Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners.
.......... looked at planning board and zoning meetings in nearly 100 Massachusetts cities and towns and found that meeting participants were disproportionately homeowners. Participants were consistently likelier to oppose new housing in their communities. ......... If you add a room for your father-in-law who is moving in with you to help raise your kids or add a home office during a global pandemic, you could receive a penalty in the form of higher taxes since you have made your property more valuable. And if someone turns their garage into an apartment, providing an affordable housing option for their community, they pay higher property taxes than similarly situated neighbors who don’t add housing options to their land. .......... Under a land value tax system, proponents say property owners would be clamoring to be allowed to develop their land more intensely — leading to more homes being built. ........... Taxing land reduces the profit that comes from just owning a piece of property. Instead, you are incentivized to put that land to work. ......... the case of a parking lot charging drivers $40 per day for parking and accruing under $10,000 in property taxes. That parking lot, Grabar writes, sits next to a seven-story building that requires more than a quarter of a million in taxes annually. ....... “You leverage the same toxic local politics that are now creating NIMBY-ism, you leverage for YIMBY-ism because now you have people wanting to build stuff.” ........... In Allentown, Pennsylvania, the system worked! ..... after the city adopted an LVT (through a split-rate system that still kept some property taxes in place) in 1996, “construction returned to the city: the number of taxable building permits surged past neighboring Bethlehem, market investment returned and capital improvement reappeared in city budgets. ... The losers in this trade were absentee owners of vacant lots, who had to shoulder much more of the burden.” ............. “The number of building permits in Allentown has increased by 32 percent from before we had a land tax.” .......... property tax reform is the third rail of American politics ........ “Now we’ve run out of suburbs,” Doucet argued. “We can’t push any further through expansion.” ........ as rents skyrocket, people are desperately searching for radical solutions to America’s housing crisis. .How Putin Wants Russians to See the War in Ukraine Even if his hold on power is precarious, he can still convince Russians that the whole world is conspiring against them. .........
People seem to be tired of Putin
, and Putin seems to feel himself teetering, a Moscow-based analyst of contemporary Russian society said. The outcome could be dire. ............ From most appearances, Moscow is a city at peace. ....... sixty-four hundred detentions since Thursday, in more than a hundred cities. Twenty-eight hundred of these—in fifty-six different cities—were on Sunday, February 27th, on the seventh anniversary of the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. ......... The next time that Yudina saw him, about an hour and a half later, it was in an ambulance outside the police station. “He was in a neck brace,” she told me. “He was covered with dirt—they must have dragged him. He was confused.” Yudin had been in and out of consciousness. When we met on Sunday, at one of those cozy and delicious Moscow restaurants, Yudin still had a swollen eye and a noticeable scrape on his left temple. .........“I think now is a turning point,” he said.
......... “If they can’t secure a military victory—at least take Kyiv and Kharkiv—then Putin will shift to treating U.S. sanctions as a declaration of war. It will be the world against Putin, and Putin will have to raise the stakes—by, say, threatening to lob a nuclear weapon at the center of the world, which he believes is in New York.” ............ “In this new situation, I can’t really imagine that he will be able to maintain his hold on power. On the other hand, we have always underestimated his ability to hang on.” ......... Russian news channels released a short clip of Putin ordering his defense minister, Sergey Shoigu, and head of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov—the two of them sitting next to each other, like two kids summoned to the principal’s office, looking weary and bloated—to raise Russia’s level of nuclear readiness. State television presented the President as confident and decisive, but it seemed apparent Putin felt that he had been misled by his military. “He has clearly miscalculated on at least two counts,” Yudin said. It appears that the generals had promised Putin a blitzkrieg that had already failed. Putin himself, it seems, had imagined that Ukrainians would welcome the Russian military with open arms. “It’s this concept that there is no such thing as Ukraine, an insane idea on which he has based an entire military operation,” Yudin said. Putin appears to have wildly underestimated Ukraine’s military and the Ukrainians’ resolve. .............. Even the shrewdest dictators—which usually means the most paranoid—often come to overestimate their reach, their popularity, and their wisdom. They surround themselves with sycophants, shut out the rest of the world, and usually, sooner or later, make a misstep. Over his twenty-two years at the helm, Putin has winnowed down his circle of interlocutors.In the past two years, fear of covid has forced him into near-total isolation. “This is a huge factor,”
Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a political-analysis show on Russia’s last independent television channel, TV Rain, said. “He is alone with only his most loyal people, who basically live with him—his adjutants, his servants in a way, who make his way of life possible. . . . They are in the same pool, sharing the same vision, and there is nothing else. They, of course, think he is sent by heaven to save the world.” ........... What small ways Putin once had of checking in with outer reality have fallen away during the pandemic. One example is the conference of Russian and foreign political scientists that he has gathered every fall since 2004. But, in 2020, he came to the event only virtually, and last year he isolated himself from the gathering and appeared in person only once, to allow the attendees to ask him questions; he sat on a distant stage, with a moderator who had been quarantining for two weeks. According to Fishman, Putin’s closest advisers, if they request a meeting, must first sequester. ......... Two of my friends went to stock up on nonperishables. Both reported that the supermarkets where they got their toilet paper, coffee, and pasta were otherwise doing normal, slow, daytime business. .......... Russians would very soon feel the combined effects of a precipitous drop in currency prices, Western-export bans, and airspace closures: everything was about to become more expensive and scarce. But economic anxiety requires a sort of consensus of uncertainty, and Russians have been through several economic crashes before: in 1992, 1998, 2008, and 2014. They know that they can survive them. This time, more than ever, they know that their hardship stems from sanctions imposed by the West. The whole world is conspiring against Russia—and that is why, according to Putin, Russia is doing what it’s doing in Ukraine in the first place. ........... Last year, the military banned the use and possession of smartphones by soldiers. A new law that went into effect on February 1st of this year legalized the use of mass graves during wars and states of emergency. These measures may make it easier to hide the real number of military losses, or the fact of any casualties at all. In the first five days of the invasion, Ukrainian sources have reported Russian losses in the thousands; Russians are not releasing numbers. ............ On Monday morning, the newscast on Rossiya, one of the official state channels, contained four headlines: “The U.N. Security Council Has Discussed the Situation in Ukraine”; “The West Continues to Pump Ukraine Full of Arms”; “Refugees from the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic Continue to Arrive in Russian Cities”; “The European Union is Closing Its Airspace to Russians; the Foreign Ministry is Working on Evacuating Russian Citizens.” In other words, the world is ganging up on Russia, which is busy saving its people, who are forced to flee both Ukraine and the European Union. All of this was bland and bloodless; videos showed the Russian representative to the U.N. Security Council, who looked bored and angry, and women and children arriving from eastern Ukraine, who looked tired. .............. “For Russians, even three generations removed from the Second World War, the word ‘war’ is scary. ‘Special operation’ or ‘military operation’ just isn’t.” ........ “Every day of Russia’s war against Ukraine is made possible because there are no real mass antiwar protests in cities of Russia. This is not so much because people are afraid of repercussions… but mostly because the vast majority of the population doesn’t know that the Russian military has been waging full-scale war for the last four days. . . . [If the five headlines on the Yandex home page] were to show something like the truth, that would bring the end of the war closer. If this space were empty, that would also be good, because it might compel people to think and ask questions. But every hour and day that it functions the way it’s working now, it’s supporting the war effort.” .............. His regime, Yudin believes, rests on a hollow kind of legitimacy that it itself manufactures. “People recognize Putin’s authority because they think that the population is behind him. He swings the big stick of this ostensible legitimacy to threaten and subordinate the bureaucrats, the élites, and the people.” ............ when the country holds what it calls elections, bureaucrats are forced, under threat of losing their jobs, to herd state employees to the polls to vote for Putin, who then uses their votes to assert his popularity and his right to continue imposing his will on the very people who just voted for him under duress. ...........The very presence of Ukraine, a familiar society that is developing a different political system, is a threat to Putin.
......... his actions are based on false premises and on bad information, which may break his legitimacy-perpetuation cycle. .......... If a sea change is going to happen again, it may happen now, when Putin has assembled every possible force against himself. ........... the adult Putin identifies with the rat. He is a rat with a nuclear button and a police state at his disposal. If this is the end of his reign, the events that may surround his downfall are chilling to contemplate. .They Called Ukraine Home. But They Faced Violence and Racism When They Tried to Flee . But when Kass reached Lviv in Ukraine’s west near Poland, joining the heaving crowds desperately trying to board trains for safety, she says she encountered hostility from the Ukrainian military, who were dividing people into two groups: those who were white, and those who were not. ......... Groups of Nepalese, Indian and Somalian men described to TIME how they were kicked and beaten with batons by Ukrainian guards who later begrudgingly allowed them to cross over, on foot. ........ Later, when Kass’s train stopped for 17 hours at the Polish border, she says Ukrainian train guards gave out bread and sausages to passengers. But they passed by Kass and her African friends. “By the time it was our turn, they threw us the ends of stale bread,” she says. After spending more than a third of her life in Ukraine, she felt let down. “It was a traumatic experience. ....... Up to 4 million more could flee if the situation deteriorates further ...... Now safely across the border, refugees of color were also dismayed by the continued preferential treatment for Ukrainians in the official Polish response and from ordinary Poles. ........ Muslim was in the final year of his medicine degree in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, where tuition costs $10,000 a year. “The moment we became useless to them, they turned us into bums,” he said. Muslim and Kuretta spent 60 hours in their car at the border pleading with Ukrainian officials—in fluent Russian—to allow them to join the column of vehicles snaking out. ........ support from Poland since the invasion means that Ukrainian nationals can access Polish trains for free, and some medical services. Solidarity between the Slav neighbors, which share a similar language and a border that stretches for more than 300 miles, has extended to villagers lending their bedrooms and homes to total strangers, and volunteers ferrying stranded Ukrainians back and forth from border towns to the larger cities. .......
Parvinder Singh from India said he spent three days waiting to cross the border without food, water, or sleep, while white Ukrainians passed through much more quickly
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'Surprise move': U.S. stunned by Poland's fighter jet offer The announcement came after a week of back-and-forth negotiations about a transfer of fighters to Ukraine. ....... The airspace over Ukraine is still contested, a senior Defense Department official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, with neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians owning the sky. ........ “The Russians continue to fly and also are capable of missile defense — very little of the nation of Ukraine is not covered by some sort of Russian surface-to-air missile capability.” .
Meet the Lithuanian ‘Elves’ Fighting Russian Disinformation . The Yorkshire puppies are a cover for a large, informal community of Lithuanian citizens who, for the past eight years, have been engaged in an ongoing battle against the Russian disinformation that regularly floods Lithuanian media, social and otherwise. The group’s members number in the thousands, and although most keep their identities secret, they include bartenders, doctors, students, businesspeople, and at least one member of the Lithuanian parliament. And although they go by the whimsical name of “elves,” they are a serious part of a broader coalition across different levels of society that have made Lithuania a leader in that other war against Russia: the information war. .......... By reporting the disinformation en masse to the platform they eventually generate enough complaints to have it removed by Facebook. ......... And for all its simplicity, the method has proven effective enough that Lithuania’s Ministry of Defense has recommended it as an alternative to young men eager to join the fight to defend Ukraine but who lack the military experience necessary to do so .......... it has become increasingly clear just how eager the Putin regime is to spread distorted facts, lies, and propaganda in its attempts to destabilize Western nations, secure the loyalty of its own citizens, and further its expansionist ambitions ........ “Every family in Lithuania was touched by Russia’s occupation” .......
“Everything,” she adds, “happens in the information environment first.”
........ “With Crimea, we saw that the mind of the people, their patriotism, had been eaten away by Russia, so it was easier to take the land. If we aren’t prepared here to withstand Russian propaganda, the same could happen here.” .Angry Putin set to 'double down' in Ukraine, intel chiefs warn lawmakers . a picture of an increasingly determined Vladimir Putin set to “double down” on his invasion of Ukraine despite being ill-prepared for the consequences to Russia’s economy and with little prospect for long-term success. ......... “I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now. He's likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties" ....... he has no sustainable political end game in the face of what is going to continue to be fierce resistance from Ukrainians.” ....... Russia has already sustained anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 casualties almost two weeks into the war. ........ Moscow has also bombed dozens of schools and hospitals in a move one official said may meet the criteria for war crimes. ....... Russia has also arrested some 13,000 to 14,000 anti-war protesters at home. .
Ukraine claims Russian general has been killed in Kharkiv
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