Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2022 i Mother Jones

I grew up learning to speak Russian. The Cold War was at its height in the early ’80s, and my school in Germany offered English as a second language in fifth grade and Russian in ninth. Just in case, you know? We were caught—though I didn’t fully realize it as a bookish punk-rock teen—between two massive powers that might just conclude that a little nuclear war in Europe was the price to pay for global dominance. So, in my overalls and with bangs down to my nose, I marched against NATO, its nuclear missiles, and the superpower leaders who seemed determined to rob my generation of any kind of future. As our editor-in-chief, Clara Jeffery, noted in compiling an amazing playlist of ’80s “doom you can dance to,” the music…

With more than $4.5 trillion in investments in thousands of companies across dozens of industries around the globe, private equity is everywhere—from the stores you shop at and the companies you work for to the food you eat and the music you listen to. You don’t have to go to the Hamptons to live the private equity life—just take a walk down your street. So what are you waiting for? Explore what the industry can do for you. 1. Public to Private Where do the biggest private equity firms get their money for leveraged buyouts? If you’re a public worker, it might be your pension fund. Altogether, these funds hold about $480 billion in private equity investments, even though one study found that PE performed about as well as stock…

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) $16.4M Congress’ PE poster child, the fourth-richest senator (estimated net worth: $85 million) co-founded Bain Capital in 1984. In 2012, Romney’s dismissal of 47% of Americans as freeloaders helped sink his presidential campaign. 30ft. In a devastating 2012 attack ad paid for by Priorities USA, an Indiana paper-plant worker named Mike Earnest recounts how he was asked by his bosses to build a 30-foot stage—only to later realize that it was for Bain executives to announce to his co-workers that they all were being fired. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) $18.3M Connecticut’s senior senator ($85 million) married into considerable wealth: His father-in-law, Peter Malkin, was the chair of a major Manhattan real estate company and a longtime rival of Donald Trump. $16.2M In 2002, after PE firm…

On a chilly evening in September 2020, Jordan Schumacher solemnly patrolled the grounds of Valley Forge Military Academy, near his wit’s end. Weeks earlier, the school’s top brass had elevated the 20-year-old college sophomore to the highest rank available to cadets—first captain. A former Boy Scout who’d joined a junior ROTC program at age 11, he was proud of the promotion and ready to lead. But as he navigated the school’s toxic environment in his new role, he’d been feeling increasingly helpless and depressed. Entrusting students in leadership roles was all well and good, but a dearth of healthy adult oversight and accountability had contributed to a culture replete with assaults, verbal abuse, hazing, and sexual violence that had resulted in police visits, lawsuits, and a cold war pitting recalcitrant…

When Grubhub came to Iowa City in 2017, Jon Sewell got what he describes as a “call to action.” He owns a D.P. Dough franchise there and had been using a delivery service called OrderUp to get his calzones to college students. But then Grubhub bought out OrderUp and doubled the commission on orders to an astronomical 30 percent, plus fees. At those rates, Sewell says, he lost money on every order. So in January 2018, Sewell joined forces with about 25 Iowa City restaurant owners who chipped in to launch their own delivery co-op called Chomp. The business, which now employs five to seven people full time and about 100 independent drivers, caps commissions at 15 percent, redistributes profits to the co-op members, and offers local customer service, which…

In East Oakland, home to what the San Francisco Chronicle calls the “Bay Area’s hottest housing market,” a row of stucco townhomes sprung up along a blighted stretch of MacArthur Boulevard in 2021. Tan-colored and not outwardly remarkable, they were designed, according to their creator, Tiny Gray-Garcia, as an antidote to “gentrifuckation.” Homefulness, as the eight-unit place is known, now provides rent-free homes to recently unhoused individuals—including Tiny and many others who conceived the project, hammered the studs, hung the drywall, and now collectively manage the space. “This is a poor people–led solution to our own problems,” says Gray-Garcia, a pigtailed and sharp-tongued 48-year-old single mother who lived in cars and abandoned buildings as a child and young adult. California has nearly a million more “extremely low-income” households than units…

In September 2018, Peggy Kuhn returned from a four-day mountain biking trip to her home in Sans Souci park, a 62-plot stretch of land south of Boulder, Colorado, where mobile homes have been set up since at least the 1950s, only to find her neighbors “crying and screaming.” Usually an oasis of sorts, the nearly 11-acre, cottonwood-lined property at the foot of the Rockies had radically changed. Just before she left, a private equity–backed firm had bought the park, and residents soon found blue bags hanging on their doorknobs, containing packages outlining a fresh set of rules. Tenants were not to “wander on the streets of the community” after 9 p.m. Children were not to play in the roads. “Unsightly” or overgrown lawns were prohibited. While Kuhn was away, landscapers…

If you were to sit down with a focus group and a whiteboard, you would have a hard time coming up with a policy with less populist appeal than the nearly three-decades-old loophole that cuts private equity billionaires’ tax rate almost in half. The carried-interest loophole, Barack Obama said, upset “the balance between work and wealth.” Donald Trump claimed the fund managers who availed themselves of this tax break were “getting away with murder.” Joe Biden, like both of his predecessors, ran for president on a pledge to end it. “People get this really easily—we’re giving a whole lot of rich people more money for no reason other than them being rich,” says Mandla Deskins, advocacy manager at Take on Wall Street, an organization pressuring members of Congress to jettison…

Last fall, the end of the pandemic seemed tantalizingly close. After the Delta wave subsided, businesses began to relax their mask policies. Most Americans had received at least one vaccine. People bought plane tickets for holiday travel. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, University of California, San Francisco, infectious disease specialist Monica Gandhi declared, “Covid-19 will soon become endemic—and the sooner the better.” Once this coveted state of endemicity happens, Gandhi wrote, we can all look forward to “a full return to normal.” Since then, politicians have increasingly used “endemic” and “normal” interchangeably. In November, when Tennessee ended its state of emergency, politicians explained the transition as a response to when “the virus becomes endemic.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the looser guidelines he unveiled in February 2022 a response…

The sun has already dipped behind southeast Arizona’s dusty blue Mescal Mountains, but for sisters Naelyn and Nizhoni Pike, huddled by a fire shooting sparks into the darkening desert, excitement lies ahead. In a few minutes, they will join a dozen runners on the first leg of a brisk 55-mile relay. Over the course of three days, they’ll traverse this arid valley where their ancestors were once imprisoned, and climb through the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, which they call home, and into the Tonto National Forest, to a site they consider their most sacred, where Naelyn has said she feels “free to be Apache”: Chi’chil Bildagoteel, an Apache name describing a place where acorns grow. The run is not a race, but rather a moving protest in support of…

After 16 years at the helm of Houdaille Industries, CEO Jerry Saltarelli wanted out. Since 1941, he’d poured his heart and soul into the company, starting out as a young lawyer and moving up the executive ranks. As CEO, he’d helped the company transform from a manufacturer of bumpers and shock absorbers into a nationwide construction and machine tools conglomerate. With the company on solid footing, he was ready to retire, but there was a problem. Houdaille—cash-rich and with minimal debt—was the kind of company in vogue with the corporate raiders of 1970s Wall Street, and the New York Times declared that a takeover might prove “irresistible.” This would likely lead to restructuring and layoffs—bleeding the company of its value and tossing aside its way of doing business. Saltarelli wanted…

For most of his 30-year career, Iowa farmer Dan Wahl never knocked heads with his state’s agribusiness goliaths. He was too busy tending his crops and cattle on 640 acres of land. But then, in September 2021, a subsidiary of a private equity firm called Summit Agricultural Group started mailing packets to farmers in his area, pitching its plan to build a 2,000-mile pipeline through 30 Iowa counties as a way of breathing new life into the state’s troubled ethanol industry. The pipeline, dubbed the Midwest Carbon Express, would slash across Wahl’s farm on its way to grab carbon dioxide generated by 31 corn ethanol plants in five states. It would carry the CO2 to North Dakota, where the gas would be buried underground. By burying ethanol’s carbon waste, the…

For years, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has railed against the excesses of private equity firms, including megadeals that leave companies bankrupt and their workers jobless as fund managers line their pockets with fees and performance bonuses. In 2013, for instance, Warren proposed legislation that would shrink PE’s sway by barring commercial banks—where most Americans hold their money—from investing in the industry. Two years later, she went after what Insider called PE’s “golden goose,” asking the Treasury Department and the IRS to crack down on waivers that allow fund managers to pass off their entire compensation as “carried interest,” which is taxed at a far lower rate than ordinary income. But her reputation as private equity’s greatest foe in Washington may have been cemented in 2019, when—as a top presidential contender in…

On January 20, 2020, the day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first Covid-19 case in the United States, private equity billionaire Leon Black appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. He smiled wide in black and white under a cold, sans-serif headline: RUTHLESS. “Nobody makes money,” read the coverline, “like Apollo’s Leon Black.” It seemed to be the perfect time to be writing about Black, whose company the authors called “Wall Street’s apex predator.” Over the last decade, the assets Apollo managed grew sixfold, and Black’s personal wealth had ballooned to $9.5 billion. The high-rolling art collector even became the chair of MoMA’s board in 2018. But the Bloomberg profile also hinted at storm clouds ahead. Jeffrey Epstein had served on the board of Black’s family…