Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2024 från Mother Jones

On the Cover Illustrator Tim O’Brien has graced MoJo’s pages many times—so when we needed a cover that said “Let them eat cake,” his painterly and surreal style was an obvious choice. Contributors Masterminded by senior reporter Tim Murphy (who wrote the lead essay and all yacht-related material) and deputy Washington bureau chief​ Daniel Schulman (this issue includes an excerpt from his new book, The Money Kings), MoJo’s issue on American oligarchs was the work of many talented hands. Freelance contributors include corruption experts Oliver Bullough (“It’s All About the Benjamins”) and Casey Michel (“Hidden Figures”), MoJo alum Dave Gilson (“My Own Private Florida”), essayists Morgan Jerkins (“How Hollywood Learned to Eat the Rich”) and Scaachi Koul (“Rich People Problems”), and inequality reporter Kalena Thomhave (“Quit While You’re a Head”), alongside MoJo’s Ali Breland (“Merchants of Death”), David Corn (“Rigged for a King”), Hannah…

THE MOST PROFITABLE, and perhaps most dangerous, factory in the United States is a two-story, off-white block about 20 minutes north of central Fort Worth, Texas. It resembles many of the other buildings in a rather barren suburb along US 287, and, had there not been a large sign inviting passersby to visit, I would have driven past without a sideways glance. Inside, it looked no more remarkable. A man in a Carhartt T-shirt and baseball cap walked slowly across the patched concrete floor; a woman with a blond ponytail in a black scrunchie jacked up a pallet; union T-shirts bearing the word “Solidarity” were the most common item of clothing. There was an unfamiliar smell: Imagine a new car filled with the hot air from a vacuum cleaner. A half-dozen…

IN A DECEMBER 2021 blog post, novelist MacKenzie Scott expressed surprise at the “inclusive and beautiful” definitions of philanthropy, such as “love of humankind,” that she’d discovered in the dictionary. Scott, who has given away more than $14 billion since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019—and who has pledged to “keep at it until the safe is empty”—wrote that she’d experienced a lifetime of less-favorable associations: “What had happened? Somewhere along the line, this big, lovely word had shriveled to describing the humanitarian impulses of less than 1 percent of the world’s population.” Perhaps we simply forgot that philanthropy in America has never been much more than a plutocratic flex. In Prometheus Bound, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus coined the adjective philanthropos—from phil (loving) and anthropo (human)—to describe the fallen…

I’LL GIVE THE Kardashians this much: There’s nothing more relatable than fighting with your sister because she stole your favorite dress. For the past 16 years, the Kardashian-Jenners have spun gold from the tumult in their personal lives through Hulu’s The Kardashians and its spiritual predecessor on E!, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. More than mere celebrities, the KarJenners are our most omnipresent cultural oligarchs, reaching into a stratosphere of wealth, pop-culture dominance, and political influence beyond that of ordinary reality stars. The five sisters clash and make up as sisters are wont to do: Kendall is furious that Kylie took Kourtney’s brown dress that she wanted, or Khloé is offended that Kourtney made fun of the color of her patio furniture covers. But in The Kardashians’ third season, which…

DONALD TRUMP IS not a typical oligarch. Before entering politics, he was not part of the small group of powerful and rich people who buttressed the ruling elite. He did not build a railroad or a technology empire. His fortune—whatever its size—was not determined by a close personal connection to a head of state. As a businessman, he generally did not use his influence and wealth to advance the interests of the government or any cause. He mostly cared about one thing—himself. But essential to his own rise to wealth and power was a core component of oligarchy: exploiting a rigged system. And during both his private sector career and his time in the White House, he has been friendly to oligarchs, cutting deals with them, cozying up to oligarchic…

ON DECEMBER 3, 1901, in his first annual message to Congress, Teddy Roosevelt began to articulate the new anti-monopoly doctrine that would define his presidency. “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions,” he said in the address, read aloud to Congress by a succession of clerks who took turns slogging through the 80-page, leatherbound volume, “and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.” He asserted that the federal government should assume “power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate business.” The US economy had by then undergone decades of consolidation in which entire industries—oil, steel, sugar, tobacco, whiskey—were swallowed up into trusts, monopolistic arrangements wherein unlimited corporate assets, operating in a…

AS THE PANDEMIC took hold and tensions between the haves and have-nots simmered, I couldn’t log in to social media without spotting an image of a guillotine, the enduring symbol of the French Revolution. By then, a similar ire toward the wealthy had already begun to seep into cinema, as evidenced by the success of the 2019 Korean film Parasite—pitting a striving family against a grotesquely wealthy one—which swept the Oscars just before the pandemic sent us all into lockdown. Filmmakers have previously scrutinized wealth’s impacts on society: Charlie Chaplin humanized the impoverished, and films like My Man Godfrey (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) exposed economic inequality. But for much of the 20th century, the rich were often fetishized. Reagan-era TV series like Dynasty and Dallas centered prosperous…

FOR THE LAST 18 months one of the most opulent and unnecessary vessels ever constructed has been floating in a narrow channel next to a jungle gym and a fleet of industrial cranes at the Port of San Diego. Built in Germany, and formerly managed by a firm in Monaco and flagged to the Cayman Islands, the superyacht Amadea is 348 feet long, with a helipad, a swimming pool, two baby grand pianos, and a 5-ton stainless steel art-deco albatross that extends outward from the prow like a bird reenacting Titanic. It can accommodate 16 guests and 36 crew, and costs $1 million a month just to maintain. Who, exactly, has been picking up that tab in the past is a matter of some dispute, tangled up in a web…

FOR YEARS, a small company headquartered in South Dakota toiled in one of the most boring niches imaginable. Specializing in servicing individual retirement accounts, Kingdom Trust acted as a so-called custodian for these IRAs, focused on maintaining slow, steady growth. But in the mid-2010s, the firm began soliciting a radically different group of clients—shadowy companies based in notorious offshore havens that were having trouble opening US accounts. On the surface, there was nothing illegal about this strategic shift. But what drove Kingdom Trust (which now also goes by Choice) into the sights of federal regulators was its egregious lack of due diligence. It “had virtually no process to identify and report suspicious transactions,” Himamauli Das, acting director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, announced last spring. It was…

During the early 20th century, Congress tried to rein in Gilded Age inequality by ratifying the 16th Amendment and passing other laws that authorized the first federal income tax and strengthened financial regulations. More than a century later, this tax system is not functioning as its creators intended, thanks to myriad loopholes that benefit the rich and an enforcement system that disproportionately targets low-income taxpayers and people of color.…

IN AUGUST 2022, a dozen or so businessmen crowded onto the balcony that looms above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As the clock neared 4 p.m., the group from Strive Asset Management waved, clapped, and flashed toothy smiles, waiting to ring the closing bell. They were a sea of navy suits. They were celebrating the start of trading for their firm’s first financial product—an exchange-traded fund titled $DRLL. Stuffed full of companies like Exxon and Chevron, $DRLL (yes, “drill”) was a way for people to invest more in fossil fuels. Strive’s reasoning for such a product comes from a sort of free-market purism: The only goal of a business should be to earn the greatest returns possible—climate-fueled collapse be damned. “Strive is mandating US energy companies to…

ON THE MORNING of April 20, the world’s largest rocket blasted off from Starbase, the SpaceX launch facility in Boca Chica, near the southernmost tip of Texas. Dubbed Starship, the 397-foot craft was expected to reach a cruising altitude of 792,000 feet and circumnavigate the globe in 90 minutes, traveling at near-orbital speeds. But from the start, things didn’t go as planned. The liftoff excavated a gaping crater in the launchpad, hurling debris thousands of feet and igniting a three-and-a-half-acre fire. Things worsened from there: Shortly into the flight, Starship’s booster failed to detach, and the rocket tumbled back toward Earth, finally exploding above the Gulf of Mexico. As Starship transformed into a fireball, a jubilant crowd of SpaceX employees at the company’s California headquarters erupted into applause and popped…

SILICON VALLEY IS a physical place, but it’s also a style of thinking, a state of being, and an ethos. Its reach has extended far beyond its origins south of San Francisco, beyond even Austin and Seattle, where it has displaced anyone who dares utter words that aren’t from a VC investment thesis or pitch deck. The trillion-dollar-plus market caps of the biggest tech companies exceed the GDPs of all but the richest countries. The Valley’s companies are ensconced in every single part of our lives—art, culture, commerce, politics, wars, and communications all run through their devices and apps. What if, though, the truth is that we haven’t Silicon Valleyed hard enough? Adherents of “effective accelerationism,” a trendy new phrase passing itself off as an ideology, think that’s the case.…