More Finger-Pointing, Please

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In a post below, Charles points out that it’s not inappropriate to play the blame game over Hurricane Katrina right now. I agree; in fact, it’s entirely necessary, and I’d like to see more of it. Consider this sentence buried at the end of a Times today, without elaboration: “Efforts to add backup power generators to keep them all running during blackouts have been delayed by a lack of federal money.” Okay, so let’s have dollar figures, figure out who’s responsible, and see how many people are affected, so that everyone can know how decisions in Washington can literally make a life-or-death difference. The hurricane will eventually fade from people’s minds; the time to draw the relevant connections is now. It’s possible to offer sympathy for those in New Orleans, donate to the Red Cross, and still figure out why this all happened.

The thing of it is, most of the time when Congress is fiddling with numbers in the budget, it’s impossible for voters to get any firm sense of where money goes, or how it actually impacts people’s lives in real and concrete ways. The Republican-run Congress knows this perfectly well; earlier this year, for instance, the GOP leadership held separate budget votes on cutting taxes and cutting spending, aware that if people got a sense for how tax cuts drain the public coffers, and a sense for where the money goes and how it actually affects real human beings, they might be a little less prone to aspersions cast on “big government” in the abstract. So it goes with Katrina. People need to know exactly how political decisions—like President Bush’s longstanding efforts to dismantle FEMA and stock the agency with political cronies—affect people, and that can best be made clear right now. It’s the only way to have any hope of getting the important policy questions right in the future.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists 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 hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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