Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced.
Cattle barons carved up Texas with barbed wire in the late 19th century, separating poor farmers and landless cowboys from vital resources for their struggling cattle herds. So the cowboys formed fence-cutting gangs to preserve the open range.
After acquiring some of the biggest and most coveted parcels of land in Vancouver, the city’s three First Nations are becoming players in the biggest game in town — real estate.
We need a model of ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, avoids the costs of private exploitation by individual firms, and does not slip into authoritarian forms of state control.
“We’ve got to be able to pass Schools and Communities First, as one measure, and then come back with another measure, and another, so that we make the rich pay their fair share.”
The Proposition 15 ballot measure aims to hike commercial tax rates and potentially raise billions to support funding for schools and other public infrastructure.
As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.
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