Time to Take #OccupyWallStreet Seriously?

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Ezra Klein says it’s not the protests themselves that have caused him to take Occupy Wall Street seriously. It’s a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” full of personal stories of people who have, seemingly, done everything right but are still struggling with debt, unemployment, and a stagnant future:

This is why I’m taking Occupy Wall Street — or, perhaps more specifically, the ‘We Are The 99 Percent’ movement — seriously. There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street are fighting to upend the system. But what gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead — has been broken, and they want to see it restored.

I haven’t followed OWS super closely, but I started taking it seriously when the right-wing media started sounding a little scared. That was sometime last week after several unions joined the movement, and while I can’t point to anything specific, it felt as though the tone at Fox and its allies changed a bit from lighthearted mockery to something a little more serious, as if OWS was a real threat that needed to be put in its place.

Anyway, we’ll see. To be truly effective, OWS will have to get a lot bigger and lot more persistent. It’s still not clear if this is something that can grow to a million+ people and stay active for multiple years. Because that’s what it will take. For more, Lauren Ellis and Tasneem Raja have a roundup of OWS activities, coverage, and an interactive map of ongoing and planned protests.

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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.

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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.

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