Best Of...Part 2

Wisconsin dairy farmer Paul Adams.

Your regularly scheduled Fucking News will return tomorrow, and I’ll be working on a new article — or articles?!? — for a story I’m hoping to break very soon.

In the meantime, I want to continue sharing a few of my “greatest hits” that I hope will illustrate the kind of journalism I think we need more of — as opposed to what we’re getting now from U.S. news outlets. And, yes, I know how arrogant that sounds. But it’s still probably better than however I said it when I was fighting for that kind of journalism from inside some of those outlets.

In yesterday’s TFN I told you about using Phil Gramm’s role in the global economic meltdown to draw attention to why that meltdown happened. This was back when I was producing for Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Well, around the same time, gas prices were topping $4 per gallon. This was a big deal at the time, and since I was already in the economic weeds on the global economic meltdown, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to look into this, too. Turned out, deregulation played a role here, too. And so did Gramm.

Gramm, the former senator, had helped deregulate electronic trading with a little bit of legislation known as the Enron Loophole. In the process, Wall Street was allowed to start gambling on gas prices. That drove up the price of gas.

Again, the idea was to use Gramm’s personal involvement as a way to draw people in to the much more important systemic elements. No article for this one, but here are the transcript and video.

Ultimately, all three presidential candidates at the time — Hillary Clinton and then-Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) — vowed to close the Enron Loophole. Obama eventually did, and gas prices came down.

Oh, and here’s Keith reporting on Gramm’s departure from the McCain campaign in the wake of our reporting and other reporting, and the negative attention it was drawing to the negative things Gramm had done.

And here’s my kinda recent followup — in which I revealed that Wall Street spawned another loophole that’s driving up prices. Now. And not just for gas, this time, for every commodity. No one’s closed it yet, but we can dream!

Here’s one I was really proud of at the time. No big gotcha moment or anything, but a mind-blowing — for me — look at how an industry’s entire business model could change in less than a generation, taking all of us along for the ride.

It’s about Big Pharma, how drugs are created, and how these companies feed into our economy and increasingly feed off of it. 

Similarly, for reasons that escape me now, I ended up looking at organic farming. It could have changed everything. Climate change. Environmental shit. The economics of farming. Rural life in America. Rural politics in America.

But for that to happen, organic farming (including livestock) had to be actually organic farming. And that required someone standing guard, ensuring the big factory farms couldn’t just…fiat themselves into existence as organic farming.

Which is basically what happened.

Okay, I’m gonna cut it short here. I had a lot more stories I wanted to share. And other pieces I wanted to run while I’m on vacation — I’m mostly done with the one I had on immigration. But…the guilt I’m feeling about not working on TFN is now starting to lose out to the guilt I’m feeling about not spending time with my friends on vacation.

So I’m gonna stop now! Thanks for hanging in there with me while I went walkabout. See you tomorrow!.