AlterNet Special

AlterNet: Readers Write:
Can Moore's SiCKO Make Health Care Reform Happen?

By AlterNet Staff, AlterNet
Posted on August 21, 2007

To say that Michael Moore's latest documentary, SiCKO, has created a buzz is a lot like saying the Bush family has dabbled in politics. In the nearly two months since the film has been out, discussions about it have exploded, making health care a hot topic in the media, among politicians and online - especially among AlterNet readers.

This summer we published upwards of 20 blogs and articles on SiCKO, many of which generated a flurry of comments. In dealing with the frustration of America's broken health system, some of you shared your personal HMO horror stories; some of you moved to other countries; some of you pleaded with Michael Moore to run for President. And nearly all of you agreed that America's health care system is in a state of crisis and needs to be fixed immediately. Which prompts one question: Will SiCKO help make it happen?

Readers like Maryanne are counting on it. Seventeen years ago, her father was admitted to the hospital with heart failure. While there, he was left unattended in the bathroom, and when he tried to rise, he fell, broke his hip and needed surgery. He was then transferred to another hospital for rehab but again was left unattended, fell, broke his other hip and needed another surgery.

The problem, Maryanne writes, was with payment. The insurance company paid for his initial hospitalization and surgeries but refused to pay the cardiologist for continued visits after the fall. Maryanne's father became further weakened and confused and was placed in a nursing home. She considered suing but ultimately decided against it. "Money," she writes, "would not get us our Dad back."

Stories like Maryanne's, which Moore uses to form the narrative spine of his film, have left many viewers a combination of shocked, sad, angry and motivated for change.

"As much as I'd I looked forward to seeing Sicko, I didn't expect it to bowl me over as much as it did," daw13 writes. "Moore really captures a sense of how sick we are as a nation compared to others, raising the question, Why?

"The film left me more deeply aware of our pathology than I think I've ever been, in a way that causes me to feel even more sad than angry. As if seeing my homeland from a distant place."

To a reader who posts under the pseudonym zyswvut, Moore's film has the potential to be "a rallying point for people seeking progressive change."

"The two most important indices on whether a government gives a rap about its people are how it performs in the areas of health care and education," zyswvut continues. "Obviously it hasn't cared much in recent years. ... It's time that most Americans are honest with themselves about the exploitative nature of our health care system."

But is Moore preaching to the choir? Will his message travel beyond the progressive sphere and up the ranks on Capitol Hill, or are the forces he is up against too powerful?

For starters, Moore must deal with unfair attacks from the mainstream media and right-wing spin from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Fox News - a group that reader David V calls an "emboldened minority."

For years, he writes, these people have been drumming a dangerous message into American's brains: "'Conservatives are always right. Liberals are always wrong. Anything that is spoken, printed or written that goes against this fact is to be attacked without mercy, regardless of the facts. Rational debate is to be shunned. Name-calling, subjecting changing and personal insults are the preferred method.' Listen to any of the above-mentioned propagandists and you'll hear examples of this on a daily basis."

After seeing Moore's film get slimed on CNN, CatDad wrote, "The corporate media will not tolerate any ongoing and profound debate on our national shame of 47 millions Americans without access to health care in the world's wealthiest nation. Any profound "debate" will be intercepted and diverted away from the core issue of the critical need to provide health care to all Americans."

If Moore can get past conservative propaganda, he is still up against money-hungry industry.

"The lack of national health care in this country is just a symptom of a much deeper sickness in American social and political culture," Zooeyhall writes. "... As long as the measure of success in our country is 'if it makes money, you don't make apologies' nothing substantial will happen. And the health industry has been VERY good at making money for certain groups. You think they aren't going to give this up without a fight?"

"Knowing this 'fine' nation as I do, it won't be "sicko" that finally gets healthcare passed," writes a commenter who goes by the name paschn. "... What will get it done is the fact that BIG BUSINESS is behind it now. Because this nation, this culture hasn't the ability to think beyond their own comfort. As long as they're working, they could care less that millions of OTHER U.S. sheeples' jobs have been subsidized with our tax dollars for moves to 3rd world countries."

"Private health insurance, HMO's etc., are the nemesis preventing reform of health care in America right now," sofla100 writes in a similar vein. "With deep pockets and legions of lobbyists, they have many a politician under wraps. But, what may help is that many big corporations now feel under siege from health care costs. Recently, Toyota decided to locate a new auto assembly complex in the already heavily industrialized area of the Hamilton-Toronto corridor in Canada, instead of placing it in the USA. The health care costs were the factor. ... So, it may ultimately be that as America continues to loose ground due to rising health costs, losing industries might bring some pressure to bear on the Congress. Of course, it will not be the individual citizenry that brings about a change, despite Moore's polemic, they stopped mattering in money-controlled America [a] long time ago, but the corporate world vs. the corporate world (insurance), might bring about change."

Industry, however, is just one potential avenue for reform. Another possibility: Elect politicians who will make health care a priority.

"With earlier presidential primaries and caucuses and growing bipartisanship on US Health Care reform, Moore's film SICKO will ensure that health care reform will be the domestic issue that will elect our next president," writes Dr. Rick Lippin, from Southampton, Pa. " ... It is a movie - like Gore's Inconvenient Truth - that comes along once in a while that will change our nation on an issue of profound importance."

Moore has been working tirelessly throughout the summer to get his message to the masses and to lean on politicians to get serious about health care.

Last month Moore challenged presidential candidates to prove they're invested in health care by giving up their own government-provided health insurance until everyone else enjoys the same level of care they do:

The American government isn't afraid to hand out free health care. Senior citizens get it. Veterans get it. As SiCKO shows you, even the detainees at Guantanamo Bay get it.

So, too, do our federal elected officials. It doesn't matter if they are Republicans or Democrats, young or old, healthy or sick - they are entitled to free, government-provided health insurance. They don't have to worry about being able to pay for medical help - even if many of their constituents do.

When Senator Sherrod Brown was running for a seat in the House of Representatives over 10 years ago, he saw something wrong with this. He pledged not to accept his free government health care until everyone in the United States had the same luxury. (He's still waiting.)

Brown reasoned that politicians should have the same privileges as those they represent. I know a lot of the Democrats running for President understand this principle. Monday night during their YouTube debate, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson all pledged to work for the minimum wage should they be elected president - to show that they're in touch with the plight of everyday Americans, and to make sure they are personally invested in making sure the minimum wage in this country is a livable one. Good for them.

Now, candidates, how about giving up your health care too?

Regardless of who takes office in 2008, SiCKO has already shown that its influence stretches far beyond the film's end.

For Sharon Jenson - a 40-year-old, divorced mother of one who has no health care - the movie was motivation to start a letter-writing campaign to persuade CNN to offer more honest reporting about health care inequities in our country.

In her letter to CNN, Jenson wrote, "We Americans have paid for far too many fat salaries, coverage we cannot use, and overpriced prescriptions which all contribute to the wealthy getting wealthier, while the working class American must lose a loved one so that insurance execs can purchase another yacht, get another costly divorce, or reserve the hottest new sports car to feed their shallow souls."

With any luck, SiCKO could provoke action from all the Jensons of the world, making more of a movement than a movie.

"Nearly everyone has had at least one experience from hell with an insurance company," hagwind writes. "I think SiCKO is going to help focus these conversations, and give political and economic context to all those personal experiences. ... [O]ne movie will not tear down the brick wall, but it can be one hell of an organizing tool."

Even those of you who don't claim to be the biggest Michael Moore fans say SiCKO is valuable - for people on the left AND the right.

"Michael Moore has got to be one of the most polarizing folks in America," kabac55 writes. " ... Nevertheless, the guy knows how to start a discussion rolling and gets some people thinking and doing something. In these times, this takes guts."

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/60369/

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Subprime Loans = Primetime for Vampire Lenders

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted on August 22, 2007

One of the most dramatic stories from the New Testament is of the time that Jesus encountered money changers in the temple. Enraged by their usury and sacrilege, he went on a tear - overturning their tables, physically driving them out and chastising them for converting the temple into a "den of robbers." The Bible doesn't say where these bloodsucking lenders went, but now we know: They have re-emerged in recent years to set up their tables right here in America, working a dark alley of homeowner financing called the "subprime mortgage market." The what? Don't be deterred by the finance industry's jargon (which is intended to numb your brain and keep regular folks from even trying to figure out what's going on). At its core, this is a classically simple story of banker greed and outright sleaze. And the astonishing part is that nearly all of the rank injustice perpetrated by today's money changers is considered legal and is practiced by supposedly reputable financial firms.

That's when avaricious mortgage hucksters and high-finance manipulators looked upon this broad pool of needy, vulnerable castoffs and suddenly shouted, "Eureka, GOLD!" With interest rates remarkably low, housing prices seemingly on a nonstop rise, and (this is the Big One) practically no regulation of this low-income market, the money changers promptly began to devise clever, Enronian schemes to entice such "subprime" borrowers into high-interest, high-fee loans. Never mind that these families really could not afford (and mostly did not understand) the level of debt being piled on their backs. That was a matter for manana. Today was for raking in profits from the poor.

The subprime schemes are run through an intricate, intertwined system of loan brokers, mortgage lenders, Wall Street trusts, hedge funds, offshore tax havens and other predators. To entrap borrowers, the industry created an arsenal of arcane financial devices and maneuvers known by such exotic names as "exploding ARMs," YSPs, teaser rates, low-doc mortgages, loan flipping and equity stripping. Ultimately, these schemes are scams, extracting high payments from the families, sucking out any equity they might build up and stealing their homes.

This is one of those economic stories, like the savings-and-loan scam of the 1980s, that are usually buried back in the business section of newspapers. But, just as with the S&L collapse, this debacle is growing too big to contain, and all of us need to be paying attention. The built-in traps of the subprime mortgage market have already taken the homes of more than a million people in just the past year, and the dangers are quickly rising for millions more. This collapse in homeownership for the working poor has begun seeping into the rest of the economy, causing thousands of job losses, shaking the soundness and reputations of some major Wall Street firms, and slowly - ever so sloooowly - forcing lackadaisical bank regulators and clueless politicians out of their laissez-faire stupor.

How it works

You might have seen some of the come-ons: "Bad Credit? No Problem!" "Zero Percent Down Payment!" "Creative Financing!" "No Documentation Needed!" "Quick and Easy Money!"

The key to building the subprime market is hustle and flimflam-trying to rush anxious, uninformed people into signing on the dotted line for what they're assured is the deal of a lifetime. Of course, the mortgage industry casts its work in a noble light, asserting that its primary purpose is to help extend the joys of homeownership to the masses. But an examination of key players reveals little altruism.

BROKERS. These are independent, local operators who troll for borrowers in your town and mine, using flyers, doorbells, phone calls, personal contacts, websites, late-night TV ads, data banks and every means imaginable to get low-wage renters to sit still for a home-loan sales pitch or to find vulnerable homeowners who can be talked into taking out a refinancing loan. Brokers don't actually make the loans, service them or have any stake in whether the deals work out. Rather, they are simply "finders" who are paid an upfront fee by the mortgage lenders for every borrower they deliver. And 71 percent of all subprime mortgages come through them.

The pretense is that the broker is the borrower's trusted advisor in the shark-infested waters of banking. Au contraire, Bubba. In most states, agents have no legal responsibility to represent a buyer's best interest. And, in fact, they don't, for the system gives brokers lucrative incentives to deceive borrowers.

Through a common practice called "steering," unsuspecting families are guided into the most expensive, riskiest subprime loans. For doing this dirty job, brokers are paid cash bonuses called "yield spread premiums" (YSPs) - though you would call them by their more common name: kickbacks. The Center for Responsible Lending reports that these YSP payoffs, averaging $1,850 per loan, are added to about 90 percent of all subprime loans. That's right, struggling families are silently assessed an extra fee for being secretly steered into a loan with higher interest rates and worse terms than they're entitled to get. They're literally being robbed by their bankers.

LENDERS. These are the brand-name players you might recognize. They include nonbank lenders - for example, New Century Financial, Ameriquest, Option One, Countrywide and Ownit Mortgage Solutions - that sprang up to tap into the new subprime gold rush, and several of them are now bankrupt or under investigation. Many big banking firms, including Wells Fargo, Lehman Brothers and Citigroup, also joined the free-for-all by setting up their own subprime subsidiaries,

Brokers are on the front lines, but the lenders are the ones who invented the scams that are bleeding borrowers. Only a decade ago, subprime loans were a mere fraction of the home-loan market. Today, these financial instruments are an $800 billion business - about 20 percent of all housing loans.

How did the subprime market mushroom? The lenders - again, they are not subject to regulation - drastically and deceptively lowered normal banking standards to draw in low-income borrowers. As one broker says, "The culture around all these subprime lenders has been, 'Hey, bring it to us. We'll make it happen.'" If a borrower can pay little or nothing down, recently had a bankruptcy, and doesn't have the income to keep up payments, the bankers say, "That's OK. Bring us that loan."

Rather than do due diligence, lenders cavalierly offer "low-doc" and "stated income" loans - i.e., they make little or no effort to document an applicant's ability to take on this burden, instead accepting almost anyone's word about having the income to meet monthly payments. "You could be dead and get a loan," says one broker.

The loans themselves are doozies, filled with numerous and nasty provisions that set unwitting borrowers up for failure. These are tucked into 20-page loan agreements written in legal gibberish. A friendly, reassuring, always smiling loan agent flips through the pages saying, "It's simple, just sign here ... and here ... and here." Among the nasties are:

* TEASERS. Subprime interest rates are loudly advertised to be only 7 percent or so, with only small-type notice that these are "adjustable rate mortgages" (ARMs). This means that the interest rate will explode to 11 percent or more after a couple of years, causing the families' monthly payments to jump by half or more. Over 90 percent of subprime loans contain ARMs.

* BLOATED APPRAISALS. Subprime lenders are notorious for pressuring appraisers to inflate the value of a house, thus causing the borrower to take out a bigger loan than the house is worth.

* HIDE-THE-ESCROW. In conventional loans, the borrower's property taxes and mortgage insurance premiums are figured directly into the monthly loan payments, with these monies set aside in an escrow account. For subprime loans, however, lenders often don't include these costly items in the mortgage, thus making the loans appear more affordable than they really are. This leads to borrower shock (and sometimes default) when the tax and insurance bills arrive separately in the mailbox. At this point, ever-helpful lenders offer to refinance the loan, thus collecting additional fees.

* EXCESSIVE FEES. On conventional mortgages, various lender fees typically total less than 1 percent of the loan amount. By contrast, subprime borrowers commonly are hit with fees (hidden in mortgage payments) totaling more than 5 percent.

* PREPAYMENT PENALTIES. Obviously, it's in a borrower's interest to get out of an abusive subprime loan as soon as possible and to refinance on better terms. But -Gotcha! - more than 70 percent of these loans carry a penalty fee of several thousand dollars for paying off the loan early. In the prime market, only about 2 percent of loans contain such punishment.

* WALL STREET. None of the above would be happening (and certainly not on such a massive scale) if the fast-and-easy money crowd on Wall Street hadn't seen a chance to make a killing on lowly subprimers. Lured by the flow of sky-high interest rates being charged to these borrowers (and abetted by the lack of government regulation in this market), Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and other giants lumbered into the action.

They set up special investment units within their banks to buy these risky mortgages from the lenders. Then the Wall Street behemoths consolidated this bulk debt, leveraged it into complex IOUs called "mortgage-backed securities," and sold these packages to wealthy speculators around the world. This Rube Goldberg financial mechanism has shoved hundreds of billions of dollars of capital into the subprime market, fueling lenders' enthusiasm for making even more of these shaky loans.

What a system! Lenders mislead borrowers, collect fat fees from them, then shift the risk of any bad loans to Wall Street. The Wall Street repackagers then transfer the bad-loan risk to their rich investors, drawing even fatter fees. These investor elites get phenomenal yields on the IOUs, then plant their profits in tax-free havens like the Cayman Islands.

It's a brilliant Ponzi scheme ... as long as all those Mr. and Ms. Subprimes keep putting their little dabs of cash into it every month. Oops! There's the rub.

The bust

Mr. and Ms. Subprime live on the economic edge, with little margin for financial downturns. In the last couple of years, three bad storms hit them. First, falling wages combined with growing inflation (fueled by rising prices for gasoline, utilities, healthcare, etc.) to squeeze their meager household finances to the breaking point. Second, their adjustable-rate mortgages began exploding; someone who was paying $1,000 a month at the start of a $150,000 loan had to pay $1,400 a month two years later.

Third, housing prices (which the whole system claimed would only rise and rise and rise) began tumbling, making it impossible for these borrowers to refinance or sell their homes to avoid financial foreclosure. When home sales were booming, George W declared this proved that his push for economic deregulation was creating a glorious new "ownership society." He was so enthused that he even designated June as National Home Ownership Month. But his laissez-faire "success" turns out to be a house of cards. As one market analyst says, "The gain in home ownership over the last four or five years is almost entirely due to looser lending standards [for subprime mortgages]."

Those cards are now crashing down. In the first half of this year, home foreclosures are up by 41 percent. Today, a record number of subprime borrowers have fallen behind in their monthly payments and face eviction (once you fall 90 days behind, lenders typically proceed with foreclosure). More than $2.28 trillion worth of ARMs are scheduled to explode to their higher interest rates between now and 2009. Two million families are expected to have the wrenching experience of losing their homes, as well as losing all the money they invested in them.

All of this is working its way up the economic chain. More than 80 lenders have gone out of business in the past six months, thousands of jobs are being cut, and hundreds of thousands of houses are being dumped on an already-saturated market (causing a further decline in prices, which makes other subprime homeowners even more vulnerable to foreclosure, which dumps more houses onto the market ... and the downward spiral continues).

Wall Street big shots are being stung as well. Bear Stearns, for example, has had to scramble to keep its two subprime hedge funds from imploding, bailing out one of them with a panic infusion of $1.6 billion. Analysts estimate that these funds are holding more than $200 billion worth of subprime loans that are in danger of default.

Regulatory shame

This abuse of vulnerable families and the resulting economic mess would not have happened without the hands-off regulatory ideology that has infected our government. There are no less than five financial agencies at the federal level that could have protected people, yet the subprime surge was allowed to proceed on the fantasy that the financial players would police themselves. The Federal Reserve Board, for example, has direct authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act to "prohibit acts or practices in connection with mortgage loans that the board finds to be unfair, deceptive or ... associated with abusive lending practices, or that are otherwise not in the interest of the borrower." The Fed simply ignored this law.

Finally, with the entire subprime system crashing around them, the regulators issued "guidelines" on June 29 requiring banks to stop some of the worst abuses, including prepayment penalties. But the new rules still allow many of the predatory practices and - worst of all - do not apply to the nonbank lenders that make a large share of subprime loans. In addition, the guidelines do not directly address the role of Wall Street in pushing such loans.

The subprime industry disingenuously asserts that any attempt to regulate it only hurts the poor people who receive these mortgages, for they have nowhere else to turn for homeowner financing. What self-serving hogwash! There could be subprime loans - from public, if not private, sources - structured and administered without deceit. Rather than target lower-income families as suckers to be had, packaging their dreams into investment playthings for speculators and tax dodgers, let's view these folks as assets to the larger community and realize that homes for them are investments in the common good. And while we're at it, let's recognize that the need for "subprime" mortgages is driven by our low-wage/no-benefit economy and by our country's growing scarcity of affordable housing. It's not merely a low-income mortgage system that must be fixed - our leaders' pursuit of a low-income America must be stopped.

From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, Aug. 2007. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time to Take It Back.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/60183/

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War Psychiatry and Iraq Atrocities:
How Killing Becomes a Reflex

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on August 22, 2007

In 1971, Lt. William Calley was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the massacre of some 500 civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. In response to Calley's conviction, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) convened the "Winter Soldier Investigation." Over a three-day period, more than a hundred veterans testified to atrocities they had witnessed committed by U.S. troops against Vietnamese civilians. Their expressed intention was to demonstrate that My Lai was not unique, that it was instead the inevitable result of U.S. policy. It was a travesty of justice, they claimed, to focus blame on the soldiers when it was the policy makers, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Johnson, LeMay, Nixon and the others who were truly responsible for the war crimes that had been committed.

In 2004, the release of the Abu Grahib photographs broke the unforgivable silence in the mainstream press about atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. Haditha followed, then Mahmoudiyah, Ishaqi, and at this writing, countless other instances of savage, homicidal violence directed at civilians have been reported. The July 30 issue of the Nation included an article, "The Other War," by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, which used interviews with 50 combat veterans to make the case that American soldiers are using indiscriminate and often lethal force in their dealings with Iraqi civilians. These veterans, the authors report, have "returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the U.S. government and American media." I would wager that they are more deeply disturbed by the reality itself than the way the media reports it, but certainly government and media distortions are another layer of betrayal. In a letter protesting that article, Paul Rieckhoff, president of the anti-war organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, made an argument parallel to that of VVAW, namely that "(a)nyone who wants to write a serious piece about the ethical lapses of the U.S. troops should start and end the article by putting blame where it belongs - on the politicians who sent our troops to war unprepared and without a clear mission" (the Nation, 7/13/07).

I'm not suggesting that American soldiers take no responsibility for their actions. Like Rieckhoff, I would argue that we must balance outrage at criminal and sadistic acts with the insistence that we "guard against blaming this new generation of veterans for the terrible and tragic circumstances" that led to those acts. And I agree that, once again, the architects have been given a free pass and that the soldiers, who are doing exactly what they have been trained to do, are taking the blame. But I want to focus on an aspect of the situation that is never addressed in the mainstream media, and not often enough elsewhere: specifically that American troops are trained to act in criminal and sadistic ways.

Military training has been part of the experience of millions of young American men since the Revolutionary War. Prior to the Vietnam era, however, that training consisted largely of practicing military skills and learning to manage military equipment. It is only in the last half century that training has evolved into an entirely new phenomenon that makes use of the principles of operant conditioning to overcome what studies done over the last century have consistently demonstrated, namely, that healthy human beings have an inherent aversion to killing others of their own species.

Operant conditioning holds that organisms, including human beings, move through their environment rather haphazardly until they encounter a reinforcing stimulus. The experience of that stimulus becomes associated in memory with the behavior that immediately preceded it. In other words, a behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence, reward or punishment, modifies the organism's tendency to repeat the behavior. Today's recruits are intentionally and methodically subjected to a training regimen that is explicitly designed to turn them into reflexive killers. And it is very effective. It is also carefully concealed. The military would prefer to keep their methods out of sight because of the moral and ethical discussions, not to mention the legal restraints, which public scrutiny and constitutional debate might impose. Or so I would like to believe.

War Psychiatry, the army's textbook on combat trauma, notes that "pseudospeciation, the ability of humans and some other primates to classify certain members of their own species as 'other,' can neutralize the threshold of inhibition so they can kill conspecifics." Modern military training has developed carefully sequenced and choreographed elements of what many would call brainwashing to disconnect recruits from their civilian identities. The values, standards and behaviors they have absorbed over a lifetime from their families, schools, religions and communities are scorned and punished. Using cruelty, humiliation, degradation and cognitive disorientation, recruits are reprogrammed with an entirely new set of learned responses. Every aspect of combat behavior is rehearsed until response becomes reflexive. Operant conditioning has vastly improved the efficacy of American soldiers, at least by military standards. It has proven to be a reliable way to turn off the switch that controls a soldier's inherent aversion to killing. American soldiers do kill more often and more efficiently. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing, calls this form of training "psychological warfare, [but] psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops."

The psychological warfare that is being conducted on today's recruits is a truly disturbing indication of the worldview of our leadership, both military and political. The group identity they are drilling into these kids, the "insider" identity, is based on explicit contempt not only for the declared enemy of the week, but for the entire civilian population, with a special emphasis on women and homosexuals. In an army that is now 15 percent female and who knows (don't ask, don't tell) what percentage gay, drill instructors still rely on labels like "girl" or "pussy," "lady" or "fairy" to humiliate, degrade and ultimately exact conformity. Recruits are drilled with marching chants that privilege their relationships with their weapons over their relationships with women ("you used to be my beauty queen, now I love my M-16"), or that overtly conflate sex and violence ("this is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun."). Aside from teaching these kids to quash their innate feelings about killing in general, they are being programmed with a distorted version of not only what it means to be a man, but of what it means to be a citizen. To ascend to the warrior class, one must learn to despise and distrust all that is not military. Chaim Shatan, a psychiatrist who worked with Vietnam-era veterans, described this transformative process as deliberate, as opposed to capricious, sadism, "whose purpose is to inculcate obedience to command."

There are any number of ways that modern training methods both support violence, aggression and obedience and help to disconnect a reflex action from its moral, ethical, spiritual or social implications, but one of the best illustrations of this process is the marching chants, or "jodies," as they are known in the services. "Jody" is the derivative of an African-American work song about Joe de Grinder, a devilish ladies' man who is at home making time with the soldier's girlfriend while the soldier is stuck in the war ("ain't no use in going home; Jody's on your telephone"). According to the military, jodies build morale while distracting attention from monotonous, often strenuous, exertion. The following, originally a product of the Vietnam era, has been resurrected for training purposes in every war since and is an example of the kind of morale building that has been judged appropriate to the formation of an American soldier:

Shell the town and kill the people.
Drop the napalm in the square.
Do it on a Sunday morning
While they're on their way to prayer.

Aim your missiles at the schoolhouse.
See the teacher ring the bell.
See the children's smiling faces
As their schoolhouse burns to hell

Throw some candy to the children.
Wait till they all gather round.
Then you take your M-16 now
And mow the little fuckers down.

Thankfully, the brainwashing has not yet been developed that will override the humanity of most American soldiers. According to the troops interviewed in the Nation, the kind of psychotic brutality described in the marching cadence above is indulged by only a minority. Still, they described atrocities committed against civilians as "common" - and almost never punished. As multiple deployments become the norm, however, and as more scrambled psyches are sent back into combat instead of into treatment, it is frightening to consider that the brainwashing may yet prevail. Given the training to which these soldiers have been subjected and the chaotic conditions in which they find themselves, it is inevitable that more will succumb to fear and rage and frustration. They will inevitably be overwhelmed by cumulative doses of horror, and they will lose control of their judgment and their compassion. Thirty-six years ago, American veterans tried to cut through the smoke and mirrors of the official response to civilian atrocities, the version that scapegoated soldiers and ignored those who gave the orders. As then Lt. John Kerry put it, "We could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel (that it is) not reds, and not redcoats (that threaten this country), but the crimes which we are committing." The soldiers who, following orders, have run over children in the road rather than slow down their convoy will never be the same again, regardless of whether government and the media tell the truth. Nor will the soldiers manning checkpoints who shoot, as ordered, and kill entire families who failed to stop, only to learn later that no one had bothered to share with them that the American signal to stop - a hand held up, palm towards the oncoming vehicle - to an Iraqi means, "Hello, come here." I have heard a number of the men cited in the Nation article speak about their combat experiences, and they are tormented by what they saw and did. They want to tell their stories, not because they are looking for absolution, but because they want to believe that Americans want to know. But neither are they willing to take the blame.

They have already carried home the psychic wounds and the dangerous reflexive habits of violence that will always diminish their lives and their relationships. In return, they are hoping we will listen to them this time when they ask us to look a little harder, dig a little deeper, use a little more discernment. Or have we already arrived at a point in our collective moral development when, as Shatan predicted, "Like Eichmann, we … consider evil to be banal and routine?"

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/60297/

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Bush's Bid for a Death Penalty Fast Track

By Andrew Gumbel, The Independent UK
Posted on August 22, 2007

The Bush administration is preparing to speed up the executions of criminals who are on death row across the United States, in effect, cutting out several layers of appeals in the federal courts so that prisoners can be "fast-tracked" to their deaths.

With less than 18 months to go to secure a presidential legacy, President Bush has turned to an issue he has specialised in since approving a record number of executions while Governor of Texas.

The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales - Mr Bush's top legal adviser during the spree of executions in Texas in the 1990s - is putting finishing touches to regulations, inspired by recent anti-terrorism legislation, that would allow states to turn to the Justice Department, instead of the federal courts, as a key arbiter in deciding whether prisoners live or die.

The US is already among the top six countries worldwide in terms of the numbers of its own citizens that it puts to death. Fifty-two Americans were executed last year and thousands await their fate on death row.

In some instances, prisoners would have significantly less time to file federal appeals, and the appeals courts significantly less time to respond. On the question of whether defendants received adequate representation at trial - a key issue in many cases, especially in southern states with no formal public defender system - the Attorney General would be the sole decision-maker.

Since Mr Gonzales is a prosecutor, not a judge, and since he has a track record of favouring death in almost every capital case brought before him, the regulations would, in effect, remove a crucial safety net for prisoners who feel they have been wrongly convicted.

Elisabeth Semel, a death penalty specialist at the University of California law school in Berkeley, said the intention of the proposed regulation was clear: "To make it more difficult for people who have been sentenced to death in state courts, including those sentenced without adequate representation and resources, to avoid being executed."

The regulations, first made public by the Los Angeles Times, will be subject to a public comment period extending into September. They will then be enacted "as quickly as circumstances allow," according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.

The administration's enthusiasm for capital punishment runs counter to the recent trend away from the death penalty in many states. Last year saw the lowest number of capital convictions across the country - 114 - since the death penalty was reintroduced in the early 1970s. The development of DNA testing has raised uncomfortable questions about the safety of many capital convictions, prompting Illinois to call a halt to all its executions and triggering reviews in many other states.

Over the past two years, doubts have also arisen over the most popular method of execution - death by lethal injection - because medical research has suggested prisoners may die in agony. One of the cocktails of drugs typically administered, pancuronium bromide, paralyses the body, masking any pain without necessarily alleviating it.

California and half a dozen other states imposed moratoriums pending a study of a new cocktail of drugs that would overcome the constitutional ban on "cruel or unusual" punishment. Some states, including Tennessee, South Dakota and Florida, have either resumed executions or are planning to do so. But California, which has 600 prisoners on death row, shows no signs of executing anybody in the near future.

President Bush has always been a death penalty enthusiast. The 152 prisoners he dispatched to their deaths in his eight years as governor of Texas set a high-water mark unmatched before or since.

According to official memos, Governor Bush would give the green light to executions based on no more than a half-hour briefing from Mr Gonzales. Mr Gonzales, in turn, often omitted mitigating evidence.

At no time has Mr Bush seen any contradiction with his avowed commitment to the sanctity of life. As President he has even instituted a National Sanctity of Human Life Day, which, he has said, "serves as a reminder we must value human life in all its forms, not just those considered healthy, wanted, or convenient".

If the regulations come into effect, they would raise serious questions about the ability of wrongfully convicted prisoners to overturn sentences. Kenny Richey, a Scot who has been on Ohio's death row for close to 20 years, is still alive - and, it appears, on the verge of having his sentence quashed - because of the intervention of a federal appeals court on his behalf.

Four years ago, a Missouri man, Joe Amrine, was released after 17 years on death row after the collapse of all evidence that led to his conviction for a jail murder. The state argued, with a straight face, that even the establishment of innocence was not a reason to stop his execution, because nothing had been procedurally incorrect about his original trial. Again, it was a federal appeals court that weighed in on Amrine's behalf.

To date, 123 prisoners sentenced to die have been proved innocent and released. Anti-death penalty activists and lawyers have raised serious doubts about hundreds of others.

Supporters of a quicker legal process argue that it is unacceptable to sentence someone to die and then wait 17 or 18 years, on average, for the sentence to be carried out. Keeping prisoners on death row is expensive - about $90,000 a year, on average - as are the legal costs of appeals.

2006 executions

China: 1,010+

Iran: 177

Pakistan: 82

Iraq: 65+

Sudan: 65+

USA: 53

Saudi Arabia: 39+

Yemen: 30+

Vietnam: 14

Kuwait: 10+

Source: Amnesty International, based on 2006 figures

+ symbol indicates that the figure is a minimum one; the true figure may be higher due to state secrecy or a lack of available information.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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