Censorship on the USian Left: Is Truthout Now in Pre-Election, Anything-to-Protect-the-Democrats Mode?

UNTIL LAST WEEK I had – past tense – a long and pleasant relationship with the website Truthout. As a former member of the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, I applauded its decision to grant its employees guild representation, and as a former news editor and editor-in-chief, I am both impressed and moved by the unique facts-with-feelings reportorial style of Maya Schenwar, who is Truthout's executive director and probably its best writer as well. I had posted on the site's comment threads for many years, and only one of my comments had ever been suppressed – that by Truthout's comment-server Discus, which does not allow posters to link to their own blogs unless the blogs themselves have achieved the status of mainstream journalism. And Discus did let me repost the material as soon as I had removed the link.

But last week Truthout – not Discus (as the message that suddenly appeared on my post maybe five minutes after I had uploaded it made clear) – deleted the following:

The huge flaw in Obamacare is that it creates the illusion of insurance – precisely what it was intended to do – while imposing a structure of co-payments  and deductibles that are prohibitively expensive. Daily Kos provides a good basic explanation of how it works. 

If you're a member of the One Percent or the petit bourgeoisie, those co-pays and deductibles are of no concern even if you choose the least expensive plan. But if you're unemployed, or chronically impoverished, or disabled, you may well be worse off than before: forced by law to buy insurance from the for-profit insurance barons, but prohibited by co-pays and deductibles from ever actually getting health care. Indeed I know several younger people who are so afflicted – not surprising since by any reasonable standard, half the U.S. population is now impoverished.

 

Here, of course, is the truly obscene windfall profit Obama handed his insurance-barony benefactors: not just the all the new policy-holders, but all the policy-holders who will never be able to afford to use their insurance: pure profit for the profiteers, exactly as our closet-Republican president obviously promised them.

Medicare is a similar scam. If one is well off, Medicare is wonderful. The co-pays are 20 percent, the deductible is $1,000 per year. But if one is destitute, as I have been since 2009, Medicare is a nightmare of deprivation unless one (A) supplements it with what used to be called Medicare Plus (an LBJ idea made real by the Clinton Administration, then seized by Bush, restructured and renamed Medicare Advantage, with the advantage going to the for-profit insurors at the expense of non-profits); and (B) is willing to endure the loss of freedom and dignity attendant on becoming an oppressed subject of the welfare system  in return for Medicaid supplements.

(Yes, contrary to one of the bigger of the many Affordable Care Act Big Lies, Medicaid IS welfare, with all the restrictions and humiliations attendant thereupon.  And for those of us us who are elderly, it is not even a grant. It is instead a loan that will be repaid by the seizure of our meager estates – including all our personal property [books, tools, etc.] – after we're dead.) 

The common policy-thread through all this is retention of the Ayn-Rand/healthcare-as-a-privilege-of-wealth savagery that is the defining characteristic of the U.S. system. Go to a civilized country, there are no co-pays or deductibles.  But – note again the example of Medicare – we'll never see anything that humanitarian here even under a public-option plan, which we'll never be allowed anyway: not as long as the Citizens United decision remains in force – and the only way that will be overturned is by revolution.

The censored comment was my response to another poster, who asked me to clarify my stance on the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. The question's context was a discussion prompted by a Thom Hartmann exposé entitled “Is Rick Scott Guilty of Murder?” In it, Hartmann revealed how the Florida governor's refusal to allow a federally funded expansion of Medicaid had seemingly killed a young woman by denying her the care that might have sustained her life.

My original remarks had focused neither on Scott nor the dead woman but on the austerity policies that are being inflicted on us by both halves of the One Party of Two Names:

The purpose of austerity – no matter whether blatantly imposed by Republicans or stealthily imposed by Democrats – is genocide: specifically the extermination of those of us who are poor, chronically unemployed, disabled, elderly or otherwise unexploitable for maximum capitalist profit.

Yes, it is an outrage Charlene Dill was murdered by denial of health care. But she was slain not just by Republican policies in Florida. She was also killed by the endlessly more damning fact that – thanks to Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer and Democrat treachery in general – the United States remains the only industrialized nation on this planet in which health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

Nor is that too harsh a judgment. Obama and the Democrats promised us public-option health insurance. But they were lying. Once their deceptions had won them the White House and control of both houses of Congress, their (premeditated) treachery insured the savagery of health care as a privilege of wealth is now eternally locked into place. It is – and will be for as long as the USian Empire survives – now sustained by Obama's permanent elimination of all public-option alternatives, which has indentured us forever to the for-profit insurance barons. So much for "change we can believe in" – the biggest Big Lie of USian presidential history.

In this context, the most bitter truth of Charlotte Dill's death is that it is merely (another) deadly example of capitalism in action. It is a microcosm of Bhopal, of Bangladesh, of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 123 woman and 23 men on this very day 103 years ago.

The lesson taught us by Charlotte Dill – if we but had the courage to heed it – is the same lesson we should have been taught by the unspeakable sound of human bodies hitting the pavement of Washington Place below the Asch Building in Manhattan on the afternoon of 25 March 1911. Until we eliminate capitalism – which is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (literally the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever set forth) – such atrocities will continue unabated.

As Neil Young so memorably said to honor Allison Krause,  who was yet another of capitalism's victims, "what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?"

Later, when my accurate summary of Obamacare's most damning truths was deleted, I again addressed the poster who had asked me to clarify my position:

I responded to your question politely, truthfully and in some detail, but Truthout suppressed it. (No, not Discus; the notice specifically said Truthout.) Apparently – with the Republicans heading for a landslide victory in November (not that it will make life in the USian Imperial Homeland that much worse) – Truthout is now in do-anything-to-protect-the-Democrats mode, even unto suppressing unpleasant truths about the Affordable Care Act. Obviously I have become persona non grata here, so this will be my last post on this website. Indeed I'm not even sure you'll be allowed to see this. But if you are, and you're curious about what was censored, Google my name, then after next Monday you can read it in my blog. 

Yes, Truthout allowed that post to live – as if its censors were quite proud of how they had helped the Democratic Party in its ongoing campaign to suppress the ugly truths about the unprecedented rip-off sarcastically known as Obamacare.

******

Outside Agitation Outside the Notebook: Because today is my 74th birthday and the sun is shining – a rare phenomenon in the coastal Pacific Northwest at this time of year – I am not going to spend my usual 10 or 15 hours assembling this week's column. Instead I am going to merely post the headlines of and links to the reports on which I commented, plus of course the main comments themselves. These, with the notable exception of the next item, all focus on a common theme: Obama the Orator's ongoing shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the results of which include the Ukrainian Crisis and its threat of World War III, the government's self-imposed disadvantage in Hobby-Lobby case (which greatly bolsters the probability it will further abolish women's reproductive rights), and the regime of unprecedented censorship and secrecy by which We the People are now afflicted.

Indeed it seems Obama intends to spend his second term giving us all the finger. His fuck-you, break-all-promises policies ever-more-defiantly serve his Ruling Class masters. His treachery is wrecking the Democratic Party and inflaming white racism into an unprecedented barrier against minority aspirations. He's ensuring not just Republican dominance for years to come, but the irreversible transmogrification of the United States into a fascist (and almost certainly neo-Nazi) empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. In other words, he's doing exactly what the One Percenters hired him to do.

***

“Kent State Truth Tribunal Addresses the United Nations Human Rights Committee”  Laurel Krause, sister of the murdered Allison Krause, reports on ongoing efforts to expose government secrets about the Kent State Massacre, which occurred on 4 May 1970. Via the comment thread, I give Ms. Krause what may be new and useful data:

There is one Kent State mystery that suggests the shooting was planned in advance.

I know of this because The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.), for which I was then the investigative reporter, published nine editions a day in that era. The last of these rolled a few minutes after Wall Street closed at 4 p.m. EDT. 

But all we had out of Ohio in that Monday afternoon's Market Final was a page-one bulletin the National Guard had fired on and wounded several students.

Across the river in Manhattan, where I lived, the final of The New York Post, the City's last remaining p.m., had no more than we at the JJ did.

The next day, because the shootings had occurred at 12:24 p.m. EDT, I asked why we missed the story. Our telegraph editor said the wire services – AP, UPI – hadn't moved anything more detailed than what we ran.

More curious than ever, I queried a UPI friend, who told me, “Ma Bell pulled the plug on everything in Ohio at about five minutes after 12.”

(I should explain here, for those unfamiliar with 1970s technology, that wire-service dispatches were transmitted over lines leased from AT&T and managed by the regional Bell systems.)

If it is true the Ohio wire-service connections were shut down just before the shootings – and I have no reason to doubt what my friend told me – this would suggest a conspiracy already in place, perhaps a scheme to terrorize the anti-war movement with an example of dead and wounded students.

*****

“It's Time to Put America First” Thom Hartmann decries the obscenity of lightning-fast, no-debate enactment of $1 billion in loans and $100 million in direct aid to Ukraine by the same Congress that killed unemployment compensation for 2 million USians and slashed food stamps for 1.7 million more. Vexed as always by Hartmann's refusal to acknowledge such savagery as nothing more than capitalism in action, I focus on economic reality:

Actually, the difference between the Ukrainian and USian Working Classes – why Ukrainia gets money and USia gets more austerity – should be obvious to anyone who is not a die-hard supporter of capitalism.

The Ukrainians – all but their oligarchs desperately impoverished – are therefore easily exploitable for maximum profit.

Not only that, Ukraine's industrial potential is enormous. It is the breadbasket of Europe – the most vast, most productive agricultural land on the entire continent – and it now effectively belongs to USian imperial agrobusiness. It will thus be farmed by minimum-wage laborers. And since the new Ukrainian government includes declared fascists, its agriculture will no doubt use slave labor too. The profits to the oligarchs and their new USian overlords will be near-infinite. 

Ukrainia also contains significant natural resources, including major fossil fuel deposits. And because of its post-coup chaos, there are no environmental regulations to stop or even slow the rape of the land – which again means maximum profit for the One Percent,  total subjugation of the Ukrainian Working Class.

Contrast this to the USian Imperial Homeland: it is but a husk of its former self. Its natural resources have been been bled dry by the One Percent, its industry has all been outsourced, its Working Class has been methodically disempowered by union-busting. We the People have mostly been reduced to hopeless poverty and are now being slowly exterminated by deliberately genocidal cutbacks in social services.  In short, the USian homeland no longer has any of the ingredients of a functioning economy. This means the so-called American Dream is dead; it also means there will never, ever be an USian economic rebirth. 

But the USian Homeland still has a charade of constitutional democracy, and – in a few places – still has some semblance of genuinely representative local government. Thus the One Percenters' hands remain much more tied here than in Ukrainia. 

By contrast, Ukrainia is now ruled by a cabal that includes many declared neo-Nazis in significant positions of power. This means – exactly as happened in Germany during the 1930s – Ukrainia will soon be ruled by an exclusively neo-Nazi government. In its inevitable imposition of a torture-state, it will soon be indistinguishable from Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. It will thus become a major element in the USian Empire's 21st Century plan of global conquest – another slave-state in the USian Empire's de facto Fourth Reich. 

That summarizes the main reasons the USian Empire instantly invests money in Ukrainia even as it continues to inflict ever-worsening genocidal poverty on its own people.

We the People are being  cast away, discarded as if we were worn-out machinery. We are literally a surplus workforce, deemed useless and abandoned because we are no longer exploitable for significant profit.  Such are the consequences of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever espoused.

As more and more of us recognize what is happening and awaken to the core truth our deepening misery is the quintessence of capitalism –  the fulfillment of all Marxist predictions about capitalism (and therefore the ultimate validation of the entire Marxist analysis) – we by our numbers and our intensifying anger will become ever more dangerous to the One Percenters.

What then will be their response? Will it be the same as that of tyrants throughout history? If so, they  will start a major war – a war big enough to exterminate the surplus Working Class population and  ruinous enough to enable the Ruling Class to abolish, forever, any last remnants of constitutional democracy. And by their continued provocation of Putin, it seems they are trying to start just such a war.

At the very least, it seems the One Percenters have convinced themselves the bloody lessons taught Darius, the Mongols, Bonaparte and Hitler no longer apply. At the very worst, their obscene, live-it-up-now-and-fuck-tomorrow arrogance – a subset of the same capitalist greed that fosters their morally imbecilic indifference to the impending environmental apocalypse – has rendered them equally indifferent to the fact such a war would be the death of our species.

Russia – with a long history of having some of the most astute and farsighted intelligence analysts on the planet – is obviously aware of all these factors. (Note that one should never underestimate Russian intelligence capabilities: One example of Russian skill is the Sepoy Mutiny of 1858, engineered by Tsarist agents, which forever stopped British Empire aggression into the underbelly of the Russian Empire. Another example is the devastatingly effective spy-saboteur-and-resistance network the Nazis eternally cursed as "the Red Orchestra," which GRU established during the late 1920s and early 1930s in anticipation of the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. [See The Red Orchestra, V.E. Tarrant, John Wiley & Sons Inc.: 1995])

With those sorts of analytical capabilities backing him up, it becomes obvious why Putin is responding as he is.

That's why I'm terrified the Ukrainian Crisis is the beginning of World War III – a war in which the  USian Empire suicidally underestimates the indomitable Russian will to “fight to the death.”

***

What many people don't know is in 510 BCE, Darius disastrously invaded Scythia, which the ancient Greeks defined as roughly equivalent to modern Black-Sea Russia, the Crimea and the Ukraine. Nevertheless the true Scythia was probably much larger, perhaps as large as the old Russian Empire, since archaeology suggests a significant Scythian presence nearly as far west as modern-day Germany and as far east as China.  DNA evidence meanwhile substantiates certain folk tales that claim Scythian origins for the Celts. Like the Celts, the Scythians were an equestrian people, and their horse-archers, at least 20 percent of whom were women – were with their long-range recurve bows considered the most formidable light cavalry of their time.

But Darius was deterred neither by the vastness of the Steppe nor by the Scythians' fierce reputation, and he marched his massive army – the era's largest and best equipped – deep into Scythia. To make a long story short, the Scythians did as the Russians have so successfully done: they retreated and retreated and retreated – then closed the door behind Darius and savaged the Persians until they fled in ever-increasing panic. (For those interested in the details, see Herodotus, The Histories, in any complete translation.) 

Nor have the Russians – many of whom themselves bear Scythian genes – forgotten this chapter of their Motherland's history: the Budenovka, for which Google, the pointed hat worn by the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War, was consciously patterned after the pointed hats of the Scythian horse archers, thereby implicitly linking the revolutionaries with ancient Russia. 

 

Presumably we all know what happened to the Mongols -- the mounds of their skulls the medieval Russians made as monuments at the sites of Mongol defeats – as we know the fates of Bonaparte and Hitler.

As to “Svyashchennaya Voyna” (“Sacred War”), do not be misled by the Soviet flag motif of the YouTube video I posted above. I chose that specifically for its English translation of the lyrics. The song remains popular in Russia today, and often highlights the widely attended performances of the Russian Army Chorus and Dance Troupe, the successor to the world-famous Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe. 

       

*****

“Obama's Preposterous Defense of the Iraq War” Reliably caustic Charles Pierce of Esquire describes with appropriate venom how Obama, in his efforts to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, has reversed his “wrong-war-in-the-wrong-place” stance against the unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now – in another classic example of his Orator-to-Betrayer shape-shift, Obama has a become a staunch defender of the entire operation. This – no surprise to me – means he's now implicitly siding with the entire band of Bush League perpetrators, that gang of war criminals he has carefully protected since the first minute of his presidency. My response was surely predictable, but I think it's worth reprinting nonetheless:

Obviously the world has learned to recognize Obama the Orator as not just Barack the Betrayer but Barack the Belligerent – and Barack the Big Liar as well.

The dire question is whether – now the president's true persona is known – he will try in some way to do to the world what he is already doing to the United States, savaging the 99 Percent with ever-more-brazenly fascist policies.

(Note his proposals of more cuts to Medicare and new obstructions to disability insurance. Note too how he is tacitly backing Hobby Lobby in its war against women's reproductive rights, or how – like the devotee of shock-doctrine capitalism he is – he is using the shock of the bed-bug plague to repeal tenant rights in public housing, thereby making the housing easier to sell to profiteers.)

Yup: vote for a Democrat, get a sneaky, maliciously dishonest hard-right Republican – such is life under the One Party of Two Names.

What Obama is doing stateside is bad enough.

As to what he might do to Russia, be afraid; be very afraid.

*****

“The Danger of False Narrative” Robert Perry continues his superb Ukraine-Crisis reporting and analysis by noting how the USian propaganda machine deluged us with Big Lies to justify the war against Iraq and is now fabricating the same sort of Josef Goebbels narrative to gin up fear and loathing against Putin and Russia. I seize the opportunity to describe a couple of seemingly-revalidated suspicions:

Apropos observed reality, the appearance of Nazi, Confederate and Ku Klux Klan flags in conjunction with the Ukrainian coup (for which see the “Confederate battle flag” link within Mr. Parry's text), tends to confirm two suppositions many old-time Leftists accepted as ugly truths:

(1)- The existence of a secret organization – originally part of the Nazi German government, but since World War II either within the US government or facilitated by it – that aids and coordinates the imposition of fascism everywhere. (Its long-term purpose is the subjugation of all the world's peoples into a single, global fascist empire.)

(2)- Clandestine but pivotal support within the US government for the Klan and other such fascist, racist, misogynist and/or neo-Nazi organizations. (Given how the US government crushed the Communist Party, the various socialist parties and the Occupy Movement, the fact the Klan and its kindred are still functional is indisputable proof they are tacitly supported by the U.S. government and its capitalist masters.)

Why does the US foster and support fascism? Because fascism is the mature form of capitalism – that is, capitalism expanded into capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

In this context, the Obama Administration is not just a false-flag operation; it is false-faced as well.

*****

“Women Justices Rock the Hobby Lobby Argument”  Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker applauds how the Supreme Court's three female justices obviously support women's reproductive rights – of course they do – but then buries his lead: “Notably, the Obama Administration chose not to contest Hobby Lobby’s assertion that use of an I.U.D. was tantamount to abortion.”

My rim-rat reflexes as good as they were 44 years ago, when I was a news editor or sat a telegraph desk, I put the most important element of Toobin's story up where it belongs:

In other words, the president tacitly supports Hobby Lobby, and has hamstrung his solicitor general accordingly.

Then I elaborate:

Apparently the president is not only a closet Republican but a closet Christian theocrat as well. Note his dramatic expansion of Bush's Faith Based Initiatives, which trumps the Constitution by using federal funding to punish non-believers. (Google “faith based initiatives obama,” no quotation marks.)

This means the president is also a closet misogynist – a tacit supporter of the effort by Christian fanatics to force women back into Biblical subjugation. Once again we see Obama the Orator shape-shifting into his true persona: Barack the Betrayer.

As if that were not dismaying enough, there is also the fact the advocates of theocracy are malevolently powerful and obscenely well funded. The One Percenters lavish money on Abrahamic theocracy whether Christian, Islamic or Judaic.

Why? Because the Abrahamic dogmas of divine-right management and prosperity as divine reward ensure the perpetuity of capitalism.

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are thus hugely courageous to defy such might. Let us hope the Supreme Court includes two equally brave male justices.

 

Important development in a related story: Hobby Lobby's anti-birth-control lawsuit is part of the vast and irresistibly well-funded Christian effort to impose theocracy and Biblical Law – the Christian equivalent of Sharia – on the United States. Another part of the same well-coordinated campaign is the Vatican's sneaky effort to abolish women's reproductive rights by leveraged buyouts of formerly secular regional hospitals, after which the ecclesiastical authorities ban birth control, abortions, assisted suicide and even termination of life support in cases of medically hopeless disease or injury. The result – exactly as the Christians intend – is tantamount to the imposition of theocracy on entire hospital service areas. Hence the relevance of “Washington State Case Study: A Difficult Miscarriage Made Worse by Hospital's Religious Restrictions on Care,” a newly published Huffington Post reprint of a profoundly disturbing academic report  that describes the medical horrors – torture, actually – inflicted on a woman by the Roman Catholic hospital that is the only care provider in the region where the victim lives. I did not comment on the report – HuffPo banished me years ago for my uncontrite socialism – but I nevertheless link it via OAN because it is a vital and revealing microcosm of the broader Hobby Lobby issues.

*****

“Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History”  Amy Goodman's report is perfectly summarized by its head, on which I could not possibly improve. My response perfectly summarizes the last six years of our political history:

 

As Obama the Orator, the president preached "hope" and "change we can believe in" and shamelessly exploited the African-American progressive tradition to leverage himself into office.

Meanwhile the Republicans ensured his victories by terrifying us with their McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan assault guns.

Yes, that's how the system works: the good-cop/bad-cop routine – with all of us as the prisoners.

Bill Moyers tells us it's all a charade, and the evidence ever-more-powerfully confirms it.

If Moyers is correct – and I'm sure he is – our so-called “free elections” are merely dramas carefully scripted by the One Percent and played out by actors chosen from One Party of Two Names. USian politics is as false as professional wrestling, the political sound and fury meaningless save as yardsticks of deception and preludes to (ever-intensified) oppression. 

 

Such is the context of Obama the Orator's (obviously premeditated) shift into Barack the Betrayer.

His presidency is not only the least transparent; it is also founded on the biggest Big Lies in presidential history. He has probably discredited the Democratic Party beyond repair. Given USian racism, he has undoubtedly obstructed equality for people of color. He is probably fostering more “why-bother” non-voters than any politician in US history.

And when he leaves office, his Ruling Class masters will lavish him with obscene wealth and prestige to reward him for all the damage he's done.

LB/30 March 2014

-30-

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.)

***

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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Quit Smoking to Get Healthy, Get Fat and Sick Instead

THE ORDEAL OF preparing my apartment for its quarterly premises inspection while I am afflicted by plantar fasciitis  in my left foot – which means I'm much more crippled than usual – has stolen my writing time. This week's OAN is thus limited to material I've posted on other sites.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not (because excess weight is among the chief causes of plantar fasciitis) – one of those posts was about the methodically suppressed connection between quitting smoking and inexplicable, uncontrollable and frighteningly fast weight-gain. It is a condition with which my post-smoking self is intimately, bitterly, god-cursingly familiar. But the facts about it – especially the hideousness it inescapably imposes on about 35 percent of former smokers, especially males – are carefully concealed by USian doctors, lest the dreadful knowledge encourage nicotine addicts to keep smoking.

Hence the following, an expanded version of the reply I posted two days ago on the comment thread of “5 Reasons Americans Are Getting Fatter: It's Not Just the Food,” an AlterNet report reprinted by Reader Supported News. 

While reporter Martha Rosenberg did an excellent job of rounding up the usual obesity-epidemic suspects – the long litany of for-profit additives and artificial sweeteners by which the capitalists poison our food – she wrote not a single word about the plague of post-smoking weight-gain. 

In this context it is important to understand the national quit-smoking campaign did not originate from any real public health concern. What began it is a condition unique to the USian Homeland: the fact the Ayn Rand doctrine that is the basis of USian economic policy defines health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. The anti-smoking drive was therefore launched in response to for-profit insurors' anger over how tobacco-related deaths were reducing their obscene profits. In other words, the USian war on tobacco smoking started as a manifestation of capitalist greed – which is precisely why it has been conducted so relentlessly and therefore with such success. Contrast the totality of the USian anti-smoking effort with the USian effort to eradicate communicable childhood diseases. The latter is a program increasingly abandoned, with predictably catastrophic results, due to deliberately genocidal neglect of the poor combined with the ailments spread by Christian fanatics who are now granted theocratic exemptions that allow them to legally ignore formerly mandatory inoculation requirements. The difference between the anti-smoking and childhood-health programs undoubtedly lies in the bottom-line: apparently payouts for smoking deaths reduce insurors' profits far more than payouts for the deaths of children.

Though I intended my response to Rosenberg to be corrective rather than confessional, my fury at the cosmic unfairness and sadism of my post-smoking circumstances – the fact I quit smoking to get healthy but instead got grotesquely fat – made parts of my contribution uncomfortably Oprah-ish. Normally I would have deleted such lapses as inappropriate emotionalism. But on second thought, it seemed the disclosures might help others who, like myself, are now after quitting smoking forever entrapped in the mortification inflicted by balloon-sized flesh. Besides, I have nothing to lose: I am who I am, and in this instance what I am – that is, horrendously obese – combines with abject poverty, physical disability and age to ensure the female gender will never again look at me with anything other than indifference, if not outright disgust. 

The associated negative emotions – which slap me in the face whenever I look in a mirror – are intensified by the fact USian doctors generally insist you're cheating anytime you gain weight on post-smoking diets. Whether calling you a liar is prompted by ignorance or is mandatory protocol, the psychological devastation is the same. The only exception I ever encountered amongst USian medical personnel was the nutritionist I consulted through Washington state's Group Health Cooperative. She said the stress of nicotine withdrawal – which is now recognized as the longest and most wrenching drug withdrawal  known to humans – throws the body into what she called “concentration-camp mode.” Thus the body begins turning all food into the fat essential to protect muscles and bones from absorption during starvation. If this is indeed what happens – and the explanation seems as good as any I've heard – the implication is that nicotine withdrawal truly ends only at death, especially for those of us who suffer the lifelong post-smoking tendency to become circus obese. 

Unfortunately, my case is typical. I weighed 158 pounds in 1985, when, at age 45, rising blood pressure and occasional bouts of cardiac arrhythmia prompted me to begin what became a ten-year fight to quit smoking. I was in good shape, an attractive and reasonably successful middle-aged journalist, the editor-in-chief of Art Direction, an international advertising-industry trade journal. As a Manhattanite I routinely walked five miles a day – Gotham-dwellers average more miles afoot than any other USians – and my 158 pounds with its 31-inch waistline was only 10 pounds and two inches more than my best condition ever, this in the Regular Army c. 1962. But my first week off cigarettes I gained 12 pounds, my first month a total of 24.5 pounds – gains I would have dismissed as impossible but for the irrefutable testimony of my trousers, which I could no longer button, and the corroborative witness borne by my belt, which was soon extended to its maximum length. 

Within weeks I went back to smoking – mainly because I knew the fast-encroaching ugliness would end my romantic and sexual prospects forever. Then my blood pressure again soared, and I again tried quitting. Once more I tried cold turkey; then I tried Smokers Anonymous (which is where I first heard of the British studies linking nicotine withdrawal to radical obesity). I tried hypnosis; I tried gradual reduction of my daily cigarette-count; I tried various over-the-counter medications that promised to help me quit. But it seemed nothing could get the nicotine monkey off my back. 

Meanwhile I had discovered a new and even more formidable complex of barriers to quitting: without nicotine, I could not function as a journalist. I could still edit copy, but I could not converse intelligently, think clearly or write a coherent sentence. I am dyslexic; soon I came to realize it was nicotine's function as a neurotransmitter – and not any innate talent – that had enabled all my intellectual acumen and indeed my entire reporting career. 

Of my communication skills, only my photographic ability was enhanced by not smoking – this because of the vast improvement in peripheral vision and tonal sense that results from the absence of vaso-constricting nicotine in one's bloodstream.

There was no triumph in my gradually-winning battle against nicotine addiction because it was equally a forever-losing battle against becoming monstrously obese. I grew fat and fatter – ever uglier, ever more embarrassed to be seen in public, ever more inescapably lonely. I had gained weight even on the unspeakable misery of a two-week, 1000-calorie-per-day diet. Tests proved the gain was not related to metabolic deficiencies. And the failure of that diet proved the weight gain was so uncontrollable not even starvation would stop it. 

When I finally managed to quit smoking permanently – this via a combination of nicotine patches and prescription medication – I was 55 years old. I weighed 195 pounds. By then, I had learned to accept my post-smoking obesity – repugnant though it was – with the same bitter resignation with which one accepts other physical handicaps. Moreover, being grossly fat was no longer the pivotal disaster of my life. My career had been destroyed by the odium of the post-traumatic clinical depression that eventually befell me after all my life's works were obliterated in a 1983 fire, and that alone left me too impoverished to ever again be attractive to any woman. Thus my physical appearance no longer mattered – precisely the realization that finally enabled me to swear off tobacco permanently. My first day without cigarettes forever was 23 September 1995. I used my last nicotine patch sometime in January 1996. Since then I have never had nicotine in any form. Within a year I had blubbered up to 235 pounds.

It would take me nearly a decade to teach myself to write again; I will never be the fast, self-assured writer I was as a smoker. And it would be a dozen years before I could again comfortably socialize. 

But even without the obesity, quitting smoking would have destroyed my physical condition. For most of my adult life I worked out regularly: jogging, walking, the long-distance hiking associated with back-country trout fishing, the day-long exertion of upland bird hunting, various self-administered physical training programs including nearly a decade with the Royal Canadian Air Force Basic Exercise Program. Then after my spine was permanently injured by one of Washington state's defiantly habitual drunken drivers, I was prescribed a combination of physical therapy and yoga that gave me enough flexibility to work a season as engineer/deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel and kept me ambulatory until – you guessed it – I began my quit-smoking effort. 

Another of the deliberately downplayed effects of nicotine withdrawal is total disruption of sleep patterns, the result of which is a profound state of exhaustion – precisely the condition that discourages exercise of any kind. And in my case – as in many such cases (or so I am repeatedly told) – the sleep disruption has never gone away. I used to sleep like the proverbial log, but I have not gotten an uninterrupted night's sleep since I smoked my last cigarette, and now after 18 years and six months, it is obvious I will never know the comfort of a full night's sleep again in this lifetime. Exhaustion – sometimes mild, more often severe – is now my normal condition. With it comes a loathing of unnecessary exertion so intense no amount of will power – at least none I am able to muster – will overcome it enough to foster regular exercise.

I know now that without cigarettes, I will always be fat – which is to say I will always be ugly. In my years off nicotine, I've weighed as much as 275 pounds. As a result I've come to regard food as my enemy, to fear and despise it and hate myself for how it obsesses my mind and deforms my body. By constant struggle, I (mostly) manage to keep my weight in the vicinity of an (only) (moderately) repulsive 225. Like the vampires of legend, I avoid mirrors; I go out in public only when I have no choice, and never for pleasure. Such is my lot as a former smoker.

***

The documentation on the weight-gain/post-smoking connection, which I first heard of through a British acquaintance in 1986, took me years to ferret out. It surfaced, albeit in much later forms, via two papers unearthed in 2010 by the skills of a talented reference librarian at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, a woman I knew only as Sarah and that only by telephone. In this instance she outdid even her colleagues at the main (Fifth Avenue) branch of the New York City Public Library, who repeatedly told me there was no such material, never mind NYPL is ostensibly the finest such institution in the nation.

Here are the two references Sarah found for me:

“Smoke-Free and Fat: the Health Hazards of Kicking the Habit”; Kent Sepkowitz, Slate: 2008. Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat. 

“Smoking as a Modifable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Middle-Aged Men”; S. Goya Wannamethee, A. Gerald Shaper, Ivan J. Perry, Diabetes Care, Sept. 2001 v24 i9 p1590. (No link available.) Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat, thereby increasing your diabetes risk.

*****

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: It's All About the Ukrainian Crisis

Most of this material is focused on the Ukrainian Crisis because of its terrifying threat of a thermonuclear World War III. As I have said before, to me it is scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis because in 1962 I trusted President John F. Kennedy. But now in 2014 I have learned the hard way – that is, by voting for him twice – not to trust President Barack Obama at all.

However, thanks largely to an astute journalist named Robert Parry, the debate is beginning to focus on whether Obama has been betrayed by his own advisors or whether he is (once again) demonstrating his formidable skills at deception and manipulation by minimizing his culpability in provoking the crisis.

Predictably, I argue for the latter – that Obama the Orator is merely showing another aspect of his true Barack the Betrayer self, most likely to improve the Democratic Party's abominable prospects in the November elections. The relevant links – those on which I contributed to discussion threads – are here  and here. 

Medea Benjamin's disturbing account of how she was savaged by the Egyptian secret police – obviously on orders of someone in the USian government if not in the White House itself – is also relevant. It, like the atrocities committed against the Occupy Movement, shows us the true nature of the imperial mind: all the more reason to fear the U.S. will escalate the Ukraine Crisis into World War III. 

LB/16 March 2014 

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