Classic muckraking articles, books, & films, and whistleblower news.
Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, Noam Chomsky, Foreward by Marcus Raskin, 2014
In this collection of essays from 1969-2013, many in book form for the first time, Noam Chomsky exposes the real nature of state power. With unrelenting logic, he holds the arguments of empire up to critical examination and shatters the myths of those who protect the power and privilege of the few against the interests and needs to the many.
Mark Puente, Undue Force. The Baltimore Sun, 28 September 2014. “The city has paid about $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits claiming that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects. One hidden cost: The perception that officers are violent can poison the relationship between residents and police.”
Jake Bernstein, Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash. ProPublica, 26 September 2014. “A confidential report and a fired examiner’s hidden recorder penetrate the cloistered world of Wall Street’s top regulator–and its history of deference to banks.” This story was co-published with This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago: “536: The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra,” 26 September 2014. Listen to the radio version here. And read the transcript of the radio version here.
Tim Dickinson, Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire. Rolling Stone, 24 September 2014. “Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world’s largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don’t want you to know is how they made all that money…. The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they’ve cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today’s GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year’s midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate. What is less clear is where all that money comes from.”
Brian Grow, P.J. Huffstutter and Michael Erman, Farmaceuticals: The drugs fed to farm animals and the risks posed to humans. Reuters Investigates, Part One, 15 September 2014. Part Two, 4 December 2014. Part Three, 23 December 2014. Part One: “Documents reveal how poultry firms systematically feed antibiotics to flocks…. Pervasive use [of antibiotics] fuels concerns about impact on human health, emergence of resistant superbugs.” Part Two: “On American dairy farms, sharp rise in the misuse of a potent but risky drug…. The antibiotic ceftiofur is a wonder drug for dairy farmers. But its strength–and the frequency at which it’s used improperly in cattle–pose a threat to public health.” Part Three: “Veterinarians face conflicting allegiances to animals, farmers–and drug companies…. The FDA is counting on vets to curb antibiotic use, but not even the government knows which of the animal doctors has financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”
Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams and Nicholas Confessore, Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks. The New York Times, 6 September 2014. “More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.” Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
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