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 for NSFWCORP:

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 Michelle Rhee's pro-charter school astroturf group StudentsFirst to promote a "report card" that the group released rating Ohio's state education policies. . . .

...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 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.

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!

Notes:

1. Hell, you don’t have to be an expert on Israeli-Palestinian clusterfuck to realize that Arab Jews can’t be blamed for anti-Palestinian violence. After all, what’s one “attempted lynching” of a Palestinian kid in West Jerusalem, compared to, say, the systematic bombing of a civilian population in Gaza with phosphorous bombs?
2. From Kahane's The Story of the Jewish Defense League: "One of the things we had done in our efforts to obtain well-trained, strong, and tough Jews for effective action against Jew-haters was to create a special group of fightersbwhich we named the Chaya Squad. The word chaya in Hebrew means “beast,” and we wanted to develop Jewishb“beasts” or “animals” who would frighten the anti-Semite to the roots of his soul. They served an invaluable function in the changing of the Jewish image in America. . . . It was a thing of joy to find a big, strong Jewish youngster band train him to defend Jewish honor, bodies, and property. It was an even more satisfying thing to watch so many of the Chayas go into battle with their yarmulkes on their heads. . . . the yarmulke had come to mean something special for them. It shouted out: “I am a Jew and, Jew-hater, as you get beaten I want you to know that a Jew is doing it.” It was repayment for the cutting off of Jewish beards while Nazi soldiers laughed.
3. 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!

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

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

SHAME’s exposés have been written up by The New York Observer, FAIR, Barry Ritholtz, Naked Capitalism; and we’ve been featured on RT television, and interviewed on radio stations from Chicago to Los Angeles.

We’re going to get even bigger, with the support of our fans. Contribute using PayPal or WePay.

Help SHAME the media establishment.
Contribute with PayPal or WePay…

Thank you,
Yasha Levine & Mark Ames
Founders of the S.H.A.M.E. Project
"Inflict & Endure"

* = Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

“In propaganda, truth pays off."

— V.I. Lenin

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To wit, there is no mention of "Megan McArdle" in Megan McArdle's "full disclosure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a tweet from 2011:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Click the cover, buy the book!

This article was first appeared in The eXiled on August 6, 2009

Just when you think you've seen so much hypocrisy that nothing can shock you, along comes Megan McArdle. McArdle, who blogs for the Atlantic Monthly, presents herself as a principled libertarian, fiercely denouncing any attempt to provide any sort of government-funded health care, because as she argues, big government is bad, bad, bad. She's written some truly appalling things over the years as a shill for big corporate interests, recently defending Goldman Sachs because, as she wrote, "financial meltdowns offer no villains."

Last week, McArdle posted an encyclopedia-length article on the Atlantic Monthly's site, denouncing Obama's health care plan in a rambling piece that essentially boiled down to this: big government is a bad thing, and free markets are the medicine you need, even if you don't like it, and even though you can't afford it. McArdle's post sparked a series of smackdowns, including Ezra Klein in the Washington Post , and Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.

What Megan McArdle doesn't mention is that her own privileged upbringing was funded by public money. That's right, Megan McArdle is just a second-generation product of the sleazy NYC construction business, which has been using public money for private gain since the Tammany Hall era. Even more galling is that Megan's father got his start in the public sector working in taxpayer-funded health care programs. If it weren't for her father's employment as a public health care official in the 1970s, Megan McArdle's life might have turned out completely different from the privileged one she enjoyed.

Megan McArdle is the daughter of one Francis X. McArdle, who built his career as a public servant in the New York City administration, then moved over to the private side, where he could leverage his contacts with the government -- and finally moved back onto the public payroll in 2006, when Mr. McArdle was appointed by then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to advise the federal government how public funds should be spent, and on whom. Earlier this year, Mr. McArdle was reportedly in Albany lobbying the New York state government for a job as the "stimulus czar," appropriating President Obama's federal spending money.

Megan was born in 1973, a few years after Francis got his big fat job on the public payroll in the New York City administration, where he stayed for 11 years. Among the first big jobs Megan's daddy took while climbing up the public payroll career ladder were jobs as Inspector General for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Director of Program Budget for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

So Megan McArdle's entry into this world was literally greased by taxpayer funds. But of course, it wouldn't stop there.

Francis McArdle, rose up the Big Government ranks in the New York city. His public-funded career reached its peak in 1978 when then-Mayor Ed Koch named him as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where he served until 1981. That job put McArdle in control of all sorts of public works: water supply, waste water, sewage infrastructure. It's kind of fitting that McArdle's privileged childhood was funded by taxpayer's shit and urine -- a Freudian might say that this is the source of her inexplicable hatred of the same Big Government that pissed dollars and shat gold on the McArdle household.

Megan's dad moved from the public sector overseeing public works to a job with real estate developer Olympia & York -- just in time to take advantage of the huge Battery Park City project that Olympia & York was developing under contract. The success of the project relied on huge taxpayer subsidies -- at least $65 million in 1981 dollars -- as well as major public works projects to make the development attractive, including the disastrous Westway road project, which drained at least $85 million of federal subsidies until it was finally mothballed in the mid-80s, due to environmental concerns and public protests -- the kinds of protesters whom grown-up Megan McArdle would later attack. No matter, though, because by the time the Westway was canceled and all that public money was wasted, Olympia & York, Megan's daddy's company, had catapulted into one of the top real estate moguls in the world, and Megan's daddy was ready to move on to even bigger things.

In 1985, F. X. McArdle had moved from the private sector to a position that Megan understands better than any other: a lobbyist who manipulates Big Government on behalf of private companies. Francis X. McArdle was named to head the General Contractor's Association of New York. He stayed in that lucrative position for the next 20 years.

In 1987, as the budding libertarian Megan was enjoying an expensive private-school education, McArdle's business was investigated by a new Organized Crime Task Force set up by the state of New York to combat the mob's control of the contracting business, which led to enormous waste of taxpayer money. Here's a New York Timesarticle on that investigation, featuring Megan's dad representing the scary people:

Anti-Crime Unit Urged for New York Builders

by Selwyn Raab -- Tuesday, January 6, 1987

Corruption is so embedded in New York City's multibillion-dollar construction industry that a permanent investigative agency may be needed specifically to uproot it, a top state investigator said. The investigator, Ronald Goldstock, director of the state's Organized Crime Task Force, also asserted that construction practices in the city must change. Mr. Goldstock, whose agency is investigating the industry, said the elimination of organized-crime racketeering would not alone solve such problems as payoffs to municipal inspectors, bid-rigging among contractors and bribes to union officials for special contract favors and the hiring of lower-paid nonunion workers. 'Even if you indict and convict every mobster involved in corruption,'' Mr. Goldstock said in an interview, ''under current conditions, someone else will come along, recognize the potential and become the new predators.''

Commenting on Mr. Goldstock's findings, the managing director of the General Contractors Association, Francis X. McArdle, said he was ''unaware of any pervasive patterns of corruption'' regarding his group. The association represents more than 100 contractors primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants.

Mr. McArdle also disputed the need for a new investigative agency. ''We don't need more people tripping over each other in search of glory, facts or whatever,'' he said.

What's frightening is that Mr. McArdle won the day: the new investigative agency was shelved in favor of the kind of self-policing "solution" that Wall Street is pushing for today. Because you know, those big government inspectors with their fact-finding missions only get in the way of innovation!

Here's where things get a little scarier: the story about the mob running Megan's daddy's area of work shortly afterwards became the subject of a Fortune magazine feature, replete with famous names from New York's organized crime world, titled: "THE MAFIA'S BIT OF THE BIG APPLE: Byzantine building codes and horrendous logistics help the mob control New York City construction -- at a price that the big developers have been all too willing to pay."

In it, we find out that the world of New York City construction and contracting is controlled by A-list mobsters like the Gambinos, Luchesses, and Anthony Salerno, who eventually went to jail. The report put together by the investigator estimated that mob corruption added 20% to the costs of construction in Manhattan at the time Megan's daddy was the head of the General Contractor's Association:

[M]any developers, builders, and contractors ''believe that the monetary costs of corruption are more than offset by the money saved or earned through corruption.'' As a result, the report contends, the industry has ''become dependent upon'' the crime brotherhood. Mafia muscle, it states, assures ''contractors that they will only have to pay off once, that the amount will be reasonable, and that the services paid for will be delivered.''

"The McArdle girl? She calls herself a libertarian? You really are a funny guy!"

By 1991, Megan was on her way to Penn U., where she would pupate into the free-market libertarian dung beetle we have all grown to loathe, thanks to her public-funded privileged upbringing, with a wink to that 20% mafia margin. Also 1991, the Megan's daddy appeared again in The New York Times, this time as the key lobbyist trying to keep the public funds flowing to the association's clients, at the expense of taxpayers:

Council Allows Asphalt Factory Dinkins Wanted
by William Glaberson -- March 23, 1991

A dispute over an asphalt plant that New York City wants to build in Queens has provided a major test of how the City Council will handle intense lobbying both from special interest groups and the Mayor. The city has moved to develop its own asphalt source because of a long history of charges of corruption and bid-rigging in the industry. Francis X. McArdle, managing director of the General Contractors Association of New York, which has historically given campaign contributions to many Council members, spearheaded the lobbying for eight asphalt producers in New York. Mr. McArdle is a former commissioner of the City's Department of Environmental Protection.

Megan showed how much she owes to her dad's way of doing business when she admitted in a blog post that she owes her success to personal contacts "I sent out about 1400 resumes blind after my firm failed. I got not one response. All the jobs I interviewed for came from personal contacts."

We learn just how useful these personal contacts are for Megan McArdle thanks to a gushing profile on her published in early 2007 in a rightwing magazine called "Doublethink" -- put out by a corporate-funded advocacy group with ties to Tom Delay and Cato, whose mission is to "identify and develop future conservative and libertarian leaders." In the profile, we learn that Megan's first job in 2001, after graduating from the University of Chicago's graduate business program as a committed Ayn Rand libertarian, was canceled due to the market drop in 2001. So instead of flipping burgers to make ends meet, the libertarian moved back home into her parents' Upper West Side digs -- a home that taxpayer money helped to fund. There, in the hard knocks of the Upper West Side, the 28-year-old MBA seethed in libertarian anger at all the welfare queens and wasteful government spending programs she saw all around her. But it wasn't until bin Laden created an opportunity that Megan finally got a job -- as an "executive copy girl" for a post-9/11 cleanup crew near the site of the WTC. It was exactly the sort of job that those "personal contacts" can help you get in the "byzantine" world of construction in NYC.

It was at this time, living in her parent's swank Manhattan pad and working a job in her daddy's line of business, that Megan McArdle's blogging career as a right-wing libertarian crusader was born.

Instead of admitting that she got her first job thanks to daddy's shady connections with the corrupt construction trades, Megan pretended that she took the WTC-cleanup job as a sort of personal penance, a gift to the people of her stricken city: "[I}t was easier to bear it all than it would be working somewhere else, and worrying, and unable to do anything about it." Really Megan, you shouldn't have born that cross for us.

Her answer to 9/11 and all subsequent economic problems, including the health care fiasco, is simple: more free markets of the sort that have absolutely nothing to do with her own family's way of making a living. And the gullible readers of her blog were so impressed that Megan moved to Washington and found work with the Atlantic Monthly, shilling for Wall Street, health care firms, and spending her entire career arguing for the total repeal of all corporate taxes. Washington is also where she found her dream man, Peter Suderman, a former FreedomWorks lobbyist. It was a natural match; like Megan, Suderman was a veteran of the deeply hypocritical world of free-market shills who make their money playing the murky world where big government and big business overlap. As part of his anti-government crusading for FreedomWorks, Suderman once helped run a fake-grassroots campaign, creating a front group, Angryrenter.com, that posed as regular joes fighting big government programs to bailout distressed homeowners. The real backers were the corporations who fund FreedomWorks -- they didn't want to have a dime of their tax dollars going to help out poor suckered American homeowners who needed some help to avoid getting thrown out on the street. Suderman's scam, pretending that the anger came from regular joe renters and not billionaires, was so sleazy that it was exposed by another rightwing publication, the Wall Street Journal.

This didn't bother Megan, because her employer, the Atlantic Monthly, has already been outed as the very embodiment of corruption, the journalism world's equivalent of the General Contractors Association. Thanks to TalkingPointsMemo, we know of at least 100 instances in which the Atlantic Monthly allowed interest groups, including health care companies, to pay large sums in order to gain access to the magazine's editorial staff:

The Atlantic has held approximately 100 of them since 2003, according to Zachary Hooper, a spokesman for the magazine. "The corporate sponsor...comes to us and says, 'We're interested in having a discussion on a certain topic.'" The magazine's business staff, said Hooper, takes things from there. The Atlantic flier makes clear that the "salons" are paid for by corporations and focused on a public-policy issue in which the corporate sponsor has a major stake. It offers the following "sampling of salon dinner sponsors and topics":

• AstraZeneca on "Healthcare Access and Education"
• Microsoft on "Global Trade,"
• GE on "Energy Sustainability and the Future of Nuclear Power"
• Allstate on "The Future of the American City"
• Citi on "The Challenge of Global Markets"

Hooper declined to say how much these corporations put up to sponsor the events. And just as with the Post, the Atlantic dinners are strictly off-the-record, and not open to the public. The flier describes them as: Private, custom, off-the-record conversations of 20-30 key influential individuals, moderated by an Atlantic editor, designed to bring a thoughtful group together for unbounded conversation on key issues of the day.

From birth, Megan McArdle has been the beneficiary of public funds: taxes paid for her upbringing, paid her father to venture into a corruption-ridden business world based on using public money for private gain, and paid her wages in her first breakthrough job. Her response is to revile government intervention as an employee of the most notoriously corrupt magazine on the market.

It goes a long way to explaining so many of her attacks -- including her failed attempt to discredit an article I co-wrote earlier this year, an article which exposed the stealth role her fiancee's former employer at FreedomWorks played in setting up the Tea Party protests. Back then, I and many of Megan's readers demanded she account for this blatant conflict-of-interest and breach of basic journalism ethics -- defending her future-fiancee's ex-employer by trying to discredit another journalist's investigation (which proved correct, I should add). At the time, last March, I wrote to Megan's editor at Atlanticmonthly.com, Ben Cohn, asking him if the Atlantic Monthly barred its writers from covering subjects in which the writer had a clear conflict-of-interest. Cohn's answer to me was a bizarre evasion: he instead answered a critique I never leveled about transparency, avoiding my question about conflict-of-interest:

I've looked carefully at her post and find that the disclosure of her relationship with Peter Suderman, which was right there in the original item, was clear and forthright. Transparency is an important value for us, and I see every evidence of transparency in Megan's work here.

I didn't ask Ben Cohn about transparency, I asked about conflict-of-interest. So I followed up with a second email insisting he tell me what the Atlantic's editorial policy is on conflict-of-interest issues. He never replied.

Now we know: conflict-of-interest is the very basis of the Atlantic Monthly's business model. And rank hypocrisy and Marie Antoinette privilege is the basis of the Megan McArdle ideology, in which we're supposed to swallow free market solutions, while she basks in the comfort of taxpayer-subsidized privilege.

So when it comes to health care, Megan McArdle has the worst solution of all, a solution designed to protect her privilege: inaccessible free market innovations for us, and corruption on the taxpayer dime for Megan and her brood. Remember this the next time Megan McArdle defends the corrupt and broken system that's worked so well for her, and so disastrously for the rest of us.

Mark Ames is co-founder of S.H.A.M.E. and author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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