October 21, 2009

MoveOn Targets Toyota’s Chamber Membership

Photo courtesy of MoveOn.

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The liberal activist group MoveOn is pressuring Toyota—maker of the eco-status-symbol Prius— to leave the embattled US Chamber of Commerce.

With the Chamber under fire for its opposition to climate change legislation, advocates for action are pushing for more environmentally conscious businesses to quit the group, or at least publicly distance themselves from the Chamber’s rhetoric. (Another business, Mohawk Fine Paper, left the group yesterday.)

MoveOn is asking members who own Priuses (Prii?) to send in photos asking Toyota to resign its membership. So far, they’ve gathered more than 770 images, which they plan to deliver to the company’s New York headquarters and dealerships around the country.

“There are a lot of people out there who really did buy a Toyota saying, ‘I feel better doing business with this company because of their green image,'” Steven Biel, MoveOn’s clean energy campaign director, told Mother Jones. “Our members who own Priuses or other fuel efficient Toyotoa automobiles find this really outrageous, it just doesn’t make sense to them.”

More photos of pissed-off drivers can be found here.

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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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