September 24, 2009

Quote of the Day

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From Eric Kolchinsky, a former analyst at Moody’s, a ratings agency, on why he’s testifying before Congress today about abuses of the ratings process:

I was part of the process that did all this damage, and I feel I should try to do something now to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

That’s refreshing.  If you read the linked story, Kolchinsky basically says that it’s business as usual at Moody’s: they’re giving high ratings to insanely complex debt instruments even when they know the underlying assets aren’t really in very good shape.  It’s yet another data point suggesting that Wall Street is already piling back into all the same practices that caused last year’s meltdown.  And why not?  Unlike Kolchinsky, none of these guys really seem to believe they did anything wrong in the first place.  Hooray for bailouts!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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