December 23, 2011

Yes Virginia, Ron Paul is a Kook

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Ha ha. I was just kidding in the last post. It got cut off because, um, my cat knocked over a power line and my neighborhood lost electricity for a bit. But we’re all good now! And I’d just like to say that Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful president a country could ever hope to have.

Anyway. As we all know, President Obama’s most dangerous enemy is Ron Paul, and it’s now my duty to tear him down so that his siren call of freedom will never reach the American people. So here you go: a fundraising letter “written” by Ron Paul in, I guess, 1991 or so. Question: what the hell is he talking about here? He’s scared, he says, by the government’s announcement of “New Money,” which could wipe you out and leave your family destitute.

Answer: as near as I can tell, he’s babbling about the introduction in 1991 of new currency designed to be harder to counterfeit. It made his skin crawl! The bills were tinted pink and blue! And they were being printed in — a nondescript building that has security measures and three-color printing presses!

There’s also some stuff about new federal rules requiring you to report cash transactions over $10,000, and I can at least understand a guy like Ron Paul having nightmares about that.

But new currency designed to be hard to counterfeit? That’s a totalitarian nightmare? You know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the fact that Ron Paul has a few good ideas doesn’t mean he’s not a lunatic kook. He is. He’s a lunatic kook who’s learned to speak in complete sentences1 and whose kookiness occasionally overlaps with the pet ideas of both left and right.

But he’s still a kook.

1In fairness, a lot of kooks have learned this trick recently.

UPDATE: More here. Much more.

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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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