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This Little Piggy

In a February ABC News special, “Freeloaders,” reporter John Stossel called Dwayne Andreas, CEO of food giant Archer Daniels Midland, the country’s “No. 1 welfare mooch” and confronted him with a Mother Jones exposé on corporate welfare (“Dwayne’s World,” July/August 1995): “Mother Jones pictured you as a pig…feeding at the welfare trough.” Andreas, who denies that the $4 million he’s fed to politicians has any relation to the subsidies that benefit his business, replied, “Why should I care?”

Turns out, Andreas does care—he has a penchant for all things pig, so much so that he tracked down the artist, Victor Juhasz, and bought the caricature for $2,500. The picture, Andreas says, “reminds me of when I was a child feeding little pigs.”

Juhasz says he is not surprised by the purchase: “People will buy uncomplimentary caricatures. Ego is blind.”

For more about Andreas’ corporate pork, see “Where Are They Now?“, in the 1997 Mother Jones 400.

Greener Government

Energy efficiency efforts at the White House have saved taxpayers close to $500,000 (“Executive Flower Plot,” January/February 1997), and now the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) wants to apply its green thumb to other federal facilities, including the Pentagon, San Francisco’s Presidio, and, of course, the Department of Energy. A lucky federal building near you may soon get the same treatment—a CD-ROM due out in September will explain the greening process to the government’s 50,000 building managers.

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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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