The World’s Dumbest Deliberative Body

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Midway through the second period of our global economic collapse, how’s the home team doing?  Conventional wisdom says the Wall Street crowd is whiny and petulant.  President Obama is well-meaning but maybe a little too cautious. Europe is too disorganized and too eager to shift the blame instead of taking action.

And then….there’s the Congress of the United States.  Michelle Bachmann, taking a page out of the Bircher playbook circa 1963, wants to make sure the Chinese don’t foist a one-world currency on us while we’re down.  Don Manzullo is so relentlessly clueless that even the normally imperturbable Ben Bernanke can’t pretend to understand him.  And LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is watching television:

On C-SPAN I found the perfect thing: The House Financial Services Committee was grilling Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke about the AIG rescue.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) grumbled about “socialized medicine,” as though he had wandered into the wrong committee room. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) obsessed about the “small group of Wall Street types who are making decisions,” especially Goldman Sachs & Co., which she described in terms James Bond uses to describe SPECTRE.

Their colleagues, meanwhile, emitted what the writer David Foster Wallace might have described as “recombinant strings of dead cliches” about undeserved bonus payments, U.S. taxpayer money paying off foreign banks and the mushrooming of that new American art form, the bailout.

They showed, in sum, that they have no understanding of the roots or remedies for the financial crisis, and — more to the point — no great desire to understand. They left me convinced that if we are to have a productive investigation of the financial meltdown, it must be taken away from posturing lawmakers.

Hiltzik’s solution is a fantasy lineup of investigators to shove Congress out of the way and figure out what really happened.  A friend who works on Wall Street ended an email cautiously supportive of Geithner’s toxic waste plan with this: “One last thought — could we possibly send Congress into recessuntil this is all over? They are killing us….”  My solution is — what?  I don’t have one.  Enjoy the show, folks.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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