Chamber Chief Pledges to Wage “Most Aggressive” Election Fight Ever

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In strident speech in Washington this morning, US Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue renewed his assault on the Obama agenda and pledged to fight the President’s allies in the 2010 elections. The Chamber will wage “the largest, most aggressive” campaign in it’s 100-year history, he said, to “highlight lawmakers and candidates who support a pro-jobs agenda, and hold accountable those who don’t.”

Lashing out out at Democrats’ leading initiatives, Donohue called health care legislation pending in Congress “a prescription for fiscal insolvency and eventual government takeover of American health care.” And he said the Waxman-Markey climate bill “would tie economic activity in knots and eliminate jobs from one end of the country to another.”

As I reported in Mother Jones‘ January/February issue, the Chamber of Commerce’s image as the voice of  American businesss is increasingly at odds with it’s right-wing political agenda and undemocratic leadership structure. Greenwire recently reported that a third of the Chamber’s massive budget–it spends upwards of $300,000 per day on lobbying–comes from a mere 19 supporters (it has long refused to name its backers or members).  “People have criticized us for helping industries or individual companies,” Donohue told the Wall Street Journal last year. “What the hell do you think we do? That’s our business!”

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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.

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