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Political Waves
Apr 20, 2012, 7:31:06 PM4/20/12
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I'm sure you've heard that little
bit of advice that shows up as an e-mail signature these days, to treat people
gently because you don't know what burdens they carry. That's better advice than
we know.
We seldom look at the back-stories of the events
that fill our headlines until we're trying to put them in historical context.
We'd be better citizens ... and people ... if we did. We'd connect dots back to
cause, which is where we might offer some pre-emptive assistance in
pressure-cooker situations that can only turn worse -- if not explode -- if we
turn away.
Here are three articles that I consider essential to understanding our nation, our world and our selves today.
First, read the truth about the Iraq war we leave in our wake. It's as bad as we thought, as combustible and as disheartening. We ignore news of the continuing coordinated bombings and murders in Iraq, the government so shaky as to be useless in combating the assaults. Iraq should have been this generations Vietnam -- and a bitch slap to the administration that caused it -- but without a draft, we had a choice to turn our backs on sacrifice ... and we did. Nobody is giving odds on Iraq's ability to self-govern and Iran is gaining ground. Read about the price paid by a whistleblower to bring that information into view.
Next, One L. Goh, the Korean man who went on a killing spree in California a few weeks ago, endured what can be thought of as a typical American story of loss and disenchantment, and failure of the system. In Goh, we can see the Achilles Heel of the Asian-ego ... a sense of responsibility, pride and respect for the elders ... played out against the increasingly cold, harsh American value of profit and loss. This is a pitiful tale and, I fear, a cautionary one.
Last, the price we pay for the class war -- the one Romney sez Obama is making up to divide the nation -- is breaking our hearts. And a bit of information in this story may not surprise you but it might make you weep: Staff Sgt. Roger Bales, the Army sniper accused last month of killing 17 Afghan civilians, may not have acted alone. Will we ever know the details?
Here's the story of three men (and more) that came to a point of decision -- they did what they felt they needed to do. Two snapped due to the enormous pressures upon them; one squealed, obeying the dictates of his conscience. All three felt they had no choice.
This is a scenario that is swirling around all of us 24/7 and it's time to look around us to see who needs help, kindness, directions to a mental health center or a financial counselor. It's time to address the kinds of pressures put on all of us by our country, our society and our growing inability to deal with all that seems broken.
It's time to deal with injustice, fraud and greed. It's killing us.
Here are three articles that I consider essential to understanding our nation, our world and our selves today.
First, read the truth about the Iraq war we leave in our wake. It's as bad as we thought, as combustible and as disheartening. We ignore news of the continuing coordinated bombings and murders in Iraq, the government so shaky as to be useless in combating the assaults. Iraq should have been this generations Vietnam -- and a bitch slap to the administration that caused it -- but without a draft, we had a choice to turn our backs on sacrifice ... and we did. Nobody is giving odds on Iraq's ability to self-govern and Iran is gaining ground. Read about the price paid by a whistleblower to bring that information into view.
Next, One L. Goh, the Korean man who went on a killing spree in California a few weeks ago, endured what can be thought of as a typical American story of loss and disenchantment, and failure of the system. In Goh, we can see the Achilles Heel of the Asian-ego ... a sense of responsibility, pride and respect for the elders ... played out against the increasingly cold, harsh American value of profit and loss. This is a pitiful tale and, I fear, a cautionary one.
Last, the price we pay for the class war -- the one Romney sez Obama is making up to divide the nation -- is breaking our hearts. And a bit of information in this story may not surprise you but it might make you weep: Staff Sgt. Roger Bales, the Army sniper accused last month of killing 17 Afghan civilians, may not have acted alone. Will we ever know the details?
Here's the story of three men (and more) that came to a point of decision -- they did what they felt they needed to do. Two snapped due to the enormous pressures upon them; one squealed, obeying the dictates of his conscience. All three felt they had no choice.
This is a scenario that is swirling around all of us 24/7 and it's time to look around us to see who needs help, kindness, directions to a mental health center or a financial counselor. It's time to address the kinds of pressures put on all of us by our country, our society and our growing inability to deal with all that seems broken.
It's time to deal with injustice, fraud and greed. It's killing us.
It's time to find our
heart.
Jude
I Had to Tell the Truth About Iraq--Even Though it Cost Me My Career
Jude
I Had to Tell the Truth About Iraq--Even Though it Cost Me My Career
Given what we left behind in Iraq, it
remains beyond anyone, even the nasty men who started the war in 2003, to claim
victory or accomplishment or achievement there.
Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch via AlterNet
April 8, 2012
People ask the question in various ways, sometimes hesitantly, often via a long digression, but my answer is always the same: no regrets.
In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those anonymous functionaries.
What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat bureaucrats.
That was too much for even a well-seasoned cubicle warrior like me to ignore and so I wrote a book about it, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. I was on the spot to see it all happen, leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in rural Iraq while taking part up close and personal in what the U.S. government was doing to, not for, Iraqis. Originally, I imagined that my book’s subtitle would be “Lessons for Afghanistan,” since I was hoping the same mistakes would not be endlessly repeated there. Sometimes being right doesn’t solve a damn thing.
By the time I arrived in Iraq in 2009, I hardly expected to be welcomed as a liberator or greeted -- as the officials who launched the invasion of that country expected back in 2003 -- with a parade and flowers. But I never imagined Iraq for quite the American disaster it was either. Nor did I expect to be welcomed back by my employer, the State Department, as a hero in return for my book of loony stories and poignant moments that summed up how the United States wasted more than $44 billion in the reconstruction/deconstruction of Iraq. But I never imagined that State would retaliate against me.
In return for my book, a truthful account of my year in Iraq, my security clearance was taken away, I was sent home to sit on my hands for months, then temporarily allowed to return only as a disenfranchised teleworker and, as I write this, am drifting through the final steps toward termination.
What We Left Behind in Iraq
Sadly enough, in the almost two years since I left Iraq, little has happened that challenges my belief that we failed in the reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war.
The Iraq of today is an extension of the Iraq I saw and described. The recent Arab League summit in Baghdad, hailed by some as a watershed event, was little more than a stage-managed wrinkle in that timeline, a lot like all those purple-fingered elections the U.S. sponsored in Iraq throughout the Occupation. If you deploy enough police and soldiers -- for the summit, Baghdad was shut down for a week, the cell phone network turned off, and a “public holiday” proclaimed to keep the streets free of humanity -- you can temporarily tame any place, at least within camera view. More than $500 million was spent, in part planting flowers along the route dignitaries took in and out of the heavily fortified International Zone at the heart of the capital (known in my day as the Green Zone). Somebody in Iraq must have googled “Potemkin Village.”
Beyond the temporary showmanship, the Iraq we created via our war is a mean place, unsafe and unstable. Of course, life goes on there (with the usual lack of electricity and potable water), but as the news shows, to an angry symphony of suicide bombers and targeted killings. While the American public may have changed the channel to more exciting shows in Libya, now Syria, or maybe just to American Idol, the Iraqi people are trapped in amber, replaying the scenes I saw in 2009-2010, living reminders of all the good we failed to do.
Ties between Iraq and Iran continue to strengthen, however, with Baghdad serving as a money-laundering stopover for a Tehran facing tightening U.S. and European sanctions, even as it sells electricity to Iraq. (That failed reconstruction program again!) Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in Iraq in ways it couldn’t have when Saddam Hussein was in power, that country will be more capable of contesting U.S. hegemony in the region.
Given what we left behind in Iraq, it remains beyond anyone, even the nasty men who started the war in 2003, to claim victory or accomplishment or achievement there, and except for the odd pundit seeking to rile his audience, none do.
What We Left Behind at Home
The other story that played out over the months since I returned from Iraq is my own. Though the State Department officially cleared We Meant Well for publication in October 2010, it began an investigation of me a month before the book hit store shelves. That investigation was completed way back in December 2011, though State took no action at that time to terminate me.
I filed a complaint as a whistleblower with the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) in January 2012. It was only after that complaint -- alleging retaliation -- was filed, and just days before the OSC was to deliver its document discovery request to State, that my long-time employer finally moved to fire me. Timing is everything in love, war, and bureaucracy.
The charges it leveled are ridiculous (including “lack of candor,” as if perhaps too much candor was not the root problem here). State was evidently using my case to show off its authority over its employees by creating a parody of justice, and then enforcing it to demonstrate that, well, when it comes to stomping on dissent, anything goes.
My case also illustrates the crude use of “national security” as a tool within government to silence dissent. State’s Diplomatic Security office, its internal Stasi, monitored my home email and web usage for months, used computer forensics to spelunk for something naughty in my online world, placed me on a Secret Service Threat Watch list, examined my finances, and used hacker tools to vacuum up my droppings around the web -- all, by the way, at an unknown cost to the taxpayers. Diplomatic Security even sent an agent around to interview my neighbors, fishing for something to use against me in a full-spectrum deep dive into my life, using the new tools and power available to government not to stop terrorists, but to stop me.
As our government accumulates ever more of what it thinks the American people have no right to know about, there will only be increasing persecutions as prosecutions. Many of the illegal things President Richard Nixon did to the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are now both legal (under the Patriot Act) and far easier to accomplish with new technologies. There is no need, for instance, to break into my psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt, as happened to Ellsberg; after all, the National Security Agency can break into my doctor’s electronic records as easily as you can read this page.
With its aggressive and sadly careless use of the draconian Espionage Act to imprison whistleblowers, the Obama administration has, in many cases, moved beyond harassment and intimidation into actually wielding the beautiful tools of justice in a perverse way to silence dissent. More benign in practice, in theory this is little different than the Soviets executing dissidents as spies after show trials or the Chinese using their courts to legally confine thinkers they disapprove of in mental institutions. They are all just following regulations. Turn the volume up from six to ten and you’ve jumped from vengeance to totalitarianism. We’re becoming East Germany.
What I Left Behind
There has been a personal price to pay for my free speech. In my old office, after my book was published in September 2011, some snarky coworkers set up a pool to guess when I would be fired -- before or after that November. I put $20 down on the long end. After all, if I couldn’t be optimistic about keeping my job, who could?
One day in October, security hustled me out of that office, and though I wasn’t fired by that November and so won the bet, I was never able to collect. Most of those in the betting pool now shun me, fearful for their own fragile careers at State.
I’ve ended up talking, usually at night, with a few of the soldiers I worked with in Iraq. Some are at the end of a long Skype connection in Afghanistan, others have left the military or are stationed stateside. Most of them share my anger and bitterness, generally feeling used and unwanted now that they need a job rather than rote praise and the promise of a parade.
We Meant Well is, I think, pretty funny in parts. I recall writing it as an almost out-of-body experience as I tried to approach the sadness and absurdity of what was happening in Iraq with a sense of irony and black humor. That’s long gone, and if I were to write the story today, the saddest thing is that it would undoubtedly come out angry and bitter, too.
A Member of a Club That Would Have Me
Having left behind friends I turned out not to have, a career that dissolved beneath me, and a sense of humor I’d like to rediscover, I find myself a member of a new club I don’t even remember applying for: The Whistleblowers. I’ve now met with several of the whistleblowers I’ve written about with admiration: Tom Drake, Mo Davis, John Kiriakou, and Robert MacLean, among others.
As ex- or soon-to-be-ex-government employees all, when we meet, we make small talk about retirement, annuities, and the like. No one speaks of revolution or anarchy, the image of us the government often surreptitiously pushes to the media. After all, until we blew those whistles, we were all in our own ways believers in the American system. That, in fact, is why we did what we did.
My new club-mates represent hundreds of years of service -- a couple of them had had long military careers before joining the civilian side of government -- and we cover a remarkably broad swath of the American political spectrum. What we really have in common is that, in the course of just doing our jobs, we stumbled into colossal government wrongdoing (systematized torture, warrantless wiretapping, fraud, and waste), stood up for what is right in the American spirit, and found ourselves paying surprising personal prices for acts that seemed obvious and necessary. We are guilty of naiveté, not treason.
Each of us initially thought that the agencies we worked for would be concerned about what we had stumbled upon or uncovered and would want to work with us to resolve it. If most of us are now disillusioned, we weren’t at the outset. Only by the force of events did we become transformed into opponents of an out-of-control government with no tolerance for those who would expose the truth necessary to create Thomas Jefferson’s informed citizenry. In meeting my club-mates, I learned that whistleblowers are not born, but created by a government with much to hide and an unquenchable need to hide it.
One of those whistleblowers, Jesselyn Radack, wrote a book about her experiences calledTraitor: The Whistleblower and the American Taliban. At the dawn of the War on Terror, Radack, an attorney at the Department of Justice (DOJ), wrote a memo stating that John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured in Afghanistan, had rights and could not be interrogated without the benefit of counsel.
The FBI went ahead and questioned him anyway, and then DOJ tried to disappear Radack’s emails documenting this Constitutional violation. Ignoring her advice, the government tossed away the rights of one of its own citizens. Radack herself was subsequently forced out the DOJ, harassed, and had to fight simply to keep her law license.
As proof that God does indeed enjoy irony, Radack today helps represent most of the current crop of government whistleblowers (including me) in their struggles against the government she once served. Radack and I are now working with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker James Spione on a documentary about whistleblowers.
What Will Be Left Behind
So what’s left for me in my final days as a grounded State Department worker assigned to timeout in my own home? Given my situation, there is, of course, no desk to clean out; there are no knickknacks collected abroad over my 24 years to package up. All that’s left is one last test to see if the system, especially the First Amendment guaranteeing us the right to free speech, still has a heartbeat in 2012.
Though I could be terminated by State within a few weeks, I am otherwise only months away from a semi-voluntary retirement. Since I’m obviously out the door anyway, State’s decision to employ its internal security tools and expensive, taxpayer-paid legal maneuvers at this late date can’t really be about shortening my tenure by a meager four months. Instead, it’s clearly about mounting my head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees not to dissent, or mention wrongdoing they might stumble across. Better, so the message goes, to sip the Kool Aid and keep one’s head down, while praising the courage of Chinese dissidents and Egyptian bloggers. The State Department is all about wanting its words, not its actions, to speak loudest.
Running parallel to the State Department termination process is an investigation by the Office of the Special Counsel into my claim of retaliation, which State is seeking to circumvent by tossing me out the door ahead of its conclusion. State wants to use my fate to send a message to its already cowed staff. However, if the Special Counsel concludes that the State Department did retaliate against me, then the message delivered will be quite a different one. It just might indicate that the First Amendment still does reach ever so slightly into the halls of government, and maybe the next responsible Foreign Service Officer will carry that forward a bit further, which would be good for our democracy.
One way or another, sometime soon the door will smack me in the backside on my way out. But whether the echo left behind inside the State Department will be one of justice or bureaucratic revenge remains undecided. My book is written and my career is over either way. However, what is left behind matters not just for me, but for all of us.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, embraced, friended, liked, tweeted or authorized this post.] ++
The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America
Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch via AlterNet
April 8, 2012
People ask the question in various ways, sometimes hesitantly, often via a long digression, but my answer is always the same: no regrets.
In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those anonymous functionaries.
What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat bureaucrats.
That was too much for even a well-seasoned cubicle warrior like me to ignore and so I wrote a book about it, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. I was on the spot to see it all happen, leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in rural Iraq while taking part up close and personal in what the U.S. government was doing to, not for, Iraqis. Originally, I imagined that my book’s subtitle would be “Lessons for Afghanistan,” since I was hoping the same mistakes would not be endlessly repeated there. Sometimes being right doesn’t solve a damn thing.
By the time I arrived in Iraq in 2009, I hardly expected to be welcomed as a liberator or greeted -- as the officials who launched the invasion of that country expected back in 2003 -- with a parade and flowers. But I never imagined Iraq for quite the American disaster it was either. Nor did I expect to be welcomed back by my employer, the State Department, as a hero in return for my book of loony stories and poignant moments that summed up how the United States wasted more than $44 billion in the reconstruction/deconstruction of Iraq. But I never imagined that State would retaliate against me.
In return for my book, a truthful account of my year in Iraq, my security clearance was taken away, I was sent home to sit on my hands for months, then temporarily allowed to return only as a disenfranchised teleworker and, as I write this, am drifting through the final steps toward termination.
What We Left Behind in Iraq
Sadly enough, in the almost two years since I left Iraq, little has happened that challenges my belief that we failed in the reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war.
The Iraq of today is an extension of the Iraq I saw and described. The recent Arab League summit in Baghdad, hailed by some as a watershed event, was little more than a stage-managed wrinkle in that timeline, a lot like all those purple-fingered elections the U.S. sponsored in Iraq throughout the Occupation. If you deploy enough police and soldiers -- for the summit, Baghdad was shut down for a week, the cell phone network turned off, and a “public holiday” proclaimed to keep the streets free of humanity -- you can temporarily tame any place, at least within camera view. More than $500 million was spent, in part planting flowers along the route dignitaries took in and out of the heavily fortified International Zone at the heart of the capital (known in my day as the Green Zone). Somebody in Iraq must have googled “Potemkin Village.”
Beyond the temporary showmanship, the Iraq we created via our war is a mean place, unsafe and unstable. Of course, life goes on there (with the usual lack of electricity and potable water), but as the news shows, to an angry symphony of suicide bombers and targeted killings. While the American public may have changed the channel to more exciting shows in Libya, now Syria, or maybe just to American Idol, the Iraqi people are trapped in amber, replaying the scenes I saw in 2009-2010, living reminders of all the good we failed to do.
Ties between Iraq and Iran continue to strengthen, however, with Baghdad serving as a money-laundering stopover for a Tehran facing tightening U.S. and European sanctions, even as it sells electricity to Iraq. (That failed reconstruction program again!) Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in Iraq in ways it couldn’t have when Saddam Hussein was in power, that country will be more capable of contesting U.S. hegemony in the region.
Given what we left behind in Iraq, it remains beyond anyone, even the nasty men who started the war in 2003, to claim victory or accomplishment or achievement there, and except for the odd pundit seeking to rile his audience, none do.
What We Left Behind at Home
The other story that played out over the months since I returned from Iraq is my own. Though the State Department officially cleared We Meant Well for publication in October 2010, it began an investigation of me a month before the book hit store shelves. That investigation was completed way back in December 2011, though State took no action at that time to terminate me.
I filed a complaint as a whistleblower with the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) in January 2012. It was only after that complaint -- alleging retaliation -- was filed, and just days before the OSC was to deliver its document discovery request to State, that my long-time employer finally moved to fire me. Timing is everything in love, war, and bureaucracy.
The charges it leveled are ridiculous (including “lack of candor,” as if perhaps too much candor was not the root problem here). State was evidently using my case to show off its authority over its employees by creating a parody of justice, and then enforcing it to demonstrate that, well, when it comes to stomping on dissent, anything goes.
My case also illustrates the crude use of “national security” as a tool within government to silence dissent. State’s Diplomatic Security office, its internal Stasi, monitored my home email and web usage for months, used computer forensics to spelunk for something naughty in my online world, placed me on a Secret Service Threat Watch list, examined my finances, and used hacker tools to vacuum up my droppings around the web -- all, by the way, at an unknown cost to the taxpayers. Diplomatic Security even sent an agent around to interview my neighbors, fishing for something to use against me in a full-spectrum deep dive into my life, using the new tools and power available to government not to stop terrorists, but to stop me.
As our government accumulates ever more of what it thinks the American people have no right to know about, there will only be increasing persecutions as prosecutions. Many of the illegal things President Richard Nixon did to the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are now both legal (under the Patriot Act) and far easier to accomplish with new technologies. There is no need, for instance, to break into my psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt, as happened to Ellsberg; after all, the National Security Agency can break into my doctor’s electronic records as easily as you can read this page.
With its aggressive and sadly careless use of the draconian Espionage Act to imprison whistleblowers, the Obama administration has, in many cases, moved beyond harassment and intimidation into actually wielding the beautiful tools of justice in a perverse way to silence dissent. More benign in practice, in theory this is little different than the Soviets executing dissidents as spies after show trials or the Chinese using their courts to legally confine thinkers they disapprove of in mental institutions. They are all just following regulations. Turn the volume up from six to ten and you’ve jumped from vengeance to totalitarianism. We’re becoming East Germany.
What I Left Behind
There has been a personal price to pay for my free speech. In my old office, after my book was published in September 2011, some snarky coworkers set up a pool to guess when I would be fired -- before or after that November. I put $20 down on the long end. After all, if I couldn’t be optimistic about keeping my job, who could?
One day in October, security hustled me out of that office, and though I wasn’t fired by that November and so won the bet, I was never able to collect. Most of those in the betting pool now shun me, fearful for their own fragile careers at State.
I’ve ended up talking, usually at night, with a few of the soldiers I worked with in Iraq. Some are at the end of a long Skype connection in Afghanistan, others have left the military or are stationed stateside. Most of them share my anger and bitterness, generally feeling used and unwanted now that they need a job rather than rote praise and the promise of a parade.
We Meant Well is, I think, pretty funny in parts. I recall writing it as an almost out-of-body experience as I tried to approach the sadness and absurdity of what was happening in Iraq with a sense of irony and black humor. That’s long gone, and if I were to write the story today, the saddest thing is that it would undoubtedly come out angry and bitter, too.
A Member of a Club That Would Have Me
Having left behind friends I turned out not to have, a career that dissolved beneath me, and a sense of humor I’d like to rediscover, I find myself a member of a new club I don’t even remember applying for: The Whistleblowers. I’ve now met with several of the whistleblowers I’ve written about with admiration: Tom Drake, Mo Davis, John Kiriakou, and Robert MacLean, among others.
As ex- or soon-to-be-ex-government employees all, when we meet, we make small talk about retirement, annuities, and the like. No one speaks of revolution or anarchy, the image of us the government often surreptitiously pushes to the media. After all, until we blew those whistles, we were all in our own ways believers in the American system. That, in fact, is why we did what we did.
My new club-mates represent hundreds of years of service -- a couple of them had had long military careers before joining the civilian side of government -- and we cover a remarkably broad swath of the American political spectrum. What we really have in common is that, in the course of just doing our jobs, we stumbled into colossal government wrongdoing (systematized torture, warrantless wiretapping, fraud, and waste), stood up for what is right in the American spirit, and found ourselves paying surprising personal prices for acts that seemed obvious and necessary. We are guilty of naiveté, not treason.
Each of us initially thought that the agencies we worked for would be concerned about what we had stumbled upon or uncovered and would want to work with us to resolve it. If most of us are now disillusioned, we weren’t at the outset. Only by the force of events did we become transformed into opponents of an out-of-control government with no tolerance for those who would expose the truth necessary to create Thomas Jefferson’s informed citizenry. In meeting my club-mates, I learned that whistleblowers are not born, but created by a government with much to hide and an unquenchable need to hide it.
One of those whistleblowers, Jesselyn Radack, wrote a book about her experiences calledTraitor: The Whistleblower and the American Taliban. At the dawn of the War on Terror, Radack, an attorney at the Department of Justice (DOJ), wrote a memo stating that John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured in Afghanistan, had rights and could not be interrogated without the benefit of counsel.
The FBI went ahead and questioned him anyway, and then DOJ tried to disappear Radack’s emails documenting this Constitutional violation. Ignoring her advice, the government tossed away the rights of one of its own citizens. Radack herself was subsequently forced out the DOJ, harassed, and had to fight simply to keep her law license.
As proof that God does indeed enjoy irony, Radack today helps represent most of the current crop of government whistleblowers (including me) in their struggles against the government she once served. Radack and I are now working with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker James Spione on a documentary about whistleblowers.
What Will Be Left Behind
So what’s left for me in my final days as a grounded State Department worker assigned to timeout in my own home? Given my situation, there is, of course, no desk to clean out; there are no knickknacks collected abroad over my 24 years to package up. All that’s left is one last test to see if the system, especially the First Amendment guaranteeing us the right to free speech, still has a heartbeat in 2012.
Though I could be terminated by State within a few weeks, I am otherwise only months away from a semi-voluntary retirement. Since I’m obviously out the door anyway, State’s decision to employ its internal security tools and expensive, taxpayer-paid legal maneuvers at this late date can’t really be about shortening my tenure by a meager four months. Instead, it’s clearly about mounting my head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees not to dissent, or mention wrongdoing they might stumble across. Better, so the message goes, to sip the Kool Aid and keep one’s head down, while praising the courage of Chinese dissidents and Egyptian bloggers. The State Department is all about wanting its words, not its actions, to speak loudest.
Running parallel to the State Department termination process is an investigation by the Office of the Special Counsel into my claim of retaliation, which State is seeking to circumvent by tossing me out the door ahead of its conclusion. State wants to use my fate to send a message to its already cowed staff. However, if the Special Counsel concludes that the State Department did retaliate against me, then the message delivered will be quite a different one. It just might indicate that the First Amendment still does reach ever so slightly into the halls of government, and maybe the next responsible Foreign Service Officer will carry that forward a bit further, which would be good for our democracy.
One way or another, sometime soon the door will smack me in the backside on my way out. But whether the echo left behind inside the State Department will be one of justice or bureaucratic revenge remains undecided. My book is written and my career is over either way. However, what is left behind matters not just for me, but for all of us.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, embraced, friended, liked, tweeted or authorized this post.] ++
The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America
The
cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth today has sparked a new type of
murder that has more in common with insurgency violence than serial
murder.
Mark Ames, Corsortium News via AlterNet
April 9, 2012 |
I was working on an article about last month’s rampage massacre in Afghanistan that left 17 villagers dead, when news hit of this past Monday’s massacre at an Oakland, California, religious college, leaving seven dead. In both cases, the shooters survived and face a possible death penalty — which is rare: Usually these rampage killings end with self-inflicted bullet in the mouth.
These “going postal” rampage killings like the one that just took place at the Oikos University campus happen so often and with such relentless rhythm, a lot of people might easily assume that these mass-shootings at American schools and workplaces have always been with us.
It’s not true, of course — as I wrote in my book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion — it’s an exclusively American phenomenon specific to our time. The first post office rampage killing took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan Revolution’s war on the American worker.
Those post office massacres quickly migrated into private workplace massacres by the end of the 1980s, where they’ve become a regular rhythmic staple of our murder culture ever since – and from the adult workplace, the massacres migrated to our schools.
We’ve had mass-killings before; and every now and then, you’ll read about a rampage killing in some other country. But only in America, and only since the mid-1980s, do American employees attack their own workplaces and offices, and middle-class students attack their own schools, with such consistency, year after year.
It was only after the crash in 2008 that some Americans began to accept the obvious: That the cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth and power introduced by the Reagan Revolution sparked a new type of murder that has more in common with insurgency violence or rebellious peasant violence than, say, the psychopathology of a serial murder.
Like so many school rampage killers, last Monday’s alleged murderer, One L. Goh, was reportedly bullied and mistreated at his nursing school program at the small Korean Christian nursing program he enrolled in. Bullying also was blamed for the high school rampage killing a few weeks ago in suburban Cleveland that left three students dead and five wounded.
The gruesome details about the way Goh is said to have lined up and executed his victims, the way he apparently singled out women, make it hard not to caricature him as a monster, a demonic psychopath — and yet, without excusing Goh’s killings, one should try to make sense of what happened to him, the downward-trending bleakness, the slow water-torture of low-five-figure debts, the broken marriage, the $23,000 tax bill owed to the IRS.
Losing Hope
In the Naughts, One L. Goh helped run a construction company. But construction collapsed as an industry in 2006-7; and unless you were Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo, you’d have nothing to show for the few good years.
In late 2007, Goh moved into the Yorkview Apartments complex in Hayes, Virginia — a bleak, prefab looking structure in a rural corner of Virginia. By the following summer, One L. Goh found himself unable to cover his $575 rent payment two months in a row. He was evicted; and on the same day that they they evicted him, creditors took his car.
The future rampage-murderer took it all stoically, even politely, according to one of Goh’s apartment complex neighbors, Thomas Lumpkin: “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”
Here is how his neighbor described the scene of One L. Goh’s last day at the Yorkshire Apartments:
Lumpkin said he recalled the day when Goh was evicted and his Nissan pickup was repossessed. Goh left by cab that day.
“He was always neat, wore nice clothes,” Lumpkin recalled. “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”
So he lost his car the same day he was evicted from his apartment in bumfuck, Virginia—and he took it all stoically as he cabbed away to god knows where.
I tried to imagine what that cab ride felt like for One L. Goh, a pudgy 40-something Korean-American dweeb, stewing with resentment, in his nice neat clothes. How far did he go in that cab — and where to?
Eventually he wound up with his father on the West Coast. One L. Goh’s father lives in an Oakland housing project for senior citizens run by a Christian non-profit. Goh found work in a San Mateo warehouse; he moonlighted as a mover. Anything to get back on his feet.
It’s not a good place to be if you’re a middle-aged failure: San Francisco has so much obscene wealth, and smug beauty — to be a fat 40-something nerd working with your father in a grocery store in Daly City, in the shadow of San Francisco, is some kind of Hell, a Hell for failures.
Goh, who was born Su Nam Ko, had lived in the shadow of his more successful, celebrated war hero brother, Su Wan Ko. In 2002, he changed his name from birth name, Su Nam Ko, to One L. Goh, stating that he did “not like my current name because it sounds like a girl’s name.”
And then last year, Goh’s brother, an Iraq War veteran and Special Forces hero, died in a freak car accident when his Toyota slammed head-on at 70 mpg into a “multi-ton” boulder lying on a Virginia road. The photos of the accident scene look almost unreal, almost staged.
The news of the brother’s death destroyed One L. Goh’s mother: She died within months of her son’s funeral.
This is the backdrop to Goh’s fateful decision to pull himself out of a years-long rut, and to start a new career for himself as a nurse. It may have been the shock of the back-to-back deaths in the family — or maybe it was his father who encouraged him, or the experience of living with his father in a building for the elderly.
Whatever the case, his widower father supported his son with a $6,000 loan to pay for the vocational nursing school tuition. But after a few months, One L. Goh was out of the program, bitter and vengeful, dead set on murder; and his father was out $6,000, thanks to his son’s bad bet.
Ignition to a Massacre
What set Goh off? Why did he leave the nursing school so early? Most reports say he was teased by his classmates for his age, 43, and his accent. Which is odd, considering most of the students are foreigners and Koreans.
(Another Korean-American rampage-killer was teased over his voice: Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui. As another Virginia Tech student told reporters back in 2007, “As soon as [Cho] started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China.’”)
Goh enrolled in what must have been one of the very worst nursing programs in the entire state of California: the vocational nursing program at Oikos University, a fundamentalist Korean-American Christian school in Oakland.
The school’s nursing program is accredited, which is important of course if you want your for-profit school program to make money. To comply with the accreditation, Oikos U. had provide a “2010 Performance Sheet” summing up its students’ performances both on the national nursing exam and, once licensed, in the job market.
The “performance” is abysmal, to the point where you almost wonder if it’s even statistically possible to fail as spectacularly as Oikos University’s nursing students. Of the programs 28 graduates from the Spring 2010 – 2011 term, only 11 of those 28 managed to pass the national nursing exam. That’s a 29 percent pass rate, almost unheard of.
According to a spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, it makes Oikos among the state’s very worst programs — the average success rate for graduates of other programs is 75 percent. (An Oakland Tribune article puts Oikos U’s exam pass rate at 41 percent of students who took the test, but the actual Performance Sheet gives a lower 29 percent pass figure — either way, both are awful).
Oikos University failed to prepare its students for the test, and it failed those who passed when they turned to the job market. According to the same Performance Sheet, of the school’s 11 students who passed the exam, eight found paying jobs as nurses, with salaries ranging as low as $5,000 per year to the one lucky top salary earner who earned up to $35,000. That’s in the Bay Area, the most expensive region in America.
In sum: One L. Goh could not have chosen a worse nursing program to pin his personal hopes on. This nursing program was all but guaranteed to fail him.
Mark Ames, Corsortium News via AlterNet
April 9, 2012 |
I was working on an article about last month’s rampage massacre in Afghanistan that left 17 villagers dead, when news hit of this past Monday’s massacre at an Oakland, California, religious college, leaving seven dead. In both cases, the shooters survived and face a possible death penalty — which is rare: Usually these rampage killings end with self-inflicted bullet in the mouth.
These “going postal” rampage killings like the one that just took place at the Oikos University campus happen so often and with such relentless rhythm, a lot of people might easily assume that these mass-shootings at American schools and workplaces have always been with us.
It’s not true, of course — as I wrote in my book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion — it’s an exclusively American phenomenon specific to our time. The first post office rampage killing took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan Revolution’s war on the American worker.
Those post office massacres quickly migrated into private workplace massacres by the end of the 1980s, where they’ve become a regular rhythmic staple of our murder culture ever since – and from the adult workplace, the massacres migrated to our schools.
We’ve had mass-killings before; and every now and then, you’ll read about a rampage killing in some other country. But only in America, and only since the mid-1980s, do American employees attack their own workplaces and offices, and middle-class students attack their own schools, with such consistency, year after year.
It was only after the crash in 2008 that some Americans began to accept the obvious: That the cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth and power introduced by the Reagan Revolution sparked a new type of murder that has more in common with insurgency violence or rebellious peasant violence than, say, the psychopathology of a serial murder.
Like so many school rampage killers, last Monday’s alleged murderer, One L. Goh, was reportedly bullied and mistreated at his nursing school program at the small Korean Christian nursing program he enrolled in. Bullying also was blamed for the high school rampage killing a few weeks ago in suburban Cleveland that left three students dead and five wounded.
The gruesome details about the way Goh is said to have lined up and executed his victims, the way he apparently singled out women, make it hard not to caricature him as a monster, a demonic psychopath — and yet, without excusing Goh’s killings, one should try to make sense of what happened to him, the downward-trending bleakness, the slow water-torture of low-five-figure debts, the broken marriage, the $23,000 tax bill owed to the IRS.
Losing Hope
In the Naughts, One L. Goh helped run a construction company. But construction collapsed as an industry in 2006-7; and unless you were Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo, you’d have nothing to show for the few good years.
In late 2007, Goh moved into the Yorkview Apartments complex in Hayes, Virginia — a bleak, prefab looking structure in a rural corner of Virginia. By the following summer, One L. Goh found himself unable to cover his $575 rent payment two months in a row. He was evicted; and on the same day that they they evicted him, creditors took his car.
The future rampage-murderer took it all stoically, even politely, according to one of Goh’s apartment complex neighbors, Thomas Lumpkin: “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”
Here is how his neighbor described the scene of One L. Goh’s last day at the Yorkshire Apartments:
Lumpkin said he recalled the day when Goh was evicted and his Nissan pickup was repossessed. Goh left by cab that day.
“He was always neat, wore nice clothes,” Lumpkin recalled. “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”
So he lost his car the same day he was evicted from his apartment in bumfuck, Virginia—and he took it all stoically as he cabbed away to god knows where.
I tried to imagine what that cab ride felt like for One L. Goh, a pudgy 40-something Korean-American dweeb, stewing with resentment, in his nice neat clothes. How far did he go in that cab — and where to?
Eventually he wound up with his father on the West Coast. One L. Goh’s father lives in an Oakland housing project for senior citizens run by a Christian non-profit. Goh found work in a San Mateo warehouse; he moonlighted as a mover. Anything to get back on his feet.
It’s not a good place to be if you’re a middle-aged failure: San Francisco has so much obscene wealth, and smug beauty — to be a fat 40-something nerd working with your father in a grocery store in Daly City, in the shadow of San Francisco, is some kind of Hell, a Hell for failures.
Goh, who was born Su Nam Ko, had lived in the shadow of his more successful, celebrated war hero brother, Su Wan Ko. In 2002, he changed his name from birth name, Su Nam Ko, to One L. Goh, stating that he did “not like my current name because it sounds like a girl’s name.”
And then last year, Goh’s brother, an Iraq War veteran and Special Forces hero, died in a freak car accident when his Toyota slammed head-on at 70 mpg into a “multi-ton” boulder lying on a Virginia road. The photos of the accident scene look almost unreal, almost staged.
The news of the brother’s death destroyed One L. Goh’s mother: She died within months of her son’s funeral.
This is the backdrop to Goh’s fateful decision to pull himself out of a years-long rut, and to start a new career for himself as a nurse. It may have been the shock of the back-to-back deaths in the family — or maybe it was his father who encouraged him, or the experience of living with his father in a building for the elderly.
Whatever the case, his widower father supported his son with a $6,000 loan to pay for the vocational nursing school tuition. But after a few months, One L. Goh was out of the program, bitter and vengeful, dead set on murder; and his father was out $6,000, thanks to his son’s bad bet.
Ignition to a Massacre
What set Goh off? Why did he leave the nursing school so early? Most reports say he was teased by his classmates for his age, 43, and his accent. Which is odd, considering most of the students are foreigners and Koreans.
(Another Korean-American rampage-killer was teased over his voice: Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui. As another Virginia Tech student told reporters back in 2007, “As soon as [Cho] started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China.’”)
Goh enrolled in what must have been one of the very worst nursing programs in the entire state of California: the vocational nursing program at Oikos University, a fundamentalist Korean-American Christian school in Oakland.
The school’s nursing program is accredited, which is important of course if you want your for-profit school program to make money. To comply with the accreditation, Oikos U. had provide a “2010 Performance Sheet” summing up its students’ performances both on the national nursing exam and, once licensed, in the job market.
The “performance” is abysmal, to the point where you almost wonder if it’s even statistically possible to fail as spectacularly as Oikos University’s nursing students. Of the programs 28 graduates from the Spring 2010 – 2011 term, only 11 of those 28 managed to pass the national nursing exam. That’s a 29 percent pass rate, almost unheard of.
According to a spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, it makes Oikos among the state’s very worst programs — the average success rate for graduates of other programs is 75 percent. (An Oakland Tribune article puts Oikos U’s exam pass rate at 41 percent of students who took the test, but the actual Performance Sheet gives a lower 29 percent pass figure — either way, both are awful).
Oikos University failed to prepare its students for the test, and it failed those who passed when they turned to the job market. According to the same Performance Sheet, of the school’s 11 students who passed the exam, eight found paying jobs as nurses, with salaries ranging as low as $5,000 per year to the one lucky top salary earner who earned up to $35,000. That’s in the Bay Area, the most expensive region in America.
In sum: One L. Goh could not have chosen a worse nursing program to pin his personal hopes on. This nursing program was all but guaranteed to fail him.
Fundamentalist Mission
One thing Oikos University does fairly convincingly is fundamentalist evangelical Christianity for Korean-Americans. Students at Oikos U. are required to attend regular church services; the pious language of evangelical Christianity frames everything.
The school’s president, Rev. Jongkin Kim, says his goal is “to foster spiritual Christian leaders who abide by God’s intentions and to expand God’s nation through them.” Under the university’s “Our Vision” it reads:
“The vision of Oikos University is to educate emerging Christian leaders to transform and bless the world at every level – from the church and local community levels to the realm of world entire.”
And then there’s the reality, revealed in a lawsuit filed last month by a former staffer of Oikos University named Jong Cha, who says the school cheated her out of $75,000 in salary and expenses, and stiffed her on a $10,000 loan that she personally gave to the Christian college in 2008.
Viewed from this angle, One L. Goh might have come to the conclusion at some point that he’d taken scarce funds from his poor old widower father, and handed it over to religious hucksters running the Golden State’s worst nursing program.
One thing to keep in mind here: It’s easy to see why Oikos University introduced a nursing vocational program. If you get it accredited, these nursing programs are guaranteed cash-cows. Most of the big for-profit education predators like Kaplan Inc. (which provides the majority of revenue to the Washington Post Company) are in on the vocational nursing for-profit gig.
You can charge students insane tuitions, hire hacks as teachers, pocket the difference, and dump the unpaid loans on the government in exchange for 100 cents on the dollar.
The Reverend who founded Oikos University certainly understood this — his good friend told the New York Times that Rev. Kim “had established the nursing school to support the school’s department of religion.” The cash must have rolled in quickly, because within a year after launching its nursing program, Oikos doubled its size — meaning doubling revenues.
And yet even with all those new revenues coming in, the school couldn’t figure out a way to raise its graduates’ test results out of the failure category. The school appears to have stiffed one of its top staffers out of her pay and her loan, suggesting, in the words of the Oakland Tribune, “that the school may have fallen on hard times.”
I wonder if this is what set off One L. Goh a few months after he enrolled — the realization that he’d been fleeced, that he enrolled in the wrong program on his father’s money. The year 2011 had already taken his brother and his mother.
A Dashed Last Hope
There is something in between the lines that suggests his plan to become a nurse, worked out with his father’s assistance a kind of desperate last attempt to turn everything around in the proverbial One Bold Swoop.
He would do something practical, and morally good, helping the elderly, people like his father — and earn a steady income that would allow him, at last, some dignity and some chance to start paying off his debts.
It was as though Goh pinned everything on this plan to reinvent himself as a nurse — and according to all our cultural propaganda, all the Hollywood movies and newspaper bromides, Goh would be rewarded for undertaking this self-transformation. It was guaranteed to change everything. As the Oikos U. ad promised, “Dreams Do Come True.”
And for a brief while last year, Goh’s mood was transformed, he really did think he had a great future ahead of him. One of Goh’s former employers at a food warehouse described Goh as “upbeat” when he ran into him last year in Oakland — a change from the usually quiet, sullen Goh he’d known.
This new “upbeat” One L. Goh boasted to his former employer “about how he had returned to school to become a nurse and help elderly people.”
The idea that you can reinvent yourself, that your fate is in your own hands, that you have the power inside of you to make yourself a winner (and if you fail, it’s all your own fault) — this may be America’s most toxic cultural snake-oil. And yet it never fails to find takers.
Of course, nothing changed — except that Goh had been conned out of his dad’s money. As his former employer put it:
“Not many people go back to school at that age. He was trying something new and it wasn’t working.”
It didn’t take long for him to figure it out. Just a few months after enrolling, One L. Goh dropped out of the Oikos University program. When he dropped out of the program, he asked them to refund his father’s $6,000 that he paid for tuition. He was denied. He fought with the administrators, but they didn’t budge. This was what made him snap.
The administrator, whom Goh fought with for his tuition refund and whom he came to kill that day, has now come forward. Her name is Ellen Cervellon. She was gone on the day of the massacre because she also teaches nursing to students at California State University at East Bay.
Now she will have to wonder, why didn’t she just approve the refund to a desperate man? What if she had approved it? Her argument was that he’d already spent several months in the program. According to a friend of Ellen Cervellon’s, Linda Music, she even denied Goh his last reasonable request, to prorate the refund.
As Matthai Kuruvila reported at SFGate.com, Goh had asked Ellen Cervellon for a full refund of his tuition and when he was denied suggested prorating the tuition refund. Cervellon said no, Music said.
That meant he threw his father’s money away: He had nothing to show for the $6,000 given to the university; he would never be able to pay his father back; and he would never be able to borrow a sum like that from him again. That was it, the final act. The jig was up for him.
Lack of Empathy
Why? Why couldn’t Cervellon meet this desperate failure half-way? What was in it for Cervellon? What’s with the Ayn Randian lack of empathy in this country among the non-oligarchy caste?
Cervellon seems to be asking herself this same question: “In talking to several of the students and faculty who were there, I think he was looking for me. I have that weight on my shoulders and I don’t know what to do with it.”
School officials have been painting a portrait of One L. Goh as a psycho and a freak, using phrases like “behavioral problems” and calling him “angry” and “paranoid.” There must be truth to that; nice, normal people in a healthy state of mind don’t rampage-massacre others.
But the intended target, Ellen Cervellon, disputes that: “He was never forced out, he showed no behavioral problems, and he was never asked to leave the program. He decided on his own to leave the program.”
The depressingly familiar dead-end life that One L. Goh found himself in — surrounded by petty scams as revealed in the ex-staffer’s lawsuit and the bleak performance of the school’s graduates, combined with the back-to-back deaths of two family members — could make a lot of sane people desperate and enraged and suicidal. Not to mention the larger context of an inequality-ravaged America where opportunity and dignity are scarcer and scarcer.
On top of all this, as he complained often, students at the nursing program wouldn’t talk to him. That could be traumatizing even under better circumstances, but under his conditions, being mocked and ignored by fellow fundamentalist Christians for being an aging loser, would be devastating.
One of Goh’s teachers continued criticizing Goh even after the massacre: “I always advised him, ‘You go to school to learn, not to make friends.’”
More great advice from the Oikos University folks.
After quitting the nursing program, One L. Goh spent the last few months working with his father at the Daly City supermarket. He was back at square one: A failure, swindled, condemned to work in a shitty job beside his struggling father whom he’d let down.
You might say that One L. Goh snapped because for once, he saw things as they really were, stripped of hope, stripped of fantasies about self-improvement or self-transformation.
He failed at everything; he was one of those faceless, anonymous losers. But there was one thing he could still excel at, something that could get him attention, something that this country perversely celebrates: mass murder in a blaze of anti-glory. So long as you’re ready to make that transformation-of-character into a death row inmate, that option is always available here.
Last Monday, according to police accounts, One L. Goh armed himself with a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol and showed up at the Oikos school for his final act. But the plan failed from the start: The administrator he was after was gone. So the target became the entire setting, Oikos University, as it so often happens in these “going postal” rampage killings.
There’s a section on the Oikos University website about the 11 beliefs that the University holds to — they call it their “Doctrinal Statement” and it’s the last belief, Number 11, that sums up the malevolence of it all:
“We believe in the existence of a personal, malevolent being called Satan who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom the place of eternal punishment was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.” ++
Murder, Suicide and Financial Ruin: How the Class War Is Destroying Americans' Lives
The financial fraudsters, the One Percenters,
fleece the most vulnerable -- military families, minorities, low-income people
-- to generate their fast riches.
Consortium News / By Mark Ames
April 17, 2012
This past Thursday, a Modesto, California, man whose house was in foreclosure shot and killed the Sheriff’s deputy and the locksmith who came to evict him from his condominium unit. Modesto authorities responded by sending 100 police and SWAT snipers to counter-attack, and it ended Waco-style, with the fourplex structure burning to the ground with the shooter inside.
It’s not surprising that this should happen in Modesto: Last year the Central California city’s foreclosure rate was the third worst in the country, with one in every 19 properties filing for foreclosure. The entire region is ravaged by unemployment, budget cuts, and blight — the only handouts that Modesto is seeing are the surplus military equipment stocks being dumped into the Modesto police department’s growing arsenal.
The shooter who died was 45 years old and he appears to have lost his condominium over a $15,000 home equity loan he took out almost a decade ago, owed to Bank of America. The condo was sold at an auction for just $12,988 to a shady firm, R&T Financial, that doesn’t even have a listed contact number. Too much for the former security guard, who barricaded himself in the condo which had been in the family for decades. He refused to walk out alive.
These “death by foreclosure” killings have been going on, quietly, around the country ever since the housing swindle first unraveled. Like the story of the 64-year-old Phoenix man whose daughter and grandson were preparing to move in with him after losing their home to foreclosure — only to get a knock on his door surprising him with an eviction notice on the house he’d owned for over 30 years. Bank of America foreclosed on him despite his attempts to work out a fair plan.
We now know that the same banks that had been bailed out over their subprime fraud disaster were, by the time this happened, headlong into another criminal scheme, this time foreclosure fraud. The fraud was effected both illegally and in bad faith on a scale so vast it’s hard not to think that it was carried out by some marauding foreign army.
Anyway, the old man grabbed a .357 and a beer, walked outside into a sea of Phoenix cops and snipers, and fired his gun off until they cut him down in a hail of bullets.
Sometimes the “losers” in this class war make it easier on everyone else by killing themselves and setting themselves on fire as they’re being evicted, as one Ohio couple recently did. Others class war “losers” aren’t as cooperative, like a Florida man who was gunned down by police after he set his foreclosed townhouse on fire last year.
It’s exactly the sort of lopsided class war that Warren Buffett first officially acknowledged in 2006:
“There’s a class war, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Buffett is right to call it a one-way war, in both a metaphorical sense and in a literal sense, given the endless wars being waged for over a decade now, wars that are tied to the class wars at home.
Murdering Afghan Civilians
Nothing illustrates the interlinking between the class war at home and the imperial wars abroad more starkly than the example of Staff Sgt. Roger Bales, the Army sniper accused last month of killing 17 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children.
The Army is trying to pin it all on Sgt. Bales’s supposedly deranged mental state, but their version of events contradicts what the victims and eyewitnesses in the village have been telling the few reporters who have had a chance to actually interview them. They’re saying that they saw several American soldiers participating in the massacre, as well as a helicopter.
Whatever the case, whether alone or with others, most people familiar with the case agree that for some reason, Sgt. Bales “snapped.” Invariably they’re over-psychologizing why he “snapped” — the military has blamed it on everything from his supposedly troubled marriage, to strain or stress, to an alleged alcohol bender.
Less well-known or discussed is what happened to Sgt. Bales on the other front: the class war front. Three days before his shooting rampage, the house where Bales’s wife and two children lived in Tacoma, Washington, put up for a short sale, $50,000 underwater. This was exactly what Sgt. Bales and his wife feared might happen if the Army forced him into a fourth battlefield deployment.
The last time Sgt. Bales deployed — to Iraq in August 2009 — Bank of America foreclosed on the family’s rental property, a duplex that his wife had bought in 1999 that was also underwater. Within months of BofA taking their duplex, Sgt. Bales’s Humvee hit an IED and flipped over, causing brain and head injuries. On a previous deployment to Iraq, Sgt. Bales had one of his feet partially blown off by a bomb.
Before being deployed to Afghanistan last year, he and his wife had been assured that the Army wouldn’t force Sgt. Bales, a highly-decorated hero who’d already sacrificed his physical wellbeing and his family’s financial health, back into combat.
Bales and his wife were planning their future as a career military family, on bases far from any combat zone, working up the Army’s pay scale year by year. But then in March 2011, a year before Sgt. Bales’s massacre, they were shocked and hurt by the Army’s decision to deny him his standard promotion to Sgt. First Class, which came with a much-needed pay hike.
(Last year, President Barack Obama’s Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Michael Mullen, said many of the austerity cuts would fall on soldiers’ pay and benefits rather than slashing weapons programs and force levels, which he called the “relatively easy” thing to do.)
When Sgt. Bales learned he wouldn’t get his promotion, his wife wrote on her blog:
Consortium News / By Mark Ames
April 17, 2012
This past Thursday, a Modesto, California, man whose house was in foreclosure shot and killed the Sheriff’s deputy and the locksmith who came to evict him from his condominium unit. Modesto authorities responded by sending 100 police and SWAT snipers to counter-attack, and it ended Waco-style, with the fourplex structure burning to the ground with the shooter inside.
It’s not surprising that this should happen in Modesto: Last year the Central California city’s foreclosure rate was the third worst in the country, with one in every 19 properties filing for foreclosure. The entire region is ravaged by unemployment, budget cuts, and blight — the only handouts that Modesto is seeing are the surplus military equipment stocks being dumped into the Modesto police department’s growing arsenal.
The shooter who died was 45 years old and he appears to have lost his condominium over a $15,000 home equity loan he took out almost a decade ago, owed to Bank of America. The condo was sold at an auction for just $12,988 to a shady firm, R&T Financial, that doesn’t even have a listed contact number. Too much for the former security guard, who barricaded himself in the condo which had been in the family for decades. He refused to walk out alive.
These “death by foreclosure” killings have been going on, quietly, around the country ever since the housing swindle first unraveled. Like the story of the 64-year-old Phoenix man whose daughter and grandson were preparing to move in with him after losing their home to foreclosure — only to get a knock on his door surprising him with an eviction notice on the house he’d owned for over 30 years. Bank of America foreclosed on him despite his attempts to work out a fair plan.
We now know that the same banks that had been bailed out over their subprime fraud disaster were, by the time this happened, headlong into another criminal scheme, this time foreclosure fraud. The fraud was effected both illegally and in bad faith on a scale so vast it’s hard not to think that it was carried out by some marauding foreign army.
Anyway, the old man grabbed a .357 and a beer, walked outside into a sea of Phoenix cops and snipers, and fired his gun off until they cut him down in a hail of bullets.
Sometimes the “losers” in this class war make it easier on everyone else by killing themselves and setting themselves on fire as they’re being evicted, as one Ohio couple recently did. Others class war “losers” aren’t as cooperative, like a Florida man who was gunned down by police after he set his foreclosed townhouse on fire last year.
It’s exactly the sort of lopsided class war that Warren Buffett first officially acknowledged in 2006:
“There’s a class war, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Buffett is right to call it a one-way war, in both a metaphorical sense and in a literal sense, given the endless wars being waged for over a decade now, wars that are tied to the class wars at home.
Murdering Afghan Civilians
Nothing illustrates the interlinking between the class war at home and the imperial wars abroad more starkly than the example of Staff Sgt. Roger Bales, the Army sniper accused last month of killing 17 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children.
The Army is trying to pin it all on Sgt. Bales’s supposedly deranged mental state, but their version of events contradicts what the victims and eyewitnesses in the village have been telling the few reporters who have had a chance to actually interview them. They’re saying that they saw several American soldiers participating in the massacre, as well as a helicopter.
Whatever the case, whether alone or with others, most people familiar with the case agree that for some reason, Sgt. Bales “snapped.” Invariably they’re over-psychologizing why he “snapped” — the military has blamed it on everything from his supposedly troubled marriage, to strain or stress, to an alleged alcohol bender.
Less well-known or discussed is what happened to Sgt. Bales on the other front: the class war front. Three days before his shooting rampage, the house where Bales’s wife and two children lived in Tacoma, Washington, put up for a short sale, $50,000 underwater. This was exactly what Sgt. Bales and his wife feared might happen if the Army forced him into a fourth battlefield deployment.
The last time Sgt. Bales deployed — to Iraq in August 2009 — Bank of America foreclosed on the family’s rental property, a duplex that his wife had bought in 1999 that was also underwater. Within months of BofA taking their duplex, Sgt. Bales’s Humvee hit an IED and flipped over, causing brain and head injuries. On a previous deployment to Iraq, Sgt. Bales had one of his feet partially blown off by a bomb.
Before being deployed to Afghanistan last year, he and his wife had been assured that the Army wouldn’t force Sgt. Bales, a highly-decorated hero who’d already sacrificed his physical wellbeing and his family’s financial health, back into combat.
Bales and his wife were planning their future as a career military family, on bases far from any combat zone, working up the Army’s pay scale year by year. But then in March 2011, a year before Sgt. Bales’s massacre, they were shocked and hurt by the Army’s decision to deny him his standard promotion to Sgt. First Class, which came with a much-needed pay hike.
(Last year, President Barack Obama’s Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Michael Mullen, said many of the austerity cuts would fall on soldiers’ pay and benefits rather than slashing weapons programs and force levels, which he called the “relatively easy” thing to do.)
When Sgt. Bales learned he wouldn’t get his promotion, his wife wrote on her blog:
“It is very disappointing after all of the work Bob has done and all
the sacrifices he had made for his love of his country, family and
friends.”
Kathilyn Bales comforted herself with the assurances they’d been given that at least her husband wouldn’t be sent back into combat again — at least the family would be going together to one of the many non-warzone bases around the world. She wrote:
“Who knows where we will end up. I just hope that we are able to rent out the house so we can keep it. I think we are both still in shock.”
Kathilyn Bales comforted herself with the assurances they’d been given that at least her husband wouldn’t be sent back into combat again — at least the family would be going together to one of the many non-warzone bases around the world. She wrote:
“Who knows where we will end up. I just hope that we are able to rent out the house so we can keep it. I think we are both still in shock.”
Then came the real shock: the Army sent Sgt. Bales back into the war zone, into Afghanistan. His wife would have to deal with the more than $500,000 in mortgage debts on her own.
It was all timed perfectly: Last December, the month Sgt. Bales was deployed to Afghanistan, one of the subprime loans worth $178,000, taken out in 2006, was timed to “reset” to as high as 10.8 percent interest, and call in its first full payment.
Joe Krumbach, former president of the Seattle Mortgage Bankers Association, reviewed this loan and the others sold to Sgt. Bales’s wife while he was in Iraq, and denounced them as “unconscionable.”
He told the Seattle Times, “The margins on these loans are disaster waiting to happen” and admitted that mortgage lenders deliberately targeted military families like the Bales family, swindling them into signing onto far pricier refinancing loans “that benefited lenders and mortgage brokers” at the expense of vulnerable military families, as well as minorities and low-income borrowers.
Another local real estate businessman who specializes in short sales agreed, telling Businessweek that “we set them up.”
“It’s not an unfamiliar story, but it’s sad,” said Richard Eastern, a co-founder of Bellevue, Washington-based Washington Property Solutions, which negotiates short sales. “We’re going to send you off to war but we’re going to foreclose on your home.” He said many lenders offered loans they knew borrowers couldn’t repay. “And it’s not just soldiers, it’s everybody. We set them up.”
The extent to which mortgage lenders and banks deliberately preyed on American military families is made clear by this little-known fact: the Tacoma region, home to Fort Lewis-McChord, the largest base in the Western United States and home to 100,000 military personnel and family, suffered one of the worst predatory subprime loan epidemics in the country, an anomaly in the state of Washington. According to Richard Eastern’s firm, roughly half of all home sales in that region are either foreclosures or short sales. As early as 2007, the Wall Street Journal singled out Tacoma as one of the nation’s worst affected regions from subprime plunder.
Who’s at Fault?
So who did this? Who, in the class war equation, waged and “won” this class war on Sgt. Bales’s family, and so many other military families? What are their names? Where are they now?
As a matter of fact, there is a name: Paramount Equity Mortgage. And there is a name: Hayes Barnard, the CEO and co-founder of Paramount Equity. He lives in Roseville, California. In many ways, the story of the “winner” in this class war story is the most revealing, and enraging part of all.
Paramount Equity was founded in 2004, and quickly spread across the Western states, issuing some $8 billion in loans. Paramount Equity’s subprime predation really took off in 2006, right after the Bush Administration’s Department of Housing (HUD) and the FHA qualified Paramount Equity government insurance on its mortgages.
Almost immediately, Paramount Equity flooded the Tacoma region’s radio airwaves with deceptive ads hard-selling refinancing loans, featuring the voice of CEO Hayes Barnard promising the lowest rates, the most honest dealing, giving his personal guarantee.
However, a raft of fraud and deception charges followed. In 2008, the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions announced it was charging Paramount Equity Mortgage with deceptive lending practices and revoking its license.
Paramount stood accused of charging and collecting unearned fees, charging consumers to buy down interest rates without actually reducing the rate, failing to make required disclosures and making state and federally-required disclosures in a deceptive manner.
“Paramount failed to make proper disclosures in almost every loan we reviewed,” said Deb Bortner, director of DFI’s Division of Consumer Services.
“Washington [state] has many licensed mortgage brokers who comply with the law. In today’s market, we simply do not need a mortgage broker engaged in deceptive conduct doing business in this state.”
The state’s charges also singled out Hayes Barnard for “engaging in a deceptive advertising campaign.”
As is so often the case, there’s far too little reported specifics on the actual nature of the fraud and deception. Sometimes you have to look in the comments sections on real estate or legal blogs from the affected region. Like this comment left on a marketing blog posting calling out Paramount Equity’s “lies”:
“I apologize if this is maybe a little off topic. I refinanced with Paramount back in 2004. Come 2009, my loan adjusted and I was left with no choice but to walk away with my 3 kids and stay at home wife. I had to rely on credit cards the last couple of years, even charging a couple mortgage payments.
“We ended up filing ch. 7 and we are now renting and have ZERO (if not worse) credit. Today (Sept. 27, 2011) an auditor came to my door and gave me some info and verified other info regarding B-of-A filing a PMI [private mortgage insurance] claim. Sorry so long winded….
“One of the docs he showed me was of my stated income which was double … DOUBLE my income at the time. I NEVER would put myself into such a situation and lied. I honestly believe the number was changed and it was burried [sic] in an inch of docs I had to sign and I just didn’t see it.
“I’m not claiming complete innocence, because after all, I DID sign everything and agreed to the loan (which I didn’t know was a negative amortization loan. Hell, I didn’t even know what that meant). Now, we’re stable, but my financial future and creditworthiness is screwed. I barely got a $500 limit credit card at 17%.
“Do I have any type of recourse here? I’m not frivolous, but I am at a
loss. In fact … I LOST everything. Thanks in advance.”
These sorts of stories can be found everywhere, and they repeat themselves over and over. And what’s most galling of all is that these plundering crooks preyed on those most vulnerable — military families suffering from the chaos of war, minorities, low-income people — to generate their fast riches, backed with government guarantees.
Getting Off Easy
For all the swindling and destruction, including the “unconscionable” exploding loans Paramount Equity foisted on Sgt. Bales’s wife while he was off fighting in Iraq, the state of Washington settled in 2009 with what can only be described as a wrist-massage: A fine of a mere $392,000, no admission of guilt.
Paramount even got to keep its license to operate. This, despite the incredible admission in the signed consent that “Paramount admits that during the relevant time period, Paramount did not maintain books and records.”
This is what a lopsided class war looks like: The financial fraudsters, the One Percenters, fleece the unsophisticated locals like 19th century Europeans plundering far-away aborigines.
One victim of Paramount commented bitterly on the settlement:
“We have not one, but TWO ugly loans which are breaking us from good ol’ Paramount Equity Mortgage. …. The citizens who signed these toxic documents are suffering EVERY DAY and losing their homes because Matt and Hayes need to make their yacht payment.
“Our financial lives, that took 30 years to build, have been crushed because of the deception that occurred in their office (where no employee appeared to be over 40 years of age) I remember asking at the closing table, ‘Does anyone have gray hair in this building??!!’ It was unnerving. The parking lot looked like a BMW Sales Lot. …
“Soon, I intend to stop crying about our mortgages, as I have been doing over the last THREE YEARS… And Washington State Department of Financial Institutions: SHAME ON YOU. Shame on you.”
Two “ugly loans” from Paramount Equity are what broke Kathilyn and Roger Bales.
The end result: Hayes Barnard and Paramount Equity Capital are doing better than ever. In 2009, Hayes Barnard was named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by the Roseville Chamber of Commerce, the wealthy Sacramento suburb where Paramount Equity Mortgage is headquartered. In 2010, the Sacramento Business Journal honored him as one of Sacrament’s “40 under 40” leaders.
The big payoff came last year, when one of the world’s largest infomercial firms, Guthy-Renker, bought a “significant equity position” in Hayes Barnard’s company. You might know Guthy-Renker as the company that makes all those annoying Tony Robbins infomercials and Susan Lucci skincare infomercials.
Guthy-Renker’s also owns an equity stake in RealtyTrac, the leading foreclosure intelligence source. That’s good news for Hayes Barnard, because it means he’ll be able to wet his beak on the aftermath of the subprime plunder by getting first dibs on the best foreclosure deals. It’s a win-win.
In this degenerate 21st Century version of America, Hayes Barnard exemplifies everything that the current system rewards. In the anti-meritocracy we live in, the sociopaths and crooks are the “winners.” Being a “winner” means you get quoted adoringly in a Sacramento Business Journal Q&A, spouting out the blackest of unintentional black humor:
“As a younger professional, what is the biggest challenge you face?
“As a young professional, the biggest challenge I face is finding the right balance between raising my three children all under 3 years old, being a supporting husband and leading my team as a CEO of three companies. … Achieving true success is to give, give, give and help as many people as you can while leading for your family, employees and community.”
That’s how the class war “winners” rub it in on the rest of us — especially their victims. How can you function after reading such self-serving drivel, particularly if you’re one of the victims?
As for the “losers” in this class war: Sgt. Roger Bales’s wife and children are ruined. They have no home; they only own debts to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, debts owed for life to the Hayes Barnards of this country. The “winner” — the swindler — is a community hero.
As for Sgt. Bales – whom the Army accuses of “snapping” for no good reason, accusing him of being a drunk, or of mental weakness, incapable of handling his marriage or the stress of combat – he might even be put to death. He now sits in Fort Leavenworth military prison, charged with the murder of 17 Afghan civilians.
These sorts of stories can be found everywhere, and they repeat themselves over and over. And what’s most galling of all is that these plundering crooks preyed on those most vulnerable — military families suffering from the chaos of war, minorities, low-income people — to generate their fast riches, backed with government guarantees.
Getting Off Easy
For all the swindling and destruction, including the “unconscionable” exploding loans Paramount Equity foisted on Sgt. Bales’s wife while he was off fighting in Iraq, the state of Washington settled in 2009 with what can only be described as a wrist-massage: A fine of a mere $392,000, no admission of guilt.
Paramount even got to keep its license to operate. This, despite the incredible admission in the signed consent that “Paramount admits that during the relevant time period, Paramount did not maintain books and records.”
This is what a lopsided class war looks like: The financial fraudsters, the One Percenters, fleece the unsophisticated locals like 19th century Europeans plundering far-away aborigines.
One victim of Paramount commented bitterly on the settlement:
“We have not one, but TWO ugly loans which are breaking us from good ol’ Paramount Equity Mortgage. …. The citizens who signed these toxic documents are suffering EVERY DAY and losing their homes because Matt and Hayes need to make their yacht payment.
“Our financial lives, that took 30 years to build, have been crushed because of the deception that occurred in their office (where no employee appeared to be over 40 years of age) I remember asking at the closing table, ‘Does anyone have gray hair in this building??!!’ It was unnerving. The parking lot looked like a BMW Sales Lot. …
“Soon, I intend to stop crying about our mortgages, as I have been doing over the last THREE YEARS… And Washington State Department of Financial Institutions: SHAME ON YOU. Shame on you.”
Two “ugly loans” from Paramount Equity are what broke Kathilyn and Roger Bales.
The end result: Hayes Barnard and Paramount Equity Capital are doing better than ever. In 2009, Hayes Barnard was named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by the Roseville Chamber of Commerce, the wealthy Sacramento suburb where Paramount Equity Mortgage is headquartered. In 2010, the Sacramento Business Journal honored him as one of Sacrament’s “40 under 40” leaders.
The big payoff came last year, when one of the world’s largest infomercial firms, Guthy-Renker, bought a “significant equity position” in Hayes Barnard’s company. You might know Guthy-Renker as the company that makes all those annoying Tony Robbins infomercials and Susan Lucci skincare infomercials.
Guthy-Renker’s also owns an equity stake in RealtyTrac, the leading foreclosure intelligence source. That’s good news for Hayes Barnard, because it means he’ll be able to wet his beak on the aftermath of the subprime plunder by getting first dibs on the best foreclosure deals. It’s a win-win.
In this degenerate 21st Century version of America, Hayes Barnard exemplifies everything that the current system rewards. In the anti-meritocracy we live in, the sociopaths and crooks are the “winners.” Being a “winner” means you get quoted adoringly in a Sacramento Business Journal Q&A, spouting out the blackest of unintentional black humor:
“As a younger professional, what is the biggest challenge you face?
“As a young professional, the biggest challenge I face is finding the right balance between raising my three children all under 3 years old, being a supporting husband and leading my team as a CEO of three companies. … Achieving true success is to give, give, give and help as many people as you can while leading for your family, employees and community.”
That’s how the class war “winners” rub it in on the rest of us — especially their victims. How can you function after reading such self-serving drivel, particularly if you’re one of the victims?
As for the “losers” in this class war: Sgt. Roger Bales’s wife and children are ruined. They have no home; they only own debts to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, debts owed for life to the Hayes Barnards of this country. The “winner” — the swindler — is a community hero.
As for Sgt. Bales – whom the Army accuses of “snapping” for no good reason, accusing him of being a drunk, or of mental weakness, incapable of handling his marriage or the stress of combat – he might even be put to death. He now sits in Fort Leavenworth military prison, charged with the murder of 17 Afghan civilians.
The way the One Percenter “winners” see this story, it’s all proof that the system is working perfectly.
As the National Journal reported, “Nearly all of National Journal’s National Security Insiders agree that the military justice system can conduct a fair trial for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.” ++
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverand Martin Luther King
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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