Author: mopress

SubPriming the Pump

by Greg Moses

CounterPunch

Now that bankers of the world have been knocked sideways by American workers in pain – a phenomenon that goes by the name of the “subprime lending crisis” — will the bankers try to fix living conditions for people who make up the subprime base of the global economy? The answer of course is fat chance.

Having once again subprimed the pump of the global economy upon the backs of the most marginalized classes, the banker-driven conversation these days would have us forget the people whose feet are sliding and focus instead on questions of monetary policy. This is globalization as ideology, a mind-framing game that squeezes all it can from flesh and blood workers while denying their basic human value.

Asia Times economist Chan Akya, for example, admits that globalization has allowed bankers from Beijing, Geneva, and Los Angeles to simultaneously milk the labor of Mexican migrant workers in the USA. And he concurs with global consensus that hard times among subprime workers in the USA is the effective trigger for global market tremors. But with a cynical conclusion, he isolates the real pain of “subprime” humanity as a costly political problem to be laid at the feet of the USA administration, and encourages Asian-sphere financiers to turn their investments inward.

Akya’s conclusion is cynical because what remains untouched is the presumption that globalization should continue with top-down arrogance. He gives us no reason to believe, for example, that the increased bargaining power of newly withdrawn Asian financiers will be put to work on anyone’s behalf but bankers who are now able to throw pretty lights upon Tiananmen Square.

And Akya fails to make plain how much Asian bankers owe to American subprime workers who this past decade have been trading with China on a daily basis at Wal-Mart. In sum, Akya’s economics is seedling to the next world war, which is what happens when financiers draw lines between each other on a map.

A lot can be learned about the “subprime” crisis by browsing the abstracts of the Fannie Mae Foundation’s Housing Policy Debates (HPD). There we learn that subprime lending is shorthand for new racism in banking. Instead of “redlining” neighborhoods filled with struggling workers of color, bankers have for the past decade “subprimed” them — giving credit to these working poor at predatory rates (cf: Wyly HPD 15.3).

At the turn of the century, 16.8 percent of households in the USA lived in “housing induced poverty” – the kind of poverty that can be caused by predatory mortgage rates (Kutty HPD 16.1). At any point in time, social investment into these households could have slightly relieved the pain of inequality through housing-allowance entitlements, job improvements, or human rights (cf: Priemus HPD 16.3,4).

In fact, affordable housing helps to grow healthier children (Newman HPD 16.2), which is another way of saying that today’s predatory lending is already replicating tomorrow’s fukked-over class. Is it any wonder therefore that subprime borrowers tend to be disenchanted with the home-owning experience?

The global lesson to be drawn from the subprime crisis is that bankers should be made to take interest in human development, not simply be allowed to extract interest from it, as they build their houses of cards. Or to put it another way, in a globalized world, banking policy is public policy. And public policy has no business taking lessons from predatory economic theories.

Bank bailouts, says Akya, can only damage the image of government. But bank bailouts in the form of mortgage vouchers given to “subprime” working peoples would surely bring us one step closer to globalization with a human heart.

Issuing housing allowances as entitlements has been tried in the Netherlands, and apparently it works well there (Priemus HPD 16.3,4). People who are secure in their housing are people who can afford to dream of better days to come, and such hope does good things for workers, their children, and — do we have to say it? — their employers, too.

Whether you belong to a Party that calls itself Republican, Democrat, or Communist, you could find some way to honestly repay subprime workers for carrying your whole world on their backs these past few years.

By Buddy Spell

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.*

And there you go…. Yet another action full of hope and anticipation ending in status quo unresolved expectations of meaningful returns. It happened. It was important for the moment. It was quickly forgotten and even more quickly dismissed. File it away in the “ ‘A’ for effort drawer”.

All that’s left now is to finish unpacking those last few supplemental and always unnecessary travel items, to haul the suitcases back to the attic, and to look forward to yet another year of war and the further destruction of America’s soul. The therapeutic effect of hellraising has always, for me, had a short shelf life.

I went to DC last week on an invitation to act as legal counsel to a group encamped on the National Mall seeking to protest the continued funding of the national nightmare which has become of America’s patently false minded invasion of Iraq four years ago.

I went to DC last week armed with the Constitution and a resolve to do whatever I could to protect our right to petition the government with grievances. I went to DC last week with hope that, finally, the planets were properly aligned and that substantial impact could be achieved by well meaning citizens calling attention to the insanity intrinsic to the road now traveled.

I observed and attended to the predictable results of peaceful civil disobedience. I spent many hours getting Americans out of jail for the crime of speaking truth to power. I marched on the Pentagon with thousands of others who share my sense of urgency and impatience. I came home and nothing had changed.

I was cursed and spat upon by so-called “patriots” who would dissolve democracy in favor of corporate monarchy as I exercised those very rights the republic’s founding fathers described as “God given”. I watched a Navy veteran cuffed and led away by armed government agents from Senate offices for expressing his own true love of country and personal courage. I saw privilege override patriotism. And I noticed that nobody noticed.

When elections are rigged and dissent is suppressed, the options of a people wishing to be better than their government become limited and restricted. All power is finite. It’s that whole action and reaction thing. It can’t go on indefinitely.

I return from Washington less hopeful than ever. And yet, for now, I intend to tilt at windmills because the options otherwise afforded remain unacceptable.

The power elite will either hear the people or fail to do so at their own peril. I hope for all of us that our voices will soon be heard.

See you on the fifth anniversary…..

*In a village in La Mancha (whose name I do not care to recall) there lived, not very long ago, one of those gentlemen who keep a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound.

****

Buddy Spell is a Louisiana attorney known to practice law in Texas bar ditches.

By Susan Van Haitsma

CounterPunch / CommonDreams

My favorite photograph of Mark Wilkerson shows him smiling, looking relaxed. He is standing in a grove of trees whose trunks radiate outward from his image as though they are drawing life from him. One side of his face glows with reflected sunshine. He wears a black “Iraq Veterans Against the War” T-shirt with a small star over his heart.

I first met Mark on the grounds of the Texas Capitol during a peace demonstration on Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, 2004. Mark was stationed at Ft. Hood, and he and his wife had driven down to attend their first anti-war demonstration in Austin. I didn’t know then the extent of Mark’s experience in Iraq, but he looked stressed, his eyes circled with dark shadows. He exuded nervous energy.

He looked at the materials on our Nonmilitary Options for Youth table and described how he had been recruited through the JROTC program in high school with assurances that he would receive training to become a peacekeeper. At the demonstration, Mark met local members of Veterans for Peace, who understood more profoundly than I the internal and external battles he was facing.

Mark had served one tour of duty in Iraq, during which he had begun to question both the morality and the practicality of the invasion and occupation. Assigned to the military police, he participated in house raids and arrests of Iraqi citizens. He witnessed the effects of the occupation on Iraqi civilians and the change in attitude toward US soldiers. He began suffering serious post-traumatic stress and underwent a crisis of conscience about his participation in the army.

He filed for a discharge as a conscientious objector in March 2004. When his claim was denied 8 months later, he appealed the decision, but soon learned that his unit was about to be deployed to Iraq for a second tour. Stuck between honoring his conscience and obeying orders to deploy, he went AWOL in January 2005.

Mark was AWOL for about 18 months. During that time, he said the nightmares didn’t stop. He also felt at sea, as though he could not move forward with his life. He worked long hours, trying to save for a future that might include prison. Just before he turned himself in at Ft. Hood in August 2006, he held a press conference at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX.

Flanked by other GI resisters and supportive members of Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace, Mark confidently and eloquently expressed his reasons for having left the military and his reasons for returning to the base to accept the consequences.

When I saw Mark Wilkerson last on February 22, 2007, he was embracing his family shortly before being handcuffed and walked to a van outside the Major General Lawrence H. Williams Judicial Center at Fort Hood, Texas following his sentencing by a military judge to seven months of confinement, demotion in rank and a bad conduct discharge for desertion and missing movement.

During the court-martial proceedings, several family members and officers in Mark’s chain of command were called as character witnesses. Mark’s wife described how, several months into his tour, his letters began to include doubts about his mission. During his first 2-week leave, she saw that Mark had changed. He was restless, bothered and “set off by little things. There was an edge to him that hadn’t been there before.” When he returned to Iraq, Mark felt increasing hopelessness about his mission, yet he performed his duties admirably, as his commanding officers testified.

After his tour, Mark had emotional battles, nightmares, and one night, a breakdown. “My body and my mind had never felt that way before,” he said. He explained that when he was home, family and friends “were treating me like some sort of hero,” but he felt nothing like a hero inside. He hesitated to ask for help in the military “because an unsaid rule is that we’re not supposed to rock the boat.” Even after he filed his conscientious objector claim, he was advised to refrain from seeking PTSD counseling while the case was pending.

In Mark’s court-martial, the fact that his conscientious objector claim had been denied prior to a looming second deployment could not be used as a defense to the charges of desertion and missing movement to which he pleaded guilty. However, it is important to note that the conscientious objector approval process in the military is considered by many to be a broken system.

By law, the military must allow soldiers to apply for discharge as conscientious objectors when they have experienced, after enlisting, a “crystallization” of their moral, ethical or religious beliefs about participating in war. However, J.E. McNeil, director of the Center on Conscience & War, says that, according to military figures, only about 50 percent of CO claims are being approved, and anecdotal evidence suggests the percentage may be even lower.

“They throw as many roadblocks in your way as they possibly can,” she says. “The process takes incredibly long, and it really doesn’t have to. They don’t really follow their own regulations. They treat it as an annoyance.”

Unlike the case of First Lt. Ehren Watada, the illegality of the Iraq war was not used as a point of defense in Mark’s court-martial. However, at one point, the military judge asked if there wasn’t an inconsistency inherent in Mark’s guilty plea. Was his intent to “shirk a duty,” or to resist an unjust war? If he was saying he was wrong to desert, was he also saying he was wrong to act on his conscience? Both defense and prosecuting attorneys stated that they saw no inconsistency, and the judge laid aside the concern.

The brief interchange touched on what may be the crux of the dilemma faced by soldiers in all wars. What is a soldier’s duty? The prosecuting attorneys in Mark’s case stressed that he “shirked his important service” when he was “absent by design.” He was told that he “abandoned the Army family that would embrace him.” Soldiers commonly say that when they are on the battlefield, they are not fighting to protect liberty or democracy; they are fighting for the soldiers on their right and left. If they are compelled by conscience to embrace a larger human family that extends to their adversary, it’s no wonder that their expanded sense of duty presents a problem for the military and themselves.

One of the prosecuting attorneys distinguished between being a good soldier and a good public citizen. “This dichotomy must be maintained,” he said.

But, human beings simply cannot divide themselves into two separate beings with two separate moral codes and two separate sets of behaviors. Attempts to do so are injurious, and soldiers who suffer from PTSD know this.

Part of Mark Wilkerson’s defense centered on his achievements in high school as a teenager with a keen interest in peacemaking. Following a serious family violence crisis when he was 12 years old that was described in detail during his court-martial, Mark adopted a strong leadership role in his family, his school and community. He used the tragedy to become more determined to prevent violence. He wanted above all to help people, to be a healer and a reconciler.

Mark wanted to help his country, but his country betrayed him. His country capitalized on his honorable intentions, gave him false promises, fed him misinformation, used him to carry out inhumane missions, caused him psychological injury and then punished him by making him an object lesson for his fellow GI’s.

In fact, Mark is an example of the best kind, for all of us. In the same courtroom where soldiers were sentenced for harming Abu Ghraib prisoners, Mark was sentenced for refusing to harm. In his final testimony, Mark’s plainspoken optimism rose above the contradictions of his surroundings.

“I’m ready to live the life I know I can live,” he said. “I still want to help people, to be useful. I always lived by a certain moral code. I know whatever I do, I’ll do it well. I look forward to being able to do it.”

Mark Wilkerson’s blog is www.markwilkerson.wordpress.com. Susan Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin, Texas and can be reached at jeffjweb@sbcglobal.net