Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1299

HUD Ends Blanket Ban on Renting to Ex-Felons

At the beginning of June, Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) ruled that landlords who exclude ex-convicts as renters may be breaking the law under the Fair Housing Act.*

The new rule reads, “A housing provider violates the Fair Housing Act when the provider’s policy or practice has an unjustified discriminatory effect, even when the provider had no intent to discriminate.”

In essence it prohibits a blanket ban against tenants with criminal records. It still permits a case-by-case assessment of whether tenants could pose a threat. In other words, the new guidelines allow a landlord from excluding an ex-convict if that person represents a threat to the safety and security of the other residents in the building.

The new rule also cautions landlords against selectively enforcing a ban on applicants with criminal records: denying housing to black ex-felons while accepting white people with criminal histories.

Supreme Court Ruling on Disparate Impact

The new guidelines follow a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling last June that the 1968 Fair Housing Act applies to disparate impact as well as “discriminatory intent”. The ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v Inclusive Communities Project prohibits any housing policy that results in poorer outcomes for protected groups, such as black Americans, regardless of whether they were intentionally discriminatory.

The HUD requirement remains that local public housing authorities ban (for life) anyone convicted of producing methamphetamines on public housing property, as well as registered sex offenders. HUD guidelines also require public housing authorities evict public housing residents if they or someone in their unit – even an unrelated guest – commits a drug crime.

The Felon Next Door

On April 4, the British Guardian ran an excellent and (in my opinion) balanced article about the cruel bans on housing and employment for formerly incarcerated African American and Hispanic men who have been preyed upon by a brutally racist criminal justice system.** Because of systemic housing discrimination – even by public housing facilities – many of these individuals have been doomed to homelessness on their release.

Contrast that with a blatantly racist article in Investors Business Daily about the Obama administration making it easier “for felons to move in next door.”  IBD accuses the Obama administration of trying to “racially balance” the US ZIP code by ZIP code. The outcome they claim will be to import violent crime into the suburbs, while lowering property values and negatively impacting local schools.

*The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968 and signed into law by President Lyndon B Johnson. It prohibits discrimination in housing on the grounds of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Criminal history is not a protected status under the law, but HUD’s new guidelines rely on the concept of “disparate impact”, noting that black and Latino people are disproportionately incarcerated and therefore more likely to excluded by blanket policies.

**In The New Jim Crow, African American attorney Michelle Alexander gives a heart breaking account of police bounty systems that deliberately target minority neighborhoods looking for pot smokers and innocent black arrestees forced to cop felony pleas because they can’t afford decent legal representation.

 

Catastrophic Radioactive Leak at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Waste Storage Facility

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Communities along Washington state’s Columbia River could be wiped out because of a leak in a massive nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Nuclear Waste Storage Site in Richland, Washington. (Bye-bye Longview, Kelso, Vancouver and Portland).

The mess on the Hanford nuclear reservation has been an on-going scandal ever since I first moved to Washington State in 1982. The bottom line is the federal government keeps stonewalling on replacing or cleaning up underground liquid waste containers that were built in the 40s and 50s and only meant to last 20 years.

Counter Information

By U.S.Reporter


Global Research, April 21, 2016


Superstation95 18 April 2016

Communities along Washington state’s Columbia River could be wiped out because of a leak in a massive nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Nuclear Waste Storage Site in Richland, Washington.  

Leak detectors sounded early Sunday morning and crews at Hanford lowered a camera into the two-foot-wide space between the tank’s inner and outer walls. They discovered 8.4 inches of radioactive and chemically toxic waste had leaked and was continuing to leak.  These tanks can hold upwards of one million gallons each!

“This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to hold waste safely from people and the environment,” said former Hanford worker Mike Geffre.  The graphic below shows the problems now faced by the people in Washington state  (Click image to enlarge):

Communities Below Could…

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The Role of Patriarchy in Psychological Indoctrination

Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy

By Mary Daly

Beacon Press (1984)

Book Review

Pure Lust* is about the systematic psychological indoctrination of women that occurs under patriarchy.

Daly’s approach to her subject is both historical and etymological. Historically organized religion has assumed primary responsibility for indoctrinating women. Daly focuses mainly on the Catholic religion, particularly the cult of the Virgin Mary and how this doctrine was used to trap women in subservient roles. After identifying clear parallels in the Jewish and Muslim religion, she examines how judges, lawyers and other male-oriented institutional roles have replaced priests in modern secular society.

Women’s Oppression Embedded in Language

The book has a heavy etymological focus, with an exhaustive examination of ways in which women’s oppression is embedded deeply in contemporary culture and language. Women who wish to fully liberate themselves must learn to recognize how language itself oppresses us and, where necessary, invent our own (as Daly does throughout most of the book).

Daly maintains this indoctrination has caused women to become separated from our “elemental race,” which is rooted in harmony with the natural world. Many women sense this – that they have been blocked of their capacity to conceive, speak and act in their own original words. They simultaneously sense their energy is being systematically drained for male use.

According to Daly, the lot of women under patriarchy has been the sacrifice of their personal needs and ambitions for children, husbands, aged parents and “just about everyone else.” This is especially true of poor and minority women.

The Origin of War, Racism and the Rape of the Environment

Simultaneously, unbridled male sexual aggression (a condition based on an obsession with impotence that Daly refers to as “phallic lust”) translates into war, racism, imposed poverty and famine, the rape of the environment and the insidious spread of the drab ugliness of a man made environment that systematically deadens minds.

Sensory Deprivation and “Potted” Desires and Emotions

Within male-dominated “sadosociety,” women aren’t allowed a self – all their experiences must be mediated by men. Daly views the modern commercial building – consisting of square, flat spaces with rigidly uniform decor, hermetically sealed windows, homogenized sound environment and constant light – as the perfect archetype of this mediated environment. The end result is a state of chronic sensory deprivation.

Under patriarchy everything women hear, touch, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. We live in a society dominated by the mass production of “potted” (ie artificial) desires and emotions. The result is the killing of consciousness and integrity in many women, allowing the routine abuse of the poor, minorities, and so-called enemies to go unnoticed and uncriticized.

Daly also examines the complex dynamics that enable men to recruit women (eg Hillary Clinton) to be token oppressors of other women, ethnic minorities and third world people.

*The title Pure Lust refers to “elemental female lust,” which Daly defines as women’s intense longing for the “cosmic concrescence that is creation.”

New York Voting Fiasco Just the Warm-up for the November Game

 

Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports that nearly 1 in 4 voters arrived at polling stations Tuesday to learn they had been purged from the voter roll.

Buckle up, America. The voting demolition derby that was the New York primary on Tuesday was merely the crash test for the coming voting wreckage in November:

Source: New York Voting Fiasco Just the Warm-up for the November Game

REALPOLITIK: ISIS is Officially Broke, Local Warlords Accuse Each Other of Corruption, Theft, and Mismanagement – By Vladimir Odintsov

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Thanks to Russian airstrikes against ISIS oil fields and loss of territory they can tax, the infamous terrorist head choppers are nearly bankrupt. Makes you wonder why Obama didn’t do this 2 years ago – and exactly who/what he was targeting with his airstrikes.

RIELPOLITIK

Source – journal-neo.org/

 – The word is on the street is that the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) has encountered serious financial challenges lately for the first time since the beginning of anti-terrorist operations in Syria and Iraq. The terrorist organization has been pushed into a corned due to continuous airstrikes aimed at destroying ISIS-held oil infrastructure. Oil production across ISIS-occupied territories has dropped by one third, while total oil revenues of ISIS were cut in half due to falling oil prices and the abrupt decrease in the capability to produce and sell oil products such as gasoline. In addition, this terrorist group has lost direct access to the black markets in Syria and southern Turkey.

On March 25, American media sources announced that Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, also known as Haji Imam, was killed during a counter-terrorism operation. He was considered the second most influential commander of ISIS and…

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The Mommy Tax

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is still the Least Valued

By Ann Crittenden

Henry Holt and Company (2001)

Book Review

The Price of Motherhood is about the refusal of English-speaking countries to acknowledge the vast amount of unpaid labor women invest in their children. Economists agree that two-thirds of society’s wealth is created by human skills, aka human capital. Yet they also refuse to acknowledge thirty years of psychology research demonstrating that the most critical education producing this “human capital” occurs in the first five years of life.

Not only is most of this work unpaid, but mothers who require part time or flexible work arrangements to address their children’s needs pay an enormous penalty in terms of lifelong earning potential. Crittenden refers to this penalty as the “mommy tax.”

According to Cittendon, while the pay differential between men and women continues to narrow, there has been virtually no change in the pay gap between mothers and unencumbered men and women. Numerous studies identify this “mommy tax,” consistently highest in English-speaking countries, as the primary cause of child poverty in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Likewise a woman’s “choice” to become a parent is the number one cause of poverty in old age.

Crittenden contrasts the US with France and various Scandinavian countries that support working mothers through policies such as free health care, one year paid maternity leave*, and free childcare. Child poverty virtually unknown in France and Scandinavia. In contrast 22% of American and 25% of New Zealand kids grow up in poverty.

The book is also highly critical of economists’ failure to count women’s unpaid labor in the GDP, given its high importance in creating a skilled workforce.** Despite the US refusal to keep data on “non-market” labor (where no money changes hands), more civilized countries do. Crittenden cites figures from Australia (where it comprises 48-64% of GDP), Germany (where it comprises 55% of GDP, Canada (where it comprises 40% of GDP), and Finland (where it comprises 46% of GDP).

Besides including “non-market” labor in the GDP calculations, the book proposes a number of other policy changes to reduce or eliminate the mommy tax. They include federal laws mandating one year paid parental leave, free health care for all children and primary caregivers, and free preschool for three and four year olds; a shorter work week; and equal pay and benefits for part time work. They also include a federal ban on discrimination against parents in the workplace, a universal child benefit, the creation of a single federal agency to collect child support obligations, and a federal mandate requiring divorce courts to award both parents an equal standard of living where there are dependent children.

*The only six countries that fail to mandate paid maternity leave are the US, Australia, New Zealand, Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.

**See review of Marilyn Waring film Whose Counting

Dismantling neoliberal education: a lesson from the Zapatistas

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Zapatistas lead the way – creating real schools that teach rather than oppress.

The Free

from Roar… AUTONOMY & ANARCHISM

The non-hierarchical education of the Zapatistas cries dignity and suggests that the suffering of the neoliberal university can be withstood and overcome.     by  Levi Gahman

 I’ve said it before—in contrast to those traditional stories that begin with ‘Once upon a time…’ Zapatista stories begin with ‘There will be a time…’

— Subcomandante Galeano (formerly Marcos)

Excerpted from Levi’s chapter ‘Zapatismo versus the Neoliberal University: Towards a Pedagogy against Oblivion’, in the forthcoming book The Radicalization of Pedagogy, edited by Simon Springer, Marcelo Lopes de Souza and Richard J. White.

The story of the Zapatistas is one of dignity, outrage, and grit. It is an enduring saga of over 500 years of resistance to the attempted conquest of the land and lives of indigenous peasants.

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A Cuban Novel About Trotsky’s Assassination

The Man Who Loved Dogs

By Leonardo Padura

Translated by Anna Kushner (2013)

Book Review

The Man Who Loved Dogs is a fictional account of the Stalinist Conspiracy to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Havana author Leonardo Padura uses three distinct perspectives to relate his story: that of Trotsky and his family, that of his assassin Roman Mercader and that of a failed Cuban writer who accidentally encounters Mercader on a Cuban beach in the 1970s as he’s on the verge of death.

The conspiracy is vaguely reminiscent of the JFK assassination conspiracy, in that it was meticulously planned and took three years to set in motion. Mercader was a Spanish Communist recruited by Stalin’s agents and brought to the USSR for specialized intelligence training. Posing as a Belgian journalist, he cultivated an American Trotskyite girlfriend to facilitate his entry into the high security compound where Trotsky’s family lived in Coyoacan Mexico.

The early part of the book contains long sections about the Spanish Civil War. These focus on Stalin’s brutal efforts to undermine the Spanish Revolution by assassinating anarchist and Trotskyite rivals, including members of the International Brigades. He then proceeded to abandon Spain’s Republican government to Franco’s fascists to improve his negotiating position with Hitler.

The History of Trotsky’s Exile

The narrative from Trotsky’s perspective begins with his forced exile to Turkey in 1929. He’s eventually offered asylum in France and Norway, both of which expel him (under pressure from local communists) after a few months. These sections also focus on Trotsky’s dismay regarding Stalin’s decade of show trials and executions, which systematically eliminated the primary Bolshevik luminaries responsible for the 1917 revolution, as well as one-third of the leadership of the Soviet Army.

Prior to 1990 Books About Trotsky Banned in Cuba

The narrative based on the fictional Cuban writer focuses on the intellectual and artistic repression that characterized the early Castro regime and the severe hardship (literal starvation in many cases) that began when the USSR collapsed in 1989 and Cuba ceased to have access to cheap soviet oil essential to their system of industrial agriculture.

Prior to the 1990s, books by or about Trotsky were banned in Cuba, as they were in the USSR. As Padura reminds us in his acknowledgements, Cubans of his generation grew up totally unaware that Trotsky or Trotskyism even existed. From this perspective, one can’t help but marvel at his extensive research into Trotsky’s personal and political history, as well as the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s show trials.

A Novel About Trotsky’s Assassination

The Man Who Loved Dogs

By Leonardo Padura

Translated by Anna Kushner (2013)

Book Review

The Man Who Loved Dogs is a fictional account of the Stalinist Conspiracy to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Havana author Leonardo Padura uses three distinct perspectives to relate his story: that of Trotsky and his family, that of his assassin Roman Mercader and that of a failed Cuban writer who accidentally encounters Mercader on a Cuban beach in the 1970s as he’s on the verge of death.

The conspiracy is vaguely reminiscent of the JFK assassination conspiracy, in that it was meticulously planned and took three years to set in motion. Mercader was a Spanish Communist recruited by Stalin’s agents and brought to the USSR for specialized intelligence training. Posing as a Belgian journalist, he cultivated an American Trotskyite girlfriend to facilitate his entry into the high security compound where Trotsky’s family lived in Coyoacan Mexico.

The early part of the book contains long sections about the Spanish Civil War. These focus on Stalin’s brutal efforts to undermine the Spanish Revolution by assassinating anarchist and Trotskyite rivals, including members of the International Brigades. He then proceeded to abandon Spain’s Republican government to Franco’s fascists to improve his negotiating position with Hitler.

The History of Trotsky’s Exile

The narrative from Trotsky’s perspective begins with his forced exile to Turkey in 1929. He’s eventually offered asylum in France and Norway, both of which expel him (under pressure from local communists) after a few months. These sections also focus on Trotsky’s dismay regarding Stalin’s decade of show trials and executions, which systematically eliminated the primary Bolshevik luminaries responsible for the 1917 revolution, as well as one-third of the leadership of the Soviet Army.

Prior to 1990 Books About Trotsky Banned in Cuba

The narrative based on the fictional Cuban writer focuses on the intellectual and artistic repression that characterized the early Castro regime and the severe hardship (literal starvation in many cases) that began when the USSR collapsed in 1989 and Cuba ceased to have access to cheap soviet oil essential to their system of industrial agriculture.

Prior to the 1990s, books by or about Trotsky were banned in Cuba, as they were in the USSR. As Padura reminds us in his acknowledgements, Cubans of his generation grew up totally unaware that Trotsky or Trotskyism even existed. From this perspective, one can’t help but marvel at his extensive research into Trotsky’s personal and political history, as well as the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s show trials.

The Gulf Stream and the Next Ice Age

The Gulf Stream and the Next Ice Age

Nikolaus Koutsikas (2008)

Film Review

This documentary examines the climatic effects of the Gulf Stream, which was first charted and named by Benjamin Franklin in 1762. This is a powerful current that transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to the west coast of France, Britain and Norway. It’s thanks to the Gulf Stream (aka the North Atlantic Drift, aka the Thermohaline Conveyor) that western Europe enjoys far milder winters that parts of Canada at the same latitude.

Paleoclimatologists who collect ocean sediment and ice core samples have been studying past disruptions of the Thermohaline Conveyor going back 100,000 years. They’ve identified a clear pattern in which the Conveyor “turns off” in response to rapid warming periods that cause the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets to melt. This in turn has triggered mini ice ages in which all of northern Europe experiences Siberian winters.

The mechanism that causes the Conveyor to turn off is apparently triggered by the rapid influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic. Under normal conditions, the Conveyor is driven by sharp temperature differentials when abrupt Arctic cooling causes it to sink rapidly, sucking in warm water above it.

Fresh water behaves differently than salt water (it doesn’t sink). According to ice core records, rapid influxes of fresh water from ice melts repeatedly switched the Conveyor off and on until about 10,000 years.

Surprisingly the risk of the Conveyor “turning off” in response to global warming has received little attention in recent publicity about impending catastrophic climate disruption. Apparently the Pentagon takes it very seriously. In 2003, they issued a report about the threat a new European Ice Age poses to national security.

It’s impossible to predict exactly how much ice has to melt before the Conveyer shuts off. The 2003 Pentagon report predicted a worse case scenario in which it might shut off in 2010. Obviously this didn’t happen. However in 2008 when this film was made, scientists had already detected a slight decrease in salinity and a gradual slowing of the current.

Most climatologists feel the Conveyor is unlikely to shut off before the Arctic Ice cap melts. Some are predicting the Arctic will be ice free in summer by 2020.

Record cold winters in the North Atlantic suggest slowing of the Conveyor has already begun: What’s Going on in the North Atlantic