The blogosphere must be doing something right. It must be providing something important that is lacking in the news you get on your teevee and in the newspapers that are delivered to your door. If it wasn’t, the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America would not be hiring consulting firms to smear, intimidate, and buy-off bloggers as the New York Times reported last month. In a classic demonstration of what I’m talking about, Glenn Greenwald highlights the degree to which the traditional media can be pushed around and co-opted.

One section of the leaked report focused on attacking WikiLeaks’ supporters and it featured a discussion of me. A graph purporting to be an “organizational chart” identified several other targets, including former New York Times reporter Jennifer Lee, Guardian reporter James Ball, and Manning supporter David House. The report claimed I was “critical” to WikiLeaks’ public support after its website was removed by Amazon and that “it is this level of support that needs to be disrupted”; absurdly speculated that “without the support of people like Glenn, WikiLeaks would fold”; and darkly suggested that “these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause.”

Needless to say, it’s expensive for the Establishment to maintain their iron-control of the messages people see, what with all these pesky bloggers out there offering alternative narratives. But we need your support to exist. Artists of all types, whether writers or musicians, have a terrible time getting paid in the digital age where everything digital is free. In a deep economic downturn, with advertising drying up, even the paltry sums we used to sustain ourselves with have dried up or significantly diminished.

We need a lot of different voices, and I believe I provide a unique point of view within the progressive blogosphere. If you value what we do here at Booman Tribune please consider making a donation to the site. Without your support, I can’t continue doing what I do.

And thank you all for your generous support. We have a great bunch around here. Great comments and a generally happy community of people. To tell you the truth, I get more compliments about the quality of this community than I get about anything else.