Canada, Italy, Brazil...People Power is Winning!

MAKING THE DIFFERENCE A victory in depth: Stopping "Crony-Media" in Canada Canadian Avaaz members successfully protected their democracy this month by shutting down a bid to subsidize a new, biased news channel with close ties to the Prime Minister's office. 83,000 people signed a petition against special government handouts for Sun TV - a propagandistic TV channel set up by Prime Minister Harper's former spin doctor, Kory Teneycke. The project was conceived after a secret lunch between Harper, Teneycke, and the infamous Rupert Murdoch, who ruthlessly exploits his vast media empire to manipulate political leaders of several major countries. Murdoch has spawned the radical right tea party movement in the US after being spurned by Barack Obama, employs 5 of the leading US Republican presidential candidates, and no UK government has won an election without his support in 30 years. Canadians were determined to stop Murdoch's "crony-media" style of subversion of democracy from being brought to Canada.

After Avaaz mobilized against SunTV, the media empire threw every big corporate tactic at us - smear pieces in a dozen of their newspapers, threats of lawsuits if we didn't immediately suspend the campaign, and even links to a criminal sabotage of our petition campaign. Avaaz members didn't scare and fought back with 83,000 petition signatures, 21,000 personal letters to the government's media commission, and over $400,000 donated to take on any lawsuits, fight the media battle and pursue a criminal investigation into the sabotage. The donations also allowed Avaaz to hire Canada's top lawyers and experts to help challenge SunTV's application to the government.

The result was a victory on all counts! Kory Teneycke was forced to resign, admitting he had "debased the debate" and SunTV abandoned its attempt to get its launch funded by a government handout. Murray Dobbin, a well-known commentator, wrote, "It is a huge victory for every Canadian who took time to write, email, phone or otherwise protest this grotesque plan to move Canadian political culture to the far right. And a victory in particular for Avaaz the on-line social movement that flushed Teneycke and his bully tactics into the open."

avaaz me hearties!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty