Pissing Everyone Off for 30 Damn Years

It’s hard to believe that a little, rag-tag radical publication like CounterPunch could survive thirty long years. Yet, here we are, three decades in, and still at it.

We all have a story about when we landed on the CounterPunch homepage. Mine dates back to 1999, shortly after the WTO protests in Seattle. I was going to college in Oregon and hopped on a bus to join others in waging our collective disgust against the impacts of unfettered globalization. After five days, I returned to Portland, feeling tired but invigorated. I remember still tasting the pepper spray and feeling the vibrations of those rowdy streets. How do I make sense of what the hell I had just experienced?

I read news reports about what had taken place. It seemed to all be about broken windows and masked lunatics. There was no real analysis and scant coverage of why such a broad cross-section of people, from labor unions to environmentalists, had locked arms in protest against the WTO.

Then, I found CounterPunch and Jeffrey St. Clair’s exceptional and critical dispatches from the rainy streets of Seattle. Finally, after much searching, it all was there. Jeff had captured the essence of what I had experienced in vivid detail. Here was a report (later turned into a book, Five Days the Shook the World) that got the story right. You weren’t going to read any of this in the pages of The New York Times.

I was immediately hooked!

CounterPunch would soon become my go-to source for everything from books to politics to the pending war on Iraq. The writing was exceptional, and CounterPunch was the only place on the left or otherwise unafraid of taking on both parties when it mattered most.

The pages of CounterPunch are where I first read Edward Said on Palestine, Leonard Peltier on colonialism, Barbara Ehrenreich on class warfare, Alexander Cockburn on, well, everything, and so many more that still write for us today.

It’s hard to believe that the 25th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle is approaching next month. In many ways, it seems like ten lifetimes ago and yesterday all at once. We’ve endured the War on Terror®, a climate that’s out of control, obscene, increasing wealth disparity, a pandemic, wars, and genocides. Through it all, CounterPunch has remained a refuge in this never-ending shitstorm of a world we inhabit.

Many things have changed since the late 1990s, including how we consume our media, and CounterPunch has (reluctantly) had to adapt. As many of you know, we ceased publishing our print magazine a couple of years ago, which broke our hearts. The costs were too significant, and most subscribers preferred a digital subscription anyway. So, after much internal discussion, we collectively decided that we needed to evolve or risk financial ruin.

It wasn’t all lost, though. As a result of these changing times, we launched CounterPunch+, our subscriber area, which we are in the process of redesigning (again, to keep up with the times). We are proud of what CounterPunch+ is and what we hope it will become. It’s only been up and running for a few years, but we already have hundreds of premium articles and a complete archive of our years’ worth of newsletters and magazines. Subscribers have access to discounts on merchandise and books. It’s a pretty cool thing.

While we are excited about CounterPunch’s future, we are also extremely concerned. Our readership has exploded in recent years. We love it, but it has genuine downsides. More readers means more bandwidth, and more bandwidth means much higher costs for us. And while inflation has hit every sector of this blood-sucking economy, it’s hit us hard too.

I’m sure you’ve noticed we are in the middle of our big annual fund drive. It’s annoying, and we all hate it, but we have no choice. We are in a financial pickle, and we need your help. We don’t run ads or take cash from Big Foundations. On the contrary, our revenue model is simple. We rely on you, the reader, to fund our operation. By doing so, we are not beholden to any entity or some billionaire, only our ideals. We aren’t corrupted or controlled. We aren’t compromised in any way. We are who we are because a small percentage (1%!) of our readers value what we do and have no problem ponying up $25 or more to keep us going. We hope that percentage will grow. We need it to.

This brings me back to CounterPunch+, which in many ways is our way of saying thank you to our supporters. Sure, a subscription to CounterPunch+ will get you all sorts of great content; it funds our regular site, which is FREE for all and reaches millions of people all across the globe every single year. We think that’s a pretty big deal, as CounterPunch remains one of the world’s most widely read left-leaning outlets. Yes, the WORLD. Your support keeps this stream of dissent flowing out across the globe, pissing off all the right villains.

Yet, here’s our reality, which is why I’m writing this letter to you.

If we don’t reach our modest goal in this fund drive, we must figure out where to compensate for lost resources. We will have to trim the fat and have no fat left to trim. This will mean one or two things, if not both: first, we will be forced to run ads, which could bring in a lot of money for us, considering our traffic load, and second, we will have to cut back on the number of articles we run. We want neither!

This is why I humbly ask that you please consider donating $25 or more if you have the means. As a thank you, you will receive a one-year subscription to CounterPunch+. For $75 or more, you can also get a free 30th Anniversary t-shirt, which will surely be a collector’s item. The sooner we reach our goal, the sooner we can stop pestering you.

Don’t have $25? How about $5 a month? That’s the price of a bad cup of coffee and less than a crappy beer at your local dive. A monthly donation of $5 or more will also get you a subscription to CounterPunch+.

Thank you so much if you have already donated and for reading and sharing CounterPunch with others. We are an eclectic family of sorts. Yes, we argue and disagree, but at the end of the day, we all can come together for a common cause: to beat the devil, as Alex Cockburn would say.

Onward, and Free Palestine!

Joshua Frank

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