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In 2002, AOL Time Warner, Inc. obtained AT&T Corporation’s stake in their cable television, film production, and programming partnership in exchange for it.

About five years ago, Enron and their partners stole it from California’s electricity and gas customers.

Duke Energy recently agreed to acquire Cinergy for its value in stocks.

Harrah’s bought Caesar’s for it.

Because of Bush’s tax cut, in 2001, the federal government took it from Social Security in order to pay the government’s bills.

It is more than four times the annual revenue of Ghana, 80% of the annual revenue of Nigeria, 20% of the annual revenue of Poland, and more than half the annual revenue of Iraq.

It is $9 billion, exactly the amount that is still unaccounted for in the reconstruction of Iraq because of what the U.S. Inspector General has labeled “severe inefficiencies and poor management.”

Once again, the business-minded, management-oriented “reformers” in the White House proved to us that their idea of management is one that is pretty much on par with Bush’s idea of scholarship when he was studying for his Harvard MBA.

The mystery of the missing $9 billion is just one more item the news media found too boring to cover. But while that money was building someone a really nice house in Baghdad, Bush was cutting veterans’ benefits, and Rumsfeld was lying about the Pentagon’s having requisitioned safer vehicles for the troops.

But hey–it’s no big deal. It’s just a lot of stolen money and dead soldiers. God bless America.

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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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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