Saturday, August 15, 2009
What Does Financial Capital Owe Society?
Corporate social responsibility is a worthy goal, but it's no substitute for regulation, subsidy, and government sponsorship of social institutions.
Barry Zigas
August 14, 2009
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The idea that private enterprise should be harnessed to the creation of social capital is an old claim given new resonance by the financial crisis. After beggaring millions of people and threatening the global economy with ruin, banks and other credit providers surely have an obligation both to run their businesses soundly and to meet a higher standard of social responsibility. While some argue this could hobble, distract, or damage corporate focus on the bottom line, let's be clear. It was not an excess of attention to social needs that caused the near total collapse of the world's financial system but almost every other kind of excess.
Milton Friedman defined the classic position against corporate social responsibility in an oft-quoted 1970 New York Times Magazine article, where he stated flatly that a corporate executive's responsibility is "to conduct the business in accordance with [shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society." Friedman continued that "there are no values, no 'social' responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals."
Companies, in other words, should stick to their business. Any diversion erodes shareholder value, diminishes focus on what capitalists do well, and arbitrarily bends private investment to pursue public goals, often without accountability for either the choice of goals or the efficacy of their pursuit.
But corporations are creatures of public legislation and regulation. They enjoy limited liability, certification by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which helps them float stock, and a variety of other public investments that help them do business. Banks, as specialized institutions, have an even more extensive other layer of public benefits in ordinary times, as well as emergency aid in a crisis. These include access to credit from the central banking system, examination and certification of soundness, and deposit insurance. And in the current crisis, government has also used trillions of dollars of public funds to prop up banks' shaky balance sheets and guarantee the institutions' debt, while the Federal Reserve has opened its spigots to provide liquidity as necessary.
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The contention that a corporation owes society something in return requires closer analysis. Some of the benefits that society expects are relatively cost-free or are spread so uniformly across business sectors that they do not impose noticeable costs. But in other cases, pursuing social goals may turn out to be less profitable or to take a measurable bite out of the company's total return.
Many of business' reciprocal obligations to society are fairly basic. As beneficiaries of government's basic civil-society functions, like national defense, corporations are expected to pay taxes and follow norms of good behavior. They may not commit fraud. We do not allow them to deny employment, credit, or other benefits on the basis of race, gender, national origin, age, or sexual orientation. Labor's right to organize and negotiate in its own interests generally is well established, though often breached in practice. Market forces alone cannot be left to assure safety in automobiles or in the air. More narrowly, the Community Reinvestment Act requires banks that take deposits out of communities to give something back, in the form of credit to low- and moderate-income as well as affluent borrowers.
Corporations didn't always accept that these citizenship responsibilities were theirs. Some still chafe at them. But they largely are accepted, at least in broad principle. Some, although not all, of these benefits impose costs on corporations. But they are the necessary cost of doing business in a civil society.
President Barack Obama has made clear that his administration will rely heavily both on broad business regulation and on exhortation to seek an increased level of social investment and responsibility from private interests. This is a healthy restoration of the principle of mutual dependency that was waylaid in a form of "extraordinary rendition" under the George W. Bush reign after decades of buildup dating back to the Reagan era.
For more than two decades, many have placed hopes in a movement for corporate social responsibility, or socially responsible investment, from which some of President Obama's optimism springs. The idea is that norms of good behavior can be cultivated among entrepreneurs and rewarded by consumers who will favor such enterprises. Many corporations pride themselves in pursuing a "triple bottom line" of benchmarks on good treatment of workers and stewardship of the environment, as well as conventional profit criteria.
There has been a proliferation of self-consciously green companies as well as mutual funds that market their services on the premise that investments in firms that have a social commitment can produce just as high financial returns as an ordinary portfolio. Recently, energy companies like Chevron and BP have launched extensive "green" advertising campaigns whose message seems to be aimed at convincing consumers that these are something other than energy companies that depend on fossil fuels for their profits. The hope is that these norms are contagious and that more and more corporate executives will appreciate that they can do well by doing good. But as Clive Crook observed in a 2005 Economist article, "Getting the most out of capitalism requires public intervention of various kinds, and a lot of it: taxes, public spending, regulation in many different areas of business activity. ... To improve capitalism, you first need to understand it."
The problem with these efforts -- sometimes sincere, sometimes just a more nimble form of marketing -- is that they often are overwhelmed by larger trends driven by the conventional bottom line. The largest banks have recently shuttered their community-development subsidiaries. Their investments in affordable housing, accessible mortgages, and community-based financial intermediaries are all shrinking along with their market capitalization. In the same two decades that corporate social responsibility has become trendy, large corporations have more aggressively busted unions, shifted to outsourcing, and cut health and pension benefits. It turns out that what we do to constrain and contour corporate behavior as citizens -- via government action -- is more potent than what we can achieve as investors or consumers.
As Brookings Institution senior fellow and New York University economist William Easterly notes, "Moral exhortation has a very limited effect on most people's behavior, much as we would wish it otherwise." So, relying on corporate good citizenship is not enough. Necessary complements are subsidy, regulation, and direct government involvement or sponsorship of enterprises with public purposes.
Sponsorship. Government has long offered specific public benefits to induce private enterprises to achieve social goals. This form of sponsorship trades social capital the government has in abundance -- land or its own credit, for instance -- to induce private capital to create broader social value, such as railroads, and credit and liquidity in various markets. This strategy can be a powerful lever in creating social investment, particularly if the government negotiates hard in return for its favors.
Sponsorship has deep roots in the financial and credit sectors. Government bank charters have long played a critical role in helping to promote capital formation as well as savings by individuals and institutions. Guarantees of deposits, mortgages, and other financial instruments extended the government's sponsorship in return for providing consumers and society with specific benefits, such as long-term mortgages with fixed rates.
Regulation. Sometimes, the most effective route to a social goal is regulation. Automobile companies, for instance, were required to comply with the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for gas mileage long before President Obama became "auto executive of the year" through auto company bailouts. The Community Reinvestment Act changed norms in the banking industry because it used government's power to grant or withhold benefits sought by banks. There is a long history of government regulation, both to compensate for market failures and to prevent anti-social corporate behaviors.
Subsidy. But when government is seeking to bring private investment into specific new areas, particularly those where costs are uncertain or where returns for the capital invested will be lower, sponsorship and subsidies are more appropriate. In a sponsorship model like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government attracts private investment to specific activities in return for certain privileges and benefits. Part of this bargain was a requirement that the companies invest in mortgages serving lower-income people and communities, even if these provided a lower return than other mortgages.
And as the fate of Fannie and Freddie demonstrates, constant vigilance is required in public-private partnerships lest the profit motive corrupt or endanger the public purpose. Real capital was put at risk through this partnership. While shareholders profited for many years through their growth and profitability, the companies' recent losses, driven by bad management decisions and weak oversight by their regulator as the mortgage market morphed into a carnival of crazed risk-taking, have wiped out nearly all common and preferred share value. But as their nominal owner today, the government is using them both to actively funnel subsidies in the form of cash and forbearance to beleaguered owners whose mortgages they hold. Freddie Mac in a recent SEC filing estimated the cost of these indulgences to be as high as $30 billion. Because of their hybrid heritage, both institutions have been far more active and responsive to the mortgage default crisis than any
of the fully private investor trusts or Wall Street banks that created them to peddle the vast bulk of toxic mortgages.
The model has its critics. National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers might have been channeling Friedman when he recently wrote disapprovingly about creative capitalism and the roles of Fannie and Freddie: "Inherent in the multiple objectives urged for creative capitalists is a loss of accountability with respect to performance."
With friends like this in high office, it is even more important for progressives to focus hard on just how sponsorship, subsidy, and regulation can be applied in new, as well as old, contexts as the financial crisis abates, and where each tool is most appropriate.
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As powerful as they are, sponsorship and regulation alone will not provide economically sustainable interventions to reduce poverty. Private capital, for instance, will not underwrite money- losing housing investments, nor should it. Government must provide the subsidies that make low-cost housing possible.
These subsidies can be provided either directly, through budget expenditures, or indirectly, through tax credits and other subsidies to attract capital to certain investments.
Subsidies provided through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and the New Markets Tax Credit, for instance, have the virtue of certainty, predictability, and low bureaucratic overhead. They only work if private capital agrees that the investments meet a market test of economic sustainability.
But many subsidy needs cannot be met through tax incentives, and many economists oppose them as a noxious perversion of the tax system. Tax subsidies are also wasteful, in that a large proportion of the subsidy "leaks" in the form of allowing well-to-do investors to reduce their taxes as a way of getting to serve social goals. Direct subsidies are the alternative, as when Congress gave the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) new authority and cash in 2009 to invest more than $2 billion to insure completion of affordable housing projects jeopardized by the financial crisis. Such cash investments sometimes are a more efficient way to subsidize specific activities, and often are needed to reach very low-income groups because tax incentives cannot be made lucrative enough to do so.
Community development financial institutions (CDFIs), a hybrid form of social capital, have benefited from a combination of direct social investments from private banks and subsidies from government. The Treasury Department's CDFI fund provides seed and matching capital grants and loans to qualified CDFIs. In past years, banks also made investments at preferential terms in CDFIs, in part because such investments were favorably regarded in reviewing compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act, and in part because CDFIs' seed investments in predevelopment expenses for housing, health care, and education facilities often led to opportunities for sponsoring banks to make market-rate loans and investments in the final products.
Low Income Housing Tax Credits, Section 8 housing rental subsidies, Community Development Block Grants, investments in CDFIs, and other explicit subsidy interventions acknowledge that government has a singular role in providing capital to achieve certain results that the private sector cannot provide. The partnership model seeks to maximize private investment in such endeavors but recognizes that subsidies must be provided in order to do so.
As a consequence of the financial crisis, the federal government now holds stakes worth $199 billion in more than 500 banks, has guaranteed trillions more, and functionally owns Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and American International Group. The old financial regulatory system and its assumptions have been swamped by decades of weakening federal capital markets regulation. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified in March 2009, "To address this will require comprehensive reform. Not modest repairs at the margin but new rules of the game."
These new rules will definitely include a more comprehensive acceptance of the federal government's ultimate role in managing moral hazard and systemic risk. We need a more comprehensive and aggressive agenda for using the levers of citizenship, sponsorship, and partnership, as well as explicit regulation and subsidy, to assure that the financial system that emerges from this wreckage benefits not only shareholders and management but taxpayers who are ultimately at risk and the society in which they live.
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Barry Zigas is director of housing policy at Consumer Federation of America, in Washington, D.C.
Air America's Ad Blacklisters Throwing Money At Right Wing Talk
Megan Carpentier
August 14, 2009 - AirAmerica.com
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Three years ago, a group of corporate advertisers informed ABC that they didn't want their commercials run during Air America programming. Media Matters reports that those companies will run ads during conservative shows.
In 2009, General Electric, Farmer's Insurance and Office Depot have financially supported Glenn Beck's racism and threats against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the radio; Bayer, Chattem Pharmaceuticals and Wyeth have given Lou Dobbs money to continue his radio-based support for the Birther conspiracy theorists and his portrayal of the current Administration as alternately Socialist, Fascist and Communist; and Home Depot, JC Penney's and Office Depot are helping provide Rush Limbaugh promote his racist, divisive commentary on a daily basis.
That doesn't even include the companies that advertise during Glenn Beck's or Lou Dobbs' television shows, which additionally includes the likes of Bayer, Wal-Mart and Nestlé.
While advertising is supposedly just a way to convince consumers to purchase products, these corporations' histories of political contributions and advocacy--in addition to their stated preferences to have their products associated with Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh rather than Rachel Maddow or Ron Reagan--reflects less a clear-eyed view of consumer preferences than it does support for conservatives and conservative causes.
Take General Electric, a supporter of both Glenn Beck's radio and television programming. In the 2006 election cycle, when they first blacklisted Air America's programming, their PAC's political contributions were two-thirds in favor of Republicans. In 2008, after the takeover of the House by Democrats and while Barack Obama's win was clearly telegraphed, GE continued to favor Republicans with contributions disproportionate to their power in Washington, giving them 48 percent of the PAC's donations. Only now that GE has nowhere else to turn, their donations for the 2010 election cycle are going two-thirds of the time to Democrats. To the victors go the spoils, I guess--as long as they can spend at least an equal amount of money supporting media programming intended to derail the agenda.
Zurich Insurance, the parent company of Farmers (another tried-and-true Beck sponsor), works much the same way. In 2006, 71 percent of their PAC's donations went to Republican candidates; 53 percent went to Republicans in 2008; and, apparently disheartened by the last election, they haven't yet given a dime for 2010. Office Depot--which supports both Beck's and Limbuagh's radio programs--doesn't apparently have a PAC, but their CEO Steve Odland gave the maximum contribution to Mitt Romney last year.
While most corporate PACs, including Wal-Mart, Bayer and Wyeth, have eased off on their contributions to Republican candidates since the Democratic resurgence 2006, Limbaugh supporters Home Depot and JC Penney have not. In 2006, their PACs gave 71 and 85 percent of their contributions, respectively, to Republicans, despite Democratic control of both Houses of Congress and the White House, their PACs have, to date, given 51 and 100 percent of their contributions of Republicans for the 2010 election cycle.
While undoubtedly those companies are still happy to take money from liberal consumers, they don't want to be associated with political programming if it skews liberal--and they're more than happy to take that money from the pockets of liberals and use it to support Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh's contributions to the American political discourse.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Zen Moment for Friday
- Common Dreams
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/even-more-gilded/
On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock
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Paul Krassner
August 14, 2009
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Four decades ago, along with 499,999 others on a countercultural pilgrimage, I was headed for the Woodstock Festival of Music & Love. I was wearing my yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time. In one of the pockets there was a nice little stash of LSD. If you happen to be brand-name conscious, then you'll want to know that it was Owsley White Lightning.
The CIA originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but, without anybody's permission, millions of young people had already become explorers of their own inner space. Acid was serving as a vehicle for deprogramming themselves from a civilization of sadomasochistic priorities. A mass awakening was in process. There was an evolutionary jump in consciousness.
The underground press was flourishing, and when LSD was declared illegal on October 10, 1966, the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle became politicized while the radical Berkeley Barb began to treat the drug subculture as fellow outlaws. Acid was even influencing the stock market. Timothy Leary let me listen in on a phone call from a Wall Street broker who thanked Leary for turning him onto acid because it gave him the courage to sell short.
As I wandered around the Woodstock Festival, I was overwhelmed by the realization that this tribal event was in actuality what the Yippies had originally fantasized about for the 1968 counter-convention in Chicago. No longer did so many of these celebrants have to feel like the only Martians on their block. Now, extended families were developing into an alternative society right before our dilated pupils. I had never before felt such a powerful sense of community.
The soundtrack was live, and the Hog Farm commune provided meals, servicing the largest Bed & Breakfast place in history. Actually, they had been hired to provide security. But to Hog Farm leader Hugh Romney, security meant cream pies and seltzer bottles. He planned to wear a Smokey Bear costume to warn people about putting out fires. This was not merely a three-day outdoor concert. This was a Martian convention. Or, as Abbie Hoffman called it, Woodstock Nation.
The political contingent was encamped in a huge red-and-white-striped tent christened Movement City. In the afternoon, a mimeograph machine was churning out flyers proclaiming that the outdoor concerts should be free. At night, several festival-goers were busy unscrewing the metal-wire fencing that had been put up during the day. Yippie Roz Payne was among them. She helped take down the "No Trespassing" sign and changed it into a sign that read "Peoples Bulletin Board."
Abbie, Roz and I took a stroll down Merchants Way, which led to the stage that was still being constructed. They took down the "Merchants Way" sign and put in its place a sign that read "Ho Chi Minh Trail." Lights had not yet been strung up along the path, and as it got darker, we kept walking and stumbling until we got lost in the woods. After a couple of hours, we saw a light through the trees, realized that we were right back where we started, and we laughed ourselves silly.
Abbie would get serious later on, though, ebbed on by his sense of justice and fueled by the tab of White Lightning that we had each ingested. While The Who were performing, he went up on stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for the possession of two joints; that this was really the politics behind the music.
Before Abbie could get his message across, Pete Townshend transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed him on the head with a swift backhand. Townshend had assumed that Abbie was just another crazed fan. When The Who played at Fillmore East the previous week, a plainclothes cop rushed on stage and tried to grab the mike. He intended to warn the audience that there was a fire next door and the theater had to be cleared, but he was able to do so only after Townshend kneed him in the balls.
Now he shouted at Abbie, "Get the fuck off my stage!" To the audience: "The next person that walks across the stage is gonna get killed." The audience laughed. "You can laugh, but I mean it!"
I inadvertently ended up with a political mission of my own at Woodstock. For a while, I was hanging around the Press Tent, which later turned into the Hospital For Bad Trips. A reporter from the New York Daily News asked me, "How do you spell braless?" I replied, "Without a hyphen." He pointed out two men with cameras who were from the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Army.
And a freelance writer who knew someone with a source in the White House told me how the Nixon administration had assigned the Rand Corporation think tank to develop a game plan for suspending the 1972 election in case of disruption. I decided to mention this at every meeting I attended, every interview I did, every campus I spoke at and every radio show that I was a guest on.
In 1970, the story was officially denied by Attorney General John Mitchell. He warned that whoever started that rumor ought to be "punished." I wrote to him and confessed, but he never answered my letter. Actually, investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum was able to trace the "rumor" back and discovered that I was the fifth level down from the original White House source. I believed it to be true, and even rented a tiny one-room apartment I could escape to when martial law was declared. It had a fireplace so that if the power went off I could cook brown rice.
My favorite moment at the festival was Jimi Hendrix's startling rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." His guitar wailing of our national anthem brought me to tears. It was a wordless version of what I interpreted to mean, "It's not that we hate America, it's that we feel the American dream has been betrayed, and we will live our alternative." My least favorite moment was when I discovered that my new yellow leather fringe jacket had been stolen from the Movement City tent.
The '60s were coming to an end, and the quality of co-option would not be strained. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" became a slogan for the Bank of America, and also for Total breakfast cereal. Tampax advertised its tampon as "Something over 30 you can trust."
Hippies became freaks. Negroes became blacks. Girls became women. Richard Alpert became Baba Ram Dass. Hugh Romney became Wavy Gravy, and his wife became Jahanarah. Yippie organizer Keith Lampe became Ponderosa Pine, and his girlfriend became Olive Tree. My sister Marge became Thais. San Francisco Oracle editor Allen Cohen became Siddartha and moved to a commune where everybody called him Sid. They thought his name was Sid Arthur.
But the seeds that were planted then continue to blossom now. And the spirit of Woodstock continues to be celebrated at such events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, Earthdance, the Oregon County Fair, the Starwood Neo-Pagan Festival, Pete Seeger's Clearwater Festival, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, and yes, the electronic magic montage of musicians and singers around the globe performing "Stand By Me" on YouTube.
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Paul Krassner publishes the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster at paulkrassner.com and he's beginning a column at sf.carnalnation.com on the 3rd Wednesday of each month.
If US health Care's So Good, Why Do Other People Live Longer?
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Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
August 13, 2009 - McClatchy Newspapers
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Ask around for the healthiest country in the world, and the United States won't come close to topping the list.
People live longer in just about every industrialized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around the Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double some of our industrialized peers.
As debate swirls in Washington and at town halls nationwide over health care reform, there is also a more fundamental question — what about health?
Could policymakers change our medical system in ways that would make America a healthier country?
Insuring everyone should help — but less than people might think, according to doctors and public health experts who've studied the issue. Putting more resources into primary care should also make a dent, they say.
Neither one, though, is likely to send America to the top ranks of its global peers.
"If you want to see dramatic changes in health, you're not going to get there even by doubling the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system," said Dr. Richard Kravitz, a University of California, Davis, professor of medicine whose research interests include quality of care.
"When you need it, you really need it … but in general, the benefits of medical care to populations are a little bit overrated," he said.
When taken all together, the other factors that play a bigger role include education, income, toxins in the environment, crime, violence, family structure, stress, obesity, nutritious food and exercise.
Across large populations, he said, numerous studies suggest that medical care contributes only modestly to overall health, perhaps somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent.
Health care for all would provide a "very large" improvement for some deprived populations, Kravitz said, but "a surtax on high fructose corn syrup would probably be more effective … than anything we could do for the health care system, just because of obesity."
Researchers who have delved into the effects of medical care on the health of large groups overall have made some surprising and sometimes conflicting discoveries.
An experiment in the 1980s that extended different levels of insurance to otherwise uninsured people found that more coverage fostered more use of the medical system but not necessarily healthier people, said Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
A 2006 study that compared white people in England with whites in the United States, in an effort to keep different ethnicities from complicating the findings, reached conclusions Muennig found startling. Even the richest white Americans, who are pretty much universally insured, had more diabetes, more high blood pressure, more heart disease and more cancer than the richest white Britons. On most measures they were a little less healthy than middle income Britons.
This points to a vast range of things health care cannot do, from providing mass transit that makes it likelier people will walk more, to providing the kind of education that correlates strongly with better health.
"Education is the fundamental ingredient for what you need to survive in any ecological niche," Muennig said. People with less education are likely to have jobs that are lower paying, higher stress and possibly more dangerous. They're likelier to live in unsafe housing and eat cheap, calorie-dense food. They're less likely to be offered job-related health insurance. Except for the insurance, he said, health care reforms cannot fix that.
Those who examine health across many nations puzzle over other oddities.
In international health care measures, America's ranking improves when life expectancy is measured for people age 65 and older. While still not at the top of the health heap, Americans who make it to age 65 have remaining life expectancies closer to 65-year-olds in other developed countries, and men stack up a little better than women against their peers worldwide.
That might mean that American medicine treats older people more effectively. Or it could mean that Medicare, universal coverage available at age 65, may be keeping older people healthier. Or it could be something called the "survivor effect," suggesting those who have lived past earlier perils are more robust.
While the factors that optimize health are complex, doctors say there are things federal policymakers could do to make America a little healthier.
Among them are strengthening primary care, finding ways to encourage better diet and exercise, and effectively reforming how health care is financed, said Dr. James G. Kahn, a professor of health policy and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
People do better in nations that encourage them to have a regular primary care provider, Kahn said, perhaps partly because regular, front-line care helps bolster healthy habits.
"Even in the United States, in locations with a higher concentration of primary care providers, people have somewhat better outcomes and also lower costs," he said.
Rewarding and encouraging primary care might also offset an American tendency to do too much, driven by a system that pays for each procedure performed by a doctor, hospital or testing lab, Kahn added.
"We do too many surgeries," he said. "Rates of cardiac surgery are lower in Canada, yet they have better outcomes."
There is hope, too, for "accountable care" groups that would move away from fee for service payments but be held accountable for keeping all their patients as healthy as possible, said Stephen Shortell, dean of the school of public health at UC Berkeley.
Shortell is also pleased that the health legislation being discussed in Washington includes billions for disease prevention and health promotion.
"You can't ignore the health care system, but the big payoff is in lifestyle factors and disease prevention," he said. "A dollar spent on those activities saves $5 in health care costs."
Afghanistan: Mission Essential, Translators Expendable
Pratap Chatterjee
August 13, 2009 - Inter Press Service
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Basir "Steve" Ahmed was returning from a bomb-clearing mission in Khogyani district in northeastern Afghanistan when a suicide bomber blew up an explosive-filled vehicle nearby. The blast flipped the military armoured truck Ahmed was riding in three or four times, and filled it with smoke. The Afghan translator had been accompanying the 927th Engineer Company near the Pakistan border on that October day in 2008 that would forever change his life.
"I saw the gunner come out and I followed him. The U.S. Army soldiers helped pull me out, but I got burns," says Ahmed, who had worked as a contract translator with U.S. troops for almost four years. "The last thing I remember was the 'dub-dub-dub' of a Chinook helicopter." A medical evacuation team took the injured men to a U.S. Army hospital at Bagram Base.
Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from shrapnel wounds in his scalp and severe burns covering his right hand and leg.
A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio - the largest supplier of translators to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to this reporter, the company said that Ahmed's "military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir's POC called MEP's manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist."
Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.
Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.
Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of U.S. contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the U.S. military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
"I Trust Him With My Life"
On a table inside a safe house in Kabul, Basir Ahmed placed dozens of photos, certificates of appreciation, and letters of recommendation from the U.S. military units he had worked with between 2005 and 2009. Some pictures showed him in Nuristan wearing T-shirts and wraparound sunglasses and sitting next to the sandbags and concrete barriers. In others, he stood in camouflage gear in the depths of winter next to a snowman.
For example, Sergeant David R. Head and First Lieutenant Candace N. Mathis of the Provincial Reconstruction Team at Task Force Spartan at the Kamdesh base wrote on Dec. 22, 2006 that: "his performance was superb and very professional. He works well as a linguist, and is always punctual."
On May 11, 2008, Ahmed received a certificate of appreciation from Lieutenant Colonel Anthony O. Wright of the 70th Engineer Battalion (Kodiaks) for his help as an interpreter during the road-clearing programme from 2006 to 2008.
It was just five months later, on a similar patrol with the 927th Engineer Company, that Ahmed was injured. At the Bagram Base, the military doctors did some skin grafts, but after about 11 days, sent him to an Afghan military hospital in Kabul. For two to three months he could not sleep properly - scaring his family when he woke up yelling.
Then Gabby Nelson - the MEP site manager - summoned Ahmed back to Jalalabad, where she had the military doctors look at him again. For about 15 days, they treated the burns. He had to report to the gate of the base at 7 a.m. in the middle of winter for Nelson to drive him to the hospital one kilometre away - too far to walk with his injuries. She was often an hour late, he said, a painful and cold delay, but when he asked her to be more punctual, she said she would stop picking him up. He stopped going to the hospital.
Two weeks later Ahmed says Nelson asked him to report for a 12-hour shift starting at 6 a.m. despite the doctors' recommendation for a month's rest. After working for the full month, he received 578 dollars, significantly less than the 845 dollars that he normally earned.
Then as luck would have it, he says, he missed work once and was late twice, because of delays on the road to the base, where the Afghan and U.S. forces often tied up traffic with their manoeuvres, he explained. Nelson told him to turn in his badge. He tried to appeal to the military, but they said they couldn’t help him - so he left the base on Jan. 24, 2009.
Soldiers who had previously worked with Ahmed, confirmed the certificates of appreciation and recommendations about his punctuality and the quality of his work. "He did his job diligently and willingly. He served with us during the most uncomfortable times, but never complained," said one soldier, who asked to remain anonymous.
Official Response
Ahmed's employer - Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel - was awarded a five-year contract in September 2007 by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The contract, to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan, is worth up to $414 million.
MEP spokesman Sean Rushton says that the company did the best it could to help Ahmed with his medical needs. "A desire to improve treatment of linguists is what began our company," said the spokesman.
Rushton and MEP's senior management said that they were pained to hear that Basir was upset at being "let go."
"Anyone reading an account of a translator who was simply let go by a company after being wounded would of course be outraged at the company, but that not only isn't true in this instance, exactly the opposite is the case," the company said in a statement released to the media.
"We have financial records showing seven disability and salary payments between his injury and the final settlement. It has been said Basir [Ahmed] received insufficient medical care, yet MEP employees not only ensured his medical coverage, they regularly took him to his treatment and got him into a U.S. military hospital," the company stated.
"It has been suggested Basir waited endlessly for his disability settlement, yet the funds arrived within six weeks of his rehabilitation's conclusion. It has been suggested MEP forced Basir to return to work when he was still recuperating, yet MEP had no financial incentive to do so and in fact, at Basir's request, MEP got him onto accommodated duty, free of physical hardship. It has been suggested MEP cut Basir loose after he was dismissed by his military supervisor, yet MEP was and is anxious to help Basir, including by considering him for a new job."
Reached by phone for his response to MEP's statement, Ahmed says that he did get disability payments such as a check for $10,000 sent to him in early July 2009 - nine months after he was injured. Yet he still feels that his employer and the military abandoned him.
But he has not been completely forgotten. About two months after leaving his job, he started receiving death threats. "Believe me, my family is too scared. One day I saw a night letter from the Taliban. They put it in our door: 'You three brothers work for the U.S. Army. Quit your job. Otherwise we are going to kill your whole family,'" he says.
Like many of his colleagues, Ahmed had kept his employment a secret from his neighbours, he believes that the injuries provided a clue about the true nature of his occupation to Taliban sympathizers in the community.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Boycott Whole Foods
Russell Mokhiber
August 13, 2009 - CommonDreams.org
.....
John Mackey is a right wing libertarian.
He's a union buster.
He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.
He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.
And he's the CEO of Whole Foods.
Primo hangout of liberal Democratic yuppies.
"We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health," Mackey wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. "We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society."
Yes it will, John Mackey.
Yes it will.
I do take that responsibility very seriously.
I try to eat well.
And exercise regularly.
I also take my responsibility as a citizen seriously.
After all, Mr. Mackey, we are all responsible for our own civic lives and our own civic health.
We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom and make wise civic and consumer choices that will protect our nation's health.
Doing so will enrich our civic lives and help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.
That's why, today, Single Payer Action is calling on all American citizens to boycott Whole Foods.
Why?
Because Mackey has launched a public campaign to defeat single payer national health insurance.
This despite the bottom line reality that single payer is the only way to both control health care costs and cover everyone.
As Dr. Marcia Angell says in today's New York Times, "if you keep health care in the hands of for-profit companies, you can increase coverage by putting more money into the system, or control costs by decreasing coverage. But you cannot do both unless you change the basic structure of the system."
Mackey leads his Wall Street Journal diatribe against national health insurance with a quote from one of his heroines – Margaret Thatcher: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
And the problem with Mackey's campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance.
Mackey is responsible for these deaths as much as anyone.
And we are responsible for putting money into his Whole Food bank account so that he can continue his campaign without resistance.
I know that this boycott of Whole Foods will upset many liberal Democrats.
Where will they buy their organic wines?
And cheeses?
And tofu?
There are options.
Your local health food co-op.
Farmers' markets.
Community supported agriculture.
Other corporate chains like Trader Joe's.
So, please, join the Single Payer Action Boycott of Whole Foods.
Don't cross the picket lines.
Don't spend another penny at Whole Foods until John Mackey and his right wing friends are defeated.
And single payer is enacted.
Onward to single payer.
.....
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Something worth forwarding
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US home repossessions rocket to record levels
Las Vegas is worst hit, while the overall records show an alarming 32% increase in repossessions year-on-year
Andrew Clark
August 13, 2009 - Guardian.co.UK
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Home repossessions have rocketed to a new high in the US as a tide of misery sweeping through the mortgage market stubbornly resists large-scale programmes by the Obama administration to keep struggling borrowers from losing their houses.
Foreclosure documents were filed on 360,149 properties during July – a rise of 7% on the previous month, and a 32% increase year-on-year. It was the third time in five months that foreclosure activity set a new record.
America's repossession capital was the desert casino city of Las Vegas, where foreclosure documents were filed on one in every 47 homes. Nevada, California, Florida and Arizona accounted for more than half of US foreclosure activity, as a vigorous housing boom driven by rapidly expanding cities in the middle of the decade turned to a spectacular bust.
James Saccacio, chief executive of RealtyTrac, the online marketplace that compiled the figures, said: "Despite continued efforts by the federal government and state governments to patch together a safety net for distressed homeowners, we're seeing significant growth in both the initial notices of default and in the bank repossessions."
More than 860,000 families in the US lost their homes during 2008 as risky subprime mortgages proved unsustainable, and the figure is set to be even higher this year, in spite of a series of government initiatives pushing banks to amend delinquent loans to provide relief for struggling borrowers.
A $75bn (£45.2bn) programme established by the Obama administration in February provides incentives for banks to help borrowers. It is intended to help as many as 4 million homeowners, although figures released earlier this month revealed that banks have made "uneven" progress in refinancing loans, with 230,000 altered under the scheme to date.
One of the difficulties facing lenders is that job losses continue to mount, with recession-hit employers cutting more than a quarter of a million positions each month. When mortgage customers lose their jobs, they no longer qualify for refinancing as they generally have no means of meeting even cut-price repayments.
A surprise drop in retail sales delivered a further blow to economic sentiment. Figures from the US department of commerce showed that till receipts dropped by 0.1% in July, confounding analysts' expectations of a rise of between 0.7% and 0.8%. After stripping out car sales boosted by the government's "cash for clunkers" subsidy programme, retail sales fell by 0.6%.
Ian Morris, head of US economics at HSBC in New York, described the figures as disappointing: "Although 'cash for clunkers' will boost things in the short run, today's retail data is a reminder that excluding extraordinary stimuli, underlying consumer trends remain fragile."
Study Finds Big Storms on a 1,000-Year Rise
Lauren Morello
August 13, 2009 - ClimateWire
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The North Atlantic Ocean has spawned more hurricanes and tropical storms over the last decade than it has for 1,000 years, according to a new study.
The research, published yesterday in the journal Nature, tries to trace the pattern of storms along North America's Atlantic and Gulf coasts back to A.D. 500, well before humans were recording weather observations.
The study's lead author, climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, said finding a reliable way to reconstruct centuries of past hurricane activity could help scientists tease out whether future climate change will alter storm patterns.
"One of the driving motivations for this research is to place in a longer-term context ... Atlantic tropical cyclone behavior, and the extent to which it may be anomalous," he said.
That meant trying to divine information about the past beyond historical records collected by ships and observers on shore, and later by storm-tracking aircraft and satellites.
The scientists relied on two different methods to reconstruct the past -- a foray into the emerging field of "paleotempestology," or the study of ancient storms.
First, they examined layers of sediment collected from coastal ponds and salt marshes that tend to flood when hurricanes make landfall nearby. Each flood deposits a layer of coarse barrier beach sand on the muddy pond floor, creating a record scientists can examine by collecting sediment cores. For the new study, Mann and his co-authors at the University of Massachusetts and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution collected cores at eight sites along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, ranging from southern Massachusetts to Vieques Island, Puerto Rico.
The researchers also used a computer model to simulate 1,500 years of Atlantic storms, feeding in information collected between 1851 and 2006 about factors known to influence hurricane activity, including sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, the occurrence of El Niño weather patterns, and fluctuations in the jet stream.
The two methods produced similar overall results, Mann said, such as showing a major peak in storm activity about 1,000 years ago.
But 'paleotempestology' doesn't end the debate
Taken together, he said, they suggest that warmer temperatures produce more storm activity -- meaning that coming climate change could increase the frequency of hurricane activity.
"The paleoclimate evidence seems to reinforce the notion that, all other things being equal, when you have warm sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, you see more activity," he said.
But Mann said there's also a possibility that climate change could alter the frequency of El Niño, which blunts hurricane activity, and counteract the effects of future ocean warming.
"Current state-of-the-art climate model projections are more or less split between whether there will be more El Niño conditions or more La Niña-like conditions," he said.
"The jury is still out. But this study is an independent data point from the paleo record that gives more weight to the proposition that warming the tropical Atlantic will continue to give us a higher level of hurricane and tropical cyclone activity."
Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has published studies linking climate change to stronger hurricanes, called the new research "an impressive piece of work, melding two completely independent approaches to estimating past hurricane activity."
Emanuel said the Nature study "shows that hurricane activity is indeed quite sensitive to climate, and although we are still not completely sure about global warming effects, the paper raises again the flag that potentially they could be large."
But James Elsner, a climate scientist at Florida State University, said the "rather large levels of uncertainty" in the new study's results gave him pause.
"I don't see it as settling the debate on climate change and hurricane activity," said Elsner, who helped develop the statistical methods employed in the new study. "I think it does provide evidence that warmth is important."
At the same time, he explained, "the lack of a real tight physical theory between ocean warmth and frequency indicates this is not the smoking gun that would allow us to confidently project what might happen as oceans warm in the future."
'Evil and Orwellian' – America's Right Turns Its Fire on NHS
Andrew Clark
August 11, 2009 - The Guardian/UK
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The National Health Service has become the butt of increasingly outlandish political attacks in the US as Republicans and conservative campaigners rail against Britain's "socialist" system as part of a tussle to defeat Barack Obama's proposals for broader government involvement in healthcare.
Top-ranking Republicans have joined bloggers and well-funded free market organisations in scorning the NHS for its waiting lists and for "rationing" the availability of expensive treatments.
As myths and half-truths circulate, British diplomats in the US are treading a delicate line in correcting falsehoods while trying to stay out of a vicious domestic dogfight over the future of American health policy.
Slickly produced television advertisements trumpet the alleged failures of the NHS's 61-year tradition of tax-funded healthcare. To the dismay of British healthcare professionals, US critics have accused the service of putting an "Orwellian" financial cap on the value on human life, of allowing elderly people to die untreated and, in one case, for driving a despairing dental patient to mend his teeth with superglue.
Having seen his approval ratings drop, Obama is seeking to counter this conservative onslaught by taking his message to the public, with a "town hall" meeting yesterday at a school in New Hampshire.
Last week, the most senior Republican on the Senate finance committee, Chuck Grassley, took NHS-baiting to a newly emotive level by claiming that his ailing Democratic colleague, Edward Kennedy, would be left to die untreated from a brain tumour in Britain on the grounds that he would be considered too old to deserve treatment.
"I don't know for sure," said Grassley. "But I've heard several senators say that Ted Kennedy with a brain tumour, being 77 years old as opposed to being 37 years old, if he were in England, would not be treated for his disease, because end of life – when you get to be 77, your life is considered less valuable under those systems."
The degree of misinformation is causing dismay in NHS circles. Andrew Dillon, chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), pointed out that it was utterly false that Kennedy would be left untreated in Britain: "It is neither true nor is it anything you could extrapolate from anything we've ever recommended to the NHS."
Others in the US have accused Obama of trying to set up "death panels" to decide who should live and who should die, along the lines of Nice, which determines the cost-effectiveness of NHS drugs.
One right-leaning group, Conservatives for Patients' Rights, lists horror stories about British care on its website. An email widely circulated among US voters, of uncertain origin, claims that anyone over 59 in Britain is ineligible for treatment for heart disease.
The British embassy in Washington is quietly trying to counter inaccuracies. A spokesman said: "We're keeping a close eye on things and where there's a factually wrong statement, we will take the opportunity to correct people in private. That said, we don't want to get involved in a domestic debate."
A $1.2m television advertising campaign bankrolled by the conservative Club for Growth displays images of the union flag and Big Ben while intoning a figure of $22,750. A voiceover says: "In England, government health officials have decided that's how much six months of life is worth. If a medical treatment costs more, you're out of luck."
The number is based on a ratio of £30,000 a year used by Nice in its assessment of whether drugs provide value for money. Dillon said this was one of many variables in determining cost-effectiveness of medicines. He said of his body's portrayal in the US: "It's very disappointing and it's not, obviously, the way in which Nice describes itself or the way in which we're perceived in the UK even among those who are disappointed or upset by our decisions."
On Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel, the conservative commentator Sean Hannity recently alighted upon the case of Gordon Cook, a security manager from Merseyside, who used superglue to stick a loose crown into his gum because he was unable to find an NHS dentist. The cautionary tale, which was based on a Daily Mail report from 2006, prompted Hannity to warn his viewers: "If the Democrats have their way, get your superglue ready."
The broader tone of the US healthcare debate has become increasingly bitter. The former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin last week described president Obama's proposals as "evil", while the radio presenter Rush Limbaugh has compared a logo used for the White House's reform plans to a Nazi swastika. Hecklers have disrupted town hall meetings called to discuss the health reform plans.
David Levinthal, a spokesman for the nonpartisan Centre for Responsive Politics, said the sheer scale of the issue, which will affect the entire trajectory of US medical care, was arousing passions: "It's no surprise you have factions from every political stripe attempting to influence the debate and some of those groups are certainly playing to the deepest fears of Americans. There's been a great deal of documented disinformation propagated throughout the country."Defenders of Britain's system point out that the UK spends less per head on healthcare but has a higher life expectancy than the US. The World Health Organisation ranks Britain's healthcare as 18th in the world, while the US is in 37th place. The British Medical Association said a majority of Britain's doctors have consistently supported public provision of healthcare. A spokeswoman said the association's 140,000 members were sceptical about the US approach to medicine: "Doctors and the public
here are appalled that there are so many people on the US who don't have proper access to healthcare. It's something we would find very, very shocking."
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Geico Pulls Its Ads from Glenn Beck's Fox News Show
Amanda Terkel
August 11, 2009 - Think Progress
.....
Fox News host Glenn Beck has been under fire in recent weeks for his comments that President Obama is a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people." Since ColorOfChange called on its members to urge Beck's advertisers to drop his show, three advertisers have pulled out. Today, ColorOfChange announced that Geico Insurance is joining them:
"On Tuesday, August 4, GEICO instructed its ad buying service to redistribute its inventory of rotational spots on FOX-TV to their other network programs, exclusive of the Glenn Beck program," said a spokesperson for GEICO Corporate Communications in an email to ColorOfChange.org. "As of August 4, GEICO no longer runs any paid advertising spots during Mr. Beck's program."
2 US Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake
.....
Scott Shane
August 12, 2009 - The New York Times
.....
Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most importantinterrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.
They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.
So "Doc Mitchell" and "Doc Jessen," as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.
Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.
Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists' role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency's inspector general.
Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.
"I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer," Colonel Kleinman said. "But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things."
For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency's "mistakes."
The psychologists' subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.
With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors' colleagues and present and former government officials.
In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.
"Ask around," Dr. Mitchell wrote, "and I'm sure you will find all manner of 'experts' who will be willing to make up what you'd like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality."
A Career Shift
At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.
But for someone with Dr. Mitchell's background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career's worth of connections.
He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology.
Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.
"I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations," Dr. Madigan said.
Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist "brainwashing." Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.
Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.
In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying "family sculpting," in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.
Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist's job at a parallel "graduate school" of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.
The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the "resistance mafia," experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.
While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.
At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called "manhandling" after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.
At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.
Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his "pretty scary" performance, another official recalled.
Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.
Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.'s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.
"It was clear that this is what we'd expect from our enemies," said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. "It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do."
Start of the Program
In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.
During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man's writing on "learned helplessness." Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell's unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was "grieved and horrified" to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.
Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.
Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.
Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor's demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.
At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell's theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy's brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.
By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person's words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required "a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings."
By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda's No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.
With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.
Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that "revisionism" in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.
As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.
In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.
The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.
Lucrative Work
The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.
But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.
The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.
Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)
In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military's SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.
The company's C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.
The psychologists' influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.'s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.
By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists' business.
In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama's C.I.A. director, announced the "decommissioning" of the agency's secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: "No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations."
Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists' lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.
More of the Same in Latin America
Mark Weisbrot
August 11, 2009 - The New York Times
.....
There were great hopes in Latin America when President Obama was elected. U.S. standing in the region had reached a low point under George W. Bush, and all of the left governments expressed optimism that Obama would take Washington's policy in a new direction.
These hopes have been dashed. President Obama has continued the Bush policies and in some cases has done worse.
The military overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras on June 28 has become a clear example of Obama's failure in the hemisphere. There were signs that something was amiss in Washington when the first statement from the White House failed to even criticize the coup. It was the only such statement from a government to take a neutral position. The U.N. General Assembly and the Organization of American States voted unanimously for "the immediate and unconditional return" of President Zelaya.
Conflicting statements from the White House and State Department emerged over the ensuing days, but last Friday the State Department made clear its "neutrality." In a letter to Senator Richard Lugar, the State Department said that "our policy and strategy for engagement is not based on supporting any particular politician or individual," and appeared to blame Mr. Zelaya for the coup: "President Zelaya's insistence on undertaking provocative actions contributed to the polarization of Honduran society and led to a confrontation that unleashed the events that led to his removal."
This letter was all over the Honduran media, which is controlled by the coup government and its supporters, and it strengthened them politically. Congressional Republicans who have supported the coup immediately claimed victory.
On Monday, President Obama repeated his statement that Mr. Zelaya should return. But by then nobody was fooled.
Mr. Obama has said that he "can't push a button and suddenly reinstate Mr. Zelaya." But he hasn't pushed the buttons that he has at his disposal, such as freezing the U.S. assets of the coup leaders, or canceling their visas. (The State Department cancelled five diplomatic visas of members of the coup government, but they can still enter the United States with a normal visa — so this gesture had no effect).
With Clinton associates such as Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff running strategy for the coup government, the Pentagon looking out for its military base in Honduras, and the Republicans ideologically tied to the coup leaders, it should be no surprise that Washington is more worried about protecting its friends in the dictatorship than about democracy or the rule of law.
But it doesn't make Mr. Obama's policy any less disgraceful. And Washington has remained silent about the dictatorship's human rights abuses, which have been condemned by human rights organizations worldwide.
In addition to its failure in Honduras, the Obama administration raised concerns last week among such leaders as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Michelle Bachelet of Chile with its decision to increase the U.S. military presence in Colombia. Washington apparently did not consult with South American governments — other than Colombia — beforehand. The pretext for the expansion is, as usual, the "war on drugs." But the legislation in Congress that would finance this expansion allows for a much broader role. No wonder South America is suspicious. Mr. Obama also has not reversed the Bush administration's decision to reactivate the U.S. Navy's Fourth Fleet in the Caribbean, for the first time since 1950 — a decision that raised concerns in Brazil and other countries.
President Obama has also continued the Bush administration's trade sanctions against Bolivia, which are seen throughout the region as an affront to Bolivia's national sovereignty. And despite President Obama's handshake with President Hugo Chávez, the State Department has maintained about the same level of hostility toward Venezuela as President Bush did in his last year or two.
President Obama's policies have drawn mostly only mild rebuke because he is still enjoying a honeymoon. But he is doing serious damage to U.S.-Latin American relations, and to the prospects for democracy and social progress in the region.
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Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
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