March 25, 2009

Twenty Years Ago Today

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Twenty years after Exxon Valdez and we’re still shipping it, pumping it, burning it.
Twenty years since James Hansen published a prophetic paper foreseeing what we’re now experiencing. A commenter from my earlier Exxon Valdez post lives on a 30,000 acre XOM oil lease in South Texas and made this film, which I like. This is what he/she had to say:

They dump all the time and don’t care. It’s horrible. Our ground water is full of BTEX and lots of clusters of leukemia around their old leases. The Railroad Commission turns a blind eye. I made a webpage: http://www.RanchoLosMalulos.com. I go around the lease and post stuff so you can all enjoy the soap opera of watching XOM dump. We sample stuff and put the lab results, have professional ground water monitoring wells done, it’s so filthy. Exxon Mobil seems to get away with a lot in this world. Their commercials make me cringe.

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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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