Bankers, Bailouts, Credit Cards and Suckers

 
 An item on the news yesterday about the progress, or lack of it, of the “Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009” (to try to keep credit card companies, i.e. banks, from arbitrarily increasing interest rates on existing credit card balances) got me thinking about debt, credit, bankruptcy and how the laws all favor the banks until it comes time for the suckers (us) to bail them out. Especially in recent years, we suckers have all been taken for a real ride. In 2005, for example, the Bush Administration passed a law—“The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act”—signed with great fanfare by President Decider, that “reformed” the bankruptcy laws, particularly governing credit card debt.  The reform was promoted as a benefit to consumers (suckers) by making it harder for the average person with consumer debt to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (the law now forced such persons to file a “means test,” as well as undertake “credit counseling” and education in personal financial management), thus reducing losses to lenders. Presumably, we’d all benefit because lenders wouldn’t tighten up on the credit cards all the rest of us depend on. Though the new hurdles definitely caused a sharp decline in personal bankruptcy filings—thus benefiting the banks—they also failed to stop the rise of interest rates and fees these same banks charged suckers. A Harvard Law School fellow, Mike Simkovic, did a study and put it this way:
            “The fact that after bankruptcy reform, interest rates and fees continued to rise, and grace periods continued to fall, even though credit card companies reaped tremendous gains from declining bankruptcy losses demonstrates that the credit card market is not price-competitive. This lack of price competition explains why the benefits of bankruptcy reform accrued exclusively to credit card lenders and…why bankruptcy reform was a failure.” (from “New Bankruptcy Laws Hurt Consumers,” at http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/07/bankruptcy_changes.html )
 
The same article cites another effect of the 2005 “reforms”:  the increase in home foreclosures and defaults—something clearly related to our current crisis. According to a study by David Bernstein, “The more stringent bankruptcy code” that limited financial relief and made it more difficult and expensive to file for bankruptcy, “appears to have increased the number of individuals walking away from their homes, their mortgages, and the other financial obligations without seeking the protection of the bankruptcy court.”
            To grant the devils their due, such restrictive measures are not, historically, as bad as the practice in ancient Greece, where bankruptcy didn’t even exist. The families of adult fathers who couldn’t pay their debts were legally liable for those debts, and so entire families could be forced into “debt slavery” until their labor discharged the debt. Many if not most of the first immigrants to the United States were debtors as well, coming to the New World as indentured servants committed to working off their debts in a few years. Thomas Jefferson, among other notables, ended his life so deeply in debt that his entire property (including about 200 slaves) went on the auction block to pay his creditors, leaving his white family penniless (his “black” family by his enslaved concubine Sally Hemings, of course, would have inherited nothing in any case). Still, according to an article in the current New Yorker Magazine, the debtor policy in the United States improved on the bankruptcy situation that had prevailed in Europe, where only traders and merchants were allowed to claim bankruptcy—European logic being that such “risk-takers” had to be protected in order for their crucial trade to continue. All others went to debtors’ prisons—for sums as small as a few shillings. In the United States, by contrast, democracy in essence demanded that all were entitled to the same protection, and so the protection of bankruptcy, usually Chapter 7, became available to anyone unable to pay his bills. This meant that though major property items could be seized, at least some “exempt” property—clothing, household goods, an older car—could be retained as the rest of the debt was discharged (except for spousal and child support, student loans and most taxes).  This was the situation that prevailed until the 2005 “reform” made bankruptcy for suckers less available.
            Since then, however, a few things have changed. Most notably, the current financial crisis has meant that now it is not those irresponsible consumers (suckers) who are going bankrupt, but the banks (mortgage brokers, investment bankers, insurance companies etc.) themselves. And, reverting to the traditional attitude that wealthy traders and merchants deserve more consideration than the workers who actually make products, our financial wizards have decreed that we taxpayers (suckers) should all agree to bail out the financiers because, after all, what they do is crucial for the rest of us. And so, in the biggest bailout in U.S. history, we’ve propped them up with trillions ($12 trillion so far?) in taxpayer dollars.
            Now that wouldn’t be quite so bad if the bastards displayed a little contrition, a little consideration for the little guy. But do they? Not on your life. First of all, these hucksters continued to pay themselves—the guys at the top—obscene bonuses. And more recently, an AFL-CIO sponsored study found that more CEOs of American companies got pay hikes than pay cuts in the year 2008. That’s right. Of 946 companies surveyed, 480 had CEOS who got pay raises, while 463 cut their CEOs pay. Moreover, median CEO salary rose 7% in 2008 (the year the economy collapsed), with their perks going up 13% to an average value of $336,246., and their average yearly compensation  reaching $5.4 million.
            Secondly, and this is the real outrage, the banks we’ve bailed out with trillions that our children will be paying for god knows how long, have chosen to stick it to us suckers in yet another way—by gouging us with credit card interest. That’s right, the same swine who have begged for  billions to keep their companies “solvent” (after they drove them and us into the ditch with their complex securitized mortgage packaging and credit default swaps all designed to make billions while the getting was good), these same hot shots have now come up with yet another swindle—sticking it to credit card debtors. It’s a foolproof game, especially now that getting bankruptcy relief for credit card debt has been made much harder (thanks to the 2005 reform cited above): just raise the rates on credit card debt arbitrarily, take it or leave it. Listen to the experience of some recent complainants to CNN.money.com. A small business owner from Southhaven, Miss wrote:
            “I have a very small business and most of our debt is on credit cards. We had a 0% annual percentage rate until January 2009 that would go up to 7.99% thereafter. A few months ago my check got there a day late. The credit card company, Advanta, increased my APR to 7.99%. I just received my current statement and the APR jumped to 25.39%. When I called, a supervisor said it was done for economic reasons. How can they do that? Is it illegal? Can I report them?”
The answer came from Kathleen Ryan O’Connor:
            “Faced with the same economic pressures as other companies affected by the ongoing recession and credit crunch, credit card companies are racing to protect themselves from the costs of more defaults by hiking interest rates and slashing credit limits, even for cardholders with excellent credit histories.”
Another small business owner had the same experience, noting that her expanding company was not only issued a lower credit card limit, but also an interest rate hike that went from 3% to 27%! The credit card company, Advanta, referred her to the terms and conditions it issues, including this one: “We may change any of your account terms, including rates and fees, at any time, for any reason.” No questions asked. Take it or leave it.
            So that’s the money game. First make a pile of money on fraudulent practices in mortgage lending and bundling the bad loans in impenetrable securitized mortgage packages to be sold to suckers the world over. Then get government bailouts (i.e. taxpayer money) to get rid of the “toxic assets” that are holding back credit and threatening to bring down the whole system. Then stick it to the taxpayers who bailed you out by raising their credit card interest so as to maintain your “profitability”—which is precisely what my credit card company, Chase, used as justification for bumping my APR over 4 percentage points. No reason needed. Take it or leave it, suckers.
            So don’t be shy about calling your Congressional reps and senators. Tell them you back the idea proposed by Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders: calling the practice of credit card companies “nothing less than loan sharking,” Sanders has proposed a 15% limit on all credit card interest. Period. Now that’s a proposal. So is Senator Christopher Dodd’s idea to “bar credit card companies from raising interest rates at any time for any reason.” I wouldn’t hold my breath that either proposal will pass, but some outraged calls and letters threatening a debtors’ revolt might help.
 
Lawrence DiStasi
 

You can Bank on it

Rivers have banks
Remember the Ganges
With ashes and hankies
And Boston has the Charles
With coeds and ivies
But while rivers have banks
Our nation has bankers
Who are bred with the Brahmins
And they give us tankers and cankers
While they hide in the Caymans


We seem to be focused on the scandalous behavior of today’s bankers with regard to being dismal stewards of wealth both at home and abroad. We have marveled at their seeming limitless incompetence and greed as though it were some historical anomaly. It is not. I observed banking close up in the late seventies and early eighties while working for one. That is when bankers chaffed under the rules that limited their grasp to banking while they pleaded for license to offer other stuff like investment products and services that were then largely limited to Trust Banking. Trust Banking was a wonderful excuse for slick bank operators in the northeast to squeeze vulnerable old widows by entertaining them in Florida and selling them questionable securities and planning advice in the winter. Of course, that was a minor scam compared to today’s derivative product schemes, but the roots were well watered and established. As for incompetence, the most salient example for me was the insatiable appetite Colonial Bank of Connecticut demonstrated for international lending. The bank had a well disciplined practice of presenting domestic loans to a loan committee that was responsible for seeing that loans were balanced by geography and by industry or business concentration. Lending to too many dry cleaners or department stores or car dealers could concentrate losses due to the vagaries of the economy or weather or fire, etc. In setting up 29 international bankers in London, however, those lessons were lost and the lending risk was concentrated not only on shipping, but on Greek Oil Tankers. Geography and industry related risks were essentially doubled up and no domestic loan committee reviewed the loans. When the recession came, the tanker “owners” simply anchored their ships in Athens harbor and walked away without a care about the debt. Colonial Bank was then taken over by Bank of Boston which itself was bought out by another bank and the fiasco rolled on. I once asked one of these senior professional bankers why they would spend hundreds of dollars in overtime labor to track down the explanation for a two dollar difference at close of business to balance the books when it would be so much cheaper to simply write off the two bucks or add it as found money. His response was that banking was “precise.” When I then asked how banking could be considered precise if the bank was out of balance in the first place, I did not get an answer.

Examples beyond my personal observation exist and I want to insert some thoughts that demonstrate one item in our national history through a well researched past that has been prelude to power and control anachronistic in our representative democracy. I commend the history Rising Tide by John M. Barry as a documented description of how bankers influenced the events surrounding the catastrophic Mississippi flood of 1927. Barry documents the engineering, politics and financing that controlled the Mississippi river. His book is consistently fascinating and occasionally alarming.
That 1927 flood cost the lives of several hundred Americans and was characterized with politics and scheming from every level of our republic. It was also an interesting stew of engineering and special interests as well as bad luck in weather. Banking, however was the item that will most remind us of today’s situation where bankers have chosen high risk over common sense or commonwealth in any sense of the words.

New Orleans lies near the exit of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, but there are parishes (counties) between the Big Easy and the sea. As the flood waters moved south along the general path of the big river, it wreaked destruction all along its path and the path itself was tortuous with excursions along the way that in one breech alone exceeded 90 miles east-west by 60 miles deep. The powers of New Orleans sought to remove even the slightest doubt that the river would overtop the levees of New Orleans Parish and they sought to dynamite the levees protecting Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes. They went to the Governor of Louisiana and to the President of the United States asking for authority to destroy the levees south of New Orleans and were met largely with indifference and light resistance at every level. They also went to the Secretary of Commerce who was put in charge of recovery activities by President Calvin Coolidge. You may remember Herbert Hoover who later became associated with laiszez faire control of banking. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce and Coolidge could not be bothered to visit the devastation despite repeated requests from most governors and the Congress. At that time, Hoover was known as a publicity hound; skilled at spin before it became a professional art form. He would ride that barge to the White House where it sunk a few years later.

If you are at all curious as to where the power of New Orleans centered, it was not with the democratically elected officials. It was the 27 or so major bankers of the city who, even then, had also been the social elite (Boston Club) of New Orleans who sponsored and supported the major krewes of Mardi Gras. Once they decided to dynamite the levees south of the city, it was only a matter of when and how much they had to pay in reparations. That is power. Most often, these bankers chose to remain anonymous as long as they were able to present their sons and daughters as king or queen of Mardi Gras. That was an honor bestowed on few and cherished by all. It required unmentionable wealth to execute the duties of Mardi Gras, especially for the secret krewe of Comus. It was the social and economically privileged that controlled the major krewes, the banks, the politics and the levee. He who controls the levee controls the world of New Orleans including the life and death of every citizen. It is parades and parties that precede Lent each year for the masses, but it is a perennial party for the bankers of New Orleans. Barry points out that a ball gown for the queen of Comus or perhaps Rex would typically far exceed the annual salary for the governor of Louisiana.

I know that some readers may feel that the impact of privilege is overvalued, but as we fast-forward to current events in banking and finance, the parallel of our banking system to the social structure of New Orleans is curious as a minimum. Banking has little basis in performance. It has a strong basis in power; social power as well as personal wealth and it is unrelated to democratically elected positions. The “Fed” prints and controls our money and yet it is not a government function. How did we get here? Can we change the structure?

When I lived in New Orleans with my wife and kids, I felt that the city was a warm and friendly town and, indeed, that is one level of the city. Peel back the layers and it is far more interesting and perhaps even sinister because nothing is as it appears there or in our national banking system. It is a costume party and you are not invited except to stand on the street at public parades shouting, “Throw me something, Mister.” Please read Barry’s book and the recent banking essay by Larry DiStasi. Catch a trinket.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
10 April 2009

Money Ex Nihilo

 
Since our little economic crisis took center stage, I have been trying, vainly, to understand it, along the way trying to understand money and a little concept called “debt-based currency.” Recently, I think I’ve got it—not thoroughly, to be sure, but enough to be able to perceive a monstrous scam when I see one, thanks to an amazing little article I suggest everyone read: “Dollar Deception: How Banks Secretly Create Money,” by Ellen Brown, J.D. on http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/dollar-deception.php . It doesn’t have to do with AIG or with credit default swaps or securitized mortgages. It has to do with the basic idea of money creation, who creates it, and how.
            Begin with some common misconceptions. 1) The Federal Reserve is the nation’s bank, a public, government entity. Wrong. The Federal Reserve is actually a consortium of private banks, which creates money and lends it to the government, to us, at a nice rate of interest. 2) The Federal Reserve, by creating its Federal Reserve notes, i.e. printing all that money we all lust after, makes most of the money supply. Also wrong. Forget paper money: most of the money that’s created is actually created by plain old banks when they make loans. 3) The money that banks create is actually backed by something substantial, like gold or silver. Wrong. The United States went off the gold standard in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this move to keep what money was left in the United States from fleeing to foreign banks. Since then, the legendary stash of gold in Fort Knox supposedly backing our paper dollars no longer exists. Your dollars are backed by literally nothing except the U.S. government’s pledge to honor them in some way that is not clear. It’s a bit of a magic trick, kept afloat by the faith of people and businesses (and countries like China and Saudi Arabia which hold so much U.S. debt that if they ever decided to call it in, we’d all be in the sewer).
            But let’s get back to basics. Banks create money out of thin air. Ellen Brown cites an astonishing lawsuit that illustrates this in an amazing way. In 1969, a man named Daly was about to lose his home to a bank that held a $14,000 mortgage on it. Daly, a lawyer, decided to sue the bank for not having “consideration,” or something of value, backing its loan to him. In court, the bank’s president admitted this was true, saying that the bank routinely created money “out of thin air” for its loans, which he said was standard practice in the industry. The judge, a Justice of the Peace named Mahoney, reiterated what he had heard: “Plaintiff admitted that it, in combination with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis…did create the entire $14,000 in money and credit upon its own books by bookkeeping entry. That this was the consideration used to support the note…[and that] the money and credit first came into existence when they created it. Mr. Morgan [the bank president] admitted that no United States Law or Statute existed which gave him the right to do this…” Given these facts—that the bank was actually extending credit without backing its loans with anything it actually had in its vaults—the court ruled against the bank’s foreclosure claim, and Daly kept his house.
            Now elementary banking theory seems to partially admit this. It grants that since at least the 17th century, in a practice started by goldsmiths, bankers have engaged in what is known as “fractional reserve banking.” That is, when people deposited their gold with goldsmiths, and received paper notes testifying to the amount and allowing them to redeem the gold when they needed it, the goldsmiths holding the gold noticed something. People never came all at once to redeem their gold. In fact, at any one time, only about 10 or 20% of the gold was needed to redeem the notes people presented. This meant that the goldsmith could actually lend from 5 to 10 times as much money (in notes) as they had backed with gold. This became the basis for “fractional reserve banking” and most currency: except in situations like the Depression, where everyone suddenly wants to redeem paper bank notes for gold or silver in what is known as a “run” on banks, banks could lend out—literally create—far more money than they actually had in reserves. Ellen Brown quotes some notable bankers on this. Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England in the 1920s:
            “The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.”
            Or Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada from 1935 to 1955:
“Banks create money. That is what they are for. . . The manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book. That is all. . . .Each and every time a Bank makes a loan . . . new Bank credit is created -- brand new money.”
Or Robert B. Anderson, Treasury Secretary under President Eisenhower:
            “[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.”
            To get some idea of the amount of money that gets created this way, and its inflationary effect (creating money means more dollars (demand) chasing the same amount of goods (supply), hence prices tend to rise) Brown cites the Fed’s own money supply (M3) statistics. First of all, new money has to be created all the time, i.e. borrowed, “just to pay the interest owed to bankers. A dollar lent at 5 percent interest becomes 2 dollars in 14 years. That means the money supply has to double every 14 years just to cover the interest owed on the money existing at the beginning of this 14-year cycle. The Federal Reserve’s own figures confirm that M3 has doubled or more every 14 years since 1959. That means that every 14 years, banks siphon off as much money in interest as there was in the entire economy 14 years earlier. This tribute is paid for lending something the banks never actually had to lend, making it perhaps the greatest scam ever perpetrated…”
            Now think about it. Bankers, and especially those in the big banks like Citibank and Morgan and Chase and Wells Fargo and Bank of America, have been getting rich on this “greatest scam ever perpetrated” for years, a scam that at one time was called usury. But not content with making billions on interest, especially from the difference between the rate they pay to borrow the money from the Federal Reserve and the outrageous rate they have been allowed, since 1981, to charge their credit card customers (one of my bank credit cards just informed me that my interest rate was being raised about 4%, the difference between the essentially 1% they get it for and the 13% they now charge me being their profit, not to mention the profit they make from poorer folks whom they charge 25 and 30% for the same credit), they had to get into “subprime” mortgages and complicated securitized debt instruments as well, so they could make even more obscene profits. All of which came a cropper when the housing bubble burst and all that debt going bad (I gather that that debt or money owed them is what banks tend to use as “consideration”) threatened to take the whole financial system down with them. And which they then had the nerve to beg the Federal Government via taxpayers to rescue them from. And which the government, using taxpayer dollars, convinced the sucker public to agree to because otherwise we’d all be doomed.
            Now, with a new president to hopefully instill some root sense into the whole system, we find that his top advisers, the Summers and Geithners and Emanuels and Goolsbees, are not only “centrist” and rooted in the financial system themselves, as are all our so-called representatives who derive the bulk of their contributions from this same financial sector, but in practice determined to revive and maintain the same bankers and the same system that brought us all to the brink of financial Armageddon in the first place.
            So consider. Bankers create money out of nothing. And then charge us and the government (also us) interest on it. Not a bad way to make a living, one you’d think would be enough for these charlatans (who, by the way, pay their working-class tellers about $11 an hour to start). But no. Greed, by definition, knows no moderation, never says ‘this is enough.’ No, greed is infinite.  Until, that is, the people finally wake up and get fed up and cry “foul.” Some of that has been happening already regarding the bonuses to the AIG scoundrels. Now what one hopes is that the outrage will continue until all banks and bankers and their whole system are truly brought to heel, along with insurance companies and the rest of the Wall Street bunco artists. How this might happen is not something I’m competent to predict (Ellen Brown suggests establishing a true government bank that prints its own money but doesn’t charge itself interest; think of the savings!) But perhaps we can all find out before it’s too late. Meantime, next time you see your banker, you might let him know that you know: Money ex nihilo might sound godlike, but it’s more like what Freud said it symbolized—the doings of the other end.
 
Lawrence DiStasi
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The Lobby Does It Again

Two days ago, under intense pressure from the Israel Lobby, including sitting senators Charles Schumer of New York and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, President Obama’s choice for chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Chas Freeman, withdrew his name from consideration.  Among other things, Freeman, a diplomat with a distinguished record compiled over thirty years, was accused of being in the pay of foreign governments like Saudi Arabia. But the real accusation, hidden as always, was his stance in bringing a balanced view to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2007, he is reported (by the New York Post) to have said:
            “The brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending. ... American identification with Israel has become total.”
Anyone who has followed this conflict, and its 60-year history would have to agree with the truth of that statement. Not the Israel Lobby, or the lapdog media. To say such things is to violate what has become a cardinal rule of American politics: don’t tell the truth about the occupation, and don’t tell the truth about the slavish American support of and identification with such oppression. In his statement upon withdrawing, Freeman makes this clearer than ever:
“…It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.
The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.” (quoted from Robert Dreyfuss’ March 11, 2009 article in the Nation)
            So, once again, as in the case of I wrote about on January 13 of this year, where Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert made the United States Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice change her UN vote, we have American advocates for a foreign power determining crucial foreign policy decisions of the United States. By attacking the President’s intelligence choice on all fronts, including in the Congress, Israel’s American surrogates dictate to the leader of the free world who can and who cannot be selected to staff key positions. The critical question then becomes: to whom are these people primarily loyal? It is a question that has been raised often in the past, particularly during wars (I know a great deal about how it was raised during World War II with regard to Italian immigrants), including cold ones. Now, with the Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman government threatening to make the middle east cauldron ever hotter, the questions must be raised anew. To wit: Can any sovereign government long tolerate such foreign interference and still call itself sovereign?
            Does everyone realize how serious this is? Sometimes I wonder.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

President Obama, Can we help?

On 4 March President Obama signed a memo titled, “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies” in which he charged the OMB and many others to review their contracting rules and policies and to clean their acts up. The major subject of the memo is saving the taxpayers’ money – an estimated $40B.
He says specifically, “The Federal Government has an overriding obligation to American taxpayers. It should perform its functions efficiently and effectively while insuring that its actions result in the best value for the taxpayers.”
Now if you just read the summary paragraphs, you would be pleased to note that the major theme of the memo is that no-bid contracts are bad, and proper competition is good. No argument at all.
Of course, very few of us read entire government documents anymore, and we certainly don’t go off and read all of the citations in those memos. I’m going to do that for all of us here in this editorial, because for us it really makes a difference. [Sorry this will make this editorial a little long.]
Buried in the memo is a charge that should interest all of us veterans and serving military very much more than just saving money. Way down in the memo he says “Government outsourcing for services also raises special concerns.”
Even further down the memo cites OMB Circular A-76, “Performance of Commercial Activities”, and says [emphasis added]:
“…[the circular] was based on the reasonable premise that while inherently government activities should be performed by Government employees, taxpayers may receive more value for their dollars if non-inherently government activities that can be provided commercially are subject to the forces of competition.”
Somewhere along the line, the “more value for their dollars” comment overtook the importance of “inherently government activities,” and trouble and mischief rushed in.
Many of us old soldiers have had “special concerns” about “government outsourcing” for a long time, and particularly for those actions that are defined as “inherently government activities”.
Again, deep in the OMB Circular it says:
“5. Policy. It is the policy of the United States Government to: …b. Retain Governmental Functions In-House. Certain functions are inherently Governmental in nature, being so intimately related to the public interest as to mandate performance only by Federal employees. These functions are not in competition with the commercial sector. Therefore these functions shall be performed by Government employees.
The Circular says under “Definitions”:
“e. An inherently Governmental function is a function which is so intimately related to the public interest as to mandate performance by Government employees.” …“these functions include those activities which require either the exercise of discretion in applying Government authority or the use of value judgment in making decisions for the Government.”
The principal class of these acts is defined as:
“(1) The act of governing; i.e., the discretionary exercise of Government authority.” Among the examples are,
• “management of Government programs requiring value judgments, as in direction of the national defense”;
• “management and direction of the Armed Services”;
• “activities performed exclusively by military personnel who are subject to deployment in a combat, combat support or combat service support role”;
• “direction of intelligence and counter-intelligence operations.”
Towards the end of the memo he says [emphasis added]:
“I further direct the Director of the OMB, in collaboration with the aforementioned officials and councils, and with input from the publicto develop and issue by September 30, 2009, Government-wide guidance to: … (4) clarify when governmental outsourcing for services is and is not appropriate, consistent with section 321 of Public Law 110-417.”
PL 110-417 is the FY 2009 National Defense Authorization Act. Now that particular section of the Public Law charges the OMB with performing a “Comprehensive Analysis And Development Of Single Government-Wide Definition Of Inherently Governmental Function And Criteria For Critical Functions.”, the title of the section.
The first task the Congress and the President have given to the OMB is to:
“review the definitions of the term ‘‘inherently governmental function’’ … to determine whether such definitions are sufficiently focused to ensure that only officers or employees of the Federal Government or members of the Armed Forces perform inherently governmental functions or other critical functions necessary for the mission of a Federal department or agency [emphasis added].
Congress and the president also charge the OMB to:
“develop criteria to be used by the head of each such department or agency to—
(B) identify each position within that department or agency that, while the position may not exercise an inherently governmental function, nevertheless should only be performed by officers or employees of the Federal Government or members of the Armed Forces to ensure the department or agency maintains control of its mission and operations;”
All of these documents cite “Title 31 501 Note” as a reference. If we dig out that note in the US Code we find the current definition of “inherently governmental function”, which is:
The term ‘inherently governmental function’ means a function that is so intimately related to the public interest as to require performance by Federal Government employees.
“Functions included.—The term includes activities that require either the exercise of discretion in applying Federal Government authority or the making of value judgments in making decisions for the Federal Government, including judgments relating to monetary transactions and entitlements. An inherently governmental function involves, among other things, the interpretation and execution of the laws of the United States so as—
“(i) to bind the United States to take or not to take some action by contract, policy, regulation, authorization, order, or otherwise;
“(ii) to determine, protect, and advance United States economic, political, territorial, property, or other interests by military or diplomatic action, civil or criminal judicial proceedings, contract management, or otherwise;
“(iii) to significantly affect the life, liberty, or property of private persons;
“(iv) to commission, appoint, direct, or control officers or employees of the United States; or
“(v) to exert ultimate control over the acquisition, use, or disposition of the property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, of the United States, including the collection, control, or disbursement of appropriated and other Federal funds.
Well, President Obama, consider all that follows “input from the public”. Perhaps more importantly, consider it as input from those who care deeply about outsourcing of military jobs and who have “been there and done that.”
Now you might expect that this was going to lead up to some diatribe against Blackwater (now “Xe”, whatever that is) or KBR (somehow no longer Halliburton, but who knows?) – far from it. Those contractors are merely manifestations of a larger and more fundamental problem,
There was some “outsourcing” in the past – Brown & Root and others like them performed a number of base support functions in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, if you performed an act that “advanced United States interests by diplomatic or military action” you were an employee – sometimes a draftee – of the United States. How can it ever be otherwise?
The broad dependency on “outsourcing” that has occurred since the demise of the draft in 1973 has masked a policy that can be stated as, “a lack of commitment by the US public to a military cause can always be overcome by money placed in the hands of for-profit corporations.”
This policy alone has changed the nature of US foreign and defense policy, and has completely changed the nature of military service.
We can’t get enough direct budget to increase the size of the military services to perform those services called out by the policy delineated in the OMB Circular – combat (infantry, ground and naval artillery, armor, fighters and bombers), combat support (engineers, intelligence, chemical, communications), and combat service support (MPs, supply, transportation, maintenance, legal, medical, administration).
If we had the budget, we couldn’t get enough volunteers to man the force.
So we substitute money for citizen service, and profit for patriotism.
Most of us who have been in combat know that there is no place there for non-combatants. Not only is it a very dangerous place for anyone, but everyone who is there needs to be under a single set of rules, and a unified command. Non-combatants aren’t constrained in that way so they are loose entities that confuse the combat situation beyond its already inherent complications.
Most of us who have been there also know that combat involves both mortal and moral choices that can only be counted on if they arise from a body of public servants who are under oath to support a national cause that goes beyond the exigencies of the immediate combat at hand. “Duty, Honor, Country” really does mean something, and it cannot be bought.
The service member who is riding shotgun for a contracted driver becomes subject to the “tactical” decisions of the driver.
The military patrol that proceeds into an area that has just been shot up by contract “security personnel” is subject to the revenge assault that is triggered by the arbitrary use of force by the contractors.
The airman or the sailor who needs immediate maintenance or ordnance support is dependent upon the “cost-effectiveness” and “profit-margin” decisions of someone who has no responsibility for the success of the mission.
The mission of the United States, whatever it is, must compete in the public eye with the mission goals that are perceived as a result of the actions of contractors over which the Government has only a contractual relationship, not a moral relationship cemented by an oath of service.
The nature of oath-bound service also changes when contractors perform those duties that all soldiers once performed for ourselves.
We didn’t just fight together, we fed each other, we helped each other repair our equipment, we shared scarce supplies, we provided other services to each other such as laundry and showers, we watched each other’s back, we even entertained each other – all in the same uniform, all under the same oath, all committed to the same national cause.
We became something that those bound only by contracts can never be– we became a “Band of Brothers and Sisters”, not just someone who was hired to do a dangerous or an inconvenient job.
So, President Obama, here is some “public input”.
If you want to fight a war, or if you must, then go all in. Wars are fought by nations, not by contracts.
Get contractors out of the combat zone. Yes, I know, that means that you’ll have to bring back KP, but getting out of KP was one of the great victories of making E-4 and a real morale booster;
besides, they still pull it on ships at sea. Also, even though they might not join for other reasons, including the competition of contractor salaries, no one will stop joining just because they have to pull KP.
While you are at it, let’s get contractors out of the VA also. Taking care of returning soldiers is also an “inherently government function”.
Without the contactors you will have to increase the force to do all those jobs that contractors are doing now, but you will be doing it with people who are under oath (and who get paid less anyway). They have to follow your orders or they will suffer for it; they are sworn to do so, and they don’t demand that each act they take generates a profit.
Contractors aren’t soldiers and soldiers aren’t contractors. Always remember the difference!
If you can’t expand the force because of the political burden of such a decision, then the people and their representatives aren’t behind you and the war isn’t important enough to fight anyway.
If a war must be fought, bring back the draft and use those whom you enlist and conscript to do the nation’s business. If you can’t bring back the draft, then the war isn’t worth fighting.
Most wars aren’t.
[Sandy Cook: Ed.]

February Miscellany

So many things going on, and so much to comment upon, so this one will be a mix of thoughts, with no attempt to make them cohere.
            All the news about the crimes among our major bankers and their cohorts on Wall Street—including the $50 billion Madoff scandal, the billions in bonuses to investment bankers, and the billions given to major banks with no indication that they did anything but use it to buy other distressed banks or simply sock it away—coupled with the growing awareness among Americans that the past 40 years, since Reagan, have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to precisely these scheming bankers and other elites, brings to mind a comment made long ago by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Charles Mann mentions it in his book on the Americas before Columbus, 1491, and it goes like this:
            Indians who visited France, Montaigne wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They [the Indians] found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.” (Mann, p. 335).
            It occurs to me that we could learn a thing or two from those Indians. I think the masses of Americans who are now suffering the loss of their homes, their pensions, their jobs, and their futures because of the outright theft perpetrated by these “geniuses” of Wall Street, ought to be thinking very hard about why they, why WE continue to honor a social compact which promotes obscene levels of wealth and comfort for a very few, and penury for the very many. Why do we, the majority, allow it? Why do we continue to not simply tolerate, but actually celebrate a system that gives immense wealth and power to CEOs and financiers who make nothing, while those who actually do produce the goods and services needed for survival—the farmers, the factory workers, the nurses and teachers and carpenters and truckers—are left begging for crumbs?  Left trying to justify a meager raise in their salaries? or health coverage? or child care? or decent schools for their children? And why do we not make plain to those living in McMansions, including our elected representatives, that if something doesn’t change, and soon, they may find their houses, and themselves, going up in flames?
                                                            *
            Also economic are some snippets heard on radio station KPFA from a documentary by Adam Curtis entitled “The Trap” (Curtis has also produced, for the BBC but of course not available in our media, a documentary called the “Century of Self” [on the rise of public relations and consumerism], and another called “The Power of Nightmares” [on the rise of religious fundamentalism both here and in the Arab world]). In “The Trap,” Curtis points out how bankrupt the once-reigning economic theory espoused by the Chicago School (free-market capitalism) really has become, partly because the theory upon which it is based—that people act rationally when they make economic decisions—was promoted mainly by John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind” fame) as game theory. This is the same John Nash who has not only disavowed his theory of rational actors, but has said that when he concocted the theory, he was anything but rational or even sane; he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Thus we have an entire economy based on a theory that is, all things considered, insane. As Curtis points out in the documentary: in tests, only two groups were found to act fully rationally in economic situations—economist themselves, and psychopaths. And of course, as Curtis’ other documentary, the “Century of Self,” points out, those who concocted the ploy that saved capitalism in the 1920s, the pubic relations boys led by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, knew this all too well. They invented advertising and public relations in order to induce consumers to want and buy goods (and wars, dictators, etc.) that were not truly needed, but were desired for subconscious reasons. We now have a global economy based on this insanity: growing numbers of people lusting after what Americans seem to have, an array of useless goods to “satisfy” desires implanted in their overstimulated psyches by constant advertising. The only question that remains is: will the current crisis force Americans to examine the basis of their economic lives, or will the solutions now being offered simply put the diseased patient on life support for a few more years?
                                                            *
            One last thought, this after seeing a lovely French film called “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2008, directed by Julian Schnabel). Based on the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, it portrays life for the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine after he has a massive stroke that leaves him paralyzed with a condition called ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Only one eye and its eyelid are capable of movement. The film begins with the paralysis and takes us through the superhuman efforts by speech therapists and Bauby himself to fashion a system, using blinks of that one eye, to communicate, one letter at a time. Incredibly, not only does Bauby learn how to “say” what he wants and feels, but he is able, after years of effort, to write an entire book, the memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon upon which the film is based. The film takes us through the gamut of emotions, from the initial horror at feeling Bauby’s paralysis (everything is shot through his point of view), to awe and triumph at his eventual publishing success, shortly after which he dies from pneumonia.
            What strikes one, aside from the emotions generated, is how different this “medical” story is from our comparable American ones. There is not one technical shot of his brain, or a CT scan, or a bloody, dramatic crisis requiring noble doctors with advanced technology and techniques to save him. The physicians, indeed, are hardly seen, and when they are, they appear as grotesques who sew Bauby’s one non-seeing eye closed. The heroes, if they can be called that, are the therapists, especially the speech therapist. In fact, the person who takes Bauby’s dictation is an editor from his magazine who is sent by the acting head of Elle to help him. She learns how to interpret his blinks, and stays with him as devoted amanuensis to the very end. And what we are left with is not the superhuman capacity of doctors and technologies, as in TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” or “ER,” but rather the eminently human capacity of language and story telling, the courage and indomitable spirit of humans helping each other despite all odds. It is a telling difference I think—in cultures, in views of what matters, what’s important in life, and where one seeks salvation. In America, it seems, salvation is always sought via some miraculous new technology; in France, at least in this film, via humans and their capacity for an interior life that matters, no matter how apparently ruined the external circumstances.

Financial Fraud

A recent column on the legacy of disaster left by the Bush Administration brings to mind some of the history behind that legacy, for the truth is, Bush didn’t sink the country on his own. His stealth attacks on both the economy and the bill of rights were prepared by previous administrations, in particular the two terms of the Reagan Administration. This is made clear by several things I’ve read recently, in particular, Thom Hartmann’s 2006 book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, and Katherine Austin Fitts’ stunning account of her time as a mortgage banker and later a high official in HUD, “Dillon Read and the Aristocracy of Profits.” Both shed important light on the staggering economic crisis the United States now faces.

            Hartmann makes clear that it was Ronald Reagan—the front man conservatives have hyped as our greatest modern president—that instituted a host of economic inequities that enabled first one Bush and then the other to enrich their friends and plunge the rest of us into a sinkhole of monumental proportions. Reagan, that is, cut the top tax rates on the wealthiest Americans from 70% in 1981 down to 28% by the end of his term in 1988. The result was not only the greatest transfer of wealth in U.S. history—from the middle classes to the very rich—but also the greatest debt in world history. This is because with the resultant shortfall in taxes, and therefore income, the government was forced to borrow to cover its expenses.

            Now, of course, this borrowing was a very big public relations problem for Republicans, who always tout themselves as fiscal conservatives—you know, pay as you go, i.e. don’t go giving away money to poor people and “welfare queens.” So Alan Greenspan came up with a clever ploy to hide part of this debt: just take a few hundred billion a year from the Social Security Trust Fund. This is the money that comes in from current wage earners via the FICA tax, which for most of Social Security’s life has outpaced the money paid out to retirees; the resulting surplus was meant to stay in the “bank” so that when more people retired (as when Baby Boomers retire) there would still be a reserve fund to pay out. Reagan, of course, thought that raiding this unused money was a great idea, and “borrowed all the money in the fund from 1982 to the present” to help cover his embarrassing budget deficits. The only problem was, Social Security had to be paid back. Greenspan’s commission on Social Security had another great idea to cover this: raise the FICA tax on working people, and raise the amount of income subject to Social Security tax from $30,000. to $90,000. This again seemed like a great idea, because it would be mainly middle class people whose incomes would be hit the hardest, while the bulk of millionaire income (all earnings over $90,000. annually) would be exempt.

            The long and the short of both these strategies (Hartmann calls them the CON game, after the neocons who became famous during W’s presidency) made the rich vastly richer. As Hartmann and many others have noted, “from 1980 to 1990, the income of the wealthiest 5% of Americans rose by 25% while the income of the bottom 40% stayed absolutely flat.” This trend has continued almost unabated, and even gotten worse since then. A recent article in Harper’s Magazine, by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, about the devastating effects of the Bush Administration, notes that “Between 2002 and 2006, the wealthiest 10 percent of households saw more than 95 percent of the gains in income…According to one study, the nation’s 15,000 richest families doubled their annual income, from $15 million to $30 million.” Corporate profits also shot up “by 68 percent.” Meantime, those at the center and bottom of the income spectrum—those hit by new FICA taxes, disappearing manufacturing jobs, and Reagan’s simultaneous assault on the unions that allowed workers to reach middle class solvency in the first place—saw their incomes actually shrink. To top it off, the safety net that Social Security was supposed to represent for middle class Americans has been vanishing. As Hartmann points out, in April of 2005, President George Bush admitted that “There is no trust ‘fund’—just IOUs that I saw firsthand.” These IOUs amount to some $2 trillion “borrowed” from Social Security. Is there anyone who, given our current economic crisis and the billions the government has been giving to bankers and automakers, as well as the estimated $10.35 trillion debt that Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate the Bush Administration ran up on its own, still thinks that the government will or can make good on all those IOUs?

            The trouble is, the shenanigans don’t end there. In her article noted above, and accessible at solari.com, Katherine Austin Fitts details how large investment bankers like Dillon Read not only derived much of their income from laundered criminal money, mostly from drugs, but also from investing heavily in the prison-industrial-complex via a company named Cornell Industries, whereby privatized prisons lobby for more severe criminal penalties to increase the prison population—and their profits.  Here is her summary:

Thanks to the successful efforts of the Clinton Administration to pass new crime legislation and ensure DOJ bureaucracy support for outsourcing contracts to run federal prisons to private prison companies — including a gush of contracts to Cornell from the fall of 1995 to the spring of 1996 — Dillon Read’s Cornell stock purchased at an average price between $2-3 per share, was now (July-Oct 1996) worth $12 a share, a 400–600% increase. In addition to their stock profits, Dillon pocketed big underwriting fees as well as the lead investment bank arranging the stock offering. In nine months, the Clinton Administration’s increase in contracts and acquisition of entities with contracts supporting 1,726 prisoners had literally made the company. The IPO reflected a stock market valuation of $24,241 per prisoner. What that means is that every time HUD’s Operation Safe Home dropped swat teams into a community and rounded up 100 teenagers for arrest, the potential value to the stockholders of the prison companies that managed the juvenile facilities and prisons was $2.4 million.
 
Furthermore, Fitts’ time at HUD exposed her to equally obscene fiscal shenanigans, this time involving the actual disappearance of huge amounts of money.  Here is how she puts it in one summary:

In October 1997, the federal fiscal year started. It was the beginning of at least $4 trillion going missing from federal government agency accounts between October 1997 and September 2001. The lion’s share of the missing money disappeared from the Department of Defense accounts. HUD also had significant amounts missing. According to HUD OIG reports, HUD had “undocumentable adjustments” of $17 billion in fiscal year 1998, and $59 billion in 1999.
 
Now Katherine Austin Fitts is not some latter-day Ronald Reagan attacking government as THE PROBLEM. Rather, she is pointing out that the unholy alliance between government and big business—the corporatocracy—leads to enormous waste, fraud and fiscal disaster. And where Reagan and his successors up to Bush have advocated “privatization” as the solution to government waste, Fitts advocates better oversight and punishment of those who are in the pockets of their corporate sponsors and lobbyists. Indeed, in her rendering, it is precisely the massive move by Republicans and Clinton Democrats towards privatization that has caused much of the problem. She gives the example, from her HUD days, of what happened to her suggestion to save money in construction projects for the poor:

When I suggested to the head of HUD’s Hope VI public housing construction program during the Clinton Administration that she could spend $50,000 per home to rehab single family homes owned by FHA rather than spending $250,000 to create one new public housing apartment in the same community, she got frustrated and said “How would we generate fees for our friends?”
 

Fitts goes on to explain that privatization really meant transferring assets “out of governments worldwide at significantly below market value in a manner providing extraordinary windfall profits, capital gains and financial equity to private corporations and investors….The financial equity gained by private interests was often the result of financial, human, environmental and living equity stripped and stolen from communities…This is why I now refer to privatization as “piratization.” And of course, Fitts’ experience while at Dillon Read with Cornell Corrections, makes this same point, with an even greater impact. Privatized prisons depend on more inmates. Prison corporations, with contacts in government, are the biggest lobbyists for harsher criminal penalties for even non-violent crimes. Why? Because the more inmates there are, the greater their profits. The so-called wars on crime and drugs, therefore, are as much if not more the result of the corporate need to stock their prisons with more inmates, than the alleged need to keep the public safe. The darkest side of this whole complex involves the U.S. government’s role in providing the drugs that spark the crime that provides the inmates.

            Thom Hartmann agrees in locating the recent rush to privatization as the heart of many problems. Where the CONS contend that they are for “smaller government,” Hartmann explains what smaller government really means: government of, by and for corporations and inherited wealth. Thus the Bush administration’s move to privatize K-12 education, which urged replacing free public schools with tuition vouchers for private schools, was just another way to cripple public education serving mainly poor and middle class families, and to expand private education that has traditionally served the rich. Unfortunately, many Americans have bought into this conservative propaganda that private corporations will be more efficient than government bureaucracies. Thus, from 1992 to 2002, Hartmann points out, “the U.S. government eliminated 48,000 civil service jobs while adding 730,000 contract positions.” The same CON game has mushroomed during Bush’s tenure, with pet corporations like Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company, making billions in military contracts to do what GIs used to do themselves. The transfer of Department of Defense dollars from what used to be a citizen military to a corporate-run military-industrial complex has been a virtual tsunami.

            Privatization’s most serious consequences may have occurred in medical care. Where hospitals used to be largely non-profit corporations whose primary mission was to care for patients, today most hospitals are part of giant corporations whose primary mission is to generate profit. A 1989 study in the New England Journal of Medicine made this clear. It found that middlemen like health insurance companies and HMOs, with their enormous and constantly rising operating costs, have put health care out of the reach of huge numbers of Americans, especially compared to a government-run program like Medicare. Where administration costs for Medicare take only 2% to 3% of the medical budget, corporations and HMOs gouge as much as 34% for administrative costs like CEO salaries, lobbying, and advertising. In other words, money that should and could go to medical care, is siphoned off to support a profit-driven corporatocracy.  George W. Bush’s showpiece Medicare bill of 2005 only added to this bonanza for the privateers. Because it mandated that Medicare cannot negotiate wholesale prices with drug companies and must always pay full retail, the enormous rise in the cost of prescription drugs is encouraged rather than mitigated. Again, privatization means a victory for the corporate giants and those who run them (including those who profit from their rising stock prices) rather than a better delivery system of health care for most Americans.

            The collapse of the financial and stock markets has put a halt to much of the CON game, at least for a time. But we can rest assured that those whose interests lie in keeping the CON going will not be sidelined for very long. Indeed, the damage they have done may already have compromised our system beyond repair. As the President of the CalPers pension fund—the largest in the nation—told Katherine Austin Fitts as early as 1997, when she and her company proposed investing pension funds in small communities, small farms and small businesses so as to keep the money working in the United States, rather than financing exploitative plants in foreign countries like China:

            “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They have given up on the country. They are moving all the money out in the Fall. They are moving it to Asia.”

            The events of the last few months seem to confirm that “they” had indeed given up on the country. The only question now is, will the rest of us get outraged enough and active enough to salvage what’s left?

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Antagonistic Pleiotropy

I’ve been thinking about this rather forbidding term ever since I ran across it in a book called Buddha’s Way Through Darwin’s World, by Charles Fisher (2007).  Now, in light of the Israeli attack on Gaza for the usual reasons of “security,” the term comes to mean even more.
            Antagonistic pleiotropy, or negative pleiotropy, refers to the phenomenon that occurs when a gene which confers an evolutionary advantage in one situation turns out to have negative effects in another. Fisher uses sickle cell anemia as his type case. In Africa, the gene that codes for sickle-shaped blood cells survives because it confers resistance to malaria, which is endemic. In the United States, however, where malaria no longer threatens survival, the gene’s negative quality emerges: it leads to sickle cell anemia among African Americans. Thus we have antagonistc pleiotropy, where a condition that promotes human survival in one circumstance becomes a malignancy in another.
            Fisher points to an even more vivid example of this phenomenon in the human taste for sugar. In the hunter-gatherer world where humans evolved, sugars were scarce, so our genetic attraction to them did not constitute a problem, but rather led us to needed carbohydrates and higher rates of survival. This situation pertained throughout most of human history. But when refined sugar became widely available, the human taste for sugar became problematic and even life-threatening. With no natural limit to our desire for sugar, suddenly the massive addition of sugars to all kinds of corporate-produced foods and beverages has in our time contributed to an epidemic of sugar diabetes, overweight children and all the ills attendant upon such conditions. Again, the genetic craving for sugar aids survival, but when it becomes an addiction to soft drinks and artificially enhanced “carbs,” it can turn deadly.
            Now we come to the human desire for “security.” We all have it, so one might say it is more or less innate or genetic. We all want to be secure from want, from attack, from untimely or painful or humiliating death, and that desire helps us survive. To be sure, this craving for security surely differs, not just between humans, but among human societies themselves. Some people seem to be natural risk-takers, willing to risk even death to live at a high pitch. Others seem more determined to construct their lives in a way that minimizes risk, minimizes any situation that could prove dangerous. Experience surely has something to do with it, especially where whole cultures are concerned, as does the era in which one lives. As someone who lived through both World War II and the Cold War, it seems to me that today’s Americans—with their exaggerated fear of aging and penchant for life insurance and a “nest egg”—worry more about personal security than ever. 
            What really sets the concern for security into high gear, however, are external events. Living through the Depression was one such event that never left those who went through its worst days. Saving every item that might one day be useful, and never wasting anything of value, are some of the results. In our time, the attacks of 9/11 have had a similar effect on today’s Americans. The retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq (however mistaken), the huge industry that arose with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the willingness of many Americans to forfeit their constitutional rights to allow the government to spy on them and others, can all be attributed to this transformative event.
            In the same vein, the experience of the holocaust in Nazi Germany can be seen to have had a similar effect for most Jews. To the extent that they are able, most vowed that “never again” would they be reduced to such depths of vulnerability and humiliation and near-extermination. The flight to the newly-founded state of Israel was one manifestation of that “never again” thinking. The determination to make that state safe from all threats, whether real or imagined, became concretized in a state apparatus that built itself upon a military capability so fearsome that it could never be challenged. 
            It takes little thought to see that here is where the natural human urge to be secure can take a negative turn, can manifest in antagonistic pleiotropy. That is, circumstances have changed, the human population has changed, human technology has drastically changed. This means that where once the urge to be secure could mean “saving for the rainy day,” today it means being determined to earn so much money that one must be prepared to wipe out all competition, ethics be damned. Where once one simply saw the need to cooperate with one’s neighbors to be secure, today it can easily morph into rejecting all associations with the herd and colluding only with like-minded fellows hiding behind armed guards and gated communities. It also means that where once one prepared to fight off an attacker by arming oneself with a club or a sword or even a gun, today that urge very quickly escalates to devastating weapons and plans for their use that involve not merely defense but mass destruction and even annihilation.
            Both Israel and the United States of America have done precisely this. Not content with having the most advanced conventional weapons and the most bellicose policies aimed at their presumptive adversaries, both have amassed nuclear arsenals that can be unleashed, and that are meant to be unleashed on any enemy foolish enough to even consider a confrontation. During the Cold War, this meant that on more than one occasion, the nuclear warheads mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles in both the United States and its perceived adversary, the Soviet Union, were placed on high alert. Thousands of such missiles could have been launched in minutes if given the proper signal. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russian ICBMs were placed on the island of Cuba, that signal very nearly arrived, and the world came closer to an all-out nuclear conflagration than ever before. And the root of the crisis was the same human desire or demand for security raised to the level of mutually assured destruction.
            Perhaps the clearest modern instance of this condition pertains in today’s Middle East. Israel has, with American aid, made itself the 5th most powerful military in the world—this for a nation of about 5 million people. It has threatened war with virtually every Arab nation and fought and won wars with most of its neighbors, maintaining its occupation over the Palestinians it displaced with ever more brutal methods. It has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), instead using its scientific prowess to amass a nuclear arsenal that insiders have estimated to exceed 200 weapons, mounted on missiles capable of reaching anywhere in its part of the world. It has attacked the installations of neighboring nations such as Iraq and Syria, when it thought they were nearing the ability to build their own nuclear weapons. And most recently, it has several times threatened to attack Iran (a signatory to the NPT), not for having nuclear weapons, but for possibly nearing the point where it might be able to build one. Most ominously of all, its leaders have more than once publicly reiterated their determination to unleash those nuclear weapons if they felt sufficiently threatened.
            In short, we are now, all of us, in the realm of antagonistic pleiotropy where security is concerned. What begins as a biological condition that enhances survival—the inborn desire to be secure from want, from danger—has, in the nuclear age, transformed into a mania that threatens not only other persons or nations that appear dangerous to us, but huge swaths of the earth, and perhaps life itself. That is because though no one knows what would happen if thousands of thermonuclear explosions were to go off in a short period of time, the terms “chain reaction” and “nuclear winter” express the grim possibilities.
            In the end, whether humans can get control of this fundamental urge depends on belief. If you believe that humans can control their sugar craving, perhaps you will feel confident that the urge to be secure can also be brought within reasonable bounds. If you see nothing but disaster in the proliferation of not just sugars but many other technologies like plastic surgery and genetic enhancement and carbon-based energy, any or all of which threaten to swamp the human ability to control them, then you may not be so sanguine.
            In either case, it is time for us all to realize the larger truth, i.e. that the biological equipment nature has given us does not always and forever contribute to our survival. Indeed, what antagonistic pleiotropy tells us is something fundamental: the demand for perfect security is a chimera, an ultimately self-defeating illusion. That is because life is NOT perfection but incessant change; thus, perfection would mean stopping the process of change, and that would mean stopping life itself. Though we may yearn for perfection, for perfect security, even coming close to it would be a monstrosity—as the examples we have, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Dresden, and now Gaza, should agonizingly demonstrate.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

Israel’s Massacre in Gaza

 
 
As I write this, the latest reports from Gaza by the AP say that over 350 Gazans, many of them women and children, have now been killed and over 1400 wounded in the latest Israeli assault on the Palestinians trapped in the tiny strip of land named Gaza. More accurate descriptions label Gaza the largest open-air prison in the world, home to 1.5 million Palestinian refugees, all of whom have become civilian targets in Israel’s relentless war again the Palestinian people and its democratically-elected leaders in Hamas.
            Israel, of course, contends that it is only acting in “self-defense,” seeking to end the rocket attacks launched by Hamas militants from Gazan territory. It contends that the people it has killed have been the very terrorists who have been launching the rockets, by implication, soldiers in what has now become an all-out, if one-sided war. But aside from the innocent Gazan civilians who have been slaughtered by bombs and rockets and drones that do not distinguish between active terrorists and unfortunate bystanders, even the so-called “security forces” Israel claims to be killing are in many cases police officers and civil servants who have had the misfortune to be housed or working in government buildings. Even more outrageously, Israel’s Tzipi Livni blames Hamas for not conforming to “the requirements of the international community.”  But if there is a consistent, repeat violator of international rules and regulations, it is Israel. It has thumbed its nose at countless UN resolutions, including 242. It has built an illegal apartheid wall in Palestinian territory. More generally, as an occupying power, Israel is required by international law to care for the people under its 60-year occupation. Instead, it has increasingly tightened its stranglehold on the Palestinians trapped in their shrinking territory, destroying every vestige of livelihood that could allow Palestinians to survive, including food and fuel and even basic medicines like insulin. In this sense, as Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada points out, Israel’s latest assault, said to have been launched in response to the “collapse” of the truce that had been in place for 6 months, is different only in degree from that  “truce,” a word the media never questions:
            “It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.
    As John Ging, the head of operations of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), told The Electronic Intifada in November : ‘there was five months of a ceasefire in the last couple of months, where the people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence. We in fact at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food.’”
            In other words, Israel has been silently killing Gazans for two years by denying its people the most fundamental necessities of life. Its siege has prevented these people from escaping either by land, by sea, or by air. It has prevailed on a quisling Egyptian government to keep the only crossing enabling the transport of precious supplies into Gaza, the Rafah crossing, mostly closed. Its bombs have now destroyed the underground tunnels which Gazans have dug to allow at least some of these supplies to enter. And now it is bombing a terrorized civilian population, including a five-story women’s dormitory at Islamic University, to send them a message: ‘We are your masters here. You have no recourse, no safety, no life to live unless you willingly place yourselves under our heel.’ And it, seconded by the likes of President Bush, expects Gazans to comply. Complying, of course, ultimately means that sooner rather than later, all Palestinians will agree to leave their own lands so that Zionist Israel can finally complete its long-range plan, an Eretz Israel cleansed of its original inhabitants completely.
            What Americans, including the new Obama administration, must decide is whether, and for how long, they can keep sending American treasure, American airplanes, American rockets, American ‘moral’ support to implement such a policy—a policy that is like nothing so much as the one that the Nazis once enforced against their own subject population, the European Jews; a policy which, absent that American aid and support, could not continue for even a single day.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

The Defining Moment

 
Our now legacy-conscious president made what should be his final surprise visit to Iraq this weekend, and lo and behold, left us with what I predict will be the defining moment of his presidency. As he was giving a talk side by side with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, an Iraqi journalist named Muntazer al-Zaidi threw first one shoe, and then the other at the “leader of the free world.” As he did so, he shouted,
            “It is the farewell kiss, you dog.” 
Though both shoes missed the U.S. president—he ducked the first, and Maliki deflected the second—the report of the double insult rocketed around the world. For the reporter had not only called Iraq’s self-proclaimed liberator a “dog,” itself an insult, but threw his shoes in a culture where such an act is considered the ultimate insult. Or rather, the soles of shoes are the ultimate insult; after Saddam Hussein’s statue was torn down in Baghdad, some Iraqis slapped its severed head with the soles of their shoes.
            President Bush, of course, was quick to dismiss the incident as bizarre and limited, saying “I don’t think you can take one guy throwing shoes and say, this represents a broad movement in Iraq.” But the damage has been done. Bush has taken the reputation of the United States to such abysmal depths that even a common reporter, one from a country we are told should be grateful for the sacrifice of U.S. lives and U.S. treasure, dares to hurl public insults at its most exalted figure.
            In short, though one must worry about what is even now being hurled at this amazingly courageous reporter, it is clear that his act stands as THE defining moment of the Bush presidency. It is more emblematic of what this President has wrought than the Mission Accomplished fiasco, where Bush, in full flight regalia, strutted across the deck of an aircraft carrier after landing in a jet, to assure the assembled sailors and the world that the United States had prevailed in Iraq when, in truth, the most vicious part of the battle was just beginning; more memorable than the “heckuva job Brownie” moment, when Bush praised his head of  FEMA for performing so well in the New Orleans drowning, even as New Orleans residents by the thousands were gasping for help.
            Yes, this moment tops them all. It is more delicious than an assassination attempt, for a Bush attacker could be characterized as a fanatic or a madman. It is more satisfying than an impeachment, for right wing zealots could easily attribute that to “partisan politics.” This attack, by contrast, came from an Iraqi, a journalist who could be expected to know the score. An Iraqi who should have been bowing down in gratitude to his, and the world’s ‘savior,’ the world’s ‘liberator,’ the world’s ‘messenger of freedom and democracy.’ And instead, the man threw his shoe, both shoes. Called the President a “dog.” In full view of the entire world. And while the President may have been right when he said al-Zaidi doesn’t represent a movement, what he did not say, and would be determined not to recognize, is the overarching truth of this moment. For here, for all time, is the historical judgment on Bush’s doomed Iraqi venture, the burial ceremony of his entire Middle Eastern policy, indeed of his entire presidency: Iraqi shoes thrown as a farewell kiss for a “dog;” a dog who has attacked a country without cause, on false pretenses, imposing on its millions of people the kind of suffering that not even a dog should have to endure. 
            Could it be any richer? Any more ironic? Remembering that the torture (called enhanced interrogation) that the Bush Administration sanctioned for its prisoners, featured snarling dogs to exploit the Arab fear they incite. Remembering all the metaphors of America’s imperial footprint, and boots on the ground, and the famous shoes of America’s first Iraqi Proconsul, L. Paul Bremer. Remembering also that instead of being welcomed by the garlands and kisses promised to American “liberators” in the runup to the war, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation can now count on being greeted with a pelting of shoes, or rotten fruit, or god knows what else. All of which poses the humiliating question: can the United States still consider itself the world’s sole superpower, the most admired empire in history? It hardly seems so. Its economy is in a shambles. Its public figures have become clowns. Its foreign policy a disaster. Its reputation a joke.
            And it is all symbolized, perfectly, by this defining moment: Two shoes hurled at the most powerful man in the world, the “farewell kiss to a dog.” How strange is the eruption of truth. How satisfying and unpredictable the eruption of poetic justice. And how accurate was the prediction of Gore Vidal, eight years ago upon Bush’s ascension to, or rather theft of, the presidency. “He will leave in disgrace,” said Vidal. Who could have imagined how thorough, how vivid, how global that disgrace would be?
 
Lawrence DiStasi

Pardon Me

This is the time of forgiveness
When trespassers get well
By making requests
To get out of hell
And return to the living
In the land of the giving
Where crime has no punishment
And lies find new nourishment
But what is the precedent
To pardon the President
For crimes by himself and his friends
Is this where it ends?



Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution provides the specific power for the President of the US to grant pardons and commutation of sentences with virtually no limit. Normally, this is of little consequence to the average citizen, but can be critical for the petitioner seeking clemency or relief. There have been some famous pardons issued over the years. Yes, even George Washington issued pardons and the power has been used in myriad ways in history. President Washington pardoned some of the guilty participants in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Citizens were energized by the steep increase in the whiskey tax of 1791 and they essentially took the law into their own hands to fight the Feds. There was a serious governmental income shortage and the tax was levied in such a way that many felt it was ex post facto and a terrible personal burden. The ex post facto feeling came to those who had already used whiskey in barter and were required to pony up cash by the federal tax collectors (federal marshals), especially those of Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania. That rebellion may have influenced events to this day when barter is rarely used and cumbersome when it happens. Some of the pardon recipients were never convicted. We will see that replicated under Gerald Ford and William Clinton where Nixon and Rich avoided convictions but enjoyed pardons.

Following the Civil War, there were several pardons issued to assist in the reconciliation of the Union with the Confederacy. Thousands of pardons were executed by Andrew Johnson to help heal the wounds of the Civil War. A few were very long in coming. General Robert E. Lee was not specifically pardoned until one hundred years following his death in 1870. Lee had petitioned Andrew Johnson in 1865, but due to colossal red tape and the technicality that his citizenship had been revoked; the request languished until a researcher found Lee’s handwritten oath of allegiance in a dusty old box in Washington. General Lee had been accused of treason and the loyalty oath was wanted to execute the pardon. Lee got his pardon, but had long lost his famous property that became what we now know as Arlington National Cemetery. President Gerald Ford signed the pardon in 1975. Actually, Andrew Johnson had issued a blanket pardon of all involved in the “insurrection,” but scholars differ as to whether or not the blanket pardon covered General Lee due to his specific loss of citizenship.

Pardons can be controversial such as when President H. W. Bush pardoned Cap “The Knife” Weinberger for his role in sending arms to Iran and the following cover up in what became known as ”Iran Contra.” In that case, there was an independent prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh (lifetime Republican) who sought personal information held by the elder Bush in contemporaneous notes when he was Vice President under Reagan. There were six senior Reagan officials pardoned by Bush. Bush himself was described as a “person of interest” due to his specific knowledge of events and personal notes that he withheld from Walsh. Bush was never charged, and he moved quickly to pardon those who were convicted and those who were about to be convicted. Walsh also cited notes held by Weinberger as being key to impeach President Reagan for his role in Iran Contra. Bush outwitted Walsh and moved more rapidly than he to remove Weinberger from the line of fire before the courts could actually capture the evidence but after it was demanded by the independent prosecutor. This probably saved Reagan the embarrassment of impeachment and may have cost Bush a second term, but it allowed virtually every airport, road, bridge and building to be named after Reagan. Ironically, on his election, it caused Clinton to remark that the concept of pardons had to be examined after this episode of crime and cover up. "I am concerned by any action that sends a signal that if you work for the Government, you're beyond the law, or that not telling the truth to Congress under oath is somehow less serious than not telling the truth to some other body under oath." He would later be accused of harboring a personal interest in a couple of his pardons as well as stretching the truth himself. In that sense, pardons can be a powerful tool to change outcomes or to reward loyalty.

Clinton became an object of scorn for his last minute pardons of dozens of petitioners and non-petitioners alike. Two of those brought special heat and an investigation led by Senator Arlan Spector to determine whether the pardons were actually signed before noon on 20 January 2001. Clinton’s half brother was in the list of 140 pardoned that day and peopled clacked that there was a conflict of interest in Clinton’s action although Roger Clinton had already served his time. One of Clinton’s pardons was granted to J. Fife Symington III, the disgraced Republican governor of Arizona. Symington had once saved William J. Clinton from drowning and, when president, he returned the favor in kind. Far more controversial was the pardon of Marc Rich who was never convicted and, in fact, was a fugitive of justice, parked in Switzerland where he still resides. Marc Rich’s wife was a major contributor to the Clinton campaigns. Clinton claimed that his pardon did not preclude civil court action to recover from any harm alleged to have occurred. Interestingly, it was none other than Scooter Libby, who presented the argument for the Rich pardon. He has since become famous, after being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame case and receiving a commutation of his sentence through GW Bush. There seems to be a circular motion that connects pardons as with the elder Bush and Reagan. Again, there was no conviction of Rich prior to the pardon and Congress was powerless to overturn the pardon. Scooter Libby merely played a helping role for President Clinton by claiming that there was no criminal case and that the offense was a civil matter.

So what are we to make of all this history as we count the days until G.W. Bush leaves office and has his final opportunities to issue pardons? First, the presidential power to pardon is essentially without limit. You don’t have to be found guilty in a court of law to be pardoned. On the other hand, if there is a civil wrong, a separate civil court may hear arguments despite the pardon. There is some fuzziness about broad pardons such as those issued by President Andrew Johnson so that identification of the specific recipients may some day be required. Robert E. Lee was not seen as qualified for the general pardon. Can G.W. Bush pardon himself? The answer is yes…but that would set up a qualifying assumption that he was guilty of promoting torture or some other crime and Bush has adamantly denied that. Can he pardon the hundreds that were acting on his orders to conduct “harsh interrogations?” Perhaps if he is able to name them, but recall that did not work well for Andrew Johnson. It may be bad form to pardon oneself but it is legal if the president names himself and others. If he does not pardon himself, Rumsfeld and Cheney, for example, then the crimes of torture and extraordinary rendition are without a statute of limitations and they are internationally recognized offenses. This means that world travel for the leaders in power during Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo may be limited. It also means that at any time in the future, criminal trials may be held here in the United States.
Will the incoming administration or the Congress have the courage to face up to rule by law or will we merely pass to some future generation with a sense of duty and justice? We have a lot to do, but are not the rule of law and the Constitution worth defending? We cannot presume guilt, but without investigations and trials, the rule of law may appear to be no more than a passing suggestion. Be heard. Give Congress some courage and a little hell along the way. Remember…no Peace without Justice. It cannot end here with rule of law traded away for temporary peace and a future draft pick.

Peace,
George Giacoppe
30 November 2008

On Erasing Culture

 
I have been thinking about the relationship between war and the elimination of “difference” for a number of years now, especially in light of what happened to Italian American culture when home-front restrictions and internments were imposed on 600,000 Italian immigrants during World War II. I have written elsewhere about how this “shaming” of an entire culture affects cultural retention. A recent reading of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007) has given new breadth and power to these thoughts. In particular, Klein’s description of the plans and machinations of Paul Bremer on behalf of the Bush Administration and its corporate cronies in Iraq makes plain that, far from being random, the attempt to debase the culture of an invaded country, and replace it with an entirely new culture is part of an overall scheme with clear methods in mind, and well-articulated and profitable end states envisioned.  
            First, it is necessary to understand what Klein posits as the conceptual notions underlying such plans. Briefly, they are the notions advanced by one of the most strangelovian psychologists ever to don a doctorate, Dr. Ewen Cameron of Canada. Cameron, supported for years by a CIA which found great promise in his ideas for their growing programs of torture, was the one who initiated the program he called “de-patterning” as a method of “curing” his mental patients. His idea was that by using electroshock therapy and isolation boxes, he could interrupt a patient’s “time and space image” by upsetting both sensory input (isolation) and memory (electroshock). This was meant to break down an individual so that he could be regressed to an infantile state, and then remade on a better mental model. To accomplish this “rejuvenation,” Cameron would often administer shock treatments as often as twice a day for thirty days—sometimes administering as many as 360 electric shocks to a single patient’s brain.  As to the success of such “therapy,” a study by his own institute, the Allen Institute in Canada, found that 75% of his former patients were worse off after treatment than before.
            Despite this dismal record, neither the CIA—in designing its own torture program—nor the Bush Administration—in applying it to whole countries—seems to have been discouraged. Rather, they found the idea of de-patterning and re-patterning on a newer and brighter template quite captivating. This is revealed by what Klein describes of the American plan for Iraq. The plan was first to shock the Iraqi people with, naturally, “schock and awe” aerial bombing, follow it with subsequent culture shocks, and then remake the whole country’s economy on a fresh “free-market” model. (This plan, not incidentally, was also used in countries such as Chile, the former Soviet Union, and many others, but nowhere as purely and savagely as in Iraq.) As Klein puts it, “the initial bombardment was designed to erase the canvas on which the model (corporatist) nation could be built.” Indeed, the comparisons to shock therapy and sensory deprivation are explicit: “the bombing was designed to take out the eyes (electricity) and ears (phone system) of Baghdad...the entire city was (thus) shackled and hooded. Next it was stripped” (pp 333-35). The stripping, of course, took the form of allowing 80% of Iraq’s National Museum to be ransacked. This theft of Iraq’s soul (and since Baghdad is considered the mother of Arab culture, of soul of the entire Arab world) was as much a part of the plan as the subsequent pillaging of state property. In this way, not only was Baghdad’s cultural heritage (the oldest in the civilized world) raped, but its public sector, once the finest in the entire Middle East, was also dismantled. Incredibly, Bremer and the Bush administration actually believed that they were bringing something superior to these deprived desert rats. For as Klein points out, in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, interrogators used “Pringles” as a way to soothe prisoners, thinking that this American high-tech junk food would amply compensate them for the torture they endured. This was the plan for Iraq as well: “terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, and then make it all ok with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food” (p. 339). And so, almost immediately after he arrived, Bremer declared that Iraq was “open for business,” and proceeded to institute a series of proclamations to totally privatize Iraq’s 200 state companies, invite American corporate cronies in to share in the bonanza, lower taxes for them to 15%, and of course, put millions of Iraqis out of work. And best of all, foreign investors could take 100% of their Iraqi profits out of the country. In return, Iraqis would get a Pringle-rich economy and culture: Burger Kings, cheap consumer products, American entertainment and values.
            We all know by now how well this worked. It led directly to what American officials called the “insurgency.” In truth, the insurgents were the Iraqi people saying “no” to the theft of their country. But here, the lesson is not in the results, but rather in the paradigm. The paradigm, I believe, is the wiping out or erasure of cultures—be it the culture of a nation conquered in war, the culture of a nation with whom the United States wishes to “trade,” or the culture of groups of people the United States wishes to assimilate—in order to soften them for the remodeling that is desired. Examples from U.S. history abound.
            The first one that springs to mind is Native American culture. Just last night, a KQED program about the Navajo, “The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo,” featured unforgettable photos of Indians at the boarding schools they were forced to attend, their hair cut short, their faces grim and chiseled, their bodies clothed not in traditional attire but in tight-fitting military uniforms. Administrators were quoted as saying they had to erase all sign of the Indians’ previous culture, including the languages they were forbidden to utter, in order to remake them as good Americans.
            The same was done to African slaves brought to the pre-Civil War South. Families were separated, all signs of their previous culture were extirpated, and all forms of cultural grouping or cultural retention were suppressed in order to avoid any possibility of organized resistance to the gruesome existence the southern economy required of its slaves.
            What is not so well accepted is the extent to which this same process applies to ordinary immigrants. This is probably due to the fact that most immigrants, in order to improve their economic or political lot, voluntarily make the wrenching decision to leave their homelands and settle in the United States. But the truth lurks beneath the surface. Those who expect to thrive in the United States quickly learn that retention of the old culture carries with it certain disadvantages—disabilities associated with foreign ways of speaking, foreign ways of viewing the world, foreign customs concerning the debts owed to families or friends or co-villagers. In other words, they learn about culture shock.
            It is war, however, and the culture shock it brings, which paints the dynamics of culture abandonment into high relief. In this, the Italian immigrants during WWII are a good type case. On Dec. 8, 1941, those who had not yet obtained full American citizenship were classified by Executive Order 2527 as “enemy aliens.” This meant that their rights were forfeited: they could be rounded up, searched, arrested, and deported with no further authority. They could be restricted as to travel and possessions, as well as excluded from certain areas. In California, this exclusion took place when the Department of Justice set up “prohibited zones” from which all enemy aliens had to evacuate: along the coast, inside San Francisco Bay, and near sensitive installations. And of course, the enclaves called “Little Italies” (the Italian immigrants, up to that point, called them “colonies”), where Italian was spoken, and where Italian culture and mores more or less thrived, were investigated and raided and searched and kept under suspicion. “Don’t Speak the Enemy’s Language” warned a poster, and thousands of families and commercial establishments suppressed their native tongue in response, many of them forever.
            The most vivid expression of this cultural suppression came in May of 1942 during the Assembly hearings on UnAmerican Activities in California held in San Francisco by what came to be known as the Tenney Committee. There, an exchange made quite clear what many in government had in mind for these Italian colonies: the erasure of their traditional culture. It came in an exchange between committee-member Kellems and a witness from the Italian community itself, Gilbert Tuoni:
TUONI: As I was saying to you before, gentlemen of this committee, the best thing is to close the papers, close the Italian broadcasting, reorganize or close the Italian organizations, they are poison—this is the time that the Italians should come into the American family…
KELLEMS: It is your opinion—or rather, I should say conviction—that there are a special group of people whose culture and background is so different from ours, and I think we do admit it is radically different—
TUONI: (Interrupting) Yes.
KELLEMS: (Continuing)—and it will only be possible for them to forget that only if they will enter the American way of life—
TUONI: (Interrupting) They will.
KELLEMS: (Continuing)—and I believe they will. Is it not your feeling that instead of persisting generation after generation teaching these things, creating a Little Italy here, that they will only find their own happiness and strength by forgetting…?
            Thus did the Tenney Committee put into words what the federal government had already put into action: Italian Americans had to prove their loyalty. The way to do that was to FORGET—forget what they knew, forget who they were. In short, the wartime provided a shock to the Italian community powerful enough to induce them to regress—to forget the culture they had grown up with once and for all—and then replace it with American culture and values. And though for Italian and German and Japanese immigrants, the war with their mother countries provided an exceptionally dramatic occasion for cultural erasure, the same is true, to a lesser and slower degree perhaps, for all immigrants to the United States. Forget what you were; become all you can be, i.e., American. 
            The question that has always haunted this paradigm is: why? Other than bigots, who benefits, and how, from a cultural makeover? Naomi Klein’s description of the shock doctrine provides the answer: Pringles. Pringles, as used by the U.S. military, symbolizes and essentializes the program. First, when someone retains and remembers and clings to the values of his own culture, he maintains a structure for resistance. Knowing who he is and what he stands for, can strenghten the courage to resist. If he can remain in a group of like-minded people, that resistance will be even more powerful. If, on the other hand, he can be de-patterned, and re-patterned on a new model, and then isolated from comrades, he will be merely an individual, on his own in opposing overpowering force. He will become malleable. He can then be re-educated in the ways and mores and values of the new culture. Pringles. He can be induced, in short, to believe that being a consumer is the key to the highest human values. To be able to buy an endless array of consumer goods and services—TV sets bigger and better than all others, cars that symbolize status, homes and clothes and foods that mimic the highest social strata—is to approach the summit of human happiness, the reason for which humans are born. And those who produce these “goods,” those who reckon the health of a culture by the always accelerating Gross Domestic Product that measures how many more useless needs are created, smile in the background, their profits intact, their share of the GDP growing ever larger.
            In sum, as long as the populace has been stripped of all resistance to such a hijacking of the human drive for ultimate good, as long as it can be diverted from any notion of sensory or cultural or mental recovery, as long as it can be convinced that its well-being depends on its continually hyped-up desire for newer and glitzier toys, the profitable game can go on. For those in on the game, the erasure of culture is a negligible price to pay.
 
Lawrence DiStasi
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