Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2020 i Mother Jones

A typical poultry, pork, or beef plant employs hundreds of people—by and large immigrants, refugees, and people of color—toiling shoulder to shoulder to dismember and break down carcasses moving down the kill line at rates as high as 390 cattle, 1,295 pigs, or 10,500 birds per hour. Meatpacking workers have always faced hazardous conditions and high injury rates, and their tight working conditions make them highly susceptible to viral pathogens. What spreads inside a meat factory doesn’t stay within its walls: By late May, rural counties that had meatpacking plants with COVID-19 outbreaks had average infection rates five times higher than the rest of rural America. As of mid-July, at least 167 meatpacking workers had died from the disease. “It’s a terrible experiment in achieving herd immunity,” says David Michaels,…

When the wave of protests swept the United States this spring in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, one of the first monuments to come down was across from a Bruegger’s at the baggage claim at Dallas’ Love Field. It was a 12-foot bronze of a man with a pistol holstered on his hip and a cowboy hat on his head, lowering his left hand to appeal for calm. His name was E.J. Banks, and he was a Texas Ranger. What precipitated the removal, in early June, was an excerpt, in D Magazine, from a new history of the Rangers called Cult of Glory, by former Dallas Morning News reporter Doug Swanson. In it, Swanson detailed Banks’ story: He was dispatched to North Texas in 1956 to prevent…

In August 2018, a few weeks after he was shot eight times at a party in Oakland, Andre Reed was recovering at his mom’s house, his wounds still open, when he got a message on Instagram. It was an old friend from his school days. She said some people were looking for him and wanted to talk. Reed, then 35, had recently been released from federal prison, after years of bouncing in and out of the criminal justice system. “Is this the police?” he asked. She said she didn’t think so but would check. “They don’t got nothing to do with the police, nothing like that,” he recalls her saying when she messaged him back. Reed was being sought by outreach workers who wondered if he’d like to meet with…

"TrapLanta" is a living portfolio of photographs taken by Willis, a mononymous, 36-year-old Navy reservist and art student who lives in Marietta, about 30 minutes north of Atlanta. He describes his work, which he posts on Instagram under the handle @_traplanta_, as “Southern vernacular, urban reportage, fine art journalism.” The images he captures range from day-glo glimpses of strip clubs to resolutely matter-of-fact portraits of neighborhood drug corners, each photo accompanied by an archly oblique caption. Take the photo of the bottom half of a person fanning out more than 18 $100 bills on the ground. Only a pair of dark hands, legs, and bright white Air Force 1s are visible. The photo is juxtaposed with a bit of history, gleaned from Wikipedia: “James ‘Honest Dick’ Tate was a Kentucky…

When Donal Trump decided to back-burner the coronavirus crisis and reboot his reelection campaign with superspreader events in June, he headed to an arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to present his case for four more years. In front of an audience of maskless fans standing side by side, Trump performed his usual routine. He threw out buzzwords (“law and order,” “left-wing radicals”). He boasted. (“I have done a phenomenal job” responding to the pandemic.) He denigrated his opponent as “Sleepy Joe.” He obsessed over personal grievances and slights, devoting much time to slamming news outlets that had recently shown video of him walking gingerly down a ramp after delivering a commencement address at West Point. What was mostly missing from Trump’s speech: ideas. Although he referred to his tax cuts for…

As the year 1990 came to an end, a fight broke out during a New Year’s Eve celebration at the Juke Box Saturday Night bar in downtown Minneapolis. A 21-year-old white student grabbed Michael Sauro from behind. Sauro, an off-duty white police officer working as a bouncer, handcuffed the man, dragged him to the kitchen, and then repeatedly drove his steel-toed paratrooper boots into his groin and head. Sauro had been a cop for 15 years and had a long record of citizen complaints against him, most of them about excessive force. “I was dealing with animals,” he would later tell a reporter when asked about the people he’d beaten. “I mean, my dog is more human than them.” But he had never been disciplined. Four years after the bar…

Carolina Ciru told herself it was going to be okay when she saw the flashing blue lights in her rearview mirror on a Friday afternoon in February. Ciru, a 42-year-old Honduran immigrant, had been stopped before while driving near her home in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The last time, she’d told the officer she didn’t have a driver’s license, and he wrote a ticket and told her to find someone to drive her home. But this time was different. Ciru was arrested for driving without a license, a misdemeanor. She was handcuffed, put in the back of a police cruiser, and delivered to the Gwinnett County Jail in Lawrenceville. Her 22-year-old daughter, Valerie, tried to pay bail but was told her mother would not be allowed to leave. Three days later, Ciru…

1. THE MONUMENT: In 1865, Edward Virginius Valentine returned from Europe to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia—the former Confederate capital—and began using his training in classical sculpture to enshrine the myth of the Lost Cause. Over the next few decades he made a career of sculpting monuments to defenders of slavery, building tributes to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. And he made the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, unveiled on Monument Avenue in June 1907 by Davis’ last surviving child and toppled in June 2020 by people protesting against systemic racism following the death of George Floyd. In recent months, protesters have spray-painted, damaged, torched, and toppled monuments of white supremacy around the country. Critics have decried the acts as shameful attempts to erase the country’s…

After more than two months on hiatus, Washington, DC’s Sauf Haus Bier Hall and Garten reopened for rooftop dining on May 29. Before customers could sit down to taste the pub’s oversized pretzels and slurp down steins, they were given the option to pass through its new Cleanse Portal—a white entry gate emitting UVC light meant to zap any remnants of the coronavirus on their bodies and in the air around them. The portal is made by Healthe, a “lighting science” company that markets its Cleanse line as a chemical-free way to sanitize air and surfaces in busy environments. “Because let’s face it,” Healthe’s website states, “sharing isn’t always caring.” Not to be confused with the UVA and UVB rays that reach us through sunlight, ultraviolet-C light inactivates bacteria and…