News Articles By Lisa Graves

In Sunday's New York Times, Robert Pear reports that biotech industry lobbyists were especially successful in getting their spin mouthed by House Members during the health care reform debate. He notes:

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world's largest biotechnology companies. E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

On November 7, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed landmark health care reform legislation after months of negotiations and despite some really outrageous lies by opponents of any efforts to redress corporate malfeasance. Only a single Republican, Congressman Joseph Cao of New Orleans, "the Good Joe," was willing to defy his party's command and vote for the bill, along with 219 Democrats, giving the bill two votes more than it needed to pass. Upon the historic vote, the Good Joe said: "I read the versions of the House health reform bill. I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding – if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans need real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children."

This week, the Center for Media and Democracy is launching its new campaign on the "Banksters" with a new companion website, www.Banksterusa.org, and a new portal in our online encyclopedia called the "Real Economy Project." We are so fortunate that Mary Bottari brought this much needed effort to demystify economic issues and spur people to take action to CMD, with the support of our founder, John Stauber, and our Board.

I see this project as the beginning of a new phase in CMD's life of weighing in on crucial issues in the media and before Congress and trying to make a real difference in outcomes. In many ways, this new effort is a return to our roots and builds on CMD's long-standing mission to "inform and assist grassroots citizen activism that . . . promotes economic justice." At the same time, this effort really takes the gloves off in aiming at both the spin and the underlying policies that have undermined the promise of the American dream.

Listen to the great journalist Greg Palast interview the Center for Media and Democracy's Wendell Potter about the way local insurance monopolies thwart reform. In the interview, Wendell considers whether Senator Olympia Snowe's support for reforms without a public option is naive or disingenuous. This past week, Wendell was on C-Span, MSNBC, the BBC, and MSNBC again, among other news shows. Below is the audio from his full interview on BBC: