A plea to our readers -- especially those of you who are free subscribers to this site
Let's start this fraught new year out right with a decision to support ThisCantBeHappening! by becoming a paid subscriber!
Corrected letter to readers and free subscribers of ThisCantBeHappening! on Substack:
Our goal in moving from an independent site on a excellent progressive and democratically run non-profit web server (MayFirst.org), to the Substack platform was to shift from a free-access news site available to all, and supported by donations (which were rarely forthcoming!) to a paid-subscription paywall model. The theory behind this change was that if people did not have to pay to read the articles we publish, even if intellectually our readers might want to support us, the process of going to a button and making a donation each month was an added step that was easy to put off for another day, and ultimately was rarely being taken — even by friends and family. The Substack subscription, which can be automatic and paid on a monthly basis using a credit or debit card, we hope will address that problem, especially if not subscribing means not being able to access new posts or archived pieces.
As it is up to now, only 10% of our subscribers are voluntarily choosing to sign up as paid subscribers without a paywall as motivation. As a result, our “income” from these articles, while much better than from the donation model we used to rely on, is still well below what’s needed to support our work and allow us to spend more of our time getting the articles researched and written that you all obviously want and aren’t finding elsewhere.
Looking at our free-subscriber base, if we could get 90% of you, instead of just 10%, to switch to paid subscribers, which means automatically paying just $8 per month (the cost of two cappuccinos a month), we’d be taking in almost $20,000 a year to support our work. That would be really significant, since 97.5% of that money would be going directly to the members of our collective, allocated according to the number of articles they posted over the calendar year.
We urge you, if you are a free subscriber, to make the switch to being a paid subscriber. It’s easy to do, and the Substack site, which uses Stripe, is secure, plus your personal information, as a free or paid subscriber, , including your email address, will never be released or sold to any other organization.
If you’re a new reader on this site, or one of the long-time readers of TCBH! on our old platform who is just finally checking us out on Substack, spend a little time looking at the archive of recent articles that we’ve done here over the past year. If you like what you see, consider signing up as a paid subscriber.
We are planning (though to date we’ve kept pushing the decision further into the future), to put our articles behind a paywall, with new free subscribers only having a one-month free trial. At this point we’re looking at March 1, two months into our second year on Substack, as the deadline for making that change. In the meantime, to encourage you all to make the change to paid subscriber, we’re offering a one-year deal: a discounted subscription rate of $6.00 per month or $60 for a full year if you sign up for a paid subscription before March 1. (You can always cancel your remaining subscription at any tie if you decide don’t want it.)
There’s also a specially discounted lifetime subscription option which, through March 1, is available for $120 instead of the usual $150 one-time payment.
As we head into this fraught year of 2025, with a wannabe fascist in the White House, a sycophantic Supreme Court and Congress willing to do his bidding, a genocidal Israeli war on its captive Palestinian population being underwritten and armed by the US and a potential nuclear conflict with Russia, China and/or Iran looming, the nurturing Earth’s climate turning increasingly life-threatening, and with the corporate media caving in to the new authoritarian state, please support our work and take this leap of faith and solidarity in support of a fearless publication that for over a decade and a half has demonstrated its refusal to be intimidated.
We won’t disappoint you.
Dave Lindorff
TCBH! Founder