Mother Jones November/December 2022

On the Cover Short of adhering actual rhinestones to the magazine, we wanted to convey the incredible wealth behind European soccer’s biggest teams. Lisa Sheehan's bejeweled soccer ball captures that glitz—with a dark twist. Contributors What did you do to stay sane while hitting your magazine deadlines? Doing cannonballs in the lake with family and opening packs of baseball and soccer cards with my kids. —Matthew Delmont, author, “The Longest War,” page 10 I took frequent breaks from writing about soccer to watch soccer. I didn’t play any, though. —Tim Murphy, author, “Power Ball,” page 22 After being out on assignment, it’s nice to wander around the woods with my dog, Moonshine. —Stacy Kranitz, photographer, “How to Save a Life,” page 48 By the Numbers Guess who owns these trophy-winning soccer teams—billionaires, fans, investment firms, or other countries? To…

In her last years, homebound during the bleak reign of Covid and suffering various maladies, Barbara Ehrenreich did what she always did: She organized an activist collective. This one was a bi-weekly Zoom study group of assorted comrades—former writing partners like myself, other sisters from feminism, labor organizers, and loving ex-husbands. Ever defiant, Barbara kept pushing us to wake the hell up and see how race, gender, and class domination benefited only the rich, and how we could support Amazon strikers and women needing abortions. I first met Barbara in 1971 when we were both hired as part of a new SUNY school with a “mission of social justice.” We helped to found a women’s studies curriculum, and began writing the first of three books on how centuries of male dominance…

Just hours after federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago on August 8 to seize highly classified national security documents, Paul Gosar urged a fight to the finish. “The FBI raid on Trump’s home tells us one thing,” the far-right Arizona congressman tweeted. “Failure is not an option. We must destroy the FBI.” Three days later, an Ohio man named Ricky Shiffer donned tactical gear, armed himself with an AR-15, and went to the FBI field office in Cincinnati. After failing to breach the facility, he fled and later died in a shootout with law enforcement. Shiffer was a frequent user of Trump’s Truth Social site, where the ex-president has kept up steady attacks on political opponents and the Justice Department and FBI. Shiffer had posted about imminent violence, telling fellow Trump supporters to…

Jeanne Herman, commissioner, Washoe County, Nevada In Nevada, county commissioners approve election results, and Herman voted against certifying the 2020 outcome in the state’s second-largest county. She has pushed to curtail the use of voting machines and wanted National Guard troops posted at election facilities. If she wins reelection this year, she might have company on the commission. Mike Clark—a Republican who won’t say whether he thinks Joe Biden was “duly elected”—knocked off another incumbent in the primary. Brian Zahra, Supreme Court justice, Michigan Federal judges smacked down Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, but some state-level jurists proved more pliable. Michigan’s high court narrowly voted to throw out a lawsuit seeking to undo Biden’s victory. Zahra—one of three dissenting Republicans—didn’t say how he might have ruled. But in a related matter, he…

Early one Saturday morning in August, some 60 newly arrived migrants—mostly men, and a few families with children and breastfeeding infants—crowd into an activity room at a Washington, DC, church. Their scant belongings, keepsakes from home and tokens from strangers encountered on the journey north, are preserved in transparent Ziplocs and white trash bags. They got here at dawn, after a 1,700-mile, 30-plus-hour road trip aboard two of the more than 150 migrant buses Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has dispatched to the nation’s capital in an act of audacious political theater. One woman asks me in Spanish where she might find a shower, saying she really needs to clean up. Another wonders whether she could get some new shoes because her cheap rubber sandals are falling apart. Others seek diapers and…

In August 1944, just two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (a.k.a. the GI Bill of Rights), Harry McAlpin, Washington correspondent for the National Negro Publishers Association, warned that the new law, though race-neutral on its face, would exclude Black veterans. The GI Bill included funding for housing, college, and job training, along with business loans and unemployment insurance, which fueled social mobility for millions of veterans and their descendants. It also included “innumerable loopholes for states to ‘rob’ returning Negro veterans of the rights and privileges they have earned by risking their lives and limbs for the preservation (?) of democracy,” McAlpin wrote. This discrimination was by design. Southern Democrats including House Veterans Committee Chairman John Rankin—who a quarter century earlier had penned an editorial…