#Francesea Mari, "A Lonely Occupation," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "Los Angeles has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city, according to the U.C.L.A. Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Renting isn't any easier." A 2016 report found that 365,000 white neighborhoods in L.A. currently don't have an adult with enough income to pay the rent.
"Braden Crooks, a co-founder of Designing the We, a design and social-impact studio that has staged exhibits on redlining throughout the country, told [Francesea Mari]: "But, because of this wealth destruction, people lost ownership and are mostly renters... you don't see the speculative investment that's pouring back into urban and redlined neighborhoods, lifting everyone's boats. You see it washing them away."
#Nathan Heller, "The Back Office," The New Yorker, December 7, 2020. - "Over the past twenty years, the number of people in the U.S. employed as executive secretaries and administrative assistants has more than halved, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which expects assistantship across industries to decline nine per cent by 2029."
"Lately, some companies have sought to shift the burdens of a struggling American middle class to workers in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere." "Offshore outsourcing, which included fourteen million workers in 2018, has been linked to unemployment and wage stagnation in the American workforce: it's harder to get a raise if your competition abroad works for much less."
"In Silicon Valley, the conventional wisdom is that companies must grow quickly and focus on a narrow band of the market (often called 'going vertical')."
Larry Deblings, letter writer in the December 7, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, who writes: "I agree that Putin looks like a genius in the end. Trump has done more subversive damage to U.S. institutions, and to fundamental principles of democracy than any network of Russian agents could have achieved."
#Daniel Immcerichs, "Forts Everywhere," The Nation, December 14-21, 2020. - "US planes and drones, meanwhile, fill the skies, and since 2015 have killed more than 5,000 people (and possibly as many as 12,000) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen." "Classifying military engagements can be tricky, but arguably there have been only two years in the past seven and a half decades when the United States was not invading or fighting in some foreign country."
"Today, there are more than 400 populated places in the United States whose name contains the word 'fort.' "
"There is nothing natural about a country maintaining an enormous system of military bases in other nations. "Fewer overseas outposts would mean fewer provocations for foreign anger, fewer targets for attacks, and fewer inducements for Washington to solve its problems by using force."
"In his previous book, David Vine, author of 'A Global History of Ameri's Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic State', calculated that overseas bases cost taxpayers more than $70 billion annually."
#Bill Gifford, "Red State Rebellion," Mother Jones, January + February 2021. - "Consider this: Utah voters not only approved medical marijuana in 2018, they also passed ballot measures calling for Medicaid expansion and independent redistricting, two major progressive priorities. However, tax reform passed by the state legislature was so transparently rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else that even Utah's generally Republican voters rebelled. Within weeks, organizers on both the left and the right had gathered more than enough signatures to compel a ballot measure repealing the tax reform. The legislature folded immediately and repealed the bill it had just passed."
"A Gallup poll ranked Salt Lake City among the 10 gayest cities in America."
"Key to understanding Utah's confusion is that its legislature is more religious and hardline than the state itself, and the gulf continues to widen." "Year after year, abortion dominates the legislative agenda, despite a recent poll conducted by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood indicating that 80 percent of Utahans feel that abortion is already sufficiently or overly restricted in the state."
"Utah is one of 18 states hurrying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would render Medicaid expansion moot."
#W.J. Hennigan, "Lost in the pandemic," TIME, November 30/December 7, 2020. - "Hart Island is a graveyard of last resort. Since 1869, New York City has owned and operated this potter's field -- the largest in the country. City workers put unidentified corpses in simple wooden coffins, load them onto a ferry, and entomb them in trenches across the island."
"Over a century and a half, more than a million people have been buried in unmarked graves on the island, including from past epidemics like tuberculosis, the 1918 flu and AIDS."
#Casey Cap, "Demon-Driven," The New Yorker, November 30, 2020. - "In a letter for the editor of a newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, [William Faulkner] suggested that justice was delivered by juries and lynch mobs alike, and that no innocent man of any race had ever been lynched. In an article for 'Life' magazine, he seemed to equate the N.A.A,C.P. with the white supremacist Citizens Council, and opposed what he called the 'compulsory integration of the South by the North.' He told the New York 'Herald Tribune' that he longed for the return of the benefits of slavery, in which 'Negros would be better off because they'd have someone to look after them.' "
"Though much historical fiction is escapist, Faulkner is brutalizing, depicting a South debased first by degeneracy, and then by the refusal to atone for it in the face of defeat. A novelist born a full generation after the end of the Confederacy insists that he would have no choice but to repeat the racist and cessation violence of his ancestors..."
#Addition to: Elie Mystal, "Supreme Injustice," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. "The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which sounds like it was named by a 6-year-old just getting hooked on phonics) dropped the tax penalty for the individual mandate to zero. With that part of the law gone, conservatives now return to the Supreme Court, arguing that, without the individual mandate they themselves killed, the entire heath care law can no longer be considered a tax and thus is unconstitutional."
"Unfortunately, religious conservatives are not content to practice their faith peacefully and without government interference." "Their long-germ culture war involves forcing the government to endorse discrimination and bigotry in the name of Jesus. They're turned to the free exercise clause of the First Amendment --which is supposed to be a shield to protect people from government prohibitions of their religious practices -- into a sword they want the government to use to strike out against the LGBTQ community and secular norms. But as it stands, the religious right has a supermajority on the Court that is eager to endorse the notion that free exercise is a tool to eviscerate the distinction between church and state."
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