What Ever-More-Censorsed U.S. Media Is Loathe to Tell Us:
Can Government Halt Evictions and Foreclosures by the Defiantly Greedy Scumlords and Banksters? If Not, We Face Unprecedented Homelessness, Probable Societal Collapse, Possible Revolution, Secession and Civil War
THE NATION'S MOST VITAL report to-date on the projected ruin inflicted by COVID-19 -- predictably pay-walled from lower-income eyes by Jeff Bezos' Washington Post -- tells us "a massive wave of evictions is coming" and warns us "temporary bans won't help."
Assigned by WaPo to a pair of uniquely qualified freelancers whose scoop-the-world story was then ironically excluded from the material its Bezos-bedazzled editors deemed fit for the multitudes of us who cannot afford its paid subscriptions, it provides what any of us reasonably well versed in world history should immediately recognize as authoritative, unflinchingly reasoned acknowledgement of the inevitable.
Hence if you read nothing else today, please read the above-linked report in full.
***
SCHOOLED BY APOCALYPSE -- and "apocalypse" is precisely what this pandemic is becoming in the "shit-hole country" a half century of slow-motion Neoliberal ecogenocide has made of the United States -- most of us now ask three questions:
- How bad might this disaster get?
- What (if anything) might the nation's federal, state and local governments be willing to do to protect us?
- And what might we ourselves have to do to stay alive?
But it took at least 18 hours of focused Internet searching -- this with help from two younger friends I know to be far more adept at search-phrasing than I -- before the Muse gifted me the right combination of words to bring up the story linked above.
And though I quickly discovered multiple links to it -- some paywalled, some not -- most were to publications or websites of such limited circulation I had no familiarity with them whatsoever-- with the story's obvious minor-media marginalization yet another measure of the form and increasing magnitude of U.S. censorship. Which in turn is further underscored by the fact "massive wave of evictions" is the only such report I could find anywhere on the English-language web.
***
EVENTUALLY I CONCLUDED the now-peripheral information I had gathered beforehand remains relevant.
I had sought to ferret out any credible on-line reports that might address the above three questions in ways specifically responsive to the all-consuming fears afflicting tenants and mortgagees -- fears proven entirely rational by the fact the planet's most fanatically Neoliberal realm long ago criminalized poverty to the murderous extent of officially and permanently defining U.S. healthcare as an exclusive privilege of wealth rather than a human right.
Intending to make my reporting on this question as useful as possible (and of course secretly smirking at what initially seemed the distinct possibility I might again at age 80 scoop the world as I had done so many times in the past), I had cobbled together I have no-idea-how-many combinations of words as I sought documentation of what despite the tsunami of propaganda from the increasingly deceptive federal government is fast becoming the looming potential homelessness of every Working Family in the imperial homeland.
What my purposefully constructed search-phrases seined up instead was a plethora of indicative reports that -- in definitive contrast to the knife-sharp edges of our opening document -- mostly seemed obnoxiously blunted by euphemisms and then again carefully edited to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
Indeed they seem so to such an obvious extent it feels to me as if their diverse editors, however ideologically opposed to one another they might pretend to be, nevertheless function from some eerie solidarity of intent, whether conscious or unconscious it matters not.
And I cannot stop wondering what might be their intent but to (again?) numb us into avoidance of the very sorts of plans and preparations we are now learning -- often at great pain -- are essential to the survival of our families, our friends, our comrades, our communities and of course ourselves.
But despite the fact these diluted texts exemplify our ever-more-deadly national curse of ever-more-forcibly delusional compulsory positivism, they also provide strong supplemental confirmation of the factual foundation of today's initial report -- that the real-estate profiteers have been discussing at least since mid-March the best ways to (further) victimize tenants and mortgagees even as (a few) state and local governments try, too often begrudgingly, to provide what the federal government so adamantly denies.
Here then is a sampling of the 40-odd links I collected, the first to a (deliberately?) visually distracting but nevertheless nationally useful click-your-state guide to vital resources:
Community Resources
The remainder are pretty much the sorts of reports we've come to expect:
COVID-19 And Eviction: Government Action Uneven Across The Country
Emergency Bans on Evictions and Other Tenant Protections Related to Coronavirus
L.A. has a coronavirus eviction ban, but landlords are finding ways to demand rent
B.C. offers $500 a month for renters, bans evictions and rent increases
Eviction lawsuits proceed in California despite relief for some tenants
Paying rent during coronavirus: Many states offer relief for renters
Property manager threatens tenants with eviction during coronavirus pandemic
An Emerging Coronavirus Concern: Eviction
And last but by no means least (offensively), we have this little journalistic gem, with its far-more-explicit disclosure of what truly obtains:
Jared Kushner’s Real Estate Company Filing Eviction Lawsuits
My hope is at least some of these links -- especially those to state-by-state anthologies of legal information -- will prove enduringly useful.
Meanwhile we stand helplessly aghast as the Trump-Pence Regime continues its relentless effort to diminish or suppress entirely any aid that might reach the proverbial 99 percent of us who are neither Neoliberal aristocrats nor part of their attendant vassalage. The Regime's effort is obviously yet another sadistic expression of its anti-Working-Family hatefulness rather than the Big Lie of accidental incompetence behind which it so often -- and so successfully -- hides its ultimately murderous malice.
As a words-and-pictures journalist who has evolved into something of a social historian, I cannot but wonder: does that malice represent deliberate embrace of the ever-more-obvious Neoliberal campaign to weaponize COVID-19 for maximum extermination of "surplus" Working Families and Working Folk (i.e., ourselves)? Is it in service to the "bring-on-the-Rapture" fanaticism of the Regime's ChristoNazi minions? Or is it sociopathic ecstasy at some fiendish combination of both brands of premeditated murder == a combination fostered by Trumpanoid worship of Hitler and intended to soar (much as German Nazism soared) -- toward some infinite height of hitherto-unimaginable Evil?
Whatever the answer might be, it does not change the fact we of the 99 Percent are in much the same position as a person attacked by some axe-wielding lunatic in that attempting to understand our assailant's motive remains a potentially fatal distraction until after we have turned back the assault.
As a consequence we are now in all probability beginning to ask ever-more insistently just how we might develop the sort of mindfulness that may prove essential to survive what is emerging from the pandemic fog as a warp-speed repetition of the centuries-long collapse of the Western Roman Empire, complete with Imperator Trump's stunning (but not really surprising) 21st Century reenactment of Emperor Honorius' reply in 407C.E. to Britannia's final desperate plea for the legions to return and help fend off the Saxon invasion: "the cantons must see to their own defense."1
Verily, if the federal government is as useless as Trump would have us believe, the federal union is already broken beyond repair.
All that remains for is for the diverse states to begin sorting themselves into separate republics. The former states of the Northeastern and Western coasts will undoubtedly lean toward social democracy -- but without Marxist discipline and collectivist solidarity they will be all-too-easily invaded, overrun and conquered by the vast ChristoNazi theocracy which with its violently resurrected "whites only" ethos would initially rule all the remaining former U.S. lands from the old Confederacy to the Canadian border including most (if not all) the erstwhile "flyover states" and would soon set out to conquer the entire continent.
Thus without intervention from abroad the former United States seems bound to replicate post-Roman Europe by becoming an irremediably toxic miasma of ignorance and sadism, its slave-plantation economy sustained by zero-tolerance theocracy complete with public executions by fire or lapidation.
What then might we -- the involuntary latter-day equivalents of the terminally abandoned Roman Britons -- do to avoid such horror?
As Sun Tzu might have told us were we in China 2600 years ago to hear him speak, we cannot win until we first acknowledge the true nature, capabilities and intent of those who assault us.
(Yes I have regretfully begun to consider as probable the unspeakably grave notion this pandemic is part of that assault, whether accidental or otherwise -- and not the least because of how so uncannily well it serves the predatory Aristocracy's plutocratic purposes.)
That's why I say again I can think of no better way to begin our long-term preparation -- or to reinforce our resolve if we have already begun -- than reading the document that begins today's Dispatches. Please.
(Besides which, clicking on the The Houston Chronicle's curiously defiant open-to-the-public link is a great way to give The Washington Post the electronic finger it deserves for [again] breaking its already oft-broken promise to un-paywall all its own COVID-19 reports.)
__________________
1An unforgettable, translated-from-the-original-Latin phrase from an academic source I read so many years ago I am sorry to say I remember neither its name nor its author.
*****
General news:
(Scan by scrolling down -- it'll take only minutes at most -- read whatever is relevant1 to you and yours, share it if appropriate and skip the rest.)
Jobless and Without Benefits, the Undocumented Community Is "Completely Out of Luck"
Nathalie Graham gives us the most courageous reporting I've seen thus far about how the federal government is weaponizing the pandemic to exterminate the greatest possible number of undocumented refugees in the United States -- though given the fatal reality of the increasingly submissive Moronic Majority, I doubt anything short of revolution can stop der Trumpenführer's euphemism-protected but nevertheless deadly domestic holocaust. Note too that before the 2016 elections I repeatedly pointed out how our Masters had impaled us on the proverbial horns of a dilemma. Yes of course we were given a choice; nothing less would sustain the imperial charade of democratic process. We could either vote for World War III (Hillary's fanatical Goldwater-Girl delusion she could nuke Russia into surrender without reducing our Mother Earth to a bug planet), or we could vote for a New Holocaust (Trump's fanatical hatred of all people of color and his intent to "purify" the United States only a bit more euphemistically than Germany's Hitler intended in Europe). Or of course we could also do as I did precisely because I could not abide the rejection and abandonment of humanitarian morality either of those choices would have required; hence I cast my ballot for minor-party candidates, thereby nullifying my vote as anything more than an affirmation of the franchise. Returning to the far more interesting subject of Ms. Graham, she is at present a staff writer with The Stranger, a Seattle entertainment paper the pandemic has stripped of its former relevance. If she is the real journalist I suspect she is, she (and maybe her colleagues too) are attempting to move the publication toward the potential new relevance of the investigative potency pioneered locally by the long-ago Seattle Sun, the Village-Voice-caliber weekly of which I was the founding photographer and sometime reporter and photo critic. (Ominously for The Stranger's post-pandemic prospects, The Sun was forced to set forever by the advertising boycott inflicted by the city's banksters and plutocrats in retaliation tor our repeated disclosures of outrages and scandals they insisted be kept secret.) Thus I dearly hope Ms. Graham survives the pandemic and finds stable -- and thoroughly fulfilling -- employment whether in her present job or elsewhere.
More news links, most -- I promise -- without comments:
Social and economic catastrophe intensifies as 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment
More than 16 million people filed US jobless claims over 3 weeks
Almost a Third of Renters Missed This Month's Payment
US gig workers and self-employed face delays in jobless aid
Homeless Families In Los Angeles Take Over Vacant Homes As Coronavirus Spreads
Rolling Protest For Rent Forgiveness
Any Rent Is Too Damn High: A Proposal for the Coronavirus Economy
Jerry Falwell Jr. Says Warrants Are Out for 2 Journalists After Critical Stories on Coronavirus Decision
Trump Administration Using Relief Funds To Bail Out Churches, Pay Pastor Salaries
Inside the deadly Oakdale federal prison, the coronavirus creates fear and danger
Congressional Black Caucus tackles outsized coronavirus impact on African Americans
Are We About To Lose The US Postal Service?
Coronavirus: Overwhelmed US funeral homes turn families away
As pandemic deepens, Trump cycles through targets to blame
The US Is A Failed State, And COVID-19 Proves It
The Real Conspiracy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
From Caitlin Johnstone's text: "Almost everything in the news is empty/irrelevant narrative. The only relevant information is where the money is moving, where the resources are moving, where the weapons are moving, and where the people are moving. Everything else is narrative meant to justify, manipulate or distract from those movements."
Reliable anthologies of pandemic reports (scroll for whatever you deem relevant):
Virus Outbreak
Updated constantly by the Associated Press.
Black Agenda Report
Updated regularly. In my opinion, the best, most informative, most relevant political website on the U.S. Internet.
RT - Breaking news, shows, podcasts
Democratic (sic) Party Big Lies and Republican censorship not withstanding, this site provides what is often the most truthful reporting available to us in the United States. Updated often.
TASS Russian News Agency
Just as Propagandamaster Bezos' WaPo gives us the Predatory Plutocrats' perspective, so does this site -- formerly Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (Телегра́фное аге́нтство Сове́тского Сою́за, Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza) -- give us, in English, the often-radically different Russian government's perspective. (It's history, dating from 1904, makes interesting reading for mediaphyles.) Updated often.
Xinhua
Ditto for the news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua's reports are regularly updates and its history is here.
Coronavirus live updates: New York suffers highest single-day death toll; WHO pushes back at Trump over threat
Probably not "fake news" and updated often -- but listed last because Propagandamaster Bezos's corporate crown jewel is nevertheless best known for its censorship1 and warmongering lies.
Indications of the pandemic's true magnitude and consequences:
(A Few) States (Now) Offering Affordable Care Act Open Enrollments
Vital news for those of us eligible for the coverage and (somehow) able to afford it.
Social and economic catastrophe intensifies as 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment
‘We will run out of food in three weeks’: Local food banks face shortage during historic demand
Coronavirus could overwhelm hospitals in small cities and rural areas, data shows
Doctor's death highlights limits of coronavirus death count
COVID-19: Devastated Saudi Royal Family Seeks to End Yemen War
Rice & wheat prices surge amid fears Covid-19 lockdown may threaten global food security
Schools struggle to safely get free meals to needy students
Campus, dorms closed for coronavirus, leaving some LGBTQ students with nowhere to go
Coronavirus: Florida vegetables an unexpected victim of COVID-19
Covid-19 may cause deepest economic crisis ‘of our lifetimes’ — WTO chief
Other pandemic-related indications and/or questions:
Navajo And Hopi Families Relief Fund Builds Movement In Response To Covid-19 Pandemic
Congress in standoff on virus aid, but first checks coming
It's Time to Move Past Employer-Based Health Insurance
As Trump rails against mail voting, some allies embrace it
Did Trump give Israel 1 million face masks despite coronavirus eq
On our own: Forgotten household skills, revived for new use
How US cancer patients are navigating new coronavirus anxiety
Vindictive vectors (includes countermeasures):
Media Facilitates Spread of Disinformation and Lies by Broadcasting "The Daily Trump Show"
LA Mayor Garcetti encourages residents to report violators of stay-at-home order: 'Snitches get rewards'
Entirely believable despite the always-questionable source.
Forcible disarmament (includes countermeasures):
SAF Joins Lawsuit Against Massachusetts Governor
Especially for Washingtonians:
Home | Washington Healthplanfinder
From the text: "Get coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Free or low-cost Apple Health is available year-round and a special enrollment is available to the uninsured who have life changes as a result of COVID-19." (Residents of other states please see "Affordable Care Act Open Enrollments" above.)
United Way program to help King County renters who’ve lost their income
Check with other United Way organizations elsewhere to learn if they have similar programs.
Also worth reading:
The Coronavirus Pandemic, Like Other Global Catastrophes, Reveals the Limitations of Nationalism
A New World Is Being Born: What Will It Be?
A trustworthy source -- a vehemently anti-Trump conservative who ever-more-frequently seems to lean Leftward -- speculates on our probable futures.
Lives Lost: A mismatched pair's love story ends with virus
Held over because it is fine unusually sensitive reporting, the sort of work that proves AP still hires real journalists -- those of us for whom it is a way of life rather than just another job.
A Family’s Fetid Week With Coronavirus
Held over because it is the most outspoken, most emotionally honest, most implicitly life-supportive and by far the best reporting I have read in many years. Indeed, Reyhan Harmanci is a writer whose talent I'd have recognized with a full-time general-assignment staff-job (way, way) back when "editor" was the key part of my job-title. (For more of her work, click on her "Family's Fetid Week" byline.)
Important stuff to bear in mind:
(All of which helps us understand more about what the PluPreds are doing to us now and what they might intend to do to us in the future.)
How a Network of Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalists Penetrated Canada’s Conservative Party to Lobby for Military Conflict
New: Glimpses of the re-emergent international Nazi Axis: is Mitch the Malignant's NeoConfederacy already a secret member?
‘Collateral Murder’ and the My Lai Massacre
RLS. Vital to understanding why the U.S. government's response to the deadly Covid-19 pandemic is genocidal rather than protective. Contrasting the U.S. population's long-ago outage at Vietnam war crimes with its present-day enthusiasm for atrocities against Muslims (and all other peoples of color) reveals how decades of Ayn Rand indoctrination purged the United States of any pretense of humanitarianism and reduced it to a thoroughly Nazified white-racist realm in which self-obsessed moral imbecility is the ruling ethos and revolution (or even effective resistance) is thus rendered psychologically impossible. Additional details here.
FOCUS: This White House Doesn't Give Two Shits About You
I am no fan of Michael Moore, but in this short piece he speaks bitter truth for us all.
Trump Admits Easy Voting Would Defeat Republicans
How gerrymandering and methodical voter-suppression have reduced our elections to meaningless charades.
Goldman Sachs warns that curing patients may not be 'sustainable'
Outright acknowledgment from the deadliest Neoliberal predators that curing disease with a single treatment is bad for profits. A report from 2018 that explains what's being done to us today, hence given knife-edged relevance by the pandemic.
Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy
Another "old" report given new relevance by what's being done to us today.
The Truth About the United States' "Continuity of Government" Plans & The Coronavirus Perfect Storm
Scroll down to the 12th graf to learn how at least eight million U.S. citizens are on the PPs' enemies lists and will be disappeared.
Military, Trump administration ready plans for domestic crackdown as virus spreads across US
From the report: "'a senior military planner working on coronavirus but not authorized to speak on sensitive planning matters [...] says that deployment of federal troops in support roles is being prepared,' including to conduct traffic stops, home searches and seizures and arrests." Scroll to Footnote2 to learn what atrocities could thus be inflicted on us.
Avenger Planet: Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature's Response to Human Transgression?
Excellent question -- though as a (solitary-practice) Gaian Pagan, I would cite the scientific hypothesis that bears the Earth Goddess' name and answer "almost certainly yes." (One of the innumerable reasons the ChristoNazis so despise us is the majority of our beliefs are based on science -- the ultimate terminator of all patriarchal religion.)
Useful references:
(No snake-oil sales or medicine-show huckstering allowed.)
How to Make a DIY Mask From a T-Shirt or Bandanna
New; hopefully useful; have not tried it myself.
What you should know about DIY masks and ventilators
From National Geographic.
CARES Act Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for Freelancers
Useful, potentially lifesaving economic information. (Disclosure: I am a longtime National Writers Union member and co-chaired one of their local writers' workshops c. 2009-2011.)
COVID-19 Relief by industry
Parents On Childcare And Challenges In Coronavirus Isolation
How to wash your hands to prevent coronavirus — because you're probably doing it wrong
Loss of smell, taste, might signal pandemic virus infection
Tests show new virus lives on some surfaces for up to 3 days
How to clean the bundle of germs that is your phone
Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide
How to Properly Make Sanitizers from Household Ingredients
Handling mail amid coronavirus: Low risk but wash your hands
My practice is to assume everything from outside is potentially contaminated, hence I wash my hands thoroughly after handling any incoming packages and sanitize any surface upon which they might have rested or been unwrapped.
_________________
1As to what prompts my sudden skepticism of virus coverage by The Washington Post, note how quickly Bezos or one of his zero-tolerance subordinates imposed paywall censorship on this pivotally important 20 March story (scroll down to "U.S. intelligence reports"), which for only a very few short minutes appeared as part of WaPo's non-paywalled daily virus report. Pretending to be real journalists rather than the Regime's scribes -- a mental downgrading inflicted as much by the clerical drudgery necessitated by computers as by the chief Josef-Goebbels-wannabee Bezos himself -- is a form of moral imbecility I cannot abide.
2Be aware that "home searches and seizures" could include not only confiscation of all real or potential weapons but -- given the ChristoNazi Regime's anti-marijuana fanaticism -- confiscation of, and arrest for possession of, all the (still federally illegal) medical marijuana upon which such a huge number of opiate-denied chronic-pain victims are now forced to depend. Too -- given the Regime's even more fanatical hatred of women and female sexuality -- such raids might also be used to confiscate all birth-control devices and criminalize all unwed women who possess them, thereby fulfilling still more of the PPs' ChristoNazis objectives. Thus -- by such mass arrests -- could the Regime give its plutocratic owners the ultimate "gift" of permanently enslaving millions of U.S. citizens for brutally hard, typically deadly labor, thereby granting our Masters' wish of exterminating "surplus workers" while following the German Nazis' model of amassing unlimited profits from mass murder.
(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)
*****
YES VERY LATE AGAIN even as I thankfully rediscover via research-to-completion production of these daily updates how to think and intuit as if I were once more an award-winning investigative reporter or an award-winning editor with an award-winning staff -- even if doing this work on a computer seems to take multiple eternities longer than ever it did by teletype, typewriter and pencil.
Again too my apology. As I said before, better late and right than rushed and wrong. But I must also apologize for the fact that -- having been working nonstop on this edition (save for meals and bathroom breaks) since about 2 p.m. yesterday -- I have also undoubtedly missed some typos (and otherwise mis-edited) this entire piece. Hence though I'm posting it now I'll return to it after I get some sleep and proofread it again. In any case I'm doing the best I can, and I extend special thanks to those of you who reassure me these Dispatches are vital enough I should keep at them as long as I am able. .
May all of us have the best weekend possible under the circumstances.
LB/10 April 2020 10:44PDT; revised and re-Tweeted 10 April 19:13PDT.
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