Mother Jones May/June 2022

On the Cover Private equity’s new robber barons have gutted hospitals, nursing homes, newspapers, restaurants, furniture stores, factories, pensions, apartments, major-league sports, the music biz, and your 401(k). And that’s just for starters. Contributors When did you realize what private equity was, and how it is malignant? I learned about PE in business school. But digging in opened my eyes to just how value is extracted.—Hannah Levintova (“The Smash-and-Grab Economy”) I knew companies profited off unreasonable rents. But, as a Brooklyn resident, photographing the way PE changes housing brought it to my doorstep.—Kholood Eid (“Flipped Off”) My dad was laid off five years ago. It wasn’t until reporting this package that I learned it was part of a PE buyout.—Abigail Weinberg (“Mobilizing Homes”) “IT’S LIKE IT’S THE BIGGEST WELFARE PROGRAM FOR THE WEALTHIEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.”Farmer…

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 of…

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…

When a 15-year-old sophomore opened fire at Oxford High School last fall, terrified students and teachers fled for safety or barricaded classroom doors. Within three minutes of arriving at the building, police apprehended the shooter, but not before four students had been fatally shot: Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling, and Hana St. Juliana. Six other teens and a teacher were wounded. Countless others in Oxford Township, a community of 22,000 just north of Detroit, were traumatized. Evidence emerged almost immediately that the alleged shooter had been signaling rageful intent to peers and adults around him—warning signs of a bloodbath that could have been avoided. I’ve tracked mass shootings for Mother Jones for the past decade and researched scores of cases for my new book, Trigger Points, which explores behavioral threat…

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 available…

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 none…