Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” thunders Blake, played by Alec Baldwinin the David Mamet movie “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. You get the picture?” Constant pressure to meet goals is nothing new in sales, and it can breed desperation.

After spending a year in jail awaiting trial, Oglala Lakota Sioux activist Red Fawn Fallis pleaded guiltylast week to two federal felonies related to her arrest while protesting the Dakota Access pipeline. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped the most serious charge against her, which would have carried a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence with the possibility of life imprisonment.

This essay, by former congressional candidate Paul Perry,is in response to The Intercept’s recent reporting on the role of fundraising in the 2018 election cycle. The first door I knocked on as a congressional candidate was a gut check. Geraldine was a soft-spoken, middle-aged white woman suffering from cancer. She lived by herself in a modest rancher just a few miles from where I went to high school in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Late last October, several hundred handsomely suited financiers gathered in the ballroom of a luxury Marriott, just two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Trump International Hotel. Lisa Kidd Hunt, the new chair of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, practically glowed as she addressed the crowd of bankers, brokers, and other money managers. “There has never been a better time to be in this industry!” she declared.

Nigerian musical artist Seun Kuti is the youngest son of the legendary Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. Like his father,Seun describes himself as a revolutionary and he is a fierce critic of the corruption ofNigeria’srulers and the U.S. and transnational corporations that prop them up and exploit the country’s vast natural resources.Nigeria is a country also targeted in Donald Trump’s racist rants.

Lenders to Puerto Rican homeowners have kicked foreclosures into high gear in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, skirting local and federal borrower protections.

The Environmental Protection Agency has tasked a banker who was banned from the banking industry for life with oversight of the nation’s Superfund program. In May, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fined Oklahoma banker Albert Kelly $125,000. According to a consent order, which The Intercept obtained through FOIA, the FDIC had “reason to believe that [Kelly] violated a law or regulation, by entering into an agreement pertaining to a loan by the Bank without FDIC approval.

The skiffs arrived a few hours after sundown on September 18, a dark and moonless night in the Peruvian Amazon. They landed at several points along the broad Corrientes River, which flows south over the country’s densely forested border with Ecuador. Hundreds of indigenous Achuar men, women, and children, many carrying ceremonial spears, organized into units by clan and village.

Maggie Wynne’s career as a foot-soldier in the anti-abortion movement began in Congress, where throughout much of the 1990s she was a staffer for the so-called Pro-Life Caucus. When George W. Bush took the White House, she moved to the Department of Health and Human Services to work in the office that connected Congress and the agency. A few years later, in 2005, she became a special assistant within HHS.

On Zerious Meadows’s last day in prison, he woke up at 4 a.m., as usual, because his cell mate works in the kitchen and leaves early to prepare breakfast. He listened to the radio — a station that plays R&B and rap from “the time when it had meaning” — and then went about distributing the last of the items he’d accumulated in 47 years behind bars.

Her search began on Thanksgiving day. Carmela Hernández went from church to church in Philadelphia, knocking on doors. Her asylum appeal had just been denied,and she and her four children had been issued deportation orders. They had until November 29 to turn themselves in to immigration officials. Her lawyer advised her to go back to Mexico, which she had fled in 2015 after three of her relatives were killed.

Rudolph J. Gerber has never forgottenwhere he was when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty over45 years ago.Hewas a new lawyer in Phoenix, working as the associate director of the Arizona Criminal Code Commission. The landmark 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia invalidated death sentencesacross the country, including those of 16 people on Arizona’sdeath row.

On the night of December 2, 2017, a Honduran woman in the rural province of Olancho was protesting what she saw as a stolen election. The woman, eight months pregnant, stood in the streets in violation of a national curfew, and she screamed alongside a rebellious multitude, “Fuera JOH!” (“Out JOH!”), referring to the incumbent president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who many believe fraudulently rigged the elections in his favor to maintain power.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Nevada declared a mistrial in the prosecution of Cliven Bundy, his sons Ryan and Ammon, and family supporter Ryan Payne, over charges related to their armed standoff with federal officials in 2014. The government had failed to disclose pertinent evidence to defense lawyers, including FBI reports that said the Bundy family wasn’t dangerous — the latest in a series of embarrassing blunders and egregious misconduct by federal agents and prosecutors.

So, which side are you on? #TeamWest or #TeamCoates? Choose fast, preferably within seconds, and don’t come to this gunfight with a knife. No, like some nerdy Rambo, we want you greased up and loaded with ammo: your most painful character smears, your most “gotcha” evidence of past political infractions, a blitzkrieg of hyperlinks and, of course, an aircraft carrier of reaction GIFs.