Brodner’s Person of the Day: George Carlin

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George Carlin, who, in a recent HBO special, gave what could be a warning label for all Corporate Media. . .and all things political in the U.S. That’s all, Brother.

“There’s a reason education sucks and will never, ever, ever be fixed. Never get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that-the real owners, the big, wealthy business interests that make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have OWNERS. They own you. They own everything. They own the land. They own all the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Congress, the Senate. They have all the judges in their back pockets. They own all the big media companies. So they control all the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. We know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of well-informed citizens capable of critical thinking. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart sitting around the kitchen table talking about a system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. What do they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work and just dumb enough to accept jobs with lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you collect it. Now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your f***ing retirement money. The want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know that they’ll get it. Cause they own this f***in’ place. It’s a big club. It’s the same big club they beat you over the head all day when they tell you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. Nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people continue to elect these rich c*ck s**kers who don’t give a f*ck about you at all. At all. At all. At all.”

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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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