July 14, 2017

Jared Kushner Helps Out His Little Brother

Chris Kleponis/DPA via ZUMA

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Last month Jared Kushner organized a meeting of tech giants to meet with President Trump. Tim Cook was there. Jeff Bezos was there. Larry Page was there. In all, companies with market caps ranging from $9 billion to $770 billion were there.

Plus the CEO of a teensy little startup with a market cap of $0.2 billion. Can you guess who it was? Can you? Huh?

Of course not. You’ve never heard of either the CEO or the company. The answer is Zachary Bookman of OpenGov, a company partly owned by Kushner’s brother, Joshua Kushner. I’m sure Josh’s investment will do well now that OpenGov has gotten this kind of high-profile attention. And that’s what brothers are for, aren’t they?

Jared Kushner is a one-man wrecking crew in the White House. If Donald Trump’s enemies were trying to infiltrate his inner circle and destroy his presidency, they couldn’t do better than Kushner. The only thing that keeps me from thinking Kushner is a DNC plant or a mutant super villain is the fact that he’s so obviously dim that his actions make a sort of demented sense. Eventually he’s going to bring the entire White House down around Donald Trump’s ears, and the whole time he’ll be standing there with that weird, blank look on his face, thinking that everything is still just fine.

The Wall Street Journal has the whole story here. Apologies for the log scale in the chart below. It was the only way to show all the companies on a single axis.

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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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