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Hey, the good guys won a vote last night. Debit card companies charge merchants an outrageously high “interchange fee” every time you use one of their cards — a fee that’s passed directly on to you, of course — and the Senate finally decided to put a stop to it:

Sixty-four senators, including 17 Republicans, agreed to impose price controls on debit transactions over the furious objections of the beleaguered banking industry….Last year businesses paid Visa and MasterCard $19.71 billion on debit card transactions, according to The Nilson Report, a trade magazine that is regarded as the best source of data on the industry. Visa and MasterCard in turn passed about 80 percent of the money, roughly $15.8 billion, to the banks that issued the cards.

So what are banks going to be forced to do in order to make up their lost profits?

Some experts warned that lower profit margins could lead banks to curtail bank card reward programs.

Ouch! No more reward programs. I think I can live with that. But if your life got a whole lot grimmer when you heard this, consider that what it really means is that for the past decade you’ve been paying about 1% extra on every single debit card purchase you’ve made so that banks could then rebate about half that amount back to you in the form of “rewards.” Anyone who thinks that’s a good deal, raise your hands. (No, not you bankers in the back. We already know it’s a good deal for you.)

Still not convinced? Well, Europe mandates fees about one-quarter ours and somehow manages to support a thriving debit card business anyway. And if even that doesn’t convince you, go back and read this post about how debit cards used to be essentially free until Visa barged into the market and deliberately set out to force merchants into a higher-cost program, and then after they’d succeeded, raised fees on the lower cost program too. Not because either of these programs actually cost anything to run, but just because they could. If it doesn’t make your blood boil, then nothing will.

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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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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