Diddling While America Burns

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This must have been how the peasants felt, watching Nero fiddle a merry tune while Rome burned.

Gasoline approaches $5 a gallon, runs on our banks are just barely averted, the war on terror drags on and on and what are we obsessed with? A magazine cover, now that the New Yorker‘s suddenly embraced satiric ones, and Bernie Mac’s barely funny jokes at an Obama fundraiser. Imagine…a comedian making luke warm fun of the probable next Prez’s marital woes. Heavens!

Do our problems seem so insoluble that we don’t know what else to tackle but inanities like this? The only good that can come of this puerility is the fodder it provides for those of us who teach journalism (students, see: what not to do). It’s twaddle like this that makes good journalism so much more precious. Wanna feed your brain instead of swaddle it in crap, wanna encourage journalists to produce more of it? Here are three items not to miss.

First, check out this bloggingheads.tv discussion between Michelle Goldberg and Rebecca Traister, two of my favorite young, outside-the-box feminist journalists. They expand my thinking and piss me off in all the best ways.

Then read this article in this week’s New Yorker, instead of just about its cover. It’s an utterly fascinating, very detailed history and analysis of a young Obama making the journey from idealistic neophyte to squinty-eyed professional politician.

I’m somewhat afraid of him now, even as I realize that only after such a process could anyone, let alone someone like Obama, be a stone’s throw from the Oval. If you want to really understand the man who may well be our next president, a president in some of the most perilous times we’ve ever faced, don’t miss articles like this one.

You can’t read, or listen to, these while you’re driving, and you might just have to miss that TMZ video of some stupid celeb buying cheez doodles, but it’s well worth it.

If you really want to do your job as a thinking adult and voter, read this Nation piece by Kai Wright. She, too, did something that I just love to hate: She’s forcing me to admit that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I wrote this about the mortgage debacle.

The subprime crisis isn’t simple. It isn’t about wanna be Donald Trumps buying McMansions. Rather, it wasn’t just about that. I had plenty of working class relatives, as early as the 80s, making fools of themselves and losing their homes refinancing at terms they refused to understand and spending the money on trips to Bermuda, shoes and big screen TVs. But now it’s clear that there was a clear pattern of deception, hard sell, and outright fraud in these loans. And that they were specifically targeted at poor, elderly blacks, and black neighborhoods.

You have to read all the way to the end for the proof I found most staggering, but the fact remains that blacks depend, to a far greater extent than others on their home equity as the basis of what scant wealth we hold as a community, and there was a concerted, ruthless effort made to defraud us; check out the parts, near the end, about how the Yellow Page-sized mortgage documents were forged to show retirees who were actually pulling in $2000 a month as fixed income being shown to have monthly incomes of nearly $5000.

Grandma and Grandpa Washington didn’t prepare those documents, IndyMac did—then sent ruthless MBAs to their ghetto homes to pressure them into signing. Entire black communities have been decimated, our future generations bereft of any low-dollar amount inheritance ever in the offing (1 in 4 whites receive a bequest while only 1 in 10 blacks do. Even then, blacks get only half as much).

I have more reading to do on all these issues, but wading through the mega pixels of brain-killing nonsense we readers seem to prefer has me more determined than ever to do so.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

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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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