The untold story of Jeffrey Goldberg & Meir Kahane, Brooklyn's bin Laden

But The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg wouldn’t have any of it. He downplayed the seriousness of the attack, and went after a New York Times reporter for implying that the lynching was a sign of systemic racism in Israel. He then tried to whitewash the violence and then excused it by pinning the attack on poor, uneducated Arab Jews:

This sort of thing isn’t actually that new. As someone who covered the funeral procession of Meir Kahane, the racist rabbi assassinated in New York more than 20 years ago, I can attest to the fact that Jewish hooligans, mainly from Jerusalem’s poorest neighborhoods (and many who are descendants of Jews who fled, or were expelled, from Arab countries), will periodically set themselves upon innocent Arabs. They did it at the funeral, and in subsequent incidents.

Goldberg packed in a lot of evil lies into that one small paragraph.

First, there’s his sleazy insinuation that Arab Jews are somehow solely responsible for the violence against Palestinians, a disgusting expression of Ashkenazi racism that blames darker-skinned Sephardic Jews for all the ills of Israeli society. [ 1 ]  Then there’s his suggestion that the brutal beating of Julani was somehow understandable or even justified because the Israeli kids doing the beating were “mainly …  descendants of Jews who fled, or were expelled, from Arab countries.” Meaning that the lynched Palestinian kid had only had his own Arab brothers to blame for what happened to him. But the juiciest lie is in what Goldberg left out…

Goldberg boasts about coming face-to-face with Jewish hooligans while covering the funeral of the ultra-rightwing anti-Arab rabbi Meir Kahne, as if to give readers the impression that his familiarity with Jewish anti-Arab extremism comes from his experience working as a journalist in Israel. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Goldberg’s connection to anti-Arab extremism is deeper and much more personal. Fact is, Goldberg self-consciously dodged having to tell his readers the truth. That is: he was himself a one-time die-hard follower and believer in Kahane’s racist rightwing extremist ideas. Goldberg might condemn their anti-Palestinian violence today and call it “appalling,” but he would have been openly supporting and cheering it on when he was the same age as the Israeli thugs who lynched Julani.

Goldberg has been trying to play the role of liberal Zionist lately, and clearly doesn’t like bringing up his ultra-rightwing past. But he had no problem describing his childhood conversion to Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology in his 2006 memoir Prisoners—the thing to remember is that Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL), which the FBI and the State Department have classified as a terrorist organization, no different than al-Qaida.

Here’s how he describes it:

“And soon enough I came across the writings of Meir Kahane, on a high shelf, and it was Kahane who provided a not un-Panther-like but specifically Semitic model of self-defense. Kahane was the Brooklyn rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968 to shake Jews out of their fatalistic and feminized passivity. He argued, infamously, in favor of the bat, the bomb, and the gun. (“Every Jew a .22,” he said, to the shame and horror of the Manhattan Jewish elite and to the secret joy of every beaten-down Jewboy in the tristate area.) . . . But for a time he held all the answers for me. In the locker room, I was a kike, but in the sanctuary of the library, I was a revolutionary kike, one of Kahane’s chayas, a beast, a street-fighting Jew.

What exactly did Kahane inspire in the the geeky “beaten-down Jewboy” from Long Island to fantasize about being part of Kahane’s yarmulke-wearing brownshirt goon squad? FYI: The chayas were the paramilitary arm of the Jewish Defense League first deployed by Kahane to square off against inner city blacks and “frighten the anti-Semite to the roots of his soul.” [ 2 ]

Well, at the time of young Goldberg became “fascinated” with the teachings of Meir Kahane, the rightwing orthodox rabbi had moved from Brooklyn to Israel and was calling for the mass ethnic cleansing and “slaughter” (in Kahane’s own words) of all Arabs living in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Read Jeffrey Goldberg's SHAME profile...

In 1980, Kahane was arrested in Israel “on charges that he planned armed terrorist attacks on West Bank Arabs to avenge the killing of Jews in the occupied territory,” reported UPI on May 1980. The report noted that the “New York-born rabbi and some followers had organized an armed underground against Arabs in the West Bank town of Hebron.” Later, in 1988, Kahane’s political party would be banned in Israel for espousing racism—no easy feat in Israel’s racist culture—and he was barred from taking his seat in the Israeli Knesset. In 1990, after spending nearly two decades agitating for the violent ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from Israel, Kahane was whacked in Manhattan by an Egyptian man. Four years later, a Kahane follower would finally carry out the rabbi’s plan for Hebron and massacred 29 unarmed Palestinians in a mosque, cutting them down with a machine gun as they prayed.

Kahane developed his violent rightwing politics while still in America, using the Jewish Defense League and its chaya brownshirts squads to terrorize inner city blacks, Muslims and Soviet officials on U.S. soil. In 1971 Kahane was convicted of manufacturing firebombs in New York. The next year, JDL was suspected of firebombing the offices of a promoter Sol Hurok in New York to protest his booking of Soviet artists for U.S. tours. The bomb didn’t stop the tours, but it did manage to kill young woman. In 1973, Kahane kept pressing his followers to keep trying to carry out a successful assassination, writing in a letter: “if we can’t get someone to shoot a Russian diplomat (anyone), we are Jewish pigs and deserve what we get.” The Southern Poverty Law Centerdescribed Kahane’s JDL as a hate group “that preaches a radical form of anti-Arab Jewish nationalism” targeting Muslims, diplomats, critics, and even Jews it deems “not Jewish enough.”  JDL was implicated in a number of bombing attacks on Soviet and Arab office properties on U.S. soil, leading the FBI and the U.S. State Department to classify the JDL as a “right-wing terrorist group.”

Kahane never served any time in the U.S. probably because of his close ties to various intelligence services. According to False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane : From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, Kahane worked as a FBI informant starting from the early 1960s  and throughout his career enjoyed the backing of Mossad and ultra-rightwing factions political factions. But the man clearly got out of hand even for his spook handlers. Eventually, the FBI, Israel and even the U.S. State Department labeled the JDL a “terrorist organization.”

But Kahane didn’t mind the terrorist label; he aspired to it.

In a 1972 Playboy interview, Kahane admitted that there was not much difference between him and Nazi white supremacists:

PLAYBOY: Then the only difference between you and, say, the American Nazi Party is that they’re wrong and you’re right?

KAHANE: I can’t put it better than that.

How long did Goldberg’s fascination with Kahane last?

In Prisoners, Goldberg writes that he became disillusioned “later in life” when he “would come to know Kahane personally.” Later in life? How much later?

Goldberg said that he had “grown disenchanted” with Kahane’s ideas by the time he went to college in the 1980s, but admitted that he still couldn’t help being drawn to the bearded Zionist warrior: “in a speech he gave to hundreds of students—most of whom were properly liberal and predisposed to loathe him—he laid out what he saw as the hypocrisy of Jewish life in America in an unapologetic, ribald, and revolutionary way, and we surrendered momentarily to his charisma.”

And Goldberg was still sweet on Kahane in 1990, when the rabbi was shot by an assassin. He recalls attending the funeral in Jerusalem and watching in disgust as Kahane’s supporters ran around screaming “Death to the Arabs!” and beating any Palestinian they came across: “Kahane would have been proud of his mourners, and he would have called the Jewish soldiers who beat them back kapos and quislings. There was no space in my heart for such a man.” Yet he quickly added that “when [Kahane's] grandsons asked me what I remembered of him, I answered, ‘He had very profound thoughts,’ which was true.”

That doesn’t sound like disenchantment. More like Goldberg’s in denial about his true feelings.

How old was Goldberg when Kahane for him no longer “held all the answers”? This old?

So the question is: Why the sudden shyness? Why did you boast about covering Kahane’s funeral without ever noting that you were once a follower? It didn’t seem to bother you in 2006, when you published the book. So why should it now?

So come on, Jeffrey, why not relax and let your inner brownshirt chaya hang loose?  Like you did in this 2006 New Yorker interview about your experience working as a jailor in Israel’s largest detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners: [ 3 ]

“It was hopelessly exotic for me. I mean, I’m from the South Shore of Long Island, and then all of a sudden I’m in the Negev Desert, by the Egyptian border, as a prison guard in what’s probably the largest prison in the Middle East, guarding the future leaders of Palestine. It was pretty exciting.”

Yasha Levine is a co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project. Read his book: The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Notes:

1. Hell, you don’t have to be an expert on Israeli-Palestinian clusterfuck to realize that Arab Jews can’t be blamed for anti-Palestinian violence. After all, what’s one “attempted lynching” of a Palestinian kid in West Jerusalem, compared to, say, the systematic bombing of a civilian population in Gaza with phosphorous bombs? [↩]
2. From Kahane’s The Story of the Jewish Defense League: “One of the things we had done in our efforts to obtain well-trained, strong, and tough Jews for effective action against Jew-haters was to create a special group of fightersbwhich we named the Chaya Squad. The word chaya in Hebrew means “beast,” and we wanted to develop Jewishb“beasts” or “animals” who would frighten the anti-Semite to the roots of his soul. They served an invaluable function in the changing of the Jewish image in America. . . . It was a thing of joy to find a big, strong Jewish youngster band train him to defend Jewish honor, bodies, and property. It was an even more satisfying thing to watch so many of the Chayas go into battle with their yarmulkes on their heads. . . . the yarmulke had come to mean something special for them. It shouted out: “I am a Jew and, Jew-hater, as you get beaten I want you to know that a Jew is doing it.” It was repayment for the cutting off of Jewish beards while Nazi soldiers laughed. [↩]
3. From the SHAME Project: In the early 1990s, Goldberg served as a prison guard at Ktzi’ot, Israel’s largest detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners. The prison has long been criticized for its inhumane conditions, including frequent beatings, lack of drinking water and forced labor. Among the hundreds of books forbidden to prisoners at Ktzi’ot have been The Lord of the Rings and Hamlet. In Prisoners, Goldberg described a scene from Ktzi’ot in which his friend repeatedly hit a Palestinian prisoner in the head with a with a heavy, sharp-edged army radio, beating him to a bloody pulp, a beating that Goldberg “deduced was prompted by something [the prisoner] said.” Goldberg admits that he lied to cover up the crime: “I found another military policeman, and handed off the wobbling prisoner, who was by now bleeding on me. ‘He fell,’ I lied.” [↩]

I was passing through the Mojave Desert and by chance stopped by a local thrift store in Joshua Tree. I’m glad I did, because I spotted a book that I just had to own. At $0.50, it was priced to sell. And as you can tell from the title above, the book’s a classic. It’s bound to remain fresh and relevant through the ages—not as a useful guide to homeownership, but as a fossil record of the biggest real estate scam in the history of the United States.

A lot of people still wonder how and why so many millions of people bought such ridiculously overpriced homes and took out mortgages and loans they clearly could not afford?

Extra! Extra! Yasha Levine makes frontpage news in Victorville!

That’s what I kept wondering when I moved out to Victorville back in the Spring of 2009 to do immersion reporting from the front line of the real estate meltdown. Located about 100 miles east of Los Angeles on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Victorville got higher and crashed harder, in terms of real estate, than almost any other place in California. It doubled its size to 100,000 in just eight short years, growing from an isolated hick outpost into a booming commuter suburb filled with the cheapest McTractHomes south of Fresno. By the time I got there, Victorville was a ruined city filled with empty master planned communities, some of them half built and abandoned, rotting dry in the sun. I spent nearly two years reporting on the real estate swindle out there, and I never could stop thinking about the central question: How the hell were people coerced into moving out here?  Why would anyone think that buying a $500,000 house in a desert 100 miles away from Los Angeles be good idea, no matter what kind of loan deal you got or how booming the market. What kind of propaganda were these people subjected to?

Well, this book provides a part of the answer: people were explicitly instructed to do so.

The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner hit the front bookcase displays at Barnes and Noble in March 2006, at the very top of the real estate market and just a few months before the whole thing crashed and burned. Its main message was simple: If you take out a mortgage to buy a home, you will always make money. There is no way you can lose—no matter when you buy, how much you pay or what type of loan you get. And the kicker is: both the book and finance expert who wrote it were bankrolled by Wells Fargo and Bank of America.

This book is just one of dozens—if not hundreds—of similar self-help snake oil guides promising a sure bet system to get rich in real estate. But it’s a good example of the massive propaganda effort financed by Wall Street that was designed to funnel as many people as possible into the mortgage meat grinder. The book was packed with blatant lies that seem so obvious and even comic in retrospect. The book was not put out by some shady fly by night operation, but by a supposedly credible financial expert who had the backing of the most well-known and respected banks, TV networks and newspapers.

But the whole thing was a fraud, shamelessly boosted by some of the biggest names in news media—none of whom have been held accountable for their role in defrauding millions of Americans.

So let’s take a look…Crack open the book and turn to the introduction, it begins like this:

What if I told you the smartest investment you would ever make during your lifetime would be a home!

What if I told you that in just an hour or two I could share with you a simple system that would help you become rich through homeownership?

What if I told you that this system was called the Automatic Millionaire Homeowner—and that if you spent an hour or two with me, you could learn how to become one? [emphasis mine]

Would you be interested? Would you be willing to spend a few hours with me? Would you like to become an Automatic Millionaire Homeowner?

Interested? Intrigued? Want to know more? Well, turn a couple of pages and you get this:

As I sit here in August 2005, I have no idea when you will be reading what I’m writing. Maybe it’s March 2006 (when this book is scheduled to be published)—by which time the real estate market could be slowing or cooling down to modest single-digit annual gains (or not). Perhaps this book was bought by a friend of yours who passed it along to you—and it’s now 2007 and those once “certain” boom markets are going bust due to speculation. Or maybe the opposite has happened—interest rates have remained at historic lows, and home prices have continued their march upward.

In fact, it doesn’t really matter when you happen to be reading this or what’s going on right now in the markets. This book is not about the boom . . . or the busts. . . . What this book is about is the truth. And the truth is this:

Nothing you will ever do in your lifetime
is likely to make you as much money as
buying a home and living in it. [emphasis in the original]

What’s this sure-fire system? Well, it’s so simple it fits on the inside flap! Here’s how you do it:

What Makes The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner Essential:

■ You don’t need a big down payment to buy a home.

■ You don’t need great credit.

■ You should buy even if you have credit-card debt.

■ You can buy a second home even if you’re still paying off the first.

■ You can get started in any market-boom or bust.

■ It’s easier to be a landlord than you think.

Just a few months after the book came out, the real estate market went into a death-spiral. Victorville and other Mojave Desert exurbs like Palmdale and Lancaster were packed to the brim with people who followed this book’s advice to the letter. They took out no down payment adjustable rate mortgages, bought at the peak of bubble, had horrible credit scores, were struggling to make ends meet and were probably up the hilt in credit card debt. Over the next year and a half, home prices collapsed by 30% and just kept falling. By the time that I packed my bags and fled West towards the Pacific Ocean in 2010, homes that had sold for nearly $400,000 at the top of the market in 2006 couldn’t find a buyer at $50,000 or $75,000. People were kicked out of their homes, lost all the “investment” payments they had made on the loan and had to find other places to live—rental homes if they were lucky; their cars or tents at the hobo camp down on the banks of the Mojave River if they weren’t.

So the Automatic Millionaire was a bust—well, at least as far as the now-former homeowners were concerned. But as we now know, the latest homeownership craze was never meant to benefit the homeowners. The only Automatic Millionaires created by this book were David Bach and the financial oligarchy he served.

See, before David Bach began his bright career as a New York Times bestselling author dedicated to spreading the gospel of homeownership, he was a senior vice president of Morgan Stanley and a partner of The Bach Group, a wealth management outfit started by his father. Yep, he was born into it. Finance runs through his veins!

So it’s no surprise that both Bank of America and Wells Fargo sponsored David Bach and his revolutionary Automatic Millionaire Homeowner wealth creation system.

Here’s an excerpt from Wells Fargo’s press release:

Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Joins with David Bach to Promote Shared Vision of the Lifelong Benefits of Homeownership to Millions of Americans

Best-Selling Author, Leading Retail Lender to Encourage People to Build Long-Term Financial Success through Homeownership

DES MOINES, Iowa – Oct. 28, 2005 – Wells Fargo Home Mortgage today announced a three-year agreement with financial coach David Bach, author of several best-selling books including No. 1 New York Times best-seller The Automatic Millionaire. The partnership is designed to increase the number of first-time, second-home and investment homebuyers and help homeowners best manage the equity in their home as an asset to achieve their long-term financial goals.

Yep, Wells Fargo is only interested in educating homeowners for the greater good. And the bank is not alone. Just look at all the smart people who praise and recommend his work. They wouldn’t lie, not with their reputations on the line!

Jean Chatzky, Financial Editor of NBC’s Today, blurbed: “The Automatic Millionaire gives you, step-by-step, everything you need to secure your financial future. When you do it David Bach’s way, failure is not an option.”

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly also endorsed the Automatic Millionaire wealth creation system: “David Bach’s no-spin financial advice is beautiful because it’s so simple. If becoming self-sufficient is important to you, then this book is a must.” Yep, this is the same O’Reilly who bashed homeowner “losers” who took out loans that they weren’t able to pay, and yet here he is endorsing a plan that says there’s no such thing homeowner who loses money. Wonder what kind of cut Bill gets off Bach’s loot?

He rips you off, puts you in debt and sticks by your side to help make sure you pay it off. What a guy!

So what’s up with David Bach today?

The man’s still doing regular TV gigs and giving financial advice to unsuspecting victims, including a weekly appearance on NBC’s Today Show. But he’s changed his racket: Bach’s no longer out to make automatic millionaires; these days he’s motivating debtors to get second/third jobs and convincing them to adopt austerity measures in their own personal lives. He’ll help you pare down your consumption footprint to the bare minimum necessary for physical survival. Yep, Bach’s our debt handler. His job is to make sure we peons keep making those monthly payments to Wells Fargo and Bank of America!

The day that degenerate shysters like David Bach are afraid to show their faces in public and feel the need to flee across the border is the day that we’ll know that we as a country are making progress towards a brighter future.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled and co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project. Read his book: The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Ever since our launch just a few months ago, the SHAME Project has been running like a buzz saw through the media establishment . . . it just needs support from readers and fans like you to keep up the pace. Can you help? Contribute using PayPal or WePay.

SHAME’S outing of Newsweek correspondent Megan McArdle as a Koch-linked conservative peeled back another a layer of the billionaires’ PR machine, sparking well-known finance expert Barry Ritholtz to declare: “Any publication that publishes anything in the future under her byline is off my reading list.” NPR and Adam Davidson had to run for cover after we unearthed their corrupt sponsorship deal with one of the most criminal subprime lenders in the country. And our exposé of Malcolm Gladwell as a tobacco industry-trained propagandist ripped a huge hole in the credibility of The New Yorker’s celebrity journalist.

SHAME’s exposés have been written up by The New York Observer, FAIR, Barry Ritholtz, Naked Capitalism; and we’ve been featured on RT television, and interviewed on radio stations from Chicago to Los Angeles. We’re going to get even bigger, with the support of our fans. Contribute using PayPal or WePay.

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Thank you,
Yasha Levine & Mark Ames
Founders of S.H.A.M.E.
“Inflict & Endure”

* = Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

Reposted from The SHAME Project

“In propaganda, truth pays off.”

— V.I. Lenin

SHAME’s recent exposé of Newsweek/The Daily Beast correspondent Megan McArdle went into great detail about her deep, close ties to the Kochs’ libertarian influence-peddling machine and her failure to disclose the connections. The most important thing you need to know about Megan McArdle is this: She is the only journalist in America whose byline has appeared on Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly cover stories, while at the same time is so close to Charles Koch that she was chosen to emcee the big 50th Golden Anniversary bash that Koch threw last year to celebrate the success of his libertarian think-tank the Institute of Humane Studies, the first of countless dozens of think-tanks (Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Competitive Enterprise Institute, etc.) that the billionaire oligarch controls today.

Megan McArdle (top) beams with joy as Charles Koch’s party clown-for-hire at the 50th anniversary bash of the Institute for Humane Studies

The SHAME profile only touched on McArdle’s underhanded strategy of issuing fake “full disclosures” to obscure just how deep her ties to the Kochs really go. And there’s a good reason she doesn’t want the public to know about her Koch connections. If people knew, they wouldn’t waste time debating, reading or even paying attention to someone so clearly corrupt and conflicted. The real question is: Why have the Atlantic Monthly and now Newsweek provided a Koch operative like McArdle with the “centrist” credibility that she so desperately needs in order to do her job as a propagandist?

As far as we could find, there have only been a handful of instances over the years when McArdle felt compelled to issue a ”full disclosure” about her journalism conflicts of interest. And every time, these “full disclosures” have been used as smokescreens to give readers the false impression that McArdle was being up-front about her conflicted relationships, when in fact her disclosures were highly selective and edited, and now raise more questions than they purport to answer. As in, “Why did she knowingly give false incomplete information?”

For example: In March 2009, McArdle led a propaganda campaign to discredit an investigation that Mark Ames and I published in Playboy that first exposed the first Tea Party protest as an astroturf campaign backed by the Koch billionaire brothers and the Koch-linked advocacy outfit FreedomWorks. McArdle smeared our reporting as a conspiracy theory, initially arguing from her Atlantic Monthly perch that FreedomWorks did not play a leading role in orchestrating the Tea Parties. She also defended the Kochs with her now-infamous line: “I don’t see any evidence offered that Koch money funds FreedomWorks, or any astroturfing organization . . . from what I know of [the Kochs], astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style.”

Indeed.

At the very end of her smear-piece, McArdle offered readers of The Atlantic a “full disclosure” about her then-fiancé’s employment at FreedomWorks:

Full disclosure:  It’s pretty much an open secret in DC, but given the content of the article I’m discussing, I think I ought to mention that I live with Peter Suderman, who once worked for Freedomworks.  Other than giving me the name of the right employee to email to make inquiries (no word back yet), I haven’t asked him about his former employer, and he hasn’t told me anything.  I debated whether to write about this, but since I’m not actually defending Freedomworks, I think it’s kosher.

Doesn’t seem so bad, does it? Well, that’s because McArdle strategically left out a few salient details.

For one thing, McArdle’s now-husband Peter Suderman was much more  familiar with FreedomWorks than she was letting on—and his work for FreedomWorks was directly relevant to the Tea Party campaign that McArdle ran cover for. As documented in the S.H.A.M.E. profile, Peter Suderman worked for FreedomWorks on an astroturf campaign called Angry Renter that was essentially a Tea Party 1.0, a 2008 precursor to the Tea Party movement of 2009.

In May 2008 The Wall Street Journal exposed McArdle’s husband’s AngryRenter.com outfit as a “fake grass-roots effort” to kill off proposed Democratic Party legislation to provide mortgage relief to struggling homeowners.

A year later, FreedomWorks was using many of the same PR strategies, tapping the same libertarian networks and even pretty much the same rallying cry—an alleged groundswell of popular opposition to a bill that would provide mortgage relief to struggling homeowners—in order to launch and promote the Tea Party movement.

McArdle also didn’t mention in her initial 2009 “full disclosure” that her husband Peter Suderman’s ties to the Kochs, even though she spent much of that article defending the Kochs. Suderman had spent most of his professional career drawing paychecks from various Koch organizations and propaganda outfits. When McArdle published her smear on the article exposing the Tea Party as a Koch-FreedomWorks operation, her boy Peter Suderman was regularly blogging for Reason magazine and would be hired on as Reason’s associate editor just a few months later.

But all the info that was airbrushed out of Suderman’s resume is nothing compared with the slash job McArdle did on her own Koch history.

To wit, there is no mention of “Megan McArdle” in Megan McArdle’s “full disclosure.”

This was February 2009, two years before McArdle would be honored for her services to the Koch cause by serving as Charles Koch’s party clown at the 50th Golden Anniversary bash of the Institute for Humane Studies. The IHS was Charles Koch’s first libertarian baby—it’s the ship that launched a thousand free-market front-groups. So it means a lot to Charles Koch to hire Megan McArdle as his party emcee—and it should mean a lot to McArdle’s readers and editors at Newsweek too, though for different reasons.

In her defense of the Kochs in 2009, McArdle didn’t mention the journalism training and job placement support she received from the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian think tank tightly controlled by Charles Koch since the 196os. (Over the years this program has launched the mainstream media careers of a long list of conservative operatives, along with Megan McArdle.) Nor did she inform readers that just a month before the Tea Party Movement she was singled out at a Koch-funded event for her “leadership role” as a  conservative activist pushing for “re-branding the Republican party,” and that she gave a strategy speech in which she echoed the objectives of the Tea Party movement. And there are at least a half-dozen other serious conflicts that she could have picked from . . .

Without getting stuck in the details of McArdle’s numerous Koch connections (that’s what the handy list below is for), the fact that she airbrushed them out from her “disclosures” is an indication of just how aware she is of the damage those ties to the Kochs would bring to her “credibility” if the public became aware of them.

Those omissions were not, and are not, mere slip-ups. McArdle had a chance to add the omitted conflicts into a subsequent post she published on the The Atlantic, supposedly to clarify and expand on her initial “full disclosure” of Peter Suderman’s connections to the Kochs. Instead, she went into sickening detail about how, when and under what circumstances she and Suderman became romantically involved, and how they decided to sleep outside an Apple store while partying at Matthew Yglesias’ house. Here’s just a small sample:

…on July 10th, when Peter and I slept out in line for the iPhone, we weren’t dating.  We were good-ish friends.  In the interests of absolutely full disclosure on this vital topic, Peter Suderman had that very week left his job at Freedomworks, and was about to join the ill-fated Culture11. [Culture11 was funded in part by trust billionaire Steve Forbes, who happened to run FreedomWorks along with Dick Armey. —YL]  The two of us decided to camp out in line three weeks before, at a party which I believe to have been hosted by Matthew Yglesias and his roommates, though it could also have been at one of a half-dozen other friends.  We met up that evening at a book party for Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, and then decamped for Virginia.  While it is true that we shared a queen-sized air mattress for several hours, Peter was a perfect gentleman. . . . Peter and I started dating two weeks after that, on July 24th, if you can refer to his invaluable help cleaning up my apartment after a fairly lengthy cocktail party as a “date”.

All her wink-wink yammering about her relationship, all the mind-numbing details and the sarcastic, mocking tone she takes towards “full disclosure” is not McArdle being stupid—it’s her acting stupid to throw you off the scent. She is most definitely not stupid, whatever her critics say. What McArdle is doing here is throwing out a crisis-management diversion—the shill equivalent of a squid squirting ink or a skunk discharging its anal stink-glands. She wants readers to wrinkle their nose and turn away in disgust—anything to keep critics from scrutinizing her Koch ties and uncovering her corruption.

We were able to dig up four other “full disclosure” statements by McArdle from the past few years, and they all use the same Peter Suderman decoy trick. In fact, it’s so consistent that you gotta wonder: Did McArdle marry Suderman just so she could could hide behind his Koch ties and give the appearance of offering “full disclosure”?

Here’s a tweet from 2011:

This “full disclosure” is from an Atlantic blog post from February 16, 2012, defending the Koch-founded Heartland Institute after a scientist obtained internal docs showing that the outfit planned to fund anti-climate-change propaganda aimed at kindergarteners and schools:

Full disclosure: One of the donors in the apparently authenticated documents is Charles Koch, and my husband did a year-long fellowship with the Koch Foundation. However, nothing I’m going to write either defends or indicts Mr. Koch, who’s actually pretty incidental to both Heartland’s funding, and this story.

This one is from a follow-up post on the Heartland Institute scandal a week later:

Full disclosure: in 2011 the Heartland Institute received a small donation from the Charles Koch foundation, which in the past also sponsored a journalism fellowship for my husband.

And this one is from an Atlantic post from February 24, 2012, that defended the Kochs from a negative Obama campaign email:

My husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and works for Reason Magazine, which has been a recipient of funds from Koch charitable organizations.

There might be more of these fake McArdle “full disclosures” floating around the Internet, and we welcome readers to send any new ones they find.

Meanwhile, seeing how Megan McArdle can’t or won’t fully disclose her conflicts of interest on her own, we will do it for her. So in the interests of media transparency, SHAME offers our readers this handy list of McArdle’s conflicted Koch connections. While by no means complete, we think it’s a good start. Hopefully some day McArdle will find the time to stop deceiving her readers and fully disclose on her own.

Megan McArdle’s Undisclosed Koch Connections (in reverse chronological order):

• In June 2012, Megan McArdle spoke at a Koch-linked Students for Liberty “Women for Liberty” event held at the Institute for Humane Studies. McArdle was described as a “shining” role model that “young women in the movement should look up to.” Students for Liberty is a Koch-funded youth club founded by alumni of the Institute for Humane Studies.
• In 2012, McArdle served as a judge for the Reason Foundation Bastiat Prize, awarded to libertarian media pundits. Reason Foundation is closely linked to the Koch think-tank network and is funded in part by a number of different Koch foundations. (She has served in this capacity for a number of years.)
• In 2011, McArdle took part in a Cato Institute panel called “U.S. Debt and the Millennials: Is Washington Creating a Lost Generation?” She described Social Security and Medicare as a “gigantic space alien that’s larger, like five times the size of earth.”
• In October 2011, Mcardle was honored by being chosen to emcee Charles Koch’s 50th Anniversary gala celebration of his flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, featuring Charles Koch as the keynote speaker and guest of honor. McArdle and Koch were joined by hundreds of leading GOP donors and activists. An IHS newsletter wrote of her performance: “Emcee Megan McArdle wove a humorous narrative through the program.” The IHS attempted to hide McArdle’s involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page.
• In February 2011, McArdle was the keynote speaker at the annual International Students For Liberty Conference, where she delivered a talk titled “Building the Case for Liberty in the New Century.” The conference included a sneak preview of the film Atlas Shrugged.
• In 2011, McArdle was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer seminar program. The program tackled such topics as “Is an ‘objective’ press possible — or even desirable?” Other faculty members joining McArdle that year included Radley Balko, then-editor at the Kochs’Reason magazine
• In 2010, she was a moderator at a Mercatus conference about credit card regulation. Koch Industries funneled a combined $3.7 million to Mercatus in 2007 and 2008. The Wall Street Journal called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.”
• In June 2010, McArdle married fellow Koch activist Peter Suderman. Suderman spent much of his adult career on the Koch payroll, rotating through positions at America’s Future Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, as well as the Moonie-owned The Washington Times. Suderman is currently a senior editor at Reason magazine.
• In June 2009, McArdle served as moderator at a Cato Institute’s healthcare reform conference. The title of McArdle’s panel was: “Should Congress Mandate Coverage?”
• In Spring of 2009, McArdle served as a judge for a Koch-funded blogger contest held to identify “young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers.” The winner received a $10,000 prize. Other judges included Cato/Reason’s Radley Balko, Jonah Goldberg, and libertarian economist Jonathan H. Adler.
• In January 2009, McArdle was a speaker at an America’s Future Foundation (AFF) event that featured “young libertarians and conservatives who have taken a leadership role in . . . re-branding the Republican party.” AFF is a libertarian organization that exists to “identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders.” It has close ties to the Koch-funded think-tank network, including Mercatus, ALEC and Institute for Humane Studies.
• In September 2008, McArdle took part in a panel discussion at AFF about “who should libertarians and conservatives support.”
• That same month, McArdle was a featured speaker at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her talk focused on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown.
• In March 2007, McArdle partied at Reason magazine’s “Happy Hour” with David Weigel, Radley Balko, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.
• In the mid-2000s, McArdle received journalism training from the right-wing Institute for Humane Studies, headed by Charles Koch since the 1960s. According to the IHS, its journalism program “places talented writers and communicators—who support individual liberty, free markets, and peace—at media companies and non-profit newsrooms” and offers “mentoring and job placement assistance.” The program currently includes a $3,200 stipend, as well as travel allowance.

Yasha Levine is co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

This past Friday, S.H.A.M.E. Project’s expose of Megan McArdle got a shout out from financial blogger/commentator Barry Ritholtz, who called our profile of the Newsweek/Daily Beast hack “one of the most brutal takedowns I have ever seen.” Ritholtz—author of the excellent 2009 book Bailout Nation, frequent Bloomberg TV pundit,  and the man behind the popular finance blog The Big Picture—advised his readers that “if you have any interest in media or journalism, it is absolutely must read material.”

Ritholtz wrote that the SHAME exposé revealing McArdle’s profound corruption and conflicted ties to the Kochs was so shocking and devastating that he vowed to stop reading any outlet that continues to publish her:

I never cared for McArdle’s work — I always found it shallow and intellectually dishonest (see below). I erroneously assumed that some of her less intelligent statements were the result of ignorance. But I never suspected her to be an utterly corrupted pseudo journalist.

Now I know better. She is simply appalling, and any publication that publishes anything in the future under her byline is off my reading list.

This is exactly why we launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project in late May. As we wrote back then, the purpose of S.H.A.M.E. is not to merely document media crimes, nor simply to humiliate or call out hypocrisy. The project is about providing useful and effective tools the public can use to protect itself from being manipulated by sophisticated public-relations con-artistry. Our job is to provide the down-low on media corruption so that people can decide for themselves whether someone can or cannot be trusted.

As a side note: Barry Ritholtz called McArdle’s profile “one of the most brutal takedowns” he had ever seen. But it’s brutal because it’s true. One thing that we’ve come to realize while doing these profiles is that, in the end, the truth always turns out to be weirder, more disturbing and much more shocking than we have ever anticipated going into it. It’s a sign of just how corrupted and degraded our media has become, and why we need S.H.A.M.E. now more than ever.

If you haven’t done so already, check out Megan McArdle’s S.H.A.M.E. Profile™ for yourself:

***

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled, co-founder of S.H.A.M.E. and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

S.H.A.M.E. just published a brand new shill profile. Its latest subject: Megan McArdle, who was just hired on this September as Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s “special correspondent on economics, business and public policy.” In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s her in the image above, beaming with joy as Charles Koch’s party clown-for-hire at the 50th anniversary bash of Koch’s flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies. But more on that later. . .

McArdle should be very familiar to eXiled readers. Many of you probably first learned of McArdle’s existence more than three years ago, when she led a smear campaign from her perch at the Atlantic to discredit the first media investigative piece exposing the Tea Party as an Astroturf campaign funded by the Kochs and FreedomWorks, written by eXiled editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine and published in Playboy in February, 2009. That’s when we first got to know the McArdle name too, and we were wondering then why someone who called herself a “journalist” would work so hard to discredit other journalists’ investigative work while defending powerful rightwing oligarchs, rather than the other way around. The S.H.A.M.E. profile on Megan McArdle clears up the air on McArdle’s long, deep undisclosed ties to the Koch brothers’ libertarian influence-peddling machine, and to the GOP activist community. Read the profile on the S.H.A.M.E. site or check it out below—we’re sure Mrs. McArdle will appreciate it if you do.

And remember, we can’t keep exposing corrupt media figures and outing covert propagandists without ongoing support from readers like you. Do your part, don’t be a tightwad, contribute your part to SHAME using PayPal or WePay and help us Shame the Hacks!

—YL & MA

Megan McArdle

Special correspondent on economics, business and public policy; Newsweek/The Daily Beast

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

The recovered history of Megan McArdle

• Megan McArdle built her career on bashing public servants and government, but her father’s taxpayer-subsidized work in government and as a government lobbyist funded her upbringing as a “child of privilege” as she described herself. McArdle’s father, Francis McArdle, was a career public servant in the New York City administration who took the revolving door to the private sector as chief lobbyist for the General Contractor’s Association of New York, where her father represented private contractors “primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants.” In 1987, the head of the New York state Organized Crime Task Force accused Francis McArdle’s clients of pervasive corruption, bribery, racketeering and union-busting. Thanks to New York’s lucrative public construction projects, Megan was able to attend Riverdale Country School, the most expensive prep school in America, according to Time magazine. Today, annual tuition at Riverdale runs over $40,000.
• In the early-mid 1990s, McArdle attended the University of Pennsylvania. She converted from “ultraliberal to libertarian” in her junior year, after working as a canvasser and field manager for Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, which she called “the most deceptive, evil place I’ve ever worked.” [ 1 ]
• In 2001, after her job offer in management consulting was “rescinded”, McArdle was given a day job in the construction industry, which her father was lobbying for at the time, and started blogging free-market Republican propaganda under the Ayn Rand-inspired pseudonym “Jane Galt.” McArdle claimed she did not use her real name for fear of being persecuted for her libertarian views: “I lived in the Upper West Side so I couldn’t discuss these things with anyone. I would just stew.” Her first blog post to go viral in the conservative blog network argued for scrapping corporate taxes. [ 2 ]
• In 2002, McArdle applied for a job in the Foreign Service but was rejected, which she blamed on asthma. “Apparently, they don’t want a foreign service full of people who are, like, ‘Well, I can only go to Paris,’” she told the Koch-funded AFF newsletter, Doublethink.
• In 2003, The Economist hired McArdle as a blogger. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, McArdle gleefully advocated the use of violence to suppress antiwar demonstrations, writing: “I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.”
• McArdle received journalism training from the right-wing Institute for Humane Studies, headed by Charles Koch since the 1960s. According to the IHS, its journalism program “places talented writers and communicators—who support individual liberty, free markets, and peace—at media companies and non-profit newsrooms” and offers “mentoring and job placement assistance.” The program currently includes a $3,200 stipend, as well as travel allowance.
• In 2011, McArdle returned to her Koch alma mater as a guest lecturer and instructor at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer internship program. The program tackled such topics as “Is an ‘objective’ press possible — or even desirable?” Other faculty members joining McArdle that year included Radley Balko, then-editor at the Kochs’ Reason magazine
• In a sign of just how close and trusted McArdle is to the Kochs, in October 2011, she was chosen to emcee Charles Koch’s 50th Anniversary gala celebration of his flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, featuring Charles Koch as the keynote speaker and guest of honor. McArdle and Koch were joined by hundreds of leading GOP donors and activists. An IHS newsletter wrote of her performance: “Emcee Megan McArdle wove a humorous narrative through the program.” The IHS attempted to hide McArdle’s involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page. (See side bar for more info on the gala event.)
• In 2006, McArdle published an article in Reason, a magazine controlled by the Kochs since the 1970′s, headlined, “The Virtue of Riches: How Wealth Makes Us More Moral“. McArdle’s article argued that wealth makes people “more tolerant of minorities, more welcoming to immigrants, more solicitous of their fellow citizens, more supportive of democratic institutions, and just plain better specimens of humanity.” In fact, studies show that the wealthiest Americans are more likely to lie and steal, while the poor donate proportionally much more of their incomes to charity.
• In August 2007, The Atlantic hired McArdle as a business and economics blogger. Her first post, titled “Dont panic!” [sic], wrongly predicted that the liquidity shock that hit the financial system earlier that month was nothing to worry about: “Having a nasty market contraction does not mean that your economy automatically goes down the tubes.”
• In September 2008, as the financial markets collapsed, McArdle gave a talk at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University focusing on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown. [ 3 ]
• That same month, in September 2008, McArdle transformed her blog at the The Atlantic into a feverish Wall Street crisis-management propaganda outlet. She argued that bankers were largely innocent, blamed government regulators and homeowners for tanking the economy, and mocked news of a criminal investigation into Wall Street crimes, writing, “For what, I have no idea.” McArdle also bizarrely claimed that bankers were victims of the real estate bubble, while blaming borrowers for being greedy profiteers: “You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that’s right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You’re the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank.” The truth is that rampant fraud and predatory lending had decimated homeowner net-worth, leaving people substantially poorer and more in debt than they had been in decades.
• McArdle’s position on financial regulations was in perfect sync with Koch Industries. The company is a major player in financial markets and emerged as one of the most powerful forces lobbying against financial reform following the crash, according to Bloomberg. Just in the last four months of 2008, Koch Industries spent over $7 million on lobbying efforts, much of that directed at fighting various financial regulation bills. Despite blatantly promoting the Kochs’ political and business agenda, McArdle failed to disclose her numerous Koch conflicts of interests.
• In 2008, McArdle argued that the recession had a silver lining for liberals and the 99%, claiming the economic downturn would reduce wealth inequality because it hurt the rich more than middle- and lower-income Americans: “Recessions are bad for everyone, but they’re worse for the wealthy.” In fact, wealth inequality has substantially worsened since then.
• McArdle proposed permanently ending inheritance taxes on the super-wealthy, citing her own experience as a “child of privilege” which gave her insight into how the super-rich never paid their taxes anyway, so why waste money forcing them to offshore their earnings. She also claimed that “estate tax may actually cost the treasury money.”
• In January 2009, McArdle was singled out for her “leadership role” by the Koch-connected America’s Future Foundation and took part in a panel of GOP strategists and top conservative activists pushing for “re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle’s strategy speech argued that so long as unemployment remained high and housing prices remained low in 2010, the Republicans would win the mid-term elections, and it would be easier to shift blame for the 2008 economic collapse onto Democrats and Big Government.
• McArdle spent the next two years criticizing proposals that threatened to improve voters’ lives before the 2010 elections. She pushed hard against health care reform, mortgage relief, financial consumer protection and unions.
• In February 2009, McArdle led a propaganda campaign in her Atlantic blog to discredit investigative journalism exposing the first Tea Party protest in February 2009 as an Astroturf campaign backed by the Koch brothers and FreedomWorks. McArdle wrote of the Kochs: “from what I know of them, astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style. I’ve seen Koch in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy, I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, he displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.” The Tea Party was launched in February 2009 to oppose a White House bill providing mortgage relief to struggling homeowners, and thereby stabilize housing prices. In the “Republican rebranding” campaign, it was important to present the Tea Party as completely autonomous and grass-roots, rather than backed by the Kochs and FreedomWorks. Thanks in large part to McArdle’s efforts discrediting the exposé, the media spent the next year-and-a-half misrepresenting the Tea Party as an authentic grassroots uprising rather than a Koch-sponsored Astroturf campaign. [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
• A year before the Tea Party, in 2008, McArdle’s fiancé Peter Suderman worked on an identical Astroturf campaign for FreedomWorks called “AngryRenter.com”, a fake grassroots movement launched by FreedomWorks’ wealthy Republican donors designed to kill proposed legislation to provide mortgage relief to homeowners, which then-President Bush opposed. In May 2008, the Wall Street Journal exposed AngryRenter.com as a fake campaign funded by Republican donors and lobbyists: “Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It’s a fake grass-roots effort — what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign.” McArdle did not disclose that her fiancé worked on FreedomWorks’ AngryRenter.com Astroturf campaign when she attacked the 2009 exposé on the Tea Party as a FreedomWorks/Koch project.
• In May 2009, McArdle led a smear campaign against New York Times reporter Ed Andrews who published a book about how he went broke under the weight of mortgage and credit card debt. To “prove” that Andrews’ bankruptcy story was really his own fault, McArdle obtained his wife’s records showing she had declared bankruptcy in the past, and used that to paint the author as untrustworthy and profligate. In fact, his wife was forced to file for bankruptcy before she met Andrews, when she had been a single mother with an ex-husband who refused to pay court-ordered child support. However, the damage was done; numerous publications attacked Andrews’ credibility, effectively blunting the effect his book might have had on the public discourse on debt and bankruptcy.
• In June 2010, McArdle married fellow Koch activist Peter Suderman. Suderman spent much of his adult career on the Koch payroll, rotating through positions at America’s Future Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, as well as the Moonie-owned The Washington Times. Suderman is currently a senior editor at Reason magazine.
• In 2010, McArdle wrote about how she bought a house in a low-income black neighborhood in Washington DC that was in the process of being gentrified, and claimed she’d met an anonymous black man on a bus who told McArdle he (and presumably many more) blacks fully approved of their neighborhoods being gentrified and pushed out by wealthier whites. McArdle quoted the anonymous pro-gentrification black man telling her: “‘You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.’ He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. ‘Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!’”
• In December 2010, McArdle attacked a New York Times investigation into the dangerous effects of formaldehyde, which causes cancer in humans. McArdle mocked those dangers: “It’s a chemical! Indeed it is. You’re surrounded by chemicals. Your couch is made of chemicals. So is the table. So is the hand-carded wool sweater you bought from the woman who raises her own sheep on organic feed. Distilled water is a chemical. Fine wine is full of them.” Once again, McArdle ran cover for Koch Industries’ business interests: According to an investigation into the Koch family by New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer, “Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a ‘known carcinogen’ in humans.” [ 6 ]

Wall of S.H.A.M.E.

“I don’t see any evidence offered that Koch money funds FreedomWorks, or any astroturfing organization . . . ”

“…from what I know of [the Kochs], astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style.”

—From McArdle’s attack on an investigative article exposing the first Tea Party protest as a Koch/FreedomWorks Astroturf campaign; February 2009

“I’ve seen Koch [sic] in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy [sic], I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, [Charles Koch] displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.”

—McArdle on the Kochs’ moral character; February 2009

“My husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and works for Reason Magazine, which has been a recipient of funds from Koch charitable organizations.”

—McArdle issues a partial disclosure about her husband’s Koch ties; February 2012

“I also disagree with the notion that the concentration of wealth is a large political problem. … while the wealthy certainly have the ear of politicians, and also give a lot of money to those politicians, it’s not clear to me how tightly these things are linked on matters of broad national policy.”

—McArdle isn’t bothered by economic inequality and concentration of wealth; February 2008

“consumption inequality, not income inequality, is what matters. If the rich have access to broad classes of goods that the poor can’t have, I find this worrying. On the other hand, if the problem is that Bill Gates has a really awesome 80 inch flat panel television, while the poor have to be content with a 32 inch CRT, well, I can’t say my heartstrings are plucked very tight by this injustice.”

—On why she doesn’t believe in income inequality; July 2009

“Borrowers were not brought down by predatory lending. . . . Borrowers were brought down by a willingness to gamble on rising home prices–exactly the same thing that knocked out Lehman Brothers. At least Lehman Brothers had the excuse that ten years of rising prices had completely screwed up their default models.”

—McArdle on why homeowners were more to blame than bankers for tanking the economy; September 2008

To me, the unsung villain of the mortgage crisis is the 30-year fixed rate self-amortizing mortgage with no prepayment penalty…The 30 year fixed rate mortgage was ultimately at the heart of the Savings and Loan crisis.

—McArdle discovers another red herring to blame; July 2010

Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there’s something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.

—McArdle belittling Iraq war critics Eric Alterman as “nuts” and economist James Galbraith as “paranoiac” for (correctly) predicting the war would cost trillions; March 2003

“I love Cato. I love school choice. I read their stuff all the time, and I think a lot of it is great. I cite it and use it.”

—McArdle on the quality of Cato Institute’s scholarship; May 2008

“For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

—McArdle argues against rushing to legalize gay marriage, which she described as “a bedrock of our society” and compared gay marriage rights to a government welfare program; April 2005

“One of the dividing lines between me and a lot of the commentators on the Wall Street crisis is that I am not outraged by their pay.”

—McArdle explains her position on exorbitant Wall Street bonuses; April 2009

McArdle on Science

“Here’s the thing: humans aren’t like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we’re not like bonobos.”

—McArdle explains why she’s not convinced by evolutionary biology; August 2010

“I’ve basically outsourced my opinion on the science to people like Jonathan Adler, Ron Bailey, and Pat Michaels of Cato . . .”

—McArdle on where she gets her climate change information; February 2012. (Pat Michaels admitted on CNN he gets 40% of his funding from the petroleum industry.)

Undisclosed Koch Work

View full IHS anniversary dinner brochure (pdf file)

Megan McArdle frequently speaks at and moderates conferences and events hosted by Koch-funded organizations, including Cato Institute, Mercatus, the Institute of Humane Studies and many others. Here is a partial list (in reverse chronological order):

• In June 2012, McArdle spoke at a Koch-linked Students for Liberty “Women for Liberty” event held at the Institute for Humane Studies. McArdle was described as a “shining” role model that “young women in the movement should look up to.”
• In 2012, McArdle served as a judge for the Reason Foundation Bastiat Prize, awarded to libertarian media pundits.
• In 2011, McArdle took part in a Cato Institute panel called “U.S. Debt and the Millennials: Is Washington Creating a Lost Generation?” She described Social Security and Medicare as a “gigantic space alien that’s larger, like five times the size of earth.”
• In 2011, McArdle served as emcee at the Institute of Humane Studies’ 50th Anniversary gala event, introducing her patron Charles Koch onto the stage. View the full brochure of the IHS anniversary dinner (pdf file).
• In February 2011, McArdle was the keynote speaker at the annual International Students For Liberty Conference, where she delivered a talk titled “Building the Case for Liberty in the New Century.” The conference included a sneak preview of the film Atlas Shrugged.
• In 2011, McArdle was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer seminar program. The program addressed such topics as “Is an “objective” press possible — or even desirable?”
• In 2010, was a moderator at a Mercatus conference about credit card regulation.
• In June 2009, McArdle served as moderator at Cato Institute’s healthcare reform conference. The title of McArdle’s panel was: “Should Congress Mandate Coverage?”
• In Spring of 2009, McArdle served as a judge for a Koch-funded blogger contest held to identify “young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers.” The winner received a $10,000 prize. Other judges included Cato/Reason’s Radley Balko, Jonah Goldberg, and libertarian economist Jonathan H. Adler…
• In January 2009, McArdle was a speaker at an America’s Future Foundation (AFF) event that featured “young libertarians and conservatives who have taken a leadership role in . . . re-branding the Republican party.” AFF is a libertarian organization that exists to “identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders.” It has close ties to the Koch-funded think-tank network, including Mercatus, ALEC and Institute for Humane Studies.
• In September 2008, McArdle took part in a panel discussion at AFF about “who should libertarians and conservatives support.”
• That same month, McArdle was a featured speaker at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her talk focused on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown.
• In March 2007, McArdle partied at Reason magazine’s “Happy Hour” with David Weigel, Radley Balko, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.

Notes:

1. McArdle’s breaking point with the group came after she was assigned to canvass a poor suburb of Philadelphia, which she described as full of “welfare mothers, elderly people collecting the minimum Social Security payment, young men on disability.” [↩]
2. McArdle’s first blogging partner was another pseudonymous right-wing blogger, Andrew Hofer, a banker with Brown Brothers Harriman and graduate of Exeter, Yale and Columbia, who denounced Bush’s critics as “elitists.” [↩]
3. Koch Industries funneled a combined $3.7 million to Mercatus in 2007 and 2008. The Wall Street Journal called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.” [↩]
4. The investigate piece that McArdle smeared was authored by S.H.A.M.E founders Yasha Levine and Mark Ames. [↩]
5. The Tea Party was central to the Republican Party rebranding strategy that McArdle helped map out in January 2009. [↩]
6. The company has long been involved in funding front groups and fighting against laws that would classify it as a carcinogen. [↩]

On Monday, September 10, the Chicago Teachers Union—the oldest teachers union in America—went on strike. Teachers are striking for better pay, smaller class sizes and more job security. They are striking against school privatizations, teaching to standardized testing and the general “corporate reform agenda” of Chicago city officials.  The list of enemies aligned against the teachers is long and intimidating: Billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, Charles Koch, Art Pope, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama and . . . Steven Levitt. Yes, Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist and author of the wildly successful book Freakonomics.

Levitt might come off as just a harmless and off-beat academic—a sort of Wes Anderson pop-economics guru who studies whacky stuff like why drug dealers live with their moms. But underneath that quirky facade, Levitt is a dyed-in-the-wool Milton Friedman neoliberal from the same “Chicago Boys” network that brought you the “shock doctrine.” When he isn’t pursing research into borderline eugenicist policies or studying the benefits of privatized prison labor on GDP, he’s hard at work doing his part helping the oligarchy put unionized Chicago school teachers up against the wall.

Specifically, Levitt has worked with Chicago’s notorious union-buster Arne Duncan, who was the CEO of Chicago public schools until Obama tapped Duncan to be the U.S. Education Secretary in 2008. Duncan has been credited with doing more than anyone else to help bring the neoliberal nightmare to Chicago’s impoverished and mostly nonwhite public schools, funneling public funds to dysfunctional private voucher schools, terrorizing unionized teachers, closing schools and turning public education into feeder tube for the prison-industrial complex. And Levitt, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, was right there along with Duncan.

Levitt, together with other University of Chicago economists, was given access to the city’s public school system and turned it into a neoliberal R&D lab for high-tech union-busting.

Teacher bashers Steven Levitt and Arne Duncan

Under the guise of objective economic science, Levitt helped develop various ways to weaponize standardized testing and use it to bully and intimidate unionized teachers. Among them was a statistical method that allowed the anti-union school bureaucracy to catch and fire public-school teachers who supposedly cheated on standardized tests. Firing and terrorizing public-school teachers was clearly a point of pride for Levitt, and he took personal credit and boasted about sacking at least a dozen teachers, gloating in his book Freakonomics that, as a result of his method, “Chicago Public School system began to fire its cheating teachers. The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned.”

Most recently, Levitt has been experimenting with a new way of making life miserable for underpaid public school teachers: an experimental program that provides teachers with a cash bonus up front at the beginning of an academic year and then forces teachers to give the money back if their students fail to test above a certain threshold. Cash-strapped teachers are horrified, wondering how they will be able to give back the money if their students didn’t test well:

For one school year, the research project by heavyweight economists from the University of Chicago and Harvard University — including the author of the best-seller Freakonomics — turned nine elementary schools in Chicago Heights School District 170 into a teacher testing ground of a behavioral phenomenon called “loss aversion.’’

Of course, neither Levitt nor any other school “reformer” would ever think that we should hold Wall Street fraudsters to the same standard of accountability. So while the financial-management class pays itself record bonuses for record failure, teachers are being tested for their ability to respond to “loss aversion.” Just how much impoverishment, financial degradation and abuse will teachers take before they are willing to lie, cheat and steal their way into keeping that $4,000 “bonus”? What will they do if they have to pay it back? Will they take a loan? What if they are ineligible? Will they sell a kidney or liver on the black market?

Levitt would definitely approve of the latter. After all, his economic hero and mentor Gary Becker is a huge fan of setting up a free-market for human organs. The free market always finds a solution!

Despite his extremist anti-worker ideology, Levitt isn’t published by Cato or the American Enterprise Institute. He’s better than that: he’s been blessed with a Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website and Freakonomics segment on public radio’s Marketplace. The New York Times has of course officially come out against the Chicago teachers strike.

Levitt shows just how hard Chicago teachers have it. They aren’t just fighting Chicago’s city officials such as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but are doing battle with the entire corrupt intellectual apparatus of the United States.

Want to know more? Check out Steven Levitt’s S.H.A.M.E. profile.

***

Yasha Levine is co-founder the S.H.A.M.E. Project and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

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This article is cross-posted from In These Times

Since its inception, the Huffington Post has relied heavily on unpaid bloggers. Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer said in 2007 that a key part of the plan of the website was to not pay these bloggers.

“That’s not our financial model,” Lerer told USA Today. “We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.”

And a 2011 Forbes article quoted a former editor-in-chief from AOL, which owns the Huffington Post, saying that around the offices, “It was always, ‘Arianna does it. That’s what she’s built her business on. Why don’t we do it, too?’”

Despite its massive growth and sale to AOL for $315 million, the Huffington Post still relies heavily on the work on unpaid workers, and has refused to sign an agreement with the National Writers Union to pay all of its reporters who are assigned stories or report to editors. The Huffington Post currently has 50 paid reporters and more than 400 other staff employed as editors, photo editors, graphic designers, and business staffers on payroll, according to Huffington Post spokesman Rhoades Alderson. But the majority of its content is still generated by its network of more than 8,000 unpaid bloggers.

Some of Huffington Post’s unpaid bloggers submit op-eds in the same fashion that letters to the editor have been done for generations. However, other unpaid Huffington Post bloggers do something that has not been done in the past. As unpaid bloggers, they are given topics to write about by editors and report to them. Leaked internal emails from Huffington Post founding editor Roy Sekoff shows that Huffington Post editors hold “daily conference calls with small groups of citizen reporters” to coordinate their reporting. According to Sekoff, on these calls, “the journalists run their pitches by our … editors, get feedback and pointers, and are also able to discuss problems, questions, comments, etc with the other journalists on the call.”

In other words, they do all the work of reporters except for no paycheck, just exposure. According to Alderson, Huffington Post currently has four unpaid reporters from its Off the Bus program complementing more than a dozen paid reporters covering the Republican National Convention (RNC).

The unpaid so called “citizen journalists” are so important to Huffington Post’s reporting model that star Huffington Post White House reporter Sam Stein recently said in an Reddit.com interview, “At the Huffington Post we employ citizen journalists who help us get stories that we simply couldn’t get from Washington D.C. or New York. That doesn’t guarantee sucess. You still have to work hard, scrape for stories, etc…But its a fun and exciting time to be in this field.”

(Full disclosure, I previously cross-posted some of my work from other places on the Huffington Post as an unpaid blogger, but was fired after I participated in a protest of union construction workers at the Mortgage Bankers Association in January 2011. I guess only in this economy can you be fired from a job that doesn’t pay you anything)

However, at the RNC, the Huffington Post has shown just how quickly paying people for exposure can spread to professions beyond reporting.

“As part of its presence in Tampa, the Huffington Post offers convention attendees Oasis, a candle lit retreat that’s ‘a reminder to find balance in the hustle and bustle of the conventions,’ ” notes the National Writers Union in a statement. “Among the offerings are yoga classes, massages, mini-facials, and meditation. Like its thousands of citizen journalists and bloggers, the massage professionals are unpaid and working for ‘exposure.’ ”

Alderson confirms the Huffington Post did not pay the massage therapists rubbing down RNC attendees. Instead, the Huffington Post made a $40,000 donation to the non-profit group “Off the Mat into the World,” which promotes relaxation techniques like yoga and massage therapy. The group, which is not based in Tampa, then recruited a number of Tampa-area massage therapist to work at the RNC strictly for tips, no pay. Off the Mat into the World did not respond to a request for comment.

Irin Carmon, a staff writer at Salon who received one of the massages, says the unpaid massage therapist told her that he was basically doing it “for the exposure.” Massage therapists make on average $21,028 a year, but exposure and connections from working a high-profile event like the RNC could lead to paid work in the future.

Earlier this summer, the Obama administration enshrined the Huffington Post doctrine of having people work for free in order to gain exposure as an official policy for the unemployed. A new Department of Labor “Bridge to Work” demonstration program would build on Huffington model of working for exposure by allowing up to 10 states to let companies employ workers receiving unemployment compensation without the employer necessarily having to pay those workers. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis wrote on Twitter when announcing the program, “As we explore every avenue to help our workforce recover, #volunteerism is a way job-seekers can do good and become more marketable.”

As construction worker Mike Daly, a member of Ironworker Local 377, told me last year, “If we as a labor movement allow the Huffington Post to get away with this pretty soon we are going to see young kids walking around construction sites working as unpaid apprentices,”.

The reality is that unpaid work such that at the Huffington Post rarely leads to real jobs.

“Unpaid work and volunteerism should not be seen as ‘stepping stones’ to a regular job: after all, today there are more unpaid internships around than ever before, and yet youth unemployment is near its all-time high,” says Ross Perlin, author of the book Intern Nation (which In These Times excerpted). “Unpaid internships and ‘volunteer’ situations (in cases where the person is really anything but) in fact tend to destroy jobs rather than create them, because firms learn that they don’t have to pay for work, they don’t have to hire.”

Since dropping its boycott of Huffington Post after many labor-funded progressives writers deseperate for publicity crossed the picket lines, the National Writers Union is now redoubling its efforts to get the company to pay writers who do original reporting and work with an editor.

“Refusing to pay workers, whether journalists or health professionals, is a sadly fitting tribute to the candidate of the one-percent. We know this is how Arianna operates. With the National Writers Union, writers and their allies are delivering a powerful message that this kind of exploitation must end,” says Andrew Van Alstyne, organizer of the National Writers Union’s “Pay the Writer” campaign.

This article is cross-posted from In These Times

Want to know more?

• Read S.H.A.M.E.’s report: The HuffPo Business Model: Deliberately Obliterating the Separation Between Paid Advertising and Real Reporting…
• …and check out Arianna Huffington’s S.H.A.M.E. profile:

As we previously reported, Fareed Zakaria was reinstated by CNN/Time magazine to his post of corporate lackey. But at least one of Zakaria’s colleagues is not happy about it.

About a week ago, Iraq War liar/Palestinian prison camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg accused fellow Iraq War booster Zakaria of even more plagiarism—and not just any plagiarism, but plagiarism of Goldberg’s own interview quotes!

In my previous post, I discussed an incident from 2009 (an incident I had completely forgotten about until it was resurrected by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, among others) in which Fareed Zakaria, who is currently under fire for plagiarizing a paragraph from The New Yorker, lifted, without attribution, two quotations from pieces I had written. I argued that quote-lifting, or quote-theft, is widely considered to be a journalistic sin, and should be considered so. Fareed disagrees, and he e-mailed me this response a few minutes ago (at the time, back in 2009, he didn’t respond, and it didn’t come up in subsequent conversaions [sic] I had with him, mainly because I forgot about it, I think).

Zakaria pled for mercy, saying that it wasn’t his fault that the journalism profession is so horribly corrupt and unethical. He’s just one guy, after all. Just a CNN anchor trying to make an honest living shilling for warmongers, neoliberals and multinationals:

Let me give you the best example from my own work: I have twice interviewed the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. These are tough interviews to set up and take months, something years. The interviews were quoted in hundreds of newspapers and magazines across the world. Less then 10% mentioned my name. So, I would welcome a new journalistic norm that insists that the interviewer always be named. But it’s unfair to castigate me for doing something that is common, if not standard, practice.

Want to know more? Check out Jeffrey Goldberg’s S.H.A.M.E. Profile:

Earlier today, eXiled editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine talked to RT’s Kristine Frazao about the S.H.A.M.E. Project’s recent expose of NPR host and New York Times columnist Adam Davidson.

Watch the segment below:

Want to know more? First, check out S.H.A.M.E.’s original expose of Adam Davidson. Then follow it up with FAIR’s “At NPR, You Can Take Money From Banks–Just Don’t Protest Them” and the New York Observer’s “NPR Planet Money Host Adam Davidson Under Fire from Rogue Media Ethicists.”

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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Cross-posted from the S.H.A.M.E. Project

“[The Middle East] is so dysfunctional, any stirring of the pot is good. America’s involvement in the region is for the good. In that way, I’m an immigrant.”

—Fareed Zakaira on invasion of Iraq

After a week on the ropes, Fareed Zakaria is back in the game. Yesterday, Time and CNN announced they had cleared Zakeera of any charges of wrongdoing: “We have completed a thorough review of each of Fareed Zakaria’s columns for TIME, and we are entirely satisfied that the language in question in his recent column was an unintentional error and an isolated incident for which he has apologized. We look forward to having Fareed’s thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on September 7.” CNN, which is a part of the Time Warner media conglomerate, issued a similar statement: “We found nothing that merited continuing the suspension. Zakaria has apologized for a journalistic lapse.”

Well, that’s settled. Who needs accountability in the journalism world when that would just get in the way of Zakaria’s important job: Being a dancing circus poodle for warmongers, neoliberals and multinationals. In other words, those who, like Zakaria, escaped accountability for their failures (and their thieving).

After a brief vacation, Zakaria will go back to work for Time Warner as one of the very worst, most toxic media shills working today.

How bad? Well, a few years back FAIR compiled an exhaustive dossier on some of Fareed’s “thoughtful and important” work on economic issues from 1999 to 2008, which they titled: “Fareed Zakaria, Spokesperson for the Global Elite: Newsweek pundit presents pro-corporate views as the poor’s perspective.” Here are some of the highlights, courtesy of the good people of FAIR.

Fareed on Seattle’s WTO protests:

Those who demonstrated against the World Trade Organization at the famous “battle of Seattle” in 1999, he asserted, were displaying the hubris of the “rich and privileged,” who were delivering “a familiar plea for the downtrodden of the world” by challenging the WTO’s promotion of sweatshops and environmental degradation in the impoverished Third World.

In other words, Zakaria denounced the arrogance of those who presume to advocate for the world’s poor—while appointing himself, the son of a prominent Indian attorney and politician, as the poor’s spokesperson. “There’s just one problem: The downtrodden beg to differ,” Zakaria declared.

In his eyes, the Third World’s poor eagerly welcome Western investment on any terms as a vast improvement over their current misery. Microscopic wages, long hours and heartless management in sweatshops, along with befouled air and water, might seem horrific to wealthy Westerners, but are gratefully welcomed by the desperate people of nations like Mexico, China and India. “In fact, if the demonstrators’ demands were met, the effect would be to crush the hopes of much poorer Third World workers,” he declared (12/13/99).

Fareed on anti-globalization/anti-free trade activists:

While claiming to stand up to concentrated corporate power, Zakaria charged (Newsweek, 4/30/01), “the anti-globalization crowd is anti-democratic . . . trying to achieve, through intimidation and scare tactics, what it has not been able to get through legislation.”

On democracy vs dictatorship:

Zakaria . . . unfavorably compared Chávez, a democratically elected president, to U.S.-supported Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf (Newsweek, 11/19/07): “Musharraf, for all his flaws, has been a far better president than Chávez, who despite Venezuela’s oil bonanza has run the country into the ground.” In reality, Chávez’s popularity and the strength of Venezuelan democracy has consistently been rated among the highest in Latin America (e.g., Latinobarómetro poll, 11/07), and economic conditions in Venezuela have improved markedly, especially for the poor, according to various international reports (CEPR, 3/21/08).

On corporate taxes:

. . . Zakaria worries that the U.S. taxes corporations too heavily in the global economy (Newsweek, 5/12/08): “Twenty years ago, the United States had the lowest corporate taxes in the world. Today they are second highest.”

Here Zakaria confuses the official “nominal” tax rate with the effective tax rate paid by corporations, which is lowered by enormous tax breaks, putting the U.S. 26th out of 30 among wealthy nations in terms of corporate taxes as a share of GDP. “Eighty-two of America’s largest and most profitable corporations paid no federal income tax in at least one year during the first three years of the George W. Bush administration—a period when federal corporate tax collections fell to their lowest sustained level in six decades,” a Citizens for Tax Justice study found (9/22/04).

On outsourcing of U.S. jobs:

Zakaria quotes former World Bank official Lawrence Summers to make the claim that Mexico’s NAFTA-driven transformation “didn’t cost the U.S. a penny” (Newsweek, 3/10/08). It is remarkable that Summers, who also worked as secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department, neglected to mention a roughly $25 billion bailout of the Mexican economy in response to the drop of the peso in 1995 (Faux, Global Class War). Further, an Economic Policy Institute briefing paper (9/28/06) estimated that NAFTA has resulted in the loss of over 1 million U.S. jobs to Mexico.

Yet Zakaria has nothing but contempt for those who argue that corporate relocations of jobs are driven by the desire to exploit low-wage labor: “There are no serious economists or experts who believe that low wages in Mexico or China or India are the fundamental reason that American factories close down,” Zakaria declared with characteristic certainty (Newsweek, 3/10/08).

But Zakaria’s flat declaration is refuted by avidly pro-business sources that have reported closely on corporate decision-making. In 1992, a Wall Street Journal headline stated (9/24/92), “U.S. Companies Pour Into Mexico, Drawn Primarily by One Factor: Low Wages.” Similarly, U.S. News & World Report (6/5/95) reported with undisguised admiration Reebok’s strategy of “global hopscotch” applied “in search of low-cost labor.”

Want to know more? Read the entire FAIR dossier here: Fareed Zakaria, Spokesperson for the Global Elite . . .

***

Yasha Levine is co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

In case you missed it: The New York Observer picked up the S.H.A.M.E. exposé on NPR host Adam Davidson last week, and came to the conclusion that S.H.A.M.E. “made a compelling case that Davidson is—if not complicitly, then inherently—conflicted.”

The Observer‘s Foster Kamer followed up the SHAME report on Adam Davidson’s financial ties to the same Wall Street banks he reports on: The speaking fees Davidson earns from the banking industry, and Planet Money‘s exclusive funding arrangement with Ally Bank. Formerly known as GMAC, Ally Bank is a poster child of everything wrong, predatory, and criminal about Wall Street banks today. It was one of the worst offenders in the subprime bubble and foreclosure fraud scandals, and has received some $17 billion in bailout funds from US taxpayers since it went belly up in 2008. Incredibly, taxpayer funds were then used to lobby against taxpayer interests in Congress, as Ally Bank spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against banking regulations that might prevent Ally Bank from yet another collapse.

A chunk of Ally’s taxpayer bailout money also has been used to underwrite Davidson’s show about the banking industry. This arrangement between NPR’s finance program Planet Money, and its sole sponsor Ally Bank, violates not only standard journalism ethics, but also the explicit policies of co-producer Chicago Public Media, which bars its journalists from taking money from the industry its journalists report on.

Davidson is a textbook case of why journalists should not be allowed to take money from the industry they report on, and why conflict-of-interest guidelines and policies are essential: Davidson’s Planet Money radio reports, and his New York Times columns, routinely boost for Wall Street interests on a scale that can be downright shocking. Worse, Davidson’s messages on his public radio shows have dovetailed with Ally Bank’s lobbying campaigns.

In other words, Adam Davidson is paid by the banks, and he goes on the radio promoting the banks’ interests. That makes Adam Davidson little more than a glorified Shamway Guy for Wall Street, a product spokesman for the financial industry under the guise of a credible journalist.

The Observer‘s Foster Kamer reached out to NPR and the New York Times to comment on the evidence provided by SHAME. NPR’s head of communications Dana Davis Rehm initially responded positively to Kamer’s query: “I expect we’ll give you comment on why we didn’t comment before, and perhaps on some of these issues you raise.” For a brief moment, it appeared as though NPR might correct its lapse of journalism ethics.

That was last Wednesday, August 8th. The following morning, Davis Rehm and the rest of the NPR crew circled the wagons and adopted the old mob legal strategy of taking the 5th, telling the Observer:

“Adam reviews all his speaking engagements with his editors and we’re confident that none of them run counter to our ethical guidelines. Beyond that, we don’t have any further comment.“

Sadly, NPR ducked its responsibilities to its listeners, and failed to live up to its pretensions to high journalistic standards. Instead, they chose to ignore the Observer‘s requests to explain why, for example, Planet Money‘s negative coverage of the proposed Financial Financial Consumer Protection Agency in 2009 (when Davidson smeared Elizabeth Warren) dovetailed with Ally Bank’s massive lobbying efforts against the same agency at the very same time. NPR decided that this was just fine.

The New York Times likewise chose to take the 5th and issue an embarrassing official response to the Observer about our allegations over their columnist’s conflicts of interest, telling Kamer:

“We have discussed this situation with Adam and we’re confident that there has been no violation of our policies around speaking engagements and no conflict of interest.”

There you have it: The corrupt and sorry state of the US major media.

We applaud the Observer and Foster Kamer for doing their best to hold two of this country’s most powerful media institutions accountable for journalistic corruption. And we urge others to keep holding corrupt media shills and their enablers accountable. If we ever want a chance to reclaim our democracy from oligarchy power—which relies on corruption and propaganda to maintain its grip and keep the public confused, powerless and demoralized—we have to make life harder on the oligarchy’s media pawns. And that means flushing them out into the open, and SHAME-ing them.

Read the entire New York Observer article here.

And remember, we “Rogue Media Ethicists” need your support to continue our work and build on our successes, to make the oligarchy’s job a little harder, and ours more effective.

“I feel like the voice of business journalism is sort of, it’s an authoritative voice of God.”

—Adam Davidson

Editor’s Note: This article, and S.H.A.M.E.’s larger investigation of Adam Davidson, has caught the attention of the New York Observer’s Foster Kamer, who suggests that the authors have made a “compelling case” that the NPR programming Adam Davidson is associated with is “inherently conflicted.”  What are the charges? Kamer summarizes:

First, that a notoriously hostile 2009 Planet Money interview between Davidson and Elizabeth Warren—the special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—was ethically tainted by Planet Money‘s financial arrangements with “the sole sponsor underwriting Davidson’s Planet Money show and his salary.” Levine and Ames argue that the sponsor in question—a financial services conglomerate—lobbied against the creation of the CFPB before it was created (and around the time of the interview), which is evidence of an insidious conflict of interest. Furthermore, they allege that Davidson is accepting speaking fees from the industry he covers for both NPR and The New York Times Magazine, something largely viewed as an unsavory, questionable practice by most journalists (and journalism institutions, which usually have guidelines against that sort of thing).

Adam Davidson is the co-creator and host of the popular economic news radio program Planet Money. On air, Davidson plays the role of an earnest, brainy reporter who’s doing his best to make sense of the complicated, jargon-filled world of finance to report business news in a way that NPR listeners can understand. However, behind the dweeby, faux-naive facade Adam Davidson presents to his listeners is a shrewd propagandist with a long, consistent history of shilling for powerful and destructive interests—and failing to disclose his financial ties to the companies and industries he reports on.

Over the years, Davidson has boosted for the Iraq War and whitewashed the occupation of Iraq, praised sweatshop labor and “experimenting on the poor,” attacked the idea of regulating Wall Street, parroted libertarian propaganda about the government’s inability to directly create jobs, argued for “squeezing the middle class,” and shamelessly fawned over Wall Street for allegedly blessing Americans with “just about anything that makes you happy.” (Read Adam Davidson’s full S.H.A.M.E. profile.)

While Adam Davidson has recently come under increasing scrutiny for using his NPR platform to promote the narrow interests of the super-wealthy in this country, little attention has thus far been given to Davidson’s corruption—his numerous financial conflicts of interest that seriously undermine his claims to being a journalist, and instead reveal Davidson as a glorified product spokesman for his Wall Street sponsors.

Adam Davidson gained national media recognition as an on-air personality in 2008, after co-producing an episode for This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money” about the implosion of subprime lending. Although Davidson’s segment was praised for making the murky world of finance easier to understand, his framing of the subprime housing debacle served another purpose: It let Wall Street off the hook for its role in rampant criminal mortgage fraud and predatory lending.

“This was a crisis that was caused by willing participation of every single person. Nobody was coerced,” said Davidson’s co-producer and partner in Planet Money, Alex Blumberg. ”And there was fraud. But that was not what caused the crisis. What caused the crisis was something bigger and more systemic that required the involvement of everybody at every step.”

This evasion-by-exaggerating-the-complexity strategy is one that Davidson and Planet Money have deployed often to whitewash and deflect the role of criminality in the housing crisis. Among the show’s fans was Treasury Secretary and former New York Federal Reserve Bank chief Timothy Geithner: “Yeah, they did a good job.”

As a piece of journalism, Davidson’s report on the subprime fraud was a failure bordering on journalistic malpractice. By absolving the role of rampant predatory criminality and spreading blame in a grand false equivalency, Davidson provided a narrative frame that comforted the American Establishment at a time when it badly needed comforting, and was duly rewarded for his services. The mainstream media joined Timothy Geithner in lavishing praise on Davidson’s subprime fraud whitewash, and awarded him and his partner with the prestigious “Peabody Award” while New York University’s Journalism Institute named the segment one of the “Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade.”

Thanks to this broad acceptance and praise of Davidson’s whitewash, he was given his own show, which launched just as the entire financial system began to melt down.

The new show, called Planet Money, was a partnership between NPR and Chicago Public Media’s This American Life, and was molded on Davidson’s successful subprime episode. Not surprisingly, Planet Money was compromised almost from the very start.

In early 2009, just a few months after Planet Money was launched, NPR announced it had secured Ally Bank (formerly GMAC) as the show’s exclusive sponsor. It was an unusual setup for NPR, and unusual (and highly dubious) for anything that called itself journalism, because it meant  that a major troubled financial institution was the only source of money for a news program about finance. At the time that the unusual agreement was signed, Planet Money was the only NPR program underwritten by a single exclusive sponsor. The arrangement raised eyebrows and would have been unthinkable before the crisis—but even by post-crisis funding arrangements, Planet Money’s deal with Ally Bank stood out as such an obvious violation of basic journalism standards that even Ad Age, the advertising industry’s trade publication, was taken aback by the “close alignment of message and news program.”

To understand why Davidson’s arrangement with Ally Bank is so odious, a little background is needed. Ally Bank is a subsidiary of Ally Financial, a giant financial services company formerly known as GMAC. There’s a good reason why GMAC would have wanted to change its name to “Ally Financial” after the financial collapse: The bank is one of the biggest mortgage servicers in the country, and has been one of the very worst offenders in foreclosure fraud and in the very same subprime fraud that Davidson whitewashed as a “blameless” phenomenon. GMAC deserves far more blame—and jail time—than any of the subprime borrowers it fleeced and ruined. Since GMAC collapsed in late 2008, it has received more than $17 billion taxpayer bailout funds in a series of bailouts. As of August 1, 2012, 74% of Ally Financial was still owned by the U.S. Government. ((See Naked Capitalism’s coverage of GMAC/Ally’s mortgage fraud.))

At the time Ally signed its sponsorship agreement with Planet Money, the bank was being investigated across the country for foreclosure fraud, robo-signing fraud, and student loan fraud. Even as bad bailed-out banks go, GMAC/Ally is considered one of the worst, most tainted of them all.

GMAC goes from thief to Ally…

Planet Money‘s relationship with Ally is a textbook example of a “conflict of interest” of the sort every journalist is taught to shun. The bank had a clear and demonstrable interest in Planet Money‘s coverage of the financial industry, especially issues that affected the bank’s bottom line. As Planet Money‘s sole sponsor at a time when NPR funds were falling, Ally obviously wielded considerable power.

After Davidson sprang a vicious and bizarre smear-attack on Elizabeth Warren in 2009, some NPR listeners started to get wise to Planet Money‘s corruption problem, and made their concerns known. Following months of complaints from readers pointing to the conflict of interest and the way Planet Money‘s segments dovetailed with the banking lobby’s own propaganda—and with Ally’s interests—NPR’s Ombudsman was forced to issue a public statement on the Ally-Planet Money relationship. Perhaps not surprisingly, the NPR Ombudsman decided that listeners’ concerns over the conflict-of-interest were “cynical”—as if the problem lay in listeners’ psychology, rather than in Planet Money’s violation of basic journalism ethics. The NPR Ombudsman went further, arguing essentially that if listeners who complained about corruption weren’t cynical, then they were ignorant.

Despite Davidson’s long experience in sales and underwriting for public radio, he claimed he was out of the loop when it came to the deal his own show, Planet Money, cut with its sole sponsor, Ally Bank: “I have nothing to do with the underwriting stuff. We don’t pay any attention to the fact that they are a sponsor. We wouldn’t for a second give them any special treatment — positive or negative.”

And yet, the actual record proves that NPR readers were right to suspect and criticize the arrangement, and that Davidson was wrong in claiming that Planet Money has not consistently pushed a narrative so in synch with Ally Bank and the financial industry that it boggles the mind how he has gotten away with it. Planet Money coverage hasn’t just been friendly to banks and the finance industry in general—some of it has been suspiciously lined up and in synch with specific policy priorities of its exclusive sponsor, Ally Bank.

One example: In 2009, just as Planet Money inked its exclusive sponsorship deal with Ally Bank, Davidson began broadcasting a number of segments critical of the proposed Financial Consumer Protection Agency Act of 2009, questioning the need  to regulate consumer financial products like mortgages and credit cards in order to protect people against bank fraud. “Will it work at all?” Davidson asked in one of his fake “gee-whiz” questions. “Is this just one more layer of regulation in a regulatory system that fundamentally broke down?”

In May 2009, in the heat of the banking industry’s massive pushback, Davidson essentially mugged Elizabeth Warren, the chief architect of the financial consumer protection bill, in an interview that took a sharp and bizarre hostile turn early on. Davidson surprised Warren and his own listeners with uncharacteristic personal smears, trying to portray her as a clueless, power-hungry ideologue. Davidson’s attack on Warren was so out of line and uncharacteristically hostile that it sparked a torrent of criticism from NPR listeners who couldn’t understand why Davidson or NPR would do such a thing. Keep in mind, this was in the spring of 2009, when unemployment was still shooting through the roof, the future of the economy was in doubt, and talk of a 1930s-style Great Depression-2 was still front and center.

It’s worth going back and listening to the interview to get a sense of just how malevolent Davidson really was, and is. Here’s an excerpt, courtesy of Corrente:

ADAM DAVIDSON: What it feels to me is what you are missing is that — I think we put aside your pet issues. We put them aside. We put them aside until this crisis is over.

ELIZABETH WARREN: The cr– What you’re saying makes no sense. Now come on. [interpolate Davidson sputtering and attempting to interrupt throughout.] It makes no sense. On an emergency basis, on one day, one week, one month, there’s no doubt in my mind we’ve got to step in, we’ve got to make sure we have a functioning banking system. I think I’ve said that like nine times now. Of course we’ve got to have a functioning banking system.

DAVIDSON: Wait a minute. I want to make you go farther. I want to make you madder before I –

ELIZABETH WARREN: No no no. [Davidson snickers] We’re now at what — we’re now seven, eight months into this. And it’s the second part of what you said. We can’t do anything about the American family until this crisis is over? This crisis will not be over until the American family begins to recover. [More Davidson sputtering.] This crisis does not exist independently –

DAVIDSON: That’s your crisis.

ELIZABETH WARREN: No it is not my crisis! That is America’s crisis! If people cannnot pay their credit card bills [Davidson tries to interrupt] if they cannot pay their mortgages –

DAVIDSON: But you are not in the mainstream of views on this issue. You are not –

ELIZABETH WARREN: What, if they can’t pay their credit card bills the banks are gonna do fine? Who are you looking at?

DAVIDSON: The [sputters]–

ELIZABETH WARREN: Who says a bank a bank is going to survive — Who is not worried about the fact that the Bank of America’s default rate has now bumped over 10%? That’s at least the latest data I saw. So the idea that we’re going to somehow fix the banks and then next year or next decade we’re going to start worrying about the American family just doesn’t [Davidson talking over] make any sense.

DAVIDSON: The American families are not — These issues of crucial, the essential need for credit intermediation are as close to accepted principles among every serious thinker on this topic. The view that the American family, that you hold very powerfully, is fully under assault and that there is — and we can get into that — that is not accepted broad wisdom. I talk to a lot a lot a lot of left, right, center, neutral economists [and] you are the only person I’ve talked to in a year of covering this crisis who has a view that we have two equally acute crises: a financial crisis and a household debt crisis that is equally acute in the same kind of way. I literally don’t know who else I can talk to support that view. I literally don’t know anyone other than you who has that view, and you are the person [snicker] who went to Congress to oversee it and you are presenting a very, very narrow view to the American people.

The Columbia Journalism Review described the Planet Money interview as a “disaster” and  “really cringeworthy stuff from Davidson,” who was so rude and unprofessional that NPR’s Ombudsman was forced to issue a public apology for his behavior. Davidson’s excuse: he had been traveling for a NPR fundraiser and was “very, very tired.”

What Adam Davidson did not disclose to the public was that at the same time he was smearing Elizabeth Warren and attacking legislation that would protect consumers against the sort of bank fraud that has devastated millions of Americans, Ally Bank, the sole sponsor underwriting Davidson’s Planet Money show and his salary, was simultaneously spending hundreds of thousands lobbying against the  Financial the Consumer Protection Agency Act of 2009.

Evidence: Here’s just one of GMAC’s lobbying disclosure forms mentioning the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009

Ally Bank is not the only financial company funding Adam Davidson’s career and filling up his bank accounts.

On top of Ally Bank’s exclusive sponsorship of Planet Money, Davidson earns lucrative speaking fees from banks and financial companies, including J.P. Morgan, Well Fargo, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs—the same companies he covers as a journalist. Davidson is frequently the only journalist/reporter booked to speak at these events; other speakers usually work in finance.

Davidson has yet to disclose his corporate clients and how much they pay him, but here is a partial list of Davidson’s speaking gigs from the last two years compiled from various publicly available sources:

• In April 2011, Davidson was the headlining speaker at the 9th Annual “Women’s World Banking” Microfinance and the Capital Markets Conference. The conference was hosted by J.P. Morgan, but the organization itself is funded by the world’s biggest banks and corporations, including BP, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, Barclays Capital, VISA, ExxonMobil—just to name a few.
• In 2011, Davidson spoke at another microfinance conference, this once was also funded by Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and CapitalOne.
• In 2012, Davidson spoke at the 27th Annual Conference for the Treasury & Finance Professional. Sponsors of the event included Bank of America, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Bloomberg, Citibank, Findelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Well Fargo and about a dozen of the most powerful financial companies in the world.

These speaking fees are a huge unaddressed problem in news media and academia. As explained by Charles Ferguson, director of Inside Job and author of Predator Nation, the problem with speaking fees is that they are “sometimes used to launder or disguise payments . . . for lobbying and policy advocacy.” That is why, for example, Obama’s former economy czar Larry Summers was roundly criticized for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees in 2008 from the same banks he was bailing out in 2009.

Chicago Public Media, which co-owns “Planet Money” through its ownership of “This American Life,” explicitly bars conflicts-of-interest: “WBEZ journalists must uphold the trust of the public by not overlapping individual interests with professional responsibilities. WBEZ journalists may not accept any form of compensation from the individuals, institutions or organizations they cover.”

Neither NPR nor This American Life would comment on S.H.A.M.E.’s investigation into Adam Davidson’s conflicts of interest. We will be seeking to get comment from Davidson’s other employer, The New York Times, about their policy on journalists having conflicts of interest.

And remember, we can’t keep exposing corrupt media figures and outing covert propagandists without ongoing support from readers like you. Do your part, contribute using PayPal or WePay…

Adam Davidson

Host of NPR’s Planet Money & New York Times Magazine Columnist

Adam Davidson graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in religion, and began his public radio career selling airtime and doing sponsor outreach. He then became an on-air radio personality, filing pro-Iraq War dispatches as Marketplace’s Middle East correspondent, and recently transformed himself into an effective propagandist for the banking industry. Over the years, Davidson has whitewashed the occupation of Iraq, praised sweatshop labor, attacked the idea of regulating Wall Street and argued for “squeezing the middle class”–all while taking undisclosed money from banking interests. No wonder Davidson shamelessly credited Wall Street for providing “just about anything that makes you happy.”

The Recovered History of Adam Davidson

• Davidson began working in public radio in 1992, doing “underwriting sales” for Chicago Public Radio, a position described by one public radio station as “equivalent to that of a sales manager at private stations. This person must go out into the community and establish rapport with local businesses in order to sell airtime to them. The underwriting representative is then responsible for developing a direct . . . and informational message to put on the air for the client.”
• Adam Davidson spent the early 2000s as Middle East correspondent for Public Radio International’s Marketplace. In the lead up to the Iraq War, Davidson filed a number of pieces promoting the invasion of Iraq; after the invasion, Davidson moved to Baghdad and filed numerous radio items whitewashing the occupation catastrophe.
• In December 2002, Davidson positively profiled an Israeli right-wing conspiracy theory site Debka.com in order to promote the invasion of Iraq. Despite the fact that Debka.com was long ago discredited in Israel, where “not a single Israeli official…sees the site as a reliable source”–and despite Debka.com’s ties to rightwing conspiracy theory site WorldNet Daily, nevertheless Davidson presented Debka’s claims that Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction–including chemical, biological and nuclear–as credible. Davidson staked his own credibility defending Debka, telling NPR listeners: “There’s really no way to confirm what they’re reporting right now, but I’ve been reading the site for years, and it’s common to think they’re nuts, then to wait a few weeks and see the same information in The New York Times.” As it turned out, Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destructions of any kind. In 2007, Davidson’s beloved Debka.com created a panic in New York City after publishing false rumors of an impending Al Qaeda dirty bomb attack.
• In February 2003, just a few weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Davidson found a couple of Iraqi merchants living in Jordan who were in favor of the coming invasion, telling Davidson’s listeners that the invasion would do wonders for Iraq’s economy. “Mohammed,” one of the merchants, told Davidson: “I’m very optimistic about the economy of Iraq.” The war decimated Iraq’s economy, destroyed its infrastructure and was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
• Davidson then moved to Baghdad and went to work whitewashing the brutality and violence of the war and occupation. In a 2004 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Adam Davison claimed that American military violence played no part in Iraqi anger at the occupation, and suggested that Americans hadn’t committed serious violence of any sort. Instead, Davidson argued that the reason the U.S. wasn’t winning the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi people was because America had not successfully rooted out Saddam-era corruption. “It’s common to hear Iraqis say the U.S. regime is just like Hussein’s. At first, I found this bizarre. The U.S. is not hacking the ears off of innocent people. The U.S. isn’t massacring entire villages. But I learned that when Iraqis make the Hussein comparison, they’re talking, in large part, about corruption.” By focusing on Saddam-era corruption, Davidson made it seem as though the problem in Iraq was that Iraq wasn’t Americanized enough, rather than the violence of the American invasion and occupation.
• After living in Baghdad for a year, Davidson had to suddenly flee the country in 2004, fearing for his life after being accused of working for the CIA. Later, Davidson admitted that he had a tight and undisclosed relationship with occupation officials, who regularly visited his Baghdad home and revealed to Davidson that the situation was much worse than was being reported. Rather than telling his listeners as a journalist should, Davidson protected the occupation authorities: “The ones I liked I’d invite over to the house. I mean, I genuinely liked them, but also we’d get them a little drunk on wine. We’d tell them, hey, tonight everything’s off the record. And we’d get real information...we’d get these people over to our house, they’d have some wine, and they’d be like, ‘oh, it’s so much worse than you know.’”
• In 2006, now working at NPR as a business reporter, Davidson criticized the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, legislation passed in the wake of Enron to tighten corporate financial accountability and make top executives criminally liable for fraud happening under their watch. “The U.S. has a bunch of crazy rules that came out of a time of hysteria in the U.S. They don’t make any sense,” Davidson told listeners. This was part of a larger push by Wall Street and corporate interests to gut Sarbanes-Oxley. Among those pushing the same PR line against Sarbanes-Oxley as Davidson were Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Foundation and even Charles Koch himself. [ 1 ]
• In 2007, Davidson boosted for the Honduran sweatshop industry, and promoted sweatshop labor in general, which he said was a great opportunity offering women upward mobility. Making socks in a sweatshop is “the only way she can improve her life,” Davidson said of one Honduran young woman he profiled for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He did not mention that Honduran sweatshop workers routinely develop incapacitating back and spinal injuries working 12-hour shifts with little or no breaks, face workplace abuse and intimidation, and earn about 65 cents per hour. Meanwhile the CEO of Gildan, a Canadian garment company doing business in Honduras that Davidson praised in his program, took home $11 million in compensation in 2009.
• In 2012, Davidson promoted an even more extreme version of the Honduran sweatshop: special extra-judicial sweatshop zones legally beyond Honduran constitutional and labor laws, where multinationals could tap cheap labor, and use their own police force and judicial systems. The extra-judicial business zones, the brainchild of University of Chicago-trained economist Paul Romer, have been denounced as “neo-colonial” and have attracted the interest of Milton Friedman’s libertarian grandson, Patri Friedman, along with other libertarians hostile to labor rights. Davidson dismissed critics of the Honduras extra-judicial sweatshop zones: “It’s easy to criticize experimenting with the livelihoods of the poor,” Davidson wrote. “We have to try some new things, probably many new things. And we have to accept that some of them won’t work.”
• In 2008, Davidson helped produce an episode of This American Life about the implosion of subprime lending that let Wall Street off the hook for its role in rampant mortgage fraud and predatory lending. “This was a crisis that was caused by willing participation of every single person. Nobody was coerced,” said Davidson’s co-producer Alex Blumberg. “And there was fraud. But that was not what caused the crisis. What caused the crisis was something bigger and more systemic that required the involvement of everybody at every step.” This evasion-by-exaggerating-the-complexity strategy is one that Davidson and Planet Money have deployed often to whitewash and deflect the role of criminality in the housing crisis. Among the show’s fans was Treasury Secretary and former New York Federal Reserve Bank chief Timothy Geithner: “Yeah, they did a good job.”
• In September 2008, Davidson falsely claimed that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act played no role whatsoever in the financial collapse: “Every economist I’ve spoken with says, simply, that it was a bad law but that it and its repeal are not really to blame for what is happening now.” Many key figures involved in Glass-Steagall’s repeal, including former Citigroup chief Sandy Weill, have contradicted Davidson’s false claim.
• In early 2009, NPR announced that Planet Money secured Ally Bank as the show’s exclusive sponsor. It was an unusual set up for NPR, as it meant that a financial institution was the sole funder of a news program about finance. At the time, Planet Money was the only NPR program underwritten by a single exclusive sponsor. Even Ad Age, the advertising industry’s trade publication, was surprised by the sponsorship arrangement and the “close alignment of message and news program.” (At the time of this writing, Ally is still Planet Money’s exclusive sponsor.)
• Ally Bank is a subsidiary of Ally Financial, formerly known as GMAC. The bank is one of the biggest mortgage servicers in the country, and has been one of the very worst offenders in foreclosure fraud and subprime fraud. It received more than $17 billion taxpayer bailout funds and has been investigated across the country for foreclosure fraud, robo-signing and student loan fraud. As of August 1, 2012, 74% of Ally Financial was still owned by the U.S. Government. [ 2 ]
• Planet Money’s relationship with Ally is a textbook example of “conflict of interest.” The bank had a clear and demonstrable interest in Planet Money’s coverage of the financial industry, especially issues that affected the bank’s bottom line. As Planet Money’s sole sponsor at a time when NPR funds were falling, Ally obviously wielded considerable power. Following months of complaints from readers pointing to the conflict-of-interest and the way Planet Money’s segments dovetailed with the banking lobby’s own propaganda, NPR’s Ombudsman was forced to look into the Ally-Planet Money relationship. The NPR Ombudsman ultimately dismissed listeners’ concerns as “cynical” and implied they did not know what they were talking about. Despite Davidson’s experience in public radio underwriting, he claimed ignorance about the nature of Planet Money’s arrangement with its sole sponsor, Ally Bank: “I have nothing to do with the underwriting stuff. We don’t pay any attention to the fact that they are a sponsor. We wouldn’t for a second give them any special treatment — positive or negative.”
• In 2009, while Ally Financial (then still known as GMAC) was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against the Financial Consumer Protection Agency Act of 2009, Davidson aired a number of segments critical of the legislation. He questioned the need to regulate consumer financial products like mortgages and credit cards in order to protect people against bank fraud. “Will it work at all?” he wondered on air, and asked: “is this just one more layer of regulation in a regulatory system that fundamentally broke down?” [ 3 ]

• In May 2009, Davidson launched a bizarre personal attack while interviewing Elizabeth Warren, the chief architect of the financial consumer protection bill. Davidson surprised Warren and his own listeners with uncharacteristic personal smears, trying to portray her as a clueless, power-hungry ideologue: “The view that the American family, that you hold very powerfully, is fully under assault . . . that is not accepted broad wisdom. . . . I literally don’t know who else I can talk to support that view. I literally don’t know anyone other than you who has that view, and you are the person [snicker] who went to Congress to oversee it and you are presenting a very, very narrow view to the American people.” The Columbia Journalism Review described the interview as a “disaster” and “really cringeworthy stuff from Davidson,” who was so rude and unprofessional that NPR’s Ombudsman had to step in and apologize for his behavior. Davidson’s excuse: he had been traveling for a NPR fundraiser and was “very, very tired.” [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
• Listen to Davidson’s full interview with Warren here:
• Adam Davidson does not disclose that he does paid speaking gigs at events funded by banks and financial companies, including J.P. Morgan, Well Fargo, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs–the same companies he covers as a journalist. Davidson is frequently the only journalist/reporter booked to speak at these events; other speakers are usually work in finance. (See top of left sidebar for detailed info on Davidson’s recent speaking engagements.)
• In 2011, Davidson expanded his media presence with a weekly financial column in the New York Times Magazine. His first column argued that government can’t create jobs, and so politicians shouldn’t try to come up with “job plans”–a demonstrably false position that also happens to be shared by Koch-funded libertarian Cato Institute. In his second column, Davidson pushed for harsh austerity measures against the majority of Americans in order to benefit the financial sector: “It really stinks, but the only way to fix the economy is to squeeze the middle class.“
• In 2012, Davidson argued that everyone should grovel before Wall Street, without which, he argued, America would be much poorer. Davidson’s pro-Wall Street propaganda was so crude that even fellow neoliberal Matthew Yglesias stepped in to criticize Davidson: “I’m generally an Adam Davidson fan, but his recent New York Times Magazine article in defense of Wall Street is pretty unconvincing. The big problem is right up there in the lede where he says ‘Perhaps the best way to really appreciate what Wall Street does is to imagine life without it.’”
• On May 1 2012, Davidson published a flattering profile of Edward Conard, Mitt Romney’s former business partner at Bain Capital, as a way of promoting more worship of the rich: “Conard . . . has laid out tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy,” Davidson wrote, as he uncritically reported Conard’s claim that inequality “is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off.” Yves Smith, of Naked Capitalism, described the article as “chock full of blatant falsehoods” among which were Davidson’s claim that penicillin was made possible by investment capital from hedge fund managers like Conard. In fact penicillin research was funded by the British and U.S. governments.
• Two weeks later, on May 16, Davidson spoke at the 27th Annual Conference for the Treasury & Finance Professional. Bank of America, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Bloomberg, Citibank, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Well Fargo and about a dozen of the most powerful financial companies in the world sponsored the event.

Undisclosed Income

Adam Davidson’s career is currently being funded by bailed out banks. On top of Ally Bank’s exclusive sponsorship of Planet Money, Davidson receives lucrative speaking fees for appearing at events funded by the same banks and financial companies he covers as a journalist. Davidson has yet to disclose his corporate clients and how much they pay him, but here is a partial list of Davidson’s gigs from the last two years compiled from various publicly available sources:

• In April 2011, Davidson was the headlining speaker at the 9th Annual “Women’s World Banking” Microfinance and the Capital Markets Conference. The conference was hosted by J.P. Morgan, but the organization itself is funded by the world’s biggest banks and corporations, including BP, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, Barclays Capital, VISA, ExxonMobil–just to name a few.
• In 2011, Davidson spoke at another microfinance conference, this once was also funded by Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and CapitalOne.
• In 2012, Davidson spoke at the 27th Annual Conference for the Treasury & Finance Professional. Sponsors of the event included Bank of America, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Bloomberg, Citibank, Findelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Well Fargo and about a dozen of the most powerful financial the largest financial companies in the world.

Chicago Public Media, which co-owns “Planet Money” through its ownership of “This American Life”, explicitly bars conflicts-of-interest: “WBEZ journalists must uphold the trust of the public by not overlapping individual interests with professional responsibilities. WBEZ journalists may not accept any form of compensation from the individuals, institutions or organizations they cover.”

Note: Neither NPR nor This American Life have responded to S.H.A.M.E.’s requests for comment about Davidson’s conflicts of interest.

Planet Money’s Ally Problem

Ally Bank has been Planet Money’s exclusive sponsor since 2009, a relationship that provides a textbook example of conflict of interest. Below are two screenshots of Ally Bank advertisements running on Planet Money’s website:

Davidson’s Shame Quotes

I feel like the voice of business journalism is sort of, it’s an authoritative voice of God.

–Davidson in a 2009 interview with Nieman Journalism Lab

The last time I interacted with University of Chicago faculty in an extended way, they were my professors. Sitting on a stage as their ‘peer,’ I felt like a kid who had borrowed his dad’s suit.

–Davidson describes his reaction to being invited to talk about the “unintended consequences” of financial regulation at Chicago University’s 58th Annual Management Conference in April 2010

Raising [corporate taxes], or even maintaining them, might satisfy the anti-corporate angst of protesters and populists, but it won’t come anywhere near paying off our debt. Most people who study the issue agree that the top federal corporate tax rate (35 percent of profits) is simply too high. The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you’ll inevitably get less of.

–Davidson’s “It’s Not Just About the Millionaires”; New York Times Magazine; November 2011

Davidson’s PR Strategies

Every economist I’ve spoken with says, simply, that it was a bad law but that it and its repeal are not really to blame for what is happening now.

–Davidson’s NPR segment “Can We Blame Or Praise Glass-Steagall?”

Most people who study the issue agree that the top federal corporate tax rate (35 percent of profits) is simply too high.

–Davidson on why U.S. should lower corporate taxes

I talk to a lot a lot a lot of left, right, center, neutral economists [and] you are the only person I’ve talked to in a year of covering this crisis who has a view that we have two equally acute crises: a financial crisis and a household debt crisis that is equally acute in the same kind of way.

–Davidson during his attack on Elizabeth Warren

Notes:

1. Malcolm Gladwell made a similar claim in a 2007 New Yorker article that defended Enron. Read Gladwell’s S.H.A.M.E. Report for more info. [↩]
2. See Naked Capitalism’s coverage of GMAC/Ally’s mortgage fraud. [↩]
3. GMAC’s total lobbying on finance-related bills in 2009 added up to $1.2 mil. See GMAC’s page on OpenSecrets.org for more information. [↩]
4. NPR did not respond to S.H.A.M.E.’s requests for comment about Davidson’s conflicts of interest. [↩]
5. Read Corrente’s transcript of Davidson’s Elizabeth Warren interview. [↩]

This is the first of a series of posts that will explore and expand on the recovered history of Arianna Huffington recently unearthed by S.H.A.M.E.

Ever since its transformation from a celebrity blog into a mainstream news media outlet, Arianna Huffington has marketed the Huffington Post to the public as a media outlet whose purpose is to leverage social media and new Internet technologies to democratize news and empower the American people by wresting control of news away from corrupt elites. To hear her tell it, you’d think that the Huffington Post was nothing less than a staging area for a populist revolt to reclaim American democracy from corporate rule:

The tech advances of the last few years have turned the news and entertainment worlds on their ears, shifting the balance of power away from media pooh-bahs dictating what is important and what is not, and towards consumers — and citizens — being empowered to choose and create. Technology is poised to have the same game-changing effect on the political world.

But HuffPo’s marketing executives tell a different, contradictory story.

HuffPo is not a news organization at all, according to Greg Coleman, Huffington Post’s president and chief revenue officer. He told Ad Age in 2010 that HuffP was a “social-media company” that exists to “help our marketers beam their messages throughout the internet, across the galaxy, the internet, and the world.”

“We make [corporations] part of the conversation,” explained another HuffPo marketing executive in 2011. “We’re acting as a social-media agency for our advertisers on The Huffington Post. We’ve become advisers to some of these companies about how to conduct the social-media outreach . . .  We help them counter this sort of one-sided conversation that is going on on the Internet about their companies.”

For all the problems of traditional media, at least newspapers have some sort of a wall between news and advertising. Sure, advertisers and sponsors still wield considerable influence over editorial content, but at least there is a tension between the two opposing forces. The Huffington Post, on the other hand, is about knocking that wall down—all in the name of democratic empowerment. After all, the separation between editorial and advertising discriminates against the corporate point of view. Why even have the division? Why is a CEO’s point of view less valuable than that of a reporter? Who makes that decision?

HuffPo ends this discrimination by leveling the playing field, and letting the reader decide: Rather than publishing their advertisers’ press releases and ads, editors refashion them as blog posts and articles that look like the rest of HuffPo, and allow the company to be “part of the community.”

In journalism, this is considered corrupt and manipulative. At HuffPo, it’s called  “sponsor-generated content.”

Naturally, advertisers love HuffPo’s sponsor-generated-content strategy. It gives their message progressive credibility, all while reaching a huge cross-section of the American population. When Arianna sold the Huffington Post to AOL in 2011, the site had 30.5 million U.S. people reading it every month. That’s nearly 10 percent of the entire population of the United States! On top of that, 9 million more people visited the site from overseas.

HuffPo execs bragged that sponsor-generated content more than doubled HuffPo’s advertising revenue in 2010, and earned it about $3 million in the first three months of 2011.

Below are just a few of the most egregious examples of HuffPo’s “sponsor-generated content” at work:

Pushing positive PR for foreign dictators

The New York Times reported that in 2009 HuffPo published a short article  accompanied by a “fashion slide show” titled “Asma al-Assad: Syria’s First Lady and All-Natural Beauty” not long after the Assad family began using Western PR firms to “shape her image.”

A couple weeks ago headlines were made when Syrian First Lady, Asma Al Assad invited the Obamas to Damascus. HuffPost readers ended up commenting more on Asma’s beauty and less on what an Obama/Assad meeting would mean for the Middle East. And we couldn’t help but notice the Syrian beauty either. In a region where the women love to cake on their make-up, it is very refreshing to see the wife of President Bashar al-Assad with very little on.

We also noticed her love for Christian Louboutin platforms, sunglasses, and her signature wavy hair.

During pro-democracy protests in Bahrain in 2011 at the start of the Arab Spring, HuffPo published a series of blog posts that whitewashed well-documented Bahraini police brutality, and instead blamed demonstrators for the violence erupting in the country.

Ken Silverstein wrote it up for Salon:

Ever since last February, when security forces in Bahrain brutally cracked down on demonstrators at the Pearl Monument, human rights groups have documented extensive violence by the government against pro-democracy protesters. In late  November, an independent commission hired by the country’s king released a report that said 35 people had been killed during the protests, including five detainees who were tortured to death, and that hundreds more had been injured and nearly 3,000 arrested.

But to judge from Tom Squitieri — the self-described “stargazer, Award winning reporter, communications crafter” who has tweeted and blogged about events in Bahrain for Huffington Post and the Foreign Policy Association — demonstrators are largely to blame for the violence. In one item he wrote about a girl named Zahra who “was attacked with an iron bar wielded by protestors” and a demonstrator named Ali who was killed “after being hit by a police car.” While Ali’s family claimed “he was deliberately run down” by the cops, Squitieri suggested it was more likely that “the police car swerved out of control after skidding on oil poured on the road by protestors.”

HuffPo did not disclose that the author, Tom Squitieri, was ”an employee of Qorvis Communications, a Washington firm that is registered to lobby for the government of Bahrain,” as Ken Silverstein discovered. Squitieri had been a reporter for USA Today until 2005, when he “resigned” over charges of plagiarism.

Creating a friendly platform for Wall Street/banker propaganda

HuffPo regularly features front-page PR by the CEO of the world’s largest bond fund, PIMCO, writing on subjects such as Greece’s debt that directly conflict with the firm’s $1.7 trillion dollars of investments it manages. PIMCO, long a major sponsor of CNBC (including Rick “Tea Party” Santelli’s show), has been criticized for the way it has exploited the media in the past to reap huge gains for wealthy bondholders. According to the New York Times, in 2008, PIMCO co-founder Bill Gross successfully “used his access to the news media to get the government’s attention” — and secure its bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac creditors, netting PIMCO $2 billion in a single day.

Promoting dangerous quacks cures

Some in the medical community have condemned the promotion of dangerous quacks by HuffPo. In 2009, a physician published an article in Salon criticizing HuffPo’s promotion of ”bogus treatments and crackpot medical theories,” including curing the swine flu with deep-cleaning enemas, as well as fraudulent spiritual healing techniques and risky cancer treatments.

Science writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Seth Mnookin wrote:  ”For whatever reason, HuffPo seemed to have a particular bee in its bonnet about vaccines and autism: If you made a list of the most irresponsible, misinformed people on the topic, it was a safe bet the majority of them had been given space for their rantings on the site.” Many of these authors use Huffington Post to promote their books and services.  (Dangerous quack remedies include a “baking soda” cancer treatment invented by an Italian doctor convicted of manslaughter and fraud in Italy.)

Then there’s the issue of the “Sweat Lodge” murderer: In October 2009, three people died at a “Spirtual Warrior” fasting and sweat lodge ceremony hosted by new age wealth guru James Arthur Ray, while 18 others were hospitalized with burns, dehydration, liver and kidney damage, as well as “scorched lungs.” In 2011, Ray was convicted on three counts of negligent homicide, and sentenced to two years in prison. Huffington Post published James Ray’s blog right up until the deadly retreat incident, describing him as “a ‘World Thought Leader’ who has traveled the globe devoting over two decades to studying the thoughts, actions, and habits of those who create true wealth in every area of their life.” Ray’s bio has since been scrubbed from his HuffPo blog.

***

Read Arianna Huffington’s S.H.A.M.E. Profile to learn more about her history of exploitation, manipulation and media corruption. . .

Malcolm Gladwell on his former roommate Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2006 book Prisoners, which is about Goldberg’s experience as a prison guard at Ktzi’ot, Israel’s largest detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners:

“Jeffrey Goldberg has done the impossible—found some hope in the rubble of the Middle East. Prisoners will bring you to tears.”

—Malcolm Gladwell

Bring tears? Gladwell’s spent the last two decades shilling for an industry involved in the largest mass-murder campaign in the history of mankind, so you know Prisoners got some powerful stuff. And it does:

Ktzi’ot has long been criticized for its inhumane conditions, including frequent beatings, lack of drinking water and forced labor. Among the hundreds of books forbidden to prisoners at Ktzi’ot have been The Lord of the Rings and Hamlet. In the book, Goldberg describes a scene from Ktzi’ot in which his friend repeatedly hit a Palestinian prisoner in the head with a with a heavy, sharp-edged army radio, beating him to a bloody pulp, a beating that Goldberg “deduced was prompted by something [the prisoner] said.”

It was in February 1991, in the Wilderness of Zin, at a place called Ketziot, not far from Kadesh-Barnea, that a friend of mine named Yoram tried, in my presence, to beat senseless an Arab by the name of Abu Firas. Abu Firas was a disagreeable and smug man, but his sourness was not a mortal sin Yoram, whom I knew to be gentle but at that moment had blood in his face, was beating Abu Firas on the head with the handset of an army radio. The handset weighed five or six pounds, and it was sharp-edged. Abu Firas was hurt.

. . . Yoram was a religious Jew, and his kippah, knit and multicolored in the style of the modern Orthodox, stayed pinned to his head through his exertions It was quite a sight—a yeshiva Jew, a God-fearer, delivering a bloody beating.

. . . Abu Firas was on his knees, grabbing at his head. His hair shone with blood. He was barely coherent.  He pleaded for water. Yoram tried to jack Abu Firas up onto his feet, but he couldn’t move.

Later in the book Goldberg admits that he lied to cover up the crime: “I found another military policeman, and handed off the wobbling prisoner, who was by now bleeding on me. ‘He fell,’ I lied.” Goldberg also took part in beatings of Palestinian prisoners, but justified it this way: “Unlike [Goldberg's camp-guard friend], I never hit a Palestinian who wasn’t already hitting me.”

This isn’t the first time Malcolm Gladwell has helped his old buddy out. In fact, Malcolm and Jeffrey have a long, rich history that goes back to when they were just two young conservatives trying to make it as media hacks in the big cruel media world of D.C. They roomed together in the 80s, and both of them started off their careers in mainstream news at The Washington Post—Malcolm worked the business beat, while Jeffrey was a police reporter. Later on the two buddies reunited again at The New Yorker. Editor-in-chief David Remnick, also a Washington Post alum, hired Malcolm in 1996, and brought Jeffrey on board in 2000. Somewhere along the way, Malcolm Gladwell introduced Jeffrey Goldberg to the man’s future wife. “[Gladwell's] responsible for the existence of my three children,” blushed Goldberg.

As a token of respect and appreciation, Jeffrey Goldberg included his buddy Malcolm on a list of “Top 50 Philo-Semites,” helping promote his Judeophilic buddy’s newest book Outliers with a link to Amazon just as Outliers was hitting bookstores in November 2008:

Malcolm Gladwell’s Top 50 Philo-Semites
NOV 20 2008, 2:39 PM ET

So, as you have undoubtedly heard, the Forward has chosen me as one of its 50 most influential American Jews. Me, Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Silverman, and Lipa Schmeltzer, among others.

This honor has changed my life, especially the magnificent gift of 1,000 shares of AIG stock from the finance committee of the Elders of Zion. It has also caused heartache. Friends are envious, even non-Jewish friends. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell is very upset. When we were roommates a very long time ago, Malcolm used to listen to the klezmer stylings of Giora Feidman on his record player. He is, in other words, very Jewy. He is also deeply wounded. “I am so jealous,” he wrote. “Shouldn’t there be a parallel list for wanna-bes?”

Yes, there should. If the Forward can publish a list of the top 50 Jews, then Goldblog can publish a list of the top 50 philo-Semites. I don’t have a philosophical problem with this, by the way: I dissent from the line, first passed on to me by Frank Foer, who, tragically, is not a top-50 Jew (though his mother is!), that philo-Semites are anti-Semites who like Jews. So, a list, and one loyal readers can help me assemble. I already asked Malcolm to provide me names of other philo-Semites, but he said: “How do I know philo-Semites? I’m such a philo-Semite I only associate with the real thing.”

Here are a few names, just to get us going:

1) George Eliot
2) Barack Obama
3) Harry Truman
4) Emile Zola
5) Malcolm Gladwell

READ MORE about Malcolm Gladwell and Jeffrey Goldberg at the S.H.A.M.E. Project:

The S.H.A.M.E. Project had a great first month that’s exceeded our expectations—and we couldn’t have done it without help from eXiled readers like you. We figured that the first month would be a period of testing out both the material and technology, but what we underestimated was just how big the response would be. Already, of the three major media figures we’ve covered, the biggest name of those three, Malcolm Gladwell, has contacted us and is showing signs of cracking.

Like you, we want these profiles, dossiers and reports to stand up to any and all attacks. Our work is having an effect; the pushback has been fierce at times; and that’s a sign we’re doing something right. Can you help? Contribute using PayPal or WePay…

As we take stock of our first month, we invite you to check out S.H.A.M.E.’s email exchange with Malcolm Gladwell, in which the best-selling author and New Yorker star journalist attempts to get eXiled editor Yasha Levine to “recognize” that shilling for tobacco is a matter of “interpretation.” This is a guy who’s been getting away with murder for decades, and he doesn’t even know how to lie and deflect well—a sorry state for a leading corporate flak to find himself in!

“What did I do to deserve this?”

We’ve only just begun, and we need to be in this for the long haul if we’re ever going to get some of our democratic power back, which can’t happen without clearing some free space in the rotten media world.

We can’t do it without your support—financial, moral, and technical—from upstanding folks like you. So keep your suggestions flowing in, keep sending out the S.H.A.M.E. reports and pushing them around. Let’s make the propagandists’ work a little more difficult, and everyone else’s a little more interesting.

Support S.H.A.M.E. Contribute using PayPal or WePay…

Thank you!

Yasha Levine & Mark Ames

“Inflict & Endure”

shameproject.com

REPOSTED FROM THE S.H.A.M.E. PROJECT

Last week, I got an email from Malcolm Gladwell. He told me he read the S.H.A.M.E. report I wrote about him a few weeks ago, and asked if I had time to answer a few of his questions:

From: Malcolm Gladwell
To: levine@exiledonline.com
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 3:56 PM

I recently read your pieces about me. I have a number of questions I’d love to ask you. Do you have the time? Cheers, M.

Well, well. What an unexpected surprise! We had reached out to the New Yorker for comment on our exposé of Malcolm Gladwell, but New Yorker editor David Remnick initially refused to comment on the record . . . and then went silent altogether. That was about a month ago—before S.H.A.M.E. released Gladwell’s profile and report, which quickly caught fire, and it seems, caught Gladwell’s attention.

It was gratifying to see Gladwell belatedly deciding to drop me a line—not just personally gratifying, but I hope gratifying for everyone who’s been helping us launch S.H.A.M.E. We’re all in this together, folks, and rousting a busy “thought leader” like Gladwell is a pretty clear confirmation that we’re doing exactly what we set out to do.

More importantly, I figured that if Gladwell was going to engage me like this, I’d have a rare opportunity to learn more about his sort of media corruption, the nuts and bolts of it all, especially the murky relationship between writing about the same corporate interests that happen to pay you tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees.

From the start, it was a little odd that he signed off with the chummy “M” at the end of an oddly chummy email . . . but I had no problem with chummy, so long as I was going to learn something, so I got my best Californian chummy by way of Leningrad on, and emailed back:

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Yasha Levine <levine@exiledonline.com> wrote:

Good to hear from you Malcolm. I welcome any questions you might have. I have plenty of things to ask you as well for a followup S.H.A.M.E. article we’re working on. I want to ask more later, but for now here are a few questions we would like answers or comment on:

1) How much is AHIP paying you to speak at its June 22 conference in Salt Lake City?

2) How much is the Society for Human Resource Management paying you to speak at their event in Atlanta on June 25.

3) How much did Bank of America pay you for that multi-city speaking gig back in November 2011?

4) Had you taken speaking fees from any firms or associations from the finance and/or banking industry before the BofA engagement Please list names, dates and sums.

5) What is the New Yorker’s policy on journalist or editorial conflict-of-interest? What is your personal policy or view on conflict-of-interest?

I’ll follow up with more soon…

Glad you got in touch! Cheers,
YL

PS: Congrats on the HBO pilot!

I was hoping he’d at least answer the first two questions, which referred to two brand new conflicts of interests Malcolm had on deck in his busy schedule.*

Some background: Gladwell was scheduled to talk at a conference put on by AHIP on June 22nd. Who is AHIP? Another one of those bland acronyms that conceals something sinister and awful—well, awful for everyone but a handful of health insurance plutocrats and the corporate speakers who rake in sweet fees at its events.

AHIP is the powerful health insurance industry lobby outfit fighting against universal healthcare and basically against anything that might bring America into line with the civilized world’s approach to health care—from AHIP’s self-interested perspective, it’s a great thing that the US has the most expensive health care system yielding the worst results in terms of life expectancy, compared to other Western countries that have access to free and cheap healthcare. AHIP’s role in profiting from this country’s health care debacle is less well known than, say, the role played by the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity. But to give you an idea of just how serious they are, it was recently revealed that AHIP slipped the Chamber of Commerce over $100 million to lobby against government-run health insurance during Obama’s push for healthcare reform. That’s on top of spending huge amounts of money on astroturf campaigns and public relations offensives to smear anything advocating universal healthcare, such as Michael Moore’s film Sicko.

So that’s why I asked Gladwell about AHIP.

Three days after his speaking engagement at AHIP, on June 25, Gladwell was booked to speak at a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) event in Atlanta, Georgia. SHRM is one of America’s oldest anti-labor/union-busting organizations. Recently SHRM helped lead the propaganda campaign to defeat a bill that would end wage discrimination against women. Right now, SHRM is lobbying to weaken union elections rules, stacking the decks even harder against labor, as if that was needed. (Turns out, S.H.A.M.E. member Steven Levitt has been known to speak at SHRM events as well.)

So those are the sorts of outfits that Gladwell takes checks from—ones that profit from off sickness and misery, and crush labor on behalf of corporate power.

Both gigs presented obvious conflicts of interest for Malcolm Gladwell, assuming he or the New Yorker still believe that journalists shouldn’t take money from the people they write about. The problem is this: Malcolm Gladwell has written about healthcare issues and unions on several occasions, oftentimes in ways that synced with the interests of AHIP and SHRM.

For example: a 2005 article for the New Yorker in which Gladwell wrote that the reason why the USA is the only Western country without universal health care was all the fault of labor unions, an interpretation of history that completely ignored the role played by big business, the medical lobby, and corporate industry front groups, just to name a few of the mega-interests arrayed against universal health care following World War Two. For Gladwell to airbrush corporate power out of the picture like that and instead lay all the blame square on labor unions is the type of skewed, right-wing revisionist history lesson you’d expect from Glenn Beck. Of course, Gladwell isn’t as crude as Beck in his delivery, but in substance, he’s closer than I or most people would ever have imagined. At least people don’t mistake Beck for a journalist—whereas Gladwell is ordained by the New Yorker. To top it all off, Gladwell takes tens of thousands of dollars from these outfits in speaking fees, while at the same time inserting messages friendly to their interests into his New Yorker “journalism” pieces. You tell me who’s more toxic between the two.

So that’s why I was so curious for answers to my questions about his upcoming (at the time of my email) speaking events. Instead of getting some answers, I got a rain-check and the first sign of what was bothering Gladwell:**

On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:39 PM, Malcolm Gladwell wrote:

Dear Yasha.

All in good time. It is my turn to ask questions.

Can we start with the original article in the Washington Post that apparently caught your eye? The news article on the costs of smokers?

Can you explain to me why you interpreted that article as being in the interests of the tobacco industry?

Just curious. M.

This was odd. The man was exposed in a thoroughly sourced investigation as someone who for 25 years has been consistently promoting the interests of tobacco, pharma and Wall Street, all while posing as a credible journalist— and now that he had the chance of confront his accuser and defend himself, all he wanted to know was what caught my eye about just one of the many articles I cited as evidence? Gee, I don’t know where to start. How about the headline, that caught my eye: “Not Smoking Could Be Hazardous to Pension System”?

Puzzled, I wrote back:

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 8:43 PM, Yasha Levine <levine@exiledonline.com> wrote:

Malcolm, I assume this is the paragraph you’re referring to:

The article, headlined “Not Smoking Could Be Hazardous to Pension System,” was not reporting new news, but simply recycling stale tobacco propaganda: a 1987 industry study called “The Social Security Costs of Smoking,” produced by the notorious National Bureau of Economic Research, an organization with ties to the tobacco industry and bankrolled by the biggest names in right-wing corporate propaganda funding—some of the same foundations that funneled cash to one of Gladwell’s first employers, the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

What exactly do you find wrong with it?

Are you aware that the study you used as the basis for your article was a favorite of Philip Morris as well? Could you comment on the fact that the study you used in your article was cited favorably by Philip Morris, and placed on a list of talking points that they promoted to counter the “claim” that smokers cost Medicare more than nonsmokers? You can read the talking points memo here at your leisure. It’s also positively cited in other tobacco industry documents, including this 1987 Tobacco Institute newsletter.

I hope this answers your question.

Now, it’s your turn to answer mine.

YL

1) How much is AHIP paying you to speak at its June 22 conference in Salt Lake City?
2) How much is the Society for Human Resource Management paying you to speak at their event in Atlanta on June 25.
3) How much did Bank of America pay you for that multi-city speaking gig back in November 2011?
4) Had you taken speaking fees from any firms or associations from the finance and/or banking industry before the BofA engagement? Please list names, dates and sums.
5) What is the New Yorker’s policy on journalist or editorial conflict-of-interest? What is your personal policy or view on conflict-of-interest?

Again, I hoped to get some answers from him, something to shine a light into the murky world where A-list journalism meets corporate propaganda and somehow manages to conceal it all. Here, by the way, is a screenshot of an advertisement for Malcolm’s speaking engagement for the health insurance lobby:

You probably won’t be surprised by Gladwell’s response: He didn’t answer my questions. Instead, he continued pressing me on “what I think” about his WaPo article, zapping me with what I guess was supposed to be thought-leader voodoo or marketing-world psychology. Whatever it was, it wasn’t how I imagined a serious New Yorker journalist would address questions and evidence of media corruption:

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012, at 10:22 AM, Malcolm Gladwell wrote:

Thank you for getting back to me Yasha. Yes. I saw that part of your article. But it doesn’t answer my question. I’m interested in what you think of the study’s argument. Why do you think that someone who writes an article about how smokers die young–and as a result use less social security–is shilling for the tobacco industry? Do you think that companies, as a whole, are delighted with people who write stories about how they are killing off their customers?

Somehow he seemed convinced that the way to salvage his reputation was not by debunking S.H.A.M.E.’s evidence with counter-evidence of his own; but rather, by engaging me in a game of wordplay footsie. Perhaps this sort of thing goes over well in the National Journalism Center seminars that he trained up in, but to me, it was almost sad. Here’s one of America’s biggest selling authors and leading journalists; a guy who’s been getting away with murder for years now . . . and no one’s taken him to task for it! It’s as though a vital part of his brain had gone to flab. He doesn’t even know how to lie and deflect well—what a sorry state for a leading corporate flak to find himself in.

I was getting annoyed, so I tried dropping a direct question to get at least one answer from him before this exchange ended.

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Yasha Levine <levine@exiledonline.com> wrote:

You asked:

Do you think that companies, as a whole, are delighted with people who write stories about how they are killing off their customers?

I can’t speak for “companies as a whole” but I can say with certainty that a specific company, Philip Morris, was delighted with the specific study that you based your article on—they were so delighted, in fact, that they recommended and used it for their PR talking points. I’m providing a link to that talking points memo, once again. I hope that answers your question.

So far I’ve been answering your questions and you haven’t answered a single one of mine. Could you please answer at least this one:

Did Philip Morris pay you to speak at the company’s recruitment event in 2005? If you wish, a simple yes or no answer will suffice.

YL

It worked! But in a kind of weird way, in terms of what it revealed. Here was Malcolm’s response:

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012, at 04:14 PM, Malcolm Gladwell wrote:

Sigh. Talking to you is a bit like talking to a brick wall. No you still haven’t answered my question..

Here is what i’m trying to get you to understand. In the early 1990′s, there was a lot of interest among anti-smoking activists in taxing cigarettes more heavily in order to pay for the health burdens caused by smoking. In order to quantify those burdens, economists began looking closely at the mortality and morbidity patterns of smokers. And what did they find? That smokers don’t cause excess health burdens because cigarettes kill them so quickly and efficiently that they die before they can burden Medicare and Social Security. In other words, in presuming to tax cigarettes more heavily, anti-smoking advocates underestimated how lethal cigarettes actually were.

Do you not see how deliciously ironic that was? And why I thought, as a reporter covering health and science, I thought that study would make for a great story? And now I learn that Philip Morris itself was touting the same study–which is doubly ironic. Here is a company that for years said they shouldn’t be regulated because smoking had no ill effects. And now all of a sudden they were saying that they shouldn’t be regulated because they were killing their customers before they reached retirement age!

Writing about that study wasn’t “shilling” for the tobacco industry. It was the opposite. It was exposing the absurdity of the tobacco industry’s position. The reason I wrote to you Yasha is that I simply wanted you to acknowledge that there is a another way to look at that study. So my question: can you acknowledge that?

In answer to your question, I have spoken once in my career at a conference sponsored by a company with an interest in the tobacco business, and I donated my fee to charity.

From: Yasha Levine <levine@exiledonline.com>
To: Malcolm Gladwell
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 2:25 PM

Don’t sigh Malcolm, you’re doing well.

You asked:

Do you not see how deliciously ironic that was?

To answer your question: No, I don’t see the “delicious irony” in anything the tobacco industry adopts into its PR strategy, when one considers that cigarettes kill over 400,000 people per year in the US, and millions per year worldwide. For you to try to characterize the tobacco industry’s PR strategy—the propaganda that enables the deaths of millions of people per year that you so willingly aped on the pages of the Washington Post—as “deliciously ironic” is an abdication of responsibility as a journalist, and frankly downright disturbing.

Your other question was:

Writing about that study wasn’t “shilling” for the tobacco industry. It was the opposite. It was exposing the absurdity of the tobacco industry’s position. The reason I wrote to you Yasha is that I simply wanted you to acknowledge that there is a another way to look at that study. So my question: can you acknowledge that?

No, I will not acknowledge it, because there is no evidence in the article supporting your claim. You said you were “exposing the absurdity of the tobacco industry’s position,” but you did no such thing. And for you to attempt to portray it that way now, 12 years later, is a crude attempt at revisionism.

So far I’ve been answering your questions, but you continue to focus on this one article. Could you answer at least a few of my initial questions—questions which you have repeatedly ignored:

1) How much is AHIP paying you to speak at its June 22 conference in Salt Lake City?

2) How much is the Society for Human Resource Management paying you to speak at their event in Atlanta on June 25.

3) How much did Bank of America pay you for that multi-city speaking gig back in November 2011?

YL

And that’s where the conversation stops. It’s been four days now since my last email, and Malcolm Gladwell still hasn’t replied . . . I guess he was too busy prepping for the AHIP health insurance conference, packing his bags and rehearsing his speech. I believe that speech is called “Cowboys Versus Pit Crews: How to Build a Sustainable Health Care Delivery System.” Should be a good one.

Malcolm, if you’re reading this—please don’t run away. You’ve made plenty of money by now, why not come clean and give us some personal insight into the world you inhabit—where trusted institutions like the New Yorker are exploited for their marketing value to unwitting readers. You’ve profited long enough, and handsomely enough, from abusing the public’s trust and doing your part in degrading democracy. You’ve profited; everyone else has been degraded. You owe it us to shine some light on that sordid world—and to help us get some of our lost power back.

We’re waiting…

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s S.H.A.M.E. Report & Profile…

Notes:

* Gladwell spoke, as scheduled, at AHIP’s Institute 2012 conference on June 22. His talk focused on how the U.S. medical system was broken because it did not eliminate “chauffeurs”—by which he meant that the medical industry wasn’t replacing its workers with machines and automation fast enough. Read the account here.

**This was not the first time Malcolm Gladwell did a speaking gig for the health insurance industry. In his 2004 disclosure statement, which predated his New Yorker article on unions and healthcare, he admitted:

“Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by that article? Yes I have. As I stated earlier, I have given my Tipping Point talk to groups of doctors, hospitals, insurers, as well as Pharmacy Benefit Managers and groups funded by the National Institutes of Health. More specifically, I have on several occasions over the past four years given paid speeches on the Tipping Point to pharmaceutical companies.”

Yasha Levine, President of S.H.A.M.E., is an investigative journalist and a founding editor ofThe eXiled. His work has been published by Wired, The Nation, Slate, The New York Observer and many others.

Click the cover, buy the book!

“In five years . . . I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”

We launched S.H.A.M.E. to expose propagandists, reveal journalistic fraud, and make it a little harder for hacks and shills to manipulate you with impunity, which they continue doing no matter how disastrous their consequences. From the start, we set out to provide readers with simple, merciless and fun to read dossiers on a range of media shills who have degraded our democracy and our world—a handy guide to help you navigate the PR-polluted media. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg fits that mandate perfectly. While Conventional Wisdom is slowly coming to terms with Goldberg’s record of warmongering, deception and violence, S.H.A.M.E. allows readers and others in the media a simple cheat-sheet so that you don’t have to waste your time looking everything up from scratch—and to prevent you from mistaking Jeffrey Goldberg for a credible journalist.

As the latest S.H.A.M.E. Profile demonstrates, Jeffrey Goldberg is a propagandist of the worst, most disastrous kind. For the past ten years-plus, he has peddled blatantly false war propaganda, fronted for the military-industrial machine and played a key PR role in drumming up unfounded terrorist fears in order to push America into war with Iraq. Instead of being held accountable for his failures and his lies, he’s seen nothing but soaring praise and personal profits.

Our profile also makes clear that there’s a dark consistency in Goldberg’s fondness for violence, warmongering and lying to cover up crimes going back to his days as a camp guard at an Israeli detention center for Palestinians. Goldberg reinvented himself from doughy college dropout into manly Israeli camp guard, boasting, “I never hit a Palestinian who wasn’t already hitting me.” Goldberg also admits he “lied” to cover up human rights abuses committed by his fellow Israeli camp guard friends.

Another important yet little-known fact: In the early 1990s, Goldberg explicitly identified himself as an Israeli participating in the “armed administration” of Palestinians in the occupied territories, giving new meaning to a recent New York Times’ description of Goldberg as “Netanyahu’s faithful stenographer.” Goldberg has thus far refused to answer questions over whether or not he is an Israeli citizen, or if he took an oath of loyalty to Israel while serving in the IDF (Goldberg claims he can’t remember); now that he is on record in 1991 identifying himself as an Israeli, it is up to Goldberg to disprove that he is a dual citizen of Israel.

S.H.A.M.E. may not be able to get Goldberg fired or held accountable for his journalistic malpractice—not yet, anyway—but we can make sure that there is a permanent record available to the public of Goldberg’s many violations of the public trust, and the damage he’s caused; and by providing this record, to make it easier for readers and other journalists to quickly call up the steaming pile of racist, warmongering gefilte shit that is Jeffrey Goldberg’s career.

READ JEFFREY GOLDBERG’S

SHAME’S PROFILE >>

Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist, gained nationwide fame and prestige after co-authoring Freakonomics, a pop economics book based partly on Levitt’s original economic research. Published in 2005, Freakonomics became an instant #1 bestseller and spawned an entire Freakonomics media franchise that included a branded Freakonomics blog (hosted on the New York Times website until 2011), a regular segment on the National Public Radio program Marketplace, a Freakonomics movie and, alas, a Freakonomics business consulting company (now called the Greatest Good).

In 2006, Time magazine solidified Levitt’s “thought leader” status by naming him one of “100 People Who Shape Our World.”* But despite Levitt’s high profile, very little has been written about his academic and ideological background. Generally Levitt is assumed to be a harmless, quirky pop economist for trivia nerds. But is that really the case?

As Steven Levitt’s S.H.A.M.E. Profile demonstrates, Levitt is a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago School neoliberal who believes in the sanctity of “the market” and a small government whose function is restricted mostly to protecting property rights. He has used “objective” economic research and mainstream credibility as cover, while attacking teachers’ unions, advocating for the privatization of prison labor, spreading crude climate denialism and promoting rank “free market” ideology that sees human labor as a resource to be extracted for maximum profit. Levitt has also developed a nasty habit of misrepresenting the research of other scientists in order to reach predefined ideological conclusions, and has failed to disclose financial conflicts of interest.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Levitt is his enduring interest in researching and “proving” the effectiveness of authoritarian and, some would say, borderline eugenicist policies. Aside from doing studies on the positive effects that incarceration has on society (we benefit to the tune of $15,000 per inmate per year if inmates are packed into overcrowded conditions), he published a paper that argued that an increase in abortion rates among black women in the 1970s was the main reason for a drop in crime in the 1990s. The methodology and data of his research were discredited by other economists, but Levitt stuck to his original conclusion linking race and crime: fewer African-American children correlates to less crime. Levitt’s explanation wasn’t just wrong, it was extremely sinister, reinforcing a racist stereotype of the worst kind with a seemingly modern “scientific” explanation.

Eugenics theory: alive and well in Freakonomics, the movie.

There’s one aspect of Steven Levitt’s career the profile did not have the space to delve into too deeply: Levitt’s ties to Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Education Secretary and the former head of Chicago’s public schools system.

In Freakonomics, Levitt presents Duncan as a do-gooder and a reformer whose “allegiance was with the children, not with the teachers and their unions.” One thing was true: Duncan did not like unions.

A notorious anti-union activist and crusader for school privatization, Duncan has been credited with doing more than anyone else to help bring the privatized neoliberal nightmare to Chicago’s impoverished and mostly nonwhite public schools. ”Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools and fired entire school staffs,” according to a great 2008 TruthOut report.

And Steven Levitt was right there along with Duncan. Working hand in hand with Duncan, Levitt devised a statistical method that allowed Duncan to catch and fire unionized public school teachers who supposedly cheated on standardized tests. Firing and terrorizing public school teachers—this was clearly a point of pride for Levitt. He took personal credit for sacking at least a dozen teachers, gloating in his book Freakonomics that, as a result of his method, “Chicago Public School system began to fire its cheating teachers. The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned.”

You hear that cheatin’ teachers? There’s a new neoliberal sheriff in town and his name is Steven Levitt!

Retired public school teachers protest against Duncan in Cupertino, California

Levitt was extremely impressed with Arne Duncan’s assault on Chicago’s public education—so much so that he published a post on his New York Times Freakonomics blog titled  ”Nobody Better Than Arne Duncan“ when he heard Obama was tapping Duncan for secretary of education in 2008: “I’ve interacted with Arne a few times, and in a variety of settings. I always walk away dazzled. He is smart as hell and his commitment to the kids is remarkable. If you wanted to start from scratch and build a public servant, Arne would be the end product.”

READ STEVEN LEVITT’S S.H.A.M.E. PROFILE >>

NOTES:

*The Time magazine entry that announced Steven Levitt’s induction into the “Thought Leader Hall of Fame” was written by none other than Malcolm Gladwell.

Read Gladwell’s S.H.A.M.E. Report…

Yasha Levine, President of S.H.A.M.E., is an investigative journalist and a founding editor of The eXiled. His work has been published by Wired, The Nation, Slate, The New York Observer and many others. He has made several guest appearances on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show.