To: U.S. Senator Chris Dodd
Chairman Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs

Dear Senator Dodd,

As women and as taxpayers, we are writing to you today to tell you that size matters.

Usually we love big. Big boxes of chocolate, big boxes of wine, big — well you know. But when it comes to big banks and big bank bailouts, it’s a whole different story.

As you get ready to take up bank reform in your committee next week, we need to talk.

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Independent journalists in Australia studied 2,203 news stories in ten different hard-copy Australian newspapers over a five day work week and found that nearly 55 percent of the stories analyzed were driven by some form of public relations. The most extreme paper was the Daily Telegraph, in which 70% of stories were triggered by some form of PR. The Sydney Morning Herald was the best at "only" 42 percent PR-driven stories. Journalists and editors explained the results by saying they are busier than ever, under-resourced, on deadline and under pressure. Many refused to even talk to the reporters investigating this story. Others who did talk asked to have their comments withdrawn out of fear of being reprimanded or fired. The study is part of an ongoing investigation called "Spinning the Media" by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and the University of Technology that examines the role the public relations plays in making the media.

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.

Headlines blared that Senate Banking Chair Chris Dodd was done with dithering, and ready to move ahead with a financial reform package without Republican support. Financial reform groups should be celebrating this as a positive move that would roll back some of the worst elements of the bill inserted during recent bipartisan negotiations, including the nutty effort to put the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) into the Federal Reserve -- an institution about as popular as the IRS.

Hold the champagne. Reading between the lines, it seems that negotiations are continuing behind the scenes and ranking Republican Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) says “an agreement is still very possible.” The little spat between Dodd and the Republicans has been beneficial, though, because it flushed out more details about the points of agreement and contention.

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The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is a small advocacy group that last fall successfully got the Disney Company to offer full refunds to people who had purchased the company's "Baby Einstein" videos, which were supposed to make very young children into geniuses. But research found that Baby Einstein videos not only failed to make babies smarter, but they actually delayed language development in toddlers. Kids who watched the videos learned fewer words than babies who never watched them. In 2006, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood complained to the Federal Trade Commission about Disney's educational claims about the videos. As a result, Disney dropped the word "educational" from their marketing materials for the videos, but that wasn't enough. Lawyers threatened a class-action lawsuit for deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the purchase price to everyone who had bought the videos. Disney finally agreed to the refund, calling it an "enhanced consumer satisfaction guarantee," without mentioning the product's defect or the lawyers' demands. Shortly after the New York Times announced the refunds, though, Disney contacted officials at the children's mental health center that had long housed and sponsored the Campaign, and pressured them to evict the Campaign, saying the group should not advocate against corporations (even though advocacy is a core responsibility of the 1963 law that provides federal financing for community mental health centers).

Financial reform in the Senate is at a critical juncture, as Senate Democrats attempt to achieve a bipartisan bill. Conservative Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) appears to be in the driver’s seat. Corker is an advocate of putting the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) into the Federal Reserve, an institution almost as unpopular with the public as the IRS.

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As state and local governments consider taxing soda and sugary drinks to raise money and address the national obesity epidemic, manufacturers of sugary drinks -- like countless other industries -- are taking PR cues from the tobacco industry to defeat the initiatives. The PR tactics they are using are starting to be old hat. By now, everyone should be able to spot them, but just in case you're not up to speed on your corporate PR literacy, here's what to look for:

Coca Cola, Pepsico and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group are running print and TV ads promoting their joint initiative to remove full-calorie, artificially-sweetened drinks from schools. At the same time, Americans Against Food Taxes, the front group for the sugary drink manufacturers, is sending out emails boasting that soda companies have replaced full-calorie soft drinks with "smaller-portion" and "portion-controlled" beverages, real juice and bottled water in schools. Voila'! Their products are no longer the problem, they are part of the solution. Even better, now they'll get kids to buy more bottled water -- which costs them next to nothing to make -- at a dollar a bottle. Score!

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Today the Funny or Die crew took the fight for financial reform to a new level, tapping the talents of reality TV star Heidi Montag who delivers the message that "with hidden fees and standard interest rate increases, that $11,000 jaw line can end up costing $50,000 dollars!" Montag is famous for her multiple plastic surgeries featured recently on the cover of People magazine.

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Nutrition experts are battling sugar industry trade groups over over public information about the health hazards of sugar, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and other caloric sweeteners. Nutrition experts say that the sweeteners added to soft drinks and countless other foods and beverages increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, and promote weight gain by adding empty calories to the average diet. Making matters worse for corn refiners, Pepsico is offering "Pepsi Throwback" and "Mountain Dew Throwback," two versions of the popular soda drinks made with "natural sugar" instead of HFCS, and sporting a "rad vintage look." But HFCS manufacturers say their products don't cause health problems or weight gain. To make their point, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) is running a series of TV ads aimed at boosting the image of HFCS and convincing people that they are misled by marketing tactics that imply that products labeled "high-fructose corn syrup-free" are healthier than products with HFCS. CRA also launched sweetsurprise.com, a Web site featuring photos of cute, slender, healthy-looking kids and families happily eating, drinking and riding bikes. The site touts the benefits of HFCS and has articles countering claims that HFCS has any relationship to obesity and other health problems.