March 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton Wins the Lead Geek Vote

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If you’re a lead poisoning obsessive (*cough*) Hillary Clinton won your vote tonight during the Democratic debate in Flint moderated by Anderson Cooper:

COOPER: Let me just point out for accuracy’s sake, there are 10 million lead service pipes delivering water to people all across this country tonight. Secretary Clinton?

….CLINTON: I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil, and it’s in lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. That’s why 500,000 children today have lead — lead in their bodies….That has, unfortunately, been in many ways, moved to a lower priority. I will elevate it, and I will do everything I can. Water, soil, and paint.

Naturally I’m pleased that the problems in Flint have turned a national spotlight on the problem of lead poisoning. I’m a little less pleased that the spotlight is so relentlessly on water. Generally speaking, lead water pipes are not really a huge source of lead poisoning in America these days. The main sources are (a) residual lead in soil and (b) lead paint in older homes—especially around window sills, where the friction of opening and closing the windows exposes old layers of paint and spews lead dust into houses. I’d love to see us spend a big chunk of money on lead remediation, which would almost certainly pay off in the long term, but the money should go mostly into soil and paint remediation.

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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.

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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.

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