Mrs. Jones Goes to Washington

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Last Dec. 6, exactly one year after Vice President-elect Gore’s ringing vow that the East Liverpool incinerator would never be allowed to run without a thorough investigation, the Government Accountability Project, Greenpeace, and Mother Jones held a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill. Neither Gore nor any member of his office attended. The investigation he’d promised was still proceeding with no visible progress and no end in sight.

In the stately hall, a university professor wittily told how a hazardous-waste incinerator was “coming soon to a neighborhood near you”–but only if your neighborhood was poor, populated by racial and ethnic minorities, and desperate for jobs. The GAP and Greenpeace people spoke of the legal issues involved and the appalling scientific hazards. GAP released a study describing the contamination of the national food supply by incinerator dioxin emissions as “catastrophic.” And citizen activists (from places like Jacksonville, Ark., and Rock Hill, S.C., as well as East Liverpool, Ohio) read from prepared texts.

The day before, at the rehearsal for the briefing, they told us how they’d done everything they were brought up to do. They’d noticed something wrong in their neighborhoods. They’d looked into the matter. Some of them had become experts on the subject of hazardous-waste incineration in general and the conditions in their local plants in particular. They’d taken their disturbing findings to the EPA and to their elected representatives. Nothing happened. Like good Americans, they went to the Capitol and politely spoke their minds. Then the citizens went home. And nothing went right on happening.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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