May 3, 2010

Poles Not Worried About Iranian Missiles

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/49403380@N00/2658316482/">cowicide</a> (<a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a>).

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Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski spoke to Foreign Policy‘s Josh Rogin last week about his country’s cooperation with American missile defense plans. The Bush administration’s plans to put missile defenses in Poland was sold—as these things generally are—as a bulwark against missile launches by a rogue state (in this case, Iran.) As Rogin explains, this was all poppycock: the interceptors were designed to shoot down long-range missiles and would have had a lot of trouble shooting down anything launched by Tehran. And as it turns out, Sikorski isn’t all that worried about the Islamic Republic nuking Warsaw. “If the mullahs have a target list we believe we are quite low on it,” the foreign minister told Rogin. 

All this reminds me of Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-Mass.) arguments against spending gobs of money on missile defense in Europe. Frank likes to talk about Prague, not Warsaw, but the analogy holds. “I will confess that I am not a regular reader of Iranian-issued fatwahs,” Frank quipped last year. “And probably one of the ones I missed was the one where they threatened devastation against Prague. We plan to spend several billion dollars to protect the Czech Republic against Iran. That’s either a great waste of money or a very belated way to make up for Munich.” Is Sikorski thinking along the same lines?

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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.

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