Occupy Wall Street ‘Stands In Solidarity’ With Obama Front Group

Infowars
Paul Joseph Watson

Fears expressed by some that the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement is being hijacked by the Democratic Party establishment have intensified after the official OWS website announced that it “stands in solidarity” with MoveOn.org, a lobbying group for the Wall Street-backed Obama administration.

The front page of the http://occupywallst.org/ proudly announces that numerous union groups will be present in New York today to join demonstrators in marches taking place this afternoon.

 “Together we will protest this great injustice. We stand in solidarity with the honest workers of….MoveOn.org,” states the website, as well as listing numerous other organizations.

What is MoveOn.org?

MoveOn.org is a lobbying organization that routinely backs Democratic candidates. The group aggressively supported Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign and is now “Perhaps the lead lobby organization for his policies….apart from Obama’s own Organizing for America,” reports Source Watch.

When MoveOn organized an online donation drive for Obama which raised $320,000, the Obama campaign responded in kind with the legally dubious action of paying MoveOn $18,000 in “credit card processing fees”.

The group also received a $5 million dollar donation from George Soros, who is a keen supporter.

Back in 2007, many leftists spoke of their betrayal by MoveOn.org after the group advocated Nancy Pelosi’s funding bill that actually prolonged the war in Iraq and prevented the troops being brought home.

“Join us on Wednesday to create a huge show of support for anti-Wall Street actions nationwide. Together, we’ll add hundreds of thousands of voices expressing our solidarity with the protests at Occupy Wall Street and across the country targeting the bankers who wrecked our economy,” states MoveOn.org’s website.

Most of Newt Gingrich's Twitter Followers Are Fake

Gawker

Yesterday Newt Gingrich laid out a new argument for why he should be the GOP presidential nominee: He's got the most Twitter followers. But according to a former Gingrich staffer, he bought them.

Gingrich complained yesterday that the press is ignoring his prodigious Twitter audience: "I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count." Which is true! Gingrich currently boasts 1,325,842 followers, whereas competitors Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann have yet to crack 100,000.

But if Newt is winning the Twitter primary, it's because of voter fraud. A former staffer tells us that his campaign hired a firm to boost his follower count, in part by creating fake accounts en masse:

Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater.

About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various "follow agencies," another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt's profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn't follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you'll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn't it?

That's quite a different explanation for Gingrich's Twitter popularity than the one offered by this Politico story on the subject: "[I]t's his personal touch: He tweets and manages his Twitter feed himself, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO. All told, he has tweeted 2,611 times in the 29 months since he joined the site."

While it would be impossible to survey all of Gingrich's followers, a cursory glance immediately turned up a few accounts that featured odd names, no personal information, no followers, no posts, and a small follow list. And there's certainly a healthy market out there for buying Twitter followers, either by hiring a company to strategically follow accounts that will follow you back or by paying for dummy accounts. If Gingrich did goose his Twitter numbers, it would help explain why he has, for instance, more than twice as many followers as Sarah Palin, which just doesn't sound right.

The Gingrich campaign didn't respond to a message seeking comment.

Tea Party Caucus Moves To Make Sure Money Will NOT Be Cutoff From Military Industrial Complex

Utility planted 'citizens' to support restart of reactors

Japan Times

FUKUOKA — About 50 Kyushu Electric Power Co. employees and affiliates were involved in attempting to orchestrate an email campaign, posing as ordinary citizens, in support of the restart of its nuclear reactors on a government-sponsored TV program, according to an internal investigation by the utility.

The staged emails account for about a fifth of all supportive opinions received in the program aired in late June, according to sources informed about the investigation. The number of those involved may increase as the investigation is still ongoing.

At a special committee on nuclear safety of the Kagoshima Prefectural Assembly Monday, Akira Nakamura, at the time head of the utility's nuclear power control department, said he was told by a supervisor to enliven discussions on the program, aimed at winning support for restarting two reactors at the Genkai nuclear power plant in Saga Prefecture.

Both Kagoshima and Saga are served by Kyushu Electric.

He thus instructed a subordinate to make the program known among other employees and affiliates. But while Nakamura neglected to follow up on the matter, the subordinate went ahead and asked others to post the comments.

The subordinate sent emails to three Kyushu Electric offices and four subsidiaries, according to the utility.

Sources at Kyushu Electric said the supervisor involved was then Executive Vice President Mamoru Dangami, who retired from the post in late June.

In his first appearance in front of reporters since the scandal broke, Dangami admitted to having issued the instruction to let employees know about the program. "Responsibility rests with me," he said.

Nakamura had denied the existence of the emails when questioned by the committee on July 4, just two days before Kyushu Electric acknowledged the shenanigans in public. He told the assembly Monday he had not been aware of the issue back then.

The emails, revealed by an in-house whistle-blower, dealt a fresh blow to the credibility of the nuclear industry as it struggles with the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 plant.

Anti-Reform Front Group Wears a Populist Mask

Center for Media and Democracy

A corporate front group with the populist-sounding name "Stop Too Big To Fail" (STBTF) is running a $1.6 million TV advertising campaign designed to appeal to liberal/progressives and get them to advocate against financial reform legislation currently under consideration in Congress. The ads target Senate Democrats in three states and ask viewers to tell their senators to "vote against this 'phony financial reform' " and "support real reform, stop 'too big to fail.' " STBTF has also put out a blitz of opinion columns on left-leaning Web sites. TPMMuckraker, which researched STBTF, says it has every indication of being an "astroturf operation funded by corporate interests to give the appearance of grassroots opposition to reform." The group's president is Robert K. Johnson, a serial astroturf group operator who also heads the corporate front Consumers for Competitive Choice (C4CC). C4CC was formerly known as "Consumers for Cable Choice," a front group funded by big telecom companies like Verizon and SBC, which fought to deregulate the cable industry. STBTF also has links to the DCI Group, a well-known Washington, D.C. Republican lobbying and astroturfing business. STBTF sought the support a prominent former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Simon Johnson (no relation to Robert K. Johnson), who now advocates breaking up big banks. At first Simon Johnson agreed, and STBTF posted a picture of him on their Web site, but when Johnson realized the group was really pushing an anti-reform message, he demanded they stop using his name and likeness, and STBTF was forced to pull all references to S. Johnson from its Web site.