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Rich Miller of Bloomberg reports:

Global investors give Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke top marks for combating the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and overwhelmingly favor his reappointment amid optimism that the world economy is on the mend.

Well, I don’t favor it — and this has nothing to do with whether Bernanke has done a good job or not.  Just look at a couple of the quotes Miller dug up.  “He’s the best, maybe around the world,” says one guy.  “If he weren’t renominated, it could have potentially very serious and severe repercussions on the stock market and the economy,” says another.  Spare me.

Look: Bernanke isn’t indispensable, any more than Alan Greenspan or Paul Volcker or William McChesney Martin were.  But everyone thought they were indispensable at the time, and that’s a dangerous way to think about these guys.  Putting Fed chairmen on a pedestal, as the financial community does routinely, breeds both complacency and insularity.  In the long run, it’s bad for business.

Wall Street needs to calm down and learn that being Fed chairman for a few years doesn’t make someone superhuman.  The world won’t end if Bernanke is replaced by one of the other dozen or so highly qualified candidates available, and Obama should take the chance to demonstrate this when he chooses Bernanke’s replacement.

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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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