Michigan AFSCME Council 25 and many other labor organizations, civic, and faith based groups will be heading to Lansing on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 to protest the Right to Work legislation jammed through both the House and Senate Chambers. Michigan Forward is urging everyone to come and Stand up for Democracy.
People will be traveling to Lansing on Tuesday from all over the state and there is a bus leaving from Grand Rapids, which is organized by the Kent Ionia Labor Council. They will be leaving on Tuesday at 7:00AM from the Kent Ionia Labor Council headquarters located at 918 Benjamin NE in Grand Rapids. You can sign up to get a seat by going to this link.
There is also a Facebook event page for the bus trip protest leaving from Grand Rapids, which might be a place to get other questions answered.
We hope to be able to attend and report on this rally/protest and we will see if the most recent legislation to make Michigan a Right to Work state will just result in more speeches or direct action by occupying the Capitol to let politicians know they mean business.
Crude Behavior: The Tarnished Legacy of the Tar Sands Industry
This article by Peter LaFontaine is re-posted from EcoWatch.
If the American dream can be reduced to a single image, it is of the homestead—a place earned through long days and late nights, hard work, planning and saving. It represents not only a dream realized, but an investment in your family and future, and a place that is rightfully all your own.
Now imagine that home, that achievement, taken away with a knock at your door, seized in the blink of an eye by a company you’ve never heard of, stolen away in distant boardrooms without your knowledge or consent, all of it enabled by the government you pay your taxes to. As Americans this seems unimaginable, and yet, for those whose homes lie in the cross-hairs of the tar sands oil industry, it’s a bleak reality.
Crude Behavior: TransCanada, Enbridge, and the Tar Sands Industry’s Tarnished Legacy, a new report from NWF, details the recent history of those companies, including underhanded legal campaigns against landowners, a systematic disregard for the rights of Native American tribes and negligent behavior that has led to significant tar sands spills in the U.S. and Canada.
As the industry plans to build thousands of miles of new or re-purposed tar sands pipelines across the country, the public and government officials need to learn what it actually means to invite in these neighbors. As the report makes clear, you shouldn’t unroll the welcome mat.
In the Great Plains, TransCanada (of Keystone XL infamy) has mounted a widespread misinformation assault, threatening lawsuits when farmers refuse to sign over their land to the company. In Texas, landowners and journalists have been threatened with arrest for “trespassing” as TransCanada bulldozes its way to the Gulf coast.
In New England, tar sands companies continue to insist, against all the evidence, that they have no plans to bring their dirty fuel through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine—while simultaneously sponsoring tar sands spill cleanup workshops. And in the Midwest, Enbridge Inc. is plowing ahead with a massive expansion plan despite the lingering effects of the biggest inland oil spill in U.S. history, the 2010 Kalamazoo River disaster.
I’ve spent over a year following the ups and downs of this roller coaster ride, and it’s hammered home the fact that the tar sands industry (and oil companies in general) have an incredibly twisted understanding of what it means to be a good neighbor. In conversations with dozens of landowners and Tribal members, I have heard a constant message: “We feel powerless and betrayed by a system that is supposed to protect us.”
The Obama Administration has a crucial upcoming decision on Keystone XL, and we’re holding our collective breath, aware that the wrong choice would lead not just to climate catastrophe but also a dismantling of our basic rights to clean water, a meaningful voice in the process and safeguards for our private property.
As Jeff Insko—a Michigander who has been fighting back against these companies—puts it: “We’ve experienced first-hand the enormous gulf between Enbridge’s ‘good neighbor’ rhetoric and their callous treatment of landowners.”
Whether by looking for back-room deals in Washington, DC or taking ranchers to court, TransCanada, Enbridge and the other players have rewritten the book on how to do bad business in pursuit of profits. National Wildlife Federation has already detailed how tar sands is a terrible bet for wildlife, our climate, the American economy and public health, and Crude Behavior is another chapter in the sordid story of this industry.
Burn the Rich, not Fossil Fuels banner hung in Grand Rapids
Today, GRIID received a media release and pictures of a banner hung in Grand Rapids off the blue bridge that connects GVSU’s Pew Campus campus to the downtown.
The Media Release states as follows:
The world leaders will not solve this and the media will not tell us the truth about the seriousness of climate change.
Director of Drug War film opening at UICA tonight: “Capitalism is destroying Democracy”
Eugene Jarecki, director of such powerful films as Why We Fight and Trials of Henry Kissinger, has directed a new documentary that exposes the Drug War as a complete sham, entitled The House I live In.
In an interview with independent journalist Laura Flanders, Jarecki talks about his motivation for the doing this film that exposes the War on Drugs. Jarecki covers lots of aspects, such as the war against poor people, racism and the prison industrial complex, but towards the end of the interview, the filmmaker talks about what the film is really about and what concerns him most as an insurgent documentary maker.
Jarecki states:
I am very frightened by the impact of modern capitalism on American democracy. I think that capitalism is destroying democracy in this country because we drank a kool-aid under Reagan of a kind of runaway, not mom and pop capitalism. We love the idea of entrepreneurs and pioneers who start their little store and make a success of it. Modern capitalism is something else. This is the idea of free market as promoted by people who want anything but a free market, what they want to do is monopolize the free market so mom and pop can’t compete and ultimately go out of business and get replaced by a box store. So that’s the America that I fear because it’s in an America where, you can go into Burger King and you can have it your way and you can design your little burger the way you want to with pickles or mustard, your choice, but Americans don’t realize by entering the Burger King to begin with, a Burger King that’s able to query incredible favor with your politicians that you can’t. A Burger King that could pollute your water supply and you couldn’t stop them. A Burger King that engage in shady labor practices and you don’t have the power. All of those things that those major corporations are doing, you’ve given away your actual choice already by letting Citizens United and other decisions in this country let loose the dogs of capitalism on the American body politic.
I think that is a theme common to all of my films. I made a film about the military industrial complex, and how it threw us into war whether we wanted to or not. The majority of the American people are peace seeking and yet we find ourselves in war after war. The American drug war which has perpetuated despite every evidence of its failure by a system of industrialized for-profit incarceration. So many businesses, so many jobs, so many bureaucrats relying upon such an inhumanity as the profiteering on the incarceration of others that that could continue.
The film opens tonight in Grand Rapids at UICA and will run through December 13.
Right to Work: Brought to you in part by the DeVos Family
As people are still reeling from news that the state legislature passed a Right to Work bill for Michigan, some sources are saying that Gov. Snyder will sign the bill into law, despite his previous claims that it would be bad for the state.
One source that is saying that Snyder will make Michigan a Right to Work state is the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which euphemistically calls Right to Work, Freedom to Work.
Not only is the Mackinac Center a source for this news, they are in many ways the architect behind the push for Right to Work legislation in Michigan. The Mackinac Center was involved in the introduction of Right to Work laws in Indiana in the past year and they have been leading the charge in Michigan, even before Snyder became Governor. The Mackinac Center also has a long history of pushing for privatization and other pro-capitalist policies ever since the right wing think tank formed in 1987.
It is also important for those of us who live in West Michigan to recognize that the Right to Work policy that Michigan is about to make into law is a policy that many business leaders in the area have been championing, none more so than members of the DeVos family.
Richard, Dick and Betsy DeVos have also been major donors of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy according to SourceWatch, Right Wing Watch and stories we have posted in the past. In addition, all of these sources also document that the Edgar & Elsa Prince Foundation and the Van Andel Family have been donors to the Mackinac Center as well, making West Michigan a major source funding for the right wing think tank.
Besides funding the main architect behind Right to Work policies in Michigan, West Michigan elites like the DeVos family are deeply involved in the creation of the West Michigan Policy Forum, which since 2008 has been pushing for Right to Work legislation in Michigan.
We reported on the West Michigan Policy Forum in 2010, when they brought anti-union strategist Rick Berman to Grand Rapids and the focus on Right to Work policies at this year’s conference as well.
If indeed, Right to Work becomes policy in Michigan, much of the blame lies with the role that West Michigan elites have played in funding and pushing such a policy. Remember this the next time someone talks about the “philanthropy” of DeVos and company, especially since Right to Work policies are really an attack against working people.
Holland City Council decision on power plant will kill us
The Holland City Council decided in an 8 – 1 vote that the new electricity plant, that provides electricity for many communities in West Michigan, will be powered by natural gas.
The current General Manager of the coal-powered plant along the lakeshore Dave Koster said in an Mlive story, “What we have (had approved) are a set of recommendations that are going to be transformative for our community, and will lead us to a cleaner, more efficient energy future.”
Such a statement nothing short of a lie. While natural gas might be perceived as cleaner and more energy efficient, the reality is that natural gas extraction and burning is just a different method of environmental destruction and negative impact on climate change.
By committing the residents of West Michigan to the use of natural gas to generate electricity, the Holland City Council has doomed the public to an increase in horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
With a growth of horizontal hydraulic fracturing will come the following:
- The use of toxic chemicals (often undisclosed) in the fracking process, chemicals which cause cancer.
- The use of millions of gallons of water, which will not only mean water diversion from lakes, streams and underground aquifers, but the disposal of this water, which will be contaminated with chemicals. Where will they dispose of this toxic water?
- New roads or the widening of roads will take place, especially in more rural and environmentally sensitive areas, causing more environmental destruction – deforestation, run-off and impacting wildlife.
In addition and more importantly, the commitment to extracting and burning a fossil fuel for electricity generation will contribute negatively to climate change. As a species, we are not in a position to continue the burning of fossil fuels, particularly at the current levels. According to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, we need to reduce current carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 or we will be beyond of point of no return.
The Holland City Council not only made a wrong decision, they made a decision that will negatively impact us for years to come and they did it with virtually no public input. Say that natural gas is cleaner than coal is like saying execution by lethal injection is more humane than by hanging.
Anti-Marriage Equality groups told to get nastier
This article is re-posted from Right Wing Watch. Editor’s Note: One of the groups encouraged to get nastier is the National Organization for Marriage, which recently received $500,000 from Doug DeVos, President of Amway. Because of the DeVos funding of this anti-equality group there is a formal boycott against Amway.
After four defeats on the issue of marriage equality at the ballot box and a failed attempt to remove an Iowa justice who favors same-sex marriage, right-wing activists are starting to panic and offering their advice to the GOP and groups like the National Organization for Marriage and Focus on the Family: you’re not anti-gay enough. Yesterday, Matthew Cullinan Hoffman of LifeSiteNews similarly argued that organizations that oppose same-sex marriage need to get nastier.
According to Hoffman, who is also a correspondent for the National Catholic Register, “the very fact that” gay marriage is even up for debate “is an indication of a level of moral confusion and decadence that borders on the apocalyptic.”
He went on to maintain that same-sex unions are a “narcissistic parody” of opposite-sex relationships as “homosexual relationships do not represent an authentic intimacy, but rather involve mutual exploitation for the sake of satisfying an unnatural lust” and lead to suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, violence along with other “destructive consequences.” “Homosexuals themselves, who are the greatest victims of the ‘gay lifestyle,’ and are in desperate need of the truth,” he writes.
“Until and unless pro-family activists adopt a comprehensive and coherent answer to the ideology of the culture of death,” Hoffman concludes, “we will continue to suffer defeat after defeat, until the institution of marriage is completely destroyed.”
If Hoffman really thinks that conservatives aren’t being aggressive enough in their attacks on gays and lesbians, then we suggest he listen to the extreme anti-gay tirades we consistently find coming from right-wing talk show hosts, televangelists and many of the Religious Right groups behind the marriage campaigns.
Although questions of tactics are always relevant to the postmortem analysis following an election loss, they ultimately cannot address the essence of the problem these defeats represent: a grave sexual perversion, one rightly denounced by virtually every society that has ever existed, is being converted in the mind of the public from a vice into a public institution, with associated privileges and rights, including access to infants and small children.
In short, the losses experienced in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington State could never have happened in a healthy society that upholds basic standards of sexual morality. The very fact that they were on the ballot at all, that the subversion of the institution of marriage has become a topic of polite conversation, is an indication of a level of moral confusion and decadence that borders on the apocalyptic.
…
In reality, homosexual relationships do not represent an authentic intimacy, but rather involve mutual exploitation for the sake of satisfying an unnatural lust. Such behavior harms bodies and minds, causing physical damage and spreading diseases, and leading often to depression, drug abuse, domestic violence, and even suicide. Numerous studies have documented the destructive consequences of the “gay lifestyle,” although they should be hardly necessary if one merely considers the physical and psychological incompatibility of same-sex relationships, which substitute the natural complementarity of an opposite-sex companion in favor of a narcissistic parody of the same.
…
If we really wish to make the case for marriage, we must take a comprehensive natural-law approach to human sexuality that does not evade the more politically difficult aspects of the question, one that affirms the integral nature of sexual relationships and the corresponding duty of the state to defend sexual morality and repress vice. That is the approach laid out by then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in an instruction issued by the Holy See’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during his leadership of the same. While affirming the goodness of natural marriage, Ratzinger also noted that homosexual unions, without qualification, must always be explicitly opposed, and that governments should act to “contain the phenomenon” of homosexuality.
Although such an approach will entail short-run difficulties and will not yield immediate victories, it is the only long-run solution to America’s terrible moral decline, which is not isolated to the definition of marriage, but includes an almost total corruption of the nation’s understanding of human sexuality, reproduction, and the value of human life. It is also the only truly charitable approach towards homosexuals themselves, who are the greatest victims of the “gay lifestyle,” and are in desperate need of the truth. Until and unless pro-family activists adopt a comprehensive and coherent answer to the ideology of the culture of death, we will continue to suffer defeat after defeat, until the institution of marriage is completely destroyed.
This article by Jon Queally is re-posted from Common Dreams.
As international climate negotiations in Doha stumble towards what many observers predict will be uninspiring agreements not nearly adequate to meet the urgent need to reduce global emissions, environmental campaigners in the US—led mostly by students—have taken new steps in forging a broad-based assault on what they see as the most powerful enemy when it comes to preventing the dangerous impacts of human-caused global warming and climate change.
The target? The fossil fuel companies themselves.
Fueled by a nearly month-long national bus tour by the group 350.org, college divestment campaigns have sprung up all over the US with student groups calling on university leaders to pull their financial investments out from oil, coal, and gas companies that profit from the exact activities that scientists have shown are warming the planet at an alarming rate.
“We’ve felt serious momentum along this transcontinental roadshow—but the numbers of full-on divestment campaigns got larger faster than we could have dreamed,” said 350 co-founder Bill McKibben. “A year notable for ice-melt, parched crops, and superstorms is going out with a different kind of bang: an explosion in activism, aimed squarely at the rogue fossil fuel industry.”
Meanwhile, advocacy groups Oil Change International and the Other 98% have teamed up to launch a public relations campaign of its own designed to put the fossil fuel corporations in their proper context.
Not mincing words, the group set up a website called Exxonhatesyourchildren.com and released this video:
Oil companies hate your children
The new campaign by Oil Change International and the Other 98% says that if you judge Exxon and other fossil fuel companies not by the rhetoric of their finely-polished TV ads, but by their actions and predictable consequences, it is easy to conclude that they “hate your children.”
Claiming the “facts speak for themselves,” the campaign asks the US public to consider the following:
1. Exxon must hate your children because their business model depends on drilling for more and more of the fuels that cause climate disruption, even though fossil fuel companies have already discovered significantly more oil, gas and coal than scientists say we can safely burn. They are creating climate chaos every day — and they’re getting rich doing it. Even the International Energy Agency now agrees that in order to have even chances of limiting global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius (beyond which the worst impacts of warming will kick in), two-thirds of the current proven reserves of fossil fuels must remain in the ground by 2050.
2. Exxon must hate your children because, for years, they spent millions funding a coordinated campaign to create confusion about climate science, which slowed the move towards a more sustainable future. Now Exxon (finally) admits that climate change is a problem, but…
- They say they can’t predict what will happen, and
- Therefore they will continue business as usual.
3. In June 2012, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to “adapt”. Tillerson blamed a public that is “illiterate” in science and math, a “lazy” press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear” for misconceptions around the oil and gas industry.
4.Exxon must hate your children because they and other fossil fuel companies send campaign contributions to candidates for Congress, and in turn, they get massive subsidies…at the expense of more important causes. For every one dollar Big Oil spends on political contributions, they get $59 back in subsidies — a 5800% rate of return. Meanwhile, they make record profits — in 2011, just the 5 biggest oil companies alone (including Exxon) made roughly $135 billion in profits. The at least $10 billion annually in our tax dollars that goes to supporting these rich fossil fuel companies should instead go to building a safe future for all our children.
5.Exxon must hate your children because climate change threatens the future of all of our children, and they seem to just ignore it. Even before Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States, we were witnessing climate impacts on a daily basis, and they’re only getting worse. Just this summer, we’ve seen drought engulf the breadbasket of America. We’ve seen freak storms ravage the Midwest and east coast. All of these impacts are consistent with scientific predictions of climate change. Yet Exxon continues drilling and funding Congressional campaigns, in order to get more subsidies to feed their addiction to their climate-destroying profits.
This article by Glen Greenwald is re-posted from The Guardian.
When the legislation that became known as “Obamacare” was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. As Politico put it at the time: “If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer.”
What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus’ office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance provider (before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Folwer had worked as Baucus’ top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus’ office, Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, and Young.
Whatever one’s views on Obamacare were and are: the bill’s mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: “to the extent that Liz Fowler is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well.” Watch the five-minute Bill Moyers report from 2009, embedded below, on the key role played in all of this by Liz Fowler and the “revolving door” between the health insurance/lobbying industry and government officials at the time this bill was written and passed.
More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone to oversee implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . . Liz Fowler. That the White House would put a former health insurance industry executive in charge of implementation of its new massive health care law was roundly condemned by good government groups as at least a violation of the “spirit” of governing ethics rules and even “gross”, but those objections were, of course, brushed aside by the White House. She then became Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and Economic Policy at the National Economic Council.
Now, as Politico’s “Influence” column briefly noted on Tuesday, Fowler is once again passing through the deeply corrupting revolving door as she leaves the Obama administration to return to the loving and lucrative arms of the private health care industry:
“Elizabeth Fowler is leaving the White House for a senior-level position leading ‘global health policy’ at Johnson & Johnson’s government affairs and policy group.”
The pharmaceutical giant that just hired Fowler actively supported the passage of Obamacare through its membership in the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobby. Indeed, PhRMA was one of the most aggressive supporters – and most lavish beneficiaries – of the health care bill drafted by Fowler. Mother Jones’ James Ridgeway proclaimed “Big Pharma” the “big winner” in the health care bill. And now, Fowler will receive ample rewards from that same industry as she peddles her influence in government and exploits her experience with its inner workings to work on that industry’s behalf, all of which has been made perfectly legal by the same insular, Versailles-like Washington culture that so lavishly benefits from all of this.
It’s difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, anti-democratic, corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as shamelessly and purely as Liz Fowler. One of the few competitors I can think of is Adm. Michael McConnell, who parlayed his military and intelligence career into a lucrative gig at Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors; then became George W Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (where he spearheaded a huge gift to the telecom industry – retroactive immunity shielding it from all accountability for its participation in the illegal Bush NSA eavesdropping program – as well as continued his Booz Allen work of privatizing intelligence and surveillance functions); then returned to the loving arms of Booz Allen, where he now exploits his national security credentials on behalf of industry interests (by, for instance, spearheading the fear-mongering campaign about cyber-warfare in order to advocate for security programs that would amply enrich Booz Allen’s clients).
This is precisely the behavior which, quite rationally, makes the citizenry so jaded about Washington. It’s what ensures that the interests of the same permanent power factions are served regardless of election outcomes. It’s what makes a complete mockery out claims of democracy. And it’s what demonstrates that corporatism and oligarchy are the dominant forms of government in the US:
This article by Steve Horn is re-posted from CounterPunch. Editor’s note: We have reported in recent months about Michigan DEQ and DNR reps citing FracFocus as a legitimate source for chemical disclosure, which this article clearly questions.
Last year, a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) chemical fluid disclosure “model bill” was passed by both the Council of State Governments (CSG) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It proceeded to pass in multiple states across the country soon thereafter, but as Bloomberg recently reported, the bill has been an abject failure with regards to “disclosure.”
That was by design, thanks to the bill’s chief author, ExxonMobil.
Originating as a Texas bill with disclosure standards drawn up under the auspices of the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy Fracking Subcommittee rife with oil and gas industry insiders, the model is now codified as law in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.
Bloomberg reported that the public is being kept “clueless” as to what chemicals are injected into the ground during the fracking process by the oil and gas industry.
“Truck-Sized” Loopholes: Fracking Chemical Fluid Non-Disclosure by Design
“Drilling companies in Texas, the biggest oil-and-natural gas producing state, claimed similar exemptions about 19,000 times this year through August,” explained Bloomberg. “Trade-secret exemptions block information on more than five ingredients for every well in Texas, undermining the statute’s purpose of informing people about chemicals that are hauled through their communities and injected thousands of feet beneath their homes and farms.”
For close observers of this issue, it’s no surprise that the model bills contain “truck-sized” loopholes.
“A close reading of the bill…reveals loopholes that would allow energy companies to withhold the names of certain fluid contents, for reasons including that they have been deemed trade secrets,” The New York Times explained back in April.
Disclosure Goes Through FracFocus, PR Front For Oil and Gas Industry
The model bill that’s passed in four states so far mandates that fracking chemical fluid disclosure be conducted by FracFocus, which recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, claiming it has produced chemical data on over 15,000 fracked wells in a promotional video.
The reality is far more messy, as reported in an August investigation by Bloomberg.
“Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year,” wrote Bloomberg. “The gaps reveal shortcomings in the voluntary approach to transparency on the site, which has received funding from oil and gas trade groups and $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.”
This moved U.S. Representative Diana DeGette (D-CO) to say that FracFocus and the model bills it would soon be a part of make a mockery of the term “disclosure.”
“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” she said.
“Fig leaf” is one way of putting it.
Another way of putting it is “public relations ploy.” As Dory Hippauf of ShaleShock Media recently revealed in an article titled “FracUNfocusED,” FracFocus is actually a PR front for the oil and gas industry.
Hippauf revealed that FracFocus‘ domain is registered by Brothers & Company, a public relations firm whose clients include America’s Natural Gas Alliance, Chesapeake Energy, and American Clean Skies Foundation – a front group for Chesapeake Energy.
Given the situation, it’s not surprising then that “companies claimed trade secrets or otherwise failed to identify the chemicals they used about 22 percent of the time,” according to Bloomberg‘s analysis of FracFocus data for 18 states.
Put another way, the ExxonMobil’s bill has done exactly what it set out to do: business as usual for the oil and gas industry.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 