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Here’s the latest good-news-bad-news on the financial regulation front:

The Federal Reserve today proposed new rules that would protect gift card users from fees and other unexpected restrictions.

….Under the proposed rules, gift cards would not expire until at least five years from the purchase date. Service and inactivity fees could only be charged once a month and only after a card had been inactive for at least a year.

The good news is obvious: at least the Fed is finally doing something.  But the bad news is equally obvious: Why did it take so long?  These things are plainly marketed as replacements for cash, after all.  And why, even now, are the rules so lame?  California flatly prevents both expiration dates and fees, and guess what?  Gift card business is booming.

On a more analytical level, I’ll say this: I can understand why gift cards might eventually expire, both for accounting reasons and for common sense reasons.  But inactivity fees?  Come on.  There’s no reason to make a card inactive in the first place, and there’s no cost to re-activating if you do.  This is just plain and simple robbery.  The fact that the Fed caved in to industry pressure to allow this is exactly why we need a Consumer Finance Protection Agency.  A CFPA would never allow scams like this.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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