March 1, 2003

Finance Reform’s Flame-Out

Reformers hoped that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law would be the first step in kicking big money out of politics. Instead, big money politics kicked the life out of McCain-Feingold.

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A Fox in the Electoral Henhouse?
By Micah L. Sifry
Apr. 15, 2002
With the appointment of former GOP lawyer Michael Toner to the Federal Election Commission, President Bush did more than simply insult the champions of reform.

Campaign Inflation
By Eric Bates
March 5, 2001
Industry pumped in a record 696 million dollars to elect George W. Bush and a GOP Congress. The Mother Jones 400 reveals the nation’s top contributors — and what they expect in return.

Padlock the Revolving Door!
By Ted Rall
May 19, 2000
Campaign finance reform isn’t nearly enough. To really get the influence of money out of politics, we need to keep ex-politicians out of corporate boardrooms.

No Small Change
By William Saletan
January/February, 1999 Issue
Reformers are overly optimistic about ridding politics of Big Money.

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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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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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