Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2022 i Mother Jones

For decades now, many of our leading newsrooms have covered American politics like it’s sports. There are two opposing teams; there are players on the field; there are people with money jockeying for power and acclaim behind the scenes. There are winners and losers. And there is a set of rules that everyone understands to determine which is which. That way of looking at politics has always had blind spots. But the biggest one didn’t become fully apparent until recently: What if, even as we follow the play-by-play, someone is setting the arena on fire? That’s where we are with democracy in America. We can see the flames licking at the corners. We can smell the smoke. And we have a choice: We can keep watching the action on the…

ARIZONA: Republicans stripped Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of the power to defend state election laws and transferred that authority to the Republican attorney general—but only through the 2022 election, in case the partisan composition of the offices is reversed after that. COLORADO: Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters allowed unauthorized individuals to copy hard drive images of election software, resulting in this information being shared publicly by election conspiracy theorists. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold called this an “unprecedented security breach.” FLORIDA: Mimicking Georgia, Republicans banned giving food and water to voters in line, along with making it harder to vote by mail—after more Democrats than Republicans did so for the first time in the state’s recent history. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill in May during a…

It was a clear spring morning on the Greek island of Chios, and the waves pummeled the shoreline, whipping the Aegean into a froth. Antonis Bourmas’ house clung to the edge of a rocky point that faced eastward to Turkey, some 6 miles across the sea. As Bourmas prepared to leave for the school where he taught economics, he spotted something moving in the distance: a boat off the coast of Monolia beach, 200 yards to his north. Through his binoculars he saw that it was lurching toward shore and appeared to lack a working motor. A closer look confirmed his suspicions: This was a boat of refugees coming to seek asylum in Europe. Bourmas, a trim intellectual with long hair and wire-rimmed glasses, grabbed a jacket and started to…

Lab meat—flesh grown in massive tanks instead of in the bodies of sentient animals—offers the promise of having our steak and eating it guilt-free, too. No vast amounts of water-polluting chemicals to grow feed crops; no low-paid slaughterhouse workers; no climate-warming gases from cow burps; and no billions of animals slaughtered each year to satisfy our carnivory. Once a staple only of science fiction, the stuff is poised to land on your dinner plate this year, at least according to boosters of the cultivated-meat industry (to use its preferred name). In Singapore—the only nation to approve lab meat for sale—you can already go to the JW Marriott South Beach hotel and order steamed chicken dumplings made with “real meat without slaughter” in the form of chicken cells grown by a…

For nearly 30 years, the Reel M Inn has occupied a squat, stucco building on a corner along Southeast Division Street in Portland, Oregon. Sleek condos and coffee shops have erased most of the neighborhood’s blue-collar grit, but the Reel, as locals call it, remains the same: a classic dive bar with neon signs and fishing knickknacks layered on its dark-paneled walls. Until closing time at 2:30 a.m., bartenders serve pop-tops and shots from behind the narrow wooden bar—“Bloody Marys are about as fancy as it gets,” Carey Bolton, the Reel’s manager and co-owner, tells me. The tiny kitchen churns out fried chicken and jojos (potato wedges)—and pretty much only chicken and jojos—for 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. The wait for food can run up to two…

At around the fifth hour of November’s “Enough Is Enough” prayer rally, hosted by the Catholic right media outlet Church Militant, event emcee and fallen alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos bounded onstage to reveal a dramatic wardrobe change. Gone were the rock-star white suit and purple shoes he’d been wearing since morning, replaced by a black shirt, black suit, and heavy crucifix, which gleamed from the jumbotrons all the way to the back of Baltimore’s Pier Six Pavilion, where the concert venue jutted into the city harbor. The bleached-blond tips of his floppy hair—fashy-short on the sides and Donald Trump combover-long on top—had been shorn in a final makeover after his year of ostentatious renunciation. At the podium, Yiannopoulos assumed an air of exaggerated modesty. “The path to salvation is a…

For many, America is unlivable. Across the country, homeownership seems like a mirage from another era. In many blue cities and states, even renting is tough. In California, the median price for a home has broken past $800,000. The rate of homelessness nationwide has risen four years in a row. A quarter of 2020’s unhoused individuals lived in either New York City or Los Angeles. All of this clearly—as we are told time and time again—constitutes a “housing crisis.” But what exactly does the phrase mean? There’s a you-know-it-when-you-see-it quality to the term that makes its vagueness easy to ignore. Someone reading Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, Evening World, in the 1920s would have associated “housing crisis” with overcrowding and sordid living conditions in Brooklyn’s tenements. A subscriber to the Rochester Democrat…

A week before the ninth anniversary of her son’s murder, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) discovered that Republicans had radically redrawn her district to oust her from Congress. A political novice, McBath had become a leading gun control advocate after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot by a white man in 2012 in an altercation over the volume of rap music Davis was playing. She went on to stage one of the biggest electoral upsets in Georgia’s recent history when, in 2018, she became the first Black person to represent the state’s 6th District, Newt Gingrich’s home turf for 20 years. Her victory exemplified Democratic inroads in formerly red states like Georgia, and the new power being exercised by communities of color in the rapidly diversifying South. But those gains…

Tom Philpott Eating in the United States represents one of the world’s great bargains. We consume the most calories per capita and don’t spend much cash to do so. Food’s claim on disposable income has fallen, from 17 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2019. Consider a fast-food chicken sandwich. It delivers 700 calories for about $4. But its once-abundant secret ingredient—the cheap labor that fuels our entire food system—is suddenly in short supply. Here’s why. FAST-FOOD WORKER • Median hourly wage: $11.47 Once the domain of high schoolers, today the fast-food industry is mostly staffed by adults. They often face injuries like burns and cuts, and sexual harassment of women is routine. A Los Angeles County Department of Public Health survey found that 69 percent of…