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While visiting the House in the earliest days of Newt’s reign, I went to one of his suddenly scheduled press conferences. Newt began with self-congratulations. He was (yet really wasn’t) amazed at his historical moment. Reform-minded voters had embraced his “Contract With America.” Still, he noted, on today’s Contract item — term limits — honest revolutionaries could disagree. For example, exactly how many years should a member of Congress be permitted to serve? In a good-faith effort to let democratic debate decide such details, Newt announced he would allow several measures to reach the House floor.

After deriding a few of the media’s questions, Newt signed a blown-up poster of a nonspecific term limit pledge and exited. I rushed after him, but he’d already disappeared into the bowels of the Capitol. I would have asked him: Why did he keep away the main grassroots group pushing term limits? Why was he enforcing military discipline on every Contract item except this one? Didn’t that guarantee no limits threatening the new GOP majority would ever be approved?

Of course, Newt’s sound and fury signified something more than mere hypocrisy on a single amendment of dubious efficacy. His brisk legislative struts upon the national stage were meant to create the illusion of a popular insurgency while distracting the press from his shakedowns and payoffs. This strategy proved so successful that Newt and his confederates became brazen. A distinctive — perhaps the distinctive — characteristic of the 104th House has been the shameless way it has cut deals with its donors.

Our cover package tells stories of corruption that would be comic were not real lives affected. Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), for example, is known for embracing the most crazed militias and anti-environmental extremists. But she also collected cash from the manufacturer of a possibly lethal baby cradle and drafted legislation that would have reduced company liability.

Paybacks like this weren’t difficult to foresee. In fact, this magazine predicted many right after the 1994 election. Our soothsaying relied heavily on common sense: Most large political donors want something in return. While looking for those somethings, we rarely encounter other journalists. This absence of consistent competition is both a relief and a concern. We like to break news, but often find our investigations greeted with indifference by our colleagues.

Whenever an election season begins, however, a shift occurs. The press wants background — just in case something breaks. For example, most of the major media attended a press conference we gave on April 17 detailing the nicotine network we’d discovered throughout the Dole campaign, the Congress, and the statehouses. We flatly predicted: “Tobacco politics could become the hottest issue in this year’s election.” The coverage was spotty and the skepticism thick. Then a few weeks later, Dole began speaking like Marlboro’s man and his fortunes turned.

Were reporters alert now, they would notice that American politics is at a turning point. The public is trying to express its anti-elitist rage, but can’t find a party that will follow through on its populist rhetoric. The media have become complicit with the moneyed elites. The press will cover rivalries between elites, but rarely questions basic corruption and the ongoing consolidation of wealth.

The best guide I’ve found to what’s happening in America today is Elementi di scienza politica, published by the Sicilian Gaetano Mosca in 1896. He asserts that elites will inevitably rule, but observes that the key difference in advanced societies is that “wealth produces political power just as [in less developed societies] political power has been producing wealth.” The public bureaucracy, Mosca believes, serves the wealthy by providing a protective legal framework while disguising the “overbearing assertiveness on the part of wealth.”

In 1994, voters responded to Gingrich’s attacks on Washington because they sensed the Democratic majority wasn’t on their side. Once in power, however, Gingrich, Tom DeLay (R-Texas), and the rest of our Dirty Dozen betrayed voters by shifting public subsidies not back to the general populace but to their own wealthy patrons. Some of the giveaways were direct and others devious — e.g., mandating a market for Golden Rule Insurance under the guise of reforming Medicare.

Newt’s Machiavellian streak wouldn’t surprise Mosca, who marries an Old World desire to accept the world as it is with modern scientific detachment. In comparison, most Americans are simultaneously more idealistic and more hands-on. Our current cynicism about politics betrays an underlying faith: We believe in the redemptive powers of opportunity, and we want to give everyone a fair shake. Our basic instinct is to divide political power in the hope that contending parties will prevent the formation of a permanent plutocracy.

This hasn’t worked because on the central political issue of the day — campaign finance — the parties refuse to contend. Most of the exposés in our cover package concern corruption that has remained unknown to the public because key Democrats haven’t protested.

The political animal’s first instinct is survival. But he or she also craves approval. It’s becoming harder to satisfy both urges. The gulf between our politicians’ two constituencies — the elites who fund them and the voters whom they ostensibly serve — keeps widening. Until we fundamentally change the financial rules of the electoral game, finding another Dirty Dozen in the 105th Congress will be painfully easy.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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