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Globalization helps drive these patterns to new extremes. Money flows into suburbs like San Marino and Palos Verdes, where Asian immigrants buy up expensive properties and generously donate their time and money to the local schools. Money flows out of poorer suburbs like South Gate, Bell and Huntington Park, all heavily Latino, where disposable income is tight and many families export remittances to a home country. New poverty builds upon old impoverishment. Infrastructure is stretched as renters crowd into dwellings that were modest to begin with. The toxic footprint of departed industries is left behind for new residents to contend with.

Many of Los Angeles’s middling suburbs have also slipped, especially those ravaged by plant closures since the 1980s. The southern section of blue-collar suburbs was hit especially hard. Here, suburbia transformed from comfortable communities housing unionized workers with well-paying jobs in local factories that gave them access to a middle-class lifestyle to fiscally strained communities housing immigrants working in low-paying, nonunion jobs.

Outer suburbs have fared little better. As home costs skyrocketed in recent decades, families chased “affordable” housing to the exurbs. They took on outsize mortgages and monster commutes, and they took with them congested roads, smog and sprawl. Compounding these strains, tax revenues lagged behind the cost of schools, roads, parks and libraries — the very infrastructure necessary to sustain middle-class life. This edifice came crashing down in the recession.

Policies to redress suburban inequality must focus not only on factors like income but also on tax equity across metro areas and regional planning that fairly distributes resources and responsibilities (like affordable housing). We should limit the mortgage-interest deduction for second homes and for values above the regional median. These steps would reduce distortions that inflate housing prices and concentrate wealth in what are already wealthy places.

the real America is, in fact, a nation of metropolitan areas, not small towns.

two-thirds of Americans live in metro areas with half-a-million or more residents.

we are, objectively, the most class-ridden nation in the Western world — the country where children of the wealthy are most likely to inherit their parents’ status. It’s also a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite.

Almost none of us are farmers; few of us hunt; by and large, we sit in cubicles on weekdays and visit shopping malls on our days off.

We’re no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation; we’re only around half-Protestant; and we’re increasingly nonwhite.

America remains uniquely democratic in its mannerisms, in the way people from different classes interact.

we are still, at root, a nation that believes in democracy, even if we don’t always act on that belief.

The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals

In March, 32 people died in neighbouring Belgium when suicide blasts hit Brussels airport and a metro station. So-called Islamic State said it was behind both the Paris and Brussels attacks.

The attacks could hit tourist sites, restaurants, commercial centres and transportation, it warns, with large events such as Euro 2016 singled out. @media only screen and (min-width: 1px) { .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: none; } .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 100%; padding: 0; } } @media only screen and (min-width: 480px) { .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 40%; padding: 0.5em; } .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: url(http://news.files.bbci.co.uk/vj/live/idt-images/data_pic-Euro_2016_data/marseille_r13sr.jpg); } } .ie8 .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 40%; padding: 0.5em; } .ie8 .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: url(http://news.files.bbci.co.uk/vj/live/idt-images/data_pic-Euro_2016_data/marseille_r13sr.jpg); }

An unnamed US official told the Reuters news agency they had no particular threat information that gave rise to the latest alert.

More than 90,000 police, soldiers and private security agents are being deployed as well.

The third teacher had written a letter of recommendation to a college for the boy who made the swastika. She contacted the college and explained why she was withdrawing her endorsement. A school district disciplinary committee decided last week to suspend the teacher without pay for saying why she had rescinded the letter, according to the teachers union. 

The punishments followed a complaint made to the superintendent by the mother of the boy who made the swastika.

between $2 billion and $3 billion.

In 2003, governor Mitt Romney shelved the project as too expensive, and its fate seemed sealed. But aggressive lobbying from supporters, including US Representative Seth Moulton and former governors Michael Dukakis and Bill Weld, has brought the proposal back into the public conversation

The MBTA faces chronic budget woes and is already seeking to build a $2.3 billion Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford, a project that has been delayed over rising cost estimates.

“North South Rail Link has the potential to fuel the growth of our economy and connect people with both jobs and housing across the state,” Moulton said Wednesday. The state needs to invest in transportation infrastructure to remain globally competitive, he added.

“You have to understand that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the commuter rail lines in the north and the south to not be connected,” he said

The results are not just suburban sprawl, which Atlanta is hardly the only city to suffer from; another result is widening income inequality—which Atlanta leads the nation in, by the way—since sprawl creates a dearth of close-in affordable housing and forces poor people spend a larger portion of their income on transportation

In 1970, just 8 percent of families in Boston and the surrounding cities and towns lived in the poorest neighborhoods. Now, the figure is more than twice as high — 20 percent

Blue- and white-collar families who once lived close enough to bump into each other in the aisles of the local hardware store or chat in the pews of the neighborhood church live in much more homogenous places now.

a Harvard social scientist, argues that the biggest threat to national cohesion is not the income inequality that has drawn so much scrutiny from the news media and the political class, but the social segregation that inequality has helped to create — in where people live, where they go to school, and whom they marry.

Low-income people bear the brunt of the new segregation. Research shows that poor kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods attend college at lower rates, earn less money as young adults, and are more likely to become teenage parents than poor kids who grow up in better-off neighborhoods.

the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

After having her first child as a teenager, marrying young and divorcing, Ms. Dougherty had faced bleak prospects. But she had gotten safety-net support — most crucially, taxpayer-funded tuition breaks to attend community college, where she’d earned her nursing degree.

She landed a steady job at a nearby dialysis center and remarried. But this didn’t make her a lasting supporter of safety-net programs like those that helped her. Instead, Ms. Dougherty had become a staunch opponent of them. She was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display at the dialysis center

“People waltz in when they want to,” she said, explaining that, in her opinion, there was too little asked of patients. There was nothing that said “‘You’re getting a great benefit here, why not put in a little bit yourself.’ ” At least when she got her tuition help, she said, she had to keep up her grades. “When you’re getting assistance, there should be hoops to jump through so that you’re paying a price for your behavior,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”

these voters are consciously opting against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good for other people — specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients who live nearby.

Where opposition to the social safety net has long been fed by the specter of undeserving inner-city African-Americans — think of Ronald Reagan’s notorious “welfare queen” — in places like Pike County it’s fueled, more and more, by people’s resentment over rising dependency they see among their own neighbors, even their own families.

This political disconnect among lower-income Americans has huge ramifications — polls find nonvoters are far more likely to favor spending on the poor and on government services than are voters, and the gap grows even larger among poor nonvoters

THAT pattern is right in line with surveys, which show a decades-long decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens. There has been a particularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans,

researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University, found a tendency by many Americans in the second lowest quintile of the income ladder — the working or lower-middle class — to dissociate themselves from those at the bottom, where many once resided. “There’s this virulent social distancing — suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person,” said Professor Edin. “They’re playing to the middle fifth and saying, ‘I’m not those people.’ ”

Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012; also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.

The political upshot is plain, Mr. Cauley added. “It’s not the people on the draw that’s voting against” the Democrats, he said. “It’s everyone else.”

low turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state’s Obamacare gains wouldn’t help Democrats. “I remember being in the room when Jennings was asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences of displacing 400,000-500,000 people who have insurance,” State Auditor Adam Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a Louisville journalist. “And he simply said, ‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’

Republicans, of course, would argue that the shift in their direction among voters slightly higher up the ladder is the natural progression of things — people recognize that government programs are prolonging the economic doldrums and that Republicans have a better economic program.

it means redoubling efforts to mobilize the people who benefit from the programs. This is no easy task with the rural poor, who are much more geographically scattered than their urban counterparts. Not helping matters in this regard is the decline of local institutions like labor unions — while the United Mine Workers of America once drove turnout in coal country, today there is not a single unionized mine still operating in Kentucky.

it also means reckoning with the other half of the dynamic — finding ways to reduce the resentment that those slightly higher on the income ladder feel toward dependency in their midst. One way to do this is to make sure the programs are as tightly administered as possible. Instances of fraud and abuse are far rarer than welfare opponents would have one believe, but it only takes a few glaring instances to create a lasting impression

The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the rise,

Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries

Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening

This is a central theme of the political writer John Judis’s excellent and compact book “The Nationalist Revival,” published this fall

Judis sees the rise of nationalism as a reaction to “the illusions and excesses of globalization.” By unleashing footloose capital and undercutting national and even international efforts to regulate the economy in the public interest, globalization “is incompatible with social democracy in Europe or with New Deal liberalism in the United States.”

He proposes a useful distinction between “globalism” and “internationalism.” He’s against the first but for the second

friends of liberal democracy need to keep two ideas in mind at the same time.

Internationalism, on the other hand, accepts that nations may sometimes have to “cede part of their sovereignty to international or regional bodies to address problems they could not adequately address on their own.”

critics of Trumpism need to recognize the ways in which globalism undercuts the rights and fortunes of large numbers of democratic citizens. The dispossessed often turn to nationalism for relief against their own sense of powerlessness.

Thinking about powerlessness is also important for understanding the backlash against immigration

there is nothing new (or necessarily indecent) about citizens saying that nations have a right to control their borders and to decide what levels of immigration they want to accept at any given time.

The challenge for the left and for all advocates of humane immigration policies is to move the debate from angry abstractions about “open borders” and toward a practical engagement with basic questions:

What level of immigration is optimal at this moment for the nation as a whole? What will it take to reach a consensus for creating a path toward citizenship for immigrants who are here illegally? And how do we build a stronger civic culture that acknowledges the rights but also the duties of the native-born and immigrants alike?

Globalism, Judis argues, “subordinates nations and national governments to market forces or to the priorities of multinational corporations.

On the one side, they should not automatically cast those who worry about the decay of national sovereignty as reactionaries. On the other, they must continue to insist — and urgently so in 2019 — that American patriotism and the defense of constitutional democracy are one and the same.

Parents deploy their wealth to make their children look interesting and have the right “talents.” It works: Children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend elite colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.  

For the super-rich, the legal scam of buying your child a spot at an elite school through, say, giving a building is a secret so open it’s hardly a secret at all

I spoke to someone who’d worked in development at a boarding school that had long served as a feeder to the Ivy League. At the time he told me that to get into an Ivy school, you need to give about $5 million.

They may not even be able to talk about this: It’s become standard to require admissions officers to sign nondisclosure agreements. 

Kushner has objected that he graduated from Harvard with honors, but since about 90 percent of his class did, too, that hardly proves he was more deserving of admission than people whose families didn’t have $2.5 million to give. 

while Harvard accepted about 11 percent of applicants in the late 1990s, when Kushner was admitted (the admission rate is lower now), more than half of the members of the Harvard Committee on University Resources — made up of some of the school’s biggest donors — had children then at the university, and many had sent more than one there.

Based on my research, I’d bet that there are orders of magnitude more students at elite colleges who took the “philanthropy” route to admission rather than the bribery one.

the true tragedy is that almost all rich families buy their kids into elite colleges by purchasing advantages they pass off as talents, whether by way of sailing lessons or elaborate vacations planned with an eye on admissions essays. We view these vastly overrepresented children of the rich as having earned their spots. And that’s the great American delusion we call “meritocracy.” 

My parents gave me a lot I’m enormously grateful for: violin lessons that cost thousands of dollars a year, trips to museums and sites in foreign countries. My boarding-school classmates enjoyed much more: prestigious unpaid internships, interview coaching and tutors who helped with the work of every class.

This is the real scandal. The 1 percent — more than 1 million American households — have more and more money, and they’re using huge sums so their children can get a leg up on the rest

Those students escape questions about whether they deserve to be there, unlike people who benefit from programs like affirmative action, which could help moderate those advantages. Instead of thinking about this as a problem inherent in the system, we call it the virtue of meritocracy. And we look to the poor and middle classes and ask, “Why aren’t you more talented?”

Mr. Yun predicts sales will remain flat for all of 2018, due to inventory shortages and eroding affordability, as both prices and mortgage rates rise.

A homeowner with a median-priced home in the San Francisco area will receive $4,500 less in housing-related tax benefits in the first year of a 30-year mortgage this year, according to real-estate data company Apartment List. A homeowner in the same position in the New York metro area would receive $1,500 less annually.

Weakness at the high end is being driven by stock market volatility and the $10,000 cap the tax bill placed on deducting state and local property taxes

“People are being a little more cautious than they were before,” Mr. Glazer said. “Buyers have a number in mind, and they’re willing to stick their ground more than in the past.”

Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in Silicon Valley, said she has seen a pickup in activity in recent weeks as buyers and sellers have digested the implications of the tax bill. Buyers are putting down larger down payments to bring the size of their mortgages below the new $750,000 cap. But that could be a challenge if the stock market continues to fluctuate, because buyers might want to hold on to more of their cash

s. Masching said she is also hearing more from older buyers who are thinking about selling their homes and using the proceeds to retire out of state, prompted in part by the changes to the tax law

“I’m hoping it’s going to be better. We never got any inventory last year,” said Ms. Masching. “The big concern for our sellers is: Where are they going to go?”

Rhian Daniel, a 50 year old who works for a medical startup, and his wife have been looking for a home for about four years, both in the Bay Area and further afield. The couple have largely given up for the moment, and are considering eventually moving to a place like Dallas, with lower home prices and property taxes.

Mr. Daniel’s wife is a therapist, and they both have student debt that limits the size of the mortgage they can get.

People have to understand that when we overrun our healthcare – our hospitals – that people will still come in with heart attacks, people will still have car accidents. These things that happen every day on top of Covid-19 will make our healthcare system collapse in the same way that you’re seeing that happen in New York and you’re seeing it happen across the globe,”

Until Wednesday morning, Georgia also had the fourth-highest death toll of coronavirus patients, until Louisiana’s cases soared. With over half a dozen Georgia hospitals shutting down during the past decade across rural communities, much of the state’s healthcare has been lacking. In 2017, a study found Georgia had one of the worst healthcare systems in the country, ranking it 49th for access.