September 13, 2010

Our Powerless Fed

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I move sort of slowly when it comes to rearranging my reading habits, and it was only about a month ago that I finally added Economics of Contempt to my RSS feed list. And then I forgot about it. Why? Because EOC, it turns out, only puts up a new post once every few weeks or so, and nothing had popped up since I moved it from bookmark land to RSS land.

But today something finally popped up, and it was….intriguing. Thanks to Barack Obama’s delays nominating new members to the Fed and to Richard Shelby’s mindless obstructionism of the ones he has nominated, the Fed Board of Governors currently only has four members:

The Fed’s emergency lending authority (the famed Section 13(3)) requires that any emergency lending facility to non-banks be approved “by the affirmative vote of not less than five members” of the Fed Board of Governors. Currently, there are only four members of the Fed board: Bernanke, Warsh, Elizabeth Duke, and Dan Tarullo. Donald Kohn retired earlier this month, and the Senate has yet to vote on Obama’s three nominees (Janet Yellen, Peter Diamond, and Sarah Bloom Raskin).

So if an emergency crops up and the Fed needs to take action, it won’t be able to. The odds of this happening are low — that’s why they call them emergencies, after all — but then again, if it does, we’ll really, really need to do something quickly — another reason we call them emergencies. So Shelby is playing with fire here, all because he’s still nursing a grudge over Democrats passing a financial reform bill that he didn’t like. Nice work, Dick.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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