Rachel Maddow warns us about the lastest astroturf group which we're sure to see more of as the debate over financial reform continues. As she notes, Rick Berman has been setting up web sites and corporate front groups that mirror legitimate watchdog sites to try to undermine them. The Consumer Rights League was set up in 2007 and it shares the same acronym with the Center for Responsible Lending, which was set up thirty years ago as an actual consumer rights group. The Consumer Rights League is now organizing protests against the real consumer rights group, the Center for Responsible Lending.

The Huffington Post has more on this here -- Center For Responsible Lending In Fight With Front Group:

The Center for Responsible Lending says the Consumer Rights League is just doing the bidding of the financial industry, which opposes reforms advocated by the center. "This is an industry-funded front group, also known as Astroturf, that can't win on the merits of their arguments so they have to attack people personally," said Kathleen Day, spokeswoman for the Center for Responsible Lending. "They lack transparency. "That should make everyone wonder why. Whose water are they carrying?" "We don't claim to be a grassroots organization. We claim to be a different voice for consumers," Flynn said. But who's paying for the megaphone? Flynn refuses to say, though he admitted to Roll Call that the financial industry does contribute to the group. According to tax forms, the league was founded in 2007 with Flynn, Jason Roe, Duane Dicharia, Michael McKay, and Theresa Kibbe as its directors. Roe and Mckay are both principals in the Federal Strategy Group lobbying firm, which has some clients in the financial industry and was paid $40,000 for start-up costs. Kibbe is married to Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, which provided office space to the league. Flynn said the league is not connected to the Federal Strategy Group. He said James Terry has replaced Terry Kibbe as the group's chief public advocate, that McKay is no longer one of the directors and that he (Flynn) works from home. A key part of the league's complaint is that the center's big donors benefited from the center's lobbying. It's the same argument made against the center on websites like www.activistcash.com, propagated by notorious industry PR man Rick Berman, for whom Flynn used to work. Flynn provided the government with two news clippings purportedly showing how the center is a front for its donors. One, a BusinessWeek story from 2007, suggested that hedge fund Paulson & Co. gave $15 million to the Center for Responsible Lending hoping to benefit from bankruptcy reform legislation for which the center had been lobbying. Another is a December 2008 New York Times story about Herb and Marion Sandler, who helped found and fund the Center for Responsible Lending. Citing this article, Flynn wrote in his letter to the IRS that Herb Sandler "made billions of dollars as the owner of a bank that wrote what are now called subprime mortgages for the low-income beneficiaries of CRL's various advocacy efforts."

As Rachel and the HuffPo article points out, they shared office space with Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, they won't say who funds them but admitted to Roll Call that they are at least in part funded by the financial industry, the board of directors of the Consumers Rights League included FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe's wife Terry Kibbe, who is a Republican fundraiser and a banking lobbyist.

Rachel said to watch out for the right wing media to start promoting the protests from the Consumer Rights League and one last tidbit, the former President of the Consumer Rights League Mike Flynn now is the editor and chief of Andrew Breitbart's site BigGovernment.com, which is promoting the fake astroturf protests. And as Rachel noted, Mike Flynn used to be a lobbyist for Rick Berman. More on that from TPM.

In The Loop: The Pay-Day Lenders' Ties To Powerful Beltway Influence-Peddlers: