What is and Who who are the people in ThisCantBeHappening!?
First a word about our roll-out plan from TCBH! founder Dave Lindorff:
We are in the process of moving our now 14-year-old alternative news site to Substack, where it will eventually be operated as a paid subscription magazine. For the first month or so, we are allowing everyone to access this site for free. For one thing it will take time for the five members of the news collective to work out how to use the site and to set up their individual payment accounts. So you can read them until that happens for free at our current site: www.thiscantbehappening.net.
That site will remain active on the MayFirst.org server where it will serve as a readily available archive or all our earlier pieces, which will remain freely available. My intention is to post an average of two articles per week myself, and a minimum of one per week (which I hope readers will consider is worth the $8/month or $80/year subscription fee, especiallly as that fee will also cover the articles that our other four members will be posting on the Substack site soon).
I will be making the transition to our Substack site in the next few days. I’ve already posted two pieces. Meanwhile you can also read us on the old site, which will remain indefinitely as an archive. If you have been a reader and like what we’ve been doing, or if you are new to the site and like what you see, please consider joining us now with a one-time life-time founders subscription of $150 (our lifetime, not yours!).
Our history:
ThisCantBeHappening.net was founded in 2004 as a blog by investigative journalist Dave Lindorff in a quixotic (and admittedly somewhat grandious) one-man effort to afflict the powerful. As the site gained recognition and readers, Dave realized it would take more than one journalist to cause any significant degree of affliction. He approached three long-time friends, political comrades and journalist colleagues — John Grant, Linn Washington and the late Charles M. Young — and asked if they would be interested in joining him to found a news collective, thus multiplying the site’s afflictive power by 300%. All three, sharing Dave’s profound frustration with the shallowness and the fawning complicity of the establishment corporate media (and with the establishment not-for-profit media, too), signed on with alacrity and a shared desire to raise hell and make change.
A number of writers have contributed on an irregular basis to the publication, including Jim Ridgeway, Ron Ridenour, Jess Guh, Alfredo Lopez, Rip Rense, Marilyn Wargo, Paul DeRienzo, Lisa Bergson, and Allen Baker and others, as well as the the late Ben Pleasants and Tom Thompson. Recently, Vermont poet Gary Lindorff (Dave’s brother) joined as resident poet.
One year into operation, ThisCantBeHappening! was awarded a coveted Project Censored Award, and as one of the 25 top winners of that honor in 2011, had an article included in the Project Censored book: Censored 2012: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2011-12. Over the following years, the site has garnered five more Project Censored awards.
More recently, Jess Guh, a political activist and family medicine physician who entered that profession wanting to help care for low-income families, joined the collective.
It is our hope that the thousands of readers who have been regularly following ThisCantBeHappening.net (which originally was free, and which we allowed to be republished on other sites at no charge, will tell their friends and contacts to check out this new expanded version of the site, which will be subscription-based — a decision we made after learning the hard lesson that no when journalism is free, most readers simply ignore requests to contribute even a small amount to support it. (Our occasional suggestion that regular readers consider donating $5 a month or $50-60 a year to support our work, never worked.)
It is our hope too, that the many readers who have generously contributed financial support for the journalistic efforts of ThisCantBeHappening.net over the years will be joined by many, many others who will now subscribe, so that we five who have been producing TCBH! stories for nearly 20 years for free out of our back pockets can really devote our efforts to getting out the truth about America’s war and senseless militarism, about the corrupt economic system we live in, about the racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination and bias that permeate this society, about the ongoing commodification of culture, and about the steady assault on freedom–-all stories and issues that are being ignored or misreported by the mass media.
Our goal is to give you the stories you aren’t getting from the corporate media, or to give you the stories you are getting from them, but from a different, and more honest, perspective.
We all have our beats–John, a Vietnam War veteran, covers war & peace, Linn, who studied law at Yale, covers the courts, the law, and race issues, Dave covers economics, politics, healthcare militarism and environment, Jess health care issues like equality of treatment and access, as well as labor and general discrimination issues, Chuck before his untimely death from brain cancer, covered culture and the lack thereof, and provided the site with a much-needed sense of humor. Gary, a brilliant poet, goes to the heart of things, sometimes with humor too. We all of course feel free to cover whatever else grabs our individual or collective interest or attention.
ThisCantBeHappening! has always relied on the kindness of strangers to survive. We need your financial support if we are going to be able to devote the time to being reporters and cannot keep doing it for free as we’ve done for almost a decade and a half.. So please subscribe on a monthly basis and try is out. Don’t just be a reader of independent journalism. Make it happen! Be a supporter of independent journalism!
