community organizing

The right wing's favorite political football, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has announced that it will be closing down. What brought down the once-strong force for justice for low-income Americans? Concerted attacks from the right were the main cause, but, Jim Naureckas notes, inaccurate reporting by the nation's major news outlets didn't help. Naureckas is the editor of Extra!, the magazine put out by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the media watchdog organization, and he joins Laura to talk about the problems with the newspapers' accounts of the ACORN saga. The most oft-asked question after the historic passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as the health care bill, is "How does this affect me?" While we can't answer all your individual questions in a 30-minute show (or a week of 30-minute shows), we thought we'd pull in some experts to lay out what's in the new law. Jacob Hacker, Yale professor, is known as "The Father of the Public Option," and Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine and editor of HealthBeatBlog.org, and they join us to break down the pluses and minuses of the biggest social reform legislation since the Johnson era. What does FOX News have to do with the demise of ACORN? According to this segment from our friends at Brave New Films, quite a lot. FOX's lead sent other news outlets scurrying after the non-story of James O'Keefe's infamous "pimp and prostitute" video, and kept up a steady drumbeat that saw the organization stripped of funds and forced to close its doors.

John Perkins and Russ Baker talk about shady global conspiracies, corporate overlords, and the military-industrial complex, and what we can do about it. In the new film "Collapse," filmmaker Chris Smith follows Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who predicted the economic crisis. But his theories often range into the apocalyptic. Is he a genius, or just paranoid? A video from New America Media takes a look at the struggles of veterans to readjust to civilian life, and asks what more we could be doing to truly honor them. And a report on the Earth Island Institute Brower Youth Awards.