Sheelah Kolhatkar, "Trailer-Park Trades", The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "In Iowa, park owners can choose whether to accept Section 8 vouchers --which are distributed to 5.2 million Americans -- and many, including the owner of Table Mound, do not, citing the administrative burden." In the U.S., approximately twenty million people, -- many of them senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities -- live in mobile homes, which are also known as manufactured housing."
"Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, and the author of the book, 'Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Fight to Place,' told me that mobile home parks now compose one of the largest sources of nonsubsidized low-income housing in the country." "According to a report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, there isn't a single American state in which a person working full-time for minimum wage can afford a one-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent." "Whereas traditional homeownership can form the basis for intergenerational wealth, mobile homes depreciate in value, like cars or motorboats."
" 'In many cases, residents have invested forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars into the homes,' he [John Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholders Project], said. 'There is such a strong incentive to pay, because are you going to walk away from the home that you put your retirement into?' " Baker was referring to a situation in which another company purchased the trailer-park, jacked up the rent, and began charging for services which had once been free.
"Trailer-parks first sprang up in the nineteen-twenties, as campgrounds designed to attract wealthy tourists." [The Mobile Home University Web site reads] "Mobile homes are the only segment of real estate that grows stronger as the economy only weakens." "Residents can be evicted for no reason, provided that park owners give them sixty days notice." A staffer in the Iowa Senate has said: "The entire chapter on manufactured-housing tenant law is absolutely obscene." "People who own their manufactured homes have little to no rights once they have put them on rental property."
#Sara Laterman, "The Argument," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "Stripping a person of their legal rights is inherently dangerous and dehumanizing . Guardianship is built on the patronizing assumption that people with certain disabilities are incapable of being full citizens, and need a nondisabled person to act as their proxy in all things." "According to AARP, about 1.3 million Americans are currently under guardianship."
"Supported decision-making is a system in which trusted advisers --usually family members, friends, or caseworkers -- explain complex choices to help a disabled person make their own decisions."
#David Bromwich, "No Offense," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "But sanctions, whether the target is Russia or Iran, hurt people more than governments. Nor do they lead people to love the country that infects the pain." "It would be interesting to learn how the racially enlightened 'New York Times,' 'Washington Post,' CNNN, PBS, and MSNBC align their rigorous reporting on the sufferings of nonwhite US residents at the hands of police with their largely uncritical treatment of thousands of nameless foreigners."
#Nathan Newman, "Perverting the Fifth," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - So if the Supreme Court is bothering to take the case [on March 22, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on an appeal from a corporate firm seeking to void California regulations giving union organizers access to its property to talk to farmworkers. The case is 'Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid'] "There's a reasonable likelihood that, with Barrett, there are now five justices ready to overturn the lower courts, and move forward with the most radical economic goals of the legal conservative movement." "As an alternative, the legal conservative holy grail has been for the courts to insist that the government compensate corporations when its regulations overreach on their property; this is what conservative legal scholars call unconstitutional 'regulatory takings.' "
"The plaintiff has invaded the key area where the court has found Fifth Amendment violations, namely where government policy mandates permanent physical change or access to private property, such as installing cable equipment, extracting walls, bike lanes, or beach access paths. The goal is to have even 'temporary physical invasions' --such as the limited periods when union organizers are permitted access to nonwork areas to talk to farmworkers -- declared unconstitutional takings as well."
"Notably, federal labor law has granted nonemployee union organizers access to mining and logging camps and other nonpublic locations without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment." "Now, despite the extensive precedents justifying California's farmworker union regulations, there's nothing to stop the current court's majority from overriding them all and opening the door to a torrent of radical new decisions."
#Mike Davis, "American Book of the Dead," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "According to a recent, widely publicized report in 'The Lancet,' about 40 percent of our Covid-19 mortality could have been averted had the US death rate mirrored the weighted average of the G7 nations." "Trump not only sabotaged and discredited the efforts of public health officials, but did so with an obvious political purpose: to expand a right-wing base already built on the foundations of climate denialism, religious superstition, and the perception that most scientists are the servants of secretive elites."
#Amanda Petrusich, "Merging Lanes," The New Yorker, The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "What we mean by 'pop' or 'jazz' or 'country' changes regularly; genre is not a static, immovable idea but a reflection of an audience's assumptions and wants at a certain point in time." "What makes something country is often just as much about what the audience for the genre expects it to be, as it is the chord progression, instruments, time signature, or lyrical content."
[Ehren Pflugfelder, a professor of writing at Oregon State University] believes that: "Black artists should be sold to Black consumers (these were often called 'race records'), and white artists to white consumers."
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