Grief, Shock After a 'Gentle Giant' Loses His Life in the Line of Duty

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Colleagues called Stephen T. Johns "Big John," for he was well over 6 feet tall. But mostly friends recalled the security guard's constant courtesy and friendliness.

Christian Davenport and Paul Duggan
June 11, 2009 - Washington Post

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Colleagues called Stephen T. Johns "Big John," for he was well over 6 feet tall. But mostly friends recalled the security guard's constant courtesy and friendliness.

"A soft-spoken, gentle giant," said Milton Talley, a former employee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Johns was killed yesterday in the line of duty -- shot, authorities said, by an avowed white supremacist who entered the museum with a rifle.

Details of the shooting remained sketchy last night, but apparently the 39-year-old, who was armed with a .38-caliber revolver, did not have time to react when James W. von Brunn walked into the museum, according to police sources.

"Immediately upon entering the front doors of the museum, he raised the rifle and started shooting," D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said of von Brunn, 88, adding that he "was engaged by security guards, and there was an exchange of gunfire."

When the smoke cleared, von Brunn was critically wounded. The only casualty among the guards was Johns, who lived in Prince George's County. At least one bullet from a small-caliber rifle hit Johns in his upper-left torso, according to Johns's employer, the Wackenhut security company.

"Two other . . . armed security officers opened fire with their service revolvers," the company said. "The intruder was hit at once" and wounded.

Johns died at George Washington University Hospital.

"There are no words to express our grief and shock over these events," the museum said in a statement, describing Johns as "an outstanding colleague who greeted us every day with a smile."

Johns, a 1988 graduate of Crosslands High School in Temple Hills, lived in an apartment in the Temple Hills area. Friends said he had a son.

Allen Burcky, another former museum employee, said last night that workers there considered each other "like family" and that Johns was "very courteous, very helpful."

Lourdes Padilla, the mother of a close friend, said that Johns trained as a plumber but that she didn't think he had ever entered the trade. He remarried about a year ago, Padilla said.

Johns's sister, Jacqueline Carter, declined to comment as she entered her home in Temple Hills. "She's in bad shape right now," said a man who was driving her.

Wackenhut describes itself as the U.S. government's "largest contractor for professional security services." An official with the union that represents Wackenhut employees at the museum said Johns was paid about $20 an hour.

"It's a heavy loss," said Assane Faye, the Washington district director of the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America.

Like other guards at the museum, on Raoul Wallenberg Place SW near the Mall, Johns underwent training for which he received the D.C. police designation of "special police officer," which permitted him to carry a revolver on duty.

Faye said that during contract negotiations with Wackenhut two years ago, the union pressed for company-issued protective vests. Although Wackenhut seemed open to the idea, vests have not been issued, Faye said.

"I hammered this in our negotiations two years ago because of how sensitive that museum is," he said. "Our guards needed more protection." He said that one of the guards at the museum was "verbally assaulted by one guy walking by, saying anti-Semitic remarks. For that reason, I made that the center of the negotiation."

Authorities said Johns was not wearing a protective vest.

Susan Pitcher, a Wackenhut spokeswoman, declined to comment on the shooting beyond the company's statement.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, said officials at those institutions took immediate steps to enhance security after the shooting in Washington.

"The key component is not only to have your own security, but to work with the local police force," he said. "In our case, the LAPD has a very good grasp of where all sorts of extremists might be and are able to deploy very quickly."

William S. Parsons, the Holocaust museum's chief of staff, praised Johns and his colleagues.

"Never take your guard force or your security people for granted," Parsons said. "They did exactly what they were supposed to do."

Taking Time Takes Patience

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Desperate and Afraid, People Trust Leader

Ted Rall
June 10, 2009 - TedRall.com

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WASHINGTON, NORTH AMERICAN PROTECTORATE, GREATER GERMAN REICH--

From Honolulu to Portland, Maine, North American citizens of the Greater German Reich gathered on June 6th to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the victory of Axis forces at D-Day, the battle that decided World War II. Fallen heroes of the Wehrmacht and SS were commemorated at solemn ceremonies and Party rallies throughout the Reich, but the day held special meaning in Washington, which until 1945 was the capital of the former United States.

Speaking at the Supreme Kommandatur, which was built at the site of the former American presidential palace, Chancellor Adolf Hitler III said the war against the Western Allies paved the way for the years of peace and prosperity that followed. "It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide," he said.

Recollections of the National Socialist triumph at Normandy were clouded by several developments--a severe recession, a war with no apparent end in sight, and continuing concerns over human rights abuses.

Hitler III swept into power last November with a slogan--"change you can believe in"--that charmed members of the Reichstag across the political spectrum from far right to extreme right. Since that time, however, changes have proven either incremental or non-existent. For example, Hitler III promised during the campaign to help national comrades in danger of losing their homes--but instead spent trillions of marks to bail out feckless banks. He promised to withdraw from the Eastern Front, but has extended the pullout timeline by a year, is leaving tens of thousands of troops in place, and even plans to open a new front in South Asia.

Finally, he declared his intent to close Auschwitz ("Germany does not 'do' genocide," he said) only to move the remaining inmates to other camps, which are being expanded.

Despite the lack of action, most people continue to support the charismatic new Leader. "He has a lot on his plate," says Kristof Mathewsohn, the cable TV commentator. "Give the guy time."

Indeed, five months into his chancellorship, the Leader remains the most trusted figure in North American politics. A new poll of homeless, recently dispossessed workers found that 72 percent trust Hitler III "to do the right thing."

"In watching and listening to Hitler III's press conferences, it's easy to appreciate why people trust him," said a man who preferred to remain anonymous because, as a Jew, he could be arrested and murdered by the state. "Sure, I wish he'd shut down the gas chambers and the ovens, but he has a lot of other problems to fix first. I'm sure he'll get around to investigating the guys in the previous administration for their role in the Holocaust--nothing drastic, maybe a truth and reconciliation commission or something."

Members of the media remain in thrall to the Leader's suave persona, which is magnified by the glamour his statuesque wife and adorable daughters have brought to Germania (formerly Berlin). "Finally--parties we can believe in!" quipped a reporter as he slipped into a sold-out Wagner performance where Hitler III and his family appeared for a long-promised "date night."

Few have forgotten that Hitler III offered the best alternative. "We live in a one-party system," pointed out Rachel Maddoff, host of "The Rachel Maddoff Show." "Can you imagine how much worse it would have been had Hitler III lost?"

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Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Water Stress, Ocean Levels to Unleash 'Climate Exodus'

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June 10, 2009 - Agence France Presse

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Tens of millions of people will be displaced by climate change in coming years, posing social, political and security problems of an unprecedented dimension, a new study said on Wednesday.

"Unless aggressive measures are taken to halt global warming, the consequences for human migration and displacement could reach a scope and scale that vastly exceed anything that has occurred before," its authors warned.

"Climate change is already contributing to migration and displacement.

"All major estimates project that the trend will rise to tens of millions of migrants in coming years. Within the next few decades, the consequences of climate change for human security efforts could be devastating."

The report, "In Search of Shelter," was compiled by specialists from Columbia University in New York and the United Nations University, and from a non-governmental organisation, CARE International.

It was presented to journalists on the sidelines of the UN climate talks in Bonn, a staging post to an envisioned new global pact for tackling global warming and its impacts.

The study swung the spotlight on several regions that, according to projections, will be badly hit by rising sea levels, flood or drought.

Rather than a migration from poor countries to rich ones, the exodus is most likely to unfold within poor nations, with a movement mainly from the countryside to cities, thus further burdening urban infrastructure, it said.

In central Mexico, where tens of millions of people live, rainfall in some areas could decline by up to 50 percent by 2080, "rendering many livelihoods unviable and dramatically raising the risk of chronic hunger," the report said.

South Asia faces both short- and long-term threats.

Warming will accelerate melting from Himalayan glaciers in springtime, thus heightening the probability of flooding. But glacier shrinkage will eventually affect the flow of major rivers that wind down from the Himalayan foothills.

"This has a lot of consequences for agricultural production in one of the world's most populous regions," said Charles Ehrhart, climate-change coordinator at CARE.

The Ganges Delta, small island states and other low-lying areas, meanwhile, are in peril from rising sea levels.

If ocean levels rise by two metres (seven feet), "9.4 million people would be completely flooded out" in Bangladesh alone, said Ehrhart.

A two-metre (seven-feet) rise is seen by most climate scientists as being at the top end of predictions for what could happen this century.

In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predicted sea levels will rise by up to 59 centimeters (23 inches) before 2100 due the expansion of warmer waters.

But this figure does not factor in a partial melting of massive ice sheets in western Antarctica and Greenland, a scenario now identified by more recent research.

The new report urged policymakers to develop tools to identify regions and populations at risk of being displaced by climate change.

And they said funds mustered to help cope with climate change under the future global treaty must also be directed at poor migrants.

The new pact, designed to run from 2012, would chiefly slash emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation that are warming Earth's atmosphere, affecting weather patterns.

The report admits that the definition of a climate migrant is complex, as poverty, a run of bad harvests or civil strife are usually the immediate, and thus most visible, triggers for displacement.

Estimates of the likely numbers range from 25 to 50 million people by 2010, while the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has pitched a figure of 200 million by 2050.

The term "climate refugee" is shunned by UN organisations, as "refugee" is a term with legal connotations under the 1851 Geneva Convention.

A healthcare reform bill will affect nearly everyone

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Despite the looming brawl in Congress, the Democratic majority is expected to pass some form of legislation.

Noam N. Levey
June 10, 2009 - Los Angeles Times

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Reporting from Washington -- Spurred on by President Obama and an array of businesses, medical providers and consumers clamoring for change, congressional Democrats have begun to lay out specific plans for overhauling the nation's healthcare system -- proposing changes that would affect almost every American, old or young, sick or well, rich, poor or middle-class.

Despite a looming brawl over key details, the Democratic majority is expected to pass a bill that will make ordinary Americans the ultimate stakeholders who must live with the system, adjust to changes and -- one way or another -- absorb the costs.

For laid-off autoworkers, there could be a new guarantee that they won't lose their family health insurance. A patient with heart disease could receive more advanced treatment to avoid hospitalization. Small shop owners could get help figuring out coverage for employees. An overweight teenager might find a new slim-down program at school.

And for some Americans, especially the affluent and those with traditional job-based medical insurance, there could be new or higher taxes.

After months of spadework and consultation with the interested parties, lawmakers begin the most sweeping healthcare debate in a generation with broad agreement on the need to control costs, improve the care Americans receive and expand coverage to nearly everyone.

But shadowing the debate, which is expected to dominate Washington's summer and extend into the fall, are the same vexing controversies that have derailed almost all previous efforts to reshape the U.S. healthcare system.

There is still no consensus, for example, about how large a role the federal government should play. Nor is there agreement on who should bear the cost, which could surpass $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Obama's proposals include higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans. But that idea has generated widespread opposition in Congress.

Other financing schemes may be just as unpopular, such as taxing employer-provided health benefits or putting new levies on sugary beverages to raise revenue and encourage healthier behavior.

The first concrete legislation emerged Tuesday as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) filed a mammoth bill that, among other things, outlines a dizzying new government regulatory structure to ensure that every American gets health insurance.

Other bills are expected to follow from a trio of senior House Democrats, including Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), whose bill may offer the best hope for gaining Republican support.

In addition, a phone-book-size catalog of amendments and less-detailed alternatives -- including many from Republicans seeking to shape the debate themselves -- are expected to compete for attention.

Though they differ on important details, the Democrats' plans all focus on three broad goals, each of which has contributed to stalemate in the past:

* Improving the quality of care for everyone by encouraging doctors, hospitals and others to adopt the best, most effective courses of treatment. Research shows that many doctors fail to adopt advances in treatment and that more than 25% of all treatment may be medically ineffective or unnecessary.

Achieving this goal moves the government into the sensitive area of relations between individual patients and their doctors.

But many health policy experts say such changes could do the most to reduce medical costs and improve care.

"At the end of the day, that may be the most important thing we end up doing," said Ken Thorpe, a healthcare economist at Emory University.

* Curbing the explosive growth in costs by prodding the medical system to make more cost-effective decisions and to increase efficiency by moving to computerized medical records.

The public and employers are staggering under the cost of the present system -- rising at more than twice the rate of inflation and expected to surpass $2.2 trillion this year. But reining in prices can narrow freedom of choice and impose changes on providers.

* Making health insurance readily available to the 46 million people who don't have it, as well as more affordable and less burdensome to those who do, and to the employers who still deliver the bulk of medical insurance to workers.

In one of their most controversial proposals, Obama and congressional Democrats want to create an optional government insurance plan that individuals could choose instead of a private plan. Supporters argue that such a plan would curb costs and improve quality by creating competition for the handful of private insurance companies now dominating the market.

Few proposals ignite hotter partisan passions.

"It's just very, very difficult," a frustrated Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said after emerging from one meeting with fellow lawmakers last week.

Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is a leading member of a bipartisan group that has been working for months on healthcare legislation with input from dozens of interest groups.

This is the seventh major push over the last century, and senior senators from both parties say they are trying to find common ground.

"I think we have been surprised at the amount of agreement there is," said Wyoming Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the senior Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

One thing lawmakers in both parties have agreed on is that people's existing healthcare arrangements should be disrupted as little as possible. In particular, people should be able to keep their insurance and their doctor if they want to.

"For lots of Americans, there won't be much change right away," said Drew Altman, an expert on healthcare politics and president of the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

"That is inherent in the strategy."

Altman said that approach reflected the fact that most Americans report high satisfaction with their own care, even as they worry about rising costs.

In the same spirit, senior lawmakers and the administration are working to preserve the current employer-based system through which most Americans get insurance, while rejecting a single-payer system favored by some liberals, as well as a more free-market system favored by conservatives.

But signs of tension are already emerging, especially over provisions that Republicans charge would lead to government intrusion into the private relationships between patients and care providers.

Sensitive as those issues may be, many healthcare analysts worry that paying the bills may ultimately be where cooperation breaks down.

"The stars are aligned. The signs are promising," said Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who has studied previous efforts to overhaul the nation's healthcare system.

"But so far there has not been much congressional willingness to consider even relatively modest revenue-raising ideas," he said. "And in the healthcare debate, time is one of the greatest dangers. It gives people a chance to decide they are against whatever is on the table."

Grand Theft Auto

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June 01, 2009
Greg Palast - GregPalast.com

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Screw the autoworkers. They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank - expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's "Car Czar" - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.

Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.

Preventive Detention for Pensions

So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal.

In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits.

The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no. Company executives must hold these retirement funds as "fiduciaries." Here's the law, Professor Obama, as described on the government's own web site under the heading, "Health Plans and Benefits."

"The primary responsibility of fiduciaries is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits."

Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short. A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin.

Yet, in effect, the Obama Administration is demanding that money for an elderly auto worker's spleen should be siphoned off to feed the TARP babies. Workers go without lung transplants so Dimon and Rubin can pimp out their ride. This is another "Guantanamo" moment for the Obama Administration - channeling Nixon to endorse the preventive detention of retiree health insurance.

Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock. Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must:

"... act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses."

By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock.

This is dangerous business: The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds.

House of Rubin

Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?

As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).

With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."

Which leaves us to ask the question: is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers?

And it's been a good year for Senor Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler. "Owning" is a loose term. Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler - indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away. Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the US taxpayer.

("Cerberus," by the way, named itself after the Roman's mythical three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hell. Subtle these guys are not.)

While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero.

If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.

It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car.

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Economist and journalist Greg Palast, a former trade union contract negotiator, is author of the New York Times bestsellers "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse." He is a GM bondholder and card-carrying member of United Automobile Workers Local 1981. Palast's latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD, "Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon - on the trail of the financial marauders."

Is Your Newest Facebook Friend a Sleazeball Debt Collector?

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Exposing the latest and slimiest ways the "financial services" industry is raking it in from cash-crunched Americans.

Liliana Segura
June 10, 2009 - AlterNet

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With millions of Americans struggling in the current economic crisis, it should come as no surprise that a growing number of people are falling behind paying their bills. This is no cause for celebration -- unless of course, you happen to make your living as a debt collector, a debt-settlement company or other notoriously sleazy outfits engineered to profit off people's financial misery.

It's bad enough that while newspapers and car companies die off, the debt business is booming. But recent months have brought a number of reports and lawsuits that exposed some of the latest -- and slimiest -- ways the "financial services" industry is using to cash in on already-struggling Americans.

Is Your Newest Facebook Friend a Debt Collector?

When Michigan resident Paula Newland fell behind in her car payments, she found herself battling some typical -- and not so typical -- tactics used by debt collectors. In addition to repeated, harassing phone calls from three companies -- including 15 calls on one Saturday and claims that phone calls were "concerning a 'family emergency' " -- Newland was told that if she did not pay up, her car would be reported stolen, and she would be arrested. The company also threatened to deploy what they called a "shame automobile" and "camp out all weekend" in front of her house.

And then came a novel approach: As if all this weren't enough, the fact there were overdue payments for her 2005 Chevy Impala were broadcast on her MySpace account.

Outraged and humiliated, Newland filed a civil suit earlier this year claiming "damage to her business and community reputation, extreme mental distress, aggravation, humiliation and embarrassment."

Newland is hardly alone. Debt collectors are increasingly using social-networking technology to go after people in debt. Ever get "friended" on Facebook by a cute stranger? Think twice before you add them. Some debt collectors have been caught posing as random "friends" on Facebook.

According to a post on Consumerist last month, "Debt collectors are using cute chicks as bait on Facebook to track down and keep track of debtors." It told the story of one employee of a debt-collection agency, who after "friending" some 658 people, declared (rather bizarrely):

"haha you guys i tricked you all my name is actually Emily and i work for cbv collections as a skip tracer i bet you guys got calls from them saying you owe money thats all my doing :) you want to call and bitch? i dare you to call me 604-[redacted]!!! I wait to hear from you :)"

Writing about the Consumerist story, blogger Angela Connor who writes at Social MediaToday, noted a trend in the Google searches that lead people to her site. "Here are a few I've seen in the last two weeks," she wrote:

1. "facebook debt collectors" (there are many instances of this one!)
2. "debt collectors are going to start infiltrating social media"
3. "Do bill collector's use LinkedIn?"

"This clearly is a topic on the minds of many," Connor wrote. "I have no idea who is conducting these searches (bill collectors or those trying to avoid them), but I know we will see this more often."

Indeed, another recent lawsuit tells the story of James Ricobene, who sued a Chicago company called Universal Tracing in April after "a senior investigator for the collection agency posted a message on [Ricobene's] daughter's MySpace page asking her to 'contact our office immediately so we can discuss the peaceful recovery' of his 2007 Mercedes GL450.

"The suit identifies JP Morgan Chase Bank as the lender on the vehicle. 'Failure to contact me will result in further action against your father,' the investigator, Chris Flanagan, warned Gina Ricobene."

Because friends and family members saw the MySpace message, James Ricobene says he was "humiliated, embarrassed and suffered substantial emotional distress."

Harassing You for Debt That Belongs to Someone Else

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is supposed to prohibit debt collectors from contacting third parties, like family members, when going after people. But this remains one of the oldest tactics in the book. What's more, consumer rights advocates tell horror stories about the relentless harassment of people who find themselves in debt collectors' crosshairs because of identity theft -- or simply because they share a name with a person with debt.

Human logic would suggest it would be simple to clear up such an obvious mistake. Wrong. Getting off a debt collector's call list is apparently harder than getting off a no-fly list.

One New York lawyer (who, full disclosure, happens to be my sister) represents poor people in debt-collection lawsuits; she tells the story of a client who is blind and partially paralyzed and yet continues to be harassed by a debt collector insisting that he pay money he owes on a gym membership.

"He was like, 'I'm stuck in a wheelchair, and I can't see! Why would I go to the gym?' " says Anamaria Segura, a staff attorney at MFY Legal Services. Neither this -- nor the fact that the man shares a name with his son, whose debt he was possibly being harassed for -- seems to be convincing the debt collector to back off.

"The thing that was hard about helping this client is that he'd not only apparently had his identity stolen; his credit report mistakenly reported debt that belonged to his son, under his son's Social Security number (they have the same name, just Jr. and SR.)"

When the collectors would call, he would explain that there was a mistake -- and they would immediately ask for his Social Security number, to confirm the account. When he refused to provide them with it due to privacy concerns -- after all, this was probably the reason his identity had been stolen in the first place -- the caller would take his reluctance as proof of a challenge or refusal to pay.

"His son was incarcerated, and they barely kept in touch, so he couldn't ask his son about the accounts, so he had to constantly field these phone calls from aggressive debt collectors who demanded payment."

Aside from the gym membership, a debt collector also accused him of owing money on a car rental. This, too, was a mistake, since the client cannot drive.

Yet debt collectors resorted to callous tactics -- including bigotry -- to try to get the money: "One collector said to him once, 'you Hispanics, you're all the same, you don't want to take responsibility.' "

While such harassment is appalling and annoying, it shouldn't actually end up costing you anything, right?

Think again.

A different New York man described being called multiple times by a Buffalo, N.Y.-based collection agency called Capital Management Services regarding debt on a Chase Bank credit card. The man, Paul Alappat, "told the collector he had never possessed a Chase Bank card and asked them to stop calling him."

When he applied for a home-equity loan two years later, however, the collection showed up on his credit report. His lender told him that if the $394.74 debt were not resolved, the loan couldn't be made.

"Since I was in a hurry to get the loan approved," Alappat said, "I paid the full amount, including the interest."

The Rise of 'Debt-Settlement' Firms

OK, so debt collectors can be total bullies. But what about those seemingly kindler, gentler companies that promise to settle your debt for a fee? According to the International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators, theirs is a "profession that truly makes a difference."

And making a difference is lucrative, apparently. "The debt-settlement industry is growing very rapidly," boasts the IAPDA Web site. The IAPDA cites historic levels of credit card debt, as well as changes in bankruptcy laws that make it harder for consumers to clear debts, as reasons to "be a part of this exciting industry." In fact, it calls it one of the "top-rated career opportunities of the new millennium."

Last month, however, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced a nationwide investigation into debt-settlement companies, calling it a "rogue industry" that offers consumers "false hope, charging tremendous fees and leaving them in a worse financial situation."

"The debt-settlement plans offered by these companies are often inherently flawed and, based upon consumer complaints, it appears that many consumers are being misled regarding the nature of the services offered by these companies," according to a press release released last month by the attorney general's office. "For example, some companies falsely represent that they can reduce consumers' credit card debt by as much as 75 percent through negotiations with creditors. In addition, the companies often take their fees up front and keep their fees even when they do not provide the promised services."

The cruelty of these plans is that they are based on a payment plan that is a set-up from the start.

"The debt-settlement plans are generally premised on consumers aggregating savings, over one to three years, from which both the payment of the company's fees and any negotiated settlement are to be made. Yet most consumers who are targeted by these companies are unable to meet the savings requirements because of their precarious financial situation."

"The real racket," says Anamaria Segura at MFY Legal Services, "is that they'll say, 'Oh you owe $4,000? We'll negotiate with your creditors and settle that for $2,500!' But the fact is, that if the consumer ever is able to compile the $2,500 to pay off the creditors, by the time that happens, the $4,000 balance is now $6,000, because of interests, fees and late charges -- and the debt-settlement companies know that,"

When people come up short, these companies end up telling consumers to find other ways to cough up the cash. This, according to the AG's office can include telling people to mow lawns, "cut down" on car insurance, "borrowing from their neighbors and church," and perhaps most memorably, "selling their blood plasma."

"Debt collectors are totally different from debt-settlement companies," explains Segura. "I've had some debt-collection lawyers say to me, 'Oh they are terrible, we don't work with them, they really mislead people.' And they're right. But in my experience debt-collection lawyers are no better."

Zen Moment of the Day

- The New York Times

Debunking Canadian Health Care Myths

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Rhonda Hackett
Jun 7, 2009 - Denver Post

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What do we pay for, anyway? As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.

Often I'll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner's nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one's merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.

Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.

Yet, the debate rages on. Indeed, it has reached a fever pitch since President Barack Obama took office, with Americans either dreading or hoping for the dawn of a single-payer health care system. Opponents of such a system cite Canada as the best example of what not to do, while proponents laud that very same Canadian system as the answer to all of America's health care problems. Frankly, both sides often get things wrong when trotting out Canada to further their respective arguments.

As America comes to grips with the reality that changes are desperately needed within its health care infrastructure, it might prove useful to first debunk some myths about the Canadian system.

* Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.

In actuality, taxes are nearly equal on both sides of the border. Overall, Canada's taxes are slightly higher than those in the U.S. However, Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash. At the end of the day, the average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent.

* Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.

The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered.

* Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.

Ten percent of Canada's GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. In essence, the U.S. system is considerably more expensive than Canada's. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.

What the American taxpayer may not realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.

* Myth: Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.

While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don't get one no matter what your doctor thinks — unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

* Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada.

There are reasonable waits for most specialists' care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer, for example. However, the wait has nothing to do with money per se, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs.

* Myth: Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.

Most patients who come from Canada to the U.S. for health care are those whose costs are covered by the Canadian governments. If a Canadian goes outside of the country to get services that are deemed medically necessary, not experimental, and are not available at home for whatever reason (e.g., shortage or absence of high tech medical equipment; a longer wait for service than is medically prudent; or lack of physician expertise), the provincial government where you live fully funds your care. Those patients who do come to the U.S. for care and pay out of pocket are those who perceive their care to be more urgent than it likely is.

* Myth: Canada is a socialized health care system in which the government runs hospitals and where doctors work for the government.

Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt says single-payer systems are not "socialized medicine" but "social insurance" systems because doctors work in the private sector while their pay comes from a public source. Most physicians in Canada are self-employed. They are not employees of the government nor are they accountable to the government. Doctors are accountable to their patients only. More than 90 percent of physicians in Canada are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Claims are submitted to a single provincial health care plan for reimbursement, whereas in the U.S., claims are submitted to a multitude of insurance providers. Moreover, Canadian hospitals are controlled by private boards and/or regional health authorities rather than being part of or run by the government.

Myth: There aren't enough doctors in Canada.

From a purely statistical standpoint, there are enough physicians in Canada to meet the health care needs of its people. But most doctors practice in large urban areas, leaving rural areas with bona fide shortages. This situation is no different than that being experienced in the U.S. Simply training and employing more doctors is not likely to have any significant impact on this specific problem. Whatever issues there are with having an adequate number of doctors in any one geographical area, they have nothing to do with the single-payer system.

And these are just some of the myths about the Canadian health care system. While emulating the Canadian system will likely not fix U.S. health care, it probably isn't the big bad "socialist" bogeyman it has been made out to be.

It is not a perfect system, but it has its merits. For people like my 55-year-old Aunt Betty, who has been waiting for 14 months for knee-replacement surgery due to a long history of arthritis, it is the superior system. Her $35,000-plus surgery is finally scheduled for next month. She has been in pain, and her quality of life has been compromised. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Aunt Betty — who lives on a fixed income and could never afford private health insurance, much less the cost of the surgery and requisite follow-up care — will soon sport a new, high-tech knee. Waiting 14 months for the procedure is easy when the alternative is living in pain for the rest of your life.

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Rhonda Hackett of Castle Rock is a clinical psychologist.

Hold Your Applause

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Chris Hedges
June 8, 2009 - TruthDig.com

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Did they play Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by U.S. iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world's largest ghetto?

What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture-yes, we still torture-only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel's brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured? How does it look for Obama to call for democracy and human rights from Egypt, where we lavishly fund and support the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East?

We may thrill to Obama's rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration. The wars of occupation go on or have been expanded. Israel continues to flout international law, gobbling up more Palestinian land and carrying out egregious war crimes in Gaza. Calcified, repressive regimes in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are feted in Washington as allies.

The speech at Cairo University, which usually has trucks filled with riot police outside the university gates and a heavy security presence on campus to control the student body, is an example of the facade. Student political groups, as everyone who joined in the standing ovation for the president knew, are prohibited. Faculty deans are chosen by the administration, rather than elected by professors, "as a way to combat Islamist influence on campus," according to the U.S. State Department's latest human rights report. And, as The Washington Post pointed out, students who use the Internet "as an outlet for their political or social views are on notice: One Cairo University student blogger was jailed for two months last summer for 'public agitation,' and another was kicked out of university housing for criticizing the government."

The expanding imperial projects and tightening screws of repression lurch forward under Obama. We are not trying to end terror or promote democracy. We are ensuring that our corporate state has a steady supply of the cheap oil to which it is addicted. And the scarcer oil becomes, the more aggressive we become. This is the game playing out in the Muslim world.

The Bush White House openly tortured. The Obama White House tortures and pretends not to. Obama may have banned waterboarding, but as Luke Mitchell points out in next month's issue of Harper's magazine, torture, including isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation and force-feeding, continues to be used to break detainees. The president has promised to close Guantanamo, where only 1 percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are kept. And the Obama administration has sought to obscure the fate and condition of thousands of Muslims held in black holes around the globe. As Mitchell notes, the Obama White House "has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment. It has sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the
records regarding our treatment of those detainees."

Muslim rage is stoked because we station tens of thousands of American troops on Muslim soil, occupy two Muslim nations, make possible the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, support repressive Arab regimes and torture thousands of Muslims in offshore penal colonies where prisoners are stripped of their rights. We now have 22 times as many military personnel in the Muslim world as were deployed during the crusades in the 12th century. The rage comes because we have constructed massive military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and established basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The rage comes because we have expanded our military empire into neighboring Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It comes because we station troops and special forces in Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And this vast network of bases and military outposts looks
suspiciously permanent.

The Muslim world fears, correctly, that we intend to dominate Middle East oil supplies and any Caspian Sea oil infrastructure. And it is interested not in our protestations of good will but in the elemental right of justice and freedom from foreign occupation. We would react, should the situation be reversed, no differently.

The brutal reality of expanding foreign occupation and harsher and harsher forms of control are the tinder of Islamic fundamentalism, insurgences and terrorism. We can blame the violence on a clash of civilizations. We can naively tell ourselves we are envied for our freedoms. We can point to the Koran. But these are fantasies that divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world, from facing our own responsibility for the virus of chaos and violence spreading throughout the Middle East. We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both.

Obama, whose embrace of American imperialism is as naive and destructive as that of George W. Bush, is the newest brand used to peddle the poison of permanent war. We may not see it. But those who bury the dead do.

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Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July.

The 'Death Tax' Scam

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America's wealthiest families are pouring millions into slashing the estate tax - and some Democrats are siding with the super-rich

Michael Crowley
May 27, 2009 - Rolling Stone

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On a bright April day in Barack Obama's America, where equality is on the rise and greed is on the run, a Democratic senator from an impoverished Southern state took a brave stand — on behalf of the country's richest families.

On April 1st, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, a state with the nation's third-lowest median income, sponsored a budget amendment that would sharply reduce taxes on the estates of multimillionaires after they die. Estates worth up to $7 million per couple, and $3.5 million for individuals, are already exempt from taxes — meaning that 99.75 percent of all Americans die without paying a dime to Uncle Sam. But Lincoln's proposal would raise the exemption to $10 million — and slash the tax rate on even larger estates from 45 percent to 35 percent. All told, the move would let the children of Wall Street barons, dot-com millionaires and wealthy industrialists pocket more than $90 billion in tax revenues over the next decade.

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, was furious at Lincoln's move, calling it "so stunning, so outrageous that some would choose this hour of national crisis to push for an amendment to slash the estate tax for the superwealthy." Yet the tax cut passed with 51 votes — including 10 Democrats.

A few weeks later, during negotiations to reconcile the Senate's budget with the one passed by the House, the tax cut was undone. But the battle over the "death tax," as Republicans have shrewdly labeled it, is just beginning — and it involves one of the best-funded and most effective lobbying operations that Washington has ever seen. It is a movement that conservatives often portray as the work of a grass-roots uprising but in large measure has been propelled by a very small number of extremely rich people. "You have a group of wealthy families that are funding a very sophisticated effort," says Michael Graetz, a law professor at Yale who has studied the movement to repeal the estate tax. Over the past 20 years, those families have exerted their power in ways that can be traced, in a surprisingly direct way, to many of the Democrats who voted for Blanche Lincoln's amendment — and who are hoping for bigger victories this fall.

The families behind the estate-tax repeal — working in concert with right-wing anti-tax ideologues — are attempting to undo a century-old consensus about taxing huge inheritances, one borne of the progressive movement in the late 19th century. The Gilded Age produced such huge concentrations of wealth that even its biggest winners agreed that they should share their fortunes rather than simply pass them along from one generation to another. Among those making the case was Andrew Carnegie, whose steel fortune dominated the nation's economy at the time. "The parent who leaves his son great wealth generally deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would," Carnegie wrote, adding on another occasion that he "should as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar." The estate tax also became a cause of Teddy Roosevelt, who argued that vast fortunes passed between
generations cause "great and genuine detriment to the community at large." Convinced that massive inheritances offended America's egalitarian principles, Congress authorized the first estate tax in 1916.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, when the heir to a fortune begun in Carnegie's time set out to undo the work of his predecessors. Frank Blethen publishes The Seattle Times, which was founded by his great-grandfather in 1896, and runs a family company that also owns newspapers in Maine and elsewhere in Washington state. The 65-year-old Blethen, who drives to work in a $93,000 Porsche and has his newspaper's logo tattooed on his leg, is obsessed with getting rid of the estate tax — a move that would enable his descendants to pocket a family fortune once estimated at $650 million, without paying a penny in taxes. In 1995, Blethen began gathering estate-tax opponents together for annual summits at which they plotted strategy for a relentless campaign to place the issue on Congress' political agenda.

At first, the prospect seemed impossible. "People thought this was out of the question," says Graetz. After all, how could the average congressman fight to save families like the Blethens more money in a single shot than most Americans make in their lifetimes? To shift the political calculus, rich families poured millions into the effort — and created front groups to do the dirty work. According to a joint report by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy, at least 18 families are actively working to repeal the estate tax by pumping money into campaign donations, advocacy groups that crank out slanted economic studies and political ads slamming estate-tax supporters. Eighteen members of those families are billionaires who can be found on the Forbes 400 list; by one estimate, their clans stand to save more than $70 billion from a total repeal of the tax.

Many of the families are household names. There is the Mars family, makers of M&Ms and other candy, who would avoid $10 billion in estate taxes. There is the Gallo family, whose winemaker patriarch hoped to save an estimated $500 million from abolishing the tax. There are the Nordstroms, of department-store fame; the Dorrances, makers of Campbell's soup; and the Wegmans, owners of supermarkets by the same name. And there is the Walton family, owners of Walmart, a clan whose worth may exceed $75 billion. Their personal profit from repealing the estate tax would total $30 billion — roughly the gross domestic product of Jordan.

The Progressive Tribe and Improving the World

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Joe Brewer
May 15, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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The world is in need of some serious change. We all know this. And many people have taken the call personally and seriously. I encourage you to do the same. You can be an engine of creativity. You can be a catalyst for positive change in the world.

It all starts when you see yourself as part of something bigger. And it helps to have a way to connect to the community you find yourself in. One key element of this is having a name that reflects your tribe - the particular group that you resonate deeply with. In the political world, this is the label that captures your identity. In recent decades our labels have been conflated and, in many cases, attacked viciously as part of public relations campaigns. One casualty of this intensely polarized struggle was the word liberal. That label means something very different today than it did a few years ago.

The newly popular label progressive has taken the political world by storm. The cynical among us treat this as nothing more than a massage of the battered liberal, and yet it is this provocative term that feeds a movement inspiring millions of people -including the supposedly disaffected youth - to rally together for a better world. Why is this word so powerful? It seems like there is more happening than mere wordplay.

Something Deeper is Going On

I am a student of language and thought (In techno-jargon, I study cognitive linguistics.) And I apply this powerful new field of inquiry to the world of political and social change. Insights about the deeper concepts underlying our political labels can help clarify just why the word progressive is so powerful as a motivator of social change. This allows us to gain new perspectives about ourselves, emboldening us to take steps in our own lives to make the world a better place.

An important starting point is knowing that brain function is at the heart of thought. The minds we have are fundamentally shaped by the way our brains operate. A major feature of brain function is that "higher" (i.e. more complex) thought processes are built on "lower" functions that work in combination. For example, in order to make sense of our lives throughout the day, our brains need to be able to construct stories that organize our experience into coherent patterns. This is a very complex process that builds upon something much more basic - the coordination of simple body movements into a choreographed sequence. So when you pick up a glass to drink from, your brain puts together arm extension, opening and closing of fingers, rotation, and many small motions of your head, neck and throat in a dance of complexity that you are scarcely aware of while you are doing it.

It is this ability to choreograph movement that makes storytelling possible. Every story is structured with a beginning, middle, and end that is motivated by some relevant purpose. The same is true for taking a drink of water.

The take-home message from this insight is that much of what your brain is doing on your behalf happens outside conscious awareness. So for movement, also for thought.

Political Labels Tell Stories

What does this have to do with politics? Everything! When you hear the word progressive, many things are happening in your brain that never arrive as conscious thoughts. The part of this having to do with concepts and meaning is what George Lakoff calls a "frame." A frame is the hidden conceptual structure that organizes your thoughts into something meaningful. The Progressive Frame is the pattern of information that arises when you think about the word progressive.

The Progressive Frame is very different from the Liberal Frame. People who haven't studied cognitive linguistics fail to realize this when they assert that the two words are interchangeable. What makes them different? Simply put, they tell different stories. (Actually, there's a lot more going on that I won't go into here.) The Progressive Frame activates a narrative about progress. This narrative has a beginning in some troubled world, then moves through an unspecified series of events to arrive at a better one. The story of progress is about improvement as understood by the storyteller.

By contrast, the Liberal Frame tells a story of liberty. In particular, it is a story about individual freedom against oppression. Historically, this has been applied to issues like self-rule (injustices of monarchy), civil liberties (the right to vote), and equality (empowered citizenship in the face of oppression). The Liberty Story is often told as one of progress from a condition of less freedom to a condition of more freedom. This is when it is most persuasive and inspirational. The power of the Liberal Frame, before it was tainted by an intentional process of radicalization by its opponents, resides in the Progressive Frame that is evoked when telling a story of progress.

The two frames are interconnected, which partly explains the confusion about their political meanings. But it has always been the Progressive Frame that compelled people to join movements. Don't believe me? Ask yourself whether you would ever join a political struggle that DOESN'T involve some kind of progress.

Ironically, the Progressive Frame lies at the heart of Conservative Populism too. The Conservative Frame underlies the powerful label conservative for people seeking to restore what they believe to be traditional values that have eroded away. This is also a story of progress, albeit one that presumes some kind of fall from grace as a pretext to the current situation. The existence of a progress story in conservative thought is what makes possible Obama's appeals to historically conservative citizens. Deep down we all want progress. It is our different notions of what we consider progress to be that leads to so much quarreling.

Declare Your Tribe and Improve the World!

Now that we have greater clarity about the concepts behind important political labels, a landscape of possibilities for actually improving the world appears before us. Political labels matter because of the stories they tell. Furthermore, the stories told by the opposition about our labels can be harmful to us. The word liberal is severely contentious now because it was targeted by a series of smear campaigns in the past (which are ongoing via conservative media outlets like Fox News and talk radio).

At the same time, we can use the power of progress to unite people. This is the great potential of knowing your frames... you can apply them clearly and powerfully when you know how they work. (Or you can habitually activate them without knowing they are there!) The essential idea is that everyone wants progress. So the label progressive has potential as a unifying force that brings together people who are tired of the push and pull of liberal versus conservative.

Tribes Will Transform the World

Why chose a label? Because it identifies you as part of a tribe. Seth Godin, the marketing guru who popularized the concept of an idea virus, makes a compelling argument that it is tribes, not money or factories, that will change the world. This TED Talk makes the case:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

We all want to make the world a better place. By implication, we are all out to get the status quo. In spite of this the status quo has proven to be quite resilient. What's going on here? I would argue that two key obstacles stand in our way.

First, most people don't understand what is happening below the surface of their awareness - making it easy to sow distrust through manipulative practices (a problem I'm exploring solutions for). This can be addressed by expanding citizen education about the workings of our minds - what I call revealing the Great Political Blind Spot.

Second, we remain divided and disorganized as world-changers. The secret behind social change is Godin's observation about tribes. Margaret Mead famously declared that it is always a small group of like-minded people who change the world. Emphasis should be squarely placed on the small group part of her observation. Like-minded people can unite with existing communications technologies in ways that couldn't have been dreamed of a few short years ago. We have outlets like the blogosphere, YouTube, facebook, and Twitter at our fingertips to organize and get the word out about our activities.

Now is the time to get organized. I encourage you to watch Godin's talk and take his closing remarks seriously. He boldly calls upon the audience to start a movement within 24 hours. All you need is to reach a critical threshold of people, each of whom is engaged in other existing networks that they can reach out to and spread ideas around.

This isn't as hard as it seems. First you have to believe that you can make a difference. Second, start thinking about things you'd like to see improved. Third, look for people who share one of your passions who also want to make progress on the same issue. For example, you might really be into cycling and want to see parents spending more time with their kids. Put the two together and you've got a recipe for Bike-A-Child as a catchy theme for a Saturday afternoon. Cyclist moms and dads can have some fun and teach their kids the importance of good exercise at the same time.

For too long politics has been about preserving our differences. I think its time to change the name of the game. Politics in the 21st Century is going to be built with affinity groups - people who come together around shared interests. Social change is going to arise from a thousand little groundswells of people making a difference in their peer networks. A thousand ripples combined can quickly become a sea change!

Rather than letting elite communications teams (marketing and PR firms) define the labels of our politics, let's claim them for ourselves. We can be progressives because we want to see real progress toward a better world. This may not lead to a vision shared by the masses, but it does allow for communities to grow around visions of our own.

Of course, the concerned reader will quickly point out that one person's vision can be another's nightmare. True enough. But until the visions come from within us, instead of from message architects in the mass media, the only progress to be made will be further entrenchment in the status quo. We've seen where this leads... the largest wealth inequalities in human history and intensely corrupt economic and political systems.

I say, "No more!"

The issue I'm concerned about is manipulation of the populace. If you don't have a movement of your own to start (or even if you do), feel free to get involved in mine. In the days ahead, I want to lay a foundation for new practices in the political and social change arenas based on insights about the mind. This is not something one person can do on his (or her!) own. It is going to take thousands of us coming together and establishing a different set of social norms for political engagement.

If we work together as a progressive tribe, we really can improve the world.

.....

Joe Brewer is founder and director of Cognitive Policy Works, an educational and research center devoted to the application of cognitive and behavioral sciences to politics.  He is a former fellow of the Rockridge Institute, a think tank founded by George Lakoff to analyze political discourse for the progressive movement.

Zen Moment of the Day

Cattle: Mother Nature's worst nightmare, apparently. Studies show that through their burps, cows emit between 200 and 400 pounds of methane gases each year, one of the most dangerous heat-trapping emission with ties to global warming, second only to carbon dioxide.

In an effort on behalf of the cows to go green, farmers in Vermont are altering cattle feed to reduce methane emissions as part of an experiment conducted by yogurt company Stonyfield Farms. In mid-May, when results were last recorded, one herd showed an 18-percent drop in methane output. Milk production has stayed the same, and the cows' coats are reportedly shinier and their breaths sweeter to boot.

- The Daily Beast

Could we be the generation that runs out of fish?

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Johann Hari
June 5, 2009 - The Independent/UK

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In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.

It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.

A growing number of scientists are warning that we could all be living in Newfoundland soon. Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a detailed study in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature saying that at the current rate, all global fish populations will have collapsed by 2048. He says: "This isn't some horror scenario, it's a real possibility. It's not rocket science if we're depleting species after species. It's a finite resource. We'll reach a point where we run out."

The species in the frontline is bluefin tuna, the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain for fish. This little creature can swim at 50mph, and accelerate faster than the swishest sports car. It has even developed warm blood. Yet every year, a third of the remaining population is ripped from the seas and slapped onto our plates. Soon, it will be gone.

All over the world, from the Bay of Bengal to Lake Victoria to the shores of South America, I have heard fishermen say their catches are shrinking, in size and in number. Industrial-scale fishing only began in the 1950s. By the standards of the news cycle, this is slow – but by the standards of the planet or of settled fishing communities, this is a click of the fingers. The effects of the new industrial fishing are uniform. Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10% shadow of its former self.

This process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction, ripping up everything in its path. Charles Clover, who wrote the book on which the documentary is based, has a good analogy for it. Imagine a band of hunters stringing a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. Imagine it scooping up everything in its way: lions and cheetahs and hippos and wild dogs. The net has a massive metal roller attached to its leading edge, smashing down every tree that gets in its way. And in the end, when the hunters open up the net, they pick out the choicest creatures and dump the squashed remains in the sun as carrion for the vultures.

But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14bn of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?

A small number of people are making a lot of short-term profit out of this destruction – and they are using this cash to ensure they can carry on hunting, down to the last fish. In 1992, an attempt to get the bluefin tuna listed as an endangered species was scuppered by the US and Japanese governments at the urging of the tuna lobby – who happen to give large campaign donations to all parties. A similar corruption has eaten into European politics.

Add to this the fact that fishermen are a determined and demanding constituency with an equally short-term agenda. They demand the maximum quotas today – even if that means no quotas tomorrow.

Our societies are structured to put these short-term cries for money for a few ahead of the long-term needs of us all. A small determined group with hard cash almost always beats a diffuse group with good intentions – until they get angry and fight back.

Yet today, ordinary people in rich countries are being insulated from the fish crisis. As we exhaust our own fish stocks, our corporations are sailing out across the world to steal them from the poor. Today, there are armadas of industrial European and American fishing boats across the coast of West Africa, leaving the small fishermen who live on its coasts to starve. Professor Daniel Pauly says: "It is like a hole burning through paper. As the hole expands, the edge is where the fisheries concentrate, until there is nowhere left to go."

We are not only stealing fish from Africans; we are stealing them from future generations. In the age of limits, we are hitting up against the capacity of the planet to provide for us – yet we are reacting with blank denial. This story is unfolding, in one form or another, in the rainforests, the air, and in the planet's climate itself.

It has left us at a strange crossroads. We will either be a despised generation who left behind a depleted husk-planet – or a heroic generation who, at five minutes to ecological midnight, turned back to the light.

With fish, the solution is even simpler and more straightforward than with the other ecological crises ensnaring us. The scientific experts say we need to follow two steps. First, expand the 0.6 per cent of the area of the world's oceans in which fishing is banned to 30 per cent. In these protected areas, fish can slowly recover. Second, in the remaining 70 per cent, impose strict quotas on fishermen and police it properly, as they do in Alaska, New Zealand and Iceland.

The cost of this programme? $14bn a year – precisely the sum we currently spend on subsidising fishermen. At no extra cost, we could turn them from the rapists of the oceans into their guardians.

Yet The End of the Line has one flaw – and it is one that riddles current environmental thought. It presents us with a great earth-altering crisis, and then says our primary response should be to change our own personal consumption habits. It urges people not to buy from Nobu, which shamefully still sells bluefin tuna, and to ask if the fish we buy is sustainably produced. It's like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, where the primary response Al Gore presses on us is to shop green and change our lightblubs.

Of course this is valuable – but it is only an anemic and minor first step. It is rather like, in 1937, reacting to the rise of Nazism by urging people to make sure that they personally weren't killing any Jews or gays or Jehovah's Witnesses, or buying from any Nazi-owned companies. We needed collective action that would stop other people from killing these minorities – just as today we need collective action that prevents anyone from irreparably trashing the means of life.

At the moment, many good people get anxious about environmental issues, and hear the message that The Response is to scrub their own lifestyle clean. Yet individual voluntary action by a minority of nice people will not save the bluefin tuna, never mind the ecosystem. But if all these honourable people act together – by volunteering for, and donating to, organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Plane Stupid – they can change the law, so everybody will be required to change their behaviour, not just a benevolent 10 per cent. It was just such determined minorities armed with the facts that spurred the fights against slavery, colonialism and fascism. When you respond as a consumer, you are weak; when you respond as a citizen, you are strong.

The voice of millions of people can drown out the concentrated power of the fishing industry – and all the other industries with a vested interest in trashing our planet – but not with the swipe of a credit card.

The alternative to collective action today is catastrophe tomorrow. As Charles Clover explains: "When the human population comes under pressure on land because of global warming, when we are running out of ways to feed ourselves, we [will] have just squandered one of the greatest resources on the planet – wild fish." The epitaph for the human species would turn out to have been scripted by Douglas Adams: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Iraq's New Death Squad

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Shane Bauer
June 3, 2009 - The Nation

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The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last summer. We're standing in the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his children are watching us quietly and his wife is twirling large circles of dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands, then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"

.."They just marched into our house and took whatever they wanted," Hassan's mother says, peeking out the kitchen door. "I've never seen anyone act like this."

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret's dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

According to Congressional records, the ISOF has grown into nine battalions, which extend to four regional "commando bases" across Iraq. By December, each will be complete with its own "intelligence infusion cell," which will operate independently of Iraq's other intelligence networks. The ISOF is at least 4,564 operatives strong, making it approximately the size of the US Army's own Special Forces in Iraq. Congressional records indicate that there are plans to double the ISOF over the next "several years."

According to retired Lt. Col. Roger Carstens, US Special Forces are "building the most powerful force in the region." In 2008 Carstens, then a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was an adviser to the Iraqi National Counter-Terror Force, where he helped set up the Iraqi counterterrorism laws that govern the ISOF.

"All these guys want to do is go out and kill bad guys all day," he says, laughing. "These guys are shit hot. They are just as good as we are. We trained 'em. They are just like us. They use the same weapons. They walk like Americans."

When the US Special Forces began the slow transfer of the ISOF to Iraqi control in April 2007, they didn't put it under the command of the Defense Ministry or the Interior Ministry, bodies that normally control similar special forces the world over. Instead, the Americans pressured the Iraqi government to create a new minister-level office called the Counter-Terrorism Bureau. Established by a directive from Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the CTB answers directly to him and commands the ISOF independently of the police and army. According to Maliki's directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over the ISOF and knows little about its mission. US Special Forces operatives like Carstens have largely overseen the bureau. Carstens says this independent chain of command "might be the perfect structure" for counterterrorism worldwide.

Although the force is officially controlled by the Iraqi government, popular perception in Baghdad is that the ISOF--the dirty brigade--is a covert, all-Iraqi branch of the US military. That reading isn't far from the truth. The US Special Forces are still closely involved with every level of the ISOF, from planning and carrying out missions to deciding tactics and creating policy. According to Brig. Gen. Simeon Trombitas, commander of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Force Transition Team, part of the multinational command responsible for turning control of the ISOF over to the Iraqi government, the US Special Forces continue to "have advisers at every level of the chain of command."

In January 2008 the US Special Forces started allowing ISOF commanders to join missions with them and the ISOF rank and file. Starting last summer--when Hassan's family was attacked--ISOF battalions began launching missions on their own, without American advisers, in Sadr City, where political agreements forbid the Americans from entering. Accusations of human rights abuses, killings and politically motivated arrests have surfaced, including assaults on a university president and arrests of opposition politicians.

The US government has been focused on turning out "as many men in arms as possible, as quickly as possible," says Peter Harling, senior Middle East analyst at the International Crisis Group. "There has been very little impetus to build checks and controls to prevent abuse. It's been very much about building up capability without the oversight that could prevent some of the units [from] turning into proxies working for some politician."

In Sadr City opposition to the Iraqi government and the US occupation is strong. There is no longer any visible militia presence, but pictures of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr still stick to the US-built concrete walls that enclose the city, and calls to prayer end with a demand for the hastened exit of "the enemy." There, the ISOF uses a policy of collective punishment, aimed at intimidating civilians, charges Hassan al-Rubaie, Sadrist member of the parliamentary Security and Defense Committee. "They terrorize entire neighborhoods just to arrest one person they think is a terrorist," he says. "This needs to stop."

US Special Forces advisers have done little to respond to allegations of abuse. Civilian pleas, public protests, complaints by Iraqi Army commanders about the ISOF's actions and calls for disbanding it by members of Parliament have not pushed the US government to take a hard look at the force they are creating. Instead, US advisers dismiss such claims as politically motivated. "The enemy is trying to discredit them," says Carstens. "It's not because they are doing anything dirty."

On the same night Hassan Mahsan's house was raided, 26-year-old Haidar al-Aibi was killed with a bullet to the forehead. His family says there was no warning. They tell me how it happened as we drink tea on the floor of their living room, furnished only with thick foam cushions and mournful depictions of the Shiite martyr Hussein. A woman weeps loudly in the corner, the sleeping child of her dead son almost obscured by the folds of her black garments.

Fathil al-Aibi says the family was awakened around midnight by a nearby explosion. His brother Haidar ran up to the roof to see what had happened and was immediately shot from a nearby rooftop. When Fathil, his brother Hussein and his father, Abbas, tried to bring Haidar downstairs, they were shot at, too. For about two hours he lay lifeless on the roof while his family panicked as red laser beams from rifle scopes danced on their windows. "We had tests the next day at the university," Hussein says. "We didn't think he would go like this."

Down the road, around the same time that night, police commando Ahmed Shibli says he was also being fired on. He illuminates two bullet holes in his house with a kerosene lamp as we talk. The men who busted open his front door called themselves the dirty brigade, he says, and they were carrying American weapons, not the AK-47s or PKCs the National Police use. When they entered, they fired immediately. "It wasn't a warning shot. They shot at me like they wanted to kill me as I was getting down on the ground. It was like we were first-degree terrorists." They fired again, he says, fatally shooting his ailing 63-year-old father. As blood poured from the old man's hip, Ahmed says the men held a gun to his little boy's head and forced his wife to search the room for the police-issued weapon he had left at work.

Ahmed and his brother were hauled to the outskirts of the city, along with Hassan, where they were lined up with other men in the dark. Hassan insists on substantiating his story by showing me an official complaint issued by a local army commander named Mustafa Sabah Yunis, alleging that an "unknown armed squadron" entered the area and arrested him.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Army was rushing in to respond to the gunfire, and according to Hussein al-Aibi, these soldiers were shot at as well. He tells me the army got Haidar off the roof and drove him to the hospital. On the way, Fathil says, the vehicle was stopped by a dirty brigade operative, who asked Iraqi Army Major Abu Rajdi where they were going. According to Fathil, Rajdi told the operative, "This is a college student who has nothing to do with anything, and you shot him recklessly." The operative responded by hitting Rajdi and saying, "Turn around and go back, or we'll shoot him and we'll shoot you too."

At Haidar's funeral, Fathil asked Rajdi to testify. "You are a representative of the government, and you saw it all happen," he told the major. "You saw that he didn't have a weapon in his hand." Fathil says the major declined. "This is the dirty brigade," he recalls Rajdi saying. "We are afraid of them. When we see them, we retreat. If I testify against them, I'll be killed the next day. They kill and no one will hold them accountable, because they belong to the Americans."

Major Rajdi's fear and distrust of the ISOF are echoed by other members of the regular Iraqi Army. "Sometimes we are surprised when the Special Forces enter," says Lt. Colonel Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, commander of the Third Battalion of the Forty-second Brigade in Sadr City. "Bad things happen. Some people steal, and some abuse women. They don't know the people on the streets like us. They just go after their target. We have suffered from this problem."

Accounts of older ISOF operations I heard around Baghdad suggest that the Americans may have knowingly allowed violence against civilians. In Adhamiya, long the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad, two hospital employees described their 2006 run-in with the ISOF to me. According to both witnesses, a self-identified ISOF operative named "Captain Hussam" unloaded his machine gun in the Al Numan Hospital after seeing the body of his superior, who had died under the hospital's care. An American operative with a red beard stood by silently watching. According to one witness, the Iraqi operative demanded his commander's death certificate, threatening to "torture you, kill you and kill the people of Adhamiya" if they didn't comply. The witnesses said the eight operatives who entered the hospital were driving Humvees, vehicles that only the Americans and the ISOF use. The next day, Captain Hussam returned, a witness said, offering a box of bullets as
an apology.

The effective head of the American ISOF project is General Trombitas of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Transition Team. A towering man with a gray mustache and a wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his over thirty years in the military training special forces in Colombia, El Salvador and other countries. On February 23 he gave me a tour of Area IV, a joint American-Iraqi base near the Baghdad International Airport, where US Special Forces train the ISOF. As we walk away from the helicopter, he cracks a boyish smile. Though he's worked with special forces all over the world, he tells me the men we are about to meet are "the best."

Trombitas says he is "very proud of what was done in El Salvador" but avoids the fact that special forces trained there by the United States in the early 1980s were responsible for the formation of death squads that killed more than 50,000 civilians thought to be sympathetic with leftist guerrillas. Guatemala was a similar case. Some Guatemalan special forces that had been trained in anti-terrorism tactics by the United States during the mid-1960s subsequently became death squads that took part in the killing of around 140,000 people. In the early 1990s, US Special Forces trained and worked closely with an elite Colombian police unit strongly suspected of carrying out some of the murders attributed to Los Pepes, a death squad that became the backbone of the country's current paramilitary organization. (Trombitas served in El Salvador from 1989-90 and in Colombia from 2003-2005, after these incidents took place.)

"The standards get looser when the Americans aren't with [the local special forces], and they can eventually become death squads, which I believe actually happened in Colombia," says Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, a book about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar by CIA and US Special Forces. The tactics taught in each country are the same, Bowden says. "They teach the same kind of skills. They use the same equipment."

Trombitas told the official blog of the Defense Department that the training missions used in Latin America are "extremely transferable" to Iraq. Salvadoran Special Forces even helped train the ISOF, he tells me. "It's a world of coalitions," he says. "The longer we work together, the more alike we are. When we share our values and our experiences with other armies, we make them the same."

Trombitas guides me into a warehouse where ISOF operatives, most of them in black masks, have been preparing for our arrival. He walks me through a special display of their American equipment--machine guns, sniper rifles, state-of-the-art night-vision equipment and fluffy desert camo that makes soldiers look like teddy bears. He takes me up a catwalk overlooking a fake house stocked with cartoonish posters of big-breasted women pointing pistols, a couple of real men dressed as "terrorists" with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces and a 10-year-old boy playing hostage.

As we stand in the observation area, the door explodes. After a minute of constant shooting, the operatives march out with the "terrorists," the boy and a poster of an '80s-style villain, wearing a jean jacket and holding a woman hostage. More than twenty bullet holes are centered on his forehead. "Look at that marksmanship," Trombitas says, smiling proudly.

Trombitas gets to the issue of human rights before I do. He assures me that US Special Forces take allegations of human rights abuses very seriously--two Iraqi men were let go for prisoner abuse since he took over in August last year, he says--but he won't comment on specific cases. I raise the issue of accountability and bring up one well-documented mission that caused waves in the Iraqi Parliament: in August the ISOF raided Diyala's provincial government compound, reportedly with the support of US Apache helicopters. They arrested a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq's main Sunni Arab party. They also arrested the president of the university, also a Sunni, and killed a secretary and wounded four armed guards during the night.

I barely get the word "Diyala" out of my mouth before the American operatives standing around us start to grumble nervously and a translator jumps in. "For the reputation of the ISOF, please, let's cut that off," he says.

Abdul-Karim al-Samarrai, a member of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance and the parliamentary Security and Defense Committee, says that what happened in Diyala was one of many signs of the prime minister's bad intentions for the ISOF. "Politicians are afraid because this force can be used for political ends," he says. In response to outrage from members of Parliament over the arrest of politicians by the ISOF, Maliki, who is officially required to approve every ISOF target, denied any knowledge of the Diyala mission. His claim of innocence raises important questions. If the man who is supposed to be in charge of the ISOF has no knowledge of its missions, then who is ultimately responsible for the force? Was Maliki lying to cover up the fact that he is using the force for political purposes? Or was someone else--namely the Americans--calling the shots?

Diyala was only the first publicized case of possibly politically motivated arrests. In December the ISOF arrested as many as thirty-five officials in the Interior Ministry who were thought to be in opposition to Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. This past March the ISOF arrested at least one leader of the Awakening Councils, semiofficial Sunni neighborhood militias that have been increasingly at odds with Maliki over his failure to keep a promise to incorporate the councils into the military or give them other employment.

The Maliki government has developed a "culture of direct control," says Michael Knights, a Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute and the head of its Iraq program. Knights visits Iraq regularly and has close contact with the country's security services. He says the people in charge of the ISOF at the regional levels are "personally chosen loyalists or relatives of Maliki. It reminds me of Saddam." Knights says that Maliki is only supposed to approve or reject missions that come to him, but occasionally he will "assert his prerogative as the commander in chief and tell the ISOF to do something or not to do something." Knights raises the possibility that the ISOF will become Maliki's personal death squad. "The prime minister is looking for re-election, and there are not that many restraints on his ability to target political opponents, as [his government] has been doing with the Sadrists for years now."

Samarrai, along with other members of Parliament, is calling for disbanding the Counter-Terrorism Bureau. He says there is no legal basis for an armed brigade to exist outside the control of the Interior or Defense ministry. "People are afraid of the existence of an organization with such dreadful capabilities that reports directly to the prime minister," he says.

Member of Parliament Hassan al-Rubaie is concerned about the close relationship between the ISOF and the Americans. "If the US leaves Iraq, this will be the last force they will leave behind," he insists. He is worried that such a powerful and secretive force that is closely tied to the Americans could turn Iraq into a "military base in the region" by allowing the United States to continue to conduct missions in Iraq with the cover of the ISOF. "They have become a replacement" for the Americans, he says.

President Obama has said he plans to increase reliance on the US Special Forces; Defense Secretary Robert Gates's recent appointment of Stanley McChrystal as commander of Afghanistan suggests that he is keeping his word. From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army's most secretive forces and is responsible for the training of special forces abroad. McChrystal was also commander of US Special Operations Forces in Iraq for five years, during which time, according to the Wall Street Journal, he commanded "units that specialize in guerrilla warfare, including the training of indigenous armies."

"The eventual drawdown in Iraq is not the end of the mission for our elite forces," Gates said in May 2008. Gates hasn't spoken on the issue since Obama took office; but Obama says he will institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities, and the White House stresses the need to "create a more robust capacity to train, equip and advise foreign security forces, so that local allies are better prepared to confront mutual threats."

Bowden says those "local allies" are often used for covert operations. "The United States Special Operations Command cultivates relationships with special forces in other countries because it gives the United States the opportunity of intervening militarily in a covert way," he says. "The ideal covert op is one that is actually carried out by local forces."

As I stand on the tarmac with Trombitas in Area IV, waiting for our helicopter to return and fly us back to the Green Zone, I ask him how long the United States will be involved with the ISOF. "Special forces are special because we do maintain a relationship with foreign forces," he says. "Part of our theater-engagement strategy is to maintain a relationship with those units that are important to the security of the region and to the world." As our helicopter appears in the lightly clouded sky, he chooses his next words carefully: "We are going to have a working relationship for a while," he says.