Fed Up New Yorkers launches newspaper with a political plan

ALBANY, N.Y. - Jan. 11, 2016 - PRLog -- A new state-wide newspaper called “Fed Up New Yorkers” published its first edition this month, with the goal of helping to establish and energize a bloc of progressive voters in New York State. “Voting matters,” said publisher Neil Fabricant, “and we hope to convince readers that they can successfully fight back against the power of big money in New York State’s politics.”

Announcing the paper’s launch, Fabricant said, “We make no pretense at the ‘we report you decide/fair and balanced’ baloney peddled by the right-wing Republican operatives who run the all-propaganda, all-the time political machinery at Fox News.”

The name “Fed Up New Yorkers” refers not just to the paper, but also to the voters it serves. “We have a political agenda,” Fabricant said, “But the difference between ‘Fed Up New Yorkers’ and the Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes/Karl Rove crowd is that we’ll tell the truth.”

The paper, and the movement, are focused on New York State for now. “If we find support, we’ll replicate the project in other states,” Fabricant said.

Each issue will include features such as “Hacks & Flacks,” which profiles political, media, and academic propagandists. The first of these, in the January edition, is Terry Nelson, an operative in the Jeb Bush campaign. Another regular feature, “Whores Who Would Be Madams,” profiles those government officials who go through the revolving door to wind up lobbying for large corporations or Wall Street, returning to their former colleagues to dispense the corporate cash. The first issue profiles Billy Tauzin, the former congressman who led the fight, first inside Congress and then as a lobbyist for Big Pharma, to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

On the Big Money front, the first edition profiles Halliburton, the company that invented the fracking process and whose former chairman and CEO, Dick Cheney, led the push to invade Iraq. Halliburton is featured in its overlapping roles as a war profiteer, serial polluter and political corrupter. Cheney’s successor, David Lesar, former partner in the Andersen accounting firm that lost its license in the Enron scandal, is “Corporate Bad Boy of the Month” for January.

The 24-page monthly newspaper’s first issue is being distributed in Albany to coincide with Gov.  Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address. That is when, as Fabricant put it, “New York’s political class, the lobbyists, legislators, executive branch, and other insiders—at least those who aren’t yet under indictment, on trial or awaiting sentencing—will be in attendance.” The paper’s entire content is available online at http://www.fedupnewyorkers.org

Each edition features a satirical cover cartoon by Keith Seidel, an illustrator whose savage caricatures depict power brokers “warts and all” and contemporary emperors without their clothes. Seidel’s political drawings follow in the tradition of Thomas Nast and other great satirists who have made a difference in New York’s political history. Seidel’s work has appeared in “Mad Magazine,” “Washington Monthly,” “The Boston Globe” and other publications and on Slate.com.

Fabricant, the paper’s publisher and editor in chief, is the retired president of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, a former legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and a counsel to the former Republican State Senate majority leader, Earl Brydges. In the late 1970s and ‘80s, he published “Empire State Report,” a Ford Foundation-sponsored monthly magazine on New York State government and politics.

The managing editor for “Fed Up New Yorkers” is John Meyer, a veteran journalist and newspaper editor who has covered government and politics for newspapers in Ohio and North Carolina, and supervised state capital and Washington bureaus for the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group.

For interviews and additional information, contact:

Neil Fabricant

http://www.fedupnewyorkers.org