Indholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2020 i Mother Jones

A MAGAZINE IS A postcard to the future, a message in a bottle—choose your vintage metaphor, because there’s something decidedly analog about the three-week gap between when we send these pages to the printer and when they show up in your mailbox. The words you’re reading come to you from the past. A very confused and uncertain past, circa mid-March. We began assigning the stories in this issue when the coronavirus was probably still slumbering in some animal host. We began editing them as the new illness was confirmed in a handful of Americans who’d traveled overseas. As we went to press, we were all working from our kitchen tables, kids’ bedrooms, and even (for quiet podcast recording) closets. By the time you read this, there will be things you…

“WE NEED THE WALL more than ever!” President Trump tweeted on March 10—one day before the WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic—just another of his more than 400 tweets about his dream of building a wall along the US-Mexico border. According to a Mother Jones analysis of government contracts, the Trump administration has so far doled out $6.5 billion to build about 470 miles of wall—260 miles of replacement fencing and 210 miles of new construction. In Trumpian fashion, the project has been characterized by cost overruns, lawsuits, sycophantic contractors, and a notoriously ineffective (and incomplete) final product. In March 2018, Trump reviewed eight wall prototypes in San Diego. The Government Accountability Office noted that many, if not all, of the designs would be difficult to build along much…

The transformation from fowl to meat begins with carbon dioxide. The gas knocks the turkeys out; a blade finishes the job. It’s all surprisingly clean, down to the vacuums that suck out their lungs. Stripped of organs and feathers, the line of identical denuded carcasses splashes into a cooling bath. While the work at Dakota Provisions may be monotonous, its workers are markedly diverse. They hail from Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, India, Nepal, South Korea, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and the Micronesian archipelago of Chuuk. But most of the 1,200 employees are Karen, members of an ethnic group from Myanmar (historically known as Burma) whose families came to the United States as refugees. Their presence in Huron, South Dakota, 8,000 miles from their homeland, is an accident of…

ON THE NIGHT of the 2020 Iowa caucuses, Brad Parscale, President Trump’s campaign manager and technology guru, arrived at an elementary school on the outskirts of Des Moines. With attention focused on the hard-fought Democratic contest, Trump sought to steal a bit of the spotlight by displaying total dominance over his no-hope opponents. As part of the process, each GOP candidate had dispatched someone to caucus sites around the state’s largest city to speak on their behalf. For some 100 voters in suburban Urbandale, it was Parscale. A 6-foot-8-inch Texan with a red Viking beard, Parscale had been plucked from obscurity in San Antonio to serve as a key digital staffer on Trump’s 2016 campaign. His pitch to the crowd included observations highlighting his now firmly established place in the…

The headquarters of the Delancey Street Foundation occupies a piece of prime real estate near the base of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, tucked between luxury condominiums and ritzy waterfront eateries. The 400,000-square-foot, four-story complex looks like a Disneyfied Mediterranean villa, with red tile roofs, flower boxes, and sun-filled windows overlooking the bustling waterfront. Inside are 177 dorms, a pool, a movie theater, and an unpretentious restaurant known as a hangout for local dignitaries. Rep. Nancy Pelosi described the facility as “the living room of the city.” On a third-floor wall hang dozens of framed photos of “HOT SHOTS WHO LIKE US”—a who’s who of California’s Democratic elite and celebrities of a certain vintage, posing with Delancey’s co-founder and CEO, Mimi Silbert. With her big auburn hair and infectious smile, she’s…

1. Beginning October 1, if the coronavirus doesn’t interfere, the Department of Homeland Security will require anyone who wants to board a flight within the United States to produce “Real ID”–compliant identification like this driver’s license. The bearer is uniquely identified by the nondescript “DD,” or Document Discriminator, a code that denotes where and when the card was issued. In a narrow sense, the Real ID is the product of a 15-year effort to ensure, in the aftermath of 9/11, that applicants for passports and other identifying documents provide secure underlying documentation. (Real ID applicants have to provide documents showing their legal name, date of birth, Social Security number, citizenship or immigration status, and two proofs of address.) More broadly, the Real ID is the product of an extraordinary social…

SINCE THE post–World War II rise of suburbia, the great American lawn has beckoned with the promise of a grassy, orderly Eden surrounding a single-family fortress. For just as long, lawns have been sending bees and other pollinating critters the opposite message: Buzz off. That’s because the very essence of a lawn (closely shorn, uniform, weed-free) leaves little room for the sustenance that pollinators depend on—pollen and nectar from a variety of flowers. Residential landscaping is contributing to an alarming ecological crisis: a steep decline in the health of pollinating animals, whose services provide one-third of the food we eat. They don’t just power the supermarket produce aisle; pollinators keep forests, parks, and shrublands humming. The most famous troubled pollinators are bees. In five out of the past seven years,…

SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION COURT, COURTROOM #2 Judge Lee O’Connor has been in his courtroom for all of two minutes before a look of annoyance washes over his face. Eleven children and six adults—all from Central America, all in immigration court for the first time—sit on the wooden benches before him. They’ve been awake since well before dawn so they could line up at the US-Mexico border to board buses to downtown San Diego, bulletproof-vested federal agents by their side. Like the dozens of families jam-packed in the lobby and six other courtrooms in this building, they’ve been waiting out their asylum cases in Mexico, as required by the Trump administration’s controversial Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico.” “The whole thing is a fucking disaster that is…

Audi: “We are a tech company that happens to make cars.” Zappos: “We’re a service company that just happens to sell shoes.” Big River Steel: “At our core, we’re a technology company. We just happen to make steel.” Shea Homes: “We’re a service company that just so happens to build homes.” Wild Alaskan: “Wild Alaskan is a tech company that happens to sell seafood.” Delta: “We’re a Customer Service Company that just happens to fly airplanes.” WestJet: “A digital company that happens to fly airplanes.” Fidelity: “A technology company that happens to be in financial services.” Sweetgreen: “We want to go beyond a food company and become a platform.” Metals.com: “We’re not really a gold and silver company, we’re a technology company.” Facebook: “We’re a technology company. We’re not a…

CINDY BETHEL WAS 6 when her babysitter’s neighbor started molesting her. Worried what else would happen if she told her parents, she confided in her stuffed panda instead. Sometimes she acted out the abuse with Barbie and Ken dolls. A few years later, the same teen neighbor raped her on a woodpile outside his house. She didn’t tell anyone about the assault until long after she moved away from her Ohio hometown. Even if she had spoken out, investigators may have struggled to get her full story. Young children often say what they think adults want to hear, and kids are easily influenced by an interviewer’s word choice, tone, and body language—all of which can lead them to provide false information. Children’s testimony helped condemn innocent people during the Salem…