Dispatch from Oakland: The Last Blue Place

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Looking out on the floor of the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland, you’d never think that the 2010 elections have been an utterly catastrophic disaster for the Democratic party. As I’m typing this, there’s a conga-line—or something close to it—forming on the floor below the stage, and a dozen or so couples are cutting a rug to the swing band up above. Occasionally, the crowd will get restless, and a chant of “Jer-ry! Jer-ry!” will begin, and then sputter out after a few short bursts. They’re all here for Jerry Brown, the state’s once-and-future governor (and secretary of state, and attorney general, and mayor of Oakland), who’s just defeated Meg Whitman and is expected to address supporters here later tonight.

California might be the one state in the union tonight where Democrats can feel legitimately good (if still a little confused) about the way things turned out. Sure, they’ll lose a few House seats, but Barbara Boxer held onto her senate seat, and Brown, despite a $141 million-challenge from former eBay CEO Whitman, returned the governor’s mansion to the Democrats for the first time in seven years. Proposition 23, the ballot provision that would have reversed the state’s progressive climate change law, went down to defeat. All is well for Golden State Democrats. Or at least as well as you’d hope, given the circumstances.

“I don’t care what’s going on in the rest of the country,” says Marianne Kearney-Brown of Napa. “Because we’re gonna have Jer-ry Brown!” 

Really, the only real setback was the defeat of Prop 19, which would have legalized marijuana. But to the provision’s supporters, who assembled just down the street from Brown’s victory party, in the parking lot of the pot-centric Oaksterdam University, losing was hardly the end of the world.

As Nela Mendoza of Oakland explained to me, “If it passes, well, fuck, we’ll burn, dude! And if it doesn’t pass…we’ll burn anyway.” Word.

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“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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