In a new undercover investigation, my colleague James O’Keefe and I reveal the apparent collusion between Ohio public sector unions and their purportedly “objective” allies in media and academia as they try to undermine public support for new labor reforms.

Union front groups We Are Ohio (WAO) and Progress Ohio are currently promoting a “no” vote on Issue 2, which is a referendum on Ohio’s Senate Bill 5, to be held on Election Day 2011 (November 8). SB 5 requires public employees to contribute a modest amount more towards their benefits, to close the gap somewhat with their private sector counterparts.

In attempting to defeat SB 5, union advocates have loudly trumpeted a study by Rutgers Professor Jeffrey Keefe that claims that public employees already earn less private sector workers do in comparable jobs.

For instance, Jeff Bell of Columbus Business First reported that when inquiring about public employees’ superior pay and benefits, WAO spokeswoman Melissa Fazekas “quickly steered [him] to a study on the compensation issue completed this year by Jeffrey Keefe.”

However, Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation and Andrew Biggs (no relation to Jax) of the American Enterprise Institute have found Keefe’s study to be, in Biggs’ words, “a piece of junk.”

In their own September 14th study, Richwine and Biggs conclude that while public employees receive 2.5 percent less in wages than their private counterparts, “when pay and benefits are taken into consideration public workers received 31.2 percent more in total compensation.” When other factors are taken into account, such as job security, “Ohio public-sector workers are paid 43.4percent more.” Richwine and Biggs conclude that under SB 5, public employees would still maintain this edge over private sector workers.

Keefe also works for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, DC think tank that boasts that it is “beholden to no one; we say what we think is true regardless of who might not want to hear it.” The EPI also claims that it “conducts research according to the rigorous standards of objectivity,” and “provides data … that allows for a clear, unbiased understanding of the economy’s effect on the living standards of working Americans.”

James and I had an agent at Project Veritas contact Keefe, posing as “Chris Fowler,” a researcher for a hedge fund manager who had chosen to work alongside the Ohio Education Association. “Fowler” offered Keefe a commission in exchange for authoring a study showing that cuts to education and collective bargaining “rights” hurt students, emphasizing that “if [EPI] find[s] evidence contrary to what our intended outcome is, we just, we want to make sure that they will omit that kind of data,” to which Keefe responded reassuringly, “Oh, what they’ll do, is they’ll not publish it … We’re not going to change the results of any study, but if it’s something you don’t want published, we’ll kill it.”

Shortly thereafter, I approached Keefe at a public symposium on SB 5 at the University of Toledo. I offered him an opportunity to defend his standards of objectivity, and, subsequently, to explain the phone call.

Keefe began by assuring that he had not and “never would” accept what I described as a “pay for play deal in which [he would] agree to kill any research that didn’t support a pro-union conclusion,” explaining that it was “the interviewer [who] said that” [emphasis mine].

However, at no point during the phone call did Keefe decline the deal. In fact, the word “kill” was not the interviewer’s. It was his–specifically.

I then asked Keefe if he “would not accept a pay-for-play deal,” to which he responded: “Never, in fact what I told the interviewer is they had to go bargain with the EPI, not me.”  That is true. He did advise our agent that his compensation would be worked out with the EPI, but under the apparent implicit understanding he would be the one commissioned, explaining, “[the EPI] bring a lot of resources to the table that’s very helpful for me to do this work.”

When I read him the EPI mission statement, asserting that it “conduct[s] research according to rigorous standards of objectivity,” Keefe affirmed it, saying, “Absolutely.”

Yet during the phone call, Keefe had emphasized how it is “important to do business with policy institutes rather than academics,” laughingly noting that “[a]cademics believe in publish or perish … no matter what the outcome is.” He reassured us that “Policy institutes have an policy agenda … The thing about EPI is when they publish something, it’s highly reliable and credible, but if it’s contrary to what you want, and what they want, they just, they pay for it, and they kill it.”

Earlier in the call, Keefe recommended that our caller contact EPI President Larry Michele and Policy Matters Ohio executive director Amy Hanauer, which he did, offering the same deal. Sam Stein of The Huffington Post reported, after hearing from both of them, that both had declined the deal offered by our interviewer, with Hanauer explaining: “They were fishing for us to say we would release it if it had a pro-union point of view or kill it if it didn’t.” Michel added, “I told him, you know, you can’t buy results.”

Policy Matters Ohio released a statement claiming to be “amused” by our “trying to get [their] director, Amy Hanauer to reveal a desire to deliver biased research,” adding: “Policy Matters is not for sale. We do unassailable research.”

We commend Hanauer and Policy Matters Ohio for maintaining their integrity, but their deserved self-vindications do not make the situation any less awkward for Keefe or EPI.

Worse, like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper, mouthwatering liberal media flocked to Stein’s incomplete narrative. Deriding our investigation as a “ratfucking” effort, Huffington’’s Dan Mirvish accused James of getting “caught with his pants down.” David Dayen of Jane Hamsher’s FireDogLake mocked it, facetiously describing it as “a brilliant plan.” Joseph Anonymous of liberal Ohio blog Plunderbund, advised us: “Consider this your notice, boys. Everyone in Ohio is on to your scam.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos wrote: “Calling [James] on it before he has the chance? That’s pretty awesome.”

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Read Project Mayhem, Part I and Project Mayhem, Part II

Recently, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and White House reporter Tommy Christopher attacked Andrew Breitbart and myself for a “failed ambush” after I released Project Mayhem, Part II, which included video in which I broke the first rule of Project Mayhem, and asked Schultz how Ohio Senate Bill 5 allegedly takes away union rights to bargain on safety, which he and his panel contended, when it specifically does the opposite.

Recounting this in a subsequent broadcast, calling me part of a “goon squad,” Schultz explained that “after the show, one of Andrew Breitbart’s lackeys ambushed me.”

First of all, I did not “ambush” him; I asked him for a few moments of his time for an interview and he agreed. Perhaps I should from now on duck, cover and scream “Help!” every time some Greenpeace member asks me if I have a moment for the environment.

Apparently Schultz’s definition of the term “ambush” is any consensual interview in which specific questions are asked which don’t comfortably warrant platitudinal answers. (By this rationale, most questions towards President Obama regarding specific language in Obamacare are ripe for secret service intervention.)

Schultz continued: “It wasn’t a scheduled interview he just came up and started talking.”

Actually we did schedule it. I asked, “Hi Mr. Schultz, can I ask you a few questions for the people of Ohio?” He said, “Sure.” So I began. I assumed by “sure” he meant “right now is fine,” as opposed to “call my assistant, she knows my schedule this week better than I do.”

In the interview, I pointed out to him that “the bill under Section 4117.08 actually gives the right to unions to be bargain on safety which the Democrat bill of 1983 didn’t.” His response was “that’s not what the firefighters are telling me,” to which I said, “But the bill says so.”

… And it still does. As the author of the bill Shannon Jones advised Schultz in my earlier video, “Reading is fundamental.” In response to the video release, Schultz admitted that while the bill does in fact say so, it at the same time doesn’t say so:

“What Breitbart and the anti-union Republicans don’t want you to know about is Section 4117.14 of the bill … Right now if firefighters and lawmakers have a disagreement, they go to a neutral third party to reach an agreement. In Senate Bill 5, those rights are taken away and the lawmakers — the lawmakers — have the final say.”

Once again, Ed, reading is fundamental. Had Schultz actually read the article I wrote in which the video was embedded, he would have found that this “Breitbart lackey” who “[doesn't] want you to know about … Section 4117.14,” specifically mentioned Section 4117.14.

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(Read Project Mayhem, Part I here)

When he’s not busy encouraging Massachusetts voters to commit voter fraud to “keep these bastards out,” or condemning “tea party rhetoric” for not “rising to the president’s challenge on tone” while calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut,” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz indulges his hobby of swooping into states like Wisconsin and Ohio, becoming an overnight expert on legislation he is only familiar with from having skimmed through SEIU-furnished Cliffs Notes, calling the legislation “racist” while cheerleading union rallies with applause-cuing platitudes, waving his arms in solidarity and then peacing out.

Schultz made a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio in which he had Congressman Tim Ryan (whom I had interviewed hours prior about Senate Bill 5’s alleged confiscation of safety equipment) and Senator Sherrod Brown on the show against a backdrop of union firefighters to whom, during commercial breaks, Schultz yelled that SB 5 “makes me believe Jimmy Hoffa even more that they are sons of bitches!” Throughout the broadcast Schultz and his guests parroted the manufactured mantra that the bill takes away safety equipment, perhaps almost enough times to make it true.

Admittedly breaking the SEIU’s first rule of Project Mayhem, I subsequently interviewed Schultz on camera and asked him to respond to the fact that the bill gives bargaining rights on safety equipment — which the Democrats’ earlier bill didn’t, citing the exact section number — to which he offered a Pulitzer Prize-warranting response: “That’s not what the firefighters are telling me.”

Well Ed, that may not be what the firefighters are telling you the bill says, but it is what the bill is telling me the bill says. When I later asked the author of SB 5, State Senator Shannon Jones, to respond to Schultz’s talking points, she clarified the provision in depth, noting to Schultz that “reading is fundamental.”

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As Andrew Breitbart recounts in his excellent new book Righteous Indignation, when James O’Keefe first showed him a series of tapes in which he and Hannah Giles had posed as a pimp and a prostitute successfully requesting help from ACORN to set up brothels for their 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, James turned to Andrew and said, “We’re going to take down ACORN.” Andrew responded, “No. We’re going to take down the media.”

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John Lennon murdered Sharon Tate. Jodie Foster shot Ronald Reagan. Oliver Stone and Marilyn Manson caused Columbine. A dog ordered the Son of Sam killings. And Fox News, the Tea Party and the American right compelled Jared Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Tucson.

The only reason these parallels don’t work is that while Charles Manson did in fact draw inspiration from “The White Album,” John Hinckley from “Taxi Driver,” Harris and Klebold from “Natural Born Killers” and (somewhat debatably) Marilyn Manson, and David Berkowitz from a Labrador retriever, there is no evidence Jared Loughner even watched Fox News or leaned right. Inconveniently, a former friend and bandmate described Loughern as “left-wing political radical” and “quite liberal,” and Loughner claimed The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page where he also released video burning the American flag.

But when it comes to exploiting human tragedy to “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it” (in Saul Alinsky’s words), no facts will obstruct a perfectly salvageable mainstream media narrative.

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Media Matters owes its readers an apology.

In my previous column, “Teachers Unions Gone Wild: The Director’s Commentary (Part 1),” I challenged Media Matters — who pompously mocked Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks for believing in the authenticity of our videos because “[James] told [him]” they were — to hold Alissa Ploshnick and her spokesman Steve Wolmer to the same standard as Brooks.

Steve Wolmer spoke on behalf of Alissa Ploshnick, who is now “in seclusion,” claiming that when editing “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” I maliciously grouped two soundbites of hers together that were allegedly uttered in totally separate contexts. Wolmer claims that Ploshnick’s comment about a teacher calling a student the N word was actually an anecdote about a student-to-student confrontation in her high school days, and “had nothing to do with tenure.” Wolmer explains that we “edited that out and put it in the tenure conversation to make it look like that was the context.”

While I was admittedly tempted to sit back and hear more of their creative fairy tales, I had to set the record straight and release the unedited raw audio of Ploshnick’s dialogue, pulling the rug out from under her and Wolmer’s lies.

What is even more amusing is that Media Matters, after snobbishly chastising Brooks for trusting James’ word that the videos were authentic, flipped a 180 and took at face value Ploshnick’s and Wolmer’s alibis which I have now proven to be undeniable lies. (more…)

If James O’Keefe and I were to release a video catching disguised al-Qaeda members casually joking about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, the mainstream media would likely be most interested to know who pays our salaries.

Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices.

Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us.

It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something? (more…)

Having done video coverage of almost 50 Tea Parties in over 45 cities in 25 states, it’s safe to say I know the Tea Party well. And as a 23-year-old coming from a generation primarily influenced by mainstream media, I believe the mainstream media’s lampooning and stigmatizing of our movement, while nefarious yet somewhat successful, has not been achieved entirely without some cooperation on our part. I believe in our movement, and believe we will win in November, but if we lose, here are five reasons why.

First: Let’s not overdo it with the 18^th century costumes. While festive and somewhat thematically appropriate, it doesn’t speak to my generation, and often begs the mainstream media to caricaturize us as Halloween-padded fringe throwbacks. We can all agree on restoring the constitutional vision of our founding fathers, but restoring their fashion sensibilities? You will have to call me a progressive on that one.

Second: A convenient Tea Party mantra has been the presumptuous, and seemingly amnesiac notion that President Obama “betrayed the American people,” that “We the People have spoken and never wanted Obama’s policies.”

Obama made his agenda clear during his campaign: He promised to socialize health care, to push for cap and trade, to implement tax policies that would “spread the wealth around,” he equated redistribution of wealth with “neighborliness,” supported the 2008 Wall Street bailouts, demonstrated his faith in Keynesian economics, his class warfare mentality, his distrust for the free market… (more…)

As a filmmaker I have always entrusted the lens of a camera to illuminate both the stuff of my imagination and that of this world that otherwise would not be visible. This summer, I was tasked by Move America Forward – the largest pro-troop 501(c)3 in the country, which hosted the recent Troopathon that raised $541,711 for care packages for the troops – to travel to Iraq and capture a glimpse of the situation that may have ended up on the cutting room floors of the mainstream media.

My traveling companions were Matt Sanchez, a Move America Forward volunteer and producer of Fox News’ The Strategy Room; Mary Pearson, photographer; and Debbie Lee, the founder of America’s Mighty Warriors, a Gold Star mom whose son, Marc Allen Lee, was the first Navy-SEAL killed in Iraq during a fight in Ramadi on August 2, 2006.

In his last letter home, Marc had written:

What I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.

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Jersey City pimp Allen E. Brown was recently sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for trafficking underaged prostitutes. Perhaps he would have gotten off had he simply claimed in court that he wasn’t dressed as a pimp when operating his prostitution ring.

For the past nine months, Media Matters for America has obsessively defended ACORN’s video-verified role in helping James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles set up a brothel for pubsescent sex slaves on the basis that James was not dressed as a pimp and that Hannah was not dressed as a prostitute — as she was in my creative b-roll portion of the videos — when entering the offices.

Despite the audio-recorded conversations in which Hannah was indisputably introduced as a prostitute requesting ACORN’s assistance in establishing a brothel, in which almost all ACORN workers approached offered their assistance — in Media Matters’ eyes, the wardrobe factor automatically rendered the damning investigation a “practical joke” and a “hoax.”

But while they laughed at the apparently trivial reality of a taxpayer-funded organization enabling underaged sex slavery, when O’Keefe set up in New Orleans what was actually intended as a practical joke to be taped and put up on YouTube as a minor radar-blip project to punctuate his more serious investigations — the left was not laughing. (more…)

On March 5, in a kicking-and-screaming, last-ditch effort to save her organization, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis wrote in BeyondChron.org of the “right-wing attacks” on ACORN by “undercover right-wing racist James O’Keefe,” repeating a Greatest Hits compilation of factually-defunct angles left has desperately drummed into the mainstream for the past five months, from the race angle to the doctored-videos angle.

On March 4, Stephen Colbert staked these angles to the pop culture turf in light of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s recent report that the undercover tapes were “heavily edited,” producing a satirically-edited interview with Sean Hannity to deride James’ allged “deceptive editing.”  No mention that Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, was endorsed by the ACORN-related Working Families Party during his recent bid for re-election. (Find the unedited audio and full transcripts here.)

And my recent bar brawl with Tommy Christopher — a Mediaite blogger who has been promoting the notion that James O’Keefe’s ACORN investigation was racially motivated — in Washington D.C. during CPAC, confirms my assessment of the utter desperation of O’Keefe’s critics.

Ironically, with no tangible evidence that O’Keefe’s videos were, in fact, “heavily edited,” the left has been literally heavily editing their attack plan against him – correcting, updating, and revising their angles of assault in order to catch up with the facts. (more…)

In their February 9 column on BustedHalo.com, “Tricks Are For Kids,”  conservative Catholic writers Dawn Eden and William Doino, Jr. joined the herd of pious finger-waggers who have taken to the high ledges to point at James O’Keefe, upon his recent arrest in New Orleans.

In an interview with Matt C. Abbott of RenewAmerica.com, Ms. Eden blasts the work of O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Lila Rose of Live Action Films (O’Keefe’s partner in the Planned Parenthood investigations):

We noted that Alinsky’s tactics ran directly counter to St. Paul’s dictum that we cannot do evil that good may come. Live Action’s work, like O’Keefe’s, uses the means of lying and deception in order to accomplish a good, which in their case is pointing out the lying and deception of Planned Parenthood.

About the ACORN investigation, she continues:

Was it really necessary to have an undergrad disguised as a scantily clad prostitute to expose the organization?

Well, it worked, didn’t it? With an enveloping sigh of disdain, Eden and Doino write: (more…)