Watch: DC’s Stockholm Syndrome

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We’ve getting emails all weeekend from friends, family, MoJo readers, and random strangers about David Corn and Kevin Drum‘s turn on Bill Moyers’ Journal. It was really an astonishingly good show, and well worth watching in the context of… just about everything happening in Washington right now. Take your pick: Today, there’s a kerfuffle about the shadow of the possibility of a financial transaction fee, a tiny amount the government could collect from banks to get a little something back for taxpayers–or, more to the point, for our children, who will be paying for the deficit we ran up for the bailout. (Yes, some banks are repaying TARP money, but do you know just how tiny fraction of the total bailout that is? Our handy chart, along with lots more data geekery on shameless bonuses and such, is here. The “Too Big to Jail” package that inspired Moyers to ask Kevin and David to come on is here.) As with every other proposal to make Big Finance bear any part of the burden for the disaster it has caused, this won’t fly unless politicians feel they have more to lose from satisfying Wall Street than they do from offending it. So watch the show and forward it to your friends. It’s as informative as it is outrage-building—and on this topic, we could use more information and more outrage

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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.

payment methods

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