December 3, 2012

Koch Brothers: It’s Only a Flesh Wound!

Bo Rader/ZUMA (Charles Koch), Dennis Van Tine/ZUMA (David Koch)

This has been a very bad year for conservative megadonors. That includes Charles and David Koch, the famously secretive industrialist brothers who pledged a do-or-die effort to unelect President Obama with the help of their wealthy allies and affiliated dark-money groups. So how have they been spinning the disappointing election results to their friends and fellow donors? This (entirely fake) letter imagines one possibility… 

Read more on the Kochs’ political activities in 2012 and the real stats cited in the phony letter above.

More MotherJones reporting on Dark Money

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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