by Jay Bookman - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain's statement in the debate that ACORN and the liberals are "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy" is probably the most overwrought, ridiculous statement by a major-party nominee in living memory.
If you make a charge that serious, you better have something to back it up. McCain has nothing. Nada zero zilch.
There is no evidence of any attempt to rig or steal this election. Just think about the scale of the effort it would take to do what McCain describes.
On a statewide level, you would need an army of thousands of co-conspirators willing and able to vote repeatedly and illegally just to have any hope whatsoever of altering the outcome, and according to the GOP fantasy, those thousands consist of homeless drunks and drunk addicts.
Yet out of this alleged conspiracy of thousands in which lowlife drunks and dopers play a large part, the GOP and its allies in the Justice Department and other governnment agencies can't find a single participant willing to admit to the conspiracy and cough up the truth?
To rational people, that would suggest that no such conspiracy exists. But rationality has nothing to do with it.
There's something in the psyche of the GOP base that needs to believe they are victims of some ill-defined but clearly treacherous group plotting against them and the country. How else can they explain the fact that they're losing? It can't be because they have proved themselves incompetent at governance, or that they have lost touch with the reality of life in 21st century America. There has to be some other reason, and if there isn't they'll invent one.
In the 2006 cycle, that need was fulfilled by Moveon. org. The rightwing blogs and punditocracy couldn't utter a paragraph without weaving Moveon into their narrative somehow. It was never quite clear how Moveon could possibly do all the nefarious things it was alleged to be doing, but that uncertainty made the right-wing fantasy all the more alluring.
This year, Moveon still exists - it's still doing what it was doing before, yet the group is rarely if even mentioned. That's because ACORN has now been cast to replace it in the role of designated villain.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Ohio Republicans in their effort to try to challenge 200,000 voters. Two hundred thousand!! Republican officials fear the verdict of the American people. They fear the wrath of those Americans drawn into political participation by anger at the direction that the GOP has tried to take their country. And they are trying desperately, frantically, to try to prevent that verdict from being delivered.
Seventeen days to election day.
AlterNet
From intimidating minority voters to whipping up racism and hatred at political rallies, the GOP has pulled out all the stops.
As Arianna Huffington warns Democrats, an increasingly desperate John McCain and the GOP are throwing the kitchen sink at Barack Obama. No wonder they called Joe the Plumber. So this week brought racist mailers, a tidal wave of robo-calls, more Bill Ayers, Sarah Palin's love of the "pro-American areas of this great nation" and McCain's outlandish claim that ACORN is "destroying the fabric of democracy."
Reed Hundt from Talking Points Memo writes, "The McCain plan will be to give up on the national popular vote and re-run the Bush campaign of 2000. By voter intimidation and robo-calls and litigation and outrageous allegations, it will aim for victory in the states that can provide an Electoral College victory. In this case, that means McCain will focus his diminished but vigorous efforts on Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Virginia. In each state we need hardly ask what images, stereotypes and fears the McCain campaign will hope to evoke."
The attacks by McCain and his surrogates are already at fever pitch -- and there is clearly a tidal wave on its way:
1. Rush Limbaugh's Racist Tactics: Bringing this toxic collection together in one despicable no-goodie bag was Rush Limbaugh, who charged that Obama -- aided and abetted by Ayers and ACORN -- is "smack dab in the middle" of a 30-year plot to teach black children to "hate, hate, hate" America.
2. Racist Attacks on Immigration: Sarah Posner for the American Prospect's blog writes: "A newly formed political action committee, the National Republican Trust PAC, is buying up e-mail blasts to the readers of conservative outlets like Newsmax and Townhall to raise money for what it calls a 'shock and awe' advertising blitz against Barack Obama in key states in the last weeks of the campaign. One of the e-mails uses the screamer headline, 'Obama's Plan: Mohamed Atta Gets His Drivers License,' while another says Republicans should 'employ Hillary Clinton's strategy' to 'expose Obama for the dangerous radical he is.'" The PAC was founded by Scott Wheeler, a former correspondent for the Moonie-owned Insight magazine, and Peter Leitner, a former Pentagon adviser and president of the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center, which trains law enforcement personnel on counterterrorism.
3. Robo-Calls: John McCain and the GOP have launched a massive robo-call effort across the country that the normally soft-spoken Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called "scummy:" "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he's surprised at 'scummy' tactics employed by Republican John McCain's presidential campaign and 'can't believe John McCain knows what's going on.'" And Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins decried the robo-calls last week: "These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics," said Collins' spokesman, Kevin Kelley. "Sen. Collins urges the McCain campaign to stop these calls immediately."
The robo-calls, sent Thursday in several states, said Obama "worked closely with domestic terrorist" Ayers. Obama, a child when Ayers was active in the Weather Underground in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has denounced Ayers' radical views and activities.
The robo-call message was repeated in a campaign flier mailed this week by the Nevada Republican Party. The four-page mailer calls Ayers a "terrorist, radical friend of Obama" and contains several images of both men.
On "Fox News Sunday," on Oct. 19, McCain defended himself to Fox Host Chris Wallace:
Wallace: But Senator, back, if I may, back in 2000 when you were the target of robo-calls, you called these hate calls and you said --
McCain: They were.
Wallace: And you said the following: "I promise you I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic." Now you've hired the same guy who did the robo-calls against you to, reportedly, to do the robo-calls against Obama, and the Republican senator Susan Collins, the co-chair of your campaign in Maine, has asked you to stop the robo-calls. Will you do that?
McCain: Of course not. These are legitimate and truthful, and they are far different than the phone calls that were made about my family and about certain aspects that -- things that this is -- this is dramatically different and either you haven't -- didn't see those things in 2000.
Wallace: No, I saw them.
McCain: Or you don't know the difference between that and what is a legitimate issue, and that is Senator Obama being truthful with the American people.
4. Widespread Voter Intimidation: AlterNet's Steve Rosenfeld reported on the widespread efforts by Republicans at various state offices to intimidate voters: "As the presidential election comes to a close, the Republican Party -- and its allies in law enforcement at the FBI and at county levels in Ohio -- are announcing voting-related prosecutions that civil rights advocates say are intended to intimidate voters, despite prosecutorial rules that bar these disclosures before an election." Recently in Wisconsin, Democrats accused the state GOP of trying to "intimidate voters by seeking people with military and law enforcement experience to watch Milwaukee polls on Election Day." In a recent e-mail, the state GOP director of Election Day operations, Jon Waclawski, said he was looking specifically for names of "Milwaukee area veterans, policemen, security personnel, firefighters, etc." Rosenfeld reports that a potentially much larger intimidation effort is on its way:
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court told Ohio's Republican Party it was not entitled to a list of 200,000-plus Ohioans whose voter registration information did not match Social Security and state driver's license databases. What did the Ohio party do? It went judge shopping, filing a closely related suit before Ohio's Supreme Court. Pennsylvania's GOP filed a similar suit on Friday. In Wisconsin, litigation on this issue is ongoing. Why are Republicans so intent on obtaining this information? ...
In recent weeks, the McCain-Palin campaign and Republican Party have embarked on a major media and litigation strategy to cast as much doubt as possible on the veracity of the 2008 vote. A look at the campaign's recent messaging and GOP tactics from Ohio's 2004 election suggest another use for the non-match lists: to target voters for mass phone calls, mailings or other messaging to deter them from voting on Nov. 4.
5. RNC Sends out Preposterous Mailer Suggesting Obama Hates Newborn Children:
Sam Stein at the Huffinton Post reports: The Republican National Committee is blasting out a new mailer charging that Barack Obama opposed a bill protecting newborns that survived botched abortions from being "left alone to die" in the operating room.
Two readers in North Carolina passed along the literature, which they received on Saturday.
The charge, which has been made many times before (including in a series of robo-calls earlier this week), is based on Obama's opposition to the Born-Alive Infant Protection bill. A review by PolitiFact found the accusation "false." Obama opposed the measure not based on a callous position on abortion rights, but because he wanted to ensure that there were measures to protect doctors from criminal lawsuits, among other factors. Illinois law already required doctors to provide immediate life-saving care to such infants.
The sole source of the mailer is an article from The Weekly Standard, and it paints Obama as far more extreme than other senior Democrats, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
6. Smears on ACORN:
In the past few weeks the McCain campaign and its Republican allies have launched a series of vicious attacks against ACORN, accusing the social-justice organization of everything from causing the financial crisis to perpetuating voter fraud. Republicans are also playing up the basically nonexistent link between Obama and ACORN in an attempt to paint the Democratic candidate as untrustworthy.
In the third presidential debate, McCain preposterously accused ACORN of "perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." On Friday, Palin made the vague yet sinister-sounding claim that "this group needs to learn that you here in Ohio won't let them turn the Buckeye State into the Acorn State." An ad released by the McCain campaign on Friday ominously asked, "Who is Barack Obama? ... He was asked to train the ACORN staff. What did ACORN in Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. ... ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today."
These attacks have no bearing on reality. While ACORN has come under fire for submitting fraudulent registration forms -- an inevitable outcome of any voter registration effort -- elections experts agree that the group's activities will not lead to voter fraud on Election Day. As Rick Hasen notes, "Even if Mickey Mouse is registering, he is not showing up on Election Day to cast ballots, and so far as I am aware, there have been no cases of phony voter registrations leading to the casting of votes in any election that have been on any large scale -- much less affected the outcome of elections." The claim that ACORN somehow helped trigger the financial crisis is equally absurd: For years, ACORN has helped working-class families buy homes while fighting to protect them from predatory lenders.
7. Outrage and Barbarism at McCain-Palin Rallies:
David Neiwert writes, "It was kind of strange, dintcha think, that John McCain came to the defense of his supporters last night after Barack Obama pointed out that people at McCain/Palin rallies were shouting out 'terrorist' and 'kill him!' in reference to Obama." An Al Jazeera camera crew caught the honest sentiments of McCain/Palin supporters at an Ohio rally:
I'm afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He's not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?
When you got a Negra running for president, you need a first-stringer. He's definitely a second-stringer.
He seems like a sheep -- or a wolf in sheep's clothing, to be honest with you. And I believe Palin -- she's filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she's gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.
8. McCain Hires Slimeball GOP Operative Who Sank His Own Chances in 2000 in South Carolina:
Jake Tapper of ABC writes:
ABC News has learned that Warren Tompkins, one of the strategists of then-Gov. George W. Bush's South Carolina campaign in 2000 -- which Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., blamed for his family being slimed -- is now a part of the McCain-Palin campaign team, albeit in an "unofficial" role.
Tompkins, a protégé of Lee Atwater, has been dispatched to North Carolina to assess the state for the McCain-Palin campaign, Southern GOP strategists tell ABC News.
... The news of Tompkins being brought on board the McCain campaign brings to a total of three the number of GOP operatives McCain now is using despite the fact that he once held them responsible for the ugly campaign that contributed to his South Carolina primary defeat, a campaign in which McCain's wife Cindy was attacked for her past addiction to painkillers, and the McCains' adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget, was targeted as his illegitimate black baby.
9. Insider Whispering Campaign That Obama Is Really a Muslim:
In his interview on Meet the Press, Colin Powell made three separate references to Republican Party operatives spreading rumors and lies around:
"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim."
"I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.'"
"John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I'm troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions."
10. Insinuating that Obama's Gigantic Small Donor Fundraising Operation Is "Dangerous:"
Perhaps overwhelmed and frightened by Obama's $150 million haul from September, McCain argued that Obama's fundraising totals -- $605 million -- showed the "dam has broken" for future White House races. McCain also complained that the identities of people who contributed more than $200 million of Obama's total take have not been reported, although that is allowable under federal law because the individual donations fall under the $200 reporting limit. "I'm saying it's laying a predicate for the future that can be very dangerous," McCain said. "History shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal."
What Angry Obama Supporters Are Doing to Stop These Attacks:
Fighting the mainstream media's attempt to have a close race, and a potential come-from-behind narrative, the media will in some cases intensify the ugly allegations made against the Obama campaign and its allies and supporters and treat it as news, or just outright ignore the stories too hot for the media to touch. Reed Hundt of Talking Points Memo argues that "Democrats need to knock on every door in those key states; respond to every charge, no matter how crazy, in every media forum that can be found; stay on the air; stay on the offense. And remember the essential voters in those key states won't finally decide until the weekend before that Tuesday."
Violent reactions are bubbling up across the country to new economic realities.
On October 4, 2008, in the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles, Karthik Rajaram, beset by financial troubles, shot his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons before turning the gun on himself. In one of his two suicide notes, Rajaram wrote that he was "broke," having incurred massive financial losses in the economic meltdown. "I understand he was unemployed, his dealings in the stock market had taken a disastrous turn for the worse," said Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Michel R. Moore.
The fallout from the current subprime mortgage debacle and the economic one that followed has thrown lives into turmoil across the country. In recent days, the Associated Press, ABC News, and others have begun to address the burgeoning body count, especially suicides attributed to the financial crisis. (Note that, months ago, Barbara Ehrenreich raised the issue in the Nation.)
Suicide is, however, just one type of extreme act for which the financial meltdown has seemingly been the catalyst. Since the beginning of the year, stories of resistance to eviction, armed self-defense, canicide, arson, self-inflicted injury, murder, as well as suicide, especially in response to the foreclosure crisis, have bubbled up into the local news, although most reports have gone unnoticed nationally -- as has any pattern to these events.
While it's impossible to know what factors, including deeply personal ones, contribute to such extreme acts, violent or otherwise, many do seem undeniably linked to the present crisis. This is hardly surprising. Rates of stress, depression, and suicide invariably climb in times of economic turmoil. As Kathleen Hall, founder and CEO of the Stress Institute in Atlanta, told USA Today's Stephanie Armour earlier this year, "Suicides are very much tied to the economy."
With predictions of a long and deep recession now commonplace, it's not too soon to begin looking for these patterns among the human tragedies already sprouting amid the financial ruins. Troubling trends are to be expected in the years ahead, especially as hundreds of thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, their families often already under enormous stress, are coming home to scenarios of joblessness and, in some cases, homelessness. Consider this, then, an attempt to look for early anecdotal signs of the fallout from hard times, the results, in this case, of a review of local press reports from across the nation, some tiny but potentially indicative of larger American tragedies, and all suggesting a pattern that is likely to grow more pronounced.
Extreme Evictions
In February, when a sheriff's deputy went to serve an eviction notice on a home owner in Greeley, Colorado, he found the man had slashed his wrists and was lying in a pool of blood. Rushed to a nearby hospital, the man survived, while the Sheriff's office tried to downplay economic reasons for the incident, saying, according to the Denver Post, that "it wasn't linking the suicide attempt to the eviction because the man had known for a week that he was to be kicked out."
In March, Ocala, Florida resident Roland Gore killed his dog and his wife, set fire to his home which was in foreclosure, and then killed himself.
In April, Robert McGuinness, a 24-year-old process server, arrived at the Marion County, Florida doorstep of Frank W. Conrad. According to an article in the local Star Banner, the 82-year-old Conrad was reportedly "cordial" at first. When McGuinness produced the foreclosure notice, however, Conrad got angry and left the room. He returned with a .38 caliber pistol and announced, "You have two seconds to get off my property or you will go to the hospital." Marion County sheriff's deputies later arrested Conrad.
On June 3rd, agents of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) set out to inform New Orleans resident Eric Minshew that he would be evicted from his "Katrina" trailer. After Minshew threatened them, the FEMA employees called the police. When they arrived, Minshew allegedly threatened them as well and "locked himself in his partially-gutted home, adjacent to his trailer." A SWAT team was called in and tear-gassed the man. Interviewed by the Times-Picayune, local resident Tiffany Flores said, "Some SWAT members told my husband they had never seen anyone withstand that much tear gas." The standoff went on for hours before "an assault team of tactical officers" invaded the home. Though Minshew opened fire, they eventually cornered him on the upper floor. When -- they claimed -- he refused to drop his weapon, they gunned him down.
That same day, in Multnomah County, Oregon, sheriff's deputies served an eviction notice on a desperate tenant. According to Deputy Travis Gullberg, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Public Information Officer, the evictee promptly pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it at his head before being disarmed by the deputies.
Hard Times
Recently, according to the Los Angeles Times, Rich Paul, a vice president at ValueOptions Inc., which handles mental health referrals, said that over the last year stress-related calls arising from foreclosures or financial hardship had gone up 200% in California. Similarly, Dr. Mason Turner, chief of psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco Medical Center, reported "a fourfold increase in psychiatric admissions at his hospital during August, with roughly 60% of patients saying financial stress contributed to their problems."
Of course, many victims of the linked economic crises never receive treatment. In July, Sacramento County Sheriff's Deputy Mark Habecker told the Sacramento Bee that twice this year "homeowners about to be evicted have committed suicide as he approached to do a lockout." In another case, he said, "a fellow Sacramento deputy found a note in the home that told him where to find the foreclosed homeowner's body." The Bee reported that such cases "received no publicity when they happened," which raises the question of just how many similar suicides have gone unreported nationwide.
In July, when police delivered an eviction notice at the Middleburg, Florida home of George and Bonnie Mangum, the couple barricaded themselves inside. Eventually, George Mangum was talked into surrendering and was arrested. "He did the only thing he knew to do, protect his family, all he did was sit on the other side of the door and say I have a gun, I have a gun and that's why he's going to jail because he threatened the police," said Bonnie. The couple's daughter Robin added, "This is my home, this is all our home and I don't think it's right. My dad was a Green Beret, he's sick, how are you going to kick him out?"
Pinellas Park, Florida resident Dallas Dwayne Carter was a 44-year-old disabled, single dad who lost his job, fell into debt, and was faced with eviction. "He always talked about needing help -- financially and help with the kids," neighbor Kevin Luster told the St. Petersburg Times. On July 19th, Carter apparently called the police to say he was armed and disturbed. When they arrived, Carter fired his pistol and rifle inside the apartment, before emerging and pointing his weapons at the officers on the scene. Police say they ordered him to drop them. When he didn't, they killed him in a 10-round fusillade.
On July 23d, about 90 minutes before her foreclosed Taunton, Massachusetts home was scheduled to be sold at auction, Carlene Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company, letting them know that "by the time they foreclosed on the house today she'd be dead." She continued, "I hope you're more compassionate with my husband and son than you were with me." After that, she took a high-powered rifle and, according to the Boston Globe, shot herself. In an interview with the Associated Press, Balderrama's husband John said, "I had no clue." His wife handled the finances and had been intercepting letters from the mortgage company for months. "She put in her suicide note that it got overwhelming for her," he said. In the letter, she wrote, "take the [life] insurance money and pay for the house."
The day after Balderrama took her life, 50 miles away in Worcester, Massachusetts, a 64-year-old man, who had already been evicted, barricaded himself inside his former home. Police were called to the scene to find him reportedly prepared to ignite four propane tanks. "His intention was to burn the house down with him in it," Sgt. Christopher J. George told the Telegram & Gazette. With the man becoming "even more despondent" as "a moving van arrived on the street," police stormed the house to find him "holding a foot-long knife to his own chest" as a piece of paper burned near the propane. The man was disarmed and the fire extinguished.
That very same day, in Visalia, California, a Tulare County sheriff's deputy tried to serve an eviction notice to Melvin Nicks, 50. Nicks responded by stabbing the deputy with a knife and barricading himself in the house for several hours. He later surrendered.
No Way Out
Bay City, Michigan residents David and Sharron Hetzel, both 56, "lost their home to foreclosure and filed for bankruptcy protection. But they did not follow through with the Chapter 13 proceedings." On August 1st, say police reports, David Hetzel mailed a letter of apology to his family members. Later that night, according to the local police, he attacked his sleeping wife, striking her in the head with a golf club and repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife. After that, he began setting fires throughout the house before crawling into bed beside his wife and killing himself with "a single, fatal wound to his torso."
On August 12th, sheriff's deputies arrived at the Saddlebrook, New Jersey home of 88-year-old Beatrice Brennan, another victim of the mortgage crisis, who had refinanced her home and fallen behind on payments. Refusing to stand idly by while his mother was put out on the street, her 60-year-old son John pulled a .22 caliber handgun on the lawmen. That sent the movers, waiting for a court-imposed 10 a.m. deadline, scurrying for their van. Brennan was able to delay the eviction briefly before a SWAT team arrested him and his mother lost her home. "I'm heartbroken over this," Vincent Carabello, a longtime neighbor, told the local paper, the Record. "How could this happen?"
Roseville, Minnesota resident Sylvia Sieferman was under a great deal of stress and beset by financial difficulties. She worried about how she would care for her two 11-year-old daughters. On August 21st, according to police reports, Sieferman "repeatedly stabbed the girls and herself." "She reached her limit," her friend Carrie Micko told the Star Tribune. "She couldn't cope anymore she felt that her daughters were suffering because she was failing to provide for them." As Micko further explained, "After a series of financial mishaps, she just couldn't see her way through. She was under extreme financial, emotional and spiritual distress and didn't want to fail them."
By Any Means Necessary
The Boston Globe reported that, on September 5th, "[f]our protesters trying to prevent the eviction of a Roxbury woman from her home were arrested after they chained themselves to the steps of her back porch." As 40 protesters chanted in the street, officials from Bank of America ordered Paula Taylor out of her house. "This is our eighth blockade and the first time there have been arrests," said Soledad Lawrence, an organizer with City Life, a non-profit organization seeking to halt the large numbers of foreclosures and evictions in Boston neighborhoods. "They can be more aggressive and we'll be more aggressive," she added.
On September 25th, as politicians in Washington tried to hash out a massive bailout package for financial institutions, six Boston police officers confronted about 40 City Life activists in front of the home of Ana Esquivel, a public school employee, and her husband Raul, a construction worker, both in their fifties. The Globe reported that four protesters were arrested as police shoved their way through in order to allow a locksmith into the house to bar the Esquivels from their home. "We've been destroyed by the bank," Ana Esquivel said, sobbing. "The bank is too big for us." While the Esquivel blockade failed, Steven Meacham, a City Life organizer, told a Globe reporter that "the protests have helped to stop about nine evictions. In the successful blockades, the homeowners were given additional time by their mortgage holders to negotiate alternatives to foreclosure."
Two days earlier, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies came to the Monrovia home of 53-year-old Joanne Carter and her 67-year-old husband John to serve an eviction notice. Joanne Carter refused to accept it. According to "Monrovia spokesman" Dick Singer, as reported in the Pasadena Star-News, she "told deputies she had guns in the house and showed them a shotgun." The next day, Monrovia police officers showed up at the home after being informed that the woman "may have made threats to a workers compensation agency." Police Lieutenant Michael Lee said that Carter told them if they "tried to come in, she would defend her house at any means necessary." She and her husband then reportedly barricaded themselves inside, after which a shotgun was fired. Police from other local departments were called in. Following an hours-long standoff, the Carters surrendered and were arrested.
That same day, in northern California, Cliff Kendall, Petaluma's chief building official, shot himself with a rifle. A week earlier, Kendall had learned that he was being laid off. "He was afraid we'd lose our home, and we probably will because I can't afford to keep it," his wife Patricia, who is on disability with a back injury, told the Press Democrat. "He was extremely upset about it and hurt."
On October 3rd, the day before Karthik Rajaram's mass murder/suicide in Los Angeles, 90-year-old Addie Polk was driven to extremes by the financial crisis. With sheriff's deputies at the door, Polk evidently took the only measure she felt was left to her to avoid eviction from her foreclosed home. She tried to kill herself. Her neighbor Robert Dillon, hearing loud noises from her home, used a ladder to enter the second floor window. He found Polk lying on her bed. "Then she kind of moved toward me a little and I saw that blood, and I said, 'Oh, no. Miss Polk musta done shot herself.'" While she was in the hospital recovering from two self-inflicted gunshot wounds, Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith announced the mortgage association had decided to forgive her outstanding debt and give her the house "outright."
On October 6th, in Sevier County, Tennessee, sheriff's deputies, with police in tow, arrived to evict Jimmy and Pamela Ross from their home. They heard a shot and entered the home to find 57-year-old Pamela dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Neighbor Ruth Blakey told WVLT-TV, "I know she really hated to leave that house. She did not want to leave that house."
Wanda Dunn told neighbors she would rather die than leave her home. On October 13th, the day she was to be evicted, the 53-year-old Pasadena, California native apparently set fire to the home "where her family had lived for generations" before shooting herself in the head. "We knew it was going to happen," neighbor Steve Brooks told the Los Angeles Times. "It was nobody's fault; it was everybody's fault."
Outsourcing Suicide
In September, readers at Slate's "Explainer" column asked the following question: If the financial crisis was so dire, "how come we aren't hearing about executives jumping out of windows?" Writer Nina Shen Rastogi dutifully answered:
"Because the current situation hasn't had nearly as devastating an effect on people's personal finances. The Great Crash of 1929 -- and, to a lesser extent, the crash of 1987 -- did lead some people to commit suicide. But in nearly all of those cases, the deceased had suffered a major loss when the market collapsed. Now, due in large part to those earlier experiences, investors tend to keep their portfolios far more diversified, so as to avoid having their entire fortunes wiped out when stocks take a downturn."
Perhaps this is true. So far, at least, Wall Street's suicides seem to have been outsourced to places that its executives have probably never heard of. There, on the proverbial main streets of America, the Street's financial meltdown is beginning to be measured not only in dollars and cents, but in blood.
Right now, there are no real counts of the many extreme acts born of the financial crisis, but assuredly other murders, suicides, self-inflicted injuries, acts of arson and of armed self-defense have simply gone unnoticed outside of economically hard-hit neighborhoods in cities and small towns across America. With no end in sight for either the foreclosures or the economic turmoil, Americans may have to brace themselves for many more casualties on the home front. Unless extreme economic steps, like mortgage- and debt-forgiveness, are implemented, the number of extreme acts and the ultimate body count may be far more extreme than anyone yet wants to contemplate.
By Robert Parry
Retired Gen. Colin Powell made what sounded like a heartfelt endorsement of Barack Obama – hailing the Democrat’s presidential qualities and criticizing the nasty tone of John McCain’s campaign. But why should anyone care what George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State thinks?
Not only did Powell lend his personal credibility to Bush at key moments – from the Florida recount battle to the Iraq War to Election 2004 – but a serious examination of his career would reveal a person who consistently has put his career ahead of his country’s best interests. [More on this below]
For that matter, why should Americans tune in to watch NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw interviewing Powell on “Meet the Press”? Brokaw is the news media’s version of a Colin Powell, never putting his career in harm’s way to alert the public about grave dangers ahead.
On March 19, 2003, as Bush was launching his unprovoked invasion of Iraq, Brokaw was onboard, sitting with a panel of retired military officers and predicting happily: “In a few days, we’re going to own that country.”
In Sunday’s "Meet the Press" interview with Powell, Brokaw was still positioning himself, presumably so he won’t get criticized by Republicans as one of those “anti-Americans.”
Brokaw even escalated the accusations against former Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers, whose passing association with Obama has become a centerpiece of McCain's campaign, what Powell denounced as “demagoguery.”
But Brokaw wouldn’t let go, even linking the timing of Ayers’s book Fugitive Days to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Ayers “wrote a book about [his radical days] that came out on 2001, on September 11, that said we didn’t bomb enough,” Brokaw told Powell and millions of other Americans.
Brokaw implied that Ayers, now a college professor living in Chicago, was such a twisted individual that he would put out his book at the precise moment when the American people were in shock and mourning over 9/11.
However, as Brokaw – himself an author – surely knows, books go to press months before their publication date (which for Fugitive Days was listed as September 2001, not Sept. 11, 2001), and Ayers’s book was in print well before 9/11. Indeed, Chicago Magazine published a review of the book in its August 2001 edition.
Brokaw may have been referring, sloppily, to a New York Times article about Ayers’s book that coincidentally appeared on Sept. 11, 2001. But again, Brokaw must know that newspapers go to press the day before the date on them, in this case on Sept. 10.
In other words, Ayers’s memoir about his experiences as a member of the Weather Underground on the run in the 1970s – as well as his Times interview – had nothing to do with 9/11. Yet, on Sunday, Brokaw joined a growing list of people, including ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and John McCain, who have made this prejudicial connection.
Since Ayers is a pariah whom virtually no one will dare defend, anything goes. But that is not how honest journalism is supposed to work. Everyone is entitled to a fair shake, whether you like them or not.
The Media’s Real Bias
As much as U.S. news media stars present themselves as straightforward journalists, they actually operate with a powerful bias in favor of the powerful. To keep their high-paying jobs, they figure out whom they can smear and whom they must treat with respect.
We saw this phenomenon in the months before the Iraq War when any wild allegation could be lodged against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. press corps – with few exceptions – joined in piling on.
Similarly, the Bush administration and the U.S. news media heaped contempt on Iraq War critics, like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, when these brave citizens challenged the Bush administration’s case for an invasion.
The opposite set of rules apply to someone like Powell, who is regarded as a “Wise Man” known for his sagacious judgment – despite a very checkered record dating back to his days as a young officer in Vietnam.
Indeed, one of the ironies about the denunciations of Ayers for engaging in violent protests against the Vietnam War is that Brokaw and other journalists leave out the context, the revulsion that many Americans felt toward the unprecedented violence that the U.S. military was raining down on the people of Indochina.
Rather than deal with the moral ambiguity of that war, journalists at the Brokaw level position themselves by hailing those who served in Vietnam and by disdaining the war’s opponents who generally get treated as spoiled brats or disloyal crazies.
Over the years, Powell has become a perfect example of how this dynamic works, with little attention paid to his actual record in Vietnam or to his role in later government misconduct such as the Iran-Contra scandal.
Journalists simply swoon over his smooth style, his measured comments and his striking narrative as an African-American who rose from a humble background to reach the highest levels of American power.
However, the reality of Powell’s narrative is less of a noble hero than a calculating careerist who always kept an eye on his future.
In the 1960s, during Powell’s two tours in Vietnam, he never joined with other U.S. military officers who risked their careers to warn their superiors about the brutal and self-defeating strategies that, eventually, ended up costing the lives of 58,000 Americans and millions of Indochinese.
Indeed, in his memoir, My American Journey, Powell justifies many of the worst tactics, such as burning down Vietnamese villages and shooting unarmed peasants from helicopters, acts that objectively would constitute war crimes.
Powell in Vietnam
During his first tour in 1963, Powell describes his work as an adviser to a South Vietnamese army unit that systematically destroyed the homes and food stocks of villagers who were believed sympathetic to the Viet Cong.
“We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters,” Powell recalled. “Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. ...
“We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?”
On his second tour in 1968, as an executive officer for the Americal Division, Powell was asked to investigate allegations from a distraught U.S. soldier who was aware of brutality committed by other Americal soldiers against Vietnamese civilians and captives. This complaint was the first official inkling of the My Lai massacre, which had occurred several months earlier.
However, for Colin Powell, it was another chance to impress the brass. Without interviewing the soldier, Cpl. Tom Glen, Powell simply accepted a claim from Glen’s superior officer that Glen was not close enough to the front lines to know what he was writing about.
After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968, admitting no pattern of wrongdoing.
“In direct refutation of this [Glen’s] portrayal,” Powell wrote, “is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”
It would take another Americal veteran, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about the atrocity at My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed Americal comrades who had participated in the massacre.
On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG’s office conducted an aggressive official investigation, in contrast to Powell’s review.
Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men who were implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians.
In his memoir, Powell did not mention his brush-off of Tom Glen’s complaint, but did include another troubling recollection that belied his 1968 official denial of Glen’s charge that American soldiers “without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.”
“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,” Powell wrote. “If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him.
“If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter.
“And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”
While it’s certainly true that combat is brutal and judgments can be clouded by fear, the mowing down of unarmed civilians in cold blood does not constitute combat. It is murder and, indeed, a war crime.
Neither can the combat death of a fellow soldier be cited as an excuse to murder civilians. That was precisely the rationalization that the My Lai killers cited in their own defense.
A Murder Case
After returning home from Vietnam in 1969, Powell was drawn into another Vietnam controversy involving the killing of civilians. In a court martial proceeding, Powell sided with an Americal Division general who was accused by the Army of murdering unarmed civilians while flying over Quang Ngai province.
Helicopter pilots who flew Brig. Gen. John W. Donaldson had alleged that the general gunned down civilian Vietnamese almost for sport.
In an interview in 1995, a senior investigator from the Donaldson case told me that two of the Vietnamese victims were an old man and an old woman who were shot to death while bathing.
Though long retired – and quite elderly himself – the Army investigator still spoke with a raw disgust about the events of a quarter century earlier. He requested anonymity before talking about the behavior of senior Americal officers.
“They used to bet in the morning how many people they could kill – old people, civilians, it didn’t matter,” the investigator said. “Some of the stuff would curl your hair.”
For eight months at Americal headquarters in Chu Lai during 1968-69, Powell had worked with Donaldson and apparently developed a great respect for this superior officer. When the Army charged Donaldson with murder on June 2, 1971, Powell rose in the general’s defense.
Powell submitted an affidavit dated Aug. 10, 1971, which lauded Donaldson as “an aggressive and courageous brigade commander.” Powell did not specifically refer to the murder allegations, but added that helicopter forays in Vietnam had been an “effective means of separating hostiles from the general population.”
In the 1995 interview, the old Army investigator told me that “we had him [Donaldson] dead to rights,” with the testimony of two helicopter pilots who had flown Donaldson on his shooting expeditions.
Still, the investigation collapsed after the two pilot-witnesses were transferred to another Army base and apparently came under pressure from military superiors. The two pilots withdrew their testimony, and the Army dropped all charges against Donaldson. [For more details on Powell’s real record, see our book Neck Deep.]
But this complex and troubling history of the Vietnam era is routinely white-washed by the likes of Tom Brokaw, who treats Colin Powell with the respect owed a genuine war hero and holds anti-Vietnam War radicals such as William Ayers in disdain reserved for traitors, now even asserting a link between Ayers’s memoir and 9/11.
The U.S. news media’s fawning over Colin Powell also has not been a victimless exercise. By holding Powell up as a near-perfect hero, the news media has allowed Powell to steer public opinion at key moments – from his work containing the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, to his political embrace of Bush during the Florida recount battle in 2000, to his selling of the Iraq War in 2003, to his support for Bush’s second term in 2004.
Perhaps, Powell is seeking to ameliorate some of that damage now by endorsing Barack Obama and warning of the dangers from another right-wing Republican presidency.
But there remains another troubling question: Why does the United States give so much respect to someone like Colin Powell – or accept as a responsible journalist someone like Tom Brokaw.
by Leonard Pitts Jr. - The Miami Herald / Common Dreams
Meanwhile, back at the War on Terror . . .
You remember the War on Terror, don't you? It was in all the papers. Back before presidential politics sucked the air from the room and your 401(k) shrank till it was worth maybe dinner and a movie, it was considered quite the important news story. Abu Ghraib? Extraordinary renditions? Fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here? Surely you recall.
I only ask because of a news story that broke last week to a yawn of media disinterest. The Washington Post reported on two secret White House memos explicitly endorsing the use of waterboarding -- simulated drowning -- on so-called high-value terrorism suspects. This is, says The Post, the first time the still-classified memos have been disclosed. They were written in response to requests from then-CIA Director George Tenet, who worried his agents might be hung out to dry if the practice were discovered and the people or their representatives demanded someone's head.
According to The Post, the White House issued written authorizations in 2003 and 2004. Yet in 2006, President Bush told the nation, "The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it -- and I will not authorize it.''
Which was, of course, a lie.
You'd think the latest proof of that lie -- yet another smoking gun to stack with all the others -- would merit attention. But a computer search Thursday turned up only seven newspaper stories mentioning the memos. Searches of the CNN and FOX news websites also came up dry, though the story did appear on MSNBC's site.
If you think my point is that the media missed an important story, it isn't. No, the point is that normal is not where we thought it would be.
You remember how it was just after Sept. 11, 2001, right? Some of us vowed we would never enter a skyscraper again. Some of us didn't want to leave our houses again. The minutiae of popular culture became staggeringly unimportant. Humorists like David Letterman and my colleague, Dave Barry, wondered if they could ever return to the business of laughter.
We were scared dry. And some of us said: Get used to it. This was the new normal.
But skyscrapers did not close from lack of use. We did not become a nation of agoraphobics. We did not lose our interest in singers and movie stars. Letterman and Barry went back to work.
Fear, which had cut through us like a hot poker, became instead a low-grade fever, ambient noise, wallpaper, something you feel without feeling, hear without hearing, see without seeing.
Then you look up one day and realize how profoundly that fear has changed your world. People are imprisoned without charges or access to attorneys, and it's routine. People are surveilled, their reading habits studied, their telephone usage logged, and it's commonplace. People, including children, end up on a secret list of those who are not allowed to fly, nobody will tell you why, there is no appeal, and it's ordinary. We swallow lies like candy, nod sagely at babblespeak, and it's unexceptional.
Torture is inflicted with White House approval, the president lies about it and it's just another Tuesday.
Once upon a time, Americans were fond of looking upon backward nations, upon places where law was whatever the king said it was, and noting with pride that we do things differently in our country. But that was a day long ago and a country long gone.
If we miss the one or mourn the other, you'd never know it to look at us. We live through what feels evermore like a Joe McCarthy fever dream. We feel without feeling, hear without hearing, see without seeing and do not protest what we have become.
Because this is normal now.
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