Yep. Someone forwarded one of my posts on the DC anarchy list to them. There was a debate about pieing Nader and I cited Henwood's piece as one reason to bring out the baking brigades.
>From: lsalzman at aba.org (Lorna Salzman)
>Doug Henwood of course is a hard line Marxist ideologue with whom I have
>had minimally polite but firm debates over environmental and economic
>issues. However, his fuse is short and his tolerance of dissent almost
>nonexistent. He is intelligent but intolerant. As for "Tom Trouble",
>whomever he may be, his name speaks volumes about what he is up to. In
>other words, we are not talking objectivity, and therefore credibility is
>at issue.
I got the nickname back in '96 when I got a nice 8-month temp assignment with a group called Contributions Watch. They claimed to be a independent campaign watchdog group. CW was actually a front group run by a bunch of Burson-Marsteller PR flacks digging up dirt on trial lawyers and public interest groups. Philip Morris secretly funded the entire outfit. I collected hundreds of pages of internal documents and passed them to PR Watch and CounterPunch and they broke the story with the WashPost. PR Watch devoted an entire issue to the story: http://www.prwatch.org/Q3-96/TOC.html#flack
Not mentioned in the story was the fact that they had infiltrated the Greens in 96 to dig up dirt on Nader's presidential campaign. They stopped once they realized his campaign was going nowhere. Some of the internal documents were passed on to the Naderite groups, green/enviro groups and Consumers Union. Of course, they didn't have a problem with my credibility then.
I've done a few other whistleblowing stints (plenty of unsavory outfits in the DC area). The results from my latest effort appeared in a recent issue of Mother Jones. http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/ND99/nami.html
I've taken a short break from working but I plan to return to temping next week. I'm hoping for some more fascinating assignments.
Tom