astroturf // Current TV

Beach Chalet Soccer Fields

OK, I know I’m going to take some heat from this, but I actually believe that... more

baghdadbythebay
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1 day ago
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The Wavelength: Your So-Called Private Life

by Eric K. Arnold, Media Consortium blogger Smart phones are hip, trendy, and... more

MediaConsortium
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12 months ago
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Progressives to ‘Uncloak’ Secret Financers Behind the Tea Party on Jan. 30th

From Raw Story .com: Progressive and liberal activists are planning at the end of... more

pinkpanther
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1 year ago
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157 comments

The Online Sabotaging of Intelligent Debate Seems Organised

These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy

joeeddy
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1 year ago
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These Astroturf Libertarians Are The Real Threat To Internet Democracy | The Guardian

http://neuralgourmet.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/libertarian_housepets.jpg

As I see in threads on my articles, the online sabotaging of intelligent debate seems organised. We must fight to save this precious gift!

They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences. In the WikiLeaks punch-up the commoners appear to have the upper hand. But it's just one battle. There's a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning.

I'm not talking here about threats to net neutrality and the danger of a two-tier internet developing, though these are real. I'm talking about the daily attempts to control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts in which money talks.

The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing. An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations but which has in reality been organised. Anyone writing a comment piece in Mandarin critical of the Chinese government, for instance, is likely to be bombarded with abuse by people purporting to be ordinary citizens, upset by the slurs against their country.

But many of them aren't upset: they are members of the 50 Cent Party, so-called because one Chinese government agency pays five mao (half a yuan) for every post its tame commenters write. Teams of these sock-puppets are hired by party leaders to drown out critical voices and derail intelligent debates.

• A fully referenced version of this article is available on George Monbiot's website
http://www.monbiot.com/

There is much more that couldn't fit go read...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/dec/13/astroturf-libertarians-internet-democracyhttp://neuralgourmet.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/libertarian_housepets.jpg As I... more

toyotabedzrock
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1 year ago
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79 comments

Libertarians Training Tea Party Activists In Guerilla Internet Tactics

This clip shows Libertarian Austin James of American Majority training tea party... more

unimatrix0
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1 year ago
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4 comments

Tea Party group attacks voting rights

In Harris County (Houston), Texas, a tea party group called King Street Patriots is... more

rmann0581
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1 year ago
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VIDEO: Beauty Pageant Gets Ugly, Miss Misinformation 2010!

Check out the Miss Misinformation Contest to see who takes home the crown!... more

captainplanet71
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2 years ago
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Astroturf In Action: Right-Wing Billionaire David Koch Pays For 40 Buses To Haul In Protesters

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the corporate front group founded in the 1980s by Koch Industries billionaire David Koch, worked closely with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to orchestrate the anti-health reform rally today. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, AFP has been encouraging right-wing activists to board their buses — free of charge — to attend the rally. While AFP does not disclose all of its corporate donors, foundations controlled by David and Charles Koch provide millions in yearly funding, and David continues to chair the AFP foundation and preside over AFP’s annual convention.

ThinkProgress found at least a dozen AFP staffers standing at their designated bus drop off point near the Capitol, handing out signs, directions, talking points, petitions, and donuts to protesters. Many of the people who work at AFP are longtime Republican operatives, like Ben Marchi, the AFP Virginia director who previously worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee and for Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX). Victor Zapanta produced this video report of AFP staffers talking about their exploits at the rally today:

AFP STAFFERS: We have 25 buses just from Pennsylvania, New Jersey we probably have 5 or 6 from Maryland.

AFP STAFFERS: We have about 40 buses coming.

Watch it: (See Video)

David Koch’s AFP has a long history of marshaling “grassroots” support for GOP objectives. In the early 1990s, AFP, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked secretly with then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) to organize angry crowds following the Clintons as they touted their health reform bill. Industry money from health insurance, telecommunications, oil, and other companies has flowed freely to AFP over the years to help AFP promote an agenda of boosting the rich, stripping consumer safeguards, and maintaining corporate monopolies. Phillip Morris rented out AFP from the Koch family, contributing millions to the organization in exchange for AFP to build opposition to tobacco regulations.

AFP’s daily activities are managed by Tim Phillips, an infamous astroturf lobbyist who built a career using Christian front groups to wage stealth campaigns. For example, his work includes fighting under the radar to promote energy deregulation for Enron and helping Jack Abramoff clients continue forced abortion sweatshops in the Northern Mariana Islands.

Will the media report on the true driver of today’s rally? Or will they leave David Koch out of the equation, despite his hand-in-glove involvement.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/05/david-koch-astroturf/Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the corporate front group founded in the 1980s by Koch... more

WakeUpPeople
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2 years ago
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8 comments

Inside Bonner's Climate Letters Forgeries

New documents expose the inner workings of the shadowy astroturf operation that aimes... more

atomiclegion
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2 years ago
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0 comments

Girls Gone TOO Wild

Dozens of perfect examples why cannabis is a safer drug than alcohol.

LibertynJusticeforAll
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2 years ago
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8 comments

‘CO2 is Green’ Campaign Misses the Point Entirely

In light of the EPA’s decision (at the behest of the U.S. Supreme Court) to... more

tbhurst
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2 years ago
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Lobbyists spend millions to fight public option

Surprise surprise

Mulcahey
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2 years ago
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Rick Scott, lobbyist and astroturf organizer, profits off the uninsured

For months now multimillionaire healthcare entrepreneur Rick Scott has been at the center of the aggressive campaign to derail healthcare reform in Washington, D.C. Reprising the role he played nearly 20 years ago, when as the head of a national hospital chain he helped kill Clintoncare, the former hospital-chain executive founded the group Conservatives for Patients' Rights, raising $20 million to fight Obamacare, including $5 million of his own money. The tall, lean Scott, whose shiny bald head swivels in exasperation at the idea of government involvement in healthcare, even stars in its nationwide ad campaign comparing Democratic proposals to socialized medicine. Through this group, he has fomented the conservative strategy to disrupt town hall-style healthcare meetings around the country by shouting down elected officials. (CPR sent schedules of the meetings to so-called Tea Party activists.) He can justifiably claim some of the credit for the Senate Finance Committee's two votes Tuesday against a public option. But in Rick Scott the right has found a frontman whose baggage threatens to overwhelm his message.

A linchpin of Scott's 2009 campaign has been the use of anecdotes from abroad -- horror stories from Britain and Canada meant to illustrate how government-controlled healthcare systems "clearly kill people" by controlling their access to care, as he told Fox's Sean Hannity in June. He even funded a documentary titled "Faces of Government Healthcare" cataloging the horror stories of British and Canadian patients who were purportedly denied medical attention for life-threatening illnesses until it was too late.

Yet even as Scott makes the rounds of Congress and talk-show green rooms, a wrongful death lawsuit has been working its way through the Florida courts against a doctor employed by the chain of walk-in clinics Scott founded. Scott has repeatedly bragged that the 27-clinic, Florida-based company, Solantic, is an example of the free-market ingenuity needed to fix our ailing medical infrastructure. The lawsuit, however, alleges a Solantic doctor misdiagnosed a patient's deep-vein thrombosis as a sprained ankle, leading to a pulmonary embolism and death. That same doctor was reprimanded by the state for misdiagnosing deep-vein thrombosis in a patient who died two years earlier. It's the kind of anecdote you'd expect to hear in Scott's documentary -- except that it condemns a free-market system where profit and patient volume may take precedence over care.

And this isn't the first time that Scott's warnings about the ills of socialist medicine have found an ironic echo in his own healthcare business. Scott argues that socialized medicine rations care and strangles competition, yet just after his first stint as anti-reform spokesman in the 1990s, while he was running the world's largest healthcare company, he was accused of monopolizing markets and choking out the competition while slashing the chain's costs to the point that it affected patient care. And while he asserts that two of the core principles of healthcare reform are "accountability" and "personal responsibility," Scott ran a company that ultimately pleaded guilty to defrauding the government in one of the nation's largest Medicare frauds ever. Two executives went to prison, the company paid almost $2 billion in fines, and Scott was pushed out of the company. Before he could retake the political stage, he had to build his healthcare business all over again.

more at link....For months now multimillionaire healthcare entrepreneur Rick Scott has been at the... more