June 14, 2010

Oil Execs on the Hot Seat Tomorrow

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It will be another busy week of hearings related to the Gulf oil disaster, kicking off with a panel of the top executives from five of the country’s largest oil companies Tuesday morning.

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment will host the five execs at a hearing titled “Drilling Down on America’s Energy Future: Safety, Security, and Clean Energy.” Appearing at the hearing will be BP America President Lamar McKay, as well as Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil; John Watson, chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation; James Mulva, chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips; and Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Company. That hearing starts at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow, and we’ll be live-Tweeting from it.

The hearings get even hotter on Thursday as the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations puts BP CEO Tony Hayward on the hot seat for the first time since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20. Up until now, other BP executives have been called on to testify; now Congress will get a crack at the top guy (and source of so many flubs in the past weeks).

The hearing on “The Role of BP in the Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill” will take place Thursday at 10 a.m. Investigators have already sent a detailed list of questions they expect Hayward to answer about evidence that the company took a number of shortcuts that potentially caused the disaster.

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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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