With the Clinton fund-raising flap still wreaking havoc in Washington, Mother Jones magazine's MoJo Wire on Thursday posted its second annual 400 List, a ranking of the country's most powerful stealth political players.
"The Forbes 400 focuses on the wealthiest people in the country," says Mother Jones investigative editor Kerry Lauerman, who conceived of the list with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Klein. "What Mother Jones wants to show is who really runs the country - who uses their wealth to push policy interests." The list appears in the print version of the magazine as well as on the Web.
Topping this year's list is Bernard L. Schwartz, CEO of Loral Space & Communications, who ponied up US$661,000 - mostly to Democrats. Now setting his sights on turning Loral venture Globalstar into a satellite telecom giant, Schwartz is set on rewriting a 33-year-old international pact that limits the number of companies allowed to get into the global satellite business. President Clinton supports the rewrite.
Using figures the Center for Responsive Politics compiled from public Federal Election Commission reports, MoJo Wire created a searchable database that allows users not only to see a straight ranking of who gave whom the most cash, but when. The final tally, $60 million, includes campaign contributions, "soft money" donations to the Republican and Democratic parties, and PAC contributions.
"The really cool thing about the Web database is that it allows users to track giving patterns, so it becomes easy to see evidence of bundling," says Lauerman. "For instance, if lots of companies in one industry or lots of individuals in one company gave to a particular politician or party on a particular date, a lot of times you can pair that with the passage of legislation benefiting that company or industry."
Besides allowing users to track individual contributions by donor, date, amount, recipient, employer, and industry affiliation, the 400 List paints thumbnail portraits of all 400 donors. MoJo Wire also includes exclusive stories on last year's top five donors - all of whom have either plummeted in rank or dropped off this year's list altogether - as well as the people who would have been on the list but had their money returned.
The one group that doesn't appear anywhere in the magazine or on the database includes givers who mistakenly showed up on the FEC's list as super fat cats, but had to be scratched by MoJo fact checkers.
One such giver, Hustler publisher and putative First Amendment stalwart Larry Flynt, was baffled when Lauerman contacted him about his political donations. "He was happy to explain why he'd given money to Clinton," says Lauerman. "He said didn't see anything wrong with helping a president who messed around a little on the side, but he really couldn't figure out why we cared."
It turned out to be a matter of clumsy data entry: Although FEC records pegged Flynt as a $100,000 political bigfoot, he gave Clinton's Legal Defense Fund $1,000. It wasn't the first time Flynt felt like spending money on a president: The Bush administration once returned a $15,000 check to Flynt and asked the smut mogul to forego attending a White House gala.
