Send the message to Congress that we need to break up the banks and end too big to fail. Call your Senator using the toll free number provided by SEIU 866-544-7573. This number will be open and available to consumers until March 31, 2010 or you can send an email at BanksterUSA.org under "Protect American Families."

Congress Daily reported today that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would spend at least $3 million in a multi-state TV ad buy opposing Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd's (D-CN) bill to revamp the financial regulatory system. David Hirschmann, President of the Chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said his organization would spend the money as the bill gets ready to be marked up and voted upon in the Senate Banking Committee next week. The chamber has vowed to kill President Obama's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency and is upset that the Dodd draft creates a strong agency, entitled to a portion of the Federal Reserve’s budget outside of the normal appropriations process. The agency would be led by a presidential appointee, independent of the Fed leadership and the big banks. According to Andrew Pincus, a partner at Mayer Brown LLP working with the Chamber: "It is a pretty unprecedented and shocking concentration of power in one individual," Pincus said. "This is a person who is not under the president's policy control and could only be fired for cause and totally determines their own budget up to a cap." Let’s hope his analysis is correct. A shockingly powerful consumer advocate is just what the nation needs right now. Keep your eyes peeled for ads, and let us know if you see them. The Chamber will focus its blitz in states represented by moderate members of the Banking Committee, including Sens. Jon Tester (D-MN) , Tim Johnson (D-SD), Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Mark Warner (D-VA).

World Water Day 2010 is Monday, March 22nd. It is no surprise that corporations have attempted to co-opt this event. One example of greenwashing that SourceWatch has targeted is the Starbucks-run "www.worldwaterday.net," which many environmentally-minded individuals may mistake for the official UN World Water Day website. Since SourceWatch first identified the misleading page, www.worldwaterday.net now routes viewers to www.waterday.org, where the Starbucks connection is not apparent. (A cached version of the original page's privacy agreement can still be viewed here). Please bookmark our new water clearinghouse on Sourcewatch to find regular updates about this precious and essential natural resource, including news about the dangers of Halliburton's hydrofracking process that is being challenged by citizens opposed to ruining drinking water supplies through efforts to extract natural gas from the Marcellus shale in New York and elsewhere.

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Here are some highlights regarding the 1,300 page bank reform bill released by U.S. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CN) yesterday.

THE GOOD
1) Capital requirements and leveraging requirements to be set by regulators (although some reformers would like these set in law to makes sure they do the job).
2) Creates a council of systemic risk regulators called a Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is generally a good idea. We don’t want to just leave it to the Federal Reserve.
3) Obama’s “Volcker Rule” included, not perfect, but at least it made the cut.

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Fifteen years ago, the Center for Media and Democracy in my book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You first exposed the deceptive PR campaign by the municipal sewage industry that has renamed toxic sewage sludge as "biosolids" to be spread on farms and gardens. Unfortunately, the scam continues to fool more people than ever, even in San Francisco which is often dubbed the country's greenest city.

I suspect that Bay area celebrity chef Alice Waters would never dump sewage sludge onto her own organic garden, nor serve food grown in sludge in her world famous natural foods restaurant Chez Panisse. The mission of her Chez Panisse Foundation is to create "edible schoolyards" where kids grow, prepare, and eat food from their own organic gardens. But Francesca Vietor, the new executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, is at the same time actively promoting dumping toxic sludge on gardens in her role as Vice President of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

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Innocent until proven guilty is a founding principle of our criminal justice system. This principle has also been codified in the U.S. Constitution via the 6th Amendment, providing the right to adequate counsel to all individuals accused of a crime. Last week, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol launched an attack on individuals who undertook the enormously difficult task of upholding justice when they represented Guantanamo detainees. In the advertisement by a new entity named "Keep America Safe," Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol question the loyalty of Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers who had previously represented Guantanamo detainees in order to defend U.S. legal obligations under the Constitution and treaties we have ratified.

The seven unnamed DOJ attorneys have been nicknamed the "al-Qaida Seven" working in the "Department of Jihad." As Dahlia Lithwick points out in her Slate column, this advertisement has stirred up panic. "The Justice Department reports being swamped with panicked phone calls since the ad started running this week. In 2010, calling someone a Bin Laden-loving jihadist isn't just meaningless partisan hackery."

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In a straight party-line vote, ten people on the Texas "Board of Education" voted Friday to change history textbooks to advance right-wing ideological positions on historical matters (the five members of the other party voted against the measures as a whole). Because Texas is one of the most populous states in the union, the contents that it requires in its history books will affect the quality of historical education students receive in other states. (Hawai'i, for example, lacks the population leverage to push for a laid-back island view of history.) In all, the Board has passed over 100 amendments to the curriculum since the beginning of the year. According to the New York Times, "no historians, sociologists or economists" were consulted during the Board's meetings on these right-wing changes, which were spearheaded by board member and dentist Don McLeroy, who claimed expertise in a host of serious educational matters not involving tooth decay.

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Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who represented Fort Worth in Congress and now leads the right-wing Freedomworks, told some Texas-sized whoppers to the Tea Party crowd at the National Press Club this week.

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As the year-long fight over health care reform draws to a close, corporations are once again pouring big money into influencing the debate. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already spent $11 million just this month to try and get 27 Democrats who supported the health care bill last year to oppose it. Pharmaceutical companies have bought $12 million worth of advertising to try and defeat the measure. The total amount of money being aimed at swing Democrats during this round of lobbying could total $30 million before week's end. The corporate front group Americans for Prosperity, financed by the billionaire conservative oil man David Koch, has also jumped into the fray, funding an anti-reform ad campaign that cost nearly $1 million. As several on-the-fence Democrats try to sort out their constituents' feelings towards the bill, the lobbying is becoming deafening.

After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm, Murray Hill, Inc., took what it considers the next logical step: running for office in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

The corporate candidate has its own Web site, Facebook page (with nearly 6,000 fans), and an online ad on YouTube that has drawn more than 187,000 hits. The video ends with an inspiring call to action: “Vote for Murray Hill Incorporated — the best democracy money can buy.”

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Ads for private, for-profit colleges and trade schools like the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges, Inc., lure students by leading them to believe that after graduation, they will land well-paying jobs that will help them get to a solid middle-class life. But graduates often end up seeing more bills than paychecks as they struggle to pay back massive student loans -- often at double-digit interest rates --after landing low-income jobs. A two-year associates degree at ITT Technical Institute, for example, costs around $40,000. The Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Portland, Oregon arranged one student a loan of almost $14,000 that carried a a 13 percent interest rate and a $7,327 "finance charge." Experts say recruiters for these schools use aggressive, sometimes deceitful recruiting practices that can mislead students into poverty. The schools derive the bulk of their revenue from federal loans and grants, and the percentages have been climbing rapidly. The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, derives 86 percent of it revenue from federal student aid sources, up from 69 percent two years earlier. Critics argue that these institutions profit at taxpayer expense while delivering questionable benefits to students. The Obama administration has floated a proposal to protect students from predatory practices by barring for-profit schools from loading them up with more debt that is justified by the salaries of the jobs they would likely pursue. The proposal has sparked fierce lobbying from the for-profit educational industry, which is pushing to maintain the status quo.

A pro-government television station in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia broadcast a fake, half-hour news report depicting a Russian military invasion of the country, sending fear and panic throughout Georgian citizens. The station called the broadcast a "simulation" of what a new invasion might look like. In August, 2008 Russian tanks, troops and armored vehicles invaded Georgia after Georgian troops attacked pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. The fake news show used footage of Georgians fleeing that 2008 conflict, and sound bites from Russian presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Throughout the broadcast, a news anchor provided "updates" saying Russian forces had bombed a military base and an airport in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, and reported on the number of deaths. The broadcast ended with a note that the events were not real, but the station did not run any on-screen notes during the rest of the show to make viewers aware that what they were watching wasn't real. Two hours after the show, the TV station ran an apology.