By Jose Lambiet at Forbes

New York billionaire David Koch was forced to pull down a privacy fence recently erected around his winter property in Palm Beach, Fla.

His staff put up the country-style camouflage net after camera crews from a liberal group filmed the 30,000-square-foot beachfront house, estimated by property tax authorities to be worth $27 million.

The fence went up in early summer after the guerrilla video Brave New Foundation, run by Hollywood producer Bob Greenwald, got kicked off the property by a security guard and town police.

The foundation is working on documentaries for the website Koch Brothers Exposed. The video below shows Greenwald’s crew knocking on the doors of some of homes owned by David and brother Charles Koch, who shares David’s No. 4 ranking in the Forbes 400.

Click here for the full story.

By Anna Almendrala at Huffington Post

Major advertisers for the controversial morning radio show John & Ken are leaving in droves thanks to a boycott organized by the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) and immigrants rights activists in Southern California.

The radio show became the target of an advertising boycott on October 6 after the show’s hosts John Kybolt and Ken Chiampou gave out the personal cellphone number of DREAM act advocate Jorge-Mario Cabrera in September. The hosts encouraged their listeners to call him and voice their opposition to the bill, which would give public and private assistance to undocumented college students (the bill has since passed).

In fact, GM’s official twitter account has been sending similar messages out to followers for hours now in response to a Twitter campaign championed by Cuentame, a Latino advocacy group working in concert with NHMC on the advertising boycott.

Cuentame founder Axel Caballero praised GM for their action and credited the power of social media for its power to put pressure on major companies. He also told The Huffington Post that Cuentame would continue “to push back against the racial and violent rhetoric that is peddled by folks like John and Ken, who are only interested in pushing their hate agenda.”

Click here for the full story.

Congratulations to the CLEAN Carwash Campaign! Check out the Cuentame video in support of their work: mycuentame.org/carwash

by Sam Quinones at LA Times

Workers at a Southern California car wash have organized and won a labor contract with their employers, making it what’s believed to be the only unionized car wash in the country.

The agreement, to be announced at a press conference Tuesday morning, is between some 30 car wash workers and the Sikder family, owners of Bonus Car Wash, at 2800 Lincoln Blvd. in Santa Monica, according to the contract The Times has received.

As part of the agreement, the family has agreed to attempt to reopen Marina Car Wash in Venice, which had closed and had employed another 30 workers, said Chloe Osmer of the Community Labor Environmental Action Network (CLEAN), a group formed to organize car-wash workers.

Click here for the full story.

Axel Caballero on Cuentame’s Immigrants for Sale campaign, and the politicians and corporations that profit from detention centers.

Thom Hartmann interviews Cuentame’s Axel Caballero for the esteemed series, “Conversations with Great Minds”

Ian Masters invites Robert Greenwald to discuss the latest Koch Brothers Exposed project – Koch Industries and Cancer Risk.

By Ardem at Blue Arkansas

Yesterday I wrote about Koch Industries’ Georgia-Pacific plant in Crossett has been dumping pollution into the local river and exposing those in the town to deadly carcinogens.  In a better world, the people in Crossett would have the ear of their elected representatives.  In the world we live in, they don’t.  Money talks in politics and just scratching the surface gives you an idea just how many people have been bought off by the Koch’s in this state.  Example A, the Congressman that should be looking out for the people of Crossett, Mike Ross.

Over the course of his Congressional career, Ross has received thousands of dollars from Koch Industries, (something that got a little bit of newsattention earlier this year) so much so that it’s become apparent that he’s their favorite Democrat.  This year, they’ve been his fourth largest contributor, giving 7,000 dollars to his campaign account (before it became clear Ross wasn’t running for reelection).  They gave him 10,000last cycle,10,000 in 2006, and let’s not for get the 5,500 contribution to his leadership PAC last year.  With contributions like that coming from one of the worst polluters in the country, people who are no stranger to the quid pro quot games of American campaign financing, it’s no wonder that Ross evolved into a crusader against the EPA and environmental regulations.  It’s just like the health care debate, where thousands of Ross’s constituents could have benefited from reform but he sided with the insurance companies paying him to kill it.  It’s just like Wall Street reform, where he sided with the firms lining his coffers rather than the people dealing with the economy their corruption had destroyed.  It’s just like the fight over the Bush Tax Cuts, where he stood up for the 1% and had the audacity to say that it was the best thing for his impoverished district that was going to bare the brunt of the austerity measures Republicans were pushing to balance the budget.  I used to call this thing soft corruption when we saw Blanche Lincoln doing.  I’ve changed my mind.  Just because it’s not illegal, doesn’t mean that this isn’t good old fashion, revolting, immoral corruption.  And this is the man who wants to be our next Governor, a corrupt Koch sucking politician looking for the next available bribe.

By Lucia Graves and Jordan Howard at Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — David Bouie, a 64-year-old resident of Crossett, Ark., says something isn’t right on Penn Road. In the 15 homes on his street, 11 people have recently died of cancer. The casualties include George Parker and his wife, Ollie Parker, as well as Bobbie Sue Gibbs and her neighbor Tom Perkins, both of whom passed away with multiple cancers. Dolores Wimberly, a former neighborhood resident, says her daughter Laetitia, a nonsmoker, died of lung cancer at 43; and Penn Road resident Norma Thompson says her husband died of lung cancer, while she continues to have breathing problems, often relying on a respirator.

“Whenever we take a trip out of town, our respiratory system seems to get better,” said David Bouie’s wife, Barbara, who has spent her entire life in Crossett, the largest city in Ashley County. “I don’t have trouble breathing, or use my eye drops, or anything. But when we come home, it starts all over again — the headache, everything.”

A provocative new video by political filmmakers Brave New Films says that Crossett residents who suffer from poor air quality and ambient carcinogens are victims of pollution emitted by a Koch Industries-owned paper manufacturer, Georgia-Pacific. The plant is located directly upstream from the channel behind Penn Road. “Whatever’s in (the water) is killing these trees,” says David Bouie in the video. “You can see the steam coming from the stuff. It gets up in the air, and it flows over where our property is.”

Click here for the full story.

By John Deans at Greenpeace

This week Brave New Films released a short documentary exposing the impact just one Koch Industries operated Georgia Pacific plant in Crossett, Arkansas is having on the local community. The film takes a look at a neighborhood around Penn Road downstream of the facility where an abnormally high number of people have died from cancer. The community believes the source is the waste flooding out of the Georgia Pacific facility down a stream that runs nearby. Please take the time to watch this film, it offers a glimpse into the real impacts of the Koch’s reckless corporation.

Click here for the full story.

By George Zornick at The Nation

One of the early storylines about Koch Industries involved its efforts to attack scientific evidence that formaldehyde causes cancer. It was first exposed by Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog last fall, and Jane Mayer’s seminal New Yorker story explored it as well. In short, while a member of George W. Bush’s National Cancer Advisory Board, David Koch was helping the Formaldehyde Council, a DC lobbying group, to question scientific research that the chemical could be lethal. At the same time, Koch co-owned Georgia Pacific, which uses formaldehyde extensively in its manufacturing operations.

In the reductive, oppositional world of DC politics, it can be easy to forget that real human beings are affected—sometimes disastrously so—by ideology and policy. Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films has just released a heartbreaking mini-documentary that puts a human face on the consequences of Georgia Pacific’s use of formaldehyde at a plant in Crossett, Arkansas. That plant has dumped millions of gallons of waste into the area’s water system, which violates the Clean Water Act—yet they’ve done so for years, while also paying a lot of money to discredit the idea that formaldehyde is bad for people.

But along one road in Crossett, near the Georgia Pacific plant, a disturbing number of residents are now dying of cancer. In fifteen families, eleven people have died of cancer and others are currently sick. A USA Today study says the town’s schools are in the first percentile for exposure to carcinogens.