Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2020 i Mother Jones

This issue of Mother Jones was going to look very different from what you’re holding in your hands—and at the same time, it hasn’t changed very much at all. Here’s why: We were planning a big package of stories on corruption, a major theme that has informed our reporting for the past year. We were digging deep on how the administration has prioritized self-enrichment for Donald Trump’s family and cronies, the only Americans he deems truly worthy of public assistance. We were looking at how profiteers have hijacked public education, and how fossil fuel companies have fought to kneecap renewable energy. We were investigating military and immigration contracting, offshore money, hedge funds, utility companies, dark-money spenders, and those who promote racism under the guise of white victimhood. But then the…

In 1980 the federal deficit was soaring and Ronald Reagan campaigned on a singular promise: He planned to cut taxes on everyone, but especially the rich. He insisted that those benefits would quickly trickle down to everyone and supercharge the economy. Throw in some social safety net cuts, Republicans said, and the whole plan would pay for itself. They were wrong. The rich got lower taxes all right, but the economy flatlined and the deficit skyrocketed. I should know: I graduated from college the same summer the tax cut passed, and I spent the next three years managing a Radio Shack waiting for the economy to get back on its feet. In 1982 Reagan was forced to raise taxes to make up for his cuts, and he continued raising them…

Few people in the United States had heard of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—the high-security biolab in Wuhan, China, that does cutting-edge research on coronaviruses—until mid-April, when the Trump administration began to imply that it might be the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. So far the only evidence supporting this idea is the coincidence of COVID-19 breaking out in the same city as the institute, but that’s been enough to feed conspiracy theories for months. Such theories were relegated to the right-wing fringe—in mid-April, Rush Limbaugh complained that you’re considered “a kook if you think that this virus happened in a lab!”—until the White House, feeling the heat for its own inept response, began to embrace them. The groundwork to do so was laid when two…

On her phone, Crystal Rodriguez keeps a photo of her father hooked up to a ventilator. Nurses at the hospital sent her the image after he’d spent close to a month in the intensive care unit at UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, Colorado, battling severe complications from COVID-19. At 58, he was unable to speak or visit with family. Rodriguez is convinced that her father was exposed to the coronavirus at work on the meatpacking line at JBS, a Brazilian-owned multinational that brings in $50 billion annually as the world’s largest meat processor. “They have so much money and so much knowledge of everything,” Rodriguez says. “Why didn’t they help protect us?” A 33-year-old single mother of four, Rodriguez grew up in Greeley, Colorado, home to JBS’s…

Locked in the worst economic slump in its history, Detroit is beset by unemployment and covered in abandoned lots. Surveying the ruins of a boom gone bust, an innovative mayor envisions a blooming city while a diverse population gets busy tilling the earth. A blighted landscape turns green and bountiful. Harvests arrive, alleviating hunger. The year was 1894. Detroit’s “potato patch” program offered families abandoned land for growing food. It was Mayor Hazen Pingree’s signature response to the Panic of 1893, a financial meltdown that sparked a brutal recession. Now largely forgotten, Pingree’s initiative established a pattern: When the going gets tough, Americans look to gardening for comfort and sustenance. The coronavirus forced us to shelter in place at the onset of spring. On cue, we took to the shovel…

The fundamental purpose of government is rather simple: protect the citizenry. Any deliberate perversion of this priority is an exercise of corruption—especially when that basic aim is supplanted by the goal of personal gain. That’s why Donald Trump’s slow, ineffectual, self-serving, and deadly response to the coronavirus has been the most consequential act of corruption in the history of American governance. It eclipses Watergate, Teapot Dome, Iran-Contra, you name it. It also happens to be the continuation—perhaps the culmination—of the corruption that Trump started spreading like a virus the moment he tramped into the White House. Corruption in government is generally thought of as an official exploiting power or position for personal benefit, often to line his or her pockets or those of a favored associate, relative, or corporation. There…

Win or lose in November, one thing won’t change for Donald Trump: Over the next few years, his company must settle a series of whopping debts. Before the end of a theoretical second term, his company will have to refinance—or, in a far less likely scenario, pay off—nearly a half-billion dollars in loans linked to some of his most prized assets, including Trump Tower. These debts are maturing at a perilous moment for Trump, whose hotels and resorts have been plagued by declining revenues. And that was before the coronavirus pandemic pummeled the hospitality industry in general and the Trump Organization in particular, forcing the full or partial closure of most of its hotel and resort properties. On financial disclosure forms, Trump has reported holding 14 loans on 12 properties.…

Amid the flood of bad news about the coronavirus, in April there was a buoy: A major clinical trial showed that an antiviral medication called remdesivir shortened the length of time that patients are sick with COVID-19, from a median of 15 days down to 11. The FDA had already rushed to approve research on the compound—an underperforming Ebola drug—and when the trial results came in, the agency quickly authorized it for emergency use. There are caveats: It’s not clear whether the drug reduces a patient’s risk of dying from the disease, and a small Chinese study showed no benefit. Still, doctors are hopeful that remdesivir will help reduce strain on hospitals and buy time for researchers to develop other treatments and a vaccine. In the meantime, remdesivir’s manufacturer, the…

1. The first version of the now-ubiquitous “flatten the curve” chart appeared in a 2007 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The image, titled “Goals of Community Mitigation,” accompanied a list of radical recommendations to swiftly change American life in the event of a pandemic: close schools, cancel public gatherings, recommend voluntary isolation. The authors used a now-familiar term for the strategy: “social distancing.” The colors have changed, but the chart then was more or less what we see today (at right). Two ugly humps: one purple and steep, representing the outcome of a pandemic in which no interventions are taken; the other hatched and flatter than the first, depicting the outcome under a community-mitigation regime. There were axes and legends, and Drew Harris, a professor of…

PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERTS agree that the country can’t safely reopen without massive testing—anywhere between 500,000 and 35 million tests a day. Getting there has been a slog, yet the president has been insisting for months that there are enough tests for everyone—when he’s not downplaying the importance of testing. 1. February 26: Trump: “We’re testing everybody that we need to test. And we’re finding very little problem.” 2. March 5: Pence: “We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.” 3. March 6: Trump: “Anybody that needs a test gets a test.” 4. March 12: Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to Congress about the testing system: “Yes, it is a failing, let’s admit it.” 5. March 13: Trump says drugstore chains are about…

If Donald Trump could build a city from scratch, it would have a casino and a golf course and all the cheeseburgers you could eat. The city’s residents would be old, with money to spend and nothing but free time. The workers would be poor, foreign, and always on the clock. They would literally live beneath you. There would be doctors, but not very many, and there would be cops, sort of, but who exactly they were there to protect and serve would remain ambiguous. There would be no proper government to speak of. The city and its services would be run by a corporation, and you would sign away your rights to a billionaire in his 70s with a tan and bad hair, in exchange for a promise of…

Are we Rome? It’s a question people in the United States have been asking for almost as long as there’s been a United States. It’s also the title of a 2007 book by Cullen Murphy, editor-at-large of the Atlantic and—full disclosure—my dad. The book struck a nerve at a time when the United States was mired in two unending wars, beset by growing inequality, and on the verge of economic collapse. But a lot’s changed since then; now we have the wars, the inequality, the threat of economic collapse plus a global pandemic and a president who was once the star of The Apprentice. So with the fall of Rome on everyone’s minds again, I called up my paterfamilias to ask a variation of another age-old question: Are we there…