Exclusive: Obama Regime Declares War on Tenant Rights

(Note: occasionally I still get a chance to do some original reporting, which in days of yore was my most award-winning skill. The following is a genuine scoop. I offered its first refusal rights to Marc Ash at Reader Supported News, but his response was to ignore my query. Hence I'm breaking the story here. Perhaps other media will pick it up and give it the widespread dissemination it deserves.)

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IN A STARTLING reversal of public policy, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has sided with a national landlord lobby that seeks to add the expense of bed-bug extermination – and possibly of all pest control – to tenants' already-soaring housing costs.

The move by HUD may be the first documented instance in which a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was able to reach directly into the Obama Administration to obtain a nearly immediate favor – a favor that is hugely beneficial to landlords and potentially so ruinous to clients it could result in a nationwide wave of evictions.

It may also be another blow against the Democrats' dwindling prospects for success  in the November congressional elections. That's because HUD's new anti-tenant stance is sure to further inflame President Obama's critics on the Left, who already accuse him of deliberately concealing Republican ideology beneath a Democratic disguise. 

HUD says its rental facilities shelter about 1.2 million households.  Based on the 2010, two-persons-per-apartment demographics of Manhattan,  where virtually everyone is an apartment dweller, the new HUD policy probably impacts at least 2.4 million people – approximately as many women, men and children as live in Chicago, Kiev or Rome. 

The agency's departure from its long-established pro-tenant policies was revealed during a recent Network for Public Health Law web-seminar entitled “Addressing Bed Bugs through Law: Challenges and Limitations.” The network's post-webinar report cites two official HUD documents that reveal the agency's new opposition to tenant rights – rights that, in many cases, have long been recognized by law. 

“In Notice H-2011-20,” says the Network report, “HUD provided guidance to owners, management agents, and tenants of HUD multifamily insured and assisted properties for bed bug infestations. HUD urged owners to develop an Integrated Pest Management Plan (IMP) and to actively engage residents in efforts to prevent bed bugs. The notice set out a timeframe for responding to a tenant’s bed bug complaint and prohibited the owner from charging a tenant to cover the cost of bed bug treatment. An owner was also prohibited from denying tenancy to a potential resident on the basis of the tenant having experienced a prior bed bug infestation.”

“Eight months later,” the report continues, “HUD issued Notice H-2012-5 to supersede H-2011-20, which eliminated the “tenants rights and responsibilities” section, including the timeframe for responding to a tenant’s complaint, the prohibition on charging tenants for bed bug treatment, and the prohibition on denying tenancy to a potential resident because of a prior bed bug problem. 

“The National Multi Housing Council (NMHC), which represents owners, claims that HUD made these revisions at its urging and Congressional pressure, because the original guidance created confusion about best management practices, hamstrung the efforts of owners and property managers to prevent infestations and failed to meaningfully address the financial issues to the owner and resident related to repeat infestations. In contrast, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) says the change eliminates important tenant protections and allows landlords to shift the cost of bed bug treatment to tenants.” 

Such costs, the public health law network estimates, can run as high as $1,500 to each tenant or tenant family – a sum that for lower-income people is devastating if not impossible, a potential precursor to bankruptcy, eviction and homelessness. 

Meanwhile, landlord response to a bed-bug infestation near Seattle, where tenants are being forced to pay the costs of extermination, is validating NLIHC's concerns. 

Equally alarming to tenants is the fact an NMHC document states landlords can now “treat resident's possessions as part of an Integrated Pest Management Program (IPM).” This means – just as has reportedly occurred in the Seattle case – landlords can invoke pest-control rights to confiscate or force tenants to destroy cherished books, artwork, furniture, photo albums, collections of phonograph records and any number of other items that might be deemed bed-bug-infested or capable of harboring such an infestation.

Moreover, NLICH says the new notice allows owners of HUD housing to “take action to deny tenancy or remove residents for causes related to infestations” – in other words, to evict tenants at will, presumably bypassing any legal protections against unjust or retaliatory eviction. 

While HUD's new anti-tenant stance has not yet been publicly acknowledged as the beginning of a campaign to require tenants to pay all pest-control costs, some health and housing professionals say privately they believe it might be just that. At the very least, they say, it's part of the ongoing national effort to minimize or abolish tenant rights. 

That this is so is suggested by the implicit ALEC involvement. ALEC is an arch-conservative organization that seeks to rewrite U.S. laws at all levels – federal, state and local – to favor the ruling One Percent by imposing additional burdens and disadvantages on everyone else. And NMHC is listed as an ALEC member. 

In this context, HUD's favorable stance toward NMHC – proven by the fact the lobbying effort bore fruit within eight months – is a significant revelation of the Obama Administration's internal ideology. So is the boast on the NMHC document cited above: that it took only two letters from Tea Party-identified congressmen to prompt HUD to reverse its former pro-tenant-rights stance. The letters, to Obama-appointed HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, were written by Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill) and Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio).

 

Though Dold was not reelected in 2012, he is running for the office again this year. His ideology and Tea-Party connections are described here and here. Stivers' Tea-Party politics are discussed here. 

The Tea Party itself, the controlling faction within the Republican Party, is sustained by lavish funding from rich industrialists and businessmen,  as well as the tobacco industry. But the Tea Party's constituency spans the entire hard-right spectrum, ranging from Wall Street and Big Business to Christian theocrats and white supremacists – and now apparently to the Obama Administration's inner circle as well. 

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Additional Notes:

(1)-HUD's policy-reversal is likely to (further) devastate Democratic Party chances in the November elections. Firstly, the afflicted people, mostly lower-income and/or minority urbanites who are a substantial demographic in progressive politics, are now (again) told – this time with unmistakable ferocity – the Democrats have turned against them and no longer want their votes. Secondly, local Democratic Party politicians who have remained faithful to the humanitarian principles of the New Deal are now (again) besmirched by association with by a national party that is increasingly right-wing and thus increasingly indistinguishable from its Republican counterpart. Voter turnout will suffer, and the flight of alienated voters to third parties will (again) be accelerated. Indeed, it seems Obama and his national Democratic apparatus is determined to facilitate Republican victory in the U.S. Senate, reinforce Republican domination of the House and foster Republican triumph at state and local levels as well. 

(2)-A HUD policy-reversal of this magnitude – particularly given its dire implications for the fall congressional elections – would have required upper-echelon White House staff approval, if not approval by the president himself. Therefore it is not unfair to regard it as yet another example of the t the president's obviously premeditated shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, and his historically unprecedented Big Lie of “change we can believe in.” 

(3)-The new HUD policy and its context – landlords seizing upon the bed-bug plague to nullify tenants' rights – is a classic example of shock-doctrine capitalism in action. Quoth Naomi Klein: “That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster...puts the entire population into a state of collective shock...Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.” (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company: 2007; pg. 17.) It's precisely how Shock-Doctrine Obama,  HUD and the landlords are using the shock of the bed-bug plague to force tenants to give up their right to landlord-provided pest control. Which of course makes the HUD properties with their disempowered tenants all the more attractive for sale to real estate profiteers. 

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Outside Agitation Outside the Notebook: three contributions to discussion threads on timely stories published by other websites:

“Crimea River, Obama's Ukrainian Blunder” Mike Whitney of CounterPunch exposes an USian Empire effort to destabilize the Crimea by insertion of Turkish-based Jihadists to inflame tensions between the secular and/or Christian majority and Tatar Muslims. Predictable denunciations by Russophobes – yes, even on Reader Supported News – prompt me to defend Whitney's work in some detail:

Firstly, non-propagandized information about the Ukrainian Crisis is available from three English-language sources besides RSN. These are Socialist Alternative; Socialist World.Net, the publication of SA's parent organization the Committee for a Workers International; and the older World Socialist Website, any or all of which Google.

 

Secondly, Mr. Whitney's analysis has to be evaluated as probably true because it applies Occam's Razor to the reported data, cleaving its tangles and assembling its diverse strands into a coherent whole that makes sense both in terms of traditional Russian foreign policy and the One Percent's plan for global enslavement that is now the core of US foreign policy.

 

Thirdly, the notion of flying squads of US-backed Jihadist mercenaries operating out of the ever-more-viciously theocratic US client-state Turkey makes sense in that it explains how the democratic impulses of the Arab Spring were so quickly perverted into zero-tolerance Islamic theocracy. (The One Percent deems Abrahamic theocracy vital to sustain capitalist tyranny.)

 

Lastly, the pending imposition of austerity on Ukraine – see the publications cited above – is sure to trigger revolution. Given Western Ukrainian history, this will likely be violent, fascist and genocidally anti-Russian. Putin is moving accordingly, much as US presidents always move to smash any socialist revolution south of the US border.

 

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“Republicans Seize Edge in the Fight for the Senate Majority” Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post reports on the election result most of us now recognize as unavoidable and all of us fear. (Yeah, I linked to this same piece in OAN's lead story.) When the Obamanoids continue their vehement defense of the indefensible, and one poster attacks my stance as “moral bankruptcy,” the Muse hands me the perfect response, slightly edited for republication here:

You conveniently forget that when I vote my conscience, I condemn myself to the same "damnation" you claim I would inflict on "millions of Americans."

 

As to “enabling the far-right,” the history of the Democratic Party since 22 November 1963 – Vietnam; welfare “reform”; deregulation; “free” trade; total surveillance; other nullifications of the constitution; the forever deaths of the Employee Free Choice Act and of public-option health insurance; etc. ad nauseam – speaks for itself...

 

By your “logic,” to resist oppression is to be guilty of "moral bankruptcy” if and when said resistance results in hurt or inconvenience to others.

 

Thus by the same "logic," one must suppose you would accuse the World War II anti-Nazi resistance of “moral bankruptcy,” since defiance by these inconceivably heroic men and women provoked unspeakable retaliatory atrocities by the Nazis: Google Oradour-sur-Glane, or Lidice, or Zina Portnova.

 

What a wonderfully “moral” rationale you have established for collaboration with an enemy.

 

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Earlier on the same thread I had explained the real reason for the impending Republican landslide, Democratic acts of betrayal further underscored by the HUD policy-change on which I reported above: 

What is fueling the Republican triumph is not the popularity of their unabashedly fascist policies but rather the electorate's anger...The voters are profoundly bitter...the Democrats are now identified as the party of the Big Lie.

 

I hear it repeatedly: “At least the Republicans are honest about what they stand for.”

 

“Yeah,” I reply. “They stand for killing all of us who are poor and disabled. They stand for slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They stand for ending food stamps and cutting off unemployment compensation.”

 

“The Democrats wanna do the same thing,” comes the inevitable rejoinder. “Only difference is the Democrats hide their intentions with lies.”

 

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I had also pointed out the ugliest truth about Obamacare: 

If you knew anything about the Affordable Care Act, you would understand what a monumental betrayal it is.

 

What it does is create the illusion of access to health care.

 

In truth it is structured so that actual care remains unaffordable for most of the (ever-more-poorly paid) 99 Percent.

 

The function ACA thus serves is truly diabolical.

 

When a person is forced to choose between food and shelter or health care, chooses the former and dies as a result, it enables the Ruling Class to blame the victim: "s/he chose to eat and avoid homelessness rather than to get treatment; hence s/he chose to die."

 

ACA's huge unpopularity is not just because of Republican propaganda -- it's because so many of us are now forced to pay our insurance-company slavemasters thousands of dollars a year for policies the staggering deductibles and co-pays prohibit us from ever using.

 

Such is life and death in the United States – the only industrialized nation on earth wherein health care remains a privilege of wealth rather than a civil right.

 

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But what really inflamed the Obamanoids was my (painfully accurate) description of USian political reality: 

With USian elections already a sham – with fascism triumphing no matter which half of the One Party of Two Names wins – the question of "getting enough votes to win" is a false question.

 

We the People have already lost. We lost our freedom when we surrendered to the coup of 22 November 1963. We lost any chance of ever regaining our freedom when we allowed the assassins to murder every other leader who might have saved us from ourselves.

 

Since then it's never been more than a choice between two fascist evils – the honestly evil Republicans and the dishonestly evil Democrats.

 

In this wretched context, the only non-evil choice is to vote my conscience – and for however many years I have left, that's exactly what I am going to do.

 

If more of us would do just that, democratic socialism – the only form of governance that's implicitly humanitarian – might yet have a chance.

 

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Thus my recognition of the live-free-or-die necessity of a viable alternative:

In this dread context, the only thing that can save us is the emergence of a overwhelmingly powerful third party – for example, Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant's Socialist Alternative, albeit on steroids.

 

If that doesn't happen, we're doomed to live the remainder of our lives under fascist tyranny.

 

And it won't be just fascism. It will be fascism combined with fanatical Christian theocracy, enforced by the most formidable surveillance, military and secret-police apparatus our species has ever known.

 

That's why I'm damn thankful I'm old.

 

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“Robert Reich: Elizabeth Warren or I Could Run for President in 2016” Aaron Blake of The Washington Post gave me a unique opportunity to describe what has emerged as the key difference between Democrats and Republicans: 

The Republicans openly declare their fascism and govern accordingly.

 

By contrast, the Democrats lie. They get elected by pretending to be progressives, then govern like fascists, thereby rendering our votes meaningless.

 

LB/23 March 2014 

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