Follow the Dark Money

Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending.

“For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently corrupts. A healthy democracy, they say, needs robust regulation—clear disclosure, tough limits on campaign spending and donations, and publicly financed presidential and congressional elections. The dean of this movement is 73-year-old Fred Wertheimer, the former president of the advocacy outfit Common Cause, who now runs the reform group Democracy 21.

“On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who consider laws regulating political money an assault on free markets and free speech. They want to deregulate campaign finance—knock down spending and giving limits and roll back disclosure laws. Their leaders include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr., and former FEC commissioner Brad Smith, who now chairs the Center for Competitive Politics, which fights campaign finance regulation.”

Author: Andy Kroll
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 19, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,806 words)

The Marines’ Breast Cancer Epidemic

A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina:

“It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for aviator sunglasses, Partain was born at Camp Lejeune, the North Carolina base where his father, a first lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was stationed in the late 1960s. Now he lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he makes his living as an insurance claims adjuster.

“Five years ago Partain’s wife noticed a grape-size bump next to his right nipple. ‘I thought it was from an ingrown hair or something. I blew it off,’ he recalls. But a couple of weeks later he decided to get it checked out. When his doctor ordered a mammogram, he remembers, ‘a chill went down my spine.’ Then came a sonogram: Partain watched in amazement as an image emerged on the screen looking like one of the globular star clusters he knew as an astronomy hobbyist. ‘I never even knew men could get breast cancer!’ he says.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: May 18, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,541 words)

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

A writer goes undercover at a shipping warehouse in Mississippi—and wonders whether Americans will ever demand higher standards for how their Internet purchases are being fulfilled:

“We will be fired if we say we just can’t or won’t get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate I am on a regular basis, I can keep this job. ‘Do you think this job has to be this terrible?’ I ask the workamper.

“‘Oh, no,’ she says, and makes a face at me like I’ve asked a stupid question, which I have. As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Feb 27, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,999 words)

I Couch-Surfed Across America

Exploring the social etiquette of Couchsurfing.org—and how its rapid growth is challenging the community’s expectations of safety and mutual respect:

“Orange Acres takes all kinds, provided you follow a few simple rules:

• No alcoholics, crackheads, or members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, or PETA
• ‘[O]n the subject of hippies and rainbow people,’ please don’t wear patchouli oil: ‘That stuff stinks forever’—and bring your own pillowcase if you have dreadlocks.
• Happy Hour starts at 6:30 p.m.; during that time—and only during that time—you may drink beer or smoke pot. Do not get shitfaced or you will be thrown out of the house. If you drink and try to drive, Jeff will handcuff you to a chair and call the cops.
• Dogs and children must be on leashes. This is non-negotiable.

“‘The place really is not a commune; it is a dictatorship,’ Halvorson tells me.”

Author: Tim Murphy
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Feb 18, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,724 words)

The Frog of War

Scientist Tyrone B. Hayes discovered a link between the herbicide atrazine and male frogs developing female body parts. His work led to a bizarre battle with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta, in which the two taunted each other over email:

“When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps:

“tyrone b hayes is hard as hell

“battle anybody, i don’t care who you tell

“you object! you will fail!

“mercy for the weak is not for sale

“‘It hasn’t been productive in the debate, and it hasn’t helped him,’ Skelly says. ‘I mean, why do that?'”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Feb 6, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,008 words)

No Country for Innocent Men

Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. “I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of.”

Ruby sat down, stood up. A picture of Tim in a tuxedo, taken at his junior prom, smiled from the mantle. Before his trial the prosecutor had offered him a deal to plead to lesser charges. “Mother,” Tim had said, “I am not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do.” He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Thirteen years later, he died behind bars. The Texas criminal-justice system has long had a harsh reputation, but it has drawn renewed scrutiny with Gov. Rick Perry’s run for president.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Dec 12, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,092 words)

The Cruelest Show on Earth

Feld Entertainment portrays its population of some 50 endangered Asian elephants as “pampered performers” who “are trained through positive reinforcement, a system of repetition and reward that encourages an animal to show off its innate athletic abilities.” But a yearlong Mother Jones investigation shows that Ringling elephants spend most of their long lives either in chains or on trains, under constant threat of the bullhook, or ankus—the menacing tool used to control elephants. They are lame from balancing their 8,000-pound frames on tiny tubs and from being confined in cramped spaces, sometimes for days at a time. They are afflicted with tuberculosis and herpes, potentially deadly diseases rare in the wild and linked to captivity [13]. Barack, a calf born on the eve of the president’s inauguration, had to leave the tour in February for emergency treatment of herpes—the second time in a year. Since Kenny’s death, 3 more of the 23 baby elephants born in Ringling’s vaunted breeding program have died [14], all under disturbing circumstances that weren’t fully revealed to the public.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Oct 31, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,566 words)

I Can Find an Indicted Warlord. So Why Isn’t He in The Hague?

Some people think that arresting Bosco would unravel the peace deal between Congo and Rwanda,” he says. “I think that that’s not true. You could certainly make a case that arresting him could be stabilizing.” He’s divisive within the former CNDP. He’s become an incredibly powerful mineral smuggler, the cause of much of Congo’s conflict. Also: “He’s a living insult to international justice, and the fact that he wines and dines next to the largest peacekeeping mission in the world in full sight? And everybody knows where he is, and logistically speaking, he would not be very difficult to arrest.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Sep 28, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,314 words)

Grover Norquist: The Soul of the New Machine

As early as the sixth grade, Norquist, now 47, remembers arguing with classmates over the Vietnam War. “Suzy somebody thought Nixon was a fascist and [Alger] Hiss was a good guy,” he says. Thanks to a fire sale at his local public library in Weston, Massachusetts, he picked up several books by J. Edgar Hoover and Whittaker Chambers on the communist threat. At 12, he was volunteering for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. After church, his father would buy him and his three younger siblings ice-cream cones and then steal bites, announcing with each chomp, “Oops, income tax. Oops, sales tax.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jan 4, 2004
Length: 13 minutes (3,356 words)

God’s Own Warden

Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once known as the bloodiest prison in the South, into a model facility. Among born-again Christians, Cain is revered for delivering hundreds of incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the nation’s largest maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, “with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” To Cain’s more secular admirers, Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the nation’s booming prison population at a time when the notion of rehabilitation has effectively been abandoned.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jul 25, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,033 words)