Quote/Chart of the Day: The Sugar Lobby

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Today’s all purpose post begins with the quote of the day. It comes from the LA Times:

From the beginning, fast food and beverage company executives were uneasy about President Obama. He and his wife were known advocates of healthy eating.

That is scary! Advocates of healthy eating could pose a real problem. The industry’s response is our chart of the day:

The entire story is worth reading. As a policy matter I’m not sure whether I support a tax on sugared beverages or not, but in the end it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that the food industry doesn’t want it, they’re willing to spend a lot of money to make sure it never happens, and both interest groups and politicians are unwilling to risk losing their support. So, no tax.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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