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From the LA Times this morning:

Satellite television provider DirecTV Inc. agreed to pay $2.31 million to settle charges that it made more than 1 million calls to its customers who had — as was their right — placed themselves on a Do Not Call list, the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

And why did the company make the calls? To ask the customers to remove themselves from the list, the agency said.

I’ve been getting daily recorded calls for the past couple of months telling me that THIS IS MY LAST CHANCE to reduce my credit card interest rates.  Finally, instead of hanging up immediately, I decided to listen to the whole spiel and get through to an operator to ask to be taken off their list.  The first one hung up on me.  The next day I tried again.  The operator said “Thank you sir” and then hung up.  The next day I tried yet again.  Finally, I got an operator who actually acknowledged my existence.  And the calls stopped.

That was two weeks ago.  Yesterday the calls started again, though I haven’t gotten one yet today.  Apparently, then, the lesson is that it takes three tries to get credit card companies to leave you alone, and even at that they only leave you alone for two weeks.  $2.31 million is too good for these people.

(And anyway, as my credit card company ought to know, I don’t carry a balance on my card.  So I don’t care about my interest rate anyway.  Idiots.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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