After Bush’s 2005 fiasco, Democrats and Republicans will join hands to privatize and cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in a more subtle way. Don’t let your guard down!

Note: This was written in June and July of 2008, before Obama was even a presidential candidate, let alone elected. It was also written before the economic meltdown and the bailout of the financial sector, leaving working families with high, long-term unemployment and reduced wages. But even in the Summer of 2008, you could see the direction of things from Obama’s choice of economic advisors, largely Clinton-era banking and finance officials whose deregulation led to the recent meltdown. Conclusion: after Bush’s 2005 fiasco, Democrats and Republicans will join hands to privatize and cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in a more subtle way. Don’t let your guard down!

Kinder, Gentler Privatization of Social Security Is Still Privatization!

By San Francisco Gray Panthers, Summer, 2008

Working-class Americans, with Democratic Party help, beat back Bush’s 2005 attempt to take future payroll taxes from the Social Security Trust Fund and put them into private market-based retirement accounts for individual workers, and then scale back Social Security benefits. The current Democratic and Republican candidates both insist they are against Social Security privatization, but if you look more closely, they are pushing a new form of privatization, gentler, and more gradual that the Bush version, but privatization all the same.

This discussion focuses on the Democratic Party for several reasons: (1) they seem more likely to win in November because McCain is associated with discredited Bush policies and because Obama has so much more money,  (2) most of our allies perceive the Democratic Party as more friendly to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and (3) the Democrats’  plans for gradual privatization of Social Security are more explicitly articulated by the powerful policy-making think tanks associated with the Democratic Party and with Obama. (McCain’s is ambiguous on Social Security, sometimes calling for 2005-Bush style private accounts and sometimes calling for 2005-Pelosi style private accounts in addition to traditional Social Security. McCain did, however, replace Phil Gramm as economic advisor with Martin Feldstein, considered the chief intellectual force of social security privatization.)

This discussion should not degenerate into a into a dead-end discussion of whether we are pro-Obama or anti-Obama, which would be confusing, and needlessly divisive. Instead, we should concentrate on informing ourselves and others about the likely threats to Social Security, no matter who wins the Presidency.  It must be emphasized that both Obama and McCain, both Democrats and Republicans, and their associated policy-forming institutions insist that after the polarizing gaffe of 2005, restructuring Social Security must be a bi-partisan, co-operative effort based on compromise between the parties. Neither party has the power to force through its complete agenda. Neither party is willing to accept the blame for privatizing Social Security, and cutting back its benefits. Democrats and Republicans are together on this. If we want to save those programs, we’ll have to do it ourselves, and it will be a bigger job than in 2005.

Obama’s Links

Advocates for seniors and people with disabilities have good reason to be disturbed over the implications for Social Security of Barrack Obama’s strong association with the centrist Brookings Institution, and particularly with Obama’s appointment  of Jason Furman as his top economic advisor.

Jason Furman is  closely linked to Robert Rubin, a Wall Street insider and a current director of the giant Citigroup, the world’s largest bank. As Clinton’s Treasury secretary,  Rubin promoted  NAFTA, the 1990’s deficit reductions that decimated so many social programs, and banking deregulation.  In the end, Clinton worked behind the scenes on a bi-partisan plan to splice private accounts into Social Security so government would only have a safety-net role, and was stopped only by the Lewinsky scandal. (A new book, “The Pact,” by Steven M. Gillon, describes the confidential meetings of Clinton and Newt Gingrich that initiated the effort to restructure Social Security.)

Furman himself was special assistant to the president for economic policy under Clinton, and was a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. He has also been a senior economic adviser to the chief economist at the World Bank.

More recently, Furman directed the Hamilton Project, which Rubin founded and largely funds, and is a part of the Brookings Institute, one of the most powerful policy think-tanks in the country with deep connections with Wall Street. Obama’s economic team includes consultants such as Lawrence Summers, who succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, former Federal Reserve vice-chair Alan Blinder, William Daley, who was Clinton’s NAFTA Task Force Chairman and still supports NAFTA, and long-term Obama advisor and Democratic Leadership Council Senior Economist Austan Goolsbee.  Goolsbee favors achieving Democratic Party objectives through market mechanisms, such as promoting free trade  (trade agreements where US business can freely exploit foreign labor, and then freely move its factories abroad), but with ameliorations such as compensations for damaged workers and communities.  Obama’s economic team includes Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chair  under Carter and Regan, who countered the 1960s-1970s workers’ offensive of strikes by  raising the prime rate to  a record rate of 21.5%, in December 1980, deliberately causing the worst recession since the 1930s, throwing millions out of work, and beginning a sustained attack on workers and their families that persists to this day. The Obama team also includes more left-leaning economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Jared Bernstein, and James Galbraith.  Nevertheless, Furman’s position as team leader and his closeness to Rubin, Wall Street, and the Brookings Institute, Volcker’s power as former Federal Reserve chair, plus Goolsbee’s closeness to the Democratic Leadership Council,  makes it all but certain that those will be the dominant voices on Obama’s economic team, especially since Obama is raising  prodigious corporate contributions ($6 million from securities and investment companies, including $544,000 from Goldman Sachs, the world’s largest investment bank) as well as smaller personal contributions (over 90% of total donors). As the economy melts down, Obama’s response has been increasingly aligned with Wall Street.

Jason Furman has achieved notoriety for praising globalization and NAFTA-type free  trade agreements, praising Wal-Mart for lowering consumer goods prices (See Furman’s paper on this),  for saying workers are better off than 20 years ago, and for excusing massive layoffs.  However, our concern here is that Furman advocates a kinder and gentler form of  Social Security privatization.  This may seem surprising  from someone who in 2005 worked for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and provided the economic analysis to defeat the Bush plan for Social Security privatization, but as early as 2006, Furman was on CNBC off-handedly advocating mandatory private accounts on top of traditional Social Security accounts, and benefit cuts for traditional Social Security accounts.

Bi-Partisan Efforts to Restructure Social Security

An extensive Internet search for particulars on Furman’s Social Security proposals fails to show much that is specific, but Furman’s parent think-tank, the Brookings Institute, has published considerable detail, which is probably more significant anyway, as it represents a consensus of powerful government and corporate policy-makers with close connections with Obama. Brookings and Obama’s advisors will propose a more gradual Social Security privatization with a few protective or compensatory measures thrown in, much as these same policy advisors promoted NAFTA with a few protective or compensatory measures thrown in.

“Taking Back Our Fiscal Future,” a combined report authored by the Brookings Institute and the Heritage Foundation found that despite overall differences, both groups agreed that  “Unsustainable deficits in the federal budget threaten the health and vigor of the American economy,” and that “the first step toward establishing budget responsibility is to reform the budget decision process so that the major drivers of escalating deficits—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are no longer on autopilot.”

In other words, a way must be found to drastically cut costs on “entitlement programs” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, where all retired or poor Americans have been guaranteed certain benefits.  (Note the Iraq-Afghanistan war being fought on borrowed money and rapidly increasing “regular” military expenditures are not even mentioned as major drivers of escalating deficits.)

The joint report recommends

(1) “Congress and the president enact explicit long-term budgets for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that are sustainable, set limits on automatic spending growth, and reduce the relatively favorable budgetary treatment of these programs,” (meaning eliminate the current budget process whereby guaranteed benefits for retired and poor Americans receive first budget priority), and

(2) “significant long-term deviations from budgeted amounts trigger automatic adjustments in benefits, premiums, provider payments, or other revenues.”

(3) The report further comments: “This requirement would give the public and their elected representatives a chance to decide explicitly how much they want to spend on these three entitlements, and how much on other priorities – such as national defense, education, and scientific research – and what level of taxes they are willing to pay to support these programs.”

Similar themes are echoed in another Brookings Institute piece “Next President and Congress: Tackle Social Security First”, where Alice Rivlin and John Kingdon argue “Of course, everyone has to compromise to accomplish a comprehensive Social Security reform. Republicans have to give up diverting existing revenues into private accounts. But they can preserve private accounts on top of Social Security and strengthen incentives for individual retirement savings without going to “privatization.”  Democrats have to accept future benefit cuts, but they need not be drastic and can spare current retirees and lower-income beneficiaries. The package could include future gradual increases in the retirement age and concentrate benefit cuts on higher income people.”

The Possible Democratic Plan for Privatizing Social Security

A more detailed outline of a possible Democratic Party version of Social Security reform is in a June, 2008 piece “Bridging the Social Security Divide: Lessons From Abroad” by Brookings Institute Senior Fellow R. Kent Weaver. Weaver is professor at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University, and has written extensively on economic policy, including a Government Accountability Office (GAO) advisory document to the Senate Budget Committee on Entitlement Reform, including Social Security. Weaver describes the Bush Social Security Privatization Plan to break up funding for the existing Social Security Trust Fund into individual private accounts as counter-productive, since it generated anger, hardened positions, and made compromise harder. Instead, this Brookings paper advocates bi-partisan compromise on Social Security reform to produce gradual privatization.

Basically, the plan is to (1) increase Social Security payroll tax revenue, (2) require employers to set up private retirement accounts for individual workers and apply the additional payroll tax revenues to the private accounts of low and medium income wage earners,  (3) gradually diminish the guaranteed benefits paid by traditional Social Security so the private accounts become a major source of retirement income, and (4) invest the current Social Security Trust Fund in private securities.  Here are the elements of the Brookings Institute plan with its explanations in quotes:

Social Security Payroll Tax Increase:  “Increase the payroll tax from 2.0-2.5%, to be split between workers and employers.”  (Obama has already proposed a “doughnut hole” tax increase: continuing the current payroll tax exemption for incomes from $102,000 to $250,000, but taxing payrolls above $250,000, (3% of taxpayers) probably at 2-4%, as opposed to the 6% paid by employees earning less than $102,000. It is estimated this would raise less than half the shortfall expected over the next 75 years.)

Mandatory Individual Private Retirement Accounts on top of traditional Social Security. “All of the new contributions (see above) would go into individual accounts that would be mandatory for all workers, but no existing payroll taxes would be diverted to individual accounts. Workers would choose from a modest range of index fund options managed by private sector fund managers. … The Social Security Administration would manage the collection and flow of money from individual accounts into those funds … At retirement, individuals could choose between annuitizing the funds in their individual accounts to guarantee a steady income stream or drawing the funds down by a set schedule. Lump-sum withdrawals would not be permitted.” (Obama has already said that he wants to make private saving easier, cheaper,  more automatic for middle-class workers, and will require employers to set up IRAs for each worker. The payroll tax increase would be used to match 50 percent of the first $1,000 of savings for families that earn less than $75,000.  More recently, automatic enrollment  in Individual Retirement Accounts, IRAs, was proposed in a joint Brookings Institute-Heritage Foundation paper.)

Gradual Reductions Defined Benefits of Traditional Social Security: “The initial Social Security-defined benefit would be reduced for future cohorts of retirees over time as the new individual accounts are phased in. Replacement rates will be set so that the combined “old” Social Security benefits and new mandatory savings accounts will roughly equal current benefits, given moderate estimates on rate of return for the mandatory savings component. Given the progressive nature of the current Social Security benefit formula, some changes in the Social Security benefit formula or injection of general revenues to finance benefits of low earners would be required. Workers would also need to receive better information about how working longer can lead to higher benefits, and about the increased risk posed by having their Social Security benefits depend partially upon the performance of individual investment accounts.”

Investment of the Traditional Social Security Trust Fund in Corporate Investment:  “Currently, Social Security trust fund surpluses are invested only in U.S. Treasury securities. Canada, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden all invest part of the public pension funds in equity, corporate bonds and other assets through independent entities in order to gain higher returns. These funds are clearly charged with maximizing fund assets for retirees rather than social investment criteria. The U.S. should consider doing the same thing. As in other countries, these funds should have a strict legislative mandate to maximize return for retirees. The U.S. could use multiple funds of limited size with heavy reliance on private fund managers, to prevent any disruption of capital markets. This approach not only would increase returns on Social Security contributions, it would ease the cash flow transition expected to occur in 2017 as Social Security shifts from serving as a source of financing for the federal government to being a drain on government revenues.” (Obama has said money people put into (traditional) Social Security should not go into the stock market.)

Emergency Fast-Track Congressional Powers to Deal with Anticipated Shortfalls: “ … automatically putting in place a combination of automatic tax increases and benefit cuts in specified proportions if the alarm bell is triggered … The president would be required to make a report to Congress within a specified amount of time proposing specific legislative steps to address that shortfall. Each house of Congress would then be given a window of time to consider the president’s recommendations under special rules limiting debate and prohibiting amendments. This procedural vote would require a special majority of 60 percent of members voting in each chamber. Final approval of the president’s plan would require a normal majority vote in each chamber. The procedural vote hurdle would hopefully encourage the president to submit a plan that could win broad support.”  (Dianne Feinstein’s S-355, calls for a permanent, bi-partisan Social Security and Medicare Solvency Commission, with power to propose legislation that would be fast-tracked on an emergency basis in Congress. Senior and disability advocates opposed S-355.)  The Brookings paper, in fact, proposes a Social Security Commission structured along the same lines as Feinstein’s Commission, involving Democratic and Republican chairs of relevant House and Senate Committees, to insure buy-in of its recommendations by all legislative groupings.

Some  ameliorating features:

Improvement of Minimum Benefit:    “ … the U.S. has one of the highest rates of relative senior poverty among the advanced industrial countries. Poverty is especially serious among elderly widows. … Congress should include in a Social Security reform package a more generous minimum benefit for retirees who have worked (or whose spouse has worked) long careers at low wages in the United States. This benefit should be paid for out of general revenues. The current safety net income program for the elderly, Supplemental Security Income, serves very few people because its benefit levels are low and its assets tests are extraordinarily stringent.  … In Canada, close to 40 percent of seniors receive the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which has moderate income tests, no assets tests, and streamlined re-application procedures …

Contributions to compensate for wages lost while caring for children: “…A requirement that government make contributions to Social Security and mandatory savings accounts on behalf of a custodial parent of very young children who is out of the labor force or has only minimal labor force participation during his or her children’s first years of life. These contributions would be paid at (or topped up to) a flat rate, perhaps 60 percent of average earnings, and paid for out of general revenues.

What’s wrong with this plan?

Mandatory individual retirement accounts, as proposed by Obama, Pelosi, and others, work against retirees even when the accounts do not replace traditional Social Security, because they accelerate the replacement of employer-sponsored guaranteed-benefit retirement plans with  plans dependent on workers’ ability to save and the stock market’s ability to continuously grow.

In the Brookings plan outlined above, over time, less of retirement benefits comes from traditional Social Security and the Social Security Trust Fund, and more is dependent on income from a worker’s private retirement account.  This is a highly uncertain income since it depends on (1) how much money the employer has been willing to put into a worker’s private account, (2) how much money a worker has been able to save during his lifetime , and (3) how well the stock market is performing.

Employer contributions, instead of being fixed by law and the same for everyone, will be negotiated between worker and employer.  Employer contributions will be driven down, just as private company pensions have been driven down over the last three decades, and more vulnerable employees’ contributions will be driven down even more.

Workers are already unable to save, and will be less able in the future. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research,  the current recession is expected to have over 4 million jobs lost, result in 5-10 million more living in poverty, and cause a $2,000 – $3,750 reduction in annual median family income.  Meanwhile, food, gas, health, and rental prices are rising sharply, and social and safety-net services are decreasing.

These individual market-based private accounts are being proposed at a time of great instability in financial markets.  The sub-prime loan crisis has not only lead to unprecedented mortgage foreclosures, but also to credit crunches and even failures of major banks like Bear-Sterns. The still-expanding US economic crisis, puts added pressure for government to put money into the private accounts in hopes that the stock market can use the money to inflate the next fiscal bubble.

For the same reasons as above, the Social Security Trust Fund must not be invested in the stock market.  The fall of Bear Sterns is estimated to cost the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board $24 million, the New York State Common Retirement Fund $30 million, and CalSTRS, the California State Teachers Retirement System, lost $84 million of its $85 million invested when Bear Sterns folded.

Conclusions

Obama has already adopted aspects of the Brookings plan for privatizing Social Security for campaign purposes, but he may not adapt them all during the presidential campaign.  Nevertheless, the Democrats’ close association with Rubin, Furman, Goolsbee, the Brookings Institute, and the Democratic Leadership Council makes it likely that the Democrats will adopt the Brookings plan once he is elected.

As Robert Pollin writes, “But keep in mind that Bill Clinton advanced similar goals in 1992, under his economic program of “Putting People First.” Yet Clinton’s economic program changed drastically even during the two-month interregnum between the November election and his inauguration in January 1993. During this time, Clinton decided that the first priority of his administration would be to serve the interests of Wall Street. The Clinton years were defined by across-the-board reductions in government spending as a share of the economy’s total spending, virtually unqualified enthusiasm for free trade, tepid and inconsistent efforts to assist working people in labor markets, and the deregulation of financial markets.”  Clinton made his “decision” based on the same advisors as Obama’s.

We need to remember that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security can pay all scheduled benefits for nearly 40 years with no changes whatsoever. And even if nothing is ever changed, Social Security will always be able to pay future retirees a higher benefit (adjusted for inflation) than current retirees receive. If government promises to repay the Social Security Trust Fund are “worthless IOUs” because the money was spent financing past wars, then the war-makers must repay the Fund, not us.

Democratic and Republican forces, both allied with corporate and financial interests, are agreed that the economy cannot sustain the promises made to recipients of Social Security, Medicare, and  Medicaid, given the arrival of 70 million new retirees, the requirements of rebuilding the military for current and future wars, and requirements to compete with China, India, and Europe in the future.

As the Brookings-Heritage report says, “Our political leaders have been avoiding this enormous issue—largely because it requires that the public be told that not all past promises can be met. Our group has come together, from diverse points on the political spectrum, to sound an alarm: if America is to remain strong, such evasions must end. “

We must be there to send a different message: past promises CAN be met, and MUST be met.  But it was action in the streets and the workplace that won us those promises, and it will have to be action in the streets and the workplace that protect them.

After Bush's 2005 fiasco, Democrats and Republicans will join hands to privatize and cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in a more subtle way. Don't let your guard down!After Bush's 2005 fiasco, Democrats and Republicans will join hands to privatize and cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in a more subtle way. Don't let your guard down!

Connecticut Post, October 28, 2009

Immigrants: Conn. raid retaliation for ID cards

By John Christoffersen

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—Ten New Haven residents filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing federal agents of violating their rights during an immigration raid they say was in retaliation for a city program that provided ID cards to foreigners in the country illegally—the first of its kind in the nation.

The sweeps in New Haven on June 6, 2007, came two days after the city approved issuing identification cards to all of its residents, regardless of immigration status. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have denied that the early morning raids were retaliatory, saying planning began the year before.

“The New Haven raids were not a product of routine immigration enforcement,” the lawsuit states. “Hartford ICE agents deliberately chose to conduct raids in New Haven in retaliation for the city’s efforts to improve public safety for all its residents by integrating immigrants and Latinos into civic life.”

Spokesmen for the U.S. Attorney’s office and ICE declined comment, citing the pending lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, cites e-mails between federal officials that the residents say show hostility to the ID card program and an intent to stop it.

One e-mail from the U.S. Attorney’s Office on March 28, 2007 disclosed that an ICE official “had been talking to his headquarters about the fact that New Haven is becoming a sanctuary city.” On May 11, the ICE official held a conference call with several prosecutors to discuss how to address the “headaches in New Haven,” according to the lawsuit.

The comments took on a racially charged tone after a city committee approved the ID card program, the lawsuit alleges. “Yale is loading up the Amistad with illegal immigrants and sailing them to freedom, while (ICE counsel) openly weeps in Hartford,” an ICE attorney wrote, referring to the slave ship that was commandeered by African captives who eventually won their freedom.

An ICE official then drafted a letter to the city expressing concerns with the program and discouraging the mayor from implementing it, according to the lawsuit. ICE officials and the U.S. Attorney’s Office agreed to disguise their collaboration to make it look like the letter was coming from prosecutors instead of ICE, the lawsuit alleges. The defendants then planned their first and only raid of the year, including only 33 New Haven-area addresses in their target list when there were 5,500 outstanding warrants for fugitives, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit contends ICE’s retaliatory intent became clear after the raid when a spokesman declared, “There is truly no safe haven for fugitive aliens.”

The lawsuit alleges ICE agents broke into homes without search warrants or consent and arrested residents based on their race or ethnicity. When the girlfriend of one of those arrested asked where they were going during the raid, one of the agents laughed and taunted that they were going to a concert by Juan Gabriel, a famous Mexican singer, according to the lawsuit.

“ICE agents broke into my home without permission while I was still sleeping, pulled the covers from my bed, and arrested me for no reason,” Jose Solano-Yangua, a plaintiff, said in a statement. “I was terrified and humiliated.”

In June, a federal judge ruled that agents violated the constitutional rights of four immigrants in the raids. Immigration Judge Michael Straus said the ICE agents went into the immigrants’ homes without warrants, probable cause or their consent, and he put a stop to deportation proceedings against the four defendants, whose names were not released.

Immigration officials have denied claims that the 32 arrests that morning were improper, and they said the people who were arrested had been ordered by judges to leave the country. They said in court documents that they were allowed into the homes during the sweep. Witnesses have alleged in court documents that parents were arrested in front of their frightened children, agents refused to identify themselves and told people in the homes to shut up.

Yale Law School students are representing the immigrants. Of the 32 arrested, none are still in custody, according to the Yale students. Of the 19 that Yale represents, 4 agreed to leave the country, 10 are still fighting their cases and five won motions to suppress evidence, according to the students.

The lawsuit, which names former and current ICE officials as defendants, seeks damages and a judgment that the officials violated the Constitution.

RAWA: Since 2001 the opium cultivation increased over 4,400%. Under the US/NATO, Afghanistan became world largest opium producer, which produces 93% of world opium.

RAWA News, November 24, 2008

CIA, Heroin Still Rule Day in Afghanistan

“U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.”

By Victor Thorn

Opium fields in Afghanistan

Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).

The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.

Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.

Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan’s mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal. But according to historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. “Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.”   (Read Wikipedia on Alfred McCoy.)

Soon, as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, “CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.”

Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms. During his research, McCoy discovered that “the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”

By 1994, a new force emerged in the region—the Taliban—that took over the drug trade. Chossudovsky again discovered that “the Americans had secretly, and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI], supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.”

These strange bedfellows endured a rocky relationship until July 2000 when Taliban leaders banned the planting of poppies. This alarming development, along with other disagreements over proposed oil pipelines through Eurasia, posed a serious problem for power centers in the West. Without heroin money at their disposal, billions of dollars could not be funneled into various CIA black budget projects. Already sensing trouble in this volatile region, 18 influential neo-cons signed a letter in 1998 which became a blueprint for war—the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

Fifteen days after 9-11, CIA Director George Tenet sent his top-secret Special Operations Group (SOG) into Afghanistan. One of the biggest revelations in Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, was that CIA forces directed the Afghanistan invasion, not the Pentagon.

In the Jan. 26, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Douglas Waller describes Donald Rumsfeld’s reaction to this development. “When aides told Rumsfeld that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn’t go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent had lain the groundwork with local warlords, he erupted, ‘I have all these guys under arms, and we’ve got to wait like little birds in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?’”

ARMITAGE A MAJOR PLAYER

But the real operator in Afghanistan was Richard Armitage, a man whose legend includes being the biggest heroin trafficker in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War; director of the State Department’s Foreign Narcotics Control Office (a front for CIA drug dealing); head of the Far East Company (used to funnel drug money out of the Golden Triangle); a close liaison with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra cocaine-for-guns scandal; a primary Pentagon official in the terror and covert ops field under George Bush the Elder; one of the original signatories of the infamous PNAC document; and the man who helped CIA Director William Casey run weapons to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviet Union. Armitage was also stationed in Iran during the mid-1970s right before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah. Armitage may well be the greatest covert operator in U.S. history.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Armitage met with the UK’s national security advisor, Sir David Manning. Was Armitage “passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks”? The scenario is plausible because one day later—on 9-11—Dick Cheney directly called for Armitage’s presence down in his bunker. Immediately after WTC 2 was struck, Armitage told BBC Radio, “I was told to go to the operations center [where] I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice president.”

These two share a long history together. Not only was Armitage employed by Cheney’s former company Halliburton (via Brown & Root), he was also a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense under Bush the Elder. More importantly, Cheney and Armitage had joint business and consulting interests in the Central Asian pipeline which had been contracted by Unocal. The only problem standing between them and the Caspian Sea’s vast energy reserves was the Taliban.

Since the 1980s, Armitage amassed a huge roster of allies in Pakistan’s ISI. He was also one of the “Vulcans”—along with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim—who coordinated Bush’s geo-strategic foreign policy initiatives. Then, after 9-11, he negotiated with the Pakistanis prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, while also becoming Bush’s deputy secretary of state stationed in Afghanistan.

Our “enemy,” or course, was the Taliban “terrorists.” But George Tenet, Colin Powell, Porter Goss, and Armitage had developed a close relationship with Pakistan’s military head of the ISI—General Mahmoud Ahmad— who was cited in a Sept. 2001 FBI report as “supporting and financing the alleged 9-11 terrorists, as well as having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

The line between friend and foe gets even murkier. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only collaborated with the Taliban, but he was also on Unocal’s payroll in the mid-1990s. He is also described by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper as being “a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s that collaborated with the CIA in funding U.S. aid to the Taliban.”

Capturing a new, abundant source for heroin was an integral part of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hamid Karzai is a puppet ruler of the CIA; Afghanistan is a full-fledged narco-state; and the poppies that flourish there have yet to be eradicated, as was proven in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to destroy the crops, despite having the chance to do so. Major drug dealers are rarely arrested, smugglers enjoy carte blanche immunity, and Nushin Arbabzadah, writing for The Guardian, theorized that “U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.” Is that why the military protested so vehemently when reporters tried to photograph returning caskets?

CounterPunch, October 28, 2009

Brought to You by the CIA

America’s Drug Crisis

By DAVE LINDORFF

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.” Well, duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan). But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election, this time gave a critically important story full play, and even, appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where there was a heroin epidemic.

A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury newspaper, and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US, which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues to destroy African American and other poor communities across the country. (The Times role here was sordid—it and other leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—did despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his work and his career, and ultimately driving him to suicide, though his facts have held up. For the whole sordid tale, read Alex Cockburn’s and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press) In this case, Webb showed that the Agency was actually using the drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to ferry down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had barred the US from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by US forces in 20001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent of the world’s opium production—this at a time that the US effectively finances and runs the place, with an occupying army that, together with Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers the Taliban 12-1 according to a recent AP story.

The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade soon follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Your tax dollars at work.

The issue at this point should not be how many troops the US should add to its total in Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether the US should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting terrorists. It should be about how quickly the US can extricate its forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings into corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney General’s office will impanel a grand jury to probe CIA drug dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back “zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job, should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years we have been fed the story that the Taliban are being financed by their taxes on opium farmers. That may be partly true, but recently we’ve been learning that it’s not the real story. Taliban forces in Afghanistan, it turns out, have been heavily subsidized by protection money paid to them by civilian aid organizations, including even American government-funded aid programs, and even, reportedly, by the military forces of some of America’s NATO allies (there is currently a scandal in Italy concerning such payments by Italian forces). But beyond that, the opium industry, far from being controlled by the Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled by the very warlords with which the US has allied itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s own brother.

Karzai, we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen, was a key player in producing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots for his brother’s election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is whether the CIA might have played a role in that scam too. In a country where finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder whether an agency like the CIA, which has ready access to printers and to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control in Kabul.

Sure that’s idle speculation on my part, but when you learn that America’s spook agency has been keeping not just Karzai, but lots of other unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best illustrated by an anonymous quote in the Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen piece, where a “former CIA officer with experience in Afghanistan,” explaining the agency’s backing of Karzai, said, “Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

“The end justifies the means” is America’s foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to Afghanistan’s drug-kingpin presidential brother should be the last straw for Americans. President Obama’s “necessary” war in Afghanistan is nothing but a sick joke.

The opium, and resulting heroin, that is flooding into Europe and America thanks to the CIA’s active support of the industry and its owners in Afghanistan are doing far more grave damage to our societies than any turbaned terrorists armed with suicide bomb vests could hope to inflict.

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.

A note about Sen. John Kerry: Kerry (D-MA), who went to Afghanistan to press, for the Obama administration, to get his “good friend” President Karzai to agree to a run-off election after Karzai’s earlier theft of the first round, has played a shameful role here. Once, back when he still had an ounce of the principle that he had back when he was a Vietnam vet speaking out against the Indochina War, Kerry held hearings on the CIA’s cocaine-for-arms operation in Central America. Now he’s hugging the CIA’s drug connections.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

SF Gray Panthers Newsletter, November, 2009

You Are What They Feed You!

The way food is grown, controlled and marketed affects everything from cost to rising numbers of children with diabetes to environmental pollution and the waste of water resources. Lobbyists for agribusiness, an interlocking of chemical companies and a conglomerate of corporations, secure hundreds of billions in government subsidies to control research in universities and insure massive mono crops—chemically dependent farming. Every pound of food grown by agribusiness methods means a loss of six pounds of healthy soil. 500,000 tons of Monsanto and Dow petrochemicals are dumped on our food yearly. World food prices rose 80% last year, largely due to corporate speculation and hedge fund bidding on land leases in Africa, India, and Latin America. Corporate agribusiness farms replace small farms, displacing farmers. In India this has caused 200,000 farmers to commit suicide. One billion people are starving world-wide, not for the lack of food, but because corporate controls and speculation encourage exporting for profit rather than producing for local consumption.

The documentary, “Food, Inc,” exposes the tragedy of this corporate controlled food system through the story of a Mexican-American family, agonizing in a supermarket, not having money to buy fresh organic fruits and vegetables for the family. They resort to buying drive-in fast foods, trapped in the cycle of eating these so-called cheap foods as they must spend most of their income for the father’s diabetes medications. But a higher price is ultimately paid with the myriad of problems caused by chemically grown, GMO, toxic foods. Foods are artificially cheap only because of government subsidies supporting agribusiness. From 1995 to 2005, $164.7 billion in subsidies went to unhealthy, unsustainable farming.

Solutions must go beyond local involvement toward supporting sustainable farms and raising living standards for farm workers worldwide. The entire food system would transform globally by ending dependency on oil: no petrochemical fertilizers, no diesel farming equipment, drastically reduced carbon footprint, and an end to stock market speculation on oil pricing. We need food grown to feed people, not for the benefit of corporate food profiteers.

The Politics of Food:

The Straus Dairy in the Bay Area

The politics of food is a huge topic. The connections we used to have to our food sources— something so basic and important—have dramatically changed in the past 30-50 years. From a progressive perspective, these changes are disastrous. Food production is now industrialized, controlled by alarmingly few corporations and supported by government food and water policies that adversely affect us and the environment. We’re now part of a global food system.

To understand a piece of this in more manageable terms, we’re taking a look at the dairy industry in California, which now produces one quarter of the nation’s milk and over a million pounds of cheese daily. Cheap feed and water subsidies from both state and federal policies encourage mega-dairies.

The organic movement has grown over past decades, supporting food production that ensures the health of the land, animals, family farmers and consumers. Partly due to its growing demand, not even the organic label is safe; Dean Foods now controls 40% of conventional and 60% of all organic milk produced. Aurora Organic Dairy supplies organic label store brands to Safeway, Walmart and Trader Joe’s. Both Horizon (Dean) and Aurora have been sued over their failure to comply with organic standards on their industrial dairy farms. The USDA has ignored these violations.

Our speaker, Brie Johnson, is the communications director for Straus Family Dairy & Creamery, one of the Bay Area’s many examples of the organic model with products widely available to all of us. Albert Straus began the only organic dairy west of the Mississippi in the early nineties. With about 300 milk cows, he’s maintained a sustainable regional dairy and processor upholding the integrity of organic milk standards. Straus continues to develop a sustainable model of energy independence, reusable packaging and land stewardship.

As consumers, we vote with our wallets and can support local sustainable agricultural models. We can also pay attention to the ongoing struggles to produce good quality food, especially local food and food safety issues.

Washington Times, October 14, 2009

Insurer ends health program rather than pay out big

Ian Pearl has fought for his life every day of his 37 years. Confined to a wheelchair and hooked to a breathing tube, the muscular dystrophy victim refuses to give up.

But his insurance company already has.

Legally barred from discriminating against individuals who submit large claims, the New York-based insurer simply canceled lines of coverage altogether in entire states to avoid paying high-cost claims like Mr. Pearl’s.

In an e-mail, one Guardian Life Insurance Co. executive called high-cost patients such as Mr. Pearl “dogs” that the company could “get rid of.”

A federal court quickly ruled that the company’s actions were legal, so on Dec. 1, barring an order by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Pearl will lose his benefits.

His medical treatment costs $1 million a year.

Most of that is for ’round the clock, in-home nursing care – for operation of his ventilator, hourly breathing treatments and continuous intravenous medication.

(Corrected paragraph:) A Guardian spokesman said policies such as Mr. Pearl’s – which offered unlimited home nursing – had simply become too expensive for new small-business customers to buy, and that even Medicaid and Medicare do not cover 24-hour home nursing. His parents, Warren and Susan Pearl of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said their health insurance premiums had risen over the years to $3,700 a month.

As a last resort, Mr. Pearl would be admitted to a state hospital under Medicaid. But the Pearls consider that a death sentence.

“Ian would be lucky, or unlucky, to survive more than a matter of weeks or months,” Mrs. Pearl said. “One-on-one skilled nursing is essential.”

Her husband, 60, a wealthy businessman, said the couple have enough savings to pay for their son’s care for a few years, and after that, they could mortgage the family’s home.

The Pearls’ younger son, Matthew, is the best-selling author of “The Last Dickens,” a novel published this year by Random House.

“Ian and Matt spend hours on the phone discussing story lines. Matt uses Ian to bounce ideas off of,” Mrs. Pearl said.

Ian Pearl became the first wheelchair-bound pupil to be mainstreamed in the Broward County elementary schools, and he was elected president of his high school class at University School of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale.

He has Type II spinal muscular atrophy – which often kills victims in infancy. He grew to adulthood only to suffer respiratory arrest at 19. He has required a tracheal tube ever since.

He has been fortunate most of his life to be covered under the Guardian small-business health plan his father bought through his remodeling company, Warren Pearl Construction of New York City.

Generous by modern standards, the health insurance plan covered home nursing, something most small-business plans do not cover today.

Over the years, Guardian has scaled back the benefits in new types of plans it has offered, to the point where it no longer offers in-home nursing coverage.

In the state of New York, where Mr. Pearl’s business operates, 54 other employers offered the Guardian plan. Their policies covered nearly 500 employees and dependents, including two other severely ill people.

The Pearls moved to Fort Lauderdale 30 years ago because the humidity there is beneficial to their son. Warren Pearl has commuted back and forth from New York every weekend since.

He said Guardian has for years used private investigators to find pretexts to deny coverage. An investigator came to their door, he said, to get proof that he does in fact fly back and forth to New York and that his two-employee company really operates in New York. Investigators went to Mr. Pearl’s job sites.

“The insurance companies are cheating in order to have obscene profits,” he said.

Guardian, a 150-year-old mutual company, reported profits of $437 million last year, a 50 percent increase over $292 million in 2007. It paid dividends of $723 million to policyholders and had $4.3 billion in capital reserves, according to its annual report. The company’s investment income totaled $1.5 billion that year, a small increase from the year earlier.

The insurer also canceled similar policies in New Jersey and South Carolina, and earlier ceased offering any health plans in Colorado, but did not cancel all of the policies in every state in which they were offered, said John Fried, the Pearls’ attorney. The company took the action only against those plans where claims were highest, he said.

The insurer discontinued the coverage late last year, but was required by law to continue paying for Ian Pearl’s care for another year.

In 2006, Guardian began an initiative called Moving Forward, which was “designed to increase Guardian’s competitive position by reducing what it paid out in claims,” wrote Judge William Pauley, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in his summary judgment in Guardian’s favor in July.

The move would help the company lower overall rates to compete better for more business.

The judge found that the company had not violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), because it canceled entire policy lines. The Pearls also claimed Guardian violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but the judge found that only HHS can enforce that law and that private citizens cannot sue under it.

The Pearls appealed to HHS under the Bush administration and were told the agency could do nothing, Warren Pearl said.

They petitioned again in a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Oct. 5, with support from their congresswoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, but have not heard back.

Contacted by The Washington Times last week, the agency said, “Our Department has been contacted by the Pearl family and we have heard their very serious concerns. We are actively investigating this matter.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, is also investigating, the Pearls said. The committee held hearings on benefit cancellations earlier this year.

Spokesmen for Mr. Waxman and Ms. Wasserman Schultz did not respond to requests for comment.

In an e-mail to four other Guardian executives entered into evidence in the Pearls’ suit, company Vice President Tim Birely discussed how the company could “eliminate this entire block to get rid of the few dogs.”

He concluded, “Paul [Saylor], keep in mind that my intent is to be as narrow and laser-like as possible. We may need to broaden some things in NY due to state of domicile and some historical [nonsense] with some of these policyholders.”

Asked about the use of the phrases such as “get rid of” and “dogs,” Guardian spokesman Richard Jones said, “I’m not aware of any language related to any of the things that you just mentioned, no.”

He said plans such as Mr. Pearl’s had simply become too expensive to market to employers.

“We certainly sympathize with [Mr. Pearl's]’s condition. As a business, though, we have to offer plans that enough customers want,” Mr. Jones said.

“But in this particular case the expense of the plan meant that most small businesses were not able or were not willing to purchase it. As a result we started offering different plans,” he said.

“This has been through the courts. Guardian’s activities were upheld by the courts as well as by the New York State Department of Insurance.

“We certainly don’t think this particular case has anything to do with health care reform,” Mr. Jones said.

Mr. Fried argues in his appeal that Judge Pauley misinterpreted the ERISA law.

“I think we’re entitled to a trial as to whether Guardian’s discontinuation of its policy was in effect discrimination against Ian Pearl,” he said.

The Pearls say they are out for justice.

“This is a matter of life and death for my son,” Warren Pearl said. “I have to have faith that HHS will enforce the law.

“This is attempted murder, as far as I’m concerned. They targeted us, they never expected to get caught. I believe that justice will prevail.”

CounterPunch, October 26, 2009

When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home

By BILL QUIGLEY and DEBORAH POPOWSKI

The Louisiana Board that licenses psychologists is facing a growing legal fight over torture and medical care at the infamous Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired colonel Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a U.S. prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women’s panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort “to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown.”  As he recounts in his memoir, Fixing Hell, Dr. James initially chose not to respond.  He “opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason…”

Although he claims to eventually find “good reason” to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

Sadly, the story of Dr. James’ complicity in prisoner abuse does not end there.  The New Orleans native and former LSU psychology professor admits to overseeing the detention, interrogation and health care of three boys, aged twelve to fourteen, who were disappeared to Guantanamo and held without charge or access to counsel or their families. In Fixing Hell and elsewhere, Dr. James proudly proclaims that he was in a position of authority at Guantanamo.

Government records indicate that, as the senior psychologist consulting on interrogations, his decisions affected the policy and operations of interrogations and detention on the base.  During his time there, reports of beatings, sexual abuse, religious humiliation and sleep deprivation during interrogations were widespread, and draconian isolation was official policy.  Prisoners suffered, and some continue to suffer, devastating physical and psychological harm.

Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist under an ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February 2008.

Dr. Bond’s complaint says that Dr. James’ conduct violated Louisiana laws governing his psychology license.  As a psychologist and military colonel, he had a duty to avoid harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain informed consent, as well as to prevent and punish the misconduct of his subordinates.

How did the Louisiana licensing board respond?  Rather than investigate, the Board dismissed the complaint, and when asked again, reaffirmed its decision.  Dr. Bond has now taken the case to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge.  Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention in the notorious prison camps built to hold men and boys captured during the U.S. “War on Terror.”

According to his own statements, he was a senior member of interrogation consulting teams that, as documented by government records, were central in designing interrogation plans that exploited psychological and physical weaknesses of individual detainees.  In one example cited by the New York Times, a military health professional told interrogators that “the detainee’s medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.”

Had Dr. James chosen to cast himself as a brave, but ultimately ineffective voice against torture, he may have fooled some people into believing him. Instead, he’s presented an utterly implausible portrait: one of a man “chosen” by “the nation” to “fix the hell” of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a feat he claims to have accomplished so successfully that ever since he was first deployed in January 2003, “where ever [sic] we have had psychologists no abuses have been reported.”

This is patently untrue.  The real “fact of the matter,” as documented by government records, reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and eyewitness accounts, is that serious abuses were widespread both during Dr. James’ tenure as senior psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, and after he left.

One would imagine that such disregard for a law designed to protect the public welfare would greatly concern the body charged with its enforcement. But the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which issued James his license, has refused to investigate whether he violated professional misconduct law.

The Board’s conduct should alarm all Louisiana health professionals and their patients.  The Board demeans the profession when it fails to seriously address the possibility that a Louisiana licensee was involved in torture.  It also strips the Louisiana psychology license of meaning and value.

How can patients rely on a license issued and enforced by a body that arbitrarily refuses to look into allegations of grave misconduct?

As the legal battle wears on, the people of Louisiana need to ask the Board’s members what “good reason” they await in order to act. They should demand that the Board of Examiners conduct a thorough investigation of Larry James and, if what he admits is true, revoke his privilege to practice.

Bill Quigley is a Loyola Law professor working at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Deborah Popowski is a Skirball Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. Both authors are involved with the campaign When Healers Harm: Hold Health Professionals Accountable for Torture, see http://whenhealersharm.org/

Bill can be contacted at quigley77@gmail.com.

Deborah can be contacted at dpopowski@law.harvard.edu.

By BILL QUIGLEY and DEBORAH POPOWSKI

The Louisiana Board that licenses psychologists is facing a growing legal fight over torture and medical care at the infamous Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired colonel Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a U.S. prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women’s panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort “to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown.” As he recounts in his memoir, Fixing Hell, Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He “opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason…”

Although he claims to eventually find “good reason” to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

Sadly, the story of Dr. James’ complicity in prisoner abuse does not end there. The New Orleans native and former LSU psychology professor admits to overseeing the detention, interrogation and health care of three boys, aged twelve to fourteen, who were disappeared to Guantanamo and held without charge or access to counsel or their families. In Fixing Hell and elsewhere, Dr. James proudly proclaims that he was in a position of authority at Guantanamo.

Government records indicate that, as the senior psychologist consulting on interrogations, his decisions affected the policy and operations of interrogations and detention on the base. During his time there, reports of beatings, sexual abuse, religious humiliation and sleep deprivation during interrogations were widespread, and draconian isolation was official policy. Prisoners suffered, and some continue to suffer, devastating physical and psychological harm.

Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist under an ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February 2008.

Dr. Bond’s complaint says that Dr. James’ conduct violated Louisiana laws governing his psychology license. As a psychologist and military colonel, he had a duty to avoid harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain informed consent, as well as to prevent and punish the misconduct of his subordinates.

How did the Louisiana licensing board respond? Rather than investigate, the Board dismissed the complaint, and when asked again, reaffirmed its decision. Dr. Bond has now taken the case to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge. Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention in the notorious prison camps built to hold men and boys captured during the U.S. “War on Terror.”

According to his own statements, he was a senior member of interrogation consulting teams that, as documented by government records, were central in designing interrogation plans that exploited psychological and physical weaknesses of individual detainees. In one example cited by the New York Times, a military health professional told interrogators that “the detainee’s medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.”

Had Dr. James chosen to cast himself as a brave, but ultimately ineffective voice against torture, he may have fooled some people into believing him. Instead, he’s presented an utterly implausible portrait: one of a man “chosen” by “the nation” to “fix the hell” of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a feat he claims to have accomplished so successfully that ever since he was first deployed in January 2003, “where ever [sic] we have had psychologists no abuses have been reported.”

This is patently untrue. The real “fact of the matter,” as documented by government records, reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and eyewitness accounts, is that serious abuses were widespread both during Dr. James’ tenure as senior psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, and after he left.

One would imagine that such disregard for a law designed to protect the public welfare would greatly concern the body charged with its enforcement. But the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which issued James his license, has refused to investigate whether he violated professional misconduct law.

The Board’s conduct should alarm all Louisiana health professionals and their patients. The Board demeans the profession when it fails to seriously address the possibility that a Louisiana licensee was involved in torture. It also strips the Louisiana psychology license of meaning and value.

How can patients rely on a license issued and enforced by a body that arbitrarily refuses to look into allegations of grave misconduct?

As the legal battle wears on, the people of Louisiana need to ask the Board’s members what “good reason” they await in order to act. They should demand that the Board of Examiners conduct a thorough investigation of Larry James and, if what he admits is true, revoke his privilege to practice.

Bill Quigley is a Loyola Law professor working at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Deborah Popowski is a Skirball Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. Both authors are involved with the campaign When Healers Harm: Hold Health Professionals Accountable for Torture, see http://whenhealersharm.org/

Bill can be contacted at quigley77@gmail.com.

Deborah can be contacted at dpopowski@law.harvard.edu.

BBC News, Washington, October 25, 2009

Exposing the colour of prejudice

By Kevin Connolly

Griffin exposed the discrimination prevalent in the Deep South

Griffin exposed the discrimination prevalent in the Deep South

How much does the colour of our skin make us who we are, and shape the way the world sees us?

The answer to that question may seem obvious now after decades of slow and uneven progress towards racial equality and enlightenment.

It would have seemed very different 50 years ago to the white Texan writer John Howard Griffin, when he embarked on one of the most remarkable one-man social and psychological experiments in history.

Griffin was the white man who fooled hundreds of Americans into believing he was a black man as he travelled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia – and who felt at first hand the bigotry that meant.

In later life, the six-week venture – described in his book Black Like Me – was to expose him to the hatred and violence that underpinned that bigotry, too.

When he toured the South lecturing to white audiences about his experiences as a black man, he was threatened, intimidated and, on at least one occasion, seriously beaten.

Widespread discrimination

In the American Deep South in 1959, to be black was to be despised – to be treated as something less than human.

There was the grinding poverty, of course, and the segregation and legalised discrimination which reserved certain railroad cars, bus seats and drinking fountains for the whites.

But there were humiliations that ran deeper still. In some states, black men accused of looking at white women with lust in their hearts could be arrested under laws which made “ogling” a form of sexual assault.

In others, “eyeballing” laws meant that failing to look down at the sidewalk when white folks passed by could lead to a charge of behaving in a confrontational way.

As part of his research, Griffin worked as a ’shoe shine boy’

Black performers – if they were ever hired by Southern theatres – were reminded in their contracts not to look at white women in the audiences.

John Howard Griffin was a remarkable man. As a Texan teenager who found himself in France at the outbreak of World War II, he helped to smuggle Jewish children to safety and freedom.

He then served with distinction in the US Air Force in the Pacific. And then, after the war – when illness struck him blind for 10 years while he was still relatively young – he became a prolific writer.

It was after his sight returned that he hit upon the idea of Black Like Me, the work which is his most important legacy.

The whole business of racial impersonation might make us feel vaguely uncomfortable now, but in 1959 a black writer simply could not have found an audience for such a graphic portrayal of African-American grievance.

Only a white writer prepared to take the extraordinary steps that Griffin took could tell the story.

His biographer Robert Bonazzi – who went on to marry Griffin’s widow – told me how in practical terms the white Texan set up transforming himself into a black Southerner.

These tools were used in the past to dehumanise

Hilary Shelton

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

“He took a drug called Oxsoralen, which is to combat vitiligo.

“In other words, black people if they get white splotches on their skin they would take this medicine to cover the white splotches. And he was told by a dermatologist that if he took massive doses of this and got under an ultra violet sunlamp – which he did – he would turn quite brown, which he did.”

Griffin’s grim adventures as a black man in a white man’s world are worth reading. They remain a set text for many American high school children.

The work raises all sorts of interesting questions, not just about life in the states of the old confederacy nearly 100 years after the American Civil War, but also about race and identity.

After all, if Griffin could fool white people to the extent that they were prepared to mistreat him, then it is fair to conclude that the colour of our skin does not have much to do with the content of our character.

Griffin’s experiment probably stands alone in history as a benign example of racial impersonation – but by a curious coincidence, exactly 50 years on we see a couple of examples of the darker form of the tradition which remind you that progress towards that age of racial enlightenment is still very uneven indeed.

Modern ‘blackface’

First, French Vogue published a photograph of a white model painted black – raising the rather obvious question of why they did not simply use a model with black skin.

I suspect you will wait rather a long time to see Vogue using pictures of someone with another natural skin tone painted white.

And then, on a talent show in Australia, a group of men did an “impression” of the Jackson Five in black make-up, or blackface, that would not have been out of place in an Alabama minstrel show in the 1890s.

Interestingly, the American entertainer Harry Connick Jr was there as a guest judge and was thus able to explain to the Australian audience what the performance looked like to other eyes.

The author passed unnoticed in the black neighbourhoods of New Orleans

He said simply: “I know it was done humorously but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons that when we see something like that we take it really to heart and I know it was in good fun but if I had known it was going to be part of the show I probably, I definitely wouldn’t have done it.”

It may seem strange to be marking Black History month (which in the UK, unlike in the US and Canada, is celebrated in October) by reporting breaches against good taste that seem to belong to another age.

It is 31 years since the BBC stopped broadcasting its own contribution to this unhappy genre – the Black and White Minstrel Show.

I asked Hilary Shelton of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to put into words what he must have hoped would be obvious by now.

He told me: “These tools were used in the past to dehumanise. In the US and Great Britain we share common experiences with race relations that make us a bit more sensitive to what it means to put someone in blackface, to put a caricature wig of an African-American on one’s head, to exaggerate the size of one’s lips or the size of one’s nose.”

Noble intent

Blackface was for years a staple of mainstream entertainment rooted in the minstrel shows of 19th-Century America.

Big stars like Bing Crosby and Judy Garland have appeared in blackface and one of the biggest of them all, Al Jolson, rarely appeared without it.

More highbrow examples of the “art” – Laurence Olivier playing Othello for example – seem to me to raise subtly different questions which are certainly worth exploring, although perhaps not within the confines of this article.

It is, by now, forgotten more or less (unless you buy French Vogue or watch Australian talent shows, of course) so it is a little depressing to find it cropping up in Black History Month and on the anniversary of John Howard Griffin’s challenging odyssey through Old Dixie.

At least it serves a purpose though – it reminds us that Griffin’s experiment was perhaps the only occasion on which one man assumed the race of another with noble intent.

It is worth reading what he wrote – and then reflecting, in this age of the first African-American president, on how far we have come.

And how far we have to go.

Photos by Don Rutledge from Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, published by Souvenir Press

SF Gray Panthers, October 11, 2009

Existing healthcare bills have a huge effect on Medicare’s financing

In response to the New York Times blog “Current Health Care Legislation Will Not Control Medical Costs, Experts Warn” a representative of the San Francisco Gray Panthers wrote:

Existing bills have a huge effect on Medicare’s financing, which is approaching crisis, with the Part A Trust Fund running out in 2017.

Existing bills for reducing growth in healthcare costs and insuring many uninsured plan to finance these changes mostly from reducing anticipated growth in Medicare costs, even though the anticipated growth in Medicare costs is known to come mainly from cost growth in healthcare generally, rather than the growth in the number of seniors. This unfairly targets seniors for healthcare cuts.

Many health experts say cost-containment strategies advanced by government, such as preventive and primary care, comparing drugs and treatments for effectiveness, systematic care of chronic disease, and electronic medical records, would give us better care, but would not save much money.

Existing bills do NOT incorporate measures that would effectively reduce healthcare costs, such as eliminating insurance companies (single-payer), hard government negotiation of drug prices and hospital costs, or paying doctors on salary so they have no incentives to over-treat us or under-treat us.

The main Medicare cost saving spelled out so far, eliminating overpayments to HMO-based Medicare Advantage programs, is justified but it covers less than half of the hundreds of billions in ten-year cost savings demanded from Medicare, leaving open questions about the remainder of cost savings.

The Senate Finance Committee bill, currently the center of gravity in legislative negotiations because it is the least expensive, calls for greater cost savings in Medicare payments to hospitals than in elimination of Medicare Advantage overpayments, and creates a Commission to permanently contain Medicare expenses, whose recommendations would take effect unless overruled by lawmakers.

Other proposed Medicare cost-containment measures could have uncertain outcomes, such as bundled payments to be split between doctors, hospitals and managers for individual patient episodes like hip replacements; benefits like co-ordination of care could be outweighed by aggressive cost cutting.

HR 3200’s Medicare-friendly provisions, like eliminating major cuts scheduled for Medicare doctors, eliminating co-pays and deductibles for preventive care, reducing the Part D doughnut hole, and increasing Part B and D premium assistance, may be lost as in the legislative fight to add benefits to the Senate Finance Committee bill.

I believe Medicare’s financial sustainability is best achieved by extending it to all, so the 80 % of us not needing expensive care now will pay in, and be assured that Medicare will be there when we need it.