Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2019 i Mother Jones

JUST BEFORE THE new school year got underway, a group of suburban parents, local officials, organizers, and celebrities from around the country crowded into a few rows of metal folding chairs at an elementary school in Mountain View, California. The school, sandwiched between Google headquarters and a working-class neighborhood in this Silicon Valley city, was being named for Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer-winning journalist who came out as undocumented in a searing New York Times Magazine essay in 2011. I watched as Vargas smiled for selfies with a string of friends, relatives, and strangers next to the plaque bearing his name in the community where he became—in every way but the paperwork—an American. At the Filipino feast afterward, kids jostled for bits of lechon as Ryan Eller, executive director of…

Jamaal Bowman (New York 16th): The 43-year-old founder and principal of a Bronx middle school is running to unseat Rep. Eliot Engel. Engel, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, is at odds with some squad members over their support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement aimed at Israel. Marie Newman (Illinois 3rd): In 2018, the former advertising exec nearly toppled eight-term Chicagoland Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the last anti-abortion House Democrats. Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List are backing her, as is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Adem Bunkeddeko (New York 9th): The son of Ugandan refugees, the 31-year-old Harvard Business School grad is mounting his second challenge to Rep. Yvette Clarke. His 2018 run was endorsed by the New York Times, which described Clarke’s accomplishments as “regrettably far between.” Cori…

WHEN SHE FIRST got out, little things like crossing the street were difficult for London Croudy. “When you’re in prison, the only thing you’re thinking about is going home. You plan all these things in your mind, and then all of a sudden you get out and reality hits you,” Croudy says. “They are like, ‘Go find a job and get this ID,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, Uber—what the hell is that?’ I feel left behind sometimes.” After serving eight years of a 13-year sentence for conspiracy to distribute heroin, Croudy was released to live in a halfway house in Oakland, California, run by the private prison company GEO Group. She had to share a room with several people, and the beds and food were similar to those…

DONALD TRUMP’S MASSIVE debts—he owes hundreds of millions of dollars—are the subject of continuous congressional and journalistic scrutiny. But for years, one Trump loan has been particularly mystifying: a debt of more than $50 million that Trump claims he owes to one of his own companies. According to tax and financial experts, the loan, which Trump has never fully explained, might be part of a controversial tax avoidance scheme known as debt parking. Yet a Mother Jones investigation has uncovered information that raises questions about the very existence of this loan, presenting the possibility that this debt was concocted as a ploy to evade income taxes—a move that could constitute tax fraud. Here’s what is publicly known about this mystery debt: On the personal financial disclosure forms that Trump must file…

IN 1981, EIGHT YEARS after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and just a year before her breakout role as pregnant Stacy in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jennifer Jason Leigh played another apparently knocked-up high schooler, this time in a CBS after-school special called I Think I’m Having a Baby. Leigh is Laurie, a hard-crushing freshman taken for a roll in the leaves by the dreamy senior asshole Peter, who is cheating on his girlfriend, Phoebe, played by a hair-flipping Helen Hunt. Not to spoil it for you, but I’ll spoil it for you: Laurie is not actually having a baby. But the 29-minute near tragedy, aimed at preteens, traces her romantic and existential anguish after she tells Peter about the “pregnancy,” and Peter essentially tells her to deal with…

She’s no longer a New Yorker, but NATHALIE BAPTISTE was born in Brooklyn, where controversial HUD administrator and Trump family friend Lynne Patton (“Lynne Patton’s Unreality Show”) is making waves. Baptiste, a Mother Jones reporter and former fellow, also reports on Congress, the climate, and the justice system, including capital punishment’s enduring legacy in the United States. Investigative journalist and Type Investigations fellow SETH FREED WESSLER is grateful to the attorneys who—pro bono, for more than two years—helped him litigate the FOIA requests that drove his investigation of the US Marshals Service’s detention standards (“Marshals Law”) and the deaths of detainees in its custody. Wessler won a 2018 Peabody Award for his reporting on public financing of Confederate memorials. As a fifth grader watching Party of Five, HILLARY KELLY heard…

“YOU HAVE NOT been the kindest journalist to me,” Lynne Patton told me over the phone. I could not argue with that: In reporting on her rise from Trump family aide to a key official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, I’ve covered her one-month stay in public housing and her Instagram post scoffing at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Yet as I watched Patton with fascination, what I really wanted to know was this: Is the most prominent black woman in the Trump administration for real? Or is she just playing the role of the loyal black friend in a reality TV presidency? Black conservatives like Patton, long confusing to liberals, are positively confounding in the age of Trump. Why do they stick by a president who makes…

A LARGE RECTANGLE of red dirt on the flat expanse of West Texas’ Permian Basin reminds Sadrac Garcia every day of what his family has lost. A few months ago, he could stand on the small porch of his brother Juan’s double-wide and peer into the window of their parents’ trailer a few meters away. Until 2017, three generations of Garcias lived on these couple of acres. The family is slowly selling off the homes and the land, an attempt to move on after their father, Isac Garcia-Wislar, died in the custody of a local jail. Sadrac, soft-spoken but direct, is tall and solidly built, with a rough goatee and a white cowboy hat. He shows me a photo of his father on this late August afternoon; they look nearly…

PREVIOUSLY, ON TV: the abortion-quandary plotline, featuring an uncertain pregnant woman agonizing over her decision. For years, this was how abortion was portrayed—until the medium’s great flowering in the new century. A brief survey of abortion TV, from “Maude’s Dilemma” to Veep’s jokes and beyond. 1972: Maude Bea Arthur’s title character decides to get an abortion after unexpectedly becoming pregnant at 47 years old. 1973: All My Children In the first Roe-era TV episode to feature abortion, lead character Erica Kane gets a serious infection after ending her pregnancy to pursue a modeling career. 1989: A Different World Kim’s boyfriend, Dwayne, tells her to “get rid of” her pregnancy. She eventually realizes it’s a false alarm. 1991: Murphy Brown The TV journalist decides to carry her pregnancy to term. She…

ONE OF THE recurring storylines of the Trump era: Things are going off the rails, but never fear—first daughter and White House adviser Ivanka Trump is quietly working behind the scenes to be the least-awful member of the administration, details of which are conveniently leaked to the press: February 2017: The New York Times reports that Ivanka and sidekick Jared Kushner “helped kill” an executive order rolling back LGBTQ protections. April 2017: Politico reports that Ivanka has “quietly reached out to” Planned Parenthood as part of her “listening tour.” April 2017: Eric Trump tells the Telegraph that a “heartbroken and outraged” Ivanka pushed her father to launch missile strikes on Syria after a chemical attack. May 2017: Ivanka, who Axios states is “passionate” about climate change, is said to be working…

IN EARLY 1973, as Joe Biden was settling into his new job in Washington, DC, Ralph Nader published a deconstruction of what made the freshman Democratic senator’s state of Delaware, the most anodyne of states, so exceptional. The answer, The Company State explained, had to do with the unique relationship between government and commerce: Delaware was less a democracy than a fiefdom, contorting its laws to meet the demands of its corporate lords. Preeminent among them was the chemical giant DuPont. Nader took readers to Rodney Square, in the heart of Wilmington. There was the ritzy Hotel du Pont, housed in a building owned by DuPont, next to a theater built by DuPont, connected to a bank controlled by the du Pont family, surrounded by law offices and brokerages—all affiliated…

THE CATALYST FOR Faribault, Minnesota’s crime-free housing law came one night in October 2013, when more than a dozen residents gathered at a city council meeting to air concerns about the state of their historic downtown. They were worried, as a local reporter recounted, about public safety and building codes. But not far from the surface, the complaints centered on the growing community of Somali immigrants, many of whom lived around the central business district of this city of 23,000 people, about an hour south of Minneapolis. Business owners were frustrated that Somali men often gathered on sidewalks to talk, blocking access to storefronts. One parent said there was now “an element of fear among the kids—especially the girls.” Shopkeepers said their businesses were infested with cockroaches because the tenants…

FOR THE WORLD to be made anew, it would have to be seen anew. Richard Edes Harrison's influential pilot's-eye-view map, first published in 1941, both reflected and facilitated a changing vision of the United States' place in the international order. The map put the country in the middle of a portrait of global mutual obligation and threat—not a conqueror so much as the pivot around which the world would be organized. Look closely and you can begin to see the outlines of a different kind of empire. 1. Pearl Harbor was not just a military crisis for the United States. It was a cartographic one, too. Strategists decried Mercator projection maps, which made the country seem insulated from both fronts of World War II and encouraged aloofness. Harrison, the dean…

ONE DAY IN JANUARY 2014, police rushed to a farm in Rasdorf, Germany, after flames burst from a barn. They soon discovered that static electricity had caused entrapped methane from the flatulence and manure of 90 dairy cows to explode. Headline writers had a field day. But the incident pointed to a serious problem: Ruminant livestock, mostly cattle, account for 30 percent of all global methane emissions, pumping out 3 gigatons of the gas every year in their burps, farts, and manure. Methane is an especially potent greenhouse gas: During its 12-year lifespan after being released, it traps 84 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, and its effect on global warming over a century is 34 times that of CO2. According to the United Nations, reducing methane emissions from…