Quote of the Day: How Your Bank Screws You

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From Felix Salmon, writing about the day his checking account balance briefly went negative:

By this point, it was abundantly clear what was going on: Citi was doing everything in its power to try to keep me in the dark as to the amount that I had unwittingly borrowed, and to try to ensure that I remained in debt to them for as long as possible.

Or maybe the real money quote is this: “All of which is to say that retail banking is broken, it’s broken everywhere.” That includes Britain, where Felix reports that banks are on the hook for as much as $30 billion in compensation for selling worthless “insurance” to their customers for the past 15 years. And you can add to the list this weekend’s New York Times piece about the endless nickel and dime fees that hourly workers increasingly get dinged with because they’re paid via debit cards.

I dunno. Maybe Matt Yglesias is right. Maybe we really do need some kind of basic, no-frills postal banking service. I’m really not a fan of the idea, but I’m also increasingly skeptical that any amount of regulation can prod banks to act decently toward their customers. They’re just too addicted to making money by screwing people, and those of us in the middle class (who mostly benefit from this system, even if we too get screwed occasionally) are too willing to put up with it. The poor and the working class are basically fighting a pitched battle against Republicans, big bankers, and the upper middle class, and that’s not a fight they’re ever likely to win.

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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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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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