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INSIDE: TIME TO DITCH YOUR GAS STOVE

JIM CROW RISES AGAIN The fight to rescue our democracy from white supremacy By Ari Berman

July + August 2021

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18 Caution to the Wind

DEPARTMENTS 5 to our readers

BY M A D I S O N PAU LY

Desperate to reopen and loaded with stimulus cash, schools are spending millions on hightech air puriﬁers. But are they safe?

6 outfront Grand Old Party of shitposters

Bicycle couriers unite!

26 Who Really Gets Rich From Robinhood

Amazon takes over Washington—from the inside.

BY H A N N A H L E V I N TOVA

Gender dysphoria? There’s an app for that.

The app makes millions funneling inexperienced investors to Wall Street traders.

34 Facing Down Jim Crow. Again. BY A R I B E R M A N

Another generation of Black lawmakers is battling a familiar enemy.

42 Gaslit BY R E B E C C A L E B E R

How the fossil fuel industry convinced Americans to love their toxic stoves

56 mixed media Do images of Black protesters let white America oﬀ the hook?

What we mean by “inﬂation” 66 food + health Public transit is more important now than ever.

48 Shapeshifter BY T I M M U R P H Y

From Green Party rabble-rouser to Senate power broker, Kyrsten Sinema’s rise is a political fairy tale—and nightmare.

Bill Gates’ dirty secret

July + August 2021

FEATURES

VOLUME 46 NUMBER 4 C O V E R : S H E I L A P R E E B R I G H T ; I N S I D E : A LY S S A P O I N T E R / AT L A N TA J O U R N A L- C O N S T I T U T I O N /A P

We gave guillem casasús a meta challenge: designing art for a story about how design tricks people (“Who Really Gets Rich From Robinhood,” page 26). He was just the right person for the task, because he’d used a similarly layered approach in writing the bio for his website. Instead of words, friends made a series of portraits of Casasús. One is his face with “I Hate Type” laid over it.

After spending the last two years learning about equities and investing as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Business School, Mother Jones reporter hannah levintova put the education to work investigating Robinhood’s trading app (“Who Really Gets Rich From Robinhood,” page 26). Unraveling the app’s complexities led to a familiar conclusion: Wall Street is ripping you oﬀ.

Mother Jones fellow lil kalish was curious when they heard about new venture capital–funded telehealth services for transgender people (“Transitioning 2.0,” page 16). They spoke with trans folks ages 22 to 56, from Kentucky to California, about what telemedicine could mean for trans health care amid a wave of anti-trans state laws, and about the history of free mutual aid in trans communities.

When the West Coast wildfires of 2020 turned the sky outside her apartment orange, Mother Jones reporter madison pauly ran her air purifier 24/7. After learning about a burgeoning industry of high-tech purifiers being pushed into schools to fight covid (“Caution to the Wind,” page 18), she checked the specs on her own machine—then dug into the concerning chemistry behind some newly popular devices.

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“ARE YOU SCREWED WITHOUT TRUMP?” The most absurd question in journalism BY MONIKA BAUERLEIN so, reader, have you been following the news less lately?

As the ceo of a news outlet, God, I hope so. I’m not supposed to say that. Reach, eyeballs, ratings, traffic—so much of the conventional wisdom about what journalism is revolves around those numbers. That’s certainly what Donald Trump thought. Remember how he warned that news ratings would “tank if I’m not there”? The truth is, they kind of did. For four years he had Americans glued to screens, lured by viral outrage, schadenfreude, or just fear of how deeply we’d slid into coup CEO M O N I K A B AU E R L E I N territory overnight. Now, finally, our collective grip on the remote has relaxed a bit. cnn’s primetime ratings dipped 45 percent from February to March. The Washington Post’s traffic declined 26 percent; the New York Times’ 17 percent. Mother Jones’ website audience is down about 40 percent. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in some ways, that’s a good thing. Because consider what was driving that traffic: Between September and January our most-read stories were about QAnon, Rudy Giuliani, Mitch McConnell ramming through a Supreme Court justice, the Sturgis motorcycle rally setting off a quarter-million coronavirus cases, and a violent insurrection to overturn the election. All of it is, forgive the language, batshit crazy stuff that never should have happened in the first place. Now we have a president so boring, his worst scandal has been his rescue dog biting staffers. Slower news days have never felt so good. It’s true that the abeyance of batshit crazy is a problem for the news business. More eyeballs means more advertising (or at least the crumbs that Google and Facebook leave behind) and more subscriptions. Even at a nonprofit like Mother Jones, we often get asked: “Are you screwed without Trump?” Of course that’s an absurd question—a news organization that needs a protofascist showman in power is a news organization that doesn’t deserve to survive. But there’s a deeper reason why I’m hoping that what some call the Trump Slump will be a boost for journalism, not a death knell. For one thing, 2020 proved that even a deluge of batshit crazy can’t save the traditional business model. More than 16,000 news jobs disappeared last year, a rate not seen since the crash of 2008. And while the pace has slowed in 2021, the cuts are likely to keep coming. “These media companies are looking at the dollar signs, and it’s just not there,” Joel Kaplan, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, told

cnn in the spring. “They have probably six months before it really gets bad.” The vulturous Alden Global hedge fund is poised to snap up the likes of the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune. nbc, HuffPost, and even public media such as wnyc in New York are cutting staff. (Here at Mother Jones, about 60 percent of our team took a pay cut last year as an act of solidarity to avoid layoffs. Right now we’re doing everything we can to avoid having to do that again.) So it’s not that “without Trump, we are screwed.” It’s that we are screwed with or without him if we can’t show the public that journalism matters for the long term—not just when there’s a despot on the move or a pandemic underway. Covering these crises is essential. But so is shining a light on the deeper forces that brought them about. Case in point: the cover story in this issue. A desperate quest to entrench white minority rule is part of what brought Trump to power, and his lies about the election have turbocharged it. As MoJo voting rights reporter Ari Berman discovered, the parallels between today’s wave of anti-voting legislation and the white supremacist movement that ended Reconstruction are stunning. Ari’s story shows the full scope of this assault on democracy, and he also unveils some of the forces behind it. In a recent scoop on our website, he revealed how dark money groups have been pushing to “right the wrongs of the mistreatment against” Trump by passing voter suppression laws in state after state. “We did it quickly, we did it quietly...Honestly, no one noticed.” Except now they have. Ari’s story was shared to nearly 50 million people on social media, and the video was watched a million times. Half a million people read the story just on our website, and many other news outlets picked it up as well, from cnn and msnbc to the Des Moines Register. The state of Iowa is investigating. That’s the kind of virality that we aim for at Mother Jones. No deceptive headlines or manipulated photos, but deeply researched reporting that gives people the information they need to create change. Granted, that kind of virality will never be a profit center. All those video views of Ari’s scoop resulted in just $91.63 in revenue. Last year our videos, a powerful tool to reach new audiences, were watched 54 million times, but made just about $22,000. MoJo is fortunate in that, for us, the most important numbers in that sentence are not the ones with dollar signs attached. They’re the ones about people, many millions of people, who found information they couldn’t get elsewhere, on stories that others weren’t reporting. The hope I have for this post-Trump (but not post-challenge) moment is that you will find our work worth supporting, in moments of batshit crazy and in moments of hope and resolve. Q J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

OUTFRONT

CHILDREN OF POD

MR. TROLL GOES TO WASHINGTON How Congress became a gop hype house BY TIM MURPHY

O U T F R O N T

i’ve seen many things at the Conser-

vative Political Action Conference over the years, including many things I wish I hadn’t. But until Ted Cruz spoke to a ballroom of activists from the main stage in Orlando in February, I had never seen an elected official interrupt his own speech to promote a podcast. “Please go subscribe,” barked the Texas Republican, sounding more like a street performer with a SoundCloud than a second-term senator. “Verdict With Ted Cruz! Verdict With Ted Cruz! Click on ‘subscribe.’ Five stars, please!” One week earlier, Cruz had left his constituents and his poodle behind to wait out his state’s deadly grid failure at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun. It was the sort of PR disaster that would leave many politicians reeling. Cruz tried to monetize the controversy instead, printing a line of Barstool Sports–chic “spring break” tank tops with a caricature of his nascent mullet. He may never lead the Republican Party, but Cruz always knows its temperature, and in the space of a few minutes in Orlando, between jokes about his ill-advised Mexican vacation and plugs for his side project, he managed to distill this conservative moment to its essence. Increasingly, as world-historical crises unfurl all around them—often exacerbated by their own policies and actions—the gop’s most ambitious ofﬁcials view their primary responsibility less as public servants than as content creators, churning out an endless stream of takes, memes, stunts, and podcasts. So many podcasts. The Republican Party has long been infused with an irrepressible hustle, what the historian Rick Perlstein calls “mail-order conservatism.” Talk radio and direct mail were not only eﬀective at peddling reactionary politics to voters; they were also perfect vehicles to sell products, such as gold and homesecurity systems. For decades these conjoined strains of politics, entertainment, and marketing have eroded trust in public institutions and the media and provided a template for self-aggrandizement and enrichment. There is nothing really like this on the left; Infowars and Goop sell the same pills, but Gwyneth Paltrow is not fomenting rebellion. 8

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The way conservatism manifested itself over the airwaves has shaped what rank-and-file conservatives expect to be told and how they expect to feel about it. The late Rush Limbaugh’s listeners called themselves “dittoheads,” eager to nod along with everything. Newt Gingrich used to distribute tapes of himself talking so that candidates could emulate his language. In the 1980s, he weaponized c-span’s new House cameras—where members previously addressed each other, Gingrich and his allies began speaking past them. They turned the Capitol into a studio and made politics into a product. Donald Trump easily won the Republican base because it had been primed for someone who could provide both the programming and the commercial breaks, sometimes all at once; in conservative politics, after all, you’re always being asked to buy something.

Under Trump, Republican politicians threw aside the grind of governance for the performance of posting. But Trump’s presidency blew past the old frontiers: The performance of politics became the purpose of it, and the grind of governance became secondary to the responsibilities of posting. It was as if, after years of awkward but largely profitable power-sharing between conservative politicians and conservative media, the Republican Party at last stumbled upon the ultimate efficiency: What if both roles could be played by the same person? Trump once dreamed of spinning a losing presidential bid into his own media entity. During the pandemic, in lieu of crisis management, he turned briefings into a variety show, assembling a rotating cast of characters, and plugging an array of sponsors—MyPillow, Carnival, Pernod

Ricard. You would not necessarily get good medical advice, but you would learn that Hanes is a “great consumer cotton products company” that’s being recognized more and more. There was no issue grave enough to take seriously and no controversy too petty to weigh in on. Anything could be resolved via tweet, precisely because nothing really can; the ephemerality was the point. And a rising generation of politicians learned an important lesson about what conservative voters wanted. If Limbaugh taught them all how to talk, Trump taught them how to govern. His enduring gift was a caucus of content creators. Just consider the Republican congressional class of 2021—the new arrivals to Washington who modeled themselves most directly after Trump. They seem almost blissfully detached from the work of Congress. There is 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who was elected on the strength of a largely invented personal story amplified with loads of influencer-style Instagram posts. He recently posted a 19-second video of himself punching the bark off a tree. Cawthorn boasted to his colleagues that he had built his staff “around comms rather than legislation.” He was in Washington, in other words, mostly just to post. When Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon representative from Georgia, was stripped of her committee assignments in February by colleagues upset that she had harassed fellow members of Congress and blamed forest fires on the Rothschilds, she greeted the news with relief. “If I was on a committee, I would be wasting my time,” she said. Now she was more free to share videos of her CrossFit workouts with the hashtag #FireFauci. Not that showing up for committee hearings necessarily means you’re there to work. Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who like Cawthorn and Greene spent her first weeks on the job scaring the shit out of her co-workers, recently hijacked a virtual committee hearing by posing like John Wick in front of a shrine of firearms in her living room. (“Who says this is storage?” she responded to critics. “These are ready for use.”) Cawthorn, Greene, and Boebert were

ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. KIKUO JOHNSON

all members of the National Republican Campaign Committee’s “Young Guns” program, which takes its name from an earlier trio of House Republicans—one of whom, Paul Ryan, went on to become a vice presidential nominee and speaker of the House and unite the party behind a vision of budget austerity. There is surely some sort of ideology at work here, too, but it’s more Jake Paul than Paul Ryan; they are treating the Capitol like their own hype house, using the stature of their office for clout. These younger, gunnier guns are taking cues from their elders. Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a content farm of a congressman who has ﬁlmed not one but two Avengers-style videos in which the ex–Navy seal parachutes out of airplanes to ﬁght Democrats, also hosts a podcast. So does Devin Nunes. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has a podcast called Hot Takes. Before he became publicly embroiled in a federal sex-trafficking investigation (“If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing,” Gaetz once said), he was considering retiring to take a job at the conservative cable channel News-

max. In February, more than a dozen House Republicans—including Gaetz and Nunes—skipped work to speak at cpac with Cruz. They took advantage of a covid-era policy that let members vote by proxy in medical emergencies; to them, promoting their brands is the job. After watching Cruz’s speech I took his advice and checked out Verdict, which he co-hosts with Michael Knowles, who rose to prominence after publishing an entirely blank book called Reasons to Vote for Democrats. Cruz recorded the ﬁrst episode at 2:40 a.m. after the opening day of Trump’s Ukraine impeachment trial— hence the name of the show—and returned to the studio every night of the proceedings. Within days of its debut, Verdict had passed Joe Rogan on the iTunes charts. At cpac, Cruz announced it had been downloaded 25 million times. It is almost certainly the most popular thing he has ever done. From the start, there were gestures that this was all “for work”; while Cruz plugs his book with regularity, he does not hawk brain pills or sell ads. In the premiere episode, Cruz solicited listener

questions he could ask during the impeachment. When Knowles asked him why he was doing the show, Cruz replied with two words: “Substance. Matters.” This is true in a technical way: Cruz talks on his show about many of the things he and his Republican colleagues talk about in the Capitol. But that Washington conversation is increasingly just an extension of what they talk about on their podcasts. The biggest crises in America right now, according to Cruz, cpac, and Trump, are the interlocking threats of Big Tech and “cancel culture.” Hearings with tech executives have become a must-watch for conservatives. Cruz advertised his hearing-room clash with Twitter ceo Jack Dorsey last summer with a Christopher Nolan–ish movie trailer and a poster reminiscent of welterweight boxing—“The Free Speech Champion vs. the Czar of Censorship.” There are substantive things to say about corporate power, but this brand of conservative opportunism zips past what’s real to fixate on what isn’t. Twitter moderators, or someone being “canceled,” is not something Congress is really positioned to do much about. They are just creating content about content creation; this is the uroboros of mail-order conservatism. Big Tech and “cancel culture” have emerged as key villains for the new right, not just because of how neatly they fit into long-standing tropes about “cosmopolitan elites,” but because so much of modern conservatism lives online. Offline, there are issues that warrant serious attention from one of the nation’s two governing parties—cities without water, cities soon to be underwater, whole states without power, and a world still suffering from a deadly virus. But with a nudge from Trump, the right has become ever more dissociated from reality, channeling its energy into an endless series of fights over “deplatforming” and who’s triggering whom. During the Obama years, a Breitbart provocateur interrupted a White House press conference to complain about losing his Twitter verification badge. Then, it was a sideshow; now, it’s the whole point. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, recently signed a law J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

O U T F R O N T

prohibiting social media companies from banning public officials. The rise of politics as content creation is hardly the sole domain of the right. After his 2016 presidential campaign ended, Bernie Sanders kept his media imprint running. He organized town halls on Facebook Live and recorded a regular podcast. Sanders, who has made no secret of his distaste for corporate-owned media, hoped to build out his own information stream for his supporters. So did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative whose prolific posting has gotten her in trouble with other members of her caucus. (Her arrival in Washington precipitated a closed-door meeting in which a colleague pleaded, “Everyone stop tweeting!”) The content creators of both the left and the right pose some of the same big-picture challenges—the rise of politicians as independent news sources, of politics as stan culture, and the acceleration of the permanent campaign.

A Pew analysis found that the outgoing 116th Congress was one of the least productive of the last half-century, but the most proliﬁc ever when it came to posting. Members sent 50 percent more tweets than they did two terms ago; they were still talking—just not to each other. The more politicians function as affinity brands peddling a product to be consumed, the more “politics,” the entertainment vehicle, becomes dissociated from politics, the distributor of power. Barack and Michelle Obama run a media company now and each hosts podcasts, too; the ease with which political ﬁgures can rebrand themselves as entertainers speaks to the two spheres’ increasing coziness. This is not what “seizing the means of production” was supposed to mean. But the way this dynamic is unfolding on the left and the right is asymmetrical. Though you would not necessarily know it from listening to Gaetz, Obama is not in office. Sanders and OcasioCortez are not angling for TV gigs; nor

are they reducing the world of lawmaking to the kind of retrograde distractions that get you booked on Tucker. They use their enormous social media platforms for civics lessons, offering behind-thescenes glimpses of the legislative process and the work of movement building, in an effort to get more people invested in both. You can buy the “Tax the Rich” sweatshirt Ocasio-Cortez wears when she holds court on policy and procedure on Instagram Live, but it is not the only thing she is selling. She and Sanders are trying to make the online world more engaged with the real world, rather than the other way around, to advance an ambitious governing program. It is a theory of change, of which clout and performance are merely a means, not the endpoint, of politics. That is the opposite of the reductive nihilism of Cawthorn or Boebert, or the eternal stagecraft of Cruz. In the first few months of the Biden administration, the world of Twitter and real life have become increasingly

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN TAGGART

estranged. In a paradoxical way, the transformation of a major political party into a meme factory has even eased some of Washington’s dysfunction. While Republicans were pitching their podcasts and talking about Dr. Seuss and his imaginary canceling— Cruz began selling copies of Green Eggs and Ham, signed by himself— Democrats pushed through a $1.9 trillion covid relief and stimulus package with little dissent. In March, Trump, banned from Facebook and Twitter, announced that he was considering launching his own social media network. “I’m doing things having to do with putting our own platform out there,” he promised. “You’ll be hearing about [it] soon.” The website he unveiled didn’t amount to much, but that’s what made it so perfectly Trump—there’s not supposed to be a there there. Meanwhile, younger Republicans aiming to take his place continued their auditions. In April, Marco Rubio called on the government to treat companies that pollute “our culture” just as harshly as it treats companies that pollute our water—sort of like an Environmental Protection Agency for tweets. Cruz, himself accused of poisoning the discourse by John Boehner, polled his hive on whether he should shoot the former speaker of the House’s new book with a machine gun. But none of the Republicans vying for Trump’s role have embraced the new posting reality as ﬂuidly as DeSantis. In May, not long after guaranteeing Florida politicians the right to shitpost, DeSantis scored his biggest coup yet: passage of a bill to roll back voting access in the state, fueled by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. When it came time to sign it, local reporters were stopped at the door—only a crew from Fox and Friends got in. DeSantis had turned an attack on fundamental rights into a live television event. Supporters of the ex-president stood behind him, cheering on cue, as the governor bantered with the hosts via satellite. Then he picked up a blue Sharpie, scrawled his name, and held up the embossed legislation for the cameras. Trump may be gone, but the show never ends. Q

GEARED UP

LOS DELIVERISTAS After work conditions deteriorated, New York’s immigrant bicycle couriers united to bring a revolution to the gig economy. on a sunny saturday in March, Gus-

tavo Ajche and Ligia Guallpa welcomed two dozen food delivery couriers to a morning rally in lower Manhattan. As mimosa drinkers ﬁlled SoHo cafes’ outdoor tables, couriers lined up for hot chuchitos, Guatemalan tamales ﬁlled with chicken and beef. Guallpa, head of the immigrantfocused Worker’s Justice Project, and Ajche, a sometime courier himself, had invited the men to learn about Los Deliveristas Unidos, an informal wjp-backed network of mostly Mexican and Guatemalan delivery workers who banded together during the pandemic. Ajche, dousing his snack in

green Picamás hot sauce, pitched them on demanding better working conditions: higher wages, a commitment from restaurants to let working couriers use restrooms, and a state-ﬁnanced insurance fund to replace stolen bikes. Once everyone grabbed chuchitos, Guallpa, petite and peppy, passed out brochures and stickers with the Los Deliveristas Unidos logo—an illustration of a biker in red, with a helmet, face mask, and raised ﬁst. Several couriers immediately stuck them on their bikes. Meal delivery apps were a staple of American eating even before the pandemic. Ajche, a native of Guatemala, has been delivering for DoorDash, J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

O U T F R O N T

Relay, and other third-party app-based restaurant delivery companies since 2018, joining a gig workforce tens of millions strong. When he started, they promised wages up to $25 an hour. But over time, Ajche said he realized that “that’s a lie...sometimes you make 5 or 10 dollars an hour”—“in the summer, there are days that you make $50.” Apps don’t always pass along the full amount customers tip to couriers. Between maintaining his black e-bike—which he bought for $2,000, requires batteries that go for up to $600, and costs $75 to $150 a month to park in designated e-bike lots—and the time rushing between distant clients, he usually ends up with slim profits. Demand for couriers grew during the pandemic, yet their conditions only deteriorated. Lockdowns cut into their hours, leaving many workers struggling to pay bills and feed families. Eighty percent of gig workers surveyed in the summer of 2020 by the University of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center said they weren’t making enough to meet household expenses. A third did not have enough for groceries. Because most app-based food delivery companies classify workers as independent contractors, not employees, the workers lacked critical labor protections and benefits during an unstable time, even struggling to qualify for snap. Benefits applications are ill-suited to gig work, said Joel Berg, the ceo of Hunger Free America. “The social safety net is outdated,” he explained. “It assumes either you’re employed or not.” The effort to improve gig workers’ access to benefits suffered a major blow in November, when Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and DoorDash poured a record-breaking $200 million-plus into a winning California ballot measure exempting the workers from being classified as employees. As companies like Uber and DoorDash back similar efforts in other states, Brian Chen, an attorney at the National Employment Law Project, warns that the thinking behind Prop 22 could expand to other sectors: “It sends a message to corporate America that, if you want to reduce your labor costs, if you want to avoid all these annoyances like paying your workers a fair 12

M O T H E R J O N E S | J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1

living wage and beneﬁts, then just lobby really hard, spend lots of money on political campaigning, and you got it.” when covid shut down New York City

last year, the Worker’s Justice Project set up food distribution sites across the city; every Friday, Ajche helps hand out boxes in a lot outside a food pantry in Bensonhurst, where he lives. The pandemic, Guallpa said, has helped more Americans acknowledge the paradox of “essential” gig workers, who, after delivering food across the city, line up for food themselves. It also changed the way gig workers think. “The food pantries have been an amazing way to organize and bring people together,” Guallpa said. “During a moment of crisis, people realize they need to be a part of something.” In October, wjp organized a protest at City Hall that Guallpa said drew 800 people, mostly couriers, from across all ﬁve boroughs. Their demands included sick leave and hazard pay, guaranteed access to receipts to monitor where tips go, and protection from routine bike theft—by requiring the New York Police Department to fast-track and prioritize reports of stolen e-bikes and establishing an insurance fund, ﬁnanced at the state level in collaboration with gig companies. Since then, New York City Council members have met with Guallpa and other wjp leaders and pledged action. In mid-April, Councilmember Brad Lander, along with several other progressive candidates for New York City offices, rallied outside City Hall to push for legislation that would grant couriers and ride-hail drivers access to sick leave. Later in April, several councilmembers, who had been meeting with wjp in recent months, introduced legislation that would help ensure workers receive all their customers’ tips, require access to restrooms, and boost wages. in february and march, DoorDash

met with wjp to discuss tip transparency and wages, but neither Ajche nor Guallpa emerged with much confidence that the company would increase wages or provide beneﬁts. “We’re just asking for a living wage

Above: Ligia Guallpa and Gustavo Ajche are organizing couriers for better pay and access to restaurant bathrooms. Previous spread and below: Protesters at Los Deliveristas Unidos’ April 21 Manhattan demonstration

and better working conditions. If we’re essential, shouldn’t we have what’s essential to survive?” Ajche asked. In late March, he and other couriers were left reeling after Francisco Villalva Vitinio, a 29-year-old DoorDash worker, was murdered while on break in an East Harlem park. Four weeks later, wjp and Los Deliveristas organized their largest action yet: 3,000 couriers parading with their bikes from Times Square to City Hall. Under heavy skies and occa-

sional spring rains, protesters in Deliveristas T-shirts held signs mimicking the apps’ branding, swapping “Seamless” for “Shameless” or declaring “Without Us, No One Eats!” Others brandished specific demands: “You aren’t just stealing my bike, you’re stealing my ability to work. Create an insurance fund to replace stolen vehicles.” During the protest, Los Deliveristas announced they were partnering with seiu Local 32BJ—one of the largest unions based in New York. As Los Deliveristas rode through the streets, they asserted themselves in a city where they’ve too often been brushed off as a small component of a convenient meal. People leaned out of apartment windows to film, cheer along, or dance to the rally’s marching band. One courier, who preferred to give only his first name, Alejandro, said that in the crowd, for the first time in months, “you feel like people in New York can hear us.” —Karina Piser J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

Julia Gillard & Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Director-General of the World Trade Organization

FEATURING

Jacinda Ardern Hillary Rodham Clinton Christine Lagarde Michelle Bachelet Theresa May

“An indispensable guide to addressing sexism and overcoming inequities.” —Ms. “Much-needed, frank talk from exceptional female leaders.” —Kirkus Reviews “A valuable handbook for putting more women in positions of power.” —Publishers Weekly

Published by the MIT Press

mitpress.mit.edu/womenandleadership

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PRIME HIRES

AMAZON’S ARMY How the company targets Washington when shopping for employees everything about amazon is big—in-

cluding the revolving door between its Seattle headquarters and Washington, DC. Major corporations have always enticed ex-officials to sign on to lobby their former agencies, win and manage government bids, offer strategic or legal advice, or otherwise wield knowledge gleaned while serving the people. No federal agency tracks such career changes, so we used LinkedIn to find almost 250 former Beltway staffers who have decamped for the tech company. “Amazon is so vast—and vaster in its ambitions,” says Jeff Hauser, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Revolving Door Project. “There is almost no department of the US government Amazon is not interested in.” Not only does the $1.6 trillion company have an enormous stake in the decisions of key lawmakers and bureaucrats, but the US government is also a major customer for Amazon’s computing services. “There is nothing more mego—my eyes glaze over—than, say, cloud services,” says Sheila Krumholz, head of the Center for Responsive Politics, a lobbying and campaign finance watchdog. “But this is big, big money, and inside baseball. The government agencies know how important it is. Amazon knows how important it is. Everyday Americans don’t.” —David Corn, Sinduja Rangarajan,

We found some 250 federal officials who went to Amazon over the last decade and a half. Here’s where they used to work:

Congress Capitol Hill hires come from committees overseeing antitrust, homeland security, appropriations, transportation, and infrastructure—and the offices of the lawmakers who run them.

Department of Defense Amazon is ﬁghting in court to contest a $10 billion dod cloud-computing contract.

13 Intelligence Community Amazon Web Services earned at least $600 million developing a cia computing cloud.

Department of Justice Amazon lures job applicants with insight into what regulators think and might do to ﬁght its antitrust footprint.

Department of Homeland Security

and Dan Spinelli

Veterans Affairs

FRANZISKA BARCZYK

18 Social Security Admin

General Services Admin

Federal Trade Comm

nasa

Commerce Dept fcc

Agriculture Dept

Labor Dept 1

1 Consumer Product Safety Comm

US Capitol Police

fbi

White House

Health and Human Services

Treasury Dept

State Department

2 Transportation Dept

J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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TRANSITIONING 2.0 Community support has always helped trans people become themselves. Now, Big Tech thinks it can too. by august, Felicity Giles knew it was

time. Her happiness was long overdue. The 36-year-old trucker changed her name, adopted the middle name Saoirse—“freedom” in Gaelic—and started looking into medically transitioning. “It was mainly an attempt to break from who I was and who I grew up as,” she told me. At the start of 2021, she spent weeks calling Planned Parenthoods in Fort Worth, Texas, where she and her spouse live, seeking a consultation for hormone replacement therapy. But the pandemic, and high demand, meant waiting more than a month to get a consultation, let alone begin hrt. Even when appointments opened up, she said, “I called them every day and never got through.” Scrolling through Twitter one night, Felicity read about Plume, a new subscription telehealth service that makes it easier for trans people to access hormones and lab work or procure doctors’ letters needed for surgeries and name changes. A day after forking over a $99-per-month fee, Felicity was talking to a Plume clinician. After a few questions, they chatted about hrt. Within hours, Plume connected her with a local physician who prescribed her estrogen and dutasteride, a testosterone blocker. Felicity picked up her ﬁrst dose that night. Plume is one of about a dozen telehealth services catering to trans clients that have cropped up in the last two years. It’s a niche market aimed at eliminating barriers that keep trans people from accessing health care. According to a 2015 study, a third of trans people report that health care providers have harassed them or denied treatment on the basis of gender identity. Trans telehealth services believe they can change that—and turn a profit. Unlike federally subsidized brick-andmortar clinics, these digital outﬁts are 16

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backed by venture capital and have been boosted by the pandemic boom in telemedicine. Plume launched in 2019 with $14 million from funders like Craft Ventures, a backer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX; it’s now available in 33 states. Folx picked up $25 million from VC ﬁrms including Bessemer Venture Partners, a backer of Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Yelp—it provides hrt in 19 states and may expand to include sti kits and specialized skinand hair-care products. Promoted as an “Adobe-equivalent” suite of health, ﬁnance, and transition-tracking apps, Euphoria trumpets celebrity funders like

Chelsea Clinton. All crown themselves the “ﬁrst” in trans tech and telehealth. All have trans or gender-nonconforming ceos and numerous trans staﬀ clinicians. Their websites are sleek and studiedly late-millennial in aesthetic, featuring photos and videos of trans influencers against soft pastel backgrounds, sharing stories of body autonomy and trans joy. A.G. Breitenstein, Folx’s ceo, says services like hers allow “our community to access health care privately and not have to walk through the gantlet of what we know will be a trans-focused attack on health care services.” But these services are expensive, and while patients’ insurance may cover the cost of medication, none accept insurance toward subscription fees. Breitenstein argues Folx’s model makes it “more patient-centric,” enabling it to provide supplies and resources that might not be covered by insurance.

MARINA ESMERALDO

AN APP A DAY

“We knew that folks needed care who weren’t getting it, period,” says Plume co-founder Jerrica Kirkley; half of Plume’s clients are uninsured. “And this was a way that [we] could do that in an extremely efficient way, versus training every health care provider...This is a way to push the edge of policy, push the edge of culture.” Not everyone sees the services as revolutionary, citing price tags—Plume’s $99 monthly fee is typical—suggestive of a focus on profiting from those who can shoulder the cost rather than dismantling the conditions that force many trans people to resort to concierge telemedicine in the first place. (That $99 doesn’t include the cost of testosterone or estrogen, which clients must buy from local pharmacies.) Last fall, University of Minnesota PhD student Qui Alexander was approached by Plume to become a “community collaborator.” On the company’s website, they saw the familiar face of a clinician who had once prescribed them testosterone. Alexander, who crowdfunded their top surgery and receives hormone therapy through university insurance, turned down the offer. They questioned whether these services could ever be sufficiently accessible and affordable, particularly to Black and brown trans people. “I wonder what it would look like to have an anticapitalist resource center to help get people basic things that they need to [live] as trans people,” they say. trans activist Dean Spade is the

author of Mutual Aid, a pandemic-era book on community care as a driver of social change. Spade dreams of a model of trans health that “starves all the systems because we’re providing everything for each other,” he says, rather than relying on “medical and legal systems that want to tell us who we are, and how we can become legitimate in their eyes.” Alongside the rise of telehealth, there’s been a renewed wave of support for a model that’s t4t: shorthand from the era of Craigslist personal ads that now connotes care by trans folks for trans folks. Two trans people in love—that’s t4t. Community-funded

mutual aid—needle exchanges, chest binder drives, microgrants—that’s t4t too. One of the largest such projects, the New York–based For the Gworls, has raised over $1 million toward rent and surgeries for Black trans people. Such efforts expand on a history of trans mutual aid dating back at least to star, the 1970s safe house for trans women set up by activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Trans health care has always been a “patchwork system,” says Erikx DiSantis, a 34-year-old transmasculine nonbinary film producer in Los Angeles. “This is really leaning into the long history of trans health care, which has primarily existed outside of federal- or state-sanctioned medical care,” they say. “You think back to trans folks getting hormones from friends, or on the street, or through veterinary means.” Or through underground clinics. In the early 2000s, two trans women—a doctor and an engineer—repurposed a tractor shed outside Olympia, Washington, into an orchiectomy clinic. Inspired by Jane, a pre-Roe collective of abortion providers, they charged about $500, enough to cover rent—and a fifth of the typical cost to safely remove trans women’s testes. Today, crowdfunding for surgeries, hormones, and living costs is ubiquitous, and Reddit, Instagram, and even TikTok posts offer de facto guidebooks to finding genderaffirming surgeons. For Felicity, whose insurance covers her hrt, Plume was well worth the $99 a month. Two months after she began hrt, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered her to submit a new medical certificate proving estrogen wouldn’t affect her competence as a recreational pilot. (“To put this really bluntly,” Felicity says the faa essentially asked, “‘Are you insane?’”) She reached out to Plume, and her doctor quickly wrote an explanatory letter. Within two weeks, her certificate was updated and she was back in the air. Nix Searcy, a 32-year-old data scientist, believes trans telehealth—done right—has “potential to be revolutionary” for hrt access. She thinks of Free the Pill, a nonprofit project advocating over-the-counter birth con-

trol, or Nurx, a sexual telehealth firm that accepts insurance, as road maps for transforming trans health. Everywhere they’ve lived, Searcy has faced difficulty getting estrogen. Sometimes she went to Planned Parenthood; other times, the cheapest, most reliable route was the black market. For people taking hrt, irregular access to hormones can lead to larger health issues. But while she appreciates their potential, Searcy can’t help feeling that the services cash in on a vulnerable demographic. “If I’m trying to make a buck off of my trans friends,” they say, “I don’t think that’s t4t.” Chris Barcelos—a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston—characterizes concierge telemedicine as a form of “complicit care.” The firms provide “a needed service that is responding to really significant inequalities,” Barcelos says, but if they’re “not also dismantling the violence and inequality that trans people experience in the world and in health care more generally, then that’s ensuring a need for them.” Apps tracking transition metrics, they explained, implicitly cast it as a linear process of assimilation—into a white, cisgender, heterosexual society. Breitenstein acknowledges that not everyone can afford a Folx subscription—$59 to $139 monthly, depending on the stage of hrt—but says growth will help reduce costs: “The bigger we get, the more commercial power we have, and then we can demand lower prices.” Through donations, the company subsidizes some trans folks. So does Plume, which is partnering with For the Gworls, the mutual aid collective, to raise money for a similar program. It plans to fund 1 to 2 percent of applicants. To endure, trans telehealth will have to make money. Mutual aid seldom does. When trans folks share extra hormones, care for one another after surgeries, or celebrate each other in our moments of gender euphoria, it’s a reminder that trans care has always come first and foremost from the community—for free. “Venture capital,” as Barcelos says, “is not part of our collective liberation.” —Lil Kalish J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

CAUTION TO THE

Desperate to reopen and loaded with stimulus cash, schools are spending millions on high-tech air purifiers. But are they safe?

By Madison Pauly Photoillustrations by Darren Braun

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randon Armbruster just wanted to keep his students safe. The chief operating officer of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, Armbruster spent the spring and summer of 2020 diligently preparing for students to return—designing outdoor classrooms, setting up testing routines, and debating whether to cancel sports. A private school with nearly 1,000 K–12 students on two campuses, St. Andrew’s had its own advisory committee of doctors and scientists to guide decisions about covid. And as they learned more about how the coronavirus could hang suspended in aerosols for hours, the committee urged Armbruster to turn his attention to ventilation and ways to maximize the amount of fresh air St. Andrew’s could pump into its classrooms. So when a contractor the school had worked with before suggested installing high-tech devices in air ducts to scrub out the coronavirus, Armbruster was intrigued. The devices used a technique called bipolar ionization, shooting tiny, electrically charged ions into the air, where they would interact with and neutralize airborne contaminants like viruses. Or, at least, that’s the theory. According to the manufacturer, Plasma Air, the Spanish Ministry of Defense had backed research that proved its purifier could reduce 99 percent of a coronavirus surrogate from the air in a Madrid hotel room within 10 minutes. All St. Andrew’s would need to do was attach Plasma Air’s small cartridges into its air ducts, hook them up to some electricity, and let the ionization process begin. Armbruster, a 45-year-old business and finance guy, liked how the ionizers sounded more “proactive” than filters, which trap tiny contaminants as they float through air ducts or are sucked into the kind of free-standing air purifier you can buy at Home Depot. The contractor assured him that other Texas schools had already gone ahead with the technology. But Armbruster wasn’t convinced. For one thing, he couldn’t find much data on bipolar ionization that didn’t come directly from the companies peddling the products. And a video on the Plasma Air website raised red flags. In a science fair–style experiment captured on camera, two slices of bread were placed side by side in transparent boxes— one with a Plasma Air ionizer running, 20

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and one without. Over six days, mold blossomed across the bread in the non-ionized box; the other slice appeared fresh. “Yeah, it works great inside a small box,” Armbruster remembers thinking. “But what’s it going to do for a big classroom?” To find out, he got in touch with Atila Novoselac and Pawel Misztal, two engineering professors and indoor air experts at the University of Texas, Austin. He asked if they would run tests on a couple of these ionizers before the school forked over more than $100,000. “Well, why not?” Novoselac recalls answering. They didn’t have access to a biosafety lab where they could test the ionizers against actual coronavirus. But they could measure whether the machines removed particles or broke down volatile organic compounds released in the air by household cleaning products, which would give them an idea of whether they worked as advertised. “We were quite excited initially,” Misztal says, “because we thought, ‘Wow, if this is really true, with those bold claims that the company was making, that should really help schools.’” Yet when they turned on the ionizers in their own stainless steel chamber, the two engineers couldn’t detect any meaningful change in air quality. At first they thought the devices must not be working. After consulting the manual and running the tests again, they got the same results. Both researchers cautioned that their experiments were informal and confined to the two specific devices they tested. But the conclusions were unambiguous: “Install-

ing this unit in a classroom’s hvac was as good as putting a brick in a duct,” Novoselac wrote in an email to another researcher. armbruster passed on Plasma Air, instead

opting to overhaul St. Andrew’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems and add higher-efficiency filters. But Plasma Air’s slice of the air purifier industry is doing just fine without him. Since the onset of the pandemic, companies hawking indoor air cleaners have benefited from people’s fears over the air in their businesses, schools, and workplaces; an enormous amount of government and corporate money being spent to ensure those places can be reopened safely; and an almost entirely unregulated landscape in which to sell fancy-sounding but largely unproven technology. The new universe of air scrubbers goes by a lot of names—bipolar ionization, photocatalytic oxidation, “organic air”— but some experts refer to them as “additive” purifiers. They all share the same underlying principle: Rather than simply subtracting matter from the air using a filter, they add molecules to create chemical reactions that, at least in theory, eliminate airborne contaminants. Those molecules supposedly float out into a room and destroy viruses, break down harmful gases, or make particles stick together, causing them to get trapped in filters or settle on surfaces, where they can’t be inhaled. Some manufacturers emphasize that their process mimics the atmospheric activity found near crashing waves, mountaintops, and waterfalls. The reality is far less rosy. In interviews with Mother Jones, nearly a dozen chemists, engineers, and indoor air-quality experts laid out a range of possible dangers. First there’s the matter of the molecules that additive purifiers release into air, which can include ozone or free radicals. Ozone, a highly reactive form of oxygen, has long been known to damage lungs and worsen chronic respiratory diseases. While some purifiers are certified to produce undetectable levels of ozone, others produce much more. And little oversight exists to keep levels in check. Free radicals, meanwhile, have an odd number of electrons, which makes them unstable and greedy. When they meet other molecules, they grab their electrons, transforming into something new. While purifiers rely on those

transformations to destroy unwanted gases, some research suggests free radicals may damage lung tissue when inhaled. Experts also worry the machines run the risk of creating harmful byproducts like formaldehyde, a probable carcinogen at high concentrations. A federal class-action lawsuit filed in May against one of Plasma Air’s competitors alleges that bipolar ionizers “make the air worse for people” by causing toxic chemicals to form. In two recent studies conducted in China, researchers found that ionizing air purifiers tested in schools reduced particulate matter but also appeared to cause health problems. “Indoor air is a complex chemical soup,” explains Jeff Siegel, a University of Toronto civil engineering professor who has spent decades researching air cleaners. “If you’re operating one of these devices, the most charitable thing I can say is you are doing an uncontrolled experiment on the air in your building,” Siegel says. “In some environments, this could be really hazardous.” In response to questions about scientists’ critiques, Plasma Air and another purifier company, Global Plasma Solutions (gps), pointed to industry certifications saying their products emit negligible or no ozone. They also note test results from commercial labs that concluded their machines do not form chemical byproducts. (Four other companies did not respond to requests for comment or declined to answer questions about the scientists’ concerns.) gps has filed defamation lawsuits against two of its critics, indoor air engineering consultants who said the company’s purifiers are unproven and potentially harmful, and that its product testing was faulty. Manufacturers often pay commercial labs to test their products, resulting in impressive-sounding claims like a 99 percent reduction in airborne coronavirus. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed research does not show additive air purifiers consistently working under real-world conditions without forming potentially harmful byproducts, according to six academic experts I spoke with and a review of scientific articles provided by manufacturers. And recent research indicates that some machines on the market may be far less effective than manufacturers claim. Scientists have only begun to study the chemical mechanisms by which the purifiers actually work indoors, says Timothy Bertram, a University of Wis-

consin chemist leading a study of bipolar ionizers. Without that understanding, it’s hard to evaluate what, if anything, additive puriﬁers do when they’re installed inside an air vent or plugged in at the back of a classroom. So far, Bertram’s study has found no evidence of the ionizers reducing aerosols.

And so, across the country, school districts drawn in by promising-sounding manufacturer data and slick marketing are now spending anywhere from several thousand dollars to a few million to install additive air puriﬁers. gps says its devices are employed by 1,300 K–12 schools and

“Installing this unit in a classroom’s hvac was as good as putting a brick in a duct.”

“The theory behind these devices is interesting,” says Delphine Farmer, an atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University. “It’s just it hasn’t been demonstrated to work in real-world environments.” At best, some experts say, additive purifiers are unnecessary, especially considering the range of proven alternatives like filters and increasing the flow of air coming in from outside. At worst, buyers hoping to fight covid could be lulled into a false sense of security while adding harmful chemicals to the air. Yet over the last year, additive air cleaners have been installed in prisons, cruise ships, and meatpacking plants—all places where the coronavirus is known to spread rapidly. They are particularly attractive to schools, where administrators are under enormous pressure to resume in-person learning by the next school year. Those schools are also loaded with pandemic stimulus cash—$13 billion from 2020’s cares Act, and an additional $130 billion in President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The familiar faces delivering the sell don’t hurt: Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, was peddling an additive air cleaner to his state legislature last fall. Former cdc Director Robert Redfield recently joined manufacturer Big Ass Fans, which is selling fans with an additive purifier on the tip of each blade. In March, ActivePure, a Texas-based additive purifier company with a multilevel marketing arm, announced it was hiring a new chief medical and science adviser: Dr. Deborah Birx, Donald Trump’s former coronavirus response coordinator.

on 400 US college campuses. Both Plasma Air and ActivePure say hundreds of schools use their devices. According to a tally maintained by Marwa Zaatari, an indoor air engineering consultant, public and private schools in at least 41 states have installed air cleaners she’s concerned about. Marietta, Georgia, put ionizers on school buses. The school district in Sacramento, California, spent more than $6 million last year to purchase and install additive purifiers. “When the cares Act dollars came through in late August, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to pursue ionization,” Greg Cole, a top administrator for Anoka-Hennepin Schools, one of Minnesota’s largest districts, says in a video posted to the district’s YouTube channel. The district spent more than $1.4 million on additive purifiers. In January, the epidemic task force at ashrae, the professional organization that sets standards for hvac, issued a recommendation that buildings should “only use air cleaners for which evidence of effectiveness and safety is clear.” The cdc urges consumers to “do their homework” on bipolar ionization: “In the absence of an established body of evidence reflecting proven efficacy under as-used conditions, the technology is still considered by many to be an ‘emerging technology.’” But for many schools, installing hightech air cleaners to fight an airborne virus still seems like the aggressive countermeasures that parents and staff clamor for. Richard Corsi, dean of the engineering and computer science college at Portland State J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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University and an advocate for better-ventilated schools, says he’s ﬁelded many queries from districts about bipolar ionizers and similar puriﬁers. “I just keep telling school district officials, ‘Stick to proven technologies,’” Corsi says. “‘Why would you want to risk this?’” additive air purifiers have been trendy

before. In the early 2000s, the Sharper Image—the mall-based purveyor of shiny gadgets—relied on its Ionic Breeze purifier for more than a third of its sales. The device was supposed to generate ions that made contaminants stick to oppositely charged collection plates inside the device. No fan, no noise, just cleaner air. Then Consumer Reports published a series of articles beginning in 2002 finding that Ionic Breeze produced “almost no measurable reduction in airborne particles” but released potentially dangerous levels of ozone as an unintentional byproduct. The findings spelled disaster for the Sharper Image. Ozone in the upper atmosphere shields humans from ultraviolet rays, but it’s toxic when inhaled, damaging lung tissue and aggravating asthma. The Sharper Image sued Consumer Reports for product disparagement and lost. Then the class actions started. Multiple lawsuits, from Ionic Breeze owners in California, Florida, and Maryland, claimed that the purifiers failed to work as advertised and exposed them to dangerous ozone levels. After years of litigation, the company was ready to settle, proposing $19 coupons for anyone who owned an Ionic Breeze. But when the judge rejected the offer, the Sharper Image’s stock plummeted. Bankruptcy followed, and the company cited the lawsuits as a cause. The plaintiffs were allotted only a small settlement, but the controversy may have helped pass the country’s first and only prohibition on additive air purifiers: In 2008, California’s Air Resources Board banned air cleaners that emit more than a moderate amount of ozone. As public knowledge about the dangers of indoor ozone grew, engineers set about redesigning ionizers, trying to avoid releasing significant levels of the gas. Today, manufacturers like Plasma Air and gps boast that their devices produce tiny levels of ozone, if any at all. Still, small increases in ozone concentrations are associated with increased risk of death from respi22

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ratory causes, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which compared 23 years of ozone data in 96 US cities with health outcomes for more than 400,000 patients. Purifiers never went away—ask anyone who’s lived through the California wildfires—but the past year has brought them back into the national spotlight. In a video posted to ActivePure’s website, Birx explained her decision to join the company as a part-time consultant: “When I was traveling the country, I was able to talk to people and understand what their needs really were, how people really want to feel safe again indoors,” she said. “I was really looking for technology that was scienceand data-driven, really working to address that specific issue, to make indoor spaces safe for individuals. ActivePure is one of

those companies that has, really, that type of technology.” In a press release, ceo Joe Urso said Birx’s presence would help bring ActivePure devices to “all indoor spaces.” Of course, Birx isn’t exactly regarded as a stalwart defender of science. As Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, she became best known for sitting by uncomfortably as her boss wondered aloud about injecting bleach to treat covid. Since Biden took office, Birx has been doing a series of TV hits to explain what happened, recounting how Trump chewed her out for issuing a dire warning about the coronavirus. So working for a company that is also in need of image rehabilitation is an interesting choice. ActivePure is descended from Alpine Air Products, Inc., a multilevel marketing company founded in 1986 to sell free-standing air puriﬁers that

CLEARING THE AIR the easiest way to increase the ﬂow of clean air at home is to open a window. But that’s not always possible during extreme weather or when outdoor pollution is high. If you’re considering air puriﬁers, here are the key things you should keep in mind:

go simple: High-efficiency particulate air (hepa) filters are a rock-solid way to remove nasty particles, including the coronavirus. Just remember, hepa filters need to be cleaned and replaced periodically. For contaminants like those produced by gas stoves and cleaning products, you’ll need an activated carbon or other absorbent filter.

read the label: Many devices list clean air delivery rates (cadr)—a measurement of the purifier’s ability to remove particles from air—in their product information. Typically, those rates are even broken down by particle type: smoke, dust, and pollen. If you’re choosing a purifier for a specific room, look for ratings greater than or equal to two-thirds of the room’s square footage. If you’re battling wildfire smoke, go stronger.

ionizing is iffy: Ionizers are supposed to break down unwanted chemicals. But the cdc says these and other additive purifiers are an “emerging technology” that lacks “an established body of peer-reviewed evidence showing proven efficacy and safety under as-used conditions.” If you’re set on buying one, the epa recommends one that meets UL 2998 standard certification, indicating it produces zero or undetectable levels of ozone. If you already own an ionizing purifier without this certification, you might consider turning off that function.

look to the pros: ashrae, the professional association for heating and ventilation, urges people only to use air cleaners “for which evidence of effectiveness and safety is clear.” But that can be hard for a layperson to determine. For in-depth advice, check the epa’s “Guide to Air Cleaners in the Home,” which offers nitty-gritty tips for consumers.

intentionally generated ozone to clean the air. In 1990, the state of Minnesota, where Alpine was based, filed a consumer fraud and antitrust lawsuit against the company, alleging it hadn’t warned buyers that the amount of ozone emitted could be harmful. A trial court agreed, and Alpine had to pay consumers damages and restitution. The company survived, and in 1994 it made $7 million in sales. But its legal problems didn’t go away. In 1995, the Federal Trade Commission told Alpine to stop making “unsubstantiated” claims about its purifiers’ ability to remove pollutants and prevent or relieve allergies, asthma, and colds. About three years later, after the company didn’t heed its warning, the ftc filed suit. A jury found Alpine lacked “competent and reliable scientific evidence” to back up many claims about its product’s effectiveness. Then, in 2000, at the height of the company’s troubles, Mike Jackson, Alpine’s vice president of marketing—the very division responsible for its bogus claims—formed a new corporation: EcoQuest International. EcoQuest promptly acquired the marketing rights to sell Alpine products, along with its entire network marketing operation. With the bombastic Jackson as president, EcoQuest grew from a small multilevel marketing firm to a powerhouse. In radio ads, Pat Boone sang the praises of its purifiers, which the company claimed produced less ozone than older versions. Thousands of dealers flocked to the EcoQuest Success Institute in Greeneville, Tennessee, for sales training programs steeped in religious language. Many of its most successful salespeople were “pastors and priests and preachers and evangelists,” Jackson told a Knoxville News Sentinel reporter. (In this sense, Birx, an evangelical, fits right in.) “I don’t believe that the non-Christian crowd should control all the money and should control all the airways and control the radio waves and control all the newspapers,” Jackson said. (When California debated its air purifier regulation, an EcoQuest dealer wept during a public hearing as she described how the company’s product had improved her mother’s breathing. “God gave humans these air purifiers, and you should not take away that gift,” she pleaded.) By 2004, EcoQuest’s cumulative air purifier sales had reportedly reached $1 billion. That summer, the company acquired a di-

vision of another firm that had a pending patent on a related process called photocatalytic oxidation, which involves shining ultraviolet light onto a surface coated with a catalyst. When working as intended, that interaction creates charged clusters of oxygen and hydrogen in the air, as well as free radicals, that break down unwanted gases into water and carbon dioxide. The way the company tells the story, the technique drew on nasa research looking for ways to reduce the buildup of ethylene gas around plants inside a spacecraft’s sealed environment. EcoQuest dubbed the technology ActivePure and got to work selling it. At least some of the new purifiers still released ozone. But Jackson assured the Knoxville News Sentinel that Alpine’s legal troubles were a thing of the past: “All that stuff was the maturing, the growing of Mike Jackson as a businessman,” he said. “I learned that you don’t make claims unless you have scientific substantiation...It probably was one of the best schools I could have gone to in learning what not to do with my company.” But in 2009, when sales plummeted amid the recession, EcoQuest went bankrupt. Jackson sold off EcoQuest to Urso, ceo of a family of companies with names like Allergy Buyers Club—and descended from Electrolux, the door-to-door sales heavyweight—that used direct sales to hawk anti-allergy bedding, aromatherapy oils, and vacuum cleaners. (According to a press release, the company signed a deal in 2018 to manufacture purifiers under the brand name the Sharper Image, though Urso says this has not happened.) Today, ActivePure is the name of Urso’s flagship company and his signature product, sold both as an hvac add-on and in free-standing air purifiers. In an email, Urso told me that their technology, improved since the EcoQuest days, complies with all federal standards “with respect to efficacy and safety” and reduces net ozone. “Our goal at ActivePure Technologies has been and is simple: finding the best path to clean and safe indoor air,” he wrote. One ActivePure product, the Medical Guardian, which uses a hepa filter and ionizer with photocatalytic oxidation, has been certified by the fda as a medical device to remove certain viruses, bacteria, and fungal spores from the air in hospitals and doctors’ offices—indicating it doesn’t produce high ozone levels. A “hand-

ful” of the company’s products, Urso added, produce ozone intentionally. Jackson, for his part, is now a leader in ActivePure’s multilevel marketing arm, which is still going strong. In a June 2020 recruitment webinar titled “How You Earn $100,000 Killing Viruses, Mold, and Mildew!” Jackson suggested that sellers can pay off their mortgage after six months of hawking air purifiers. (Urso says Jackson is an independent distributor whose views do not represent the company.) Urso’s companies make the jaw-dropping claim that their technology can kill more than 99 percent of airborne coronavirus in three minutes. The powerful oxidants produced by the purifiers “seek and destroy dna and rna viruses,” according to some of the company’s marketing language. Sales have quadrupled over the last year, a press release boasts; in one promotional video, Jackson claims they “sold out” 25,000 systems in a single week in 2020. The ActivePure website now lists 39 schools and child care centers it says use its purifiers; “hundreds more,” it claims, “trust” its technology. “We developed technology, called ActivePure, that destroys the covid virus in the air and have deployed it for decades,” Urso wrote in an open letter to Biden on his company’s website. “I urge you and the nation’s governors and mayors to encourage—or, where you can, require—the use of the best technology now. It is the missing link. Bringing America back depends on it.” peg pavelec first heard of ActivePure

from a friend’s sister, a direct salesperson for its multilevel marketing arm. Pavelec, the owner of Little Inspirations preschool and day care in Hyde Park, Chicago, hadn’t much obsessed over ventilation during the city’s hot summer last year, when the roughly 85 kids her staﬀ looked after spent a lot of time in the neighborhood’s green spaces. “Our program is very nature-based,” she says. “We try to get outdoors as much as possible.” But when the winter came and covid cases surged, she started to focus more on indoor air quality. When her friend’s sister reached out in late 2020, Pavelec was eager to learn more. The woman, she recalls, talked a lot about the science behind the device. “Some of it was all gibberish, because it’s very technical,” she says. “But as the conversation continued, it became J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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much more layperson friendly. There’s little animated videos, sharing how the units work, and what they do, and how they kill 99 percent of the viruses out there.” Pavelec loved what she heard—including the part about how ActivePure was considered a “Certified Space Technology.” Because the company’s photocatalytic oxidation technique draws on science developed by nasa, the company can pay a licensing fee to the Space Foundation, a nonprofit that is not run by nasa, to put the foundation’s stamp of approval on its ActivePure products. Other certified technologies include a line of South Korean skin care and the KegSheet, a $14 beer keg insulator. “It’s like rocket fuel for your brand!” reads a banner across the Space Foundation webpage. “Wow, this is nasa,” Pavelec remembers thinking about ActivePure. “If it really works the way they say it works, that could be life-changing.” But Pavelec paused at the cost: up to $10,000 to outfit both her child care locations. Before she pulled the trigger, she emailed Brent Stephens, the father of two children in her program and an indoor air expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “I would not jump on this,” Stephens wrote back to her. He was especially worried about the potential for the purifiers to generate free radicals, which could be expected to react with all sorts of chemical compounds in the air and turn them into other molecules. A 2018 Environmental Protection Agency report supports the idea that these types of devices could generate formaldehyde, as well as nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, because of the free radicals it creates. The epa concludes: “The effectiveness of [photocatalytic oxidation] air cleaners sold for use in homes remains largely undocumented.” “The new daughter molecules that are produced can be even more toxic than the original parent,” Stephens explained to Pavelec. The kids could end up breathing higher levels of formaldehyde. At the request of Mother Jones, Stephens analyzed the data that is the basis for ActivePure’s claim to reduce 99 percent of aerosolized coronavirus. The stand-alone purifier used in the experiment is advertised for rooms between 500 and 3,000 square feet, yet it was tested in a box the size of an oven. “Crazy outsized device in a tiny chamber,” Stephens concluded. “Standard trick.” Bud Offermann, another 24

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indoor air engineering consultant I asked to review the data, agreed. At best, he said, the study showed “proof of concept.” (According to Urso, ActivePure does not produce volatile organic compounds. He “does not agree that a small chamber invalidates the basic conclusion that the technology deactivates” the coronavirus.) “These are concerning,” says Farmer, the Colorado State University atmospheric chemist, who also reviewed ActivePure’s test data. “I would leave a room quickly and would dissuade anyone with asthma or other cardiorespiratory conditions from getting near until they went through more tests for byproducts.” Farmer also warned another school administrator, Chris Wilderman, about a different type of additive purifier: bipolar ionizers. Wilderman, the director of maintenance and operations for one of Colorado’s largest districts, was helping to decide how to spend millions in cares Act funding. Last summer, he installed bipolar ionizers from Global Plasma Solutions in two schools that couldn’t bring enough outside air into classrooms. He was considering putting gps units in more buildings when he heard Farmer talking about indoor air quality on npr. Farmer, at the time, was working with other scientists on what they believe is the first peer-reviewed study assessing whether bipolar ionization reduces particulates or forms byproducts in a real-life setting—examining, coincidentally, gps devices. Though the study, published in March, did not look at the effect of ionizers on viruses, it found that the machines did little to reduce particulate matter in both a test chamber and an occupied office building. And while the purifier appeared to break down some concerning gases, it seemed to produce small increases in others, like acetaldehyde and toluene, which the epa classifies as hazardous. (One bright spot: the researchers concluded the system was not producing ozone.) gps says it disagrees with the study’s results, arguing the authors did not design their experiment properly. “gps and its leadership doesn’t just appreciate, but enthusiastically encourages the testing” of its technology, the company said in a statement. It also stressed that those studies need to be “accurately replicating real-world applications of the products.” But it’s not just Farmer raising alarms about gps.

In May, the company was hit with a classaction lawsuit alleging gps deceives consumers by falsely claiming its technology is independently tested and that it “preys on people desperate to cleanse the air and protect themselves.” The complaint continues: “Defendant’s ‘profits over people’ scheme won the company acclaim, publicity, and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.” gps told me it intends “to aggressively defend our technology and claims.” Wilderman says Farmer’s advice was “don’t get fancy.” He decided to put air purifiers with hepa filters in every classroom in the district. “sars-CoV-2 is transmitted through exhaled aerosols,” Farmer explains. “One way to really reduce that risk is to remove as many particles as you can from

as scientists have started to raise

the air. That’s what having a hepa filter is designed for.” For Wilderman, outfitting a single high school with 143 free-standing hepa purifiers cost $26,884. Putting in gps ionizers in that same school would have run about $350,000. (gps points out that its ionizers don’t require replacement filters.) Pavelec, in Chicago, wavered after her friend’s sister sent her a trial ActivePure device, but she ultimately said no to the purifiers. Still, not every school has a Stephens or Farmer to consult with. In northern Virginia, Rappahannock County is home to two public schools, about 800 students, and zero stoplights. Robin Bolt wears a lot of hats for the school district, overseeing technology, facilities, and equity. Last year, when Bolt requested bids to install “air

scrubbers,” ActivePure came back as the cheapest option. To Bolt, the manufacturer data was promising, and online reviews sounded good. For just over $126,000, the district installed one model in the ducts and put free-standing versions in its offices. Since then, Bolt has heard from a school nurse that sicknesses have gone down; the air inside, to her, smells fresher. But she’s unsurprised to hear that there’s little peer-reviewed science backing up her district’s new puriﬁers. “We’re ﬂying by the seat of our pants,” she says. “We’re trying to do what is best for our students. That’s always the endgame.” “The specs looked very good,” she added. “And then that nasa seal sort of makes you feel a lot better about it.”

alarms, some institutions have reversed course on additive air purifiers. In February, the Sacramento school district pulled photocatalytic oxidation machines from school buildings after a Sacramento Bee investigation led to outcry from the teachers union. Public schools in Montclair, New Jersey, turned off their gps ionizers after parent objections. And last summer, when a Phoenix megachurch hosting a Trump rally announced it had installed purifiers that could supposedly kill “99 percent of covid within 10 minutes,” backlash from experts led the state attorney general to issue warning letters to both the church and the company, Clean Air exp. Each rolled back its claims. (Clean Air exp rebranded four months later. It now sells under the name PuriFi Labs.) Yet no US governmental body has attempted to regulate the indoor air cleaner industry systematically. Products that can’t pass California’s ozone test are sold freely in other states; one ActivePure website, for example, serves different homepages to customers outside the state. The ftc has sent warning letters to a handful of air purifier companies making covid-related claims but has not publicly announced any follow-up action, according to a spokesperson. And while the fda regulates medical devices, it’s up to companies to decide whether to seek that certification. In an email to Mother Jones, an epa spokesperson said it keeps an eye on false and misleading claims from air purifier manufacturers but that companies aren’t required to submit safety or efficacy data to the agency. “epa is concerned about the potential for schools to be victimized,” the spokesperson said. But enforcement, for now, is case by case. “These products just fall in that gray zone where no government authority is really ready to provide oversight or regulation for them,” Farmer says. “It’s probably not going to happen until someone gets really badly hurt.” All the scientists I spoke with say that the goal should be more peer-reviewed research on what exactly additive cleaners are doing. In the meantime, indoor air-quality experts are urging schools to follow the precautionary principle: “If you don’t understand it, do not use it,” Zaatari says. She’s working on an (continued on page 62) J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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The app makes millions funneling inexperienced investors to Wall Street traders. Did Alex Kearns pay with his life? BY HANNAH LEVINTOVA · ILLUSTRATIONS BY GUILLEM CASASÚS

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Alex Kearns started trading stocks on an app called Robinhood in 2018, two years before he threw himself in front of a moving train. The University of Nebraska sophomore and rotc cadet was the only person in his family who used the app, but he had talked with his father, Dan, about it, who figured it seemed harmless enough. Alex was studying management and had gotten curious about investing as he learned more about financial markets. He’d even started chatting on the phone with a cousin, Bill Brewster, a professional investor and portfolio manager, about economics and central banking. But unbeknownst to anyone who knew him, Alex had begun trading high-risk financial instruments called options. He was at his family’s Naperville, Illinois, home when, a little before midnight, on June 11 of last year, he got a startling notification indicating he had lost $730,000. He had only about $16,000 in his account. The alert sent Alex into a panic. Robinhood did not provide any obvious live customer service phone number. So he fired off three increasingly desperate emails to the company. Was it possible they’d made a mistake? He’d thought the losses on this trade were capped at $10,000. Could they please check? According to a lawsuit later filed by his family, the company sent back only unhelpful programmatic replies. One came in a little after 3 a.m., warning Alex he had just six days to deposit $178,612.73 to begin settling the trade. Alex sent his last note after 7:30 a.m., less than two hours before the markets were set to open on Friday morning—and a time when most professional brokers are already at work and answering calls. He waited. The opening bell rang on 28

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Wall Street at 9:30, ushering in the trading day. Robinhood still had not sent anything to clear up the confusion. So Alex typed out a short note on his computer, saved a screenshot of his Robinhood balance, and got on his bike. He rode through his hometown, a leafy Chicago suburb where he’d been marooned after campus shut for the pandemic, eventually stopping at a secluded railroad crossing. Amid grassy sprawl and tidy houses, he ran onto the tracks. He was 20 years old. His parents found his suicide note: “If you’re reading this then I am dead. See the image ‘Suicide 2’ for why.” He explained he never intended to take this much risk. He’d been looking forward to his future, he wrote, and he could not imagine the pain he’d caused his family. “Please understand that this decision was not made lightly. You could fill an ocean with the amount of tears I’ve shed typing this. Please, please take care of yourselves. The amount of my guilt I feel as I commit to this is unbearable—I did not want to die.” That night, Bill was sitting around a campfire on vacation when Alex’s parents called and relayed fragments of what had happened. “He died thinking that he was saving his family from financial ruin,” Brewster says. “But that’s not even the beginning of the story.” While Robinhood declined to comment on Alex’s death for this article, in the year since his suicide, the company has framed what happened as a horrific accident and issued public commitments to improve its interface, user education, and customer service. Over the same period, the com-

pany has been subject to unprecedented scrutiny, first as it attracted millions of new investors bored at home during the pandemic, and then again after a horde of traders, many of them using the app, drove the share price of GameStop, a brick-andmortar video game store, up by more than 1,700 percent this past January. In response, Robinhood froze new purchases of the stock, giving hedge funds who’d bet on its decline valuable time to recover. Though Robinhood argued it was forced to do so by demands from its clearinghouse, the explanation did little to mollify the app’s users, some of whom sued claiming the company had sided with its own allies and wealthy investors at their expense. The GameStop episode blanketed the press this past winter, prompting two federal agencies and a congressional committee to launch probes into Robinhood’s freeze. Meanwhile, Alex’s family quietly filed their wrongful death case against the company. In some ways, these were all complementary inquiries into who the app really serves. Founded by two children of immigrants, Robinhood climbed from startup to multibillion-dollar enterprise on the back of a promise to upend the financial sector’s fraternity of suits and, like the app’s namesake, share the spoils with the people. But that’s not exactly how things played out. Robinhood may allow users to trade commission-free—but, as many of them have discovered, those trades still come at a cost. baiju bhatt and Vlad Tenev came up

with the idea for Robinhood in 2012, after witnessing Occupy Wall Street. The pro-

tests, they’ve said, represented a boiling over of grievances among their generation, directed at the big banks that set off the 2008 financial crisis. Bhatt and Tenev, then in their mid-20s and friends going back to meeting as Stanford physics majors, wanted to build something that might give their fellow millennials access to the wealth-growing power of the market. At the time brokerages charged $7 to $10 per trade. They would do them for free. While the app was in development, Robinhood built up its antiestablishment identity and courted millennials with teaser videos that razzed traders on the stock exchange floor, and with a lineup of celebrity investors—eventually, everyone from Ashton Kutcher to Jay-Z—who were cultural touchstones to their target audience. Online, Robinhood created a minimalist launch page where interested people could drop their email addresses for advance access to the app—and gamified it by allowing people to move up the line by referring friends. When Robinhood hit the Apple app store in 2014, the waitlist was nearly 1 million people long. As the app onboarded hundreds of thousands of new users in its first months, Bhatt and Tenev told their story—and faced an obvious question: If everyone else is charging per trade, how does Robinhood make money doing it for nothing? At a 2014 San Francisco startup conference, Tenev sidestepped the question, explaining that other brokerages that charged their users per-trade commissions were doing it not to cover trading costs— which were virtually free now that trades were electronic—but to fund the costs of bringing in more customers. Robinhood didn’t need to charge commissions because they didn’t need marketing—they’d built a “simple,” “beautiful” product that people couldn’t get enough of. “Other brokers… spend millions on Super Bowl ads. Robinhood doesn’t, and the savings are passed on to you,” the company trumpeted in an early promotional video. “The fact that we’re a brokerage leads people to think that a service like Robinhood should exist to make money,” Tenev said at the conference. “But that’s really not the case. The purpose of Robinhood is to make buying and selling stocks as frictionless as possible. If we make money as a side effect of that, that’s great.”

THE MERRY MIDDLEMEN How Robinhood gets paid Users

Robinhood makes no money directly from users’ “commission-free trades.”

Robinhood

But Robinhood gets commissions from its market maker partners for routing customers’ trades their way— this is called payment for order ﬂow (pfof).

Market makers

But Robinhood’s profitability wasn’t a side effect of being frictionless. It was very much the point. From founding, its business model was dependent on customers trading frequently, allowing the company the chance to earn a different kind of commission—known as pfof, or payment for order flow—from every transaction. The payments are essentially a finder’s fee given to Robinhood by so-called market makers, the Wall Street firms that make money executing individual investors’ trades. Since launch, Robinhood has enthusiastically embraced pfof, arranging favorable rates that eclipsed those of other brokerages, making it, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s largest source of revenue. The money flows evoke a key lesson of the digital age: If something is free, then you’re not the customer—you’re the product being sold. The market makers who pay Robinhood a premium to execute the app users’ trades include multibillion-dollar firms, like Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial, that conduct automated high-frequency, or socalled “flash,” trading. Before their Robinhood days, Bhatt and Tenev had gotten

to know the inner workings of this business and the valuable information flows they use to make money. They’d founded Celeris, an algorithmic trading company, and then Chronos Research, which built backend software for automated traders. Flash traders are willing to pay brokers a premium for the right to execute what the industry calls “dumb money” trades— orders from investors who don’t know as much about the stocks they’re trading as Wall Street professionals. That’s because, armed with better information and complex algorithms, market makers know they’ll usually be able to arrange a better price than the one the investor agreed to buy or sell at. They then split the difference, paying some to Robinhood as pfof while keeping the rest for themselves and usually offering only a sliver of the better price back to the customer in “price improvement.” Generally, the more ignorant the bet by a Robinhood investor, the bigger both the pfof and the market makers’ profit. It’s reminiscent of homeowners giving real estate brokers a cut of buying or selling a home—except in this system, the agents’ commissions are derived from a secret price the buyers will never know. Lawmakers, financial experts, and regulators have pointed out that order flow payments present glaring conflicts of interest. One of them is that the payper-trade system incentivizes brokers and market makers to encourage more—rather than more informed—trading. “Robinhood and the high-frequency trading firms have the same incentive, which is to cause there to be as much trading as humanly possible, to create as much flow as humanly possible, which maximizes profits for the executing dealers and Robinhood,” says Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a Wall Street reform nonprofit. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a February letter to Citadel’s ceo, the practice means the “more shares they see, the more bread crumbs they take.” It can also encourage brokers to seek market makers that will give them the best pfof, rather than the best prices for their customers— despite an sec mandate, known as the “best execution” rule, that requires brokers always to seek the best deal for customers. (Jacqueline Ortiz Ramsay, a Robinhood J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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Robinhood’s framing is ‘We’re the highway robber stealing from the rich to give to the poor.’ In fact, the revenue model means that you’re actually taking money out of the pockets of ordinary people and giving it to a billionaire.”

communications executive, says the company is bound by the rule and has designed its system “to achieve quality execution.”) Under the system, Robinhood is incentivized to encourage riskier trades—including options trades like the one that left Alex distraught. According to the Kearns’ lawsuit, market makers paid just 17 cents per 100 shares on regular stocks, but 58 cents per 100 shares on options contracts. (Robinhood declined to comment on the figures.) Nine years ago, the UK’s securities regulator banned pfof completely. Over the last few decades, the pfof model has faced an existential complication, as more everyday investors have ebbed away from speculative stock picking in favor of safer, steadier index funds— lessening the number of sales where Wall Street firms can profit from dumb money. But Robinhood has helped to reverse the tide, adding a surge of new and inexperienced stock-pickers to the churn. In an email, Ortiz Ramsay argued that “a majority of our customers are not un-informed,” and pointed to the company’s educational resources on users’ “investment opportunities.” She added that many use the app for buy-and-hold strategies. But experts take issue with the company line. “Robinhood seems to be designed to create this pool of uninformed retail investors and serve them up on a platter to the market makers,” says James Tierney, a former sec official and a professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law who has studied the company’s model for a forthcoming paper about Robinhood and investing app regulation. That it was commission-free from the start, Tierney says, means “there had to have been the thought that ‘We will only be profitable if we’re able to fit this need that market makers have for unin30

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formed investors...’ I don’t know if you’ve ever fished, but some ponds are stocked with captive fish to make fishing easier.” in november 1999 , sec Chair Arthur

Levitt flew to Boca Raton to address more than 1,000 investment bankers gathered at an annual conference to tell them that they must first and foremost uphold their duty to their customers—not their own pocketbooks. “I worry that best execution may be compromised by payment for order flow,” he said, warning of “clear” conflicts of interest. In the audience was a trader who had, since the 1980s, pioneered the strategy: Bernie Madoff. A decade before his fund was revealed as a massive fraud in 2008, it had seen enormous growth by paying brokers to execute their customers’ trades, siphoning about 10 percent of the New York Stock Exchange’s volume to his own private salesroom and pocketing the price gaps. Levitt’s speech—clearly directed at the few firms like Madoff’s that were early pfof adopters—kicked off years of financial industry debate, with Madoff among the practice’s most vocal defenders. “It’s very important that we don’t keep on characterizing payment for order flow as being this evil child,” he insisted at an sec hearing. At the same time Madoff publicly defended pfof, his too-good-to-believe returns faced mounting suspicion. Analysts, and eventually the sec, theorized they might be explained by an illegal practice called “front-running,” whereby brokers make their own trades just before executing their customers’, taking advantage of the ways the later trades will reshape the market. After Madoff’s fund collapsed, the sec found no evidence he was front-running, instead concluding he had been running a simpler but even more brazen scam, a

Ponzi scheme. But 20 years after Levitt’s warning, Robinhood and its market maker partners have the same kind of insight and access to information that Madoff had, and face similar criticisms and suspicions. Some critics and lawmakers, including House Financial Services committee member Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), have theorized that Robinhood’s market maker partners could front-run order flow from the app’s customers in “dark pools,” private exchanges where Wall Street firms trade outside the view of the regular market. (The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Citadel $700,000 in 2020 for doing exactly

this over a two-year period. When asked about recent speculation of front-running, a Citadel spokesperson reiterated that the practice is illegal. Virtu declined to comment.) In a move that echoes Levitt’s warning, the sec has also raised questions about whether Robinhood’s reliance on pfof—which exceeds that of its competitors—means it isn’t fulﬁlling its duty to get the best prices for its clients; Ortiz Ramsay says the sec’s concern “doesn’t represent the company today.” Meanwhile Robinhood has stepped forward to defend pfof in congressional hearings, lawsuits, and a PR blitz that includes blog posts, explanatory videos, and ﬁreside

chats with the founders—reprising Madoff’s role as the guardian of Wall Street’s right to profit off dumb money. alex opened his Robinhood account as

a senior in high school, investing about $5,000 saved from birthdays, a lifeguarding job, and gifts from his grandparents. By the time he was a college sophomore, he’d tripled it. Always a top student—he’d won a White House education award in middle school—Alex excelled at unl’s college of business and was selected to coach students in an introductory course. One of his closest friends from rotc recalls bull sessions lasting till 1 or 2 a.m., chewing over

life, their futures, and the stock market. He was precisely the type of investor who Robinhood targeted, not only with its many commercials featuring broke college students or young people slurping instant ramen and riding the bus, but with a design ethos steeped in simplification and gamification. From its founding days, the app’s interface was overseen by Bhatt, who pushed an inviting feel in contrast to the intimidating or alienating vibe of other brokerages’ interfaces, full of analyst ratings and finance speak. “We make use of simple colors to remove as much information as possible,” a company designer told a trade publication. “Baiju is someone who really cares about minimalism and clean design,” an early Robinhood design staffer tells me. “It was important to him to build a trading platform in the most minimal way possible.” Some professional investors were wary of the company’s less-is-more approach, criticizing how it deprived users of research tools and analytics. “A lot of people in the industry take the view that the product is basically a toy,” Bhatt admitted to Institutional Investor not long after launch. Robinhood is stuffed with video game– like elements that lure investors into trading more, which is a losing strategy for most. When a customer first signed up, they were gifted a free stock, chosen on a screen that resembled a slot machine. The app rained confetti when users made certain trades or sent more money to the app, a feature that was disabled this spring after much criticism. Users who signed up friends were entered in lotteries for surprise stocks—it might be worthless, or it might be Apple. Despite such flourishes, Ortiz Ramsay “strongly” rejects the claim Robinhood gamifies investing. Robinhood also pioneered the selling of fractional shares, which Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropology professor at nyu who wrote a book about addictive gambling design, compares to penny slots— small-stakes bets that make users feel less risk and thus invite them to trade more. The app’s default settings flood users with emoji-laden push notifications that coax customers to trade. For new joiners, the notices direct them to lists of the app’s most popular stocks, or of “Daily Movers”: the 20 stocks with the biggest daily percent change in price—up or down. It stands out J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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from similar features on other sites that put gainers front and center. In a 2020 study, a group of business school professors found that this particular design choice drew Robinhood users to trade stocks on the list far more intensely than traders at other brokerages. “We do find investors lose money in the whole process,” says Xing Huang, a business professor at Washington University of St. Louis, and one of the study’s authors. Parts of the app remind Schüll of Las Vegas casinos, where carpet is installed so it never presents a right angle, a stopping point that forces walkers to make a decision. “The last thing you want to do when you’re engaging a gambler—or, in this case, a trader—is to put them in a position of a rational decision maker,” she says. “You want to have the carpet smoothly and seamlessly turn into the gaming area, so that the easiest thing for the person to do is to continue moving forward. You see that absolutely in the design of this app. It’s about instantaneity, immediacy, ease of access—you just kind of flow right into it.” This March, the House Financial Services Committee echoed concerns that platforms like Robinhood “encourage behavior similar to a gambling addiction.” You might expect that Robinhood’s interface would trumpet customers’ wins, but the app is also crafted in a way that calls attention to losses. The app comes set up to ping customers when their stocks move, no matter the direction. Years of research in behavioral science have shown that people who see losses try to reverse them, notes Schüll, like roulette players doubling down after a bad spin. She calls it “the chasing effect, where you want to gamble more on other stocks to make that up, to race to get it back.” As Vicki Bogan, a professor and behavioral finance expert at Cornell’s business school, told a recent congressional hearing, Robinhood’s “cues, pushes, and rewards” work to “exploit natural human tendencies for achievement and competition…to motivate individuals to make more trades.” And investors who trade more usually do far worse than those who take a set-itand-forget-it approach. By building in behavioral cues that get people to trade more heavily, Robinhood is ultimately encouraging users to act against their own financial interests by making frequent trades— while pfof and its related profits pile up for the app and its superrich collaborators. 32

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The Robinhood account balance Alex saw before he died

The net worth of the founder of Citadel, Robinhood’s largest market making partner, is in the ballpark of $21 billion. (A Citadel Securities spokesperson emphasized that the company sometimes loses money executing Robinhood’s trades, but declined to share numbers detailing its take on order flow purchased from the app.) “Robinhood’s framing is ‘We’re the highway robber stealing from the rich to give to the poor,’” says Tierney. “When in fact, the [pfof] revenue model means that you’re actually taking money out of the pockets of ordinary people and giving it to a billionaire.” After Alex’s death, Brewster sank hours into figuring out what had happened. “I felt like I was at war,” he says. A key insight came after Bill found another Robinhood user who shared a screenshot documenting an options trade he’d made on the app, explaining that he, like Alex, had been shown a six-figure loss—an “alarming sight” until he realized it was a phantom that would disappear when the full trade was resolved. Similarly, Alex did not actually owe $730,000. The Robinhood app just made it look like he did by showing the same kind of incomplete trade. Despite his relative inexperience, Alex had properly hedged his bets, setting up trades that would mostly cancel each other out if one failed. In the kind of options trade Alex had done, such a lag is common—but it wasn’t reflected in

Robinhood’s display. While other brokerages sometimes also display losses on incomplete options trades, they make it much tougher to qualify to make those trades in the ﬁrst place, Kelleher explains, and put more barriers—like disclosure pages—on users’ screens before they are executed. In the wake of Alex’s death, Robinhood said it would make it harder to sign up to trade options. But I was recently able to get approved for basic options trading with a few taps of my own, as was a cbs reporter. Robinhood’s Ortiz Ramsay tells Mother Jones that the company has “enhanced our options oﬀering” since June 2020, with features aimed at guiding options traders through the scenario that Alex faced, including live voice customer assistance. Alex’s parents, who declined to comment for this story, have told a court they have information that makes them believe Robinhood eliminated phone service to cut costs; Ortiz Ramsay says that claim is “inaccurate.” For Alex’s family, the realizations that his losses weren’t real and might have been explained away in a phone call were devastating all over again. “It was all for nothing,” Brewster says. “It is about the most tragic thing that I can fathom.” the same year that Robinhood

launched, financial journalist Michael Lewis published Flash Boys, an exposé of

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high-frequency trading firms. Zooming in on TD Ameritrade, he described how, every year, representatives from Wall Street banks and market makers would fly out to the company’s headquarters in Omaha to negotiate new order flow rates in person, with handshakes and steak dinners. This was by design: They wanted to avoid a paper trail that might reveal the value of these customer trades—and the information contained within them. The conflicts of interest laid out in the 2015 book highlighted, as Levitt had warned some 15 years earlier, how trading firms’ order flow profits came at the expense of everyday investors, igniting a firestorm on Wall Street and in Washington. As senators mounted hearings, according to the sec, Robinhood executives grew worried about what their booming user base would think if people knew Robinhood made money from order flow, paid by the very highfrequency trading firms getting critical attention in Congress and the press. Before the app’s formal 2015 launch, an answer to a key entry on the website’s faq—“How does Robinhood make money?”—mentioned order flow. According to the sec, it disappeared in December 2014, as the company set up a new page claiming the company made only “negligible” income from pfof. The new page linked back to the faq, where Robinhood promised to disclose if order flow were ever to become a significant revenue source. Over the next year and a half, order flow represented more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue; the faq page did not change. Meanwhile, Tenev, who had occasionally mentioned order flow when asked about the company’s revenue model, stopped bringing it up completely. The sec says the company wrote a training manual telling customer service reps to avoid mentioning order flow if asked how Robinhood made money. The following year, during negotiations over order flow rates with several market maker firms, Robinhood cut deals that were better for the company and worse for their customers. Typically, brokers take 20 percent, with the rest going to the customer as price improvement. Robinhood’s contracts flipped this ratio, giving it 80 percent. The sec has said that at least one of the market makers pointed out that the unusually high order flow rates would mean worse prices

for Robinhood’s customers, but the company proceeded anyway. In 2016, shortly before federal regulators began a scheduled review of Robinhood’s trades, the company formed an internal committee to oversee its market maker partnerships. Over the next three years, the committee regularly reported that Robinhood’s customers weren’t seeing much price improvement on their trades. It wasn’t until late 2018, though, that the committee started assessing how Robinhood’s metrics compared with those of its competitors; not surprisingly, they found its users were getting a raw deal. Looking between 2016 and 2019, they determined users lost $34.1 million in price improvement that they could have received had they traded elsewhere—even after accounting for $5-per-trade fees. Meanwhile, Robinhood’s revenue from order flow grew to $687 million in 2020. After a $6 billion valuation in 2018, Bhatt and Tenev both became billionaires. In December 2020, the sec announced it had charged Robinhood with misleading users about how it made money and failing to protect their financial interests, and that it had agreed to pay $65 million in penalties. That same month, Massachusetts regulators launched an ongoing case accusing Robinhood of manipulating its customers with both its app design and its advertisements aimed at attracting inexperienced investors. This spring, Robinhood prepared to offer shares in the company by filing paperwork with the sec. When made public sometime this summer, the documents could shed light on who holds Robinhood’s purse strings. “If it turns out that all of their initial funding came from the market makers, then it would be pretty strong evidence that from the get-go, this has been designed to solve that ‘stock the pond with fish’ problem,” says Tierney. An early Robinhood staffer I spoke with says that isn’t the case. “There was never ill intent,” they say, explaining that internal discussions were exactly as advertised, with a focus on giving people power to improve their financial lives, and a chance to stand against big institutional investors. Indeed, on its way to the top, Robinhood has fulfilled parts of its vision of how to “democratize” finance, bringing millions of first-time investors into the market, and

pushing changes, like the selling of fractional shares, that have taken root across the industry. But the staffer also saw how such talk went only so far when compared with the realities of a financial industry that at its heart places profit over principle, and a Silicon Valley ethos that rushes money-first into ideas that seem like neat solutions to messy problems. “It’s too easy to get access to money, too easy to do options trading, too easy to take out margin,” the employee says. “They kind of spun out of control.” They add, “I do see this as a free market experiment,” one that exposed how any effort to truly democratize finance would mean forgoing profits and building alternative financial institutions—a trade that Robinhood never opted to make. alex kearns’ funeral was a week after

his death. His father, Dan, spoke at the service, explaining that with Alex and his sister both home during the pandemic, their house had again become full with family and happy moments. Dan described Alex as intelligent and intent on learning a little bit about everything—curious in the way of a young man still sketching out his future. Alex was also hard on himself, Dan said, demanding “near-perfection” in his own life. “Why he foolishly thought he was saving his family from financial hardship by sacrificing himself over stock losses, I’ll never fully know,” he said, imploring his nieces and nephews to share their problems with their families, who would help them solve anything. It was what they wished Alex would have done. Robinhood made its first public statement on the day of the funeral. Over the previous week, as Alex’s parents planned the service, founders Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev had been “focused on identifying how we can improve Robinhood’s customer experience,” they wrote in a post outlining new plans to limit options trades. They said they were devastated by the tragedy, pledging $250,000 to suicide prevention. About seven months later, the company stepped in to block its users from buying GameStop. Alex’s family filed their case. And Robinhood made its biggest ad buy ever: a $5.5 million spot at the Super Bowl. Q J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

FAC DO JIM C AGA ANOTHER G OF BLACK LA BATTLING A FA Georgia state Sen. David Lucas stands by an art piece called Expelled Because of Color, representing 33 Black Georgia legislators thrown out of the General Assembly in 1868.

By Ari Berman · Photogra

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ENERATION WMAKERS IS MILIAR ENEMY.

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On September 3, 1868, Henry McNeal Turner rose to speak in the Georgia House of Representatives to fight for his political survival. He was one of 33 new Black state legislators elected that year in Georgia, a revolutionary change in the South after 250 years of slavery. Eight hundred thousand new Black voters had been registered across the region, and the share of Black male Southerners who were eligible to vote skyrocketed from 0.5 percent in 1866 to 80.5 percent two years later. These Black legislators had helped to write a new state constitution guaranteeing voting rights for former slaves and leading Georgia back into the Union. Yet just two months after the 14th Amendment granted full citizenship rights to Black Americans, Georgia’s white-dominated legislature introduced a bill to expel the Black lawmakers, arguing that the state’s constitution protected their right to vote but not to hold office. “You bring both Congress and the Republican Party into odium in this state,” said Joseph E. Brown, who had served as governor during the Confederacy years, when “you confer upon the Negroes the right to hold office…in their present condition.” 36

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Turner was shocked. Born free in South Carolina, he’d been appointed by Abraham Lincoln as the ﬁrst Black chaplain in the Union Army. After the war, he settled in Macon, Georgia’s ﬁfth-largest city, where he was elected to the legislature. As a gesture of goodwill, he’d pushed to restore voting rights to ex-Confederates. But now white members of the legislature—both Democrats and Republicans—were turning on their Black colleagues. Turner’s passionate speech would become a rallying cry for the civil rights movement 100 years later. “Am I a man?” he asked. “If I am such, I claim the rights of a man. Am I not a man because I happen to be of a darker hue than honorable gentlemen around me?” But his pleas went unheeded. The legislature voted to expel the Black lawmakers, who weren’t even allowed to participate in the vote. “The sacred rights of my race,” said Turner, were “destroyed at one blow.” Soon he was getting death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. “We should neither be seized with astonishment or

regret” if he were to be lynched, editorialized the Weekly Sun of Columbus, Georgia. Two weeks later, one of the ousted Black legislators, Philip Joiner, led a march to the small town of Camilla in southwest Georgia, where white residents opened ﬁre, killing a dozen or more of the mostly Black marchers. And so Reconstruction all but ended in Georgia almost as soon as it began. Outraged Republicans in Washington attempted to reinstate it, putting the state back under military rule, purging ex-Confederates from the legislature, and giving Black members their seats back. But in the 1870 election, Georgia’s white majority united to reclaim the state and vote out the Black members, backed up by kkk violence that kept many Black people from the polls. “There is not language in the vocabulary of hell strong enough to portray the outrages that have been perpetrated,” Turner wrote to Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner. Five years after the war ended, ex-Confederates had retaken Georgia. “The Southern whites will never

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Henry McNeal Turner’s “I Claim the Rights of a Man” speech became a rallying cry of the civil rights era.

consent to the government of the Negro,” said Democratic US Sen. Benjamin Hill. “Never!” Georgia became a blueprint for how white supremacy would be restored throughout the South. One hundred and fifty years later, another Georgia legislator representing Macon rose to defend the rights Turner had fought for. Like Turner, Democratic state Sen. David Lucas is an African Methodist Episcopal minister. In 1974, at just 24, he became the first Black member of the legislature to represent Macon since Reconstruction—a product of the second Reconstruction, of the 1960s, when the country passed civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act, to restore the squandered promise of the first. With his Super Fly suit and Honda 750 motorcycle, he stood out among the good ol’ boys in the state Capitol. On February 23, 2021, Lucas, now 71, took to the Senate podium to oppose a new voter-ID requirement for mail-in ballots introduced by Georgia Republicans. In 2005, Republicans had specifi-

cally exempted mail-in ballots from the state’s voter-ID law, believing that more rural and elderly voters would be the ones casting them. But now they were changing the rules after the Black share of mail-in voters increased by 8 points in 2020 and the white share fell by 13 points. The measure was one of 50 anti-voting bills they’d introduced after the state went blue in November and Donald Trump tried to overturn the election results by falsely alleging a massive conspiracy to rig the vote. Lucas, the in-house historian of Georgia’s Legislative Black Caucus, said the bill “reminds me of the election of 1876.” He told the story of the disputed presidential contest that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House on the condition that he would withdraw federal troops from the South, officially ending Reconstruction. “When they pulled out the federal troops,” said Lucas, “that’s when we had Jim Crow and folks got lynched.” This history was personal for Lucas. When he was 13 and playing four square with friends, the police picked him up and

falsely accused him of throwing a rock through a white driver’s windshield. They took him to a convenience store, where the driver got in the back of the police car, placed a gun to his head, “and told me he’d kill me,” Lucas said. Later, as a student at Tuskegee University, he worked on the campaigns of the first Black legislators elected in Alabama since Reconstruction, and worked with a Black professor of political science to register Black voters in the area. As he canvassed small-town dusty roads, white men in pickup trucks would drive by with shotguns and ask him, “Why are you registering folks to vote?” After 45 years in office, he told his colleagues emotionally, he couldn’t believe he still had to defend his right to vote. What should have been the country’s most fundamental principle remained the most contested. “I will not go home and tell those folks who voted that I took away the right for you to vote,” Lucas vowed on the Senate floor. A month later, Georgia Republicans passed a sweeping rewrite of the state’s election laws—rolling back access to mail-in ballots, limiting drop boxes, making it possible for right-wing groups to challenge voter eligibility, and boosting the heavily gerrymandered legislature’s power over election administration. Across the country, 361 bills were introduced in three months to limit voting access, the largest number of voting restrictions proposed at one time since the end of Reconstruction. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the state’s voting bill alongside six white male Republicans, under a painting of a slave plantation. When Park Cannon, a young Black Democratic state representative from Atlanta, knocked on the governor’s door demanding to see the signing, Georgia state police arrested her and dragged her from the Capitol, charging her with two felonies (soon dropped)—a scene that harked back to the brutal crackdowns against 20th-century civil rights activists. “If you don’t like being called a racist or Jim Crow, then stop acting like one,” Democratic state Sen. Nikki Merritt told her white Republican colleagues following the arrest. During Reconstruction, racial equality was written into the US Constitution for the first time. It was nothing less than a “second founding,” Columbia University historian Eric Foner wrote in his 2019 book of the J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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same name. Trailblazing Black lawmakers like Turner were elected, and the party that was aligned with Black voting rights made inroads in a region dominated for a century by the party of white supremacy. Multiracial government became a fact of life where white minority rule had been the norm. The overthrow of Reconstruction was a stark reminder of the fragility of progress on voting rights. The second Reconstruction that began in the 1960s was marked by long, slow advancement that culminated in 2020, when Black voters turned out in record numbers to elect the state’s first Black and Jewish US senators. “After I finished crying, I was just so elated, that Georgia stands alone in the South,” said State Rep. Al Williams, who marched from Selma to Montgomery with John Lewis and was arrested 17 times during the civil rights movement. “A Jewish guy and a Black Baptist preacher—who would have ever thought it?” But the vicious white backlash that has followed those victories—an attempt to overturn the election, an insurrection at the US Capitol, a record number of bills to restrict voting rights—has all the makings of a concerted attempt to end the second Reconstruction. The means have changed and grown less violent, but the basic idea is the same: to couch voting restrictions in race-blind language to disenfranchise new voters and communities of color. Once again, the party of white grievance is rewriting the rules of American democracy to protect conservative white political power from the rising influence of new demographic groups. “Nobody’s putting in a literacy test, nobody’s putting in a poll tax,” says Yale historian David Blight. “But there are all kinds of ways for how to just restrict voting this time. Rather than utter disfranchisement, they are obviously going for: Knock off 5 percent of the Black vote, and you can once again win Georgia.” in august 1890, ex-Confederate leaders in

Mississippi convened to draft a new state constitution that would disenfranchise Black voters once and for all. “Let us tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the Universe,” said Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Solomon S. Calhoon. “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.” 38

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Rep. Park Cannon is arrested in the Georgia Capitol after knocking on Gov. Brian Kemp’s office door while Kemp signed a sweeping voting law.

Reconstruction had brought even bigger changes to Mississippi than to Georgia because Mississippi had a Black majority. More than 225 Black officeholders were elected, including two US senators, a congressman, speaker of the house, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and superintendent of education. It was the very success of Reconstruction that made white Mississippians so determined to overthrow it. In 1875, ex-Confederates had retaken the state following the Georgia model: White Democrats formed paramilitary groups and attacked Republican meetings, threatened economic reprisals against Black farmers, and stuﬀed ballot boxes. “If a colored man said he was going to register, they advised him not to,” said Aurelius Parker, a member of the legislature. “If he was still determined in his statement that he was going to register, they would tell him that if he did register, he could not vote.” Those who ignored such threats were told, “You had better spend Monday digging a grave for yourself if you intend

to vote, for you will not be allowed to live.” White Democrats weren’t always proud of the methods they used to keep Black people from the polls. “It is no secret that there has not been a fair count in Mississippi since 1875, that we have been preserving the ascendancy of the white people by revolutionary methods,” Judge J.B. Chrisman said during an unusually candid speech at the state constitutional convention in 1890. “In other words, we have been stuffing ballot boxes, committing perjury, and here and there in the state carrying the elections by fraud and violence…No man can be in favor of perpetuating the election methods which have prevailed in Mississippi since 1875 who is not a moral idiot.” They soon shifted tactics to achieve the same goal. The Reconstruction laws were technically still on the books, and if Republicans, who had taken uniﬁed control of the federal government in 1888 for the ﬁrst time since the Grant administration, passed new legislation to enforce the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed men

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Nobody’s putting in a literacy test. Rather than utter disenfranchisement, they are going for: Knock oﬀ 5 percent of the Black vote, and you can once again win Georgia.

” the right to vote regardless of race, Black people could regain their influence in the state. So Mississippi Democrats attempted something historic, drafting a new state constitution “to effect an electorate under which there could be white supremacy through honest elections,” wrote J.S. McNeily of the Vicksburg Herald. The constitutional convention established a dizzying array of devices to eliminate Black suffrage, including a poll tax and the disqualification of prospective voters who committed minor crimes like “obtaining goods under false pretenses”— offenses for which Black people were disproportionately charged. The centerpiece of the plan was a requirement that any voter “be able to read any section of the Constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” This “understanding clause” gave local white election officials tremendous discretion to turn away Black people, while permitting local whites who might

fail such a test to vote regardless. There are striking similarities between the Mississippi plan of 1890 and the Georgia plan of 2021. The same pattern that existed during Reconstruction—the enfranchisement of Black voters, followed by the manipulation of election laws to throw out Black votes, culminating in laws passed to legally disenfranchise Black voters—is repeating itself today. Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to nullify Joe Biden’s victory, and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani asked the state legislature to appoint its own presidential electors to overturn the will of the voters. When these efforts failed, Georgia Republicans rushed to change their voting laws to make it much easier for Republican candidates to find those votes in future elections—replacing extralegal attempts to rig the election with ostensibly legal ones. The proponents of these laws have defended them in eerily similar ways. White Mississippians of the 1890s claimed there

was nothing racist about their new constitution because it was intended “to correct the evil, not of Negro suffrage per se, but of ignorant and debased suffrage,” said Mississippi Democratic Sen. James Z. George. The “understanding clause” was “an enlargement of the right to vote and not a restriction upon it,” George argued, since it did not disenfranchise voters if they could sufficiently interpret the Constitution—a loophole that, in practice, existed for white people, not Black people. Similarly, in 2021, Kemp said “there is nothing Jim Crow” about the Georgia law and argued that it “expands access to the ballot box,” pointing to a provision that requires more days of weekend voting. That won’t affect large counties in the Atlanta area that already offered multiple days of weekend voting but will create more voting opportunities for rural counties that lean Republican. Nor did Kemp mention the 16 different provisions that make it harder to vote and that target metro Atlanta counties with large Black populations. And both plans had built-in backstops in case they didn’t succeed in manipulating the electorate. In post-Reconstruction Mississippi, the lieutenant governor and secretary of state would appoint all the local election officials, who could ensure the results favored white Democrats. This consolidation of election authority was replicated by Democrats across the South. In Maryland, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the governor appointed the county commissioners who selected the election judges. In Alabama and Arkansas, election officials were chosen by a state board led by the governor; in Virginia and North Carolina, the legislature appointed them. This year, after Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand to overturn the election, the Georgia legislature stripped the secretary of state of his chairmanship and voting rights on the state election board; and lawmakers instead gave the legislature the power to appoint a majority of board members. The board, in turn, has the authority to take over up to four county election boards it deems underperforming. And since November, at least nine gop-controlled counties have dissolved their bipartisan election boards to create all-Republican panels. Combined with a provision allowing right-wing groups to J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

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mount an unlimited number of challenges to voter eligibility, these changes will make it easier for Republicans to contest close elections and possibly overturn the results. then, as now, Congress had the power to

stop the disenfranchisement of Black voters. One month before the Mississippi convention of 1890, the House of Representatives passed a bill sponsored by Massachusetts Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge empowering federal supervisors to oversee registration, voting, and ballot counting in the South, and giving federal judges the power to invalidate fraudulent election results. “The Government which made the Black man a citizen of the United States is bound to protect him in his rights as a citizen of the United States, and it is a cowardly Government if it does not do it!” Lodge said. Senate Republicans also greeted the Mississippi convention with outrage, vowing to approve the Lodge bill when they returned to the chamber that fall. But Democrats staged a dramatic filibuster—the first of many Southern-led filibusters to kill civil rights legislation—giving exhaustive speeches and using a variety of endless procedural delays to derail the bill. Sen. George of Mississippi alone gave three marathon 40

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speeches in opposition. “It will never come to pass in Mississippi, in Florida, in South Carolina, or any other State in the South, in any State in the American Union, that the neck of the white race shall be under the foot of the Negro,” he vowed. With the support of a group of Western Republicans from sparsely populated mining states who feared the expansion of suffrage to Chinese immigrants, Senate Democrats mounted a sneak attack on January 5, 1891. Democrats were quietly told to hastily assemble in the chamber. Democrat Isham G. Harris of Tennessee controlled the gavel while Vice President Levi Morton, a Republican who usually presided over the business of the Senate, was taking a leisurely lunch. As Republicans angrily protested, the assembled senators voted 34 to 29 to scrap the Lodge bill. Today, the parties have flipped, but the situation is similar. Aided by national dark money groups like Heritage Action for America (see sidebar), Republicancontrolled states are rushing to pass new voting restrictions while Democrats in Congress are pushing two sweeping bills to protect voting rights and stop many of these efforts. Once again, these bills are likely to be blocked by a Senate filibuster.

Republicans have denounced one of the bills, HR 1, in the same apocalyptic terms that Democrats once used to criticize the Lodge bill. Ted Cruz of Texas called it “the single most dangerous piece of legislation before Congress.” The failure of the Lodge bill is a stark reminder of the costs of inaction, both for democracy and for the party that supports Black voting rights. Following its defeat, Democrats suppressed the Black vote so efficiently that they gained unified control of the federal government in 1893 for the first time since before the Civil War. They promptly repealed the laws that had been used to enforce Reconstruction and protect Black suffrage. “Let every trace of the reconstruction measures be wiped from the statute books; let the States of this great Union understand that the elections are in their own hands,” House Democrats wrote in an 1893 report. “Responding to a universal sentiment throughout the country for greater purity in elections many of our States have enacted laws to protect the voter and to purify the ballot.” A similar phrase—“preserve the purity of the ballot box”—was inserted by Texas Republicans in a sweeping anti-voting bill this year and stricken only

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Left: People wait to register to vote in Macon, Georgia, in 1962.

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Right: Voters in Cobb County, Georgia, wait in line for up to three hours during the 2018 midterms.

after Democrats pointed out that it dated back to Jim Crow. Following the adoption of the Mississippi plan and failure of the Lodge bill, by 1907 every Southern state had changed its constitution to disenfranchise Black voters, through poll taxes, literacy tests, property requirements, and complex registration and residency laws. The number of Black registered voters in Mississippi fell from 130,483 in 1876 to 1,264 by 1900; in Louisiana from roughly 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904; in Alabama’s Black Belt counties from 79,311 in 1900 to 1,081 in 1901. By the early 1900s, only 7 percent of Black residents were registered to vote in seven Southern states, according to data compiled by the historian Morgan Kousser, and Black turnout fell from 61 percent of the voting-age population in 1880 to just 2 percent in 1912. “The failure of the Lodge bill was taken by the white South as a go-ahead,” says Foner. “‘The Republican Party has given up, and therefore we can go forward.’” Once voting rights are taken away, the history of Reconstruction shows how difficult it is to get them back. If Congress fails to act, don’t expect the courts to step in. In 1898, the US Supreme Court upheld

the Mississippi plan, despite clear evidence of Black disenfranchisement and the racial motivations behind it. The law’s provisions “do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil, only that evil was possible under them,” Justice Joseph McKenna wrote. Five years later, Jackson Giles, president of the Colored Men’s Suﬀrage Association of Alabama, challenged Alabama’s literacy test on behalf of 5,000 Black citizens in Montgomery. Giles had voted in Montgomery for 30 years before the new constitution disenfranchised him. Yet the Supreme Court said there was nothing it could do to help him. “Relief from a great political wrong, if done, as alleged, by the people of a state and the state itself, must be given by them or by the legislative and political department of the government of the United States,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1903. The states’ rights jurisprudence of the post-Reconstruction court has been resurrected by today’s court, which under Chief Justice John Roberts has gutted the Voting Rights Act, refused to overturn partisan gerrymandering, and almost completely turned its back on (continued on page 63)

THE DARK MONEY BEHIND VOTER SUPPRESSION if the restrictive voting laws sweeping states across the country seem oddly similar, it’s no coincidence. Mother Jones and the watchdog group Documented obtained a video in which a prominent conservative dark money group bragged to donors in April that it was behind the new voting limits in a range of battleground states. In the leaked recording, Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, claimed that her group (a sister organization to the better-known Heritage Foundation) had funded, lobbied for, and sometimes even written the voter suppression bills taken up by Republican state lawmakers. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.” The controversial new Georgia voting law, she said, had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” including several that made it harder to vote by mail following Democrats’ disproportionate use of the practice in their surprising wins in the state in the presidential and Senate races. She said Heritage Action wrote “19 provisions” in a Texas voting bill and claimed credit for similar measures in Iowa, Florida, and Arizona. Heritage Action is not required to disclose its donors, and it’s been able to operate its voter suppression campaign largely in the shadows. Anderson said of the team’s Iowa effort, “Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’” That is, until we noticed. Mother Jones’ story on the video prompted national outrage, including among Republicans. In Iowa, gop lawmakers blasted Heritage’s effort to take credit for their bill as a “bald-faced lie.” A state-affiliated watchdog agency launched an investigation into whether Heritage violated state lobbying rules by failing to register, and the top Democrat in the state House ﬁled an ethics complaint. As it turns out, you can only run a $24 million voter suppression campaign for so long before you run into trouble. —A.B.

BY REBECCA LEBER ILLUSTRATIONS BY KYLE LETENDRE

G A S L I T

arly last year in the Fox Hills neighborhood of Culver City, California, a man named Wilson Truong posted an item on the Nextdoor social media platform—where users can interact with their neighbors—warning that city leaders were considering stronger building codes that would discourage the use of natural gas in new homes and businesses. In a message titled “Culver City banning gas stoves?” he wrote, “First time I heard about it I thought it was bogus, but I received a newsletter from the city about public hearings to discuss it...Will it pass???!!! I used an electric stove but it never cooked as well as a gas stove so I ended up switching back.” Truong’s post ignited a debate. One neighbor, Chris, defended electric induction stoves. “Easy to clean,” he wrote of these glass stovetops, which use a magnetic field to heat pans. Another neighbor, Laura, expressed skepticism. “No way,” she wrote. “I am staying with gas. I hope you can too.” Unbeknownst to both, Truong wasn’t their neighbor at all, but an account manager for Imprenta Communications Group. Among the public relations firm’s clients was Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions, a front for the nation’s largest gas utility, SoCalGas, which aims to thwart state and local initiatives restricting the use of fossil fuels in new buildings. c4bes had tasked Imprenta with exploring how platforms such as Nextdoor could be used to engineer community support for natural gas. Imprenta assured me that Truong’s post was an isolated affair, but c4bes displays it alongside two other anonymous Nextdoor comments on its website as evidence of its advocacy in action. Microtargeting Nextdoor groups is part of the newest front in the gas industry’s war to bolster public support for its product. For decades the American public was largely sold on the notion that “natural” gas was relatively clean, and when used in the kitchen, even classy. But that was before climate change moved from distant worry to proximate danger. Burning natural gas in commercial and residential buildings accounts for more than 10 percent of US emissions, so moving toward homes and apartments powered by wind and solar electricity instead could make a real dent. Gas stoves and ovens also produce far worse indoor air pollution than most people realize; running a gas 44

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stove and oven for just an hour can produce unsafe pollutant levels throughout your house all day. These concerns have prompted moves by 42 municipalities to phase out gas in new buildings. Washington state lawmakers intend to end all use of natural gas by 2050. California has passed aggressive standards, including a plan to reduce commercial and residential emissions to 60 percent of 1990 levels by 2030. During his campaign, President Biden called for stricter standards for appliances and new construction. Were more stringent federal rules to come to pass, it could motivate builders to ditch gas hookups for good. Gas utilities have responded to this existential threat to their livelihood by launching local anti-electrification campaigns. To ward off a municipal vote in San Luis Obispo, California, a union representing gas utility workers threatened to bus in “hundreds” of protesters during the pandemic with “no social distancing in place.” In Santa Barbara, residents have received robotexts warning that a gas ban would dramatically increase their bills. The Pacific Northwest group Partnership for Energy Progress, funded in part by Washington state’s largest gas utility, Puget Sound Energy, has spent at least $1 million opposing electrification mandates in Bellingham and Seattle, including $91,000 on bus ads showing a happy family cooking with gas next to the slogan “Reliable. Affordable. Natural Gas. Here for You.” The gas industry also has worked aggressively with legislatures in seven states to enact laws—at least 14 more have bills—that would prevent cities from passing cleaner building codes. This past spring, according to a HuffPost investiga-

tion, gas and construction interests managed to block cities from pushing for the stricter energy efficiency codes favored by local officials. In a potential blow to the Biden administration’s climate ambitions, two big trade groups convinced the International Code Council—the notoriously industry-friendly gatekeeper of default construction codes—to cut local officials out of the decision-making process entirely. Beyond applying political pressure, the gas industry has identified a clever way to capture the public imagination. Surveys showed that most people had no preference for gas water heaters and furnaces over electric ones. So the gas companies found a different appliance to focus on. For decades, sleek industry campaigns have portrayed gas stoves— like granite countertops, farm sinks, and stainless-steel refrigerators—as a coveted symbol of class and sophistication, not to mention a selling point for builders and real estate agents. The strategy has been remarkably successful in boosting sales of natural gas, but as the tides turn against fossil fuels, defending gas stoves has become a rear guard action. While stoves were once crucial to expanding the industry’s empire, now they are a last-ditch attempt to defend its shrinking borders. ver the last hundred years, gas companies have engaged an all-out campaign to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat. At the same time, they’ve urged us not to think too hard—if at all—about what it means to combust a fossil fuel in our homes. In the 1930s, the industry embraced the term “natural gas,” which gave the impression that its product was cleaner than any other fossil fuel: “The discovery of Natural Gas brought to man the greater and most efficient heating fuel which the world has ever known,” bragged one 1934 ad. “Justly is it called—nature’s perfect fuel.” It was also during the 1930s that the industry first adopted the slogan “cooking with gas”; a gas executive saw to it that the phrase worked its way into Bob Hope

bits and Disney cartoons. By the 1950s the industry was targeting housewives with star-studded commercials that featured matinee idols scheming about how to get their husbands to renovate their kitchens. In one 1964 newspaper advertisement from the Pennsylvania People’s Natural Gas Company, the star Marlene Dietrich professed, “Every recipe I give is closely related to cooking with gas. If forced, I can cook on an electric stove but it is not a happy union.” (Around the same time, General Electric waged an advertising campaign starring Ronald Reagan that depicted an all-electric house as a Jetsons-like future.) During the 1980s, the gas industry debuted a cringeworthy rap: “I cook with gas cause the cost is much less / Than ’lectricity. Do you want to take a guess?” and “I cook with gas cause broiling’s so clean / The ﬂame consumes the smoke and grease.” The sales pitches worked. The prevalence of gas stoves in new single-family American homes climbed from less than 30 percent during the 1970s to about 50 percent in 2019. In some of the most populous cities—particularly in California, New York, and Illinois—well over 70 percent of homes now rely on gas for cooking. According to the American Gas Association, residences, including apartments, make up 68 percent of the industry’s revenue. Beginning in the 1990s, the industry faced a new challenge: mounting evidence that burning gas indoors can contribute to serious health problems. Gas stoves emit a host of dangerous pollutants, including particulate matter, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides. One 2014 simulation by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that cooking with gas for one hour without ventilation adds up to 3,000 parts per billion of carbon monoxide to the air—raising indoor concentrations by up to 30 percent in the average home. Carbon monoxide can kill; it binds tightly to the hemoglobin molecules in your blood so they can no longer carry oxygen. What’s more, new research shows that the typical home carbon monoxide alarms often fail to detect potentially dangerous levels of the gas. Nitrogen oxides, which are not regulated indoors, have been linked to an increased risk of heart attack, along with asthma and other respiratory diseases. Homes with gas stoves

have anywhere between 50 and 400 percent higher concentrations of nitrogen dioxide than homes without, according to epa research. Children are at especially high risk from nitrogen oxides, according to a study by ucla Fielding School of Public Health commissioned by the Sierra Club. The paper included a meta-analysis of existing epidemiological studies, one of which estimated that kids in homes with gas stoves are 42 percent more likely to have asthma than children whose families use electric. Shelly Miller, a University of Colorado, Boulder, environmental engineer who has studied indoor air quality for decades, explains that when a stove burns natural gas—just as when a car burns gasoline— that combustion reaction oxidizes molecules in the air to create nitrogen oxides, which can make us sick. “Cooking,” she says, “is the No. 1 way you’re polluting your home. It is causing respiratory and cardiovascular health problems; it can exacerbate ﬂu and asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in children.” Between the stove emissions and other household chemicals, “you’re basically living in this toxic soup.” In the face of mounting health concerns, the industry has taken an approach right out of the tobacco playbook, citing a lack of regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the epa as evidence of why the public shouldn’t be concerned. But the epa has never said

gas stoves are safe. In 2016, the agency linked short- and long-term nitrogen dioxide exposure to respiratory problems like asthma. The ucla study found that indoor NO2 emissions from running a stove alone can sometimes cause levels that the epa would consider unacceptable outdoors, and running an oven at the same time makes things even worse. Indeed, the data shows that California’s buildings emit more nitrogen oxides than power plants, and only slightly less than cars. The gas industry claims that proper ventilation can take care of any combustion fumes. Yet even among families who are aware of the potential health effects, many cannot afford to install a sufficiently powerful hood vent, and there’s certainly no regulation requiring it. Indeed, most stove fans do little more than move the polluted air about. Because of dated building codes and an unregulated market, low-income Americans, many of whom are renters, have to put up with invisible combustion byproducts in cramped living spaces. Last year, I published an article that exposed how trade groups representing gas utilities hired social media influencers to convince millennials and Gen Xers that gas stoves are the cool and superior way to cook. In the Instagram posts I reviewed, none of the influencers appeared to have fume hoods over their stoves, or even mentioned ventilation. I knew I had gotten the industry’s attention when many of the posts were suddenly deleted,

“If they are saying that we are paying inﬂuencers to gush over gas stoves so be it,” wrote one gas executive in an internal email. “Of course we are and maybe we should pay them to gush more?”

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and I started receiving long, unsolicited emails from industry consultants. Around that time, I came across a trove of emails obtained by the fossil fuel watchdog Climate Investigations Center. According to the emails, representatives from the PR firm Porter Novelli had reached out to one of its clients, American Public Gas Association (apga), which then emailed gas executives at several utilities to ask whether Porter Novelli’s social influence campaign on behalf of apga should be paused in light of the backlash from my piece. “They should not stop for even 1 hour,” replied utility executive Sue Kristjansson, an industry veteran. “If they are saying that we are paying inﬂuencers to gush over gas stoves so be it. Of course we are and maybe we should pay them to gush more?” The emails showed the executives debating their next move: Some thought they should tell the inﬂuencers to emphasize proper ventilation. Others worried that giving even an inch to their critics would be admitting defeat. “If we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done,” wrote Kristjansson, who is now president of Berkshire Gas, a utility in Massachusetts. When I reached out to Kristjansson for comment, a Berkshire spokesperson sent me a statement, repeating familiar claims: “The science around the safe use

of natural gas for cooking is clear: there are no documented risks to respiratory health from natural gas stoves from the regulatory and advisory agencies and organizations responsible for protecting residential consumer health and safety.” Yet Kristjansson’s hard-line approach seems to be losing favor. Take Kate Arends—the founder of Wit and Delight, a polished lifestyle website for “designing a life well-lived”—whose Instagram account has more than 300,000 followers. Arends’ brand fits perfectly with the affluent female demographic the industry hopes to target—indeed, at least one of her posts is sponsored by apga. A week after my story ran, Porter Novelli contacted apga again, this time on behalf of Arends, seeking the group’s guidance on how best to communicate on “issues related to ventilation.” Arends wanted to make sure any health and safety information she shared was accurate. Months passed—by fall I had not seen any more sponsored posts from Arends and wondered whether she had dropped the sponsorship. Then, late last October, she ran a post sponsored by Natural Gas Genius, an apga campaign: “An Exercise in Candlemaking and the Comforts of a Roaring Fire.” In a 600-word post festooned with photos of her exquisitely decorated home, Arends explained her decision to replace her wood-burning fireplace with a natural

PERCENTAGE OF NEW SINGLE-FAMILY HOMES WITH GAS STOVES 50

0 1939

1959

Source: 2019 American Housing Survey

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1979

1999

2019

gas model and extolled the wonders of her gas stove. Tellingly, her post included a note that shows how the industry has grown savvier on the delicate issue of air quality. “If natural gas is the right choice for your family,” she wrote, “ventilation and air quality are the things to keep top of mind.” It was the first time I had ever seen an influencer acknowledge the need for ventilation. o far, every city that has tried to pass cleaner building codes has faced an onslaught of gas industry attacks. Sierra Club’s Western regional director, Evan Gillespie, remembers how quickly SoCalGas reacted two years ago when an obscure California agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, decided to discuss the full emissions impact from gas appliances. Gas groups sent one representative to a district meeting, three to the next one, and seven to the next, accounting for a full one-third of that meeting’s attendance. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of a book on utility astroturfing, described to me the unsettling experience of seeing how quickly the SoCalGas-aligned c4bes swamped the Santa Barbara City Council after sending residents texts and emails warning of higher electricity rates and gas stove bans. But the tables may be turning. In November, the powerful environmental regulators at the California Air Resources Board issued an unequivocal statement proclaiming that gas stoves cause indoor air pollution. The announcement, a possible gamechanger for cities on the fence about electrification, calls for much stricter ventilation standards for all household appliances. It was the first time any major public agency has recommended policy changes to reflect the science of stoves and indoor pollution. Environmentalists say the move away from gas is as inevitable as the demise of coal. It’s not a matter of if buildings go electric, but when. The California Energy Commission plans to incorporate subsidies for electric home heating and hot water in its next update to the state’s building code; some experts anticipate that it may even ban gas in new construction starting

in 2026. That prospect has the industry scrambling: If California’s most populous cities—which account for 8 percent of construction-related greenhouse gases—phase out gas-fired structures, other states will likely follow suit. “If we’re able to get gas bans in new buildings, then these gas companies are losing their growth, they’re losing their new market share, and they’re going to start shrinking,” says Stokes. “That sort of downward spiral becomes very problematic, because then investors start to think this isn’t a good company to invest in. The fights that are playing out in California and New York are really bellwethers for the gas industry overall.” The industry doesn’t want too many dominos to fall, including in places like Culver City, where Truong made his progas Nextdoor post. Reached by phone, Imprenta vice president Joe Zago distanced his company from the campaign. Zago told me that c4bes had tasked Imprenta with finding a sympathetic resident of the middle-class Fox Hills neighborhood to post a statement supporting its position, but Truong had acted independently: “He made this post on his own without direction or approval from anyone at Imprenta and without the knowledge of Imprenta or our client.” The firm’s contract with c4bes—now the subject of a state inquiry into the improper use of ratepayer dollars on anti-electrification campaigns— expired in February 2020, Zago added, and Imprenta’s work with c4bes was “fairly limited in scope.” Imprenta isn’t the only firm backing away from gas companies. In November, Porter Novelli announced it would drop the American Public Gas Association and cease participation in the Natural Gas Genius campaign. “We have determined our work with the American Public Gas Association is incongruous with our increased focus and priority on addressing climate justice,” Porter Novelli executive Maggie Graham explained to the New Yorker. The mounting criticism of natural gas has put the industry on the defensive. After a version of this story ran online, the Independent Petroleum Association of America penned a response on its public outreach website: “The article misrepresents why natural gas became and remains the dominant energy source for homeowners, over-

looking the crucial fact that the resource has been delivering the most affordable energy for decades,” and the industry “is working to address individuals’ primary need for affordability and their climate concerns, too.” Environmentalists see the defection of the PR firms as evidence of a shift in public sentiment. Consumers are beginning to realize, “I’m burning fossil fuels with an open flame in my house, and it’s contributing to asthma my kid has; it’s harming my mom,

my dad, and my grandparents,” says the Sierra Club’s Gillespie. “I think people’s perception of what it means to have a gas stove changes pretty quickly.” The industry has spent a century convincing Americans to fall in love with gas stoves, but as the public begins to fully understand the risks of what used to be its favorite appliance, Gillespie predicts, “what was long seen as this great strength of the industry is actually their greatest weakness.” Q J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

BY TIM MURPHY ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELSEY DAKE

From Green Party rabble-rouser to Senate power broker, Kyrsten Sinema’s rise is a political fairy tale—and nightmare.

S H A P E S H I F T E R

Kyrsten Sinema wasn’t the only Democrat to vote against including a $15 federal minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill in early March, but she was the only one whose vote became a meme. The clip itself is short and sparse: Sinema, the 44-year-old ﬁrst-term Democratic senator from Arizona, walks briskly around the well of the chamber, gives Mitch McConnell a friendly pat on the back, and pauses in front of the clerk. Then she thrusts her right thumb dramatically down, dipping her body for emphasis.

“Ms. Sinema. Ms. Sinema: No,” says the clerk, recording her vote. But Sinema, by this point, is already gone. That morning, she had brought a chocolate cake for the floor staff who worked long hours before the final stimulus vote. Now “Marie Antoinette” was trending on Twitter. Within a few hours, the image was everywhere—on cable news, late-night shows, even the side of an old flour mill in downtown Tempe, near the intersection where, in 2003, Sinema led an anti-war vigil on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. “Keep the cake,” read the message projected onto the building. “Support the $15 minimum wage now.” To Sinema’s progressive critics, her vote was a funhouse mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down vote to save the Affordable Care Act four years earlier—only now an Arizona Democrat was rejecting one of her party’s biggest legislative priorities. More alarming was her opposition to reforming the filibuster, the Senate rule that allows a minority of senators to block a piece of legislation from coming to a vote. Weeks earlier, Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters from news outlets that are not based in her home state, had drawn a sharp line 50

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during an interview with Politico: “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” she said. In the face of united Republican opposition, many Democrats feared such a standard would doom almost every piece of their agenda— from immigration reform to voting rights to lgbtq equality. Democrats expected such intransigence from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a conservative from a state Donald Trump carried by 39 points, who once shot climate legislation with a gun and whose wife cuts his hair with a Flowbee. But to those who have supported Sinema from the beginning of her career, her heel-turn is more painful. Long before she became one of the Democratic caucus’s most centrist members, Sinema was so liberal she refused to even join the party. From her family’s struggle with poverty during her childhood to her Green Party roots, her rise is the story of striving and adaptation, and of the transformation not just of an idealist, but of a state—from a Republican stronghold she once dubbed the “meth lab of democracy” to a bona ﬁde battleground. But in the process, Sinema has left some back home wondering whether she’s

misread the lessons of her own ascent. As a progressive in one of the nation’s most conservative state legislatures, Sinema abandoned her early radicalism for a new theory of change. She learned to play nice, seeking incremental progress through careful messaging and across-the-aisle relationships, and reinventing herself as a post-partisan deal-maker. But her success was also powered by an army of activists—outsiders like she had once been—operating on a far different theory of change. Now, for the ﬁrst time in her career, she holds real power. The future of the party and the Senate just might hinge on what Kyrsten Sinema wants to do with it. when sinema tried to explain why she op-

posed the minimum-wage hike, she began, as she often does, with a nod to her past. “I understand what it is like to face tough choices while working to meet your family’s most basic needs,” she said in a statement. While critics called her a hypocrite and pointed to comments in which she had previously endorsed a higher wage, Sinema insisted she still did support an increase. Her issue, she said, was that the wage increase had nothing to do with covid relief. Sinema had become a stickler for the rules. She didn’t start oﬀ that way. The hardships Sinema faced growing up have long formed the foundational story of her politics. Born in Tucson, she moved with her family when she was 8 to a rural community in the Florida panhandle after her parents divorced. While her new stepfather struggled to ﬁnd work, they settled across the street from relatives, in a cinder-block building that had once been a gas station; she said they subsisted with help from members of the lds church to which they belonged. The details of the living arrangement are a matter of dispute—she has often said their home lacked electricity and running water, although relatives insisted to the Washington Post in 2018 that it had both. But a gas station with running water is a gas station nonetheless. Sinema grew up poor and from a young age was possessed with a relentless drive to change her own circumstances. At 16, she was co-valedictorian of her high school class. Two years later, she graduated from Brigham Young University. She moved to Phoenix, got married at 19 and divorced within a few years, and became a

social worker at an elementary school in a Mexican American neighborhood. Sinema worked for Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid, managed a campaign for a Green Party state legislative candidate named John Scudder, got a master’s in social work at Arizona State University, and in 2001 launched her first campaign—for a seat on the city council. Her interests, she told a local newspaper, were housing and poverty; she raised practically nothing because she believed donations were “bribery.” “What Kyrsten had to say was always a million times smarter than what anyone else had to say,” says Carole Edelsky, a retired Arizona State University professor who volunteered on the Scudder campaign. “She was head and shoulders above everybody. She was gorgeous and brilliant. She was a lightning rod. She just sparkled.” Sinema was active in every political club and attended every meeting. “She just struck me as somebody who slept like two or three hours at night,” another activist tells me. During that first campaign, Sinema auditioned for a part in a community theater production of Jacob’s Gift, an original play “about a young Jewish couple who just had their baby boy, and it was a big decision as to whether or not to have a bris,” explains Janet Arnold Rees, a local theater mainstay who played Sinema’s character’s mother in the show. Even back then Sinema could sometimes be hard to pin down. Rees, who praised her co-star as “a delight—and a very talented actor,” recalls Sinema describing herself as a “libertarian.” A spokesperson claimed during one of her congressional campaigns that she had joined the Green Party because she was interested in sustainability. The play’s program identified her simply as a city council candidate who “loves shoes and purses and hates macrame owls.” When an anti-circumcision activist wrote to congratulate her on the show, she wrote back at length, unpacking her own thoughts on the play and on the nature of belief more broadly. Sinema, who had left the lds church after college and currently claims no religious affiliation, explained that she was drawn to her character, Eileen, because of the way she challenged the strictures imposed on her by tradition. “I am interested in religious thought, customs and rituals, and have always been fascinated with the idea that people in so-

cieties do things just because ‘they’re supposed to,’” Sinema wrote. “Organized religion, by its very deﬁnition, prescribes a set of rules and then tells its ‘followers’ to live by these rules. I liked Eileen because she questioned and thought for herself.” But Sinema felt betrayed by the ending, in which her character at last bows to tradition. “Eileen should have done more with her conviction,” Sinema wrote. “A person with conviction who gives in still gives in, and that is what is remembered in the end. I hope that one day she doesn’t give in.” By the time the votes were tallied in her city council race on September 11, 2001, Sinema’s doomed city council campaign was an afterthought. A few days later, Congress authorized a global war on terror, and a small but determined group of activists in Phoenix, calling themselves the Arizona Alliance for Peaceful Justice (aapj), began discussing how to push back. Sinema dropped by an early organizing session at a Quaker meeting house in Tempe and threw herself into the anti-war cause. In a movement that sometimes drifted toward chaos, Sinema emerged as a natural leader—“in charge without being ‘I’m the boss’ kind of in charge,” says Seth Pollack, a former Green Party activist. She or-

ganized protests and invited members over to her house near downtown Phoenix to make signs beforehand. (For the uninspired, Sinema even suggested slogans—“Bombing for Peace Is Like Fucking for Virginity”; “Real Patriots Drive Hybrids.”) On “occasions where she wanted to draw attention,” an aapj member recalls, Sinema grabbed a bullhorn and wore a bright pink tutu (an image that would later feature in Republican TV ads). And on Wednesdays after work, Sinema and a small group of women donned black veils and stood in silence outside a public library. She intended to keep the vigils going, Sinema told the Arizona Republic at the time, “’til there’s no more war.” Only one member of Congress had voted against the war in Afghanistan, and the drumbeat for invading Iraq felt unstoppable. But aapj members had their own theory of change, rooted in passion and persistence. For a long time, on its website, aapj featured a slightly altered quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead—a catechism for the righteous but outnumbered: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.” They had a special disdain for would-be allies who coveted power over ideals. When

“This is the ﬁrst time in Kyrsten Sinema’s political life that she has been in power. And I think she hasn’t really adjusted to a reality where big things are possible.”

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hawkish and conservative-leaning Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman passed through Tucson during his presidential campaign in 2003, Sinema led a caravan of activists to protest outside his event. “He’s a shame to Democrats,” she told a reporter. “I don’t even know why he’s running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him— what kind of strategy is that?” Politically speaking, Sinema was still on the fringe. When she ran for state legislature in 2002—this time as an independent—she blamed her defeat on the local Democratic Party, which she said had told voters she was “too extreme for central Phoenix.” But she was honing the skills of a politician too, lobbying for social services at the state Capitol and skillfully navigating the crosscurrents of the anti-war movement. Peace activist groups, as one member tells me, “are not exactly the model of organizational efficiency,” and aapj was no exception. One early meeting devolved into an argument over the name. (“Some people thought it should be aajp—because the justice had to come ﬁrst, before the peace,” recalls Korky Day, an early member.) The anti-war movement brought together Quakers and veterans, Wobblies and gun-toting libertarians, united by the one thing they all opposed.

The most persistent source of tension was the anarchists, whose militant methods grated on many members. When the anarchists and peaceniks deadlocked over the tactics they used at anti-war demonstrations, Sinema—whose day job as a social worker, after all, involved conflict mediation—brought the two factions together in Tempe to broker a truce. “She’s always had the inclinations of a social worker—‘sit down and talk and we can reach an agreement on something,’” says Victor Aronow, a longtime peace activist who is still active with the group. “That’s always been one of her strong and weak points simultaneously.” When the conflict flared up again, the group turned to Starhawk, a self-described witch and ecofeminist from San Francisco who had made a niche for herself in lefty circles by fusing “earth-based spirituality” with political activism. Members of her movement, known as the Pagan Cluster, were involved in the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, the fight against deforestation, and the anti-war movement. “They were having conflict between the anarchists and the peace people, and they asked me to come and do a training and a mediation,” Starhawk remembers. “I was

“She’s not going to break the rules to get things done,” says a longtime friend. “She views the people who do that as people who are chipping away at the foundations of how the institutions are supposed to work.”

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really pleased that there were enough anarchists and peace people in Phoenix that they were actually having conﬂict with each other!” Starhawk spoke at a teach-in that Sinema helped organize at Arizona State University in 2003, and later that year they linked up again in Miami, where a small delegation of Phoenix activists had decided to participate in a big demonstration against the Free Trade Area of the Americas—a proposed agreement that would turn much of the Western Hemisphere into a nafta-like open market. In Miami, there was a mobile composting toilet that someone was ferrying around on a bicycle, and a “convergence space” in an old warehouse with a permaculture garden inside. Elizabeth Venable, who had traveled with the Phoenix group, remembers Sinema wandering around the day before the march at the Really Really Free Market—where there was no such thing as capitalism, and the clothes and food and plants were all gratis. People paid for items with “fairy money” and traded skills and hugs for goods. It was a glimpse of the world many activists wanted for themselves. And then the next day, they confronted the world as it was. There had been an ominous undercurrent all week. Police had arrested activists oﬀ the street and raided camps in the days before the march. When the tear gas started that afternoon, Sinema was doing a spiral dance near the front of the march—a ritual in which demonstrators formed a long chain, circling back on itself; they hoped to summon energy from their togetherness. (“She Dabbled in Witchcraft” was the headline of a 2018 press release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I think she was just friends with the pagans,” Venable says.) Law enforcement later said it had acted in response to vandalism, but Sinema recounted in an email thread with aapj members later that night how the police crackdown had really started. “The police were the aggressors from the beginning, shoving protesters with batons, then beating protesters, then taser gunning people in the crowd and launching rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tear gas into the crowds, hitting all sorts of people,” she wrote. One of Venable’s friends lost part of his ear. A rubber

bullet hit Sinema’s backpack. There was a sense of powerlessness about the way a movement they’d built could be so readily repressed. When she turned on the news that night, she fumed at how the media ampliﬁed the police narrative. “It was brutal,” she wrote. miami coincided with the end of Sinema’s

career as an outsider. Back in Phoenix, the peace movement had already begun to splinter. Although she could always be counted on for big events, “she sort of faded from the aapj scene,” says Aronow. Sinema, for her part, felt that the movement had begun to “stagnate”—they met every two weeks to discuss the same things over and over. She was tired of being irrelevant. She left social work and went to law school, hoping it would unlock her access to “the

power attorneys wield,” but “for good.” When she ran for state legislature again in 2004, she did so as a Democrat—and won. “My political stance has never changed,” she told the Arizona Republic during that race. Operating outside the two-party system just wasn’t getting her anywhere. And for her first few months on the job, operating inside didn’t either. Sinema was, as then–Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano later put it, “a gadfly”—an “unconventional” and “starry-eyed idealist” who was “suspicious of those who disagreed with her.” In Sinema’s political memoir, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last, she describes herself during this time as “bright-eyed,” “bushy-tailed,” and “rather annoying.” She gave blistering floor speeches but accomplished nothing. And then she found a lifeline—a new

group, called Arizona Together, that had formed in response to Prop 107, a ballot initiative that sought to ban same-sex marriage in the state. Sinema had not made a secret of her sexual orientation when running for office, but it still came as a surprise to some in the Capitol. After using the word “we” in a ﬂoor speech about lgbtq rights that February—as in, “We’re simply people like everyone else who want and deserve respect”—a reporter asked her what exactly she meant. “Duh, I’m bisexual,” Sinema said. The marriage ban seemed unstoppable. Republicans had used same-sex marriage as a battering ram in state after state, winning dozens of referendums while losing none. Among activists, “there was a philosophy called ‘lose forward,’” recalls Joe Yuhas, a consultant for Arizona Together. “The thinking was, ‘It’s a foregone conclusion that we’re J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

S H A P E S H I F T E R

gonna lose, so let’s use this opportunity to educate the public about the unfairness and the inequality,’ that basically the lgbt community was being persecuted.” Rather than emphasize the prejudice underpinning the referendum and lodge emotional appeals about equality—rather than losing forward—Arizona Together tried something different. Sinema and her co-chair, a gay Mormon Republican named Steve May, decided to emphasize the impact the referendum would have on straight couples. The state’s large population of retirees, for instance, would also be adversely affected by the attempt to link domestic partnerships solely with procreation. The couple they wanted voters to put in their heads wasn’t the proverbial Adam and Steve; it was “Al and Maxine”—two seniors who simply wanted to support each other financially and be there for each other’s medical decisions. “The most compelling factor was really Kyrsten’s commitment to message discipline,” Yuhas says. “She was exceptional.” At one point, the campaign discovered that a group of about two dozen volunteers was veering from the poll-tested approach and emphasizing the referendum’s anti-gay intent in their conversations with voters. According to Yuhas, the campaign changed the locks on the local office so they couldn’t come back. The referendum was defeated by four points—the only anti-marriage amendment in the nation to lose at the ballot box that year. Prop 107 was a turning point in Sinema’s career. She’d won something big, in difficult circumstances, by reining in her impulses to speak righteous truths and following what the data told her instead. It marked the beginning of a new political identity that was not just rooted in pragmatism and collegiality but was sometimes antagonistic toward the activist tradition she’d come out of. Three years later, in 2009, she published Unite and Conquer. It’s sort of a manifesto of her new theory of change and an apologia for her career until then. There are also breathing exercises. In her book, Sinema writes dismissively of “the dread disease” of “identity politics.” Liberals were too quick to embrace the “mantle of victimhood,” to define themselves narrowly into smaller and smaller affinity groups. Progressives loved the idea of coalitions, but they were rarely the broad54

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based alliances that could effect change; too often, she wrote, they were just big “pseudocoalitions,” comprising the same 51 people you organized with last time, under a slightly different acronym. “Because each ‘identity group’ is necessarily made up of a small (and historically politically disenfranchised) group, the group is, by definition, small,” she wrote. “Small doesn’t win elections. In fact, small pretty much always loses.” (Sorry, Margaret Mead.) The key to getting things done in politics, she decided, came down to an ethos she called “letting go of the bear and picking up the Buddha.” The “bear” in this case was the mentality too many progressive activists brought to politics—a sense of fear and anger toward people who didn’t agree with them, which led liberals to stick together in losing identity groups. The Buddha is the opposite of that—chill and open-minded. She called this new form of legislating “Enso politics,” after the Japanese word for circle. Enso “symbolized infinity, the perfect meditative state, and enlightenment.” The bear was the old Kyrsten; she had become the Buddha. unite and conquer was written under

siege. It’s a theory of resisting destructive changes—and pushing through incremental good ones—from someone who spent her 20s being ignored and her 30s in a legislature that was quickly descending into the Bad Place. In 2010, the new Republican governor, Jan Brewer, would sign SB 1070, which subjected Latino residents to mass racial profiling. The same year, Republican legislators challenged the president to produce his birth certificate; just before that, they’d sold off the Capitol to generate revenue. As conservatives in the state ramped up their attacks on undocumented families and allied themselves with the violent Minutemen movement—armed vigilantes who patrolled the border and detained migrants themselves—Sinema fused her old activism with a new influence. She’d always opposed border fencing projects. Now she ramped up her work as a legal observer with the aclu and a group called No More Deaths, whose members hiked deep into the desert to leave jugs of water for migrants crossing over the border. After Sinema got her law degree and joined the legislature, she would sometimes sit at night in a pickup truck with binoculars on the dirt road par-

alleling the border outside Douglas, monitoring the Minutemen’s actions for illegal activity. No More Deaths used scanners to track the group’s movements and barged in to disrupt their patrols. In an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in early 2006, the co-founder of the Minutemen, Chris Simcox, an influential figure among Arizona conservatives at the time who is now serving a prison sentence for child sexual abuse, complained that Sinema was making his life hell. “They follow us, they create traffic hazards, they get their cars in between our cars when we are deploying to a certain area to patrol,” he griped. That was Kyrsten Sinema in her early years as a state representative: a national conservative target and a liberal star. Audiences in Iowa and Morocco wanted to hear her talk about immigration. Sinema still identified herself as a progressive—in 2005, she told a panel at a conference in Las Vegas that she was “looking forward to the revolution” when “overweight white men” no longer ran government. “She could make a legislator cry—that’s what we all said,” says Laura Ilardo, the cofounder of No More Deaths. But there’s another way of looking at the experiences that formed the backbone of Unite and Conquer, one that’s easier to see in hindsight. The kinds of activists she pooh-poohed in her book weren’t always wrong—they were just defining pragmatism differently. Take the same-sex marriage fight. “Kyrsten and Steve were like, ‘There’s no losing, it’s win’; I think this actually gets at the core of Kyrsten Sinema—she wins,” says Kent Burbank, a community college professor and longtime lgbtq activist in Tucson. “She knows how to read what polls well, what the data shows is the stances she should take in order to win. And that is what this campaign was about.” But Burbank, like many activists in Tucson, the state’s traditional progressive hub, felt that there were limits to letting public opinion dictate whether they’d stand up for themselves—after all, the public opinion was what they were trying to change. These supporters of gay rights grew so frustrated with Arizona Together they eventually ran their own ads, featuring people like Carlos Torres, a gay Army veteran, as a rejoinder to the focus-grouped straightness of Al and Maxine. While they

If you strip away the TED Talk bohemianism, she sounds a lot like a very particular sort of senator she once hoped the revolution would purge.

were thrilled Prop 107 lost, they didn’t view the campaign as a breakthrough because Arizona Together had won by fighting about something else. “I kept saying this is not gonna work long term,” Burbank says. “They’re going to come back, and they are going to pass another one in Arizona.” Two years later, a better-funded referendum won easily. Marriage equality was ultimately achieved, Burbank notes, not because of arguments about heterosexual seniors, but through the courts, in response to changing public opinion. Sinema executed a brilliant plan, but it was more complicated than that; the “dread disease” identity politics won too. “I don’t like losing,” Sinema said late in her career in the state legislature, explaining why she’d softened her politics. “It’s not rocket science.” As an outspoken critic of SB 1070, Sinema worked with colleagues to strip the law of language that would have forced hospitals to report on the legal status of patients to police. But activists wanted to go further than that; they wanted to go on oﬀense. So they organized a recall drive for the bill’s lead sponsor, Russell Pearce, the Senate president. The problem: Sinema and Pearce had become buddies. (Unite and Conquer chapter ﬁve: “Make Friends.”) Pearce was defeated, and at a tense community meeting afterward, Sinema was asked by an immigration activist why she hadn’t helped with the recall.

Pearce, she replied, was her boss. Her answer stunned the room—someone else in the audience asked if they really heard her right. Yes, Sinema conﬁrmed— Pearce, as Senate president, was her boss; antagonizing him would have made it harder to get things done. “She just didn’t show up,” the recall campaign’s lead organizer would say later. To them, recalling Pearce was getting things done. In doing so, they previewed a new power dynamic in state politics and a coalition that would change the culture of the state. The Pearce recall was powered by both Mexican American activists and progressives as well as moderate Mormons in his district. They, too, had united and conquered. Even as she was sitting out the recall, Sinema was working alongside Pearce on an “anti-trafficking” measure that critics feared would open families of undocumented residents to criminal penalties. Confused by her apparent shift, Ilardo, who had known Sinema since they’d been social workers in the same school district, sent her a long email wondering what had happened. How, she wanted to know, could someone who had walked the migrant trail with No More Deaths get to this point? She never heard back. the last people to pick up on the extent

of Sinema’s transformation have been her opponents. When she decided to run for Congress in 2012 in a newly created swing

district, her Republican challenger that year was a tea partier named Vernon Parker, who—like Rep. Martha McSally, the opponent she defeated in her Senate race several years later—hoped to leverage Sinema’s early career against her. Parker invoked Starhawk and the pagan circle and aapj’s call for “world disarmament.” One attack ad depicted Sinema floating in outer space. Parker splashed her name next to a red handbag emblazoned with an upraised fist—a reference to a 2006 interview in which Sinema called herself a “Prada socialist.” But such attacks sort of made Sinema’s case for her. “Prada socialist” is disarming in its dissonance; it’s a joke about being pigeonholed. (“If they only saw my closet,” Sinema said in 2017, putting the point more finely. “I’m, like, an awesome capitalist.”) Like many people who latched on to lefty movements at the turn of the millennium, who marched against the war one month and globalization the next, her activism was rooted less in textual socialism than in a general dissatisfaction with the people in charge. “It was never about ‘Let’s leave the electoral process behind for some sort of Maoist rearguard action,’” as one aapj member put it. Her 2002 platform—the one that made her “too extreme for central Phoenix”— called for a “living wage,” lgbtq equality, and universal access to health care; this is the Arizona Democratic Party’s platform today. “Maricopa was so Republican that doing anything that was not Republican was seen as a flaming lefty—people in the aclu were considered flaming lefties,” says Edelsky, the old Green Party ally. Republicans have tried over and over to beat Sinema by running against a caricature she once drew of herself. But who’s afraid of a Prada socialist? No one, it turns out. Once in the US Senate, Sinema followed a familiar playbook. Just as she had in Arizona, where she moved her desk next to the Republican Andy Biggs so they could make jokes about their colleagues, Sinema set out to make herself relevant in the gop-dominated Senate chamber through relentless congeniality. She was a “social butterfly,” one conservative remarked early in her House tenure—the antithesis of the angry Marxist they’d been warned about. Sinema won over Republican colleagues on predawn runs along the National Mall and in bipartisan (continued on page 64) J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

MIXED MEDIA

STILL FRONTING How the George Floyd uprising was framed BY RAMENDA CYRUS

in 1963, Walter Gadsden, 15 years old, was attacked

by a police dog during a protest on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. The moment was captured by Bill Hudson of the Associated Press. His photograph was later said to have brought the world to the side of the civil rights movement—a grand claim but not an unreasonable one, given both the photo’s mass circulation and the meanings ascribed to it by white audiences. Gadsden was a “frail Negro,” in one description; full of “saintly calm,” in the words of Diane McWhorter, paraphrasing the photographer’s editor. The writer Paul Hemphill, in his memoir of growing up in Birmingham, saw a “thin well-dressed boy seeming to be leaning into the dog, his arms limp at his side, calmly staring straight ahead as though to say, ‘Take me, here I am.’” Hudson’s photo offered a drama of wholesome nonresistance, with Gadsden in the role of a martyred innocent. But something was obscured in that narrative, as Martin Berger argues in Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. The white gaze skipped right over the signs of Gadsden’s resistance— the hand on the cop’s arm, the left knee thrust into the dog’s chest. These details did not fit with the prevailing picture of the struggle for civil rights. What white people saw instead was Black passivity. In Gadsden they saw a vulnerable boy who, like Black people throughout the South, was in need of white help. The photo may have drawn sympathetic white liberals to the cause of racial justice, but it did so, Berger writes, on terms that allowed them to feel secure and magnanimous, as if they were “bestowing rights” on Black people. In May 2020, people again took to the streets, this time in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Many things had changed since the day Hudson trained his lens on Gadsden. The Black Lives Matter movement enjoyed broader support than the civil rights movement did in its time, and the media documenting the uprising was no longer so monochromatically white. But were things really all that different? I looked at front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post during the hectic early days of the protests and saw several familiar tropes, marshaled in familiar ways. The visual portrayal of the uprising was operating within the same boundaries established by well-meaning but ultimately self-interested white liberals during the civil rights era. Now as then, it seemed, the principal concern was to channel and validate white response to Black rebellion in the streets.

Bill Hudson’s famous photo of Walter Gadsden in 1963. White people saw a portrait of martyrdom, missing the signs of resistance.

martyr: A Black person at the mercy of a white person or the state was a familiar image during the civil rights movement. Think of the photos of lunch counter sit-ins where white people screamed Black people down, or the photos of water hoses turned on kids during the Children’s Crusade in 1963. Today, “passive” Black people may have their hands in the air, or perhaps they are being carted away by police in riot gear. For white audiences, these photos stamp innocence onto Black people, thus translating the protest into an acceptable cause. In this image from the May 30 Washington Post, a Black man kneels with his ﬁsts raised. Black viewers have tended to read photographs like this one as “images of power,” Berger tells me in an email. “After all, it takes strength to calmly confront militarized police to make one’s principled point.” On the front page of an establishment newspa1. the

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per, however, different meanings more readily assert themselves. The man’s hands in the air represent the compliance demanded by the state, as embodied by the indistinct armed figures in the distance. The primary colors lock in the gaze, and the longer you linger, the more you might feel as if he is offering up his body, just as Walter Gadsden seemed to. The viewer is invited to appreciate the man’s ironclad will, his brave forbearance; the viewer is not implored to consider the desperation and anger it might have taken to put himself in that position in the first place. the rioter: Photos from the urban uprisings of the late 1960s presented a different image of Black protest. Black people were now “forceful figures,” Berger says. They were no longer protesters; they were rioters. Media coverage tended to focus on the aftermath of riots, reinforcing white discomfort and 2.

solidifying resistance to anything other than a “peaceful” protest. The person depicted here could be of any race; all the viewer registers is the dark ﬁgure—“literally black,” says Michael Shaw, founder and publisher of Reading the Pictures, a website dedicated to analyzing the visual framing of social issues—silhouetted against a backdrop of destruction. He was put in mind of “war photography,” calling it “a very toxic photograph, very loaded.” The accompanying headline, “spreading unrest leaves a nation on edge,” only furthers the sense of anxiety. Of course not everyone was on edge in that moment—what of the people who felt a sense of joy and liberation watching Minneapolis’ Third Precinct burn down?—but the assumptions embedded in the presentation give a sense of the upper bound of the liberal establishment’s sympathy with the cause. Yet, while the riot photos may have

PREVIOUS SPREAD: BILL HUDSON/AP

ABOVE: REUTERS; ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION/AP; GETTY; NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX (2)

evoked the imagery of the late 1960s, Berger points out that they were not received in the same way: “Millions of whites in the 21st century were able to look at these images of powerful Black actors without losing their sympathy or pulling back” from the cause. the crowd: Large, diverse crowds were irresistible subjects of last year’s protest coverage. “There’s a kind of anonymity to them and a redundancy,” Shaw says. The protesters are always squeezed into the frame, suggesting a crowd bursting at the edges, and signage is usually prominently featured. The mildness of these images reassures white viewers that the protests are peaceful while also communicating the scale of both the problem and the resistance to it. Berger notes the Black marchers holding up cell phones in the crowd shots—“individuals who have taken charge of their self-representa3.

tion...no longer reliant on the white press to get their stories out.” In this package from the June 16, 2020, Washington Post, Shaw sees “an interesting juxtaposition where you get a dialogue between the photographs.” The allusions to the civil rights era in the crowd shot—the “i am a man” sign, with “king” in the distance—are paired with the intimate portrait of Rayshard Brooks’ family, as if history itself were beckoning the viewer to come to the rescue of Black humanity. 4. good versus evil: These photos are

from diﬀerent protests, yet they were placed together on the New York Times’ June 1 front page. Good vs. evil is the narrative. Note the ominous, depersonalized image of the police, portrayed like an alien invasion against the unarmed, white-presenting demonstrators in the streets of Brooklyn. As with the images from the 1960s, it’s clear who the bad

guys are supposed to be. White viewers are thus reassured that they are not complicit. The conflict, in the package’s telling, is about the cops and the violence they inﬂict on Black people— true enough but only part of the story. “Many millions of liberal whites have no problem seeing the problem of race as one of violent police,” Berger says. “That allows them to distance themselves from racism, since they can’t imagine themselves perpetrating white-on-Black violence. White outrage at police conduct downplays their complicity in a racialized system that beneﬁts whites.” Until white people examine how they can be participants in a movement against police brutality and still receive racism’s dividends, America will keep spinning in circles. In the early days of the uprising, the action in the streets challenged the white response. The front pages of the country’s establishment newspapers seemed to coddle it. Q J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

M I X E D

M E D I A

The hidden meanings of hard-money politics well into the 19th century, the word “inﬂation” referred

mostly to bodily phenomena. It meant an enlargement of hot air in your stomach, a cancerous growth, a swollen organ, an imminent fart. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary from 1755 called it “the state of being swelled with wind.” Today, inflation tends to be used in an economic context, denoting an increase in the price of goods and the resulting loss in purchasing power. Five percent inflation means that $1,000 in June 2021 can buy you 95 books; before, it got you 100. Yet the word has not drifted so far from its roots. It’s still described as an illness in our body economic, a toxic byproduct of gluttonous government spending and bloated wages for workers. The response from some quarters to President Joe Biden’s fiscal policy proposals, like his massive covid relief packages and the $2 trillion infrastructure bill, has sounded like a physician’s diagnosis. The Economist wondered if the American economy would grow so fast it’d risk running a “fever”; policymakers worried the economy is “overheating.” Out of such metaphors are inflation hysterias made. Inflation in an economic sense took root in the lexicon after the Civil War, when gold bugs and “inflationists” fought over whether to put more money in circulation. A party arose to fight for inflation: the Greenbacks (named for the new currency), who joined with labor interests. On the other side were business interests—“sound money” men who saw inflation as a personal affront. One famous tract said paper money was “clamored for as a new dram is called for by a drunkard.” Andrew Dickson White, a founder of Cornell University, compared the loss of “thrift” from paper currency adoption as “a disease more permanently injurious to a nation than war, pestilence, or famine.” For Michael O’Malley, a professor at George Mason University, the 19th-century arguments rhyme with Reagan-era demagoguery about “welfare queens driving Cadillacs.” And they were used to similar effect. As W.E.B. Du Bois explained, Reconstruction fell amid charges of corruption from former Confederate landholders, little more than veiled complaints that “poor men were ruling and taxing rich men.” Said O’Malley: “The alleged corruption of greenbacks is connected to

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both paper money—or excessive debt—and racial equality.” It was the project of 20th-century reactionaries to obscure the distributive struggles contained within inflation. In 1963, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz published their tome, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. They found that each depression had coincided with a mismanaged supply of money: We’d inflated wrongly sometimes and deflated wrongly other times. In doing so, Friedman and Schwartz “posed inflation as an entirely technical matter,” said Ellen Frank, a lecturer in economics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A just-so story emerged about how low unemployment and higher wages inevitably result in inflation, a framing in which unemployment has a “natural rate” but inflation is always an ill to be eradicated. As one conservative joked before Congress, even God wants inflation to be zero. Thus the austerity of the 1970s and beyond was offered as a technocratic fix. Doctorates got to play doctor and prescribe a hard medicine for America’s indigestion. Paul Volcker, installed as chair of the Federal Reserve by Jimmy Carter, hiked up interest rates, allowing bankers to make a killing and stalling the economy. The harms were an afterthought, like the side effects enumerated at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial: lower wages, higher unemployment, less spending on the welfare state. Examples of inflation run amok—Weimar Germany, Hungary after World War II, Zimbabwe in the late 2000s—underscored the philosophy. Forget the German war debts and the 1970s oil shocks. Forget that there is no strong agreement among economists about what causes inflation. Do you want to become a failed state because of a higher minimum wage? We are still living with the wreckage caused by the old consensus. “We’ve lost the industrial heartland of the country,” said the economist James Galbraith, a longtime enemy of inflation hawks. “That’s what we’ve lost.” It was never just about the money. Inflation hysteria is always class war of one kind or another, waged on behalf of the asset-holders against perceived forces of “social destabilization,” O’Malley said. “It’s about the wrong kind of people getting too much stuff.”

YIPPIEHEY STUDIO

by jacob rosenberg

Our planet can’t wait.

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CAUTION TO THE WIND

(continued from page 25)

ashrae standard for additive air-cleaner testing and raising money for more research. A handful of scientists recently released an online tool to help convert additive purifier manufacturer data into more informative metrics. Corsi, Stephens, and others have all given webinars cautioning schools to stick to proven methods like increasing the flow of outdoor air and upgrading filters. Farmer, in conversa-

tions with school administrators, has recommended they simply duct-tape hepa ﬁlters to box fans: $50 apiece, no risk of byproducts. And in April, a dozen indoor air-quality scientists and engineers co-signed an open letter to schools written by Zaatari and another consultant. “Many districts, constrained by varying degrees of limited budgets, deferred maintenance, and pressure to get kids back in school, have already implemented electronic air cleaning devices, relying on incomplete data and ex-

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aggerated claims to make a well-intended, but incorrect decision,” they wrote. “Despite the resources invested, we recommend that these districts strongly consider turning off or disabling these electronic air cleaners to prevent unintended harm to building occupants.” At least one purifier company is firing back at its critics. This spring, gps filed lawsuits accusing Zaatari and Offermann of defamation and product disparagement. Offermann, who spent decades testing additive air purifiers for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had self-published a paper titled “Beware: The covid-19 Snake Oil Salesmen Are Here,” which gps claims unfairly maligned its test data, according to court papers. In a separate complaint, gps accused Zaatari of mounting “a systematic campaign designed to smear gps” on Twitter, in news articles, and during webinars that portrayed ionizers as potentially dangerous—including likening them to cigarettes. “They’re basically suing to try to silence me,” Zaatari told me in April. “I’m not going to stop.” It’s an uphill battle at a time when institutions are looking to do anything possible to fight the coronavirus. For Armbruster, in Texas, finding ways to stop the spread of covid in school “immediately took precedence over everything else that we had planned.” Wilderman, in Colorado, spent months sorting through a bombardment of air purifier marketing. “We were getting flooded every day, from everybody you can think of—individual air purifiers, hepa filters, UV light, dry hydrogen peroxide,” he recalls. Contractors cold-called him. School board members forwarded sales emails. Pavelec, the day care and preschool owner, worries about what parents might think if they learn she turned down any technology that could potentially offer covid protection. “People have strong opinions about this,” she says. “People say, ‘Well, you should be doing everything that you possibly can to make sure every moment, every particle is eliminated.’ There’s a lot of fear. And there’s a lot of tragedy that’s already come around.” She understands their perspective—and the purifiers’ allure. When she tried out an ActivePure device as a sample, she put it in her basement and allowed her son to have a friend over. For a short time, she was a little less anxious. Then she began to wonder if she had a false sense of security. “That view that there’s this new technology that could be the solution is really enticing,” she says. “You want to believe it.” Q

“We elected Georgia’s ﬁrst African American and Jewish senator, and, hours later, the Capitol was assaulted,” Warnock told his colleagues. “We see in just a few precious hours the tension very much alive in the soul of America.” When he was born in 1969, Warnock said, Georgia still had two arch-segregationist senators, Richard B. Russell and Herman E. Talmadge. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Talmadge predicted that “blood will run in the streets of Atlanta” if schools were desegregated. When Talmadge’s father, Eugene, the state’s longtime segregationist governor, was asked in 1946 how he would keep Blacks away from the polls after the federal courts invalidated the state’s whitesonly primary, he picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single word: “pistols.” Warnock noted that he now held the Senate seat “where Herman E. Talmadge sat.” That was progress, but the immediate backlash showed just how entrenched the reactionary forces in American politics had become. At the time, 250 bills had been introduced at the state level to restrict voting rights. One month later, when Warnock testiﬁed at a Senate hearing on “Jim Crow

FACING DOWN JIM CROW. AGAIN.

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eﬀorts to protect voting rights for communities of color. The 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder—when the court’s conservative majority ruled that states like Georgia and Mississippi, with a history of discrimination, no longer needed to clear their voting changes with the federal government—had an impact similar to Hayes’ decision to withdraw federal troops from the South in 1877. The federal government, it was clear, had abandoned its commitment to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. “The only thing that protects people’s access to the vote is federal protection, federal intervention,” says Northwestern University historian Kate Masur. “If nothing else, that pattern is clear in US history.” on march 17, 2021, a week before Georgia

passed its voter suppression law, Raphael Warnock gave his maiden speech on the ﬂoor of the US Senate. Like Henry McNeal Turner, Warnock was a preacher before he became a politician, and his election was followed by a horriﬁc act of violence.

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2021,” the number of proposed restrictions had increased by more than 100, and Georgia was at the center of a heated national debate over voter suppression. “I come here today to stress the critical need for the federal government to act urgently to protect the sacred right to vote,” he said. The last time that happened, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he compared it to the last battle over slavery, to redress not just the country’s original sin, but the failed hope of Reconstruction. The Union victory at Appomattox was “an American victory but also a Negro victory,” Johnson said. “Yet for almost a century, the promise of that day was not fulﬁlled.” Warnock said he thought often about what would have happened if the Voting Rights Act had not passed in 1965, if the country had not intervened to enforce the 15th Amendment after it had been ignored for so many years. “If we had not acted in 1965, what would our country look like?” he asked his fellow senators. “Surely, I would not be sitting here. Only the 11th Black senator in the history of our country. And the ﬁrst Black senator in Georgia. And maybe that’s the point.” Q

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SHAPESHIFTER

(continued from page 55)

spin classes she taught in the House gym. (It was her friend Kevin McCarthy’s idea.) A Virginia Republican once spent an hour teaching her how to flip-turn in the House pool. Trey Gowdy became a close friend. As a senator, she now counts Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz as confidants. Making Republican friends, though, is different from making Republican allies. Not long after she was first elected to the House, msnbc’s Chris Hayes pressed her on the limits of this approach. “Can you, by force of your personality, bring the Republican caucus over?” he asked. This is the essential question of Sinema’s long game—it is the tension behind the idea of uniting to conquer. For much of her career she has been identified in the press and by opponents for the ways in which she stands out from her predecessors—bisexual, vegan, nonreligious, and liable to, for instance, wear a purple wig to events as formal as a junior colleague’s swearing-in. But if you strip away the ted Talk bohemianism, she sounds a lot like a very particular sort of senator she once hoped the revolution would purge. Joe Biden’s first book, after all, is also filled with stories of bipartisan comity—how he broke through a curmudgeonly colleague’s wall of resistance to find common ground and Get Things Done. Sinema believes the solution to what ails the Senate can be found in the lessons of her book—in bipartisan spin classes, in inclusive messaging, in proverbs ripped from Fight Club (“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” is a favorite saying). And in many ways it is working for her. Her press releases often read like dispatches from an alternative Washington, in which both parties are working together diligently on an endless stream of low-profile but consequential proposals to expand telehealth programs for veterans, shut down phone scammers, and provide broadband access to Native American communities. Like a lot of people who have flourished in difficult spaces, Sinema is convinced that her method should be a blueprint for others. Until recently, Sinema and the left have managed to have their cake and eat it too. If she hadn’t evolved, she probably wouldn’t be a senator. And without Sinema, there’s no $1.9 trillion stimulus, no halving of the child poverty rate, no $1,400 checks. She has been at once 64

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a model of Old Washington moderation and the 50th vote for what Bernie Sanders called “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country.” No one would even be talking about a minimum wage increase if Martha McSally still held her seat. As it is, Sinema is reportedly working on an $11-an-hour compromise with a good friend—Mitt Romney. “She believes in the rules and believes in the processes, and she’ll figure out how to use those rules and processes to her advantage to get things done and bring people into alignment with her goals,” says Chad Campbell, a longtime friend who campaigned for Sinema when she was still an independent and served with her in the state legislature. “She’s better at that than most everybody, but she’s not going to break the rules to get things done, and that’s just the way she operates. She views the people who do that as people who are chipping away at the foundations of how the institutions are supposed to work.” But even Joe Biden is starting to change his tune on the rules these days. Because, it turns out, making peace with a post-Trump gop is not quite the same as bringing together the anarchists and pacifists. For one thing, the anarchists are less violent. Her pal Andy Biggs, now an ultra-maga congressman, celebrated the January 6 riot by voting to disenfranchise his entire state. Her friend Ted Cruz wanted to argue in the Supreme Court that Texas could throw out Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. What if something is broken that interpersonal relationships can’t mend— what if it’s the entire Republican Party? What if, as Biden has now come to believe, it’s the Senate itself? there is one thing in Sinema’s career

that until recently had never changed, no matter how much she has. When I spoke with Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, a progressive political organization, she had recently finished reading Sinema’s first book, hoping to glean some insight into what her senior senator was thinking. (Sinema later wrote a second, adapting her dissertation on the Rwandan genocide, for which she traveled extensively in the country and earned her PhD; she later picked up an mba, bringing her advanced degrees to four.) “This is the first time in Kyrsten Sinema’s political life that she has been in power,” Kirkland told me. In Arizona in the 2000s,

“There just wasn’t a lot that was possible. And I think she hasn’t really adjusted to a reality where big things are possible.” That is what’s driving Arizona progressives crazy right now—the possibility that after finally acquiring power, Sinema simply won’t let Democrats use it. Russell Pearce isn’t her boss anymore. For the first time in her career, Sinema doesn’t have to choose between playing nice and protesting; she can simply agree to change the rules so the Senate works like it’s supposed to. Sinema is a co-sponsor of the Equality Act, for instance, which extends civil rights protections to cover gender identity and sexual orientation. But the Equality Act is almost certainly dead on arrival if the filibuster stays on the books in its current form. So is the party’s voting rights package, the For the People Act, which advocates say is necessary to stave off the most aggressive voter disenfranchisement campaign since Jim Crow. So is gun control. So is immigration reform, the issue that more than any other made her a political star in Arizona. When the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform package in 2013 that included a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented Americans, Sinema hired Erika Andiola, a daca recipient from Phoenix, as a staffer and moved her to Washington, DC, to try to sway Republicans. They made little headway. “I just get the impression that she’s still trying to do that,” says Andiola, who is now chief advocacy officer at the immigrant rights group raices Texas. Andiola speaks highly of her former boss, who offered assistance and support when her mother was nearly deported after she took the DC job, but she’s “frustrated” by Sinema’s recent posture. “We just can’t afford to wait until Republicans decide to distance themselves from Donald Trump,” Andiola says. “We don’t know when that’s going to happen. And I’m worried that she’s making the wrong calculation.” To Sinema’s defenders, what others consider naive is really foresight. It is not a question of evolving values, but of whether rapid, big changes are the best way to sustain those values long term. Yes, she has the mindset of someone in the minority— that’s what a majority needs. “I think that she’s concerned about what would happen if some of the institutional protections were taken away and Republicans take control back,” Campbell

says. “More than that, she also thinks that passing meaningful, long-term, impactful legislation and making meaningful, long-term, impactful change does require a diverse coalition of people so they can survive this cyclical political thing. That’s her mindset.” When Sinema ran for Senate in 2018, she seized the “maverick” mantle of McCain, hammering McSally for attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act while at the same time refusing to back the Democratic nominee for governor, David Garcia, who supported more liberal policies like Medicare for All. Garcia lost by 14 points; Sinema held on by 2.4. But Sinema’s political acumen only got her part of the way to the Senate. That such a breakthrough was even possible was a result of organizing work, among Mexican Americans in particular, for more than a decade—through the Minutemen clashes, SB 1070, the Pearce recall, and the toppling of the racist Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Venable recalls Sinema once telling a leadership program she was involved in that “her base was basically suburban white women.” But those swing voters were only the final piece; it was the activists she’d once worked closely with, who championed a more aggressive theory of change, who brought Arizona to a place where someone like her could win. “I don’t think she’d be in office if it wasn’t for that work,” says Carlos Garcia, a Phoenix city council member who is the former executive director of Puente, which began organizing Latino communities against Arpaio in 2007. To these activists, who supported her in 2018, Sinema’s caution tells a different story—that she is misappropriating political capital that others have earned. In her statement explaining her vote against the $15 amendment, for instance, Sinema touted her backing for previous efforts, saying she had “strongly supported” a 2016 statewide referendum that implemented a gradual minimum-wage increase. But that initiative was spearheaded by a group called Living United for Change in Arizona. And if Sinema ever endorsed the measure, that’s news to Alex Gomez and Tomás Robles Jr., lucha’s executive directors. More cautious Democrats warned them, they wrote in an op-ed after the measure passed, that “its failure would set back progressive politics in Arizona for a decade.” Two years later, their campaign received nearly 300,000 more votes statewide than did Sinema.

In 2018, even as Sinema clung to the center, a coalition led by lucha knocked on more than 2.5 million doors for her and the rest of the Democratic slate. Given her recent record, many voters had doubts about her commitment to economic justice and immigrants’ rights. (In Congress, the former social worker—who had served on the board of a refugee advocacy group and represented an Iraqi refugee in court while serving in the state legislature—voted to halt the admission of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and supported new penalties for people entering the country illegally.) lucha worked to assuage those concerns. Now, Gomez says, the group can’t even get a meeting. “We had more dialogue and communication with Jeff Flake than we do with Kyrsten Sinema now,” she says, referring to Sinema’s Republican predecessor. “We had more dialogue with John McCain than we do now.” And it is because of the organizing work of lucha, Puente, and others that there are now two Democratic senators from Arizona, not just one—a feat that seemed improbable when Sinema was starting out. Unlike Sinema, Mark Kelly has never been a progressive icon. But he did, as activists point out, vote to raise the minimum wage to $15 in March. In the aftermath of the vote, critics on the left began sending Sinema Venmo requests for the $15 they felt owed. A state senator, Martin Quezada, floated a primary challenge. Veteran activists, like her old aapj colleague Aronow, and newer ones, from Indivisible, picketed her office. More than two dozen Arizona Democratic Party field organizers signed on to a letter asking her to reconsider—in their thousands of conversations with voters, they’d heard a lot about health care, wages, and human rights, they said, but not one word about Senate rules. “Who knows,” Starhawk tells me. “Maybe there’s some psychic connection we can invoke to get her to support changing the filibuster.” But it was another voice from Sinema’s past who might have distilled her current positions to their essence. “This girl has changed tremendously,” Jan Brewer, the Republican governor who signed SB 1070 into law, told a sports radio host a few days after the thumbs-down. She thought Sinema was “crazy” when they first crossed paths in Phoenix, but no longer. “This is not the person that we all knew,” Brewer said. And on that point, at least, Kyrsten Sinema has finally brought everyone together. Q J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1 | M O T H E R J O N E S

A RIDE, NOT A PRIVILEGE The essential workers’ case for funding public transit by aaron wiener this is the year

we almost let public transportation die. The cuts that cash-strapped transit agencies proposed before being bailed out by Congress—eliminating 40 percent of New York City’s subway service, a fifth of the DC region’s Metro stations, two-thirds of Atlanta’s bus routes—wouldn’t have been their instant demise, but it was hard to see a way out of the death spiral of mutually reinforcing service cuts and ridership losses. For white-collar workers tidying up their Zoom backgrounds in their living rooms, the empty tracks were largely conceptual, a hypothetical nuisance in some faroff future that involved getting up off the couch to go to

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work. But the people running our supermarkets, day cares, and hospitals were already experiencing the very real impact of the deep cuts that had already gone into eﬀect. Lacking other ways to get to work, many of these people—disproportionately Black, Brown, and lower-income—simply left home a lot earlier to endure an extra bus transfer or a longer wait for the train. Which is all to say that the pandemic has taught us that public transit funding is not just helpful to commuters or vital

ANGELICA ALZONA

FOOD +HEALTH

ECONUNDRUMS

to a carbon-neutral future. It is a matter of equity. The $30.5 billion for public transit included in the rescue package President Biden signed in March was the biggest subsidy the federal government has ever given our country’s trains and buses. It will get the major urban transit agencies, as well as Amtrak, through the worst of the pandemic-induced dive in ridership. But then they’ll be faced with difficult math all over again, necessitating some combination of higher fares and lower service. Or not. Other city services aren’t expected to pay for themselves with user fees. When parks or schools or libraries are in need of maintenance, we don’t restrict access to them or charge people more to use them. Instead, we’ve collectively decided that they’re services for the population at large—particularly for those without a golf course membership, private school tuition funds, or a room in the house called the library. Fortunately, it seems we’re approaching more of a bipartisan consensus on the need for federal transit funding. Biden’s infrastructure plan allocates an additional $85 billion for transit; even the Republican counteroﬀer includes $61 billion—twice the record-setting amount from the March rescue package. But the country’s public transit systems need steady, dedicated funding to ensure equity, not just infusions of cash in a once-in-a-century pandemic. “This is a grand opportunity,” says Adie Tomer, who runs the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the Brookings Institution, “to think about a more equitable approach.” It’s tempting to say that the United States simply can’t hope to have European-style public transit because of our sprawl and car dependence. Yet European and Canadian cities went on the same postwar sprint to suburbanize and build highways; the difference was that they also connected these new suburbs to the urban core by rail. It would be prohibitively expensive to retroﬁt every US suburb to look like the ones surrounding Munich or Paris. But it wouldn’t be that hard to make them look more like Toronto’s suburbs, which are just as full of cookie-cutter McMansions as many US ones, except they have frequent, reliable

bus service. Prior to the pandemic, Toronto’s regional bus service was logging more than 260 million passenger trips annually; in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, which has a bigger population, that figure was only 30 million. Federal support in the United States has generally been limited to launching fancy new transit projects—say, a light rail that ends up with such a small budget it’s barely useful—rather than maintaining and expanding service on old ones. That money would be better spent making existing bus service widespread and reliable, transit experts say. Buses could not only connect people to the major transit lines heading downtown; they could also link suburbs to one another. That’s vitally important, given that fewer than a quarter of the jobs in major US metros are in the downtown core; 40 percent of commutes are now suburb to suburb. And most jobs effectively require a car, forcing lower-income Americans—who increasingly live in the suburbs—to either stretch their budgets or severely limit their employment options. “Only buses can effectively deliver anything that looks like equity,” says transit consultant Jarrett Walker. “And yet there’s just been a persistent, relentless disinvestment in their operations.” Walker says he’s often asked to design bus systems on such a meager budget that the buses can only run every 40 minutes. In 2015, Walker helped redesign Houston’s bus network, focusing on providing more frequent service—generally every 15 minutes—in high-ridership areas. With the new map, Houston became one of the few US metro areas with rising bus ridership, though it came at the expense of some service to farther-flung, lower-demand areas. There’s something for everyone in good public transit. It’s essential to curbing climate change. It’s good business and economics: The American Public Transit Association estimates that every dollar spent on transit generates $5 in economic activity. It makes our urban areas livable and accessible. But the pandemic has highlighted something more fundamental: Many of the people we’ve started calling essential workers simply can’t get by without it. Q

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An examination of the environmental, social, and spiritual impact of a hydroelectric dam on an Indigenous community

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EMPIRE OF DIRT Investors are snatching up farmland—and sowing discontent. by tom philpott

as eye-popping new fortunes emerge from the

shadowy digital domain of cryptocurrency, a more tangible asset has caught the attention of some of the nation’s wealthiest investors: farms. Bill Gates, the software oligarch turned philanthropist, along with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Melinda, are the nation’s “largest private farmland owners,” the trade journal Land Report recently revealed. The Gateses own 242,000 acres nationwide, an empire of dirt more than 1.5 times the size of Chicago, and worth a cool $5 billion. They’re not alone. Over the last decade, farmland has taken off as an “asset class,” finance speak for a type of investment that Wall Street salespeople urge wealthy people to include in their well-balanced portfolios. The basic pitch: “Buy land—they aren’t making it anymore,” as the old investment saying goes. As global population rises—and demand for land-intensive foods like meat rises even faster—the world’s cache of arable land is shrinking under pressure from sprawl, pollution, and desertification. Between 1940 and 2015, the average price of an acre of farmland increased sixfold and economists expect that trendline to steepen. As a result, financial giants Prudential, Hancock, tiaa, and ubs have all acquired substantial US farmland holdings. So far, banks, insurance companies, and pension funds, along with individuals like Gates, own just a tiny fraction of the $2.5 trillion US farmland universe. But that could soon change, especially considering that seniors own more than 40 percent of farmland, suggesting an “impending transfer,” as the American Farmland Trust, an agriculture conservation nonprofit, noted in a recent report. Where deep-pocketed investors see an opportunity, the next generation of would-be farmers faces an uncertain future. Nearly a century of price appreciation means that “acquiring land has become increasingly difficult,” especially for the “diverse new generation of farmers and ranchers who want

M O T H E R J O N E S | J U LY + A U G U S T 2 0 2 1

In the not-so-distant past, prominent politicians were attuned to the threat of an investor-class takeover of the land that feeds us, notes Madeleine Fairbairn, author of Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush. Back in 1977, during a surge in land prices, Wall Street titan Merrill Lynch and the now-defunct Continental Illinois Bank and Trust announced plans to launch Ag-Land Trust, a mutual fund to allow big investors to grab hold of farmland. The US House Agriculture Committee called a hearing to decry the development. “Should land investment trusts become more common, the land would be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands and management decisions would be made by an ever-dwindling number of people,” Chuck Grassley, then a young Republican representative from Iowa, complained. The trend, he concluded, “would be disastrous for the small, independent farmers, and in the end, for the consumer.” Chastened, Merrill Lynch and its partner shuttered Ag-Land Trust before it got started. Someone should alert Grassley, now a powerful member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, that the land trusts are back with a vengeance. Q

ANGELICA ALZONA

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

to enter the field,” American Farmland Trust warns. Across the country, aspiring farmers are increasingly being outbid on land deals as investment funds swarm, says Holly Rippon-Butler, the land campaign director for the National Young Farmers Coalition. People who want to “grow for their communities” are being priced out, Rippon-Butler says, in favor of farm managers who answer to distant investors seeking profit above all. (Gates, it should be noted, views his holdings as just that, rather than part of his climate efforts.) This system doesn’t just cripple a new generation of farmers; it hurts their rural neighbors and the economies of local towns. Absentee landlords are “not going to the local hardware store and buying products there,” says Loka Ashwood, a rural sociologist at the University of Kentucky. “They’re not using a local seed dealer, they’re not using a local equipment dealer, their kids aren’t going to the local schools.” Rural dwellers iced out of the land rush are often left alienated and angry. “The validity of the US government—the validity of the democratic state—is closely tied to access to land and long has been in rural America,” Ashwood says. “I see this as deeply related to the increased skepticism towards the government.”

AMERICA IN CONFLICT

MILITARISM AS A WAY OF LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD

Drawing explicit lines, across time and a broad spectrum of violent acts, to provide the deﬁnitive ﬁeld guide for understanding and opposing white supremacy in America.

“A book of incandescent insight—a clear and persuasive account of how the misuse of wartime service has been coopted into a mythos of whiteness.”

“Rebuts the idea that ‘lone wolves’ drive terrorism and focuses on a comparative analysis of the White nationalist and militant Islamist groups that can drive it.” —Kirkus Reviews

—Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

NEW IN PAPERBACK “One walks away convinced that the US empire and its global network of bases must be dismantled if we are to have any hope of putting a stop to the devastating cycle of endless US wars.” —Jacobin

“A sharp book about how America uses the threat of terrorism as an excuse to indulge its own worst impulses.”

NEW IN PAPERBACK “A crucial contribution to building the powerful, broad-based, and diverse movement that is our only hope.” —Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

—Kirkus Reviews