Bush Staffers Want to Grow Oranges in the Arctic

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In this week’s Rolling Stone Tim Dickinson, a former MoJo editor, waded through thousands of previously-FOIAd documents and emails to construct a comprehensive look at the Bush Administration’s campaign of global warming denial.

Mother Jones was among the first on this beat back in spring of 2005 when Chris Mooney uncovered the administration’s attempts to silence the global warming debate by way of its close ties to ExxonMobil, and that company’s funding of climate change skeptics.

Interestingly, Tim notes that many of the documents he details in his feature were in plain sight, not buried from the public under any sort of top secrecy. I too, as the fact-checker for Mooney’s piece two years ago, recall the reams of documents, the trail of evidence linking high-ranking administration employees, such as Larisa and Paula Dobriansky and Phillip Cooney, to the upperest of oil-industry crust.

Check out Tim’s piece for a good summary, and for doozies such as this email to ExxonMobil lobbyist turned White House adviser Cooney, from White House energy staffer Matthew Koch, who, upon hearing about an industry-funded study that refuted warming was happening at all said:

“What??!! I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!”

Did he not learn anything from Jack Abramoff? If you are going to be callous and mess with the nation and people’s lives on a grand scale, please, at least refrain from boasting about it in email verse.

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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.

payment methods

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