Yearly Archives: 2011

We have less than two hours to go with our fundraiser. We were at 1104 donors officially tallied as of 11 PM EST. The donations I can track from my end spiked in the last two hours, with 44 more of you chipping in. James B, who is processing non-PayPal credit card donations, is behind (!) and estimates he has 25 more than he told me about as of his last update (6:30 PM). So we are somewhere between 1170 and 1175 donors, within striking distance of our final goal of 1200 donors.

I’m thrilled at the response.

Less than four hours remain in the Naked Capitalism fundraiser. Show your support of critical thinking, merciless evisceration of lame punditry, deep diving into turbid financial waters, and cute animal pictures. As our guest blogger, Michael Hudson, has said:

Naked Capitalism has quickly become my favorite and most informative site to see where the bodies are buried. Yves focuses on the all-important technical details that are beyond the competence of most sites to grasp, let alone walk the reader through the maze.

hanks so much for your generous contribution to our fundraiser. We’ve raised our target for the number of donations to 1200 and we are now at 1080 as of 9 PM EST. With our deadline of midnight PST (3:00 AM) we’ll just squeak if those of you who haven’t had time yet chip in, and those who’ve given earlier make an additional donation on behalf of those that are suffering financial hardships.

Join us and participate via our Tip Jar, another credit card portal or by check (see here for details). Yes, PayPal and Chrome do NOT get along, so if you use Chrome, try another browser for the Tip Jar, or use the portal, or send a check (be sure to send us a message, “Check is in the mail” so we can count your donation in the fundraiser total).

This effort has been very gratifying in demonstrating that many of you really do value having an alternative to the mainstream media that provides hard-hitting commentary.

The Naked Capitalism community has spoken loudly and clearly. You’ve said you want this site to be more effective and you’ve been willing to provide tangible backing for your desire to have us demystify finance, call out chicanery in high places, parse propaganda, and in our small way, help promote the creation of a more just society.

I’ve always been a big believer in the comments section, because you correct me, give ideas and information, and make my work and that of the other bloggers better. What’s happened this week took that up a level. It’s always a bit lonely to throw out ideas into the void, to see if they resonate with others. Over the past few years, and especially over the past week, you have showed me that we are actually a community, a group of people who believe together in justice. Individually, you decided to put your resources on the line to make sure that we keep going, grow, and get better, that our words and ideas matter. This is essential, it’s the first part of creating a different society, where we assert our own collective dignity.

Thanks to the many readers who have so generously responded to our appeal, we’ve beaten our target of 750 donors and are now at just over 825. Since we had over 200 of you contribute yesterday, we’d like to see if we can reach the new target of 1000 by midnight PST.

So far, your investments have paid for improvements we’ll be acting on in the upcoming months: upgrades to site speed and service, a travel budget, meaningful “thank yous” to the regular guest bloggers, vacation support to keep the site vibrant while I get some R&R, a grab bag of smaller site enhancements, like a mobile version of the site and audio equipment for podcasts, and using more support staff for specific tasks so I can spend less time on administration and more on site content. We have already given the go-ahead for a server upgrade, and one reader is trying to find a way to make compressing the antidote du jour photos easy for me to do every day (this will also evidently improves site performance a lot). One reader has a draft version of a mobile site I hope to be able to show you later today (he’s tweaking some recalcitrant bits).

The goal here is to build a culture where we pay for truth, instead of being lied to for free. Guest posters Matt Stoller and Mark Ames have described why we are engaged in this effort: because elite financiers have sought to create an information monopoly in the media and inside the Beltway, and Naked Capitalism has become one of a small number of sites that cuts through their propaganda.