Thanks to the generosity of over 600 members of the Naked Capitalism community, we’ve met our first hurdle, our critical budget for IT support and defenses, the second supporting the comments section, and the third, funding to continue our expanded Links section, at an increasing pace.
Many of you responded to our 2024 Double Your Donations challenge, which produced a hefty upsurge. And we are excited to see even more new donors than in years past. Even so, our overall dollar totals are a bit behind where we’d like to be, even with the average donation amount being ahead of last year. Can regulars who have not contributed yet dig a bit deeper to help us meet our goals and keep this site humming?
Due to a miscommunication with Lambert over the thermometer for our last goal, that one was showing a total much lower than where we really stood. The result, after the Double Your Donation upsurge, is that we are already at $24,675, versus $27,000 of funding for guest bloggers. So it will take only a bit more to top up this goal adn give them a big round of monetary applause by going straight to the Tip Jar! Kind words in the comments section are also very much appreciated.
As long-standing readers know, over the years, we’ve been improving the caliber of writers who contribute to Naked Capitalism. We like to send our mainstays, Lambert, Conor, Nick, and KLG a significant honorarium out of the fundraiser We work on the old Wall Street partnership model: a thin level of assured pay, and then bonuses that reflect, on the generous side, their and the site’s performance that year. They’ve each stepped up in a very big way to shift their coverage, both the focus and the level of output, to match the stresses of the many disruptive forces affecting the environment, geopolitics, finance and the economy, and domestic affairs.
Where would you be without Lambert helping keep our collective sanity by regularly putting on his yellow waders, particularly for this wildly volatile and heavily propagandized election and official mumble shuffle about Covid (and now mpox and avian flu)? He’s also kept up other regular beats like permaculture, zeitgeist watch (like his review of Apple’s “Crush”) ad, and new ones like labor action.
Conor has widened Naked Capitalism’s scope, with particularly well-received discussions of German politics (such as on the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s party), Turkiye, Italy, and US geopolitical failures, such as how we lost the supposed war for the Black Sea.
Nick continues to provide extensive international coverage, focusing on payments and banking, such as Mexico’s more open defiance of the US, such as in restricting GMO corn, Milei’s wobbles, the digital currency disaster in Nigeria and the rethinking of “no cash” plans in the UK after the CrowdStrike debacle.
KLG continues to peel the curtain back on dubious practices in medical and biosciences research.
Even though we pay our contributors for helping fill this site’s regular schedule at a good level, writing isn’t a very well remunerated line of work. Our guest bloggers regularly turn out in-depth analysis quickly, but the fact that they can do so is a result of their considerable experience and expertise.
We’d also like to send monetary “thanks yous” to Thomas Neuburger and other writers whose work we post here.
We thought we’d share some supportive reader messages. From Ghost in the Machine
I have sent $200. I visit Naked Capitalism each day and like others have commented, while the news is dire, it is a psychological salve to read comments from others who ‘see it too.’
Naked Capitalism will certainly receive more from me in the coming months, likely in angry response to some outrageous violation of the 1st or 4th amendment.
And Leftist Mole:
Naked Capitalism is my morning read here on the left coast while my relatives all display maddening TDS and spew Russiagate nonsense. Your site is keeping me sane and grounded in reality as our beautiful country circles the drain politically and for the poor and working class in every way.
And from barefoot charlie:
What just amazes me about NC is that it keeps getting better. Nick and Conor bring us ever more news of what we do to the world with the precious gift of thinking and writing clearly about our thrashing imperium. Plus Michael Hudson, whose perspectives of the last 5000 years keep us up to the minute on the fate of debt empires. On top of what Yves and Lambert et al have done for us for so long–I am eternally grateful, even though time-challenged from so much offered here to learn.
Thank you all, for everything. You’re worth more than money.
So we hope you’ll acknowledge our writers’ skills and dedication with a big, generous thank you at the Tip Jar. They are our mainstays and deserve a lavish thank you!
Donated.