Indholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2021 i Mother Jones

If a journalist's life is measured in how many malefactors they pissed off, Jim Ridgeway’s time on earth was successful beyond words. In a career—really, a commitment—that spanned six decades of what we used to call the alternative press, Jim was a fierce, cantankerous, unstoppable embodiment of the reporter’s mandate to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. We were fortunate to call him a colleague for five years here at Mother Jones, and when he died in February, it felt like yet another weight on the pile of loss accumulated this past year. But eventually we found ourselves coming back to the words of this magazine’s namesake, Mary Harris Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.” Except Jim probably would have said, “Never mind…

Randy Economy feels “blessed.” The conservative radio broadcaster and ex-Trump campaign volunteer says he’s spending up to 17 hours per day on what he calls his life’s greatest work: the drive to kick California Gov. Gavin Newsom out of office. From his home in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, Economy’s one-man media machine—he’s the spokesperson and senior adviser for the RecallGavin2020 campaign—has turned what was once a fringe cause pushed mainly by conspiracy theorists and right-wing radicals into a rallying cry for GOP heavyweights and a handful of Silicon Valley multimillionaires. Everyone in California is mad. Economy just has to sell them on the solution: Blame Newsom. The year-old recall campaign claims it’s collected more than 2 million signatures, well over the million-and-a-half needed to trigger a special election. If California’s counties…

1783: The United States, newly victorious in the Revolutionary War, begins to press for ownership of and access to Indigenous lands, ultimately seizing 1.5 billion acres over the next century. 1830: The Indian Removal Act allows the government to seize the lands of Native peoples in the East and South in exchange for a “colonization zone” west of the Mississippi River. The Trail of Tears soon follows. 1848: The lower Rio Grande Valley becomes part of the US. Anglos begin squatting on the land of Mexican subsistence ranchers, who eventually forfeit their holdings. 1862: Congress passes the first Homestead Act, allowing citizens to claim 160 acres in exchange for a small fee. Homesteaders dispossess Native Americans of 246 million acres in the West. Nearly a quarter of today’s Americans are…

On a cloudless February day, in the shade of a white tent set up in a small parking lot in San Francisco’s Mission District, Dina Gonzalez rolls up her left sleeve to receive her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. She had recently recovered from COVID; after weeks of fever and sleeping in the basement and praying not to spread the virus to her husband or her kids, which, thank God, she didn’t, this shot could not come soon enough. “I don’t want to go through that again, no, no, no,” she says in Spanish. The 57-year-old runs a home day care, and she needs to protect herself and the kids as she reopens the business. On the street outside the tent, vendors sell chicharrones and fruit cups, as a…

Deadly viruses don’t care what’s in your wallet, but socioeconomic privilege and access to wealth do wonders when it comes to not simply surviving a plague but cashing in on it. Having spent more than a year prior to the pandemic doing research for a new book about American wealth in the Second Gilded Age (April 13, Simon & Schuster), I wasn’t sure how this plague might affect the story. But perhaps unsurprisingly, over the past year, the superrich have remained safely ensconced on their side of an economic chasm that has only grown wider as more and more Americans struggled to stay afloat. I put together these stats to demonstrate just how much the coffers of the 1 percent have benefitted, often at the expense of everyday Americans. Who’s…

In late February, a caucus of Republican legislators wrote a three-page memo to rally opposition to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Highlighting “liberal goodies” in the bill, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) explained that his group had put together a fact sheet “to educate Americans exactly how their taxpayer dollars are being spent by Democrats.” There it was again, invoked as usual to block government aid: the myth of the “taxpayer” and their “dollars.” The phrase “taxpayer dollars” has a populist, even democratic ring to it. Gone are the days when we referred to the treasury as “the king’s purse” or treated taxation as a tithe or gift to the crown. “Taxpayer dollars” suggests that the money spent by the federal government is owned by “the people.” But the…

“Hello, deplorables!” That’s how Amy Kremer greeted the thousands of Trump supporters she had helped gather at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, on January 6 to “stop the steal.” Resplendent onstage in a bold leopard-print shawl, with the White House rising up behind her, the former flight attendant had come a long way since she and another Georgia woman, Jenny Beth Martin, became known as the “founding mothers” of the tea party movement back in 2009. During the heyday of the grassroots conservative movement that had sprung up to oppose President Barack Obama, Kremer had headlined cross-country bus tours stumping for candidates like Christine (“I’m not a witch”) O’Donnell and fighting against the Affordable Care Act. The tea party had helped elect hardcore conservatives who blew up immigration reform and…

The lockdowns last March nearly spelled doom for Joe Squared, a pizzeria and music venue in Baltimore’s arts district. The popular eatery already had some outstanding debts from a recent expansion; all of a sudden it had to curtail its hours and shut its dining room. General Manager Okan Arabacioğlu recalls frantically trying to make the numbers work with owner Joe Edwardsen, but they decided they couldn’t sacrifice the quality of the coal-fired pizza or the living wage they paid employees. “So at that point,” Arabacioğlu says, “we were like, let’s wrap it up.” Joe’s closed its doors for the next nine months. The two men continued to brainstorm about what to do next. Edwardsen was considering getting out of the restaurant industry to spend more time with his family.…