December 7, 2020

Please. Can We Cut the Crap and Just Help People?

Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images via ZUMA

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I don’t have any particular hook for this aside from the looming end of the year, but it’s depressing as hell to watch our leaders screw around with partisan bullshit while COVID-19 is destroying people’s lives. At the end of the year, millions of people will lose unemployment payments. More millions will be in danger of being evicted from their homes. Small businesses are going bankrupt and taking their owners with them. And right here, in the richest nation on earth, lines at food banks are stretching for miles in some places.

Forget about macroeconomics. Sure, spending more money would be generally good for the economy, but I happen to believe that we can squeeze by without a ton of new stimulus. What matters now is simpler and rawer: helping people who need help. That’s it.

I’m not an idiot. I know that even rich countries have practical limits on how much they can spend on social welfare programs. But we’re nowhere near that limit. And anyway, we’re talking about temporary help. By summer, when vaccine uptake reaches critical levels, most of this temporary assistance can be phased out.

So why the hell are we still arguing over it? Why can’t everyone agree that this is a one-off emergency and we need to help the people who need help? It doesn’t require anyone to change their deeply-held beliefs about spending or welfare or economics. It just requires a bare minimum of human decency. How is it that we’ve lost even that?

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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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