Property and Racial Inequality

 #Marcia Chatelain, The Burning House," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"Property and racial inequality have been bound up together so tightly and for long that we often miss the relationship, and yet we cannot understand police brutality in the United States without it." "We are just beginning to confront, for example, how fixtures of the inner city --  the fast-food restaurants, the payday lenders, the cash-for- homes fliers --  and all outward signs of the physical and financial exploitation that was routinized in the post-civil-rights years and has undermined Black advancement, despite the passage of laws that were supposed to ensure equal  treatment in housing." "Rather than create a nation of homeowners, the housing programs of the Great Society, which relied on pubic-private ventures that almost always benefited the private interests, and " "Not onlyhas Trump's board consstntlyhelped to intensify racial disparities." Keeanyer-Yamahlta Taylor, author of 'How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,' traces how the growth of this urban white panic calcified redlining and inspired the drafting of racially restrictive covenants, which led to the rise of the suburbs, as well as efforts to take the wealth from cities and direct it to those new developments." "These urban renewal programs simply razed cheap but necessary housing for the poor, and limited the expansion of public housing, which would have provided some relief."

"Burdened with predatory loans and with other support, many low-income homeowners lacked the funds     to maintain houses beset by poor plumbing, faulty wiring, and other problems, and soon defaulted on their loans."

"According to the Census Bureau, Black families have lagged the general population in homeownership for the past 70 years." "In fact, there remains a 30 percentage point difference in homeownership rates for white and Black Americans." "As the 2008 crisis reminded many Americans, as long as housing is tied to a for-profit system that mercilessly exploits vulnerable families instead of empowering them, and as long as values rise and fall relative to racist perceptions of what is a good or bad school district, and makes good or bad neighbors, housing inequality will persist, a burning house, indeed."

#Michelle Chen, "An Agency Against Itself," The Nation, Septber 21/28, 2

"A report by The Nation and Type Investigations -- based on interviews with more than 25 labor advocates, attorneys and current and former NLRB staff members -- reveals that the federal agency that's supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of management. Not only has Trump's board consistently sided with bosses, but career civil servants at the NLRB's regional branches say they are being deprived of funding and staff." "With private sector union membership now down to about 6 percent, workers and unions are often left seeking justice through this Byzantine, Depression-era judicial apparatus." "The NLRB's rightward shift under Trump has deterred some unions from taking cases to the agency. A current NLRB staff member, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said she has observed unions opting to settle to  avoid triggering an unfavorable ruling. 'Unions, she said, 'are just less likely to turn to us because they -- don't want to create bad law."

"In the more immediate term, Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would expand the rights of workers to strike and organize at work, institute meaningful penalties for bosses who violate labor law, and allow workers to sue employers in civil courts rather than be forced to rely on lengthy litigation at the NLRB."

#Laura Secor, "The Man Who Wouldn't Spy," The New Yorker, September 21, 2020.

"International sanctions had long been a fact of life in Iran. In the twenty-tens, in the run-up to nuclear negotiations between Iran and six  world powers, the restrictions tightened: Nothing that could be classified as 'dual use,' or applicable to both military and civilian realms, could be imported to Iran."

Laura Secor devotes much of her article to a conflicted foreign national named Asgari, who was involved in a Byzantine relationship with U.S intelligence agents. Complicating the matter was that the Iranian government sees any returning national, who has had dealings with a U.S. intelligence agencyas a potential spy. Asgari's attorneys told him not to expect much: U.S. federal courts are not known for granting constitutional rulings in favor of foreign nationals. Asgari had just been acquitted by a federal judge, yet he would end the day in prison.

"As most Americans began sheltering in place and tried to stay six feet apart on the street, detainees in the Alexandria Staging Facility, all but pickled in their shared breath. Asgari had spent two years in the federal court system, and five months in the clutches of ICE, all because the F.B.I. had tried and failed to recruit him, and because his visa -- if it really was a visa -- had never been stamped." '

"To win release on supervision, people who had been imprisoned precisely because they were to be deported had first to prove that they weren't flight risks. Their detention is considered to be administrative in nature, not punitive, but they were housed in the same facility as people convicted of crimes."