John Stauber (1953 - ) is an American writer and political activist who has co-authored five books about propaganda by governments, private interests and the PR industry. They include one book about how industry manipulates science (Trust Us, We're Experts), one about the history and current scope of the public relations industry (Toxic Sludge is Good for You), and one about mad cow disease (Mad Cow USA), which predicted the surfacing of the disease within the United States.

In July 2003 Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, which argued that the Bush administration deceived the American public into supporting the war. In 2004, the two co-authored Banana Republicans, which argued that the Republican Party is turning the U.S. into a one-party state. The book argues that the far-right and its functionaries in the media, lobbying establishment and electoral system are undermining dissent and squelching pluralistic politics in the United States. In 2006 the two wrote The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq, which builds upon the arguments they posited in Weapons of Mass Deception.

Stauber is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which sponsors PR Watch and SourceWatch. Since the 1960s, he has worked with public interest, consumer, family farm, environmental and community organizations at the local, state and national level. He edits and writes for the Center's quarterly newsmagazine, PR Watch. He is also a member of the Liberty Tree Board of Advisers.

Stauber grew up in a conservative Republican household in Marshfield, Wisconsin, but the war in Vietnam turned him into an anti-war and environmental activist while still in high school.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that, ironically, when Stauber was promoting his book on PR, it was delivered to the media with a slick press kit, and a prewritten list of questions for reporters to ask when interviewing the authors

Naomi Klein

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Jump to: navigation, searchNaomi Klein

Born May 5, 1970 (age 37)Montreal, Quebec

Occupation journalist, author, activistSubjects anti-globalizationWebsite NaomiKlein.org

Disambiguation: For the author of The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, see Naomi Wolf

Naomi Klein (b. 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist well known for her political analyses of corporate globalization.

Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her family has a history of activism, as does that of her husband, Avi Lewis. Her grandfather was fired for labor organizing at Disney in the United States. Her father Michael, a physician, was a Vietnam War resister and became a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her film-maker mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein, won fame with her anti-pornography film, Not a Love Story.[1][2] Her brother Seth is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Her in-laws are Michele Landsberg and Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis. An aunt is married to Daniel Libeskind, the architect.

Klein's writing career started early with contributions to The Varsity, a University of Toronto student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. She credits her wake-up

call to feminism as the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.[3]

In 2000, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. This movement had shut down the WTO Meeting of 1999 one month before the release of No Logo. The book lambasts brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations. These corporations are also often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits, she writes. Klein criticized Nike so much in the book that it became one of the first publications to receive feedback from the company.[4]

In 2002 Klein published Fences and Windows, a collection of articles and speeches she had written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement (all proceeds from the book go to benefit activist organizations through The Fences and Windows Fund). Klein also contributes to The Nation, In These Times, Canada's The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, and The Guardian.

She has continued to write on various current issues, such as the war in Iraq. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine entitled "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia",[5] she argues that, contrary to popular belief and criticisms, the Bush administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a fully unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals.

Also in 2004, Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, released a documentary film called The Take, about factory workers in Argentina who took over the closed plant and resumed production, operating as a collective. The first African screening was in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban where the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement began.

In October 2005, Klein was ranked 11th in the The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by Prospect magazine[6] in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine. She was the highest ranked woman on the list. Prospect based the list and its rankings entirely on an Internet poll.[7]

Naomi Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published on 4 September 2007. The book first discusses the CIA's manual of torture, the Kubark CounterIntelligence Interrogation handbook, describing the process, referred to by Naomi Klein as a shock, of regressing the prisoner down to a childhood state. This shock is used as a metaphor throughout the work for all crisis - natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks - which, because of the psychological shock, allow opportunistic dramatical economical reforms, referred to as economical shocks. A criticism of Milton Friedman of the Chicago School and laissez-faire capitalism is analyzed from Suharto's Indonesia, 1965 and Pinochet's Chile, 1973, among others, forward to the present. Current attempts at cracking the Middle East with the failed US-generated model for

privatization of Iraq's economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority are expanded from Klein's original Harper's Weekly essay Baghdad: Year Zero.

Mark Curtis (British author)

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Mark Curtis is a British historian and journalist writing on British and US foreign policies and international development and trade issues. He is a former Director of the World Development Movement, and Head of Policy at the NGOs Christian Aid and ActionAid. He is author of the best-selling books, Web of Deceit and Unpeople.

[edit] Books Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses (Vintage, London, 2004) Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World (Vintage, London, 2003) Trade for Life: Making Trade Work for Poor People (Christian Aid, London,

2001) The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order (Pluto, London,

1998) The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed, London,

1995)