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The draft G-20 communiqué is here.  The final communiqué is here.  Looking solely at the section on financial regulation, it’s hard to see too many huge differences.  Regulation of hedge funds, which Obama was said to be resisting, is still there.  However, Obama was also said to be opposed to a greater role for international regulatory bodies, and he appears to have won that round.  The draft section that called for regulators “to supervise cross-border institutions and to complete the establishment of colleges of supervisors for all significant cross-border financial firms” is gone.

What else?  The section on tax havens got beefed up rhetorically with a single sentence: “The era of banking secrecy is over.”  That’s nice.

I haven’t looked at the rest in any detail, but it includes about a trillion dollars in loan pledges and IMF support, but no specific targets for domestic stimulus.  That number could have been higher, and probably should have been higher, but reality being what it is, that’s not bad.

And the big losers in all this?  Protesters.  The street wars were a big deal in Seattle, guys, but with every passing year your schtick just looks more and more pro forma.  Time to give it a rest.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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