March 3, 2016

The Big Lies Just Keep Coming and Coming and Coming….


Speaking of big lies, here is Donald Trump two weeks ago talking to Anderson Cooper about his health care plan:

COOPER: Will people with pre-existing conditions be able to get insurance?

TRUMP: Yes.

And here is Trump’s health care plan, released today:

The phrase “pre-existing conditions” appears nowhere. It’s just the usual mish-mash of Republican claptrap, including state lines, tax deductions, HSAs, “price transparency,” and block-granting Medicaid. Plus there’s one liberal idea just to keep everyone on their toes: allowing importation of pharmaceuticals. Why? “Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector,” Trump says, “drug companies provide a public service.” I’m not sure even Bernie Sanders would have the nerve to say this.

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

Headshot of Editor in Chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

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