September 23, 2010

Empty Pledges

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Does pundit law require me to comment on the Republicans’ “Pledge To America” that was released today? I’m not sure. And it’s a pretty tedious bunch of boilerplate. So I’ll limit myself to one thing: the section on reducing spending. It has ten provisions. Here’s how I score them:

  • Four of them (#5, 7, 9, 10) are just blather.
  • One of them (#3) is quite plainly not a promise the GOP can or will keep.
  • Two of them (#4, 6) are trivial.

So that leaves #1, 2, and 8. Here they are:

  • Act Immediately to Reduce Spending: There is no reason to wait to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. Congress should move immediately to cancel unspent “stimulus” funds, and block any attempts to extend the timeline for spending “stimulus” funds. Throwing more money at a stimulus plan that is not working only wastes taxpayer money and puts us further in debt.

  • Cut Government Spending to Pre-Stimulus, Pre-Bailout Levels: With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to begin paying down the debt, balancing the budget, and ending the spending spree in Washington that threatens our children’s future.

  • Impose a Net Federal Hiring Freeze of Non-Security Employees: Small businesses and entrepreneurs are the engine of our economy and should not be crowded out by unchecked government growth. We will impose a net hiring freeze on non-security federal employees and ensure that the public sector no longer grows at the expense of the private sector.

Canceling unspent stimulus dollars is just stupid. There’s not all that much left and it would mean leaving lots of programs half finished. But whatever.

The real meat is in the other two. And as usual, Republicans refuse to call out actual programs they want to cut. Everyone knows there won’t be an across-the-board anything, not spending cuts and not hiring freezes. There will only be cuts in actual, named programs. But what? The FBI? Highway construction? Food stamps? Ag subsidies? Corporate welfare? NASA? NOAA? Education spending? The NIH and CDC?

What’s it going to be, guys? If you’re afraid to name any actual programs now, why should anyone believe you’re suddenly going to develop the guts to stand up to your own supporters and name them once you’re in office?

For more on the general vacuousness of this document, see David Corn, Ezra Klein, and Jonathan Bernstein.

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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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