United States (US)

This is jaw-dropping:

Ultimately government leaders’ actions — or inaction — could shape Boston’s identity for decades, experts say.

“The next generation is in trouble, unless they have wealthy parents who can help,” said economist Barry Bluestone, professor emeritus at Northeastern University.

“We have some housing for the very poor,” built with the help of state and federal subsidies, Bluestone said. “And there’s more than enough for the very wealthy. But everybody in between — the working and middle class — is just being priced out of the city at a faster and faster pace. And those are the people who, let’s be honest, make the city.”

[…] 

It is often hard to tell who owns high-end US real estate, as affluent people frequently buy property through shell companies that protect their transactions’ confidentiality. It’s even harder to know how many buyers actually reside in such residences.

At One Dalton, about 15 percent of the building’s 171 units remain unsold, four years after the building opened, according to city and state records as of Sept. 25. Griffin, the spokesperson for One Dalton’s developer, said that although numerous units are unsold, some are not being marketed at this time.

Meanwhile almost two-thirds of One Dalton buyers are limited liability corporations, trusts, or other entities that can enable owners to obscure their identities.

There is no definitive way to tell how many residents sleep there, or for how many days a year. But there is this suggestive indicator: Only 16 percent of One Dalton’s units have owners who filed for a residential tax exemption, affirming that it was their primary home, city records show.

In a bizarre new article titled “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught but sees few options,” The Washington Post reports that the Biden administration believes Israel has gone too far and is killing too many civilians in its assault on Gaza, but are powerless to do anything about it.

[…] 

In summary, this Washington Post article is telling us that Biden is powerless to stop the genocidal massacre in Gaza because he really likes the people doing the genocide and doesn’t want to stop them from doing it.

We’ve been asked to believe a lot of very stupid things since this onslaught began last month, but the idea that the Biden administration is powerless to stop a genocide that it is directly arming and supplying has got to be the absolute stupidest.

Blaming Russia, or third party candidates who never poll in significant numbers for the election of Trump and the rise of Christian fascism, is infantile. The Libertarian Party received 1.2 percent of the vote in the last presidential election. The Greens, 0.26 percent. The death blow to democracy is not those who vote for fringe parties, but apathy. Eighty million eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election, no doubt because they did not expect much to change in their lives whoever was in office. And they were probably right.

The root cause of our political distress lies with a liberal class that places corporate and personal profit above the common good. Liberals have conspired, since the presidency of Bill Clinton, to strip the country of manufacturing, and with it, jobs that sustained the working class. They have been partners in the transformation of democratic institutions into tools to consolidate the power and wealth of corporations and the ruling oligarchs. They forgot the fundamental lesson of fascism. Fascism is always the bastard child of bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in Italy. It was true in the former Yugoslavia with its warring ethnic factions. And it is true in the United States. 

Last September, New York resident Tara Rule posted a raw, emotional video on Tiktok saying she had been denied a medication to treat a debilitating condition called cluster headaches, because her neurologist told her she was of “childbearing age” and the medication could cause birth defects to a hypothetical fetus.

Rule said that as she sat in her neurologist’s office at Glens Falls Hospital, she told him she never planned to have kids and would have an abortion if she became pregnant; referencing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, he responded that getting the care she was seeking is “trickier now with the way things are going.” He also said she should bring her partner “in on the conversation” on her medical care. Rule asked if the issue preventing her from getting the “highly effective” medication was solely that she could become pregnant and, “If I was, like, through menopause, would [the medication] be very effective for cluster headaches?” The doctor affirmed it would. He also asked about her sex life and whether she’s “with a steady person.” Rule shared audio recordings of the appointment on TikTok at the time.