Inequality and the City, and Other Matters of Deep Concern

Eric Alterman,"Inequality and the City," The Nation, December 30/2019/January 6, 2020.
New York's biggest problem is affordable housing. Every year during his [Michael Bloomberg's] tenure, the city lost thousands of rent-stabilized apartments to market rates that were often double what tenants had been paying. Bloomberg's solution was to encourage the building and purchase of luxury housing -- often by people who couldn't be bothered to show up at their luxury investment properties. From 2000 to 2012, the number of housing units in New York City rose by less than six percent, a rate below all three of the 22 largest cities with growing populations.

Atosa Araxia Abrahamian, "Fact: Sh*t Happens," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
"A second Trump term would derail any efforts toward a green equitable, and fair 21st century. Corporate power will continue to swell; more plant and animal species will die off; people will suffer hotter summers colder  winters, longer [work] hours,worse benefits, less pay; and  minorities will feel their pain compounded by the weight of marginalization." "That brings us to where we are today, with  a veneer of economic prosperity but few guarantees for working people in the future."

Jamie Ducharme, "The puzzle of lung cancer," TIME, November, 25, 2019.
"A 2018 study in the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' showed that rates of lung cancer incidence actually rose over the past 20 years born among women born in the period from 1950-1960;  in younger women diagnoses fell, but as much as among men." "The U.S. smoking rates have been higher among men than women,and continuing to the present day." As of 2017, almost 16 percent of adult men smoked, compared with about 12 percent of women, according to federal data.

Margaret Talbot, "Out of Frame," The New Yorker, November 4, 2019.
"In the early years of the twentieth century, women worked in virtually every aspect of silent-film-making, as directors, producers, editors, and even camera operators." "Some scholars estimate that half of all film scenarios in the silent era were written by women, and contemporaries made the case, sometimes with old stereotypes, sometimes with fresh and canny arguments, that women were especially suited to motion picture story-telling." "In Hollywood, script supervisors, who have historically been women, were once known as 'continuity girls.' "

Sarah Lenard, "A Recovery for the Whole Family," The Nation, November 25, 2019.
"Consider that federal public investment today stands at the lowest level since 1947. Advocates for social services have been losing ground for decades." "At the same time, real wages have fallen since the 1970s, burdening workers even more."

According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the average cost of licensed infant child care is $1,230 per month, which is almost a fifth of the U.S. family monthly income. In the past decade, the cost of child care has increased by nearly 25 percent, while real wages have roughly stayed the same. What's more, there are about 2 million domestic workers in the United States, the majority of them immigrant women and women of color, and 1.2 million child care workers.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Next Steps," The New Yorker, December 9, 2019.
"Defending Trump has required Republicans to become increasingly comfortable with the conspiratorial; these days they barely seem persuadable. One way to counter the President's complaints about being denied 'due process' would be to give him room to make whatever case he has; based on all that we know this would only expose his weaknesses. In a series of tweets last week, Trump said that he would 'love to have his aides testify but he is fighting the subpoenas because future Presidents should in no way be compromised.' " My Comment: Based on the historical record, it is highly unlikely that future presidents will be fighting impeachment proceedings, and the multitude of investigations being conducted of Trump's behavior and actions. In a more real world, presidents should not be permitted to use executive privilege to shield them from investigations of illegal behavior or abuses of power.

Impeachment-Related Matters
#David Remnick, "Impeachment Whirlwind," The New Yorker, November 25, 2019.
"Only willful [opposition] to fact can obscure the reality that Trump, with the help of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and various others, tried to exert a vulnerable ally in order to gain an advantage in the 2020 election campaign. How could a President engage in such brazen self-dealing? How could he play games with the security needs of a state that had been invaded by Russia, first in Crimea and then in the Donbass?"

#Republican members of the Intelligence Committee, led by Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Devin Nunes of California made every attempt to confound voters with misdirection and conspiracy theories.

#Roger Stone on Trump: "Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country like you've never seen. Both sides are armed, my friends. This is not 1984. The people will not stand for impeachment. A politician who votes for it would be endangering their own lives."

#On December 19, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said: "Let's be clear: the House's vote yesterday was not some neutral judgment... . It was the predetermined end of a partisan crusade." He called the effect "slapdash," and the "most rushed, least thought through and most unfair treatment inquiry in modern history." He also called it the "first purely partisan presidential impeachment since the wake of the civil war." Not content with that, he called it "partisan rage" and a "rigged inquiry."