Many activists fighting against police abuses have embraced longtime GOP activist and Koch employee Radley Balko for his reporting on the militarization of police. Leaving aside the libertarian politics of focusing on the militarization of police as the problem — rather than the worsening class war and inequality in this country that make a militarized police force inevitable — few have bothered to scrutinize the accuracy and professionalism of Balko's reporting.

They should, as the Wall Street Journal discovered too late. Last summer, the Journal published a long excerpt from Balko's book, "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces". Shortly after Balko's article was published, factual inaccuracies came to light, forcing the editors of the Wall Street Journal to fact-check his article, something Balko's editors at Public Affairs apparently failed to do. The laundry list of factual errors and shoddy reporting was so long, that the Journal updated his story by appending a long "Corrections & Amplifications" at the end of his piece. The correction to Balko's reporting stands as one of the most epic reporting corrections in the annals of journalism. Here it is:

Corrections & Amplifications

The Consumer Products Safety Commission does not have a SWAT team. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that it does. Also, the U.S. Department of Education and the Fish and Wildlife Service have law-enforcement divisions, but the agencies say they don't receive tactical or military training and don't operate as SWAT teams. An earlier version of this essay incorrectly said that the agencies have SWAT teams. In addition, the earlier version incorrectly described the execution of two search warrants. In the first case, the FWS says that its officers' weapons weren't drawn when it searched a Gibson Guitar factory in 2009. The essay incorrectly called it an "assault-style raid." In the second case, the Department of Education says its search of the residence of alleged members of a student-loan fraud ring was successfully executed. The essay incorrectly described the search as "bungled" and incorrectly implied that the home was searched because a resident had failed to repay her student loan. Finally, Mr. Balko says that he sought comment from the U.S. government agencies mentioned in the essay while researching a book in 2012. The essay incorrectly implied that the agencies had failed to respond to recent requests for comment.

Balko's laissez-faire attitude towards facts and falsehoods in his reporting should come as no surprise to SHAME readers. As our profile shows, since the late 1990s, Balko has worked as a Republican Party propagandist, recruiter and activist — most of that time in the Koch brothers' front groups like Reason magazine and the CATO Institute. Balko has also operated as an undisclosed tobacco industry lobbyist, and allied with PR industry villain Rick Berman's campaign on behalf of the fast food industry. Moreover, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal would be the last publication to take a hostile view towards Balko's journalism; from 2001 through 2008, Balko worked for Murdoch as a regular columnist at FoxNews.com. Murdoch served on the CATO Institute's board of directors, where Balko continues to serve as a CATO Media Fellow.

In other words, Balko is the furthest thing from a professional reporter. However, because Balko has pursued a subject dear to many liberal activists struggling against police abuse, and because he comes with deep Koch pockets and relationships — no one on the left has had any interest in checking Balko's facts and professionalism. Apparently fact-checking a reporter is something only done when we disagree with the report; otherwise, it's unseemly.

The problem of course is that a right-wing GOP shill like Balko is earning the credibility and respect of many on the left, who aren't even bothering to question why a Koch-funded PR operative has taken such an interest in police militarization, and what their political goal is in doing so. As SHAME revealed, Balko believes the answer to criminal justice problems is privatization. Balko has proposed privatizing criminal labs and privatizing juries, and defended Stand Your Ground laws during the Trayvon Martin trial by falsely asserting, "Stand Your Ground was not a factor in the Zimmerman verdict."

Balko has even called for privatizing National Security, in a FoxNews article headlined: "National Security Needs Private Sector Innovation."

These are Balko's libertarian politics, which he is certainly entitled to. But they are not likely the sort politics that Balko's many progressive boosters share.

Read Radley Balko's SHAME profile...

The SHAME Project was the first to expose Malcolm Gladwell as one of America's most successful propagandists. In May 2012, we told the story of how Gladwell began as a college Republican, received journalist training at the tobacco-funded National Journalism Center and then throughout his career used his books and articles to run cover for pharmaceutical companies, big tobacco, the health insurance industry and Wall Street fraudsters — all while pocketing serious cash as a sought-after corporate speaker, earning $1 million a year, sometimes from the very same corporations and industry groups he happens to promote and defend in print.

Writing in NSFWCORP, Yasha Levine reviews Malcolm's Gladwell's latest bestseller, "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants." And it ain't pretty:

Ever since Malcolm Gladwell’s “David and Goliath” came out in early October, he's been on a non-stop promotional tour. He's appeared on the BBC and the Daily Show, he's done Twitter group chats and Ted Talk Q&As, and has had negative and positive reviews published in dozens of media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian. But despite all this PR attention, as far as I can tell, no one's really described in plain English what the book is about. And that's just weird…

So let me be the first: The book is about pitying the rich. Its central thesis: being poor, crippled and/or discriminated against helps you succeed in life.

"We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.”

"David and Goliath" is the right book for our times. America is in the grips of historic economic inequality, unemployment and misery; it’s being looted and trashed by finance hucksters and extraction industry oligarchs, while its citizens are disengaged and distracted and too tired and overworked to really do much about it.

Gladwell offers to soothe this swirling world of shit, misery, exploitation and corruption with a simple counterintuitive message: People who live paycheck to paycheck or dig in the trash, well, they're not as disadvantaged as popular wisdom would have us believe. The truly disadvantaged are the rich. Because wealth, power, mansions, Porsches, private jets, servants, elite private schools, influence and access — all those great things — are barriers preventing them from realizing their true potential and achieving success. In short: Wealth holds you back.

Read the full review over at NSFWCORP.com...

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine just published in NSFWCORP a companion essay to go along with Radley Balko's SHAME profile. It puts Balko's recent defense of George Zimmerman and Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law into context, and explains why Balko frequently confounds his progressive supporters with pro-corporate, reactionary positions on everything from boosting for privatization and guns to attacking teachers’ unions...

Update (10/8/2013):  AlterNet reprinted SHAME's Radley Balko article in full. "Meet Former GOP Public Relations Flak Radley Balko, Now a Libertarian Crusader Against Police Militarization"

Read it:

Just after George Zimmerman was found “not guilty,” Huffington Post reporter and Cato Institute Media Fellow Radley Balko tweeted out a false claim in defense of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law:

"Media people: Stand Your Ground was not a factor in the Zimmerman verdict. Stop perpetuating this myth."

A lot of Balko’s followers, particularly progressives and journalists, were baffled: Why would one of the foremost muckrakers on criminal justice abuse write something so obviously wrong and misleading? As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

"There has been a lot of complaint that "stand your ground" has nothing to do with this case. That contention is contravened by the fact that it is cited in the instructions to the jury."

Coates quoted directly from the judge’s instructions read to the jury:

"[Zimmerman] had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force..."

Balko was finally forced to retract after getting called out by ProPublica’s Justin Elliot and NSFWCORP cartoonist Matt Bors. But it left many of his progressive-minded followers baffled, and it was hardly the first time Balko had been called out for taking reactionary stances on the Trayvon Martin murder case. After going noticeably silent for almost a month after Trayvon’s murder, Balko twisted the framing around, tweeting out in March 2012:

"Sad to see a case of racism and police corruption/ineptitude/indifference being shoehorned to fit anti-self-defense, anti-gun politics"

Many of Balko’s progressive followers, unaware of his long career inside the GOP think-tank network, have mistaken Balko’s criticisms of police abuse and the War On Drugs with a larger progressive politics; they’ve assumed he shares many of the same progressive assumptions they do. So every time Balko comes out with a pro-corporate, reactionary position — boosting for privatization and guns, defending Stand Your Ground, savaging Naomi Klein and teachers’ unions, or taking misleading and reactionary positions on the Trayvon Martin murder case — his progressive readers are left confused, but without a broader understanding of where Balko comes from.

In fact, Radley Balko’s current incarnation as a crusading journalist focused on criminal justice abuse is but a recent twist in Balko’s career as a GOP public relations flak.

Or read the story on NSFWCORP.com (subscription required)...

This article first appeared in NSFWCORP on July 26, 2013

Just after George Zimmerman was found “not guilty,” Huffington Post reporter and Cato Institute Media Fellow Radley Balko tweeted out a false claim in defense of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law:

"Media people: Stand Your Ground was not a factor in the Zimmerman verdict. Stop perpetuating this myth."

A lot of Balko’s followers, particularly progressives and journalists, were baffled: Why would one of the foremost muckrakers on criminal justice abuse write something so obviously wrong and misleading? As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

"There has been a lot of complaint that "stand your ground" has nothing to do with this case. That contention is contravened by the fact that it is cited in the instructions to the jury."

Coates quoted directly from the judge’s instructions read to the jury:

"[Zimmerman] had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force..."

Balko was finally forced to retract after getting called out by ProPublica’s Justin Elliot and NSFWCORP cartoonist Matt Bors. But it left many of his progressive-minded followers baffled, and it was hardly the first time Balko had been called out for taking reactionary stances on the Trayvon Martin murder case. After going noticeably silent for almost a month after Trayvon’s murder, Balko twisted the framing around, tweeting out in March 2012:

"Sad to see a case of racism and police corruption/ineptitude/indifference being shoehorned to fit anti-self-defense, anti-gun politics"

Many of Balko’s progressive followers, unaware of his long career inside the GOP think-tank network, have mistaken Balko’s criticisms of police abuse and the War On Drugs with a larger progressive politics; they’ve assumed he shares many of the same progressive assumptions they do. So every time Balko comes out with a pro-corporate, reactionary position — boosting for privatization and guns, defending Stand Your Ground, savaging Naomi Klein and teachers’ unions, or taking misleading and reactionary positions on the Trayvon Martin murder case — his progressive readers are left confused, but without a broader understanding of where Balko comes from.

In fact, Radley Balko’s current incarnation as a crusading journalist focused on criminal justice abuse is but a recent twist in Balko’s career as a GOP public relations flak.

After Balko graduated from Indiana University in 1997 with degrees in journalism and political science, he found work with Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute as its “Campus Journalism Coordinator.”

The Leadership Institute is a Republican Party recruitment organization that describes itself as “the premier training ground for tomorrow’s conservative leaders,” whose goal is “to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative public policy leaders” through its numerous “journalism seminars.” The Leadership Institute’s alumni include Karl Rove, Rove’s fake White House press pool “reporter” Jeff Gannon, convicted criminal James O’Keefe, and major GOP figures including Grover Norquist, Christian Right leader Ralph Reed, and Sen. Mitch McConnell.

A Los Angeles Times article on a Leadership Institute-sponsored journalism seminar at a North Carolina college said it “bore little resemblance to a traditional journalism class” teaching students “how to start their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals. And how to pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student government.” The LI seminar grads’ ultimate goal: “to alter the basic makeup of the nation’s professional news outlets.”

At the Leadership Institute, Balko “marketed and recruited college journalists for LI’s two-day seminars,” according to his online resume.

This was how Radley Balko’s “journalism” career began: marketing and coordinating seminars for Karl Rove’s and James O’Keefe’s college Republican recruitment outfit.

Balko did something right: By 2001, he was working at the Cato Institute, the billionaire Koch brothers’ flagship libertarian think-tank in Washington DC. (Cato was originally founded in 1974 as the "Charles Koch Foundation.”) Balko’s job description at Cato: “Marketing manager for the Cato Institute” and “Managing editor of www.cato.org”. His duties included marketing “Cato’s studies, forums, conferences, scholars and publications,” as well as “forging corporate and association partnerships.”

Balko also landed a gig as a FoxNews.com columnist, riding with the incoming Bush Administration’s ideological tidal wave. At FoxNews.com Balko churned out crude rightwing pro-corporate propaganda, attacking government regulations, praising free-markets, boosting for Big Tobacco and the health insurance industry. A sample Radley Balko headline: “Greed Makes the World Go 'Round.”

Balko wrote his FoxNews.com column throughout the Bush years, and from 2001 through 2008, one of his favorite themes was promoting the privatization of Social Security. That also happened to be the favorite theme of his employer, the Cato Institute, which had poured more resources into privatizing Social Security over more years than any outfit in DC. As Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported in June 2001,

"The Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, has spent about $3 million in the past six years to run a virtual war room to promote Social Security privatization....Two members of Bush's Social Security commission, Sam Beard and former representative Timothy J. Penny (D-Minn.), are on a Cato privatization panel, and Cato staff members have been assigned to the Bush commission."

Cato placed a former Pinochet minister responsible for crushing labor unions during the dictator’s bloody reign, Jose Piñera, in charge of Cato’s “Project On Social Security Choice” (originally named the “Project on Social Security Privatization”). In 1998, former UN official Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs suggested that Cato’s vice president, Piñera, was a human rights criminal:

“Pinera was the Pinochet dictatorship's labor minister at a time when the country's trade union movement was suffering one of its worst periods of repression....Pinera was a vital cog in the Pinochet dictatorship's ability to implement a draconian labor code. It is simply outrageous for the Cato Institute to have him as co-chair of its Social Security privatization effort. This is an example of crime without punishment and reflects the conservative organization's contempt for the suffering imposed on Chile's population during the Pinochet era.”

In a 2001 column for Fox, Balko pushed for Social Security privatization just as the Bush Administration, led by advisors from the Cato Institute, geared up for a major Social Security privatization campaign. Balko called Social Security “little more than a tax on laborers” and said that privatizing it would “benefit the poor” and “also benefit African-Americans.” In a 2003 blog post headlined “Fisking Tom Tomorrow,” Balko described Social Security as “a fraud and a lie, a ponzi scheme that would be illegal if ever attempted in the private sector.”

Balko was still selling the Social Security privatization snake oil in 2008, after the financial markets were free-falling, and millions of Americans saw their private retirement savings disappear. In an October 6, 2008 FoxNews.com piece headlined, “Social Security Still Needs To Be Privatized,” Balko wrote:

"You think the stock market is risky? The federal government currently has obligations it will never be able to keep."

That same year, he went after Naomi Klein in a series of blog posts for her book, "The Shock Doctrine":

“Klein is really just astonishingly stupid. It’s telling that she waited until after [Milton] Friedman was dead to publish her ignorant attack on his legacy.” —January 2008

“In a just world, Klein’s book would have been recalled, and she’d have slunk off the national stage in shame. She is not a serious person.” —October 2008

“Naomi Klein, giant ignoramus, or the giantest ignoramus?” —July 2008

In 2010, Balko responded to the New Yorker éxpose on the Koch brothers by tweeting,

“I’d like to thank the Koch brothers for six years of funding my right-wing, corporatist work on police abuse and criminal justice reform.”

Later in 2011, during Koch-backed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions, Balko published a long defense of the Kochs, claiming they weren't interested in politics, and contributed mainly to civil society and the arts:

“But though I’ve never met either of the Koch brothers, I suspect that like most libertarians, they’d rather avoid the unseemly world of politics as often as possible, where winning generally means forcing other people to bend to your will… They seem more interested in contributing to voluntary, civil society, by promoting ideas (yes, through think tanks and magazines like Reason), the arts, research, and by fighting particularly pernicious laws like the PATRIOT Act through the courts instead of through contributions to generally spineless politicians.”

Balko’s right-wing views on economics issues were consistent with his views on key social issues, such as his opposition to affirmative action.

As the Iraq war heated up in 2003, Balko published inflammatory pieces attacking affirmative action in public universities, while supporting private universities’ rights to racial discrimination, citing Bob Jones University as an example. Even more disturbing, Balko in the same piece said he opposed the very existence of public universities (despite having graduated from Indiana U) — in other words, Balko supports a totally privatized university system, in which racially segregated universities would be allowed to operate unmolested:

"If Bob Jones University wants to prohibit blacks from stepping foot on campus, I don’t think such a policy should be illegal...

"There’s no need for public universities. But if you’re going to have them...I’m sorry, but you just can’t grant admission to one student and deny it to another for any reason other than merit."

Later in 2003, Balko blamed the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal at the New York Times on affirmative action:

"Nearly everything about the Blair case came about because of affirmative action, or at least from the entitlement mindset that comes with support for affirmative action.”

Ignoring the numerous examples of white journalists in plagiarism scandals (Stephen Glass, Jack Kelley, Mike Barnicle, Stephen Ambrose, etc), Balko blamed his own racist thoughts regarding the Jayson Blair scandal not on himself or his right-wing libertarian ideology, but rather on affirmative action programs and liberals:

"What’s unfortunate — and what I’m loathe to admit — was my reaction when, a couple of days later, I saw [Jayson Blair’s] picture. 'He’s black,' I said as a foul thought emerged from the darker corners of my thinking: 'probably an affirmative action case.'

"As it turns out, my first, more shameful conclusion was correct. Race had everything to do with this story — and not because bigoted people chose to exploit Blair to further some hateful agenda. Rather, it’s because open-minded, well-intentioned people used Blair’s race to put him in a position he wasn’t professionally prepared for. And in so doing, those open-minded people lent a bit of ammunition and a small sense of validation not just to hate mongers, but to those pestering, nagging thoughts about things black and white like the one that occurred to me when I first saw Jayson Blair’s picture."

Balko’s disturbing views on race were not confined to his opposition to affirmative action. For instance, in a 2002 a blog post Balko accused Jesse Jackson of “stirring up racial animosity” and extorting money from major US corporations. As proof, Balko cited and even quoted from a white supremacist, anti-immigrant source, American Renaissance magazine, recommending his readers do the same:

“Read a detailed account of Jackson’s corporate shakedowns ... here, from a group called Common Sense Club."

At the time Balko linked to the Common Sense Club, its “About” page described itself as:

"The mission of the CommonSenseClub.com is to expand the readership of American Renaissance."

On the same “About” page, the Common Sense Club warned readers:

"Besides the extra tax burden on white Americans, and soaring insurance rates of all kinds, etc., there is the far greater cost of ever expanding legal discrimination against whites in the form of 'affirmative action.'"

"Affirmative action has now been expanded from its original clientele of American-born blacks to include virtually all non-whites… so that now non-whites fresh off the boat receive preferences over the children of whites who have been here for generations"

"Nearly one million Arabs— nearly all of whom have arrived since 1965— now live in America, and are lobbying for racial preferences."

The article that Balko linked to and quoted was taken from American Renaissance magazine’s “Extra!” section in its March 2001 issue, which begins with the attack on Jesse Jackson Balko cited as proof Jackson is a racial extortionist. On the same page Balko linked to, there were further claims that “young black men are particularly murderous” and “immigrants continue to bring tuberculosis,” along with praise for an “excellent and comprehensive” racial eugenics book by Arthur Jensen, and a piece arguing that the happiest Americans are whites who live in the purest-white regions of the country.

By the end of 2004, Balko was listed as a Cato Institute “policy analyst.” One of his jobs: lobbying for Big Tobacco interests. Cato’s major donors have included Philip Morris, British-American Tobacco, and RJ Reynolds; secret tobacco industry documents leaked in the late 1990s revealed the Cato Institute’s covert role as a “National Ally” of the tobacco lobby, and Cato executives including Ed Crane, Robert Levy and Tim Lynch shamelesslygroveling to tobacco executives for donations while selling Cato’s willingness to shill for their interests.

In 2004, Balko exploited America’s terrorism fears to argue that hiking taxes on cigarettes would help Hezbollah and other terrorists:

The tax hike might also mean … an invigorated black market for cigarettes, an increase in the crime and menace that come with black markets, and a growing presence of international terrorist organizations that fund themselves with bootlegged cigarettes.

The following year, without disclosing his employers’ ties to tobacco companies, Balko testified against a smoking ban in workplaces before the District of Columbia City Council, arguing that the smoking ban would be tantamount to fascism:

“This isn’t about worker’s rights. The idea that the Washington, D.C. city council is banning public smoking to benefit the city’s waiters, waitresses and bartenders is a canard. There are countless jobs and professions that are far more dangerous than serving food or drink in the presence of secondhand smoke….The health risks associated with secondhand smoke are debatable.”

Balko then went on a conspiratorial rant, alleging that smoking bans were a conspiracy by “healthists” determined to make everyone live like they do, “by force, if necessary.” Balko concluded by warning the lone DC council member who stuck around to listen to his horseshit (eight of the nine council members walked out):

“I’d urge the D.C. city council to resist this tide of tyrannical healthism.”

Tobacco kills nearly 6 million people a year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The same year Balko lobbied against DC’s smoking ban, Balko ran “Morgan Spurlock Watch,” a website attacking Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Super Size Me” — which Balko called a “scam” — defending the fast food industry and Big Agro. The website was an extension of the “policy analysis” work he was doing for the Cato Institute, which has been a longtime promoter of Big Agro and restaurant industry interests, running articles with headlines like“Food Apartheid” and “A Happy Meal Ban Is Nothing To Smile About.” Balko explained why he set up the anti-Spurlock website: “[Spurlock is] consumed by a loathing of business and capitalism – to the point of refusing to allow accuracy to get in the way of making his point. And I think someone needs to hold him accountable.”

Balko’s pro-fast food industry PR repeatedly cited and relied on propaganda published by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) — a front-group for the restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industries created by notorious PR man Rick Berman, whom “60 Minutes” called “Dr. Evil.” Balko quoted “evidence” from Berman’s CCF on numerous occasions, and encouraged his followers to read CCF propaganda.

A few months after setting up “Morgan Spurlock Watch,” Balko took on a cause that he has since become known for, overshadowing nearly all of his other right-wing propaganda: The Mississippi death-row murder case of Cory Maye, convicted of shooting a policeman to death during a drug raid. Maye had pled “not guilty” on “self-defense” — he claimed the police, who had come with a warrant, burst into his apartment without announcing themselves, and that he shot the officer in the dark, unaware he was a cop.

Balko and his employers have heavily promoted a narrative giving the Cato Institute employee enormous credit for “saving a man’s life” — a rather tawdry and shameless bit of self-promotion that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It is largely because of Balko’s alleged role in freeing Maye, an African-American, that some people were shocked and puzzled by his claims about the George Zimmerman murder case. In fact, Balko’s positions in both cases is consistent: Both times, Balko aligned with the side of “Stand Your Ground” and self-defense laws.

Cory Maye shot and killed Mississippi K9 officer Ron Jones in 2001, and was sentenced to die by lethal injection in January 2004 after the judge and jury rejected Maye’s self-defense argument. Balko took up Maye’s cause in December 2005, nearly two years after Maye was sentenced to death. Balko’s interest coincided with a new ALEC model “Stand Your Ground” bill inMississippi’s legislature, part of a major SYG push in several states in late 2005 and early 2006. The Cato Institute has been a vigorous defender of “Stand Your Ground” laws and an opponent of gun control. ALEC’s ties to the Koch brothers have been well-documented.

Balko took up Cory Maye’s cause for Cato at the same time that Eric Holder’s law firm Covington & Burling swooped in with half a dozen lawyers and took over Maye’s defense. On March 6, 2006, the AP reported on the significance of Maye’s case for the new ALEC-sponsored “Stand Your Ground” bill in the Mississippi legislature:

"Radley Balko, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute in Washington and a biweekly columnist for FoxNews.com, has taken up Maye’s cause.

"…'The state of Mississippi is about to add a perverse twist to that violation by executing Maye for daring to defend himself.'

"The case is all the more relevant now, as lawmakers consider measures that would broaden the right for citizens to kill intruders.

"Currently it is legal for Mississippians to defend themselves from intruders who they believe will do them 'some great personal injury.'

"Two bills before the state Senate and the House would expand that right to include a citizen’s place of employment, businesses and vehicles."

Covington & Burling’s lawyers succeeded in overturning Maye’s conviction on the grounds that the judge had not properly instructed the jury about Maye’s right to shoot in self-defense — thereby saving not only Maye’s life, but also the legal viability of Mississippi’s new “Stand Your Ground” law, which passed in 2006.

Today, Covington & Burling’s role — and that of the half-dozen lawyers assigned to Maye’s defense pro bono — is all but forgotten, while Balko’s role blogging about Maye has been turned into legend, on forums like his own Huffington Post bio page:

“His reporting on the Cory Maye case, in which Maye mistakenly killed a police officer in a mistaken drug raid, helped Maye get off death row and win a new trial. Maye was finally released in July 2011.”

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 16-year-old African American, was shot to death while walking home by an armed vigilante waffentwerp named George Zimmerman. The Trayvon murder quickly went national as word spread that his killer was not charged due to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law — the law that became ALEC’s model “Stand Your Ground” law passed in scores of other states, including Mississippi. As the Trayvon murder dominated headlines, Balko’s readers were puzzled by his unusual silence, given his focus on criminal justice system abuse and the Cory Maye case, where he “saved a man’s life.”

Nearly a month after Trayvon’s murder, Balko finally broke his silence:

"I’ve received quite a few emails, Tweets, and comments asking why I haven’t yet written on the Trayvon Martin case. These have ranged from polite inquiries as to what I think about the case, to not-so-subtle implications about what my “conspicuous silence” says about me, to demands that I drop everything and investigate, to a weird rush of emails a couple days ago screaming (as much as an email can scream) that I haven’t covered the case because Martin is black and I only care about the civil liberties of white people. Given the narrow time window in which that last batch of emails arrived, I’m fairly sure they all came from the same blog post or discussion board, though I wasn’t able (and didn’t put up much of an effort) to track down the source."

Balko offered a series of excuses, including: “I’m working on a number of other projects that I can’t just drop in order to jump into another story,” “I’m writing a book,” “I also do occasionally enjoy doing things that aren’t work-related,” and “it doesn’t appear to involve any issues about which I have some specific expertise…”

And yet Balko did have a lot to say about the case: He accused Trayvon supporters of “shoehorning” the case “to fit anti-self-defense, anti-gun politics”; declared “I’m not yet convinced [Zimmerman] committed a crime”; and savaged the prosecutor who finally brought charges because she met with the Martin family and prayed with them:

"I find the idea of a prosecutor praying with a victim’s family off-putting in general. But it’s particularly troubling in this case...

"...By meeting with Martin’s family, praying with them, and implying in her press conference that she immediately saw them as the victim’s family, she gave the impression that she had made up her mind before she started investigating. And her weak indictment did little to vindicate her of that notion."

After Zimmerman was found “not guilty” by a jury instructed to rule based on the “Stand Your Ground” law’s narrow language, Balko waged a misleading defense of “Stand Your Ground” falsely claiming, “Stand Your Ground was not a factor in the Zimmerman verdict.”

His newer readers, many of them progressives unaware of Balko’s past, were confused; had they been following Balko’s career, they would have seen that his politics have been consistent since his first columns for FoxNews.com and the Cato Institute over a decade ago.

Even in the policy area where progressives have lined up with Balko, his solutions are extreme: Balko supports privatizing juries, privatizing criminal labs, and believes that the solution to America's high incarceration rate is, and we quote: "less democracy."

To read more about Radley Balko and other covert media shills, check out his SHAME profile.

This article first appeared in NSFWCORP on July 26, 2013

Remember Ally Bank's conflicted funding of NPR financial news program Planet Money? Well, turns out NPR is much more compromised than we ever imagined. Even its coverage of education issues is rife with biased reporting and undisclosed conflicts of interest that tie NPR to some of the most powerful pro-school privatization interests in the country.

Yasha Levine reports in NSFWCORP...

***

Et Tu NPR?

Last week, I wrote about the nation’s first successful “parent trigger” privatization of a public school, in a isolated town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. In that piece, I mentioned how parents and teachers had become disillusioned by the biased reporting of parent trigger in the media.

“No matter what article I read, it seemed to me that the common perspective that was shared was pro-Parent Revolution,” said La Nita M. Dominique, the local Adelanto president of the state teachers union, referring to the outside pro-charter front group that descended on their community and used harassment, deception and thinly veiled threats of deportation to push parents into signing a petition that handed over their kids’ school to a private contractor.

Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, described feeling that she was caught in some kind of grand conspiracy that was bigger and more powerful than anything she could imagine.

“I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I’d get the article and I’d be like this has nothing to fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? [D]o they own the newspapers?”

It’s easy to paint this as the paranoia of parents who feel like the media doesn’t understand their concern about parent trigger. That was my first impulse too. And then I started reading some of the coverage.

It didn’t matter if it was Fox News, NPR, the Washington Post, LA Weekly or the local right-wing newspaper: coverage of parent trigger issues would invariably have the same pro-privatization bias, even down to their use of the same stock phrases about “parent empowerment” and the need give parents the ability to “reform” a system that protects lazy public school teachers and their sleazy their union cronies.

All very strange — until you start connecting the dots between the financial backers of pro-parent trigger groups like Parent Revolution and the media industry.

As I wrote in my earlier piece, Rupert Murdoch has announced his plans for expansion into private education (“When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”) The Financial Times and The Economist are both owned, or part owned, by Pearson, which has huge interests in education and educational publishing.

Some media organizations would barely survive without their educational arms. The parent company of The Washington Post, for example (which also owns Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine and other media properties) relied on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, for 62% of its revenue in 2012.

In these cynical times you might not be surprised to learn that News Corp, The Washington Post Company and Pearson are hugely conflicted in their education coverage.

But then there’s NPR.

What’s not just surprising, but actually shocking, is how far pro-school privatization interests have been able to infiltrate and corrupt the reporting at supposedly left-leaning NPR, and its affiliate public radio stations.

Consider a new NPR local news project called State Impact, which NPR describes as a “local-national collaboration between NPR and station groups in eight states that reports on state government actions and their impact on citizens and communities.”

In January, State Impact published an interview with Greg Harris, the Ohio director of Michele Rhee’s pro-charter school astroturf group StudentsFirst to promote a “report card” that the group released rating Ohio’s state education policies.

State Impact reporter Ida Lieszkovszky had nothing but praise for StudentsFirst, describing it as “a group looking to improve education through increased accountability for teachers and principals, more financial transparency in schools, and enhanced power for parents, is grading states on their education initiatives.”

StudentsFirst gave Ohio a C-, largely because the state did not “evaluate”—aka fire—teachers based on “performance” and limited the number of total charter schools that could be opened. In fact, StudentsFirst gave most states Ds or lower for not firing unionized teachers, for not being nearly pro-charter enough and for not scrapping their “outdated pension systems.” (California got an F, while NSFWCORP’s home state of Nevada got a straight D.)

Lieszkovszky took StudentFirst’s discredited pro-charter blather at face value, and was even nice enough to embed the full report card at the bottom of the article. She also fed the StudentsFirst rep anti-union questions during the interview…stuff like this:

Q: Some of the measures that you mentioned, like tying teacher pay to teacher performance, are things that the teachers’ unions in the state really don’t like. How much of this has to do with unionization in these states?

The interview also included a link to a NPR State Impact profile page for Michele Rhee that reads like it was crafted by Rhee’s publicist, describing her as a crusading reformer trying to “build a national movement to defend the interests of children in public education.” The profile makes no mention of the controversy surrounding Michele Rhee’s reform tactics, which have been discredited in a series of test-score cheating scandals.

NPR might describe State Impact’s coverage of StudentsFirst as “news reporting” but at times it feel closer to outright shilling.

So, why would public radio be so willing to gush about groups like StudentsFirst and their pro-privatization agenda?

Well… it might have something to do with the fact that both NPR’s State Impact and Rhee’s StudentsFirst are funded by the same pro-privatization groups. In this case, the Walton Family Foundation, which has been funneling over $100 million a year to various right-wing efforts to break teachers unions and privatize public education—and that includes both NPR and StudentsFirst.

In 2012, the foundation gave Rhee’s StudentsFirst $2 million. That same year, it cut NPR a hefty check cut NPR a hefty check for $1.4 million. The foundation classified both handouts—one to a respected news organization; the other to a notorious astroturf outfit—as “K-12 Education Reform Grants” to “Shape Public Policy.” Among other grantees funded under this category include the the ultra-libertarian Institute for Justice and the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation, both Koch-connected outfits involved in the nasty business of busting unions.

How much of the Waltons’ $1.4 million NPR grant went specifically to fund the State Impact project is not entirely clear, but State Impact does list the Walton Family Foundation as a major donor on a “Supporters” page, hidden several clicks away from the program’s homepage.

Looking through NPR’s recent education coverage, it becomes clear very quickly that this glaring conflict-of-interest is not one-off event or an accidental editorial misstep.

In fact, pro-charter school bias and undisclosed conflicts-of-interest run rampant through NPR’s education reporting. Take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past decade, it has funneled around $8.5 million to National Public Radio and its affiliate stations and networks, according to data compiled by the Seattle Times. And a good chunk of that money was specifically earmarked for “improving” NPR’s education reporting.

For example: In 2009, the foundation gave National Public Radio a grant of $750,000 to “support coverage of education issues on NPR programs, including the ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘All Things Considered’.” That same year, it sent another $651,768 to Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media to “strengthen the quality and quantity of reporting” on education issues. American Public Media produces NPR’s Marketplace programming, which has also come under the corrupting influence of Wall Street and pro-austerity interests. (Read our previous reporting on that issue here, here, and here.)

A combined total of nearly $3 million from Gates and the Waltons? That’s a whole lot of money just for education coverage — and all of it’s coming from two of the biggest backers of the push to privatize public education.

As recent investigation by Dissent magazine found that private philanthropies spend a combined $4 billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector. The Gates and Walton foundations sit at the top of the food chain, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic gifts to increase their leverage over a sector that’s worth up to $1 trillion a year.

In 2011, the New York Times reported on the incredible scope of Gates’ funding of education issues.

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005… “It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation.

And sure enough, hosts and reporters of those NPR programs routinely struggled to cover charter schools, parent trigger campaigns and pro-charter outfits funded by Bill Gates and the Walton family in a positive light, all while keeping readers and listeners in the dark about the NPR’s financial conflict of interest.

Here are just a few examples:

In December 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a six-minute segment titled, “In California, Parents Trigger Change At Failing School” about Parent Revolution and its parent trigger campaign in Adelanto.

The program described Parent Revolution in generally positive terms and gave a lot of air time to Ben Austin, the Beverly Hills political operative who runs the group and helped push the parent trigger law through California’s legislature in 2010. It also aired the unsubstantiated rumors spread by Parent Revolution that the nefarious teachers’ union threatened undocumented immigrants were with deportation if they signed Parent Revolution’s trigger petition. (As I revealed in my “Pulling the Trigger” piece, the exact opposite was true: Parent Revolution was offering to help fix the immigration problems of undocumented parents in return for their support of the parent trigger campaign.)

In the end, NPR conceded that Parent Revolution’s campaign was “incredibly disruptive” to the community, but concluded that it was a step in the right positive direction:

“Still, giving parents the right to take over a failing school is a powerful idea. With the financial backing of influential groups like the Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations, the parent trigger is expected to spread beyond Adelanto.”

And, while the program identified the Gates and Walton foundations as funding Parent Revolution and the parent trigger movement (the two foundations gave a combined $7.8 million to Parent Revolution from 2009 to 2012), NPR didn’t see fit to tell listeners that Walton and Gates were also major funders of their own education coverage.

But this wasn’t NPR’s first mention of Parent Revolution and Adelanto. Two months earlier, in September 2012, it had broadcast another parent trigger conflict-of-interest fluff job: a segment on Talk of the Nation called “Parent-Trigger Laws: A Bold Plan To Save Schools.”

For nearly 15 minutes, host Neal Conan promoted “Don’t Back Down,” an “issues” movie in which indie superstar Maggie Gyllenhaal uses the parent trigger law to fight back lazy school teachers and their corrupt union bosses. Conan then used the film (which was produced by right-wing billionaire and school privatization supporter Phillip Anschutz) to describe a real life parent trigger campaign that was being waged by Parent Revolution in the desert town of Adelanto.

Here’s Conan introducing the segment:

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis star as a fed-up parent-teacher combo who mobilized to take on the bureaucrats and the union. . . . The story is fiction, but the theme and controversy the film taps into are very real. Several states have passed what are known as parent-trigger laws, which give parents a pass to make changes in failing school: a new curriculum, longer school days, different personnel. They can even take over, entirely, and turn it into a charter school.”

Conan’s sole guest was Sean Cavanagh, an assistant editor at the influential Education Week magazine.

Cavanagh praised parent trigger “reform” law, and described Adelanto’s parent trigger campaign as having wide parent support: “I can’t think of many issues where it’s easy to get, you know, 51 percent of parents at a school behind – behind any effort.”

And this is where NPR’s coverage got real sleazy.

See, not only was NPR’s Conan doing a fluff piece on a corporate front group bankrolled by two of the radio network’s major funders, without disclosing this conflict-of-interest to readers. But Cavanagh, the sole expert invited onto the program to talk about these issues, was also being paid out of the same bucket, and he wasn’t saying anything about it either.

In 2011, the Gates Foundation gave Education Week a $2 million grant to support coverage “focusing on the education industry and innovation in K-12 education.” The foundation gave the Education Week an additional $5.2 million from 2005 to 2009 to create “special reports on education”

Among other duties, Cavanagh runs Education Week’s “Charters & Choice” blog. A few days ago, that blog boosted a study published by Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice that supposedly shows how school vouchers and other school privatization schemes “can help boost the academic performance of students making use of those programs.” As it turns out, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which was founded by Milton Friedman and his wife Rose in the mid-90s, is also funded by the Waltons. Their foundation gave the outfit a combined $1.02 million from 2011 to 2012.

So not surprisingly, talking to Conen on NPR, Cavanagh had nothing but kind words to say about Parent Revolution:

That’s right. That’s right. Parent Revolution has been helping the parents from the very beginning. Their director is Ben Austin, who’s actually a former Clinton administration, White House official. And they’ve been very active in trying to help the parents carry this movement forward. At the same time, you know, they make the argument, look, this is a parent-led effort, and we are going to do what the parents at Desert Trails Elementary want.

Let’s go through that again: here we have a NPR program in which everything—the host, the interviewee and the subject being discussed—are all funded by the same pro-privatization outfits. And disclosures? Not a single one.

Read full story on NSFWCORP.com (subscription required)...

NSFWCORP recently published an article in which I explore the weird, sleazy public relations blitz designed to whitewash the role that top Penn State officials played in covering up the crimes of Jerry Sandusky. It was an impressive campaign, and included the likes of New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell.

Was Gladwell an unwitting victim, roped in by Penn State's multi-million dollar propaganda push? Or was this just another one of his usual PR jobs? Read the article on NSFWCORP.com to find out...

FROM: YASHA LEVINE
DATE: DEC 13TH, 2012

RUNNING COVER FOR THE ENABLERS OF SERIAL CHILD MOLESTERS

SANTA MONICA, CA: The saga of Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky came to end this past summer, when a jury found him guilty of molesting 10 boys over a period of 14 years and a judge sentenced him to serve out the rest of his life behind bars. Or so it seemed…

Before Sandusky had even been transferred to his new digs at the Greene supermax state correctional facility, a well-greased public relations campaign popped up on the scene defending the people and the university that had hushed up the retired Penn State football coach’s monstrous crimes and enabled him to keep molesting boys for more than a decade. The PR offensive was truly impressive. It involved a phalanx of high profile lawyers, top dollar crisis management professionals, media consultants, astroturf groups and even ateabagger filmmaker—all them pushing similar story lines that kept the blame focused on Sandusky and exonerated Penn State’s bureaucracy from any wrongdoing.

Why would anyone want to protect a bunch of sleazy serial child molester enablers? The answer is simple: money.

Continue the article at NSFWCORP >>

Want to know more? Read Malcolm Gladwell's SHAME profile, then check the in-depth report.

***

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!

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

On August 15, 2012, in West Jerusalem, a small group of Palestinian teenagers was attacked by a mob of Israeli youths. The New York Times described it as an "attempted lynching." The Israelis, who had apparently planned on lynching someone that night, set their sights on a couple of Palestinian kids hanging out at a busy city square, chased one of them down and then beat him until his heart had stopped. His name was Jamal Julani, a 17-year-old resident of East Jerusalem. He only survived because a medical student happened to be on the scene and was able to resuscitate him in time. The beating took place in full view of hundreds of people, who stood by and watched without intervening. According to an eye witness in account in The Jerusalem Post, "People who tried to resuscitate the Arab were mocked by the crowd of Jewish youths."

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 2008 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 promotor 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 Center described 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."

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

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.

So the question is: Why the sudden shyness? Why did you boast about covering Kahane's funeral without ever noting that you was once a follower? It didn't seem to bother in 2008, when you published his 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!

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. 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 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 a 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 the financial 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 their loans and had to find other places to live—rental homes if they were lucky; 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 home-ownership craze was never meant to benefit the homeowners. The only Automatic Millionaires it created 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 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 Bach's 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 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!