(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.)
***
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.
***
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.
******
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.
*****
“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.
***
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.”
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
*****
“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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