“
It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one's own bedroom
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Alfred Jarry
“
She wanted to write to him. Tell him she was glad he was back, that he was alive, that he was home and safe. But words to him no longer fit right in her her mouth.Words which belonged in his ownership were no longer hers to give. Silence was the only acceptable state her heart would grant. He would never know what he missed, because she refused to be heard in his presence. All the words he could have had, all the phrases he might have danced with. The smiles which would have been imprinted upon his heart, would never be. And his lips would never be able to reply to the words she could not say.
”
”
Coco J. Ginger
“
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
“
We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.
”
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Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)
“
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.
”
”
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)
“
For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility.
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Nancy Isenberg (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America)
“
She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most.
”
”
David Nicholls
“
My city. I pondered that phrase, wondered why Barrons felt that way. He never said “our world.” He always said “your world.” But he called Dublin his city. Merely because he’d been in it so long? Or had Barrons, like me, been beguiled by her tawdry grace, fallen for her charm and colorful dualities?
I looked around “my” bookstore. That was what I called it. Did we call the things of our heart our own, whether they were or not?
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Dreamfever (Fever, #4))
“
In order to retain money in savings, you have to feel in your subconscious mind that you deserve to keep the money.
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”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
In his grave, we praise him for his decency - but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.
When he suggested that all men should have a place in the sun - we put a special sanctity on the right of ownership and the privilege of prejudice by maintaining that to deny homes to Negroes was a democratic right.
Now we acknowledge his compassion - but we exercised no compassion of our own. When he asked us to understand that men take to the streets out of anguish and hopelessness and a vision of that dream dying, we bought guns and speculated about roving agitators and subversive conspiracies and demanded law and order.
We felt anger at the effects, but did little to acknowledge the causes. We extol all the virtues of the man - but we chose not to call them virtues before his death.
And now, belatedly, we talk of this man's worth - but the judgement comes late in the day as part of a eulogy when it should have been made a matter of record while he existed as a living force. If we are to lend credence to our mourning, there are acknowledgements that must be made now, albeit belatedly. We must act on the altogether proper assumption that Martin Luther King asked for nothing but that which was his due... He asked only for equality, and it is that which we denied him.
[excerpt from a letter to The Los Angeles Times in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; April 8, 1968
”
”
Rod Serling
“
Ask most people who live in a home and have a mortgage on it whether they own their own home and the answer is almost guaranteed to be a resounding 'yes'. Yet it's the wrong answer. Technically speaking, until they have paid the mortgage off, they don't own it. Herein lies the difference between reality and illusion, between ownership and control. This confusion lies not only at the individual level, but also at the heart of government thinking.
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Dambisa Moyo (How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly- and the Stark Choices Ahead)
“
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.
”
”
Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
“
Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities.
”
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David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
“
Father of the fatherless son, now is the time to take ownership and see your own responsibility in the problem. Do not be a missing mystery. Do not be a fatherless father that covers up his flaws. Own up to it, and be the start of healing the unhealed fatherless son.
”
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Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
“
All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.
”
”
Neal Ascherson (Black Sea)
“
On building homes for fallen angels:
When I was small - I sought a home,
a place to go and rest my bones.
Then founded something, of my own,
I lived among the restless stones.
If seeking leads you back to evil,
what good is that, I asked a weevil.
He said a home is what you make,
it can't be real, if it is fake...
And if you wait instead of seek,
will you find love, or something bleak?
I know (myself) for I have found,
a beauty, hidden – in a sound.
Waiting is boring.
And so is exploring.
A smile is sometimes all it takes.
And then your whole world simply breaks.
”
”
Will Advise (Nothing is here...)
“
New houses, which are crap, because they don’t build them the way they used to anymore. Old houses, which used to be good, because they were built back when they built them the way they used to, but which today, as a result of being old, are crap. So whichever kind of house you own, it’s going to be some variety of crap, which means sooner or later everything in it will break. Dealing with broken things is the essence of home ownership, and it’s exhausting.
”
”
Dave Barry (Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster))
“
Father of the fatherless son, do not underestimate the impact of your physical and emotional absence. Do not limit your role in your son’s life. Be the tools your son needs to help build his present and future. Father of the fatherless son, now is the time to take ownership and see your own responsibility in the problem. Do not be a missing mystery. Do not be a fatherless father that covers up his flaws. Own up to it, and be the start of healing the unhealed fatherless son.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
“
Think of the corporate manager who gets two hundred emails per day and spends his time responding pell-mell to an incoherent press of demands. The way we experience this, often, is as a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly. Yet this same person may find himself checking his email frequently once he gets home or while on vacation. It becomes effortful for him to be fully present while giving his children a bath or taking a meal with his spouse. Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.
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Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction)
“
To the Congress:
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
Both lessons hit home.
Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.
This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.
”
”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“
Learn to enjoy things without owning them. Ownership is nothing, access is everything. Visit a library, a park, or a museum.
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Joshua Becker (Simplify: 7 Guiding Principles to Help Anyone Declutter Their Home and Life)
“
Why was it, he wondered, that those polls that measured well-being focused on income and home ownership and never asked about the view?
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Anne Hillerman (Rock with Wings (Leaphorn and Chee Mysteries))
“
When you leave your old neighborhood for your land, the city streets and businesses will almost instantly fade from your mind. The chirping of birds will replace the yelling of people.
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Norm Geddis (Off the Grid Financed Land Online: The Ultimate Guide to Seller Financed Land Ownership for Homes, Cabins, Hunting, and Investment.)
“
The rapacious white tribe who were arriving in increasing numbers, not only as convicts but also as settlers, wanted to own everything they touched. They slashed and burned the wilderness so that they might graze their sheep and grow their corn. They erected fences around the land they now called their own and which henceforth they were prepared to defend with muskets and sometimes even their lives. They built church steeples and prison walls and homes of granite hewn from the virgin rock and timber cut from the umbrageous mountain forests. They possessed everything upon the island, the wild beasts that grazed upon its surface, the birds that flew over it, the fish that swam in its rushing river torrents and the barking seals resting in the quiet bays and secluded inlets. Everything they thought worthwhile was attached to the notion of ownership.
”
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Bryce Courtenay (The Potato Factory (The Potato Factory, #1))
“
If there is a diamond hidden in some drawer at your home, perhaps you won’t notice until next festive cleaning. If it’s in a hotel room. you will find it immediately after check-in.
You are in the illusion that your body, family. home, office etc. are yours. Because of this illusion of ownership, you are missing so many diamonds that God has given you. See everything from the eyes of a guest, not owner.
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Shunya
“
I feel like I have been Burr in my life as many times as I have been Hamilton. I think we've all had moments where we've seen friends and colleagues zoom past us, either to success, or to marriage, or to home-ownership, while we lingered where we were—broke, single, jobless. And you tell yourself, 'Wait for it.
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Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton: The Revolution)
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The bottom line is that the government has artificially mitigated lenders’ risk, and it has done so on the perverse, altruistic premise that “society” has a moral duty to increase home ownership among low-income Americans.
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Yaron Brook (In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance)
“
The rental income served as a dividend, so to speak, but even at an early age, I focused more on the home appreciation. I came to understand the tax advantages of home ownership, implications of depreciation, and the opportunity to use the homes as leverage in borrowing money.
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Donald J. Trump (Trump: The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received: 100 Top Experts Share Their Strategies)
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Home ownership,and the vast consumption of materials and energy it requires, forces some pretty exploitative foreign policy manoeuvres. This makes people in those resource-rich places as mad as natives were at the practices of the colonial empires exploiting them two hundred years ago.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back)
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From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
“
And by laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.
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”
Jonathan Alter
“
While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched a whole heap of other responses a fourteen years old can't really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn't think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark.
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Bryce Courtenay (The Power of One (The Power of One, #1))
“
This is how we are being governed right now, people.
Six conservative justices.
They're just doing what they want.
And what they want is retrogression,
maintenance of the status quo--
not even the current status quo,
but that
from a hundred years ago.
Small government for gun ownership,
what husbands do to their families inside the home,
and rich people's taxes.
Large government for the rights of everyone else
to breathe, to work, to love, to grow,
to read, to pray or not in their own way,
to think.
Liberty for me, say the privileged white men in charge,
because they can.
And, to keep everyone in their pre-Reconstruction pre-women's-rights place:
Law and order for you.
Liberty for me.
Law and order for you.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
I'm not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.
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Tana French (The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2))
“
Our primary objective in every mortgage transaction should be to borrow in a way that reduces debt, improves financial stability, and helps us get debt free in as short a time as possible!
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”
Dale Vermillion (Navigating the Mortgage Maze: The Simple Truth About Financing Your Home)
“
I had to laugh. I'd set out on this journey home planning to push Billy past the point of endurance, playing on his misplaced feelings of ownership towards me, and five hundred yards from his door I had succeeded.
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Julia Golding (Cat's Cradle (Cat Royal, #6))
“
Federal housing policy has actively encouraged homeownership, from Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act to George W. Bush’s ownership society. But in the Middletowns of the world, homeownership comes at a steep social cost: As jobs disappear in a given area, declining home values trap people in certain neighborhoods. Even if you’d like to move, you can’t, because the bottom has fallen out of the market—you now owe more than any buyer is willing to pay.
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J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
“
To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world.
Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. It takes many subtle forms; and in its self-righteous aspect, it is very obstinate. The desire to "serve" with the unconscious longing to dominate is difficult to understand.
Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those whom we seek to control? To dominate is to use another for self-gratification, and where there is the use of another there is no love. When there is love there is consideration, not only for the children but for every human being. Unless we are deeply touched by the problem, we will never find the right way of education.
Mere technical training inevitably makes for ruthlessness, and to educate our children we must be sensitive to the whole movement of life. What we think, what we do, what we say matters infinitely, because it creates the environment, and the environment either helps or hinders the child.
Obviously, then, those of us who are deeply interested in this problem will have to begin to understand ourselves and thereby help to transform society; we will make it our direct responsability to bring about a new approach to education. If we love our children, will we not find a way of putting an end to war? But if we are merely using the word "love" without substance, then the whole complex problem of human misery will remain.
The way out of this problem lies through ourselves. We must begin to understand our relationship with our fellow men, with nature, with ideas and with things, for without that understanding there is no hope, there is no way out of conflict and suffering. The bringing up of a child requires intelligent observation and care. Experts and their knowledge can never replace the parents' love, but most parents corrupt that love by their own fears and ambitions, which condition and distort the outlook of the child. So few of us are concerned with love, but we are vastly taken up with the appearance of love.
The present educational and social structure does not help the individual towards freedom and integration; and if the parents are at all in earnest and desire that the child shall grow to his fullest integral capacity, they must begin to alter the influence of the home and set about creating schools with the right kind of educators. The influence of the home and that of the school must not be in any way contradictory, so both parents and teachers must re-educate themselves.
The contradiction which so often exists between the private life of the individual and his life as a member of the group creates an endless battle within himself and in his relationships. This conflict is encouraged and sustained through the wrong kind of education, and both governments and organized religions add to the confusion by their contradictory doctrines. The child is divided within himself from the very start, which results in personal and social disasters.
”
”
J. Krishnamurti (Education and the Significance of Life)
“
Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses.
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”
Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye (Vintage International))
“
Because street harassment is perhaps the clearest manifestation of the spectrum of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault that exists within our society. Yes, it starts out small; but allowing those ‘minor’ transgressions gives licence to the more serious ones, and eventually to all-out abuse. We’ve heard the same words and phrases crossing over and echoing and repeating, from women who are shouted at in the street to women who are assaulted and women who are victims of domestic violence in their own homes. The language is the same. And if we say it’s acceptable for men to assume power and ownership over women they don’t know verbally in public, then, like it or not, we’re also saying something much wider about gender relations – something that carries over into our personal relationships and our sexual exchanges. Because this is a line that doesn’t need to be blurred. It should be clear and simple. Take it from the women whose experiences started out with just a little ‘harmless’ street harassment – a sexual ‘compliment’ or a wolf whistle, or a ‘Hey baby’ – but then turned nasty, became full-blown attacks. Ask them what the problem is with a harmless bit of fun.
”
”
Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism)
“
She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today’s Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centred? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn’t such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.
”
”
David Nicholls (One Day)
“
In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village. Houses were considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650s wrote: 'No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither merchants nor paupers.... Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
In fact, because many Americans keep guns in their homes, burglars in the United States spend more time than burgulars in other countries “casing” a house to ensure that nobody is home. As a result, countries with high gun ownership rates experience dramatically fewer break-ins during periods when the residents are at home.22
”
”
John R. Lott Jr. (The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You'Ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong)
“
She becomes accustomed to the notion of home being a small thing. Attainable and compact. In this manner, Weils's home becomes an inch wide, becomes whatever she imagines it might be, whatever she might bring with her. A pillow is home, a book, the sound a car's wheels make when moving through rainwater. Small, intangible moments you might bring to yourself, might claim ownership over.
”
”
Keith Rosson (Fever House (Fever House, #1))
“
The quintessential "self-made man" (and it is almost always a man) is self-sufficient, confident, stoic, righteously industrious, performatively heterosexual, and power. His success is signified through acquisition--home ownership, marriage, and children--and display of taste and things--craft beer and Courvoisier, Teslas and big trucks, bespoke suits and I-don't-care CEO hoodies. On the surface, it looks like that idea has evolved some. We have our Beyonces, Baracks, and Buttigiegs. But that doesn't mean the American Dream has become liberated from its origins or that its promise of freedom is more free. It just means more of us are permitted entry to the club if we do the double duty of conforming to its standards and continuing to meet the ones set for us--women must lean in, queer couples must get married, people of color must be master code-switchers.
”
”
Mia Birdsong (How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community)
“
The right to issue unlimited quantities of anonymously tradable shares, along with the institution of a liquid market for them, created something new: corporations with power so immense, it dwarfed that of their countries of origin, and could be deployed in faraway places assiduously to exploit people and resources. Shareholding and well-governed share markets fired up history, separating ownership from the rest of the East India Company’s activities unleashed a fluid, irresistible force. Unchecked, the East India Company grew more powerful than the British state, answerable only to its shareholders. At home, its bureaucracy corrupted and largely controlled Her majesty’s government. Abroad, its 200,000-strong private army oversaw the destruction of well-functioning economies in Asia and a number of Pacific islands and ensured the systematic exploitation of their peoples.
”
”
Yanis Varoufakis (Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present)
“
With the act of marriage the situation frequently changes fundamentally. The marriage contract gives each partner the exclusive possession of the other's body, feelings, and care. Nobody has to be won over any more, because love has become something one has, a property. The two cease to make the effort to be lovable and to produce love, hence they become boring, and hence their beauty disappears. They are disappointed and puzzled. Are they not the same persons any more? Did they make a mistake in the first place? Each usually seeks the cause of the change in the other and feels defrauded. What they do not see is that they no longer are the same people they were when they were in love with each other; that the error that one can have love has led them to cease loving. Now, instead of loving each other, they settle for owning together what they have: money, social standing, a home, children. Thus, in some cases, the marriage initiated on the basis of love becomes transformed into a friendly ownership, a corporation in which the two egotisms are pooled into one: that of the "family".
”
”
Erich Fromm (To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche)
“
By letting the participants create their own follow-ups and time schedule, I’m trying to create a sense of ownership in them. This principle is known as the “IKEA Effect,” named for the home furnishings retailer whose products are notoriously difficult to assemble. The IKEA Effect states that by forcing consumers to play an active role in the assembly of their dresser or bookshelf, they will value the product more highly than if it were assembled in store.11 In a similar fashion, by creating their own deadlines, employees will be more motivated to meet them.
”
”
Robert C. Pozen (Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours)
“
Having to remind your partner to do something doesn’t take that something off your list. It adds to it. And what’s more, reminding is often unfairly characterized as nagging. (Almost every man interviewed in connection with this project said nagging is what they hate most about being married, but they also admit that they wait for their wives to tell them what to do at home.) It’s not a partnership if only one of you is running the show, which means making the important distinction between delegating tasks and handing off ownership of a task. Ownership belongs to the person who first off remembers to plan, then plans, and then follows through on every aspect of executing the plan and completing the task without reminders. A survey conducted by Bright Horizons—an on-site corporate childcare provider—found that 86 percent of working mothers say they handle the majority of family and household responsibilities, “not just making appointments, but also driving to them and mentally calendaring who needs to be where, and when.” In order to save us from big-time burnout, we need our partners to be more than helpers who carry out instructions that we’ve taken time and energy to think through (and then who blame us when things fall through the cracks). We need our partners to take the lead by consistently picking up a task, or “card”—week after week—and completely taking it off our mental to-do list by doing every aspect of what the card requires. Otherwise we still worry about whether the task is being done as we would do it, or done fully, or done at all—which leaves us still shouldering the mental and emotional load for the “help” or the “favor” we had to ask for. But how do we get our partners to take that initiative and own every aspect of a household or childcare responsibility without being (nudge, nudge) told what to do? Or, to simply figure it out?
”
”
Eve Rodsky (Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live))
“
Many a time when he “took hold” to smash a strike, or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, [Manderson] sent ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless than they . . . Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.
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E.C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case (Philip Trent, #1))
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The benefits of gun ownership have generally gone ignored in medical journals that have studied gun ownership, what is called the public health literature. There is no mention that widespread gun ownership deters criminals from breaking into homes. There is no mention that gun ownership helps protect residents from harm in the event of a break-in, or that mass public shooters consistently attack gun-free zones where they don’t have to worry about victims being able to defend themselves. And gun owners—contrary to what the media advises—should not unquestioningly store their guns locked and unloaded. That defeats the purpose of being ready at a moment’s notice.
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John R. Lott Jr. (The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies)
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To really be free of fear involves being free of the feeling of any personal responsibility of ownership for everything - even of our body. If we feel that we are a separate individual who personally owns or possesses even just a body, fear will hound us.
What we feel we own is felt to be personal and what is felt to be personal is felt to be separate from others and life, and then fear seems warranted.
But when nothing is experienced as personal then nothing is felt to be separate and fear falls away.
So regardless of how much money, if any, we have in the bank and how many material possessions we own, each of us is invited to the deeper surrender of ‘owning without owning’.
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Dhyana Stanley (The Human Experience Is The Dance Of Heaven And Earth: A Call Home To Peace)
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For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres.
But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.
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Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies)
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In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?
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David Limbaugh (Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why The Democrats Must Not Win)
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Some employees were offered jobs in Georgia, but few took up the offer to relocate. They had houses and mortgages, and the real estate market was already grim, thanks to the closing of two smaller mills the year before. True, people weren’t sure how they’d pay those mortgages now, but they had kids in school and family nearby that might be able to help a little, and many irrationally clung to the possibility that the mill might reopen under new ownership. They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving, and because for a while at least they’d be able to draw unemployment benefits. Others remained out of pride. When the realization dawned that they were the victims of corporate greed and global economic forces, they said, okay, sure, fine, they’d been fools but they would not, by God, be run out of the town their grandparents and parents had grown up in and called home.
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Richard Russo (Empire Falls: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
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…Understood that a will is not enough to protect you and your loved ones. …Had a revocable living trust with an incapacity clause. …Transferred ownership of your assets into the trust. …Created a backup will. …Updated the beneficiaries on all your assets. …Understood the safest way to hold title to your home. …Had an advance directive and a durable power of attorney for health care. …Reviewed your critical documents once a year.
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Suze Orman (Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny)
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The most important modification that must be made to a standard analysis of incentives is salience. Do the choosers actually notice the incentives they face? In free markets, the answer is usually yes, but in important cases the answer is no. Consider the example of members of an urban family deciding whether to buy a car. Suppose their choices are to take taxis and public transportation or to spend ten thousand dollars to buy a used car, which they can park on the street in front of their home. The only salient costs of owning this car will be the weekly stops at the gas station, occasional repair bills, and a yearly insurance bill. The opportunity cost of the ten thousand dollars is likely to be neglected. (In other words, once they purchase the car, they tend to forget about the ten thousand dollars and stop treating it as money that could have been spent on something else.) In contrast, every time the family uses a taxi the cost will be in their face, with the meter clicking every few blocks. So a behavioral analysis of the incentives of car ownership will predict that people will underweight the opportunity costs of car ownership, and possibly other less salient aspects such as depreciation, and may overweight the very salient costs of using a taxi.* An analysis of choice architecture systems must make similar adjustments.
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Richard H. Thaler (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness)
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Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired wealth and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the "self-fulfilling prophecies" of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
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Melvin Oliver (Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality)
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Is one's homeland the place where a person evolves into life, or is that a choice made in adulthood, as one chooses a fateful name? Perhaps it is also your memory, Father Raven,that plays tricks on me, and the land that was given to my mind's eye is not all the homeland where our ancestors lived. Am I entitled to call my island "home," even though I do not live in it permanently? Even though from sun cycle to sun cycle it becomes more of a dream? I am flooded with another person's nostalgia, captive to the visions that insist on visiting me.
A fictitious homeland. A longed-for land that never was.
If land is not property, then anywhere may be considered a homeland, and the Jewish tribe may therefore adopt the island even without a deed of ownership. The Jew is free to settle in whichever land he desires. Why, then does he insist on drawing borders for himself, when he has already managed to obtain a measure of power that I will never achieve? Perhaps that is the Jewish tribe's virtue: they have turned their foreignness into a javelin.
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Nava Semel (Isra-Isle)
“
His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana.
His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest.
In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time.
He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.
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Hank Bracker
“
Pages 85-87:
Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a laborer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labor was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty laborer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…
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J.S. Furnivall (Colonial Policy And Practice)
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Emilia 3: Was I a trawl of fish or stack of hay? Was I meat? What else was there for me now? His hook in me digs deeper, burrows further into my flesh so that it can assert it's ownership over my body. He has covered all inches of me. While he discusses what to do with my future. His seed is busy making home of my now. What were these feelings growing in me? The flutterings of a tiny creature making himself known or was it something else? It was a strange feeling indeed. A growing sense of unease.
Emilia 2: A flickering flame. Heat.
Emilia 3: I felt heat. Of something starting. Something that has lain quiet and still for some time. Held down. Buried. And this unspeakable action by my lord has awakended it somehow. I knew that I would marry that man but no longer for my love.
Emilia 2: I did it for my child.
Emilia 3: For me? I would begin to fan this flame so as to see how bright it would burn.
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Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (Emilia (Oberon Modern Plays))
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2018 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper14 looked at data from four million people in eighty lower-income countries and found that TV ownership was associated with a 6 percent drop in likelihood that a couple had had sex in the previous week. And, interestingly, the decline in the sexual frequency of married couples discussed earlier in the chapter started in about 2000, just as broadband Internet was reaching most homes. “The No. 1 recommendation that every sex therapist will give is to get the technology out of the bedroom,” says Canadian sex researcher (a lot of sex researchers are Canadian) Lori Brotto. “The bedroom really should just be saved for two things and two things only.” When your focus in bed is on a screen, it cannot be on your partner. And if your partner is trying to get your attention, it’s disheartening to be ignored for a slab of glass and microprocessors. Dismay and horniness cancel each other out.
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Belinda Luscombe (Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together)
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This story is not being told as much as it should be. In the late ’70s, the spread [or difference in interest rates] between mortgages at the consumer level and the 10-year US Treasury bond was about 450 basis points, or four and a half percent. Through securitization, we brought down that spread to about 150 basis points, or one and a half percent. When you think about the savings of America and the mechanism for home ownership, securitization was a foundational reason why more Americans were able to buy homes.III Changes to government-influenced underwriting characteristics, which first occurred in 2004, focused on having more people have home ownership and on reducing down payments. The result was that individuals with lower-quality credit would be able to get mortgages that previously would not have been available to them. These were typically called “subprime mortgages.” That led to the financial crisis. The structure of mortgage-backed securities remained strong and good and helpful for society. All good things, if not properly governed, can lead to bad outcomes. That’s what really happened.
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David M. Rubenstein (How to Invest: Masters on the Craft)
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Time to breed now,” I pant against her ear, instinct taking control of my body, my actions, my words. I’m an animal operating on pure adrenaline and it wants ownership. Wants to own her, claim her forever. Forever. “You’re going to have a big, round belly and I’m going to worship it. Worship you, my perfect girl. My fucking queen. Open up and let me get the deepest I’ve been. Come on. You want this. You want to have my child. Let Daddy breed you, Cindy. It’s coming now. Lie still and welcome it home. Here comes my seed.
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Jessa Kane (Coaxing the Roughneck)
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Not owning a home from your twenties onward is a big red flag that a person is not financially competent!
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Steven Magee
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Federal funding of the interstate highways, whose routes often deliberately tore through communities of color, literally paved the way for white flight. At the same time, federally guaranteed mortgages issued by the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration made home ownership accessible to millions of Americans living in neighborhoods that were restricted to whites through overt measures such as restrictive covenants (contracts signed by property owners in all-white neighborhoods prohibiting the sale of homes to nonwhites) and through the stealthy acts of realtors and neighbors.
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Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
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Civic life too begins at home, allowing us to plant roots and take ownership over our community, participate in local politics, and reach out to neighbors in a spirit of solidarity and generosity.
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
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Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves.
Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.'
As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.'
The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.
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Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
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We opened this information up to build feelings of trust and ownership in our employees, in the hope of getting the same reaction from the workforce as Jack Stack did. And it worked. I closed that umbrella, and no one complained. Since then all financial results, as well as just about any information that Netflix competitors would love to get their hands on, has been available to all of our employees. Most notable is the four-page “Strategy Bets” document on the home page of the company’s intranet.
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Reed Hastings (No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention)
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Maybe I do what I do because I’ve never believed in ownership. I feel as though everyone is on borrowed time and everything is borrowed. Nothing in our lives is long term, so why do you feel you need ownership over items? Letting go of the notion that you have to own something and keep everything forever will make you feel so much better.
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Dilly Carter (Change Your Space: Reclaim Your Home, Your Time and Your Mind)
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In short, there is no reason to believe that the authors of the Second Amendment thought it had anything to do with private ownership of arms or the personal use of guns, such as hunting or defense of the home.
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Robert A. Goldwin (From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constutition)
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This is an asset I can leverage with good debt, the property covers all operational expenses, improvements, insurance, taxes, and debt while I patiently wait for the rents to increase and the value of the property then appreciates at which point we sell or refinance and own the property with no money invested. I never deviate from this criteria. I invest my surplus cash into income-producing machines, in great locations, where the rent is less than the cost of home ownership, and I am buying at or below replacement cost. When I do invest, I buy very large deals, typically 200 to 1,000 units at a time, in markets with decades of projected job growth, and market demographics more likely to rent than own.
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Grant Cardone (How To Create Wealth Investing In Real Estate: How to Build Wealth with Multi-Family Real Estate)
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Tonight, romance and softness will be scarce, so when it happens, I'll hold it close to my heart. Never forgetting that even in moments of ecstasy, there is something deeper between us. Belonging. Home. Ownership. A forever.
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CC Monroe (Her Halloween Desires: A Her Shadows His Secrets Novella)
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I have no doubt that my parents would have relished having more time as my primary family, the people I thought of as *home.* They could have chosen to disapprove of or resent me when I made choices that they did not anticipate, choices that kept me far away form them. But their love for me was never about ownership, or control, or whether I followed the path they expected. They were grateful that Dan and I had found each other, and they weren't afraid that we would struggle, because they themselves had not experienced a life free from struggle. *We're lucky,* my father said in his wedding toast, *to get to witness your love and commitment. We can't wait to see the life you'll build together.* They never saw me as choosing one kind of family over another, one dream or one life over another. They could not imagine a future in which I did not pursue everything I wanted.
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Nicole Chung (A Living Remedy: A Memoir)
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Many of my parents’ friends own more than one house, sometimes so many that whole dwellings sit unused and empty for years. And so it’s an odd contradiction that they often seem to get stuck on the most minute details when it comes to renovations. My hypothesis is that this is a way to feel the thrill of ownership come to life again. It’s polishing the already gilded lily.
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I.M. Millennial (A Year in Boomertown: A Memoir)
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My father had a master plan. He told me, “My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That’s two houses. That son gets his own house, that’s three houses …” The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed.
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Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye)
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For spring and summer, Dina baked delicate and light pastries fragranced with rosewater, meskouta orange bundt cake, and delicate raspberry macarons. When strawberries were in season in early June, she made airy fraisier cake. For autumn and winter, Dina worked with heavier ingredients: thick, dark chocolate, cinnamon, cardamom, gingerbread, and pumpkin. As the days grew colder and the light dimmed earlier and earlier, people started to crave that feeling of warmth and comfort. And Dina would give that to them, even if only for a short while. One special bake for this season was a ginger and persimmon cake, yellowed with saffron strands, which Dina had bought on her last trip to Morocco, and fresh vanilla pods, their sweet scent so potent that it wafted across the café.
This was in addition to all the regular pastries and cakes she had on offer, which were all recipes her mother had taught her to bake. The cake made with dark honey from the Atlas mountains was an all-time customer favorite. Dina had imbibed it with a very specific spell, a childhood memory of a time that she must have fallen asleep on a car ride home, and although she was a little too big to be carried, she remembered her father lifting her into his arms, her mother closing the car door softly so as not to wake her, then carrying her upstairs and tucking her into bed.
When she'd been fashioning the spell for the first time, it had occurred to Dina that one day your parents put you down and they never picked you up again, and so she'd made the honey cake to recreate that feeling of childhood comfort. That sensation of someone taking the utmost care of you, holding you close, was a feeling that many in the rushing city of London didn't experience often.
Sometimes she wondered if she was really in the business of café ownership, or if she was more of a fairy godmother in disguise. Undeniably, the magical pastries were great at keeping customers coming back for more, so that was a bonus on the businesswoman side of things.
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Nadia El-Fassi (Best Hex Ever)
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If you fully convert your home to rental property and use it that way for years before selling it, after you do sell you can either take advantage of the lower long-term capital gains rates or do a tax deferred exchange. For tax purposes, you get to deduct depreciation and all of the write-offs during the ownership and you can shelter up to $25,000 in income from active sources subject to income eligibility requirements. (Please
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Eric Tyson (Real Estate Investing For Dummies)
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I wonder who in their right mind thought I was mature enough for this: motherhood, home ownership, a career, adulthood in general. I hope I have them all fooled, that I have any clue at all what I’m doing.
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Cassandra Dunn (The Art of Adapting)
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Progressives needed a new idea, and Alinsky came up with one: force banks and financial institutions to loan money to unqualified applicants so that they can buy homes. Alinsky’s own idea was to terrorize the banks by having thousands of activists walk into banks and open up accounts of one dollar each, in effect paralyzing the bank’s normal operations. This became the model for a number of leftist groups that took up the cause of bank intimidation, notably an Alinskyite organization called ACORN. The ideological justification for this tactic was “social justice.” Starting in the 1970s, ACORN and other leftist groups protested that banks were “discriminating” against poor and minority home loan applicants. Even though such applicants had less wealth, less income, and less reliable credit histories, these groups insisted that banks should lower their lending standards to accommodate them. According to these activists, home ownership was a “right” and getting a mortgage to buy a home was a matter of “fairness.” In 1977, a liberal Democratic Congress obligingly passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed into law, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This law, aggressively promoted by liberal icons like Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator William Proxmire, imposed on banks an “affirmative obligation” to make loans in their own neighborhoods, even if those neighborhoods were poor credit risks.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
“
For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased 130 square feet on which to grow Swedish strawberries. “The land didn’t cost more than four rubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,” wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: “Now it’s war!” And war it certainly was—all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerin Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marveled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany. And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Czar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans…. So “Now it’s war!” was right.
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Jonas Jonasson (The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man #1))
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Don’t make the mistake of considering poverty a disease for which we must find a cure. It is a social condition, not an illness. Poverty does not kill people, but its effects might.” “Angels dancing on a pin, Dr. Pasca?” “Not at all. Think it through. If we allow people to consider poverty an illness, then they will happily relegate it to the rarified air of laboratories and specialists and asylums instead of keeping it right where it belongs—in their own parlors and sitting rooms. They will expect you and me to find its cure instead of seeing that all of us have the responsibility to rectify the deplorable conditions in which many people live. Never take ownership of poverty, Doctor.
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Karen J. Hasley (Where Home Is (The Laramie Series, #3))
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the ideological defense of “private property” is both vague and misleading. The seizure, or even abolition of private property doesn’t refer to the water bottles or homes that many of us have purchased; private property in the context of anti-capitalist politics refers to the ownership by bosses and landlords of the resources people need to survive. Most people have no access to the tools and supplies required to build their own furniture, provide all their own food, or maintain a home entirely on their own. In a capitalist society, we depend on the market to provide these for us in exchange for money. We work waged jobs, where we receive only a portion of the value we add to the commodities we produce, and go into debt in order to afford them. When anti-capitalists talk about private property, they’re not referring to the possessions consumers have purchased in order to live; they’re referring to those possessions that the wealthy have accumulated in order to rent or sell to those who must work a waged job to survive.
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Anonymous
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Home ownership is equated with the American dream—but what do we do? What we are encouraged to do by family, friends, banks, and politicians? We are encouraged to take out a mortgage for 30 years. This isn’t home ownership, but rather voluntary servitude that imprisons us in a job or occupation.
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Conrad Cooper (Own Less & Live More: A sailing adventure that takes you from the cubical to Key West)
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Private Ownership of coal-mines! Private Ownership of sealed-up entrances and non-existent escape-ways! Private Ownership of fans which did not start, of sprinklers which did not sprinkle. Private Ownership of clubs and revolvers, and of thugs and ex-convicts to use them, driving away rescuers and shutting up agonised widows and orphans in their homes! Oh, the serene and well-fed priests of Private Ownership, chanting in academic halls the praises of the bloody Demon!
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Upton Sinclair (King Coal: A Novel)
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Money begets more money. And what happens when you become really wealthy is that you get into investing. Though most Americans’ net worth is tied up in their homes, the very wealthy hold a majority of their wealth in stocks and private businesses. In fact, the top 10 percent of households in the United States own 84 percent of all stocks, while the bottom 50 percent own just 0.5 percent. This disparity in stock ownership has widened in recent years, with the top 1 percent of households owning 53 percent of all stocks as of 2020.
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Kyla Scanlon (In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work)
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Relationships are tricky and always changing. Successfully clibing the prefessional ladder is just one more variable that can make them that much more complicated. Knowing how to hold the boundaries between your personal life and your professional life isn't just about getting ahead, it's about maintaining some joy while you do so. It 's about keeping your relationsips intact on both sides of the line. Conquering your career can feel like a lonely business, so you'll need your people by your side - at home and at work
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Lauren Wesley Wilson (What Do You Need?: How Women of Color Can Take Ownership of Their Careers to Accelerate Their Path to Success)
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He had been a struggling real estate developer living in the home his parents had bought back in the early ‘80’s when home ownership was still attainable with hard work.
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Gary Ballard (Under the Amoral Bridge (The Bridge Chronicles, #1))
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The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties. These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property. Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.
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Richard M. Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences)
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A geographical palimpsest can be described as a place that has shifted purposes over a vast period of time. From Indigenous communities to Spanish settlers to Euro-American pothunters to Anglo land-grabbers to Nuevomexicana/o homesteaders to an elite boys’ school to the Manhattan Project to the current national laboratory, the space has changed ownership and function since around 1600 CE, when the Pueblo peoples atop the plateau abandoned their homes.
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Myrriah Gómez (Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos)
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The final stretch to finding me would be allowing that eight-year-old girl in, actively inviting her into every moment of my current existence to experience the joy she so longed for, letting her taste what it means to feel truly alive. The destination is finding a home for her. A place of peace where the past does not envelop the Viola of NOW, where I have ownership of my story.
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Viola Davis (Finding Me)
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Touching unnoticed objects reactivates your sense of
ownership. Reactivating ownership makes it harder to let go.
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Annie Eklöv (Help! My Room Exploded: How to Simplify Your Home to Reduce ADHD Symptoms)
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1. The Negro Must Learn To Put First Things First. The First Things Are: Education; Development of Character Traits; A Trade and Home Ownership.
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Taleeb Starkes (The Un-Civil War: BLACKS vs NIGGERS: Confronting the Subculture Within the African-American Community)
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The ubiquity of housing ownership in Singapore means that there is a widespread belief that real security can only come from home ownership.
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Teo You Yenn
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Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall
Quoting page 85-87:
Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…
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J. S. Furnivall
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She was tired of shuffling around, of living in spaces owned by other people— a landlord would just be another man to whom she was beholden.
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Sarah Perry (After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search)
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Class divisions were firmly entrenched. The ever-widening gap in land ownership elevated large planters into a small, privileged faction. At the same time, the labor system reduced servants to debt slaves, and, living so far from home, they had little recourse to demand better treatment. Isolation, then, increased the potential for abuse. The only liberty for colonial servants came with their feet—by running away. Jamestown’s founders reproduced no English villages. Instead, they fashioned a ruthless class order.
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Nancy Isenberg (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America)
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stockpiling of goods, runs on banks, and widespread urban discontent. This put Zhao seriously on the political defensive and under attack from the conservative Old Guard. Over the summer of 1988 a comprehensive plan to control inflation and stabilize the overheated economy was worked out by senior leaders Yao Yilin and Li Peng, as well as State Council think tank economists—which was presented to the Third Plenum of the Thirteenth Central Committee in September. As a result, prices were frozen, foreign trade was recentralized, a very tight fiscal policy forced on state banks, investment controls were put in place, and capital construction halted. Zhao himself came in for six-and-a-half hours of harsh criticism and was forced to make a self-criticism. This was the all-important backdrop to the dramatic demonstrations of the spring of 1989 (which were triggered by economic discontent as much as by political demands). Among the many other economic reforms stimulated during Deng’s tenure, two others deserve brief mention. The first concerned changes in the ownership structure, and the second concerned efforts to establish a regulatory structure (as distinct from an administrative structure) for qualitative oversight of economic activity. With regard to the first, a key part of creating the hybrid state-collective-private economy that Deng and his colleagues envisioned necessitated the creation of truly private enterprises and private ownership.56 Citizens in both rural and urban areas were permitted to purchase long-term leaseholds on property (often their homes) and to pass it from generation to generation. Another example of
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David Shambaugh (China's Leaders: From Mao to Now)
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Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect they do it to annoy. One knows, after all, that they lead lives of their own: plant the lily bulb in the center of the bed and watch it come up under a brick near the edge; pull up a sick little bush and throw it on the compost heap, and ten to one, it will obstinately revive. Usually, though, gardening failures, like airplane crashes, are the result of 'human error', of not reading the directions or paying attention.
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Eleanor Perényi (Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (Modern Library Gardening))