Billionaires Toast to Merrill Lynch Underwriting Coal-Fired Power Plants

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The Billionaires for Coal had a grand old time cavorting outside Merill Lynch in downtown San Francisco yesterday. Toasting with champagne glasses, tossing out one-liners, they sneered at a group of earnest, banner-waving protesters nearby. Just a few pairs of hipster sneakers and some scruffy facial hair poked out from under the Billionaires’ suits, top hats, and cocktail dresses.

“Why travel to the tropics when we can bring the tropics to us?” asked Jodie van Horn. In real life she’s an activist with Rainforest Action Network, but as a Billionaire she goes by Alata Monie. “We’ll convert our winter properties to summer properties, and our summer properties to scuba properties.”

Read the rest of this blog and more on The Blue Marble.

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It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

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We simply can’t afford to come up short. There is no cushion in our razor-thin budget—no backup, no alternative sources of revenue to balance our books. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the fierce journalism we do. That’s why we need you to show up for us right now.

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