Who could have imagined these guys would do something underhanded?

Who could have imagined these guys would do something underhanded?

"Fix the Debt," the front-for-corporate-tax-breaks arm of the Erskine Bowles/Alan Simpson catfood road show, has been trying to foment generational warfare. Among their efforts is attempting to create an uprising of college age people against their parents and grandparents, using the Alan Simpson frame that the greedy geezers are trying to steal away their future by taking their $1,230/month Social Security benefits. They call this effort "The Can Kicks Back."

So, being the corporate- and Pete Peterson-funded astroturf organization that they are, they decided to tackle this problem by putting their propaganda in local newspapers around the in the names of college students. But here's what they were't counting on: getting caught. Here's what the Gainsville Sun in Florida has to say about the scam.



If you liked University of Florida student Brandon Scott's column last Sunday about the national debt, you also should enjoy columns by Dartmouth College student Thomas Wang and University of Wisconsin student Jennifer Pavelec on the issue. After all, they're the same columns. The identical columns ran last weekend in newspapers in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. They each included the same first-person passage describing the student's work with the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its "millennial arm," The Can Kicks Back. [...] The Center for Media and Democracy's Mary Bottari wrote on the Huffington Post that The Can Kicks Back was an attempt to make it seem like college students are energized by the debt issue. Its efforts include paying students $65 to participate in a flash mob for deficit reduction, she wrote. These efforts are called "astroturf" because they only appear to grassroots. When it comes to columns and letters, The Sun's policy is not to publish astroturf pieces written by advocacy groups and only signed by supporters.

Thepulled the op-ed when it discovered it was astroturf, as did Wisconsin’s, and the New HampshireNow if we could just get Washington, D.C. to recognize them for what they are.