Go to Original
By Bruce Wallace
Many here rely on remittances from overseas relatives, and the dollar's slide against the peso has forced some people to cut back, with private education the first to go.
MANILA — The U.S. dollar has always been king down by the docks on Manila Bay, where Philippine seamen congregate to swap stories and look for work.
On the swarm of recruitment booths outside the Luneta Seafarers Center, photocopied fliers advertise jobs that pay in dollars: $2,300 a month for a welder on a natural gas tanker or $3,900 for a second mate on a passenger liner.
But lately, the dollar has lost some of its luster with the highly sought-after crews.
"Almost everyone is asking for more money because they know the foreign exchange is not to their advantage," says James Estrada, a marine engineer who recruits crews for 300 ships operated by Wallem Maritime Services.
"You get fewer pesos for your dollar. So we’ve had to make salaries higher."
The dollar’s slide against other currencies is rippling across the globe: It is keeping more American tourists at home, raising prices on imports and creating bargains for foreigners swooping down on U.S. assets.
It is also causing financial pain in less obvious places, such as the Philippines, where millions of people have come to rely on the purchasing power of dollars sent home by relatives working abroad.
An estimated 10 million overseas Philippine workers provide money for an even greater multiple of dependents at home. A year ago, one dollar bought 49 Philippine pesos. Today, it brings about 41 pesos, a sharp depreciation that has coincided with rising commodity prices to create an economic crunch in this archipelago of 92 million.
"The biggest losers are overseas workers because the peso value of their remittances to their families has shrunk," says Benjamin Diokno, an economics professor at the University of the Philippines and a policy advisor to the previous Philippine government.
Filipinos working overseas have been a pillar of the Philippines’ economy since the 1970s, when some of the country’s hardest-working and best-educated people left to take up service jobs in other parts of Asia, in the West and the Persian Gulf states: nurses and domestic helpers, hospital technicians, sailors and nightclub entertainers.
The money they send home each year accounts for more than 12% of the Philippine economy, often sustaining several extended-family members, some of whom don’t work. For years, these dollars have paid private school fees for younger siblings and bought small condos for aging parents.
"We used to pity people who didn’t have someone in their family making dollars," says Estrella Gonzaga, 55, sitting in her small but comfortable Manila house that is plastered with family photos, including a high school graduation picture of her daughter Hasmine, a nurse who moved to the Bronx nine years ago.
Over the years, money sent by their daughter allowed Gonzaga and her husband, Jose, 62, a retired X-ray technician who spent five years abroad himself in the 1980s, to build a nest egg of dollars in their Manila bank account. But in December, needing an operation for a herniated disk and with no health insurance to cover the $3,700 cost, Gonzaga had to ask her daughter for more money. And she underestimated the gap between the dollar and the peso.
"She sent me money, but I had to go back and ask for more," she says. "The dollar just seems to be falling so fast."
Economists say the drop so far has merely crimped lifestyles, not crippled the economy. The dollar’s decline is only part of a mix of wider economic problems the Philippines faces, from an ominous decline in salaried jobs to sharply rising food and gasoline prices. Analysts also note that those overseas workers living in Europe and paid in the rising euro are doing better than ever. The issue is not a strong peso, they point out. It is a weak dollar.
But many here worry that the subtle effects of dollar weakness today may have a deeper impact down the road. They point in particular to families that can no longer count on dollar remittances to fund private education for children and siblings.
"The patterns of expenditure show that a big part of the money sent home by overseas workers is spent on private education, and this was a significant investment in human capital," Diokno says. "Now I’m talking to private school owners who say their enrollments are off for next year because families are pulling children out and putting them into the public system."
Manila’s public schools report being swamped with new admissions. Some of the increase is attributable to the rising Philippine birthrate. But Jose Gonzaga, the retired X-ray technician, says he knows several people who can no longer afford to send their children to private school because of the dollar’s drop.
Not every Filipino is obsessed with the exchange rate, says Pedrito Villaflor, a marine engineer who has shifted careers and is writing a master’s thesis on why Philippine seamen are so widely coveted by shipping companies.
"Seamen are loyal to the U.S. dollar," he says, contesting the recruiter’s claims of demands for higher salaries. "Most of them don’t understand exchange rates. As long as they are getting paid in U.S. dollars, they are happy."
Others are less sanguine. The Gonzagas are loath to touch the money in their dollar account, stocked over the years with irregular contributions from their daughter. "When we need it badly, I take a little bit out," Estrella Gonzaga says. "But the rate is too low.
"We’re still hoping that if we leave it there for a while, the dollar will go back up."
Monday, May 5, 2008
Web social networks friendly to identity thieves
Go to Original
By Joseph Menn
Scam artists are taking advantage of a trusting arena to get members to divulge passwords and other information.
Michael Maris became an unwitting spammer.
The 22-year-old college student from Chicago received messages last year from annoyed friends on MySpace, wondering why he had used the social networking site to send them pitches for male enhancement products.
He checked his outgoing mail folder and discovered that someone had hacked into his account, then blasted the unsolicited messages to each of his 70 MySpace pals. Among the recipients were his nieces, ages 14 and 16.
"I couldn't believe that it happened," he said.
Social networking sites, which let users create detailed profile pages and connect with friends, are becoming the hot new thing for identity thieves, both amateur and professional. As improved spam filters and skeptical consumers make bogus e-mail less successful, scam artists are taking advantage of the atmosphere of trust that exists within these online circles of friends.
Symantec Corp., a tech security firm, recently reported that 91% of the bogus U.S.-based websites used in so-called phishing attacks during the second half of 2007 imitated the log-in pages of two unnamed social networking sites -- believed by industry executives to be the two biggest, MySpace and Facebook. Phishing tries to trick recipients into visiting phony websites and disclosing account numbers, passwords and other personal data.
"The bad guys are very adaptable. If something doesn't work, they come up with something new," said Kevin Haley, a product executive at Symantec. "Users feel more comfortable surrounded by their friends online -- what could be safer?"
Sometimes financial gain isn't the objective. Cyber-bullies have taken over the social networking accounts of acquaintances to post vicious rants or engage in mischief.
Frank Nein, a new-media executive in Los Angeles, is still perturbed that a man showed up at the home of his 12-year-old daughter after another girl impersonated her during MySpace chats.
Nicole Whiting, a 19-year-old nanny from Charlotte, N.C., fielded questions from friends about her new boyfriend, Patrick. They learned of the relationship on what they thought was her Facebook page.
One problem, she said: "I don't even know a Patrick."
It turned out that "some lonely guy" had copied her pictures from her MySpace page, borrowed her first name and created a Facebook profile for an imaginary girlfriend. Her problem ended after she tracked down Patrick and complained.
But experts warn that victims of more sophisticated scams won't get off so easy. The same kind of hucksters who dreamed up e-mail scams featuring Nigerian dictators are now focused on cracking social networks to peddle products and engage in identity theft.
In more organized campaigns, scammers distribute free widgets that purport to help users decorate their profile pages but secretly use the log-on information to spam their friends, as happened to Maris. Other crooks surreptitiously install software that records keystrokes to steal financial data, or they use personal details gleaned from the profiles to make e-mail fraud attempts more credible.
One common technique on social networking sites involves sending messages that appear to come from an online buddy, inviting the recipient to check out a new profile page. The page then asks the recipient to log in.
It's a scam. Although the page looks as if it's on MySpace or Facebook, thieves have set it up to capture log-in names and passwords. The con artists can then try those names and passwords to gain access to e-mail accounts, financial accounts and other websites, given that many people use the same password widely.
For scammers, knowing the names of a target's friends can be a powerful tool. Last year researchers at Indiana University used simple tools to crawl through major networking sites and record the connections among Indiana students they found. They then sent e-mails that appeared to come from a friend also enrolled at the school.
About 72% of the recipients clicked on the e-mailed link and then entered their university user names and passwords at a fake site. In a control group where the e-mails came from strangers at the university, only 16% fell for it.
MySpace and other sites that rely on outside advertising networks also have been compromised by malicious banner ads that take advantage of security holes in users' Web browsers to install spyware. In addition, both MySpace and Facebook recently had security vulnerabilities in their systems for uploading photos. "Toolkits" for exploiting those vulnerabilities to forcibly install "malware" circulated rapidly in hacker communities.
Most attacks work only against people who lack updated firewalls, anti-virus systems and anti-spyware programs, but some can victimize anyone clicking the wrong link.
Parry Aftab, executive director of the nonprofit group WiredSafety, said the most pernicious attempts to get log-on information or install spyware remained phishing e-mails that appear to come from financial institutions. The account takeovers at social sites, by contrast, usually aim to send spam within a network, drawing people to porn sites or those selling questionable wares.
Major social networking sites are stepping up their defenses. Beverly Hills-based MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., now tries to have the Web links from its pages go through a sort of quarantine. When it recognizes that users are about to follow a link away from the site, MySpace flashes an explanation of the potential for fraud.
"MySpace employs a variety of technological, legal and policy solutions to protect our users from phishing attempts," Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.
MySpace and Palo Alto-based Facebook Inc. declined to make executives available for comment.
"Facebook is committed to user safety and security and is constantly improving the site to provide new technology to catch phishers quickly and limit the damage they can do," it said in a statement. "We always encourage users to take precautions when clicking on any suspicious links and to only log in to Facebook from pages they know are legitimate."
Security experts said they expected identity theft and other scams on social networking sites to escalate.
Spam has evolved from advertising pitches to fake e-mails from banks and, most recently, highly targeted phishing attacks that focus on a given company's executives or customers. Some instances of that tactic, known as spear-phishing, rely on information about the targets gleaned from postings on Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites favored by professionals, experts said.
As the social networks do better at blocking fake or captured user accounts, the scams will become more harmful by automatically installing key-loggers and other data-stealing software, said Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging technologies at anti-spam firm Cloudmark Inc.
"As anti-spam improves, all the techniques they use for e-mail will work on social networks," he said. "This time, those techniques are going to have a much higher rate of success."
By Joseph Menn
Scam artists are taking advantage of a trusting arena to get members to divulge passwords and other information.
Michael Maris became an unwitting spammer.
The 22-year-old college student from Chicago received messages last year from annoyed friends on MySpace, wondering why he had used the social networking site to send them pitches for male enhancement products.
He checked his outgoing mail folder and discovered that someone had hacked into his account, then blasted the unsolicited messages to each of his 70 MySpace pals. Among the recipients were his nieces, ages 14 and 16.
"I couldn't believe that it happened," he said.
Social networking sites, which let users create detailed profile pages and connect with friends, are becoming the hot new thing for identity thieves, both amateur and professional. As improved spam filters and skeptical consumers make bogus e-mail less successful, scam artists are taking advantage of the atmosphere of trust that exists within these online circles of friends.
Symantec Corp., a tech security firm, recently reported that 91% of the bogus U.S.-based websites used in so-called phishing attacks during the second half of 2007 imitated the log-in pages of two unnamed social networking sites -- believed by industry executives to be the two biggest, MySpace and Facebook. Phishing tries to trick recipients into visiting phony websites and disclosing account numbers, passwords and other personal data.
"The bad guys are very adaptable. If something doesn't work, they come up with something new," said Kevin Haley, a product executive at Symantec. "Users feel more comfortable surrounded by their friends online -- what could be safer?"
Sometimes financial gain isn't the objective. Cyber-bullies have taken over the social networking accounts of acquaintances to post vicious rants or engage in mischief.
Frank Nein, a new-media executive in Los Angeles, is still perturbed that a man showed up at the home of his 12-year-old daughter after another girl impersonated her during MySpace chats.
Nicole Whiting, a 19-year-old nanny from Charlotte, N.C., fielded questions from friends about her new boyfriend, Patrick. They learned of the relationship on what they thought was her Facebook page.
One problem, she said: "I don't even know a Patrick."
It turned out that "some lonely guy" had copied her pictures from her MySpace page, borrowed her first name and created a Facebook profile for an imaginary girlfriend. Her problem ended after she tracked down Patrick and complained.
But experts warn that victims of more sophisticated scams won't get off so easy. The same kind of hucksters who dreamed up e-mail scams featuring Nigerian dictators are now focused on cracking social networks to peddle products and engage in identity theft.
In more organized campaigns, scammers distribute free widgets that purport to help users decorate their profile pages but secretly use the log-on information to spam their friends, as happened to Maris. Other crooks surreptitiously install software that records keystrokes to steal financial data, or they use personal details gleaned from the profiles to make e-mail fraud attempts more credible.
One common technique on social networking sites involves sending messages that appear to come from an online buddy, inviting the recipient to check out a new profile page. The page then asks the recipient to log in.
It's a scam. Although the page looks as if it's on MySpace or Facebook, thieves have set it up to capture log-in names and passwords. The con artists can then try those names and passwords to gain access to e-mail accounts, financial accounts and other websites, given that many people use the same password widely.
For scammers, knowing the names of a target's friends can be a powerful tool. Last year researchers at Indiana University used simple tools to crawl through major networking sites and record the connections among Indiana students they found. They then sent e-mails that appeared to come from a friend also enrolled at the school.
About 72% of the recipients clicked on the e-mailed link and then entered their university user names and passwords at a fake site. In a control group where the e-mails came from strangers at the university, only 16% fell for it.
MySpace and other sites that rely on outside advertising networks also have been compromised by malicious banner ads that take advantage of security holes in users' Web browsers to install spyware. In addition, both MySpace and Facebook recently had security vulnerabilities in their systems for uploading photos. "Toolkits" for exploiting those vulnerabilities to forcibly install "malware" circulated rapidly in hacker communities.
Most attacks work only against people who lack updated firewalls, anti-virus systems and anti-spyware programs, but some can victimize anyone clicking the wrong link.
Parry Aftab, executive director of the nonprofit group WiredSafety, said the most pernicious attempts to get log-on information or install spyware remained phishing e-mails that appear to come from financial institutions. The account takeovers at social sites, by contrast, usually aim to send spam within a network, drawing people to porn sites or those selling questionable wares.
Major social networking sites are stepping up their defenses. Beverly Hills-based MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., now tries to have the Web links from its pages go through a sort of quarantine. When it recognizes that users are about to follow a link away from the site, MySpace flashes an explanation of the potential for fraud.
"MySpace employs a variety of technological, legal and policy solutions to protect our users from phishing attempts," Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.
MySpace and Palo Alto-based Facebook Inc. declined to make executives available for comment.
"Facebook is committed to user safety and security and is constantly improving the site to provide new technology to catch phishers quickly and limit the damage they can do," it said in a statement. "We always encourage users to take precautions when clicking on any suspicious links and to only log in to Facebook from pages they know are legitimate."
Security experts said they expected identity theft and other scams on social networking sites to escalate.
Spam has evolved from advertising pitches to fake e-mails from banks and, most recently, highly targeted phishing attacks that focus on a given company's executives or customers. Some instances of that tactic, known as spear-phishing, rely on information about the targets gleaned from postings on Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites favored by professionals, experts said.
As the social networks do better at blocking fake or captured user accounts, the scams will become more harmful by automatically installing key-loggers and other data-stealing software, said Adam O'Donnell, director of emerging technologies at anti-spam firm Cloudmark Inc.
"As anti-spam improves, all the techniques they use for e-mail will work on social networks," he said. "This time, those techniques are going to have a much higher rate of success."
An Atheist Goes Undercover to Join the Flock of Mad Pastor John Hagee
Go to Original
By Matt Taibbi
By Matt Taibbi
The following is an excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s new book, The Great Derangement" (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).
I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I’d spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio -- anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.
There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?
"Excuse me," I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. "I see everyone has blankets. I didn’t bring any. Is this going to be a problem?"
The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.
"Name?" he said.
"Collins," I said. "Matthew Collins."
He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. "Don’t worry, Matthew," he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. "A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there."
I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.
I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone -- a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country -- to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church’s pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country -- not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.
The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.
So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an "Encounter Weekend" -- three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of "knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television -- great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act -- toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers -- and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director’s cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn’t know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.
The bus was nearly full, and mostly quiet. Here and there a few people sitting together or near each other huddled and chatted, but I could see right away that a great many people on the trip had come alone, like me. They were people of all sorts: younger white men in neat middle-class haircuts, a matronly Mexican woman quietly reading a romance novel, a few scattered weather-beaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts, a couple of ten-alarm soccer moms who would prove the loudest people on the bus by far, a few quiet older men of military bearing.
The one obvious conclusion anyone making a demographic study of the Cornerstone Church population would come to would be that it’s a solidly middle-class crowd. These are folks who are comfortable eating off paper plates and drinking out of gallon jugs of Country Time iced tea over noisy dinners with their kids. They’re people who grew up in houses with back yards and fences, people with families. This particular journey to God is not a pastime for the idle rich or the urban obnoxious.
I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper bag full of cheeseburgers.
"Some weather we’re having, with this rain," I said.
"Tell me about it!" she said, introducing herself as Maria. "It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today." She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. "It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip," she said. "Otherwise, I would never have made it."
"It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley," I heard a voice behind me say.
This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I’d come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.
"Well," I said, "since the new year, I’ve just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am."
I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those "God told me to put more English on my tee shot" lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he’ll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.
Maria smiled. "I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?"
"No, I haven’t," I said.
"Me neither," she said. "I’m really excited."
"They’re wonderful," said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. "They really change you forever."
I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church -- pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! -- so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.
One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous -- they’re appearing as the "after" photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.
In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull’s belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual -- and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you’re overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you’re ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don’t want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning -- they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.
I was very, very, very good -- at everything!" shouted our hulking ex-paratrooper pastor, Philip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mike that curled around his ruddy face. "I was a Green Beret -- top of the class. Six feet four, 225 pounds. A star athlete, basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the varsity football team..."
The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds-style crowd of fatties, addicts, loners and broken-home survivors populating the warehouse-size building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together. In his introductory speech, Fortenberry did everything but tape-measure his biceps. His autobiographical tale of an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn as a turbocharged, Army-trained enemy of Satan ("A friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung up in a post office in Hell," he quipped), was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation -- and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly wanna-be’s.
It did. "I’m going to start tonight by telling y’all two stories," he began.
The first was a story from his Army days, about having to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a young man and being trapped in the back of the transport plane when the landing went wrong and the plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway. "If you’ve ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what I mean," he said, and I saw nodding heads all through the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a single chance to drop the name of a piece of military equipment.
The second story was more personal. It was about being a little boy in a small Southern town whose father ran around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior’s ballgames. But from time to time he would come back home to Mom, moving back into Junior’s world, turning his life upside down.
"And every time he came back," the pastor said, waving his hand up and down and his voice fairly breaking with tears, "it was like one more bounce along that runway, bouncing in that C-130, tearing my little boy’s world apart."
The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood staring at his audience in full pre-weep, his eyes wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one of the weirder features of the post-Promise Keeper Christian generation, and Fortenberry -- himself a Promise Keeper, incidentally -- had it down to a science. "You never came to my ballgames, Dad," he’d screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the word "ballgames."
I heard sniffles coming from the audience.
Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how his bitterness at his father’s abandonment had pushed him, in high school, to become just about the best basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry, we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high school and had many great games.
How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly into the specific stats of some of those games; he also punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic to a mistress in a roadside motel room. "But after a while I realized that all those thousands of jump shots" -- here he mimicked a jump shot -- "and all those thousands of moves" -- he ducked his head back and forth, Tim Hardaway-style -- "hadn’t brought me any closer to Dad."
The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called "the wound." The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry’s tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father’s abandonment had crushed his "normal."
"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"
The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.
After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy’s chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry’s Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren’t privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the "body" had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.
The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained, because they’d failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they’d been afraid to look behind the bush.
"So I’m telling you now, as you go into your groups," the pastor explained, "don’t be afraid to look behind the bush."
I wrote in my binder: "LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH." Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.
The groups were segregated. Men with men, women with women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was actually a recent graduate of the program. At the beginning of the group stage, the coaches were all called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry would call out the coach’s name first, then the names of his group members.
My coach’s name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man, ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache and a softening middle. He looked a little like a post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez -- soft-spoken, deferential, all nose and mustache.
There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was Jos, a huge Mexican with a sheepish expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker’s build; and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man pushing forty with a bald head and stubbly beard. Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out at us like he could barely make out our faces.
Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.
"Well," Morgan said, "I think what we’re going to do to start is this. I’m going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we’re going to go around in a circle, and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that OK?"
Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?
Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan’s wound was a tale that wouldn’t have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life -- something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men -- although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women’s roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.
Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.
Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.
"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to tell your story?"
My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn’t use my real past -- not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process -- but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.
"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."
The group twittered noticeably. Morgan’s eyes opened to tea-saucer size.
I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I’d made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.
"He’d be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he’d pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know -- whap!"
I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought -- after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my mid-twenties -- at least that much was true -- and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father’s passing from cirrhosis.
It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.
So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.
Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father’s life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:
I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man’s hands.
Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from Jos at the last part -- his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.
After each of these grueling exercises we would have lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing unbearably atonal Christian hymns. Then we would have teaching/Bible-study sessions led by Fortenberry on the theme of the moment (e.g., "Admit the Truth About Our Wounds") that lasted an hour or so. Then, after Fortenberry would waste at least half the session giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his professional resume ("I was the manager of the second-largest ranch in America, 825,000 acres...") and bragging about his physical prowess ("If someone was to slug me, I could whip just about anyone here"), we would go back to the group session and confess some more. Then we would sing some more, receive more of Fortenberry’s hairy lessons, and then the cycle would start all over again. There were almost no breaks or interruptions; it was a physically exhausting schedule of confession, catharsis, bad music and relentless, muscular instruction. The Saturday program began at 7:45 a.m. and did not end until ten at night; we went around the confess-sing-learn cycle five full times in one day.
We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry’s blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat ("Tighten your saddle, he’s fixin’ ta buck" was how "cowboy" Fortenberry put it), when we would experience "Victory and Deliverance." But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to "find your wounds" ("My husband hid my Saks card!") at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.
True, I could see some other angles to what was going on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family -- your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.
But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the coaches started to show us glimpses of the program’s end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that perhaps spanned generations in each of our families. Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn carried their parents’ curse to their adult lives and became alcoholics themselves -- only to have children and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse there to begin with? Here was where we could get into religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan, etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and demons -- probably for unbelief, bad behavior, disobedience, worship of the wrong gods and so on.
This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform all of us at the retreat from being merely fucked up to being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an almost entirely secular program to get our biographies out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of the weekend: Satan and the devils inside us.
He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of Genesis -- the sweat on Adam’s brow, the pain of Eve’s childbirth, etc. -- the punishments for eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. "How many of you women out there have had babies?" Fortenberry asked. "Can I see some hands?"
A dozen or so hands raised.
"Now, did it hurt?" he asked.
Laughter. Of course it hurt.
"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?" He paused. "There are some people out there who will tell you it’s genetics. It’s in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it’s not genetics. It’s a generational curse!"
Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. "Take homosexuals," he said. "Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created -- by pedophiles."
The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a "rod of iron" to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing -- but the audience ate it up anyway. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a shit. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.
A team of twenty of the world’s leading scientists wouldn’t be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.
Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who called him up one night. "Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air," Fortenberry said. "And I said to my nephew, I said, ’It isn’t something they’ve done. It’s something you’ve done.’ "
The crowd murmured in assent.
"I told my nephew to look around the house," Fortenberry continued. "I said, ’Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?’ And he said yes. And I said, ’That’s your problem.’ So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that."
He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry’s nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.
Here I have a confession to make. It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise -- two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses -- a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene -- even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry -- outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest -- in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?
You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.
On the final morning of the weekend, we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard Western shirt and hiked-up jeans, sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. "This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face," he said. "But let me tell you something. It’s already been won. It was won 2,000 years ago."
The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a soundboard for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building suddenly turned unnatural, like the light during a partial eclipse.
Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. Now, on the final morning, he looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.
Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.
"When the word of God is in your mouth," he said, "the demons can’t come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can’t have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don’t pray."
The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open and let the demons out.
And he began.
At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back at him.
"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus..."
After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think the Deliverance was going to be a bust.
But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience. To my left, a young black man started writhing around in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of nerdly jheri curl -- a dead ringer for a young Wayne Williams -- started wailing and clutching his head.
"In the name of Jesus," continued Fortenberry, "I cast out the demon of astrology!"
Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.
"In the name of Jesus Christ," said Fortenberry, more loudly now, "I cast out the demon of lust!"
And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn’t see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.
Now the women began to pipe in. On the women’s side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you’ve ever watched The Houston 560 or any other gangbang porn movie, that’s what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense.
It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.
"In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!" said Fortenberry.
"Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!" wailed a woman in the front row.
"Bleeech!" puked the bald man behind me.
Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.
"Need .. a .. bag," I said as he came over.
He handed me a bag.
"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!" shouted Fortenberry.
Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.
"In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!" Fortenberry continued. "In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!"
Cough, cough!
The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up. Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making horrific demon noises.
"Rum-balakasha-oom!" shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. "Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of philosophy!"
Philosophy?
It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was playacting to some degree or another. I was reminded of the Tolstoy story "The Kreutzer Sonata," when the male narrator described marriage as being like the bearded-lady tent in a French circus he’d seen. You pay a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the carnival barker shouts at you, "Was that not the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen, monsieur?" -- well, you’re too ashamed to admit that you’ve been had, and so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was really something! That’s how people come to say marriage is a blessing, and that’s how you can get fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.
The whole thing -- the demonic expulsions, the trading of miraculous wives’ tales, the crazy End Times theology based on dire predictions that come and go uneventfully once a year or so -- it’s all a con that is done with the consent of the conned. Which is what gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it is real.
The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there mute, looking around absent-mindedly, waiting for it to end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag -- perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my journalistic career -- when I made the mistake of closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.
"Matthew!" he snapped. "Keep your mouth open! Let the demons out!"
"Oh, right!" I said. I straightened up and opened my mouth in the shape of a letter O.
Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.
"I cast out .. uh .. In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name of Jesus, the demon of disconnect."
Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive himself. He had been at this for a long time. His stamina really was astounding, a testament to his military training.
Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the past decades, any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things -- Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W’s shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program -- the modern version might very easily be this completely batshit holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.
We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to "just let it out. Just let it out and it’ll come out."
He didn’t come right out and say, "Just act like you’re speaking in tongues." But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he’d once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him -- and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.
I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:
"Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha... Come on, Matthew, let it out."
American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you’re holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford’s heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!
But I didn’t think of this at the time and just went another route.
"Let it out, Matthew," the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. "Just open your mouth."
I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song "What is Autumn?" by the Russian rock band DDT:
What is autumn? It’s the sky The crying sky below your feet. Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds. Autumn I’ve not been with you for so long!
It’s actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.
"Hmm, very good," my coach said. "Good job, Matthew."
I kept going, on to the next verse. "What is autumn? It’s a stone..."
"OK, that’s good," the coach said, annoyed, moving on to the next guy.
"It’s important that you practice," said Pastor Fortenberry. "It sounds silly, but when you’re at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You’ll get used to it, and soon you’ll be speaking in tongues like nobody’s business!"
He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.
He held up his hands in triumph.
"Hallelujah!" he shouted.
The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.
"Hallelujah!"
He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again. Arms in the air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.
We had graduated.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this -- once you’ve gone this far -- you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.
By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.
Adapted from the forthcoming book, "The Great Derangement" by Matt Taibbi. Copyright 2008 by Matt Taibbi. Published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission. Names of Encounter Weekend participants have been changed to protect their privacy.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
Using Higher Ed.'s $340 Billion in Endowments to Make the World a Better Place
Go to Original
By Don Hazen and Jan Frel
By Don Hazen and Jan Frel
Socially responsible investing, the use of financial investments for social good, is a powerful tool to promote economic and social democracy. It convinced Home Depot to stop using old growth timber, RJR Nabisco to discontinue its "Joe Camel" advertisements and ARCO to withdraw its operations from the totalitarian state of Burma -- and it’s gaining popularity as a tool for activists.
But what about on college and university campuses across the country?
Campus activists have traditionally gone after corporate offenders on issues such as fair trade and sweat shops, and the multi-hundred billion dollar growth in school endowments in recent decades is a huge opportunity to change corporate behavior. Enter the Responsible Endowments Coalition (REC), which helps students and other university members to push corporate reform on human rights, environmental responsibility and equal opportunity. AlterNet caught up with REC executive director Morgan Simon to discuss the crucial role that endowments can play in forcing economic change.
AlterNet: Why is responsible investing a key vehicle for change on campuses, and why are students responsive to working on endowments as a form of activism?
Morgan Simon: Students are naturally interested in changing their campuses for the better, thinking about the structure of society and what’s going to be effective: Sometimes that means taking over buildings, but it also means doing petitions and raising awareness on important social issues. Students are really starting to explore where their leverage point is in society.
Nationwide there’s $340 billion worth of endowments at U.S. colleges and universities -- that’s the leverage point and a pretty powerful message. Capital markets have the power to transform the society we live in. For me as an undergrad at Swarthmore College, which has a $1 billion endowment, I started thinking that this is where I could make some real impact. In general, the students that I talk to are thrilled to learn about responsible investing as a form of activism, because it is a a tactic and a tool kit that can be applied to all social and environmental justice issues. It doesn’t matter if you’re passionate about the environment, diversity issues, or equal opportunity on gender or race, genocide, the list goes on -- but students can apply responsible investment to all.
AlterNet: How do you deal with the obstacle of how complicated the various financial instruments are and how they operate?
Simon: One of REC’s major emphases is helping students from all class backgrounds understand what a mutual fund is. A big hurdle is getting students to be fluent about the role of money in society -- that they aren’t afraid of it. But the truth is that students don’t have to understand everything about the market.What’s key for them to understand is that their school is probably sitting on a big pot of money, and that there are a lot of fairly simple things those students can do to make the schools change their attitudes and practices with that money to support social justice and the environment.
AlterNet: Your literature also explains that you’re also focused on reaching out to trustees and the college administration.
Simon: Yes, we talk to administrators and tell them that a focus on responsible investing is a great way to show student and alumnae what your values are, and teach your students to learn more about the financial world. It ties the student body much closer to administrators. And when this happens, the feedback we hear from students is, "Gosh, I had no idea how hard it is to run a school; how much it takes to run an endowment and that trustees are very often volunteeers who really care about the school." It builds relationships of trust.
There’s also the issue for school administrators that colleges and universities are nonprofit, mission-driven institutions; they don’t pay taxes. Is it the case that there are financial institutions that happen to run a school, or are they mission-based institutions that believe in a cause and have an investing arm that’s part of it? Are a school’s assets supporting its mission 100 percent of the time? That’s the same conversation that the foundation world has to consider.
This is a different tack that a lot of campus campaigns take, which frequently pit students against the administration. In many instances, the trustees just need to be made aware of the power that their endowments have from a shareholder perspective -- that you don’t have to change the stocks you’re holding, but that you can use the power of your stock in the company to change its practices. We can tell the school administration, "Look you’ll either make the exact same amount of money, or you might even improve the value of those stocks because the responsible practices you’re pushing for will improve the company’s value.
I got my start telling Swarthmore to hold a shareholder resolution with Lockheed Martin on sexual orientation discrimination, and the big argument there was why would you cut out 10 percent of your potential applicant pool? That’s just a dumb financial decision, in addition to the morality of the issue.
AlterNet: This raises the question of who is deciding what returns you need? Because if the people at Harvard decide they need to make 23, 24 percent a year, you’re going to have a harder time doing that, doing socially responsible investing. Is that a greed factor -- why are they deciding they need to make returns far beyond what most normal people will ever see?
Simon: I understand that a lot of people say that it’s important to get a maximum return, but fiduciary law says that you’re supposed to get a "reasonable" return. Well, what does "reasonable" mean? It’s also the issue that your actions are supposed to serve your mission. And if you’re contradicting your mission with your investing, then that isn’t the right return. In our case, for example, we’re not saying, "You shouldn’t have the money for scholarships." We really do think they can make reasonable returns even when they follow responsible patterns of investment.
AlterNet: In addition to the issue of defining what a reasonable return is, there’s the issue of defining what socially responsible means. Your literature says that you "allow the work of your member to define the goals of the causes of your members to define the work" of your organization.
Simon: In general, we present a menu of options, saying, "You have X amount of money in bonds, you should put it in a community bank or a green bank. You’ve got money in public equities, so you should be voting your proxy statements." We can help set up committees on investor responsibility, where students are part of the mix and come together with administrators and trustees, and explain about the possibilities they have to make proxy votes. And then we leave it up to them on how the committee decides. It’s not about us dictating the values; it’s about us saying, "You have a voice as a shareholder."
AlterNet: You said that many times it’s the issue that schools simply don’t use their shareholder power in the annual meetings.
Simon: Princeton, for example, does not use its stockholdings to vote in shareholder meetings. Most of the time, if you don’t vote your proxy under the law, it counts as a vote for management. So when schools say, "We don’t want to politicize our endowment," they are anyway. Every time they throw their vote away, they are effectively making the statement that they don’t care about the changes they could have voted for.
AlterNet: How does the approach you’re taking conflict with the idea of divestment, like dropping stocks in companies that are making money in ways that encourage humanitarian crises?
Simon: You can’t divest in everything you don’t like, because then where are you going to invest? Oftentimes, it’s not that a company is in a developing country, it’s that some of the company’s practices there are unjust or bad for the environment. You can engage with that company’s practices at the shareholder meeting, or you can divest your holdings in it -- but did the company stop doing what you didn’t like about it? Of course, sometimes the company is directly tied to causing genocides, and then the issue of divestment comes into play in terms of what a school’s mission is.
AlterNet: What’s a recent successful campaign you’ve worked on?
Simon: Students we worked with at Macalester College got the school to put $500,000 of their operating budget into a local community bank. Students worked with the school’s local community office of the college to make a big push to get students and faculty to move their money into the community bank as well. It was a win for everyone -- the school got great publicity, the activists saw their campaign work, and a lot of students who change banks now have the experience that they don’t just have to open an account with any bank -- but instead can lay claim to a bank of their choosing that also will invest in the community.
For more, visit Responsible Endowments Coalition.
Don Hazen is AlterNet’s executive editor. Jan Frel is AlterNet’s senior editor.
Meet Gus Puryear: Bush's Latest Villainous Nominee for a Lifetime Judgeship
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By Silja J.A. Talvi
By Silja J.A. Talvi
Editor’s Note: In 2004, Estelle Richardson’s lifeless and battered body was found on the floor of a Corrections Corporation of America prison cell. Four years later, that unsolved homicide has come back to haunt Republican stalwart "Gus" Puryear, the nation’s top private prison litigator and Bush nominee for U.S. District Court. This is Part I of an AlterNet exclusive, two-part investigative feature by Silja J.A. Talvi.
Part 1: Mr. Puryear, meet Ms. Richardson
It’s hard to say what Estelle Ann Richardson would have thought if she had would have the chance to meet the man who authorized a hefty settlement check for her children.
Maybe she would have noticed that he moved in the world like someone who was used to things going his way, that he had a lot of money, or that he looked a lot younger and more relaxed than most of his corporate peers. It’s hard to say, because she never had the chance to be introduced to the harmless-enough looking man possessed of a rather ostentatious name: Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV.
The 39-year-old lawyer, awaiting a lifetime appointment as a judge in U.S. District Court, prefers to be called "Gus."
By all accounts, Gus is a charismatic, outgoing guy who likes to spend time with his family. He volunteers as a Deacon in the Presbyterian Church, and serves as a board member of The Exchange Club of Nashville, where one of his responsibilities is to organize the annual Antiques and Garden Show. From a corporate standpoint, Puryear has excelled in his job as general counsel for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest and most influential private prison company. Under his direction, CCA’s in-house attorneys work with a stable of contracted law firms to handle corporate legal matters of all kinds, not the least of which are the hundreds of claims and lawsuits filed against the company at any given time. A smart, enthusiastic GOP stalwart, Puryear is the kind of guy the party wants around. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also very, very rich: between his bank account, assets, and unexercised CCA shares, he’s worth about $13 million, give or take a few thousand.
On the other hand, Richardson, a low-income, African American mother of two, moved through a world quite removed from that of the upper-echelon neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces that afford Puryear his comfort zone. It’s unlikely that the two would have ever met under even the most random of circumstances. The exclusive, members-only Belle Meade Country Club to which Puryear belongs, for instance, wouldn’t have been the kind of place Richardson would have set foot in, particularly considering that African Americans weren’t even allowed to join until 1994. (To this day, the only Black member lives out-of-state. To boot, none of the women who have been admitted to the club, called "lady members," hold voting privileges.)
Belle Meade country clubbers probably raised a glass to toast Puryear when President Bush nominated him to sit on the federal bench in the Middle District of Tennessee. Yet, instead of breezing through what should have been an easy, perfunctory hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this past February, Puryear was confronted with a series of uncomfortable questions about his legal and professional qualifications for the bench.
Nothing about Puryear’s hobnobbing, rapid ascent to the status of a GOP darling suggested emergence of an ad-hoc, grassroots movement to derail his nomination, much less the methodical persistence of a former CCA prisoner-turned-jailhouse lawyer hell bent on exposing the judicial candidate’s affiliations, biases, and lack of courtroom experience. What Richardson’s story has to do with all of this isn’t obvious on the face of it, but the connection between the two has bubbled to the surface amidst a strange series of post-nomination twists and turns that no one, including Puryear, could have seen coming.
A mysterious homicide
On July 5, 2004, Richardson’s lifeless, 34-year-old body was found slumped on the floor of an isolation cell in a Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)-operated detention facility in Nashville, Tennessee. An autopsy revealed that she died as a result of massive blunt force injuries to the head, resulting in a cracked skull. Richardson also had four broken ribs and serious internal organ injuries. Dr. Bruce Levy, Tennessee’s chief medical examiner, ruled that Richardson’s death was homicide. His autopsy revealed a set of injuries that were consistent with a "deceleration injury," meaning that her head and body slammed simultaneously toward a hard surface, such as a wall or a floor.
In an interview with The Tennessean in September 2004, Dr. Levy emphasized that Richardson’s injuries could not have been the result of a fall or suicide. Richardson, as he pointed out, was in a highly restricted segregation unit, allowed no freedom of movement outside of her small, one-woman cell, much less contact with other prisoners. "It’s a restricted area," he said. "There’s a limit to what you can do. If she had fallen from a high window or if she had been hit by a car, I would expect to see these types of injuries."
Richardson was murdered in the notoriously overcrowded and understaffed CCA-run Metro Detention Facility (MDF). Previously known as the Metro Davis County Detention Facility, MDF serves as a multipurpose role as a pre-trial detention facility, a jail for misdemeanant offenders and, under $17 million annual contract with the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC), a medium-security prison for convicted felons serving one-to-six year sentences. Overseeing the entire operation is Sheriff Daron Hall, a former prison administrator for a CCA-run prison in Brisbane, Australia.
While Richardson was locked up at MDF, the prison still held men and women alike in grossly overcrowded conditions. (A few months after her death, women were moved into a separate facility.) Two years before Richardson’s death, a 12-year period of federal court supervision related to overcrowding had finally been lifted, but it would have been hard for anyone to argue that conditions had improved to any meaningful extent. Operated by CCA since 1992, MDF was designed to accommodate fewer than 900 people. MDF’s population now surpasses 1,300 inmates.
Chronic overcrowding and understaffing in private or public detention facilities has inevitable consequences, ranging from the spread of contagious diseases to an increase in sexual and physical violence. At MDF, in just a three-and-a-half year period (2000-2004), ten prisoners died in custody. Eight of those were deemed "natural" deaths, although specific details on these kinds of incidents are difficult to suss out, especially because the TDOC does not collect any incident reports or statistics from MDF. The state prison system uses the strange rationale that these inmates are housed in a county jail run by an outside contractor, and therefore not subject to the same kind of reporting requirements.
With 70,000 juveniles and adults in its custody in 65 detention facilities nationwide, CCA contracts with all three federal corrections agencies, nearly half of all states, and more than a dozen municipalities. Representing the fifth-largest prison system in the country, CCA is the nation’s largest private prison corporation and, as such, the publicly traded company is directly accountable to its shareholders, not to taxpaying citizens. Although the company is expected to comply with federal and state laws and provide contract-specific reports to governmental agencies, there can be long delays before an agency (much less the public) receives word of in-detention suicides, violence, disease epidemics, employee sexual harassment complaints -- even prison escapes and riots.
In March, a former CCA employee, Ronald Jones, went public with his assertion that Puryear directly told him and other staff in the quality assurance department to create two audit reports relating to serious incidents at their detention facilities-such as riots, escapes, and "unnatural" deaths. According to Jones, one of the audit reports was intended for clients, board members, and shareholders, while the other was kept secret as an internal company document. CCA responded by calling his assertions inaccurate and those of an employee bent on retaliation for a pending termination: "If our interest was in under-reporting or not finding quality issues, we simply would not have created this department or its programs in the first place," CCA spokesperson Louise Grant told The Tennessean.
Richardson’s death occurred in 2004, one year before Puryear subsumed quality assurance under the legal department and instituted the policy. As such, Richardson’s murder might have generated little media interest were it not for the fact that she died during three weeks in solitary confinement, and was allowed out of her cell only one hour a day for either closely supervised "recreation" time or a brief opportunity to bathe in a caged shower under guard supervision.
In search of a better life
In 1999, Richardson headed down to Tennessee with her young children in tow. Diane Buie, her older sister, says that Richardson had grown tired of stagnating in her hometown. Although she had skills as both a medical technician and an interior decorator, Richardson was struggling financially, working a dead-end job as a telemarketer. She had decided to go after the necessary training to become a surgical assistant, Buie explained, because she wanted to provide a better life for her children.
The interstate move in 1999 didn’t prove to be a fortuitous one. Richardson missed her sister and mother back home, and she was having real trouble making ends meet. Somewhere along the way, Richardson fell in with a crowd of small-scale hustlers who sold prescription drugs on the black market. At first, she helped out with obtaining the drugs sold to habitual pill poppers. Later, she started to sample the goods, and developed a habit of her own, resulting in a March 2002 arrest when she tried to acquire painkillers with a forged prescription. Her children were with her at the pharmacy, and so in addition to charges of illegal drug possession, forgery, and theft, the D.A.’s office added a charge of attempted child neglect.
Richardson pled guilty in September 2002, and was handed a suspended six-year sentence, as long as she complied with the terms of her parole. Like so many others struggling in the grip of both addiction and poverty, Richardson tried to hold everything together for a while, but eventually fell back into drug use. In November 2003, she failed urine analysis by testing positive for marijuana and cocaine; her probation officer issued an arrest warrant when Richardson didn’t turn herself in. Busted for food stamp fraud in March 2004, Richardson was sent to MDF as a pre-trial detainee. It wasn’t until April 23, 2004, that a judge decided to revoke her probation and sentence her to a two-year prison term.
Buie was in regular contact with her younger sister by phone. She says that they were able to keep each other strong by focusing on Richardson’s post-release plan of returning to Michigan to be reunited with her children, who had since moved back to Lansing. "I was going to help her find a nice place and buy new furniture for her," Buie explains.
It was going to be the end of a bad chapter in Richardson’s life, and the beginning of a new day.
Unbeknownst to Buie, Richardson hadn’t been at MDF for long before CCA staff identified her as a "special needs" inmate. According to information that CCA shared with the press after a $60 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of Richardson’s minor children, Richardson had gotten into three fights since she had been imprisoned, and that she required psychotropic medication. To be more specific, CCA noted that she had been classified "mentally deficient and psychologically impaired," something that the company’s legal defense team, directed by Puryear, would later make a point of great emphasis. While CCA spokespersons seemed to have no problem letting out the information about Richardson’s special classification and her need for medication, they claimed the imperative to protect the confidentiality of medical records as the reason why they couldn’t provide more detail about what kind of care Richardson actually received and when, if at all, a mental disorder had been diagnosed.
Whether Richardson was actually mentally ill or "deficient" cannot be conclusively established. Some family members seemed eager to allow the lawsuit against CCA to highlight this alleged mental deficiency as an indication of her vulnerability. Buie and her mother, Estella, reject it altogether, and see it as yet another attempt by CCA to point the finger at Richardson’s allegedly erratic behavior instead of the violence inflicted by their prison guards. To boot, Richardson’s probation officer said that she had never seen evidence of any kind of mental deficiency.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that Richardson had developed psychological problems that weren’t as obvious until she got to prison. Understandably, the experience of being separated from her children, trying to recover from drug addiction without any kind of treatment incarceration, and being in prison for the first time in her life, would compromise her mental health.
Whatever the underlying factors, CCA staff made the decision to put her in a segregated, "lockdown" area of the prison reserved for the ill-defined "special needs" population, and/or for those who had been deemed too disruptive for the general population.
The last days
What we are able to piece together about these last few weeks of Richardson’s life are the products of a police and prosecutor’s investigation, copies of MDF/CCA prison logs in evidence, the public statements of one prison guard, in-detention videotape of physically violent encounters, and sworn affidavits from four women who were also locked up in administrative segregation.
Together, they point toward a brutal end to Richardson’s life. As the plaintiffs in Vilella v. CCA asserted: "CCA employees routinely and systematically unconstitutionally used excessive force and caused injuries to Estelle Richardson." Most significantly, the evidence gathered by the plaintiff’s investigation reveal circumstances leading to her death radically different from the explanations that Puryear has tried to put forth:
- On April 26, 2004, a CCA guard pepper-sprayed Richardson while she was in the "shower cage" of the segregation unit, something captured by the automatic video cameras mounted throughout the unit, according to the lawsuit. (Buie attests to the existence of the videotape, which was entered into evidence and cited in the lawsuit. She still possesses transcripts of this and later altercations.) The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, David Randolph Smith, notes in the Second Amended Complaint to Vilella v. CCA that Richardson that had been pepper-sprayed for not "putting on her pants following the shower quickly enough to suit the officer." Richardson was then cuffed and placed in leg irons, placed face down on the floor. During the incident, one or more officers put their body weight on Richardson’s back.
- On or about June 27th, 2004, guards notified medical personnel that Richardson had "blood on her head." The nurse who examined her in the early morning hours of June 28th noted that Richardson had "blood oozing from [left] ear," gave her Tylenol, and made an urgent doctor’s referral for an appointment later that day. There is no record she was subsequently seen by a physician.
- On June 29th, 2004, CCA Captain Hambrick recorded Richardson’s pleas for medical attention in the unit log: "Can you get the nurse down here? I am hurting, and if you don’t get the nurse down here I am going to die." Other prisoners in the isolation unit later attested to Richardson’s attempts to stop constant, untreated ear bleeding with sanitary napkins or tampons. Hambrick reported that she notified medical personnel. There is no record of a follow-up examination by a nurse or physician. According to the complaint, these observed injuries were "the result of the use of excessive force by [unidentified CCA guards]," and that a physician’s order on July 2 was ignored. When CCA was asked to validate whether Richardson was seen (or not), the company cited the need to protect medical confidentiality.
- On July 2nd, 2004, four prisoners in the segregation unit offered similar accounts of another incident in Shower Cage 3. According to their affidavits, CCA guard Shirley Foster assaulted Richardson with "excessive force." Richardson screamed, and there was "blood all over the shower cage," said prisoner Cameron James. Another noted that the guard pushed Richardson so hard that she fell and "busted her mouth." One prisoner, who kept her own, daily calendar, had written an entry that day: "Foster slamed [sic] Estelle in shower Fri."
From that point forward, there are numerous and consistent prisoner accounts of Richardson’s blood stains on her sheets, of non-stop bleeding from her ear, and of disregard by prison guards for her well-being. It is particularly notable that these prisoners were willing to come forward and provide affidavits despite their fears of retaliation. Indeed, It is possible, although not provable, that retaliation did take place, after all. This past January, 36-year-old Gerald Townsend, died from internal bleeding after, Ronnie Sullivan, 22, attacked him for an unknown reason. Townsend was serving a sentence for non-violent burglary and vehicle theft, while Sullivan was had been convicted for an aggravated assault charges. As it turned out, Gerald was the brother of Judy Townsend, one of the four women who were willing to sign affidavits regarding the assault on Richardson.
Then, on July 4, 2004, Richardson was to have her last, physical encounter with CCA guards. According to information gathered from the guards and prisoners in the unit, Senior Officer Keith Andre Hendricks told Richardson to get her "nasty ass up and clean [your] room," referring to bloodied sanitary napkins and other debris in her cell. When she did not respond, he entered the cell with Officer Joshua Shockman, with Officer Jeremy Neese observing.
According to the investigation, Hendricks pulled her off the cell bed and threw her to the ground. James, one of the prisoners, recalled that he kicked Richardson [while she was face down," with his knee in her back. Another prisoner in the unit, Ruby Champlin, swore that she heard Richardson’s head hit the floor, before Hendricks sprayed her with mace. In her diary from that time, prisoner Tracey Alexander recorded that all three officers beat Richardson after she was maced.
Early the next morning, at 5:37 a.m., a call to 911 came in from MDF. A CCA supervisor alerted the 911 operator that a "female inmate was on the floor and needed medical assistance." Paramedics arrived and found her unresponsive at 6:00 a.m. Richardson was pronounced dead at Southern Hills Medical Center.
Police conducting the murder investigation shortly after Richardson’s death asked to see the videotape footage which would have been recorded by the constantly running video camera in the unit. According to the CCA guards, the video camera somehow malfunctioned during this incident. Upon examination, the police investigators noted that there appeared to be nothing wrong with the camera.
Two of the four CCA guards were working double-shifts because of staffing shortages at MDF. Three of the four were young, relatively new employees: Schockman, 23; Wood, 26; and Ness, 24. Only Keith Andre Hendricks, 35, was a senior prison guard, with four years of experience. Neese had only been on the job for four months. Shockman, who shared a residence with Neese, had been on the job for little over a year, coming to CCA from a background as a boxing instructor and club bouncer with extensive experience in various martial arts.
It is very unlikely that the three younger guards had receiving sufficient training to help them understand (or manage) the psychological stressors of working in a lockdown unit, in which prisoners are likely to exhibit various states of distress, anger, and/or serious psychiatric problems. Even experienced correctional officers tend to avoid working in these prisons-within-a-prison, in these increasingly prevalent 23-hour lockdown units known as "Administrative Segregation," "Security Housing Units (SHU)," Intensive Management Units (IMU)," "Special Management Units (SMU)," or what MDF refers to as "Admin Max."
With little else to do but sit and stew in stripped-down cells for days, weeks, months (or even years on end), many prisoners begin to lose touch with reality altogether, which is only exacerbated by the absence of natural light, human touch, limited or non-existent reading materials or phone privileges. Hallucination, paranoia, aggression, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation are among the more common by-products of this form of isolation, which Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Stuart Grassian first identified and entitled the "SHU syndrome" in the 1980s.
As such, it’s entirely possible that Richardson was mad at the prison for putting her in a unit like this one, and it’s also quite possible that her first experience dealing with this kind of deprivation-oriented punitive confinement led her to act disruptively. Based on the incident the day before she was found dead in her cell, it is just as likely that she could have been responding sluggishly or erratically. The latter scenario is even more likely in the wake of autopsy and toxicological reports that revealed Richardson had not only suffered severe physical trauma, but that she had died with extremely high doses of psychiatric medicines in her system. The levels of Paxil and Doxepin found in her body were extremely high, according to post-mortem toxicological analysis by a Vanderbilt University clinical pharmacist; Richardson would have likely been behaving abnormally.
There’s also the possibility that Richardson could have incurred the wrath of these guards because she persisted in asking for help for pain and bleeding. No matter what, Richardson would have been very weak, which begs the question: why would it take four, healthy adult males to perform a forcible cell extraction with the use of a chemical agent?
By definition, cell extractions in jails and prisons are very physical: armed with some kind of chemical agent, electrified or non-electrified shields, riot gear, batons, and/or stun guns, any number of guards rush into a prisoner’s cell to subdue him/her as quickly as possible, to get that person down to the ground, and to hogtie (or otherwise restrain) that person. According to most jail/prison guidelines, cell extractions are only to be committed as a matter of last resort (especially in relation to the safety of the individual, or other prisoners and staff); usually with the presence of medical staff; and must be videotaped from start to finish.
The commonplace mandate for cell extractions to be videotaped isn’t hard to deduce: people get hurt. Considering the force with which prisoners are taken down, injuries sustained by prisoners related to cell extractions are more common than not, whether in the form of lacerations, broken teeth, or more serious bodily harm. Without videotaped evidence, prisoners can sue on grounds of cruel and unusual punishment-for short-term injuries or permanent disabilities sustained.
Without videotaped evidence, it was the word of those four prisoners and the opinion of the state’s top medical examiner, who conducted the autopsy that Richardson died as a result of one or more serious assaults inflicted by CCA guards -- the only people who could have possibly had physical contact with Richardson for nearly three weeks on end.
Handling the damage
It took one year and three months for the four male guards to be charged with reckless homicide. (The female guard was not charged.) During that time period, all four guards were on paid administrative leave. After they were arrested, ach posted bail and were quickly released from custody. While the prosecution moved forward, the Richardson family filed the $60 million lawsuit against CCA for being responsible for her murder by failing to provide adequate training and supervision of its guards.
Under Puryear’s direction, a bevy of outside lawyers were already hard at work so as to minimize the damage to CCA. Medical experts were brought in to challenge chief medical examiner Dr. Bruce Levy’s original autopsy conclusions about the injuries indicating that she had been murdered, who reported that her fatal injuries were several days old and thus could have been self-inflicted or caused by earlier fights with prisoners. CCA’s hired pathologist, Dr. William McCormick, went so far as to postulate that the "cause of the rib and liver injuries is almost certainly the resuscitative attempts made on Ms. Richardson."
In the process, Puryear and his legal while emphasizing their empathy for the family’s "tragic loss," their desire to comply with the investigation, and alleged that her death could have been the result of earlier injuries sustained from fights with other prisoners, a seizure, or a self-inflicted injury. "My understanding of the medical experts’ opinions is that this raises the possibility that Ms. Richardson could have unintentionally struck her own head against an object or concrete floor (as in the case of a seizure or fall)," Puryear wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
CCA’s interpretation of the injuries leading to Richardson’s death, a lack of videotaped evidence, provided the necessary level of doubt to help Puryear lessen the PR and financial damage to CCA. Puryear’s legal strategy worked. His timing was good: not only had the medical findings cast doubt on the circumstances surrounding Richardson’s death -- something that would making a court victory much harder to obtain -- but severe infighting between economically struggling family members had worn them down. Buie’s mother lost custody of Richardson’s children. As a result, they were shut out of the lawsuit, although the two of them had always been in the children’s lives (and had assumed the primary responsibility of raising the kids when Richardson left for Tennessee), Buie and her mother aren’t related to Richardson by blood; they were her mother- and sister-by-adoption.
On February 22, 2006, Puryear personally represented CCA in the final mediation between the company and Richardson’s family members. CCA settled with the plaintiffs for an undisclosed sum after plaintiffs dropped all civil actions against the four guards. Citing lack of definitive proof that the four guards caused her death, the Davidson County D.A.’s office dropped all charges against them, while acknowledging that she had, indeed, been killed. Richardson’s murder remains unsolved to this day. A story like this isn’t particularly unusual within the American prison system. It’s not unusual for correctional employees accused of abuses behind prison walls to have charges dropped once enough time has passed -- that is, if charges got filed in the first place. It’s certainly not unusual for public and private prison systems to settle lawsuits away from the public eye, reassured by the knowledge that strict non-disclosure clauses can keep aggrieved parties from speaking out. It’s not unusual that Richardson entered the CCA jail as a non-violent offender with a drug problem, or that she was abused in the confines of an out-of-sight segregation unit. What is unusual is that a woman with so little power in her day-to-day life, particularly in the eyes of the people who arrested, sentenced, and imprisoned her, would heavily influence Puryear’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this past February. Much of the reason why Richardson’s murder popped back up to haunt Puryear’s appointment as a federal court judge is attributable to a former CCA prisoner, Alex Friedmann. It can be said with a fair amount of certainty that Puryear couldn’t possibly have seen Friedmann’s agitation against his confirmation coming his way. And he certainly couldn’t have expected that Estelle Richardson’s unsolved murder didn’t just go away with a few handshakes, a confidentiality agreement, and a two million dollar settlement check.
In Part 2: Puryear battles his opposition with a few unlikely allies, including the lead attorney on the lawsuit against CCA, Thurgood Marshall, Jr., U.S. Senators, and bipartisan Tennessee attorneys. What most of them have in common is the company that Puryear has spent over a half-decade defending, the GOP, and a bunch of well-placed campaign donations.
Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It’s So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.
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