How to Fix It: Let the Sun Shine In

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“There’s a famous line from National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy: ‘If you guard your toothbrushes and your diamonds with equal zeal, you’ll lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds.’ Right now all the resources are in classification and we need to get back into the declassification business, because that’s American history. And it’s also accountability. It isn’t just dusty stuff. If all these guys think that nothing is gonna come out for 100 years, they’re going to act a whole lot more boldly.

“And it’s not going to be simply a matter of flipping a switch to undo it. This default position to operating in the shadows is going to be somewhat appealing to whomever inherits that office. Even when Pelosi came into power and the Democrats assumed the majority in both houses, there was a predisposition toward secrecy. You’re going to have to bring in people dedicated to transparency, and you have to demonstrate that there are rewards for candor. We have to restore the protections of whistleblowers and also the encouragement and rewards. It shouldn’t just be that they don’t get crucified; it should be that they are again folk heroes, as opposed to traitors.”

Read an extended interview with Ted Gup about the Bush legacy here.

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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.

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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.

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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