’s touted but troubled statistical management system, CitiStat, and threw around phrases such as “data-focused management,” “relational databases” and “predictive analytics.”
“Being on the B Team sucks,” Mckesson told me after the forum. We walked out into the unseasonably warm day on our way to the city’s Washington Monument, where he was set to film a segment with Fusion TV. The interview was one of many Mckesson was doing with national media, including with me, about his campaign. He has also gotten his share of coverage from Baltimore media, but with so many candidates in the race, that share isn’t large.
The walk should take 15 minutes. It took twice as long. He stopped a half-dozen times to talk to people he knew or people who recognized him. Crossing a street, he greeted Seema Iyer, whose work on vacant homes he’d just cited at the forum. Later, a man and woman biked up to us. She said, “I just put you on my Pinterest page.” Almost as an aside, she added that she planned to vote for him.
In informal interactions like these, Mckesson is a naturally gifted campaigner. You wouldn’t know this is his first election (if you don’t count the student government races he entered and won each year from sixth grade through college). He’s unfailingly pleasant to talk to, quick to flash his infectious smile, easy to spot in his signature blue Patagonia vest.
“DeRay is such an intense listener,” said Campaign Zero co-founder Johnetta Elzie, another prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement who is working on his mayoral campaign. “He has a very unique talent for picking out certain parts of people’s stories and pushing them to the front.”
After dropping into a nearby coffeehouse, where Mckesson bought a sea salt chocolate chip cookie, we waited for the TV crew. After they arrived, Mckesson fell into an easy conversation with Fusion’s Dan Lieberman. He laughed and chatted and used funny voices — and then caught himself: He was being too goofy in one of the most public places of the city where he’s running for mayor. “I’m so used to being in other people’s cities,” he said. “I can do whatever I want to do. But I live here. And I’m running for mayor. Details!” The cameras switched on, and Mckesson switched into candidate mode, repeating several of his lines from the forum.
Since entering the race, he also had been unsure how to act on Twitter. His following is more than 10 times bigger than all of his opponents’ put together. It struck me when I scanned his feed before meeting with him that the vast majority of it wasn’t about the mayoral race. He made it clear over several conversations that this was no accident. He wanted to be sure not to stray too far from what brought him 330,000 followers today: a mix of updates on his activism and news and commentary on race and police violence. As a candidate, he had continued some of his Twitter traditions. He was still tweeting often, “I love my blackness. And yours.” And before signing off most nights, he tweeted, “Sleep well, y’all. Remember to dream.” But in his first month as a political candidate on Twitter, he felt less comfortable baldly stating his own views on race and police violence. And he didn’t know how his followers outside Baltimore or those mainly focused on police violence would react to pleas for financial support or local updates. (His follower count has continued to grow at about 500 per day, the same rate as before his bid, and his Baltimore posts have gotten few complaints from followers, though many also get fewer retweets and favorites than his more general commentary does.)
With nothing scheduled for a couple of hours, Mckesson went for a haircut. He thought he looked sloppy for Fusion, and his next event was also an on-camera interview, with a local youth-journalism program. We walked a few blocks to Shear Legacy. His usual barber was out, so he settled in to the chair of Leon Presbury.
Mckesson slipped into a mode he often uses when he meets people who know about his celebrity. He shared stories with Presbury about some of the impressive people he’d met through his online fame, including Obama, musicians Beyoncé and Azealia Banks, and actor Jeffrey Wright. (Closer to home, Baltimore filmmaker John Waters has endorsed Mckesson, while local author D. Watkins wrote positively about his campaign.)
In between stories, Mckesson paused to check his phone. Every once in a while, something — a pause in the conversation, a burst of notifications, a sense that too much time had elapsed — made him check Twitter. He scrolled through his timeline and notifications expertly and efficiently, lingering on a tweet that caught his eye. The fate of the tweet, whose author might have one-thousandth the following of Mckesson, hung in the balance. “I could totally not read it,” Mckesson said of his notifications. But “the power of Twitter is that I am so connected,” he said. “I’m part of the community, too.”
The day before, Mckesson had announced his fundraising through March 15, and now his feed was filling up with reaction. He thought the numbers were good news: He was near his goal of $250,000 and had the third-most donors from Baltimore of any candidate and by far the most donors overall. (Pugh and Dixon both hold more cash, and venture capitalist David Warnock’s largely self-funded campaign is spending more than everybody else, including $650,000 on TV ads.) But the vast majority of Mckesson’s donors — 95 percent — are from outside the city and include some prominent technology executives. Mckesson is the candidate of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; of Twitter’s executive chairman, Omid Kordestani; and of YouTube’s global head of family and learning, Malik Ducard. Mckesson says that’s much better than some of his rivals’ donor bases, which include special interests in Baltimore that he thinks are more likely to expect favors than the executives of companies based elsewhere. Some of Mckesson’s critics — and even a few of his fans — disagree, interpreting the support of digital tycoons as the mark of a sellout.
Sitting in Presbury’s chair, Mckesson said he was frustrated by the blowback and wondered whether people who object to his donors think you can run a campaign for free. “It’s super-expensive,” he said. “I’m fundraising where my friends are.” (A section of his website responds to “rumors” about him, including about his funders.) He went silent when Presbury wrapped his face in a towel — to relax him and open up his pores — and then started talking again the moment the towel came off. When he wasn’t talking, he was tweeting or checking his notifications.
He paused at one. “This makes me want to scream,” he said, and handed me his phone to read a tweet that used offensive language to call him a fraud. “Who is that?” Presbury asked. “Some random person,” Mckesson said.
We stopped by the campaign office a few doors down from the barbershop. Mckesson confirmed with his campaign manager, Sharhonda Bossier, that he was doing an event for YouTube. “I owe you that thing for the Aspen Institute,” he remembered, referring to an event set for later that week sponsored by the foundation-funded think tank.
Mckesson is a strong believer in technology, which makes him a natural ally for the tech executives who have backed his candidacy. He has used Crowdpac to raise money online, and Jack’d, the gay men’s social network, endorsed him. He was wearing socks bearing the plaid pattern of Slack, the messaging platform. Among the interests he lists on LinkedIn are new technologies, gadgets and emergent sectors. He used to be “obsessed” with SimCity, he told Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in Interview magazine. “Technology is an accelerant at its best,” Mckesson said. “It creates access.”
His love of technology stems from a broader faith in the power of innovation to address all manner of social problems. For example, on the testy topic of charter schools, which Hastings backs and which many of Mckesson’s allies abhor, he doesn’t say he supports them. But he told me that he wished their critics would at least acknowledge the theory behind them, however flawed they can be in practice: “If I lower constraints, innovation increases. When innovation increases, learning increases.”
Mckesson’s campaign hasn’t been as innovative as he’d like. He has paid for polling and traditional campaign staff and highly produced campaign videos. But the major distinguishing factor of his campaign, and its competitive advantage, is Twitter. His followers are numerous and impressive. Among them are Beyoncé, John Legend, Zendaya, Rachel Maddow, Seth Rogen, Questlove, Steve Harvey, Missy Elliott and Macklemore. But just 2 percent of his followers are in Baltimore — far fewer than his follower total in New York City and about the same number as in London.1
Mckesson’s followers outside Baltimore can’t vote for him, but they can help his campaign in other ways. Every tweet he sends asking for donations nets him about $1,000, he said. Each one asking for people to join his campaign’s mailing list — possible volunteers for the campaign’s homestretch — nets him about 70 people. He’s marshaling his online following to call 30,000 residents in Baltimore, a virtual phone bank capitalizing on his Twitter platform but also risking exacerbating the perception that he is not a native son.
His follower count, he said, understates his platform because of his high volume of posting and all the retweets he gets: an average of 258 in the 90 days through April 6, according to social-analytics company Socialbakers. He tweeted an average of 107 times per day in March and burned the candle at both ends, averaging just six and a half hours between his last tweet of the night and his first the next morning. He says that some months, his tweets get 100 million impressions. “It’s about reach,” he said.
Mckesson, like most candidates, won’t say what he plans to do if he loses. His lifestyle isn’t sustainable, he told me — he has to start earning money again. He has been staying with family friends since moving back to Baltimore after Gray’s death a year ago. He has been paid only for the occasional gig, like a teaching stint at Yale, after leaving his $110,000-a-year job with the Minneapolis public schools last March for full-time activism, and, now, campaigning. “I’m used to a predictable income,” he said.
Another Uber, to another event. On the way, we passed the Cathedral of the Incarnation, draped with a banner bearing the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Mckesson’s relationship with other activists in the movement was complicated before he announced his candidacy, and some have criticized his run as a bid to enter a system that he should be fighting from without. McKesson’s candidacy isn’t an “act of progress” but “an act of co-optation and repression,” Marissa Jenae Johnson, co-founder of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter, told Al Jazeera America right after Mckesson entered the race.
Mckesson’s closest allies, though, remain staunch supporters. His fellow leaders of Campaign Zero have supported his candidacy, in person and over the phone, helping to craft his platform. Elzie plans to be in Baltimore through the primary to help with the campaign. Samuel Sinyangwe, a Campaign Zero co-founder, told me that campaigning for office was “the next logical step” for Mckesson. He added that other activists, inspired by Mckesson’s example, are considering running in the next election cycle.
“Can you work within the system, or is that selling out or is that strengthening the system you’re trying to resist?” Sinyangwe said. “Those are questions that have been around for centuries. Those won’t be resolved with this campaign.”
__________________________________________
The second issue from yesterday stems from the comments from the phoney right wing group below calling mainstream media FAR-LEFT. Almost all Americans understand our media is captured by global corporations that are corporate right, even NPR which is now global CHAMBER OF COMMERCE....Marketplace Money. While Republicans have always called media LIBERAL and left-leaning----it is now using terms like RADICAL AND FAR-LEFT policies which are simply last centuries FDR social democracy. Below you see Van Jones being called communist----Obama is being called socialist ---and both work for 1% Wall Street global corporations just as Republicans do.
About “EOAN”
EOA News, a division of EOA Network is a conservative news and opinion site and a leader in grassroots journalism. The Main Stream Media is to “objective journalism” as Snooki is to Mensa. ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and the list goes on and on, but they have all have been fully co-opted by the Far Left.
Supposedly this group is far-left and radical and if we look at the organizations and people attached to it----they are GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATION---working for what is being called green energy/clean energy but are simply GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY ENERGY. These are the organizations creating all national media policy around environment. Center for Media and Democracy IS A CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL GROUP. We see international labor unions strongly Clinton neo-liberal Liuna and United Steelworkers always behind global corporate development-----Institute for America's Future is a Clinton global neo-liberal organization and who thinks a state Treasurer like Angelides is not Wall Street these days? We see Google and its global technology corporations in this group and who does not know PA has one of the worst environmental records especially with fracking---its government is owned by fracking. We know Sierra Club has been Clinton neo-liberal for these few decades always backing Wall Street neo-liberal candidates its leadership was taken. The right-wing group EOAN knows this too. Please take time to learn organizations and their leaders we know are posing progressive and that will let us know when media is Wall Street and corporate.
Apollo Alliance
This article is part of the Coal Issues portal on SourceWatch, a project of CoalSwarm and the Center for Media and Democracy. See here for help on adding material to CoalSwarm.
Apollo Alliance began in 2003 when "Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger co-founded the Apollo Alliance to unite major environmental groups and labor unions around a high-tech vision for the future of the American economy. The coalition called for a new “Apollo Project” to revitalize the American economy built around a $300 billion, 10-year effort to accelerate the transition to clean energy. [1]
It is a group of U.S. business, labor, environmental, and community leaders working to promote clean energy as a means of creating energy independence, reducing carbon emissions, and generating new jobs for and opportunities for American workers and businesses.[2] The group was founded by COWS and the Institute for America's Future in 2004.[3] Chaired by former California State Treasurer and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, the Board includes the president of the NRDC and the executive director of the Sierra Club, the heads of the Laborers' International Union of North America and the United Steelworkers Union, and actor and environmentalist Robert Redford.[4]
The group advances a plan to lessen the country’s dependence on foreign oil, build a stronger economy, and create a cleaner environment. The ten-point plan calls for diversifying energy sources by expanding the use of existing renewable technologies such as solar, wind, and biomass; modernizing existing power plants; investing in long-term development of hydrogen fuel cell technology; increasing incentives for and prevalence of hybrid cars and energy-efficient building and appliances; and improving transportation options and public infrastructure for metropolitan areas. [5]
Board Members
Here is the board of Institute for America-----all Wall Street and global corporate neo-liberalism-----we see Hollywood--Beatty and Streisand are huge Clinton supporters, the Mayor of LA----how global neo-liberal is Villaraigosa? This is how we know a media outlet will not be pushing REAL PRO-ACTIVE issues
AND NOT BE EDUCATING AGAINST CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL CANDIDATES.
Institute for America's Future
DirectorsAccessed October 2009: [1]
_________________________________________
As someone who 'LIKED' Center for Media and Democracy and have been subjected to its social media memes these few years it is very easy to determine this is a Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal media outlet. It will constantly speak of ALEC and the Koch Brothers without ever mentioning Clinton neo-liberals as being the source of global ALEC policies. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have installed nothing but ALEC -----Chamber of Commerce policies and Trans Pacific Trade Pact is one long product of ALEC. When a media outlet bashes ALEC and Koch Brothers without ever mentioning a far-right Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal----we know it is a Clinton media outlet. The Nation is a Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal journal and is called progressive because it is progressively get rich neo-liberal ----NOT SOCIALLY PROGRESSIVE.
I don't know Lisa Graves personally but one could assume if a person was tied to the US Justice or Senate Judiciary Committee----that would be a 5% to the 1% who would not want to out Wall Street players.
Keeping Americans focused on ALEC which several decades ago was the top corporate policy-maker but has since merged into the global Chamber of Commerce ----not American Legislation any more keeps people focused on what Congressional Bush neo-cons and Clinton neo-liberals pretend to fight ---while ignoring what the global corporate tribunal is doing---those global NGOs and councils writing policy for these few decades. You won't see this group tie the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF into the making of US International Economic Zone policy----they never mention it. They are busy fighting the ghosts of corporate policy past. If ALEC is fighting for free market then why is it not fighting CLINTON/BUSH./OBAMA that killed free market in US with monopoly, fraud and corruption, and corporate subsidy? It never mentions these. What we do see are the very socially controversial policies that created factions in American population groups and THAT was its function. Identifying ALEC as a problem is just fine-----but it moves discussion from the GORILLA IN THE ROOM topics like ONE WORLD US cities as International Economic Zones and global corporate tribunals.
These are the media outlets that keep Americans focused on social issues while our local, state, and national economy is being hijacked by global corporations. Here we see the hotbutton social issues---abortion---- stand your ground----immigrants. While the media focuses on Voter ID our elections are so rigged and fraudulent no one's vote is counting. Does Center for Media and Democracy address that? Of course not.
Center for Media and Democracy.
Advocacy activities
CMD has been referred to as a "liberal advocacy group" by The Des Moines Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Wisconsin State Journal, and the La Crosse Tribune of La Crosse, Wisconsin.[3][4][5][5][6]
CMD has advocated against the activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers
AwardsCMD and progressive magazine The Nation shared a September 2011 Sidney Award, an award given by The Sidney Hillman Foundation in recognition of "socially-conscious journalism", for "ALEC Exposed."[38]
John Stauber was the founder of Center for Media and Democracy and if we read this article he is shouting all the right stuff. As he says below-----as with all media that was socially progressive this organization changed leadership in 2009----right after the economic crash-----and he says what I say----it has just become part of the Clinton neo-liberal echo chamber.
If we know this history----we know when organizations creating media are not hitting on the REAL issues-----progressive means getting progressively richer----it does not always mean socially progressive.
'I ran CMD until 2009, but then stepped down, feeling that I had taken its mission as far as I could after co-authoring six books through the Center. I am now pursuing more personal interests neglected for all my decades as an activist and author. I am no longer writing books or running an organization, and glad of it. CMD continues under new leadership, but it has become much like other US progressive think tanks, part of the Democratic Party’s liberal echo chamber'.
What We Do
The Center for Media and Democracy is a national watchdog group that conducts in-depth investigations into corruption and the undue influence of corporations on media and democracy.
The findings of CMD's investigative journalism are regularly cited by the leading national and state newspapers in the U.S., including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post. CMD's reporting is credited by news shows on major broadcast stations including HBO, Showtime, PBS, NBC, CBS, and others, and has also been featured on in-depth news programs, such as Moyers & Company, Democracy Now, and the Thom Hartmann Show, as well as NPR and other public broadcasting agencies, such as the BBC and CBC.
CMD is led by Lisa Graves, who formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and Chief Counsel for Nominations for the chair of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, among other strategic research and analysis roles in Washington, DC. Her vision and determination help drive CMD's substantive focus and the power of its credible story-telling. These exposés reveal how some of the most powerful corporations in the world manipulate public policy, elections, and some in the media in ways that undermine real democracy.
CMD's breakthrough investigations of the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its American City County Exchange (ACCE), the State Policy Network (SPN), and numerous corporations and corporate-front groups have sparked national debate and ignited waves of related reporting by other journalists in numerous outlets and in leading national magazines. CMD's reporting has also built on excellent investigative reports in magazines like the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and more.
CMD also publishes the online news journal, PRWatch; a specialized encyclopedia about corporations, their CEOs, and corporate-funded front groups, SourceWatch; a clearinghouse for news about ALEC and its award-winning investigation, ALECexposed.org; and other specialized investigative websites, like ALECclimatedenial.org.
CMD focuses on documenting key facts and revealing the impact of policies on ordinary people, not on what some PR spokesperson claims is true. With the cuts to newsrooms across the country, CMD's original and in-depth investigations are more important than ever in breaking through the spin of corporate-backed PR.
Notable policies and model bills
ALEC's website states that its goal is to advance "the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism".[7] In 2003, Donald Ray Kennard, then a Louisiana state representative and ALEC national chairman, said, "We are a very, very conservative organization... We're just espousing what we really believe in."[16] Craig Horn, a North Carolina state representative and ALEC member, said of ALEC in 2013, "It's a lightning rod organization because it has a decidedly conservative bent—there’s no doubt about it."[71]
Although ALEC originally focused on social issues such as abortion, which it opposed, in more recent years the group has focused more on business and regulatory matters.[8][16] According to John Nichols of The Nation, ALEC's agenda "seems to be dictated at almost every turn by multinational corporations. It's to clear the way for lower taxes, less regulation, a lot of protection against lawsuits, [and] ALEC is very, very active in [the] opening up of areas via privatization for corporations to make more money, particularly in places you might not usually expect like public education."[72] A Brookings Institution study of state legislation introduced in 2011–2012 found that ALEC model bills that became law were linked most often to controversial social and economic issues. The study concluded that this phenomenon has hurt ALEC because, "Dirtying its hands with social issues undermines ALEC's ability to exercise influence over fiscal ones."[73]
'Stand Your Ground' laws'
Stand Your Ground' gun laws expanded to 30 states through the support of ALEC, after Florida passed its law in 2005.[74][75][76] After the Florida law had been passed, ALEC adopted a model bill with the same wording.[5] In the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, ALEC's support for Stand Your Ground laws ultimately led to the departure of high-profile corporate members such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Bank of America, and General Motors.[43]
Voter identification
Prior to 2012, legislation based on ALEC model bills was introduced in many states to mandate or strengthen requirements that voters produce state-issued photographic identification. The bills were passed and signed into law in six states.[8] Voter identification bills introduced in 34 states would have made voting more difficult for students, the elderly, and the poor.[17]
Immigration
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2014)The "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", an Arizona law commonly known as "SB 1070", was drafted during an ALEC meeting in December 2009 and became an ALEC model bill.[77] Enacted in 2010, SB 1070 was described as the toughest illegal immigration law in the U.S.[78] Portions of SB 1070 were held by the Supreme Court to be preempted by federal law in 2012.[79]
Bills similar to SB 1070 were passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah, and have been introduced in 17 other states.[17]
________________________________________
Who is tied to Center for Media and Democracy? Institute for America's Future
Here is the board of Institute for America-----all Wall Street and global corporate neo-liberalism-----we see Hollywood--Beatty and Streisand are huge Clinton supporters, the Mayor of LA----how global neo-liberal is Villaraigosa? This is how we know a media outlet will not be pushing REAL PRO-ACTIVE issues
AND NOT BE EDUCATING AGAINST CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL CANDIDATES.
The only future many below see for America is as ONE WORLD global corporate tribunal with US cities as Foreign Economic Zones
Institute for America's Future
Directors
Accessed October 2009: [1]
Baye Adofo-Wilson - Lincoln Park/Coast Cultural District, Inc. (LPCCD)
Warren Beatty - Mulholland Productions
Susan Bianchi-Sand
Maria Jobin-Leeds - Access Strategies Fund
Robert Johnson - Impact Artist Management
Charles Rodgers - New Community Fund
John Sweeney - AFL-CIO
Margery Tabankin - The Streisand Foundation
Katrina vanden Heuvel - The Nation
Antonio Villaraigosa - Mayor of Los Angeles
Scott Wallace - Wallace Global Fund
Roger Wilkins - Clarence J. Robinson Professor Emeritus, George Mason University
I knew right away when Black Lives Matter popped up from nowhere----that is how national media described it-----that is was part of this underground network of
bloggers and twitter feeds. Wall Street and national media made their 'civil rights' leaders from this network just as Santelli gained his popularity.
This network pops out for all that 5% to the 1% candidates and is made to look populist----grassroots. Many citizens here in Baltimore knew Deray McKesson was not their candidate even as national media tried hard to sell him to underserved voters. Kwame Rose came from that BLM movement as a Wall Street player given lots of media time around the nation and he went right to being that captured media reporter----REAL NEWS where he interviews his candidate for Mayor of Baltimore----Catherine PUGH---CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA candidate Wall Street wanted for Baltimore.
THIS IS HOW ALL OUR PUBLIC POLICY DISCUSSIONS ARE CAPTURED TO CLINTON NEO-LIBERALISM----THIS HIDDEN NETWORK OF BLOGGERS AND TWITTER FEEDS GIVING US WHAT MEDIA CALLS 'POPULIST CANDIDATES' WHO THEN SIMPLY REPEAT THE SAME TALKING POINTS.
This is how Obama came out of nowhere in 2008-----and he made it to the Illinois state assembly because he built these networks during community organizing in underserved communities POSING SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE while being 1% Wall Street.
ALL OF THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING BEING DONE IN US CITIES ARE TIED TO ORGANIZATIONS PUSHING WALL STREET PUBLIC POLICY----BE AWARE AND KNOW THE LANGUAGE AND PEOPLE ATTACHED TO CANDIDATES
Playboy dips a toe into investigative journalismMegan McArdle
Mar 2, 2009
Business
Like The Atlantic?
'Thanks to the "tea party" campaign, as the article notes, Santelli's value has suddenly soared. If you look at the scores of blogs and fake-commenters on blogs (for example, Daily Blog, a slick new blog launched in January which is also based in Chicago) all puff up Santelli like he's the greatest journalist in America, and the greatest hero known to mankind. Daily Bail, like so much of this "tea party" machine, is "headquartered nearby" to Santelli, that is, in Chicago. With Odom, the Sam Adams Alliance, and the whole "tea party" nexus: "Rick, this message is to you. You are a true American hero and there are no words to describe what you did today except your own. Headquartered nearby, we will be helping the organization in whatever way possible."
It's not difficult to imagine how Santelli hooked up with this crowd. A self-described "Ayn Rand-er," one of Santelli's colleagues at CNBC, Lawrence Kudlow, played a major role in both FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth'.
Wall Street players are made left-leaning heroes and then media allows them the only air time or they are the ones made media reporters. This gives us the only route to public policy talking points which are always MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD IN REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATIC PARTIES. Below we see the headlines for a Georgia media outlet and below that is a New York Times top election columnist FiveThirtyEight----who always comes closest in his predictions----
HE KNOWS THIS NETWORK AND KNOWS THE FIX.
This is a long article---please just glance through to see how media builds a candidate------
Can DeRay Mckesson Turn 330,000 Twitter Followers Into 20,000 Votes?
Posted: Monday, April 11, 2016 GEORGIA WORLD
*******************
'McKesson’s candidacy isn’t an “act of progress” but “an act of co-optation and repression,” Marissa Jenae Johnson, co-founder of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter, told Al Jazeera America right after Mckesson entered the race'.
Can DeRay Mckesson Turn 330,000 Twitter Followers Into 20,000 Votes?
By Carl Bialik
Filed under Local Elections
Published Apr 11, 2016 New York Times FiveThirtyEight
DeRay Mckesson poses for a selfie with students from Wide Angle Youth Media at the Waverly Branch library in Baltimore, March 23, 2016.
Carl Bialik
DeRay Mckesson was standing alone, in a hallway outside the Turner Learning Commons auditorium at the University of Baltimore, checking his phone. He was 30 minutes from appearing on stage with three of the other long-shot Democratic candidates in the crowded Baltimore mayoral race. The leading candidates in the race had debated here the day before in a well-attended and televised forum. This Wednesday morning undercard forum had almost as many candidates and moderators as voting-age members of the audience.
On Twitter, Mckesson, 30, is the most prominent voice in a grass-roots movement to ensure that black lives matter. But at this stage of the race, in late March, he’d been struggling to gain an audience in his campaign to be mayor of his hometown, where he’d filed to run at the deadline in February, surprising other candidates and many of his activist allies. He was fighting criticism that he is a carpetbagger: a creature largely of Twitter and of the places other than Baltimore where he has protested and rallied. Fewer than 1 percent of voters in the most recent Baltimore Sun poll of the race had said they were going to vote for him. He had about a month to change thousands of minds.
Although he has spent most of the last year and a half as an activist, helping to build the Black Lives Matter movement, he has a credible case as an uber-wonk. Campaign Zero’s detailed policy proposals include a push for better data on people killed by police officers. His first job, which he started in 2007, was with Teach for America at a Brooklyn middle school teaching math, and while he’s not a quant, he can speak that language. He later worked as an HR executive for the public-school systems of Baltimore and Minneapolis. His statements at forums and meet-and-greets in the mayoral campaign include recitals of stats he has absorbed about adult illiteracy and about the effect of long commutes. His 26-page platform, informed by advice from local experts, is impressively detailed, more so than most other candidates’. It includes charts showing where Baltimore stands on important measures and specifies where he’d like the city to go.
But this is a noticeably wonky slate of candidates in a wonky race focused on audits and processes as much as personality and biography. In forums last month, candidates said they’d improve the city’s touted but troubled statistical management system, CitiStat, and threw around phrases such as “data-focused management,” “relational databases” and “predictive analytics.”
“Being on the B Team sucks,” Mckesson told me after the forum. We walked out into the unseasonably warm day on our way to the city’s Washington Monument, where he was set to film a segment with Fusion TV. The interview was one of many Mckesson was doing with national media, including with me, about his campaign. He has also gotten his share of coverage from Baltimore media, but with so many candidates in the race, that share isn’t large.
The walk should take 15 minutes. It took twice as long. He stopped a half-dozen times to talk to people he knew or people who recognized him. Crossing a street, he greeted Seema Iyer, whose work on vacant homes he’d just cited at the forum. Later, a man and woman biked up to us. She said, “I just put you on my Pinterest page.” Almost as an aside, she added that she planned to vote for him.
In informal interactions like these, Mckesson is a naturally gifted campaigner. You wouldn’t know this is his first election (if you don’t count the student government races he entered and won each year from sixth grade through college). He’s unfailingly pleasant to talk to, quick to flash his infectious smile, easy to spot in his signature blue Patagonia vest.
“DeRay is such an intense listener,” said Campaign Zero co-founder Johnetta Elzie, another prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement who is working on his mayoral campaign. “He has a very unique talent for picking out certain parts of people’s stories and pushing them to the front.”
After dropping into a nearby coffeehouse, where Mckesson bought a sea salt chocolate chip cookie, we waited for the TV crew. After they arrived, Mckesson fell into an easy conversation with Fusion’s Dan Lieberman. He laughed and chatted and used funny voices — and then caught himself: He was being too goofy in one of the most public places of the city where he’s running for mayor. “I’m so used to being in other people’s cities,” he said. “I can do whatever I want to do. But I live here. And I’m running for mayor. Details!” The cameras switched on, and Mckesson switched into candidate mode, repeating several of his lines from the forum.
Since entering the race, he also had been unsure how to act on Twitter. His following is more than 10 times bigger than all of his opponents’ put together. It struck me when I scanned his feed before meeting with him that the vast majority of it wasn’t about the mayoral race. He made it clear over several conversations that this was no accident. He wanted to be sure not to stray too far from what brought him 330,000 followers today: a mix of updates on his activism and news and commentary on race and police violence. As a candidate, he had continued some of his Twitter traditions. He was still tweeting often, “I love my blackness. And yours.” And before signing off most nights, he tweeted, “Sleep well, y’all. Remember to dream.” But in his first month as a political candidate on Twitter, he felt less comfortable baldly stating his own views on race and police violence. And he didn’t know how his followers outside Baltimore or those mainly focused on police violence would react to pleas for financial support or local updates. (His follower count has continued to grow at about 500 per day, the same rate as before his bid, and his Baltimore posts have gotten few complaints from followers, though many also get fewer retweets and favorites than his more general commentary does.)
With nothing scheduled for a couple of hours, Mckesson went for a haircut. He thought he looked sloppy for Fusion, and his next event was also an on-camera interview, with a local youth-journalism program. We walked a few blocks to Shear Legacy. His usual barber was out, so he settled in to the chair of Leon Presbury.
Mckesson slipped into a mode he often uses when he meets people who know about his celebrity. He shared stories with Presbury about some of the impressive people he’d met through his online fame, including Obama, musicians Beyoncé and Azealia Banks, and actor Jeffrey Wright. (Closer to home, Baltimore filmmaker John Waters has endorsed Mckesson, while local author D. Watkins wrote positively about his campaign.)
In between stories, Mckesson paused to check his phone. Every once in a while, something — a pause in the conversation, a burst of notifications, a sense that too much time had elapsed — made him check Twitter. He scrolled through his timeline and notifications expertly and efficiently, lingering on a tweet that caught his eye. The fate of the tweet, whose author might have one-thousandth the following of Mckesson, hung in the balance. “I could totally not read it,” Mckesson said of his notifications. But “the power of Twitter is that I am so connected,” he said. “I’m part of the community, too.”
The day before, Mckesson had announced his fundraising through March 15, and now his feed was filling up with reaction. He thought the numbers were good news: He was near his goal of $250,000 and had the third-most donors from Baltimore of any candidate and by far the most donors overall. (Pugh and Dixon both hold more cash, and venture capitalist David Warnock’s largely self-funded campaign is spending more than everybody else, including $650,000 on TV ads.) But the vast majority of Mckesson’s donors — 95 percent — are from outside the city and include some prominent technology executives. Mckesson is the candidate of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; of Twitter’s executive chairman, Omid Kordestani; and of YouTube’s global head of family and learning, Malik Ducard. Mckesson says that’s much better than some of his rivals’ donor bases, which include special interests in Baltimore that he thinks are more likely to expect favors than the executives of companies based elsewhere. Some of Mckesson’s critics — and even a few of his fans — disagree, interpreting the support of digital tycoons as the mark of a sellout.
Sitting in Presbury’s chair, Mckesson said he was frustrated by the blowback and wondered whether people who object to his donors think you can run a campaign for free. “It’s super-expensive,” he said. “I’m fundraising where my friends are.” (A section of his website responds to “rumors” about him, including about his funders.) He went silent when Presbury wrapped his face in a towel — to relax him and open up his pores — and then started talking again the moment the towel came off. When he wasn’t talking, he was tweeting or checking his notifications.
He paused at one. “This makes me want to scream,” he said, and handed me his phone to read a tweet that used offensive language to call him a fraud. “Who is that?” Presbury asked. “Some random person,” Mckesson said.
We stopped by the campaign office a few doors down from the barbershop. Mckesson confirmed with his campaign manager, Sharhonda Bossier, that he was doing an event for YouTube. “I owe you that thing for the Aspen Institute,” he remembered, referring to an event set for later that week sponsored by the foundation-funded think tank.
Mckesson is a strong believer in technology, which makes him a natural ally for the tech executives who have backed his candidacy. He has used Crowdpac to raise money online, and Jack’d, the gay men’s social network, endorsed him. He was wearing socks bearing the plaid pattern of Slack, the messaging platform. Among the interests he lists on LinkedIn are new technologies, gadgets and emergent sectors. He used to be “obsessed” with SimCity, he told Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in Interview magazine. “Technology is an accelerant at its best,” Mckesson said. “It creates access.”
His love of technology stems from a broader faith in the power of innovation to address all manner of social problems. For example, on the testy topic of charter schools, which Hastings backs and which many of Mckesson’s allies abhor, he doesn’t say he supports them. But he told me that he wished their critics would at least acknowledge the theory behind them, however flawed they can be in practice: “If I lower constraints, innovation increases. When innovation increases, learning increases.”
Mckesson’s campaign hasn’t been as innovative as he’d like. He has paid for polling and traditional campaign staff and highly produced campaign videos. But the major distinguishing factor of his campaign, and its competitive advantage, is Twitter. His followers are numerous and impressive. Among them are Beyoncé, John Legend, Zendaya, Rachel Maddow, Seth Rogen, Questlove, Steve Harvey, Missy Elliott and Macklemore. But just 2 percent of his followers are in Baltimore — far fewer than his follower total in New York City and about the same number as in London.1
Mckesson’s followers outside Baltimore can’t vote for him, but they can help his campaign in other ways. Every tweet he sends asking for donations nets him about $1,000, he said. Each one asking for people to join his campaign’s mailing list — possible volunteers for the campaign’s homestretch — nets him about 70 people. He’s marshaling his online following to call 30,000 residents in Baltimore, a virtual phone bank capitalizing on his Twitter platform but also risking exacerbating the perception that he is not a native son.
His follower count, he said, understates his platform because of his high volume of posting and all the retweets he gets: an average of 258 in the 90 days through April 6, according to social-analytics company Socialbakers. He tweeted an average of 107 times per day in March and burned the candle at both ends, averaging just six and a half hours between his last tweet of the night and his first the next morning. He says that some months, his tweets get 100 million impressions. “It’s about reach,” he said.
Mckesson, like most candidates, won’t say what he plans to do if he loses. His lifestyle isn’t sustainable, he told me — he has to start earning money again. He has been staying with family friends since moving back to Baltimore after Gray’s death a year ago. He has been paid only for the occasional gig, like a teaching stint at Yale, after leaving his $110,000-a-year job with the Minneapolis public schools last March for full-time activism, and, now, campaigning. “I’m used to a predictable income,” he said.
Another Uber, to another event. On the way, we passed the Cathedral of the Incarnation, draped with a banner bearing the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
Mckesson’s relationship with other activists in the movement was complicated before he announced his candidacy, and some have criticized his run as a bid to enter a system that he should be fighting from without. McKesson’s candidacy isn’t an “act of progress” but “an act of co-optation and repression,” Marissa Jenae Johnson, co-founder of the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter, told Al Jazeera America right after Mckesson entered the race.
Mckesson’s closest allies, though, remain staunch supporters. His fellow leaders of Campaign Zero have supported his candidacy, in person and over the phone, helping to craft his platform. Elzie plans to be in Baltimore through the primary to help with the campaign. Samuel Sinyangwe, a Campaign Zero co-founder, told me that campaigning for office was “the next logical step” for Mckesson. He added that other activists, inspired by Mckesson’s example, are considering running in the next election cycle.
“Can you work within the system, or is that selling out or is that strengthening the system you’re trying to resist?” Sinyangwe said. “Those are questions that have been around for centuries. Those won’t be resolved with this campaign.”
__________________________________________
The second issue from yesterday stems from the comments from the phoney right wing group below calling mainstream media FAR-LEFT. Almost all Americans understand our media is captured by global corporations that are corporate right, even NPR which is now global CHAMBER OF COMMERCE....Marketplace Money. While Republicans have always called media LIBERAL and left-leaning----it is now using terms like RADICAL AND FAR-LEFT policies which are simply last centuries FDR social democracy. Below you see Van Jones being called communist----Obama is being called socialist ---and both work for 1% Wall Street global corporations just as Republicans do.
About “EOAN”
EOA News, a division of EOA Network is a conservative news and opinion site and a leader in grassroots journalism. The Main Stream Media is to “objective journalism” as Snooki is to Mensa. ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and the list goes on and on, but they have all have been fully co-opted by the Far Left.
Supposedly this group is far-left and radical and if we look at the organizations and people attached to it----they are GLOBAL GREEN CORPORATION---working for what is being called green energy/clean energy but are simply GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY ENERGY. These are the organizations creating all national media policy around environment. Center for Media and Democracy IS A CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL GROUP. We see international labor unions strongly Clinton neo-liberal Liuna and United Steelworkers always behind global corporate development-----Institute for America's Future is a Clinton global neo-liberal organization and who thinks a state Treasurer like Angelides is not Wall Street these days? We see Google and its global technology corporations in this group and who does not know PA has one of the worst environmental records especially with fracking---its government is owned by fracking. We know Sierra Club has been Clinton neo-liberal for these few decades always backing Wall Street neo-liberal candidates its leadership was taken. The right-wing group EOAN knows this too. Please take time to learn organizations and their leaders we know are posing progressive and that will let us know when media is Wall Street and corporate.
Apollo Alliance
This article is part of the Coal Issues portal on SourceWatch, a project of CoalSwarm and the Center for Media and Democracy. See here for help on adding material to CoalSwarm.
Apollo Alliance began in 2003 when "Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger co-founded the Apollo Alliance to unite major environmental groups and labor unions around a high-tech vision for the future of the American economy. The coalition called for a new “Apollo Project” to revitalize the American economy built around a $300 billion, 10-year effort to accelerate the transition to clean energy. [1]
It is a group of U.S. business, labor, environmental, and community leaders working to promote clean energy as a means of creating energy independence, reducing carbon emissions, and generating new jobs for and opportunities for American workers and businesses.[2] The group was founded by COWS and the Institute for America's Future in 2004.[3] Chaired by former California State Treasurer and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, the Board includes the president of the NRDC and the executive director of the Sierra Club, the heads of the Laborers' International Union of North America and the United Steelworkers Union, and actor and environmentalist Robert Redford.[4]
The group advances a plan to lessen the country’s dependence on foreign oil, build a stronger economy, and create a cleaner environment. The ten-point plan calls for diversifying energy sources by expanding the use of existing renewable technologies such as solar, wind, and biomass; modernizing existing power plants; investing in long-term development of hydrogen fuel cell technology; increasing incentives for and prevalence of hybrid cars and energy-efficient building and appliances; and improving transportation options and public infrastructure for metropolitan areas. [5]
- Cathy Calfo, Executive Director
Board Members
- Phil Angelides, Chairman - Businessman and former California State Treasurer
- Frances Beinecke - President, Natural Resources Defense Council
- Robert Borosage - President, Institute for America's Future
- Leo Gerard - International President, United Steelworkers Union
- Van Jones - President, Green for All
- Mindy Lubber - President, CERES
- Kathleen McGinty - Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
- Regis McKenna -Regis McKenna, Inc.
- Terence O'Sullivan - General President, Laborers' International Union of North America
- Ellen Pao - Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
- Carl Pope - Executive Director, Sierra Club
- Robert Redford - Actor, Director, Environmentalist
- Dan W. Reicher - Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, Google
- Joel Rogers - Director, Center on Wisconsin Strategy
Here is the board of Institute for America-----all Wall Street and global corporate neo-liberalism-----we see Hollywood--Beatty and Streisand are huge Clinton supporters, the Mayor of LA----how global neo-liberal is Villaraigosa? This is how we know a media outlet will not be pushing REAL PRO-ACTIVE issues
AND NOT BE EDUCATING AGAINST CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL CANDIDATES.
Institute for America's Future
DirectorsAccessed October 2009: [1]
- Baye Adofo-Wilson - Lincoln Park/Coast Cultural District, Inc. (LPCCD)
- Warren Beatty - Mulholland Productions
- Susan Bianchi-Sand
- Maria Jobin-Leeds - Access Strategies Fund
- Robert Johnson - Impact Artist Management
- Charles Rodgers - New Community Fund
- John Sweeney - AFL-CIO
- Margery Tabankin - The Streisand Foundation
- Katrina vanden Heuvel - The Nation
- Antonio Villaraigosa - Mayor of Los Angeles
- Scott Wallace - Wallace Global Fund
- Roger Wilkins - Clarence J. Robinson Professor Emeritus, George Mason University
_________________________________________
As someone who 'LIKED' Center for Media and Democracy and have been subjected to its social media memes these few years it is very easy to determine this is a Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal media outlet. It will constantly speak of ALEC and the Koch Brothers without ever mentioning Clinton neo-liberals as being the source of global ALEC policies. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have installed nothing but ALEC -----Chamber of Commerce policies and Trans Pacific Trade Pact is one long product of ALEC. When a media outlet bashes ALEC and Koch Brothers without ever mentioning a far-right Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal----we know it is a Clinton media outlet. The Nation is a Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal journal and is called progressive because it is progressively get rich neo-liberal ----NOT SOCIALLY PROGRESSIVE.
I don't know Lisa Graves personally but one could assume if a person was tied to the US Justice or Senate Judiciary Committee----that would be a 5% to the 1% who would not want to out Wall Street players.
Keeping Americans focused on ALEC which several decades ago was the top corporate policy-maker but has since merged into the global Chamber of Commerce ----not American Legislation any more keeps people focused on what Congressional Bush neo-cons and Clinton neo-liberals pretend to fight ---while ignoring what the global corporate tribunal is doing---those global NGOs and councils writing policy for these few decades. You won't see this group tie the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF into the making of US International Economic Zone policy----they never mention it. They are busy fighting the ghosts of corporate policy past. If ALEC is fighting for free market then why is it not fighting CLINTON/BUSH./OBAMA that killed free market in US with monopoly, fraud and corruption, and corporate subsidy? It never mentions these. What we do see are the very socially controversial policies that created factions in American population groups and THAT was its function. Identifying ALEC as a problem is just fine-----but it moves discussion from the GORILLA IN THE ROOM topics like ONE WORLD US cities as International Economic Zones and global corporate tribunals.
These are the media outlets that keep Americans focused on social issues while our local, state, and national economy is being hijacked by global corporations. Here we see the hotbutton social issues---abortion---- stand your ground----immigrants. While the media focuses on Voter ID our elections are so rigged and fraudulent no one's vote is counting. Does Center for Media and Democracy address that? Of course not.
Center for Media and Democracy.
Advocacy activities
CMD has been referred to as a "liberal advocacy group" by The Des Moines Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Wisconsin State Journal, and the La Crosse Tribune of La Crosse, Wisconsin.[3][4][5][5][6]
CMD has advocated against the activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers
AwardsCMD and progressive magazine The Nation shared a September 2011 Sidney Award, an award given by The Sidney Hillman Foundation in recognition of "socially-conscious journalism", for "ALEC Exposed."[38]
John Stauber was the founder of Center for Media and Democracy and if we read this article he is shouting all the right stuff. As he says below-----as with all media that was socially progressive this organization changed leadership in 2009----right after the economic crash-----and he says what I say----it has just become part of the Clinton neo-liberal echo chamber.
If we know this history----we know when organizations creating media are not hitting on the REAL issues-----progressive means getting progressively richer----it does not always mean socially progressive.
'I ran CMD until 2009, but then stepped down, feeling that I had taken its mission as far as I could after co-authoring six books through the Center. I am now pursuing more personal interests neglected for all my decades as an activist and author. I am no longer writing books or running an organization, and glad of it. CMD continues under new leadership, but it has become much like other US progressive think tanks, part of the Democratic Party’s liberal echo chamber'.
What We Do
The Center for Media and Democracy is a national watchdog group that conducts in-depth investigations into corruption and the undue influence of corporations on media and democracy.
The findings of CMD's investigative journalism are regularly cited by the leading national and state newspapers in the U.S., including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post. CMD's reporting is credited by news shows on major broadcast stations including HBO, Showtime, PBS, NBC, CBS, and others, and has also been featured on in-depth news programs, such as Moyers & Company, Democracy Now, and the Thom Hartmann Show, as well as NPR and other public broadcasting agencies, such as the BBC and CBC.
CMD is led by Lisa Graves, who formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and Chief Counsel for Nominations for the chair of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, among other strategic research and analysis roles in Washington, DC. Her vision and determination help drive CMD's substantive focus and the power of its credible story-telling. These exposés reveal how some of the most powerful corporations in the world manipulate public policy, elections, and some in the media in ways that undermine real democracy.
CMD's breakthrough investigations of the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its American City County Exchange (ACCE), the State Policy Network (SPN), and numerous corporations and corporate-front groups have sparked national debate and ignited waves of related reporting by other journalists in numerous outlets and in leading national magazines. CMD's reporting has also built on excellent investigative reports in magazines like the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and more.
CMD also publishes the online news journal, PRWatch; a specialized encyclopedia about corporations, their CEOs, and corporate-funded front groups, SourceWatch; a clearinghouse for news about ALEC and its award-winning investigation, ALECexposed.org; and other specialized investigative websites, like ALECclimatedenial.org.
CMD focuses on documenting key facts and revealing the impact of policies on ordinary people, not on what some PR spokesperson claims is true. With the cuts to newsrooms across the country, CMD's original and in-depth investigations are more important than ever in breaking through the spin of corporate-backed PR.
Notable policies and model bills
ALEC's website states that its goal is to advance "the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism".[7] In 2003, Donald Ray Kennard, then a Louisiana state representative and ALEC national chairman, said, "We are a very, very conservative organization... We're just espousing what we really believe in."[16] Craig Horn, a North Carolina state representative and ALEC member, said of ALEC in 2013, "It's a lightning rod organization because it has a decidedly conservative bent—there’s no doubt about it."[71]
Although ALEC originally focused on social issues such as abortion, which it opposed, in more recent years the group has focused more on business and regulatory matters.[8][16] According to John Nichols of The Nation, ALEC's agenda "seems to be dictated at almost every turn by multinational corporations. It's to clear the way for lower taxes, less regulation, a lot of protection against lawsuits, [and] ALEC is very, very active in [the] opening up of areas via privatization for corporations to make more money, particularly in places you might not usually expect like public education."[72] A Brookings Institution study of state legislation introduced in 2011–2012 found that ALEC model bills that became law were linked most often to controversial social and economic issues. The study concluded that this phenomenon has hurt ALEC because, "Dirtying its hands with social issues undermines ALEC's ability to exercise influence over fiscal ones."[73]
'Stand Your Ground' laws'
Stand Your Ground' gun laws expanded to 30 states through the support of ALEC, after Florida passed its law in 2005.[74][75][76] After the Florida law had been passed, ALEC adopted a model bill with the same wording.[5] In the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, ALEC's support for Stand Your Ground laws ultimately led to the departure of high-profile corporate members such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Bank of America, and General Motors.[43]
Voter identification
Prior to 2012, legislation based on ALEC model bills was introduced in many states to mandate or strengthen requirements that voters produce state-issued photographic identification. The bills were passed and signed into law in six states.[8] Voter identification bills introduced in 34 states would have made voting more difficult for students, the elderly, and the poor.[17]
Immigration
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2014)The "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", an Arizona law commonly known as "SB 1070", was drafted during an ALEC meeting in December 2009 and became an ALEC model bill.[77] Enacted in 2010, SB 1070 was described as the toughest illegal immigration law in the U.S.[78] Portions of SB 1070 were held by the Supreme Court to be preempted by federal law in 2012.[79]
Bills similar to SB 1070 were passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah, and have been introduced in 17 other states.[17]
________________________________________
Who is tied to Center for Media and Democracy? Institute for America's Future
Here is the board of Institute for America-----all Wall Street and global corporate neo-liberalism-----we see Hollywood--Beatty and Streisand are huge Clinton supporters, the Mayor of LA----how global neo-liberal is Villaraigosa? This is how we know a media outlet will not be pushing REAL PRO-ACTIVE issues
AND NOT BE EDUCATING AGAINST CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL CANDIDATES.
The only future many below see for America is as ONE WORLD global corporate tribunal with US cities as Foreign Economic Zones
Institute for America's Future
Directors
Accessed October 2009: [1]
Baye Adofo-Wilson - Lincoln Park/Coast Cultural District, Inc. (LPCCD)
Warren Beatty - Mulholland Productions
Susan Bianchi-Sand
Maria Jobin-Leeds - Access Strategies Fund
Robert Johnson - Impact Artist Management
Charles Rodgers - New Community Fund
John Sweeney - AFL-CIO
Margery Tabankin - The Streisand Foundation
Katrina vanden Heuvel - The Nation
Antonio Villaraigosa - Mayor of Los Angeles
Scott Wallace - Wallace Global Fund
Roger Wilkins - Clarence J. Robinson Professor Emeritus, George Mason University
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