America Faces Permanent Unemployment

SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN–It has been two years since the U.S. economy, once the envy of the world, drew its last breath. Millions of homeowners have gotten evicted. Unemployment has soared to Great Depression-era levels. Yet, aside from the witless “take America back” rants of the Tea Party crazies, things are calm. Remarkably so, when you consider the misery and rage that is tearing families apart.

The explanation: unemployment benefits. By the time I got laid off as an editor in April 2009, Congress and the Obama Administration had extended checks for the jobless to a record 99 weeks. Another extension was approved in July.

The money isn’t great. In New York, you get $405 a week plus $25 “Obama bucks” per week. But it’s enough to make a difference. If you hustle a little–odd jobs paid in cash, off the books, for example–unemployment makes it possible for many of the 20 percent-plus of Americans who lost their jobs under the Bush-Obama Depression to squeak by.

As usual, the mainstream media is missing the point. They see the debate over extending unemployment as horse-race politics. “As a political matter,” The New York Times reported on July 20th, “the issue has appeal to both parties, especially in an election year in which each party needs first to motivate its own base.” Democrats say they favor more money for the jobless as a matter of sympathy; Republicans say they oppose it because they’re worried about budget deficits.

In reality, unemployment is Revolution B Gon–a stopgap measure to keep the out-of-work at home in front of their TVs rather than out in the streets, breaking things.

Though stupid, Congressional Republicans are well aware of this. They’re playing a dangerous game–all it would take is one Democratic defection in the Senate to end unemployment benefits–but they figure they’ll score political points by voting against measures they really want to see pass.

With employers refusing to hire and the federal government unwilling to enact a broad, people-directed, New Deal-style stimulus, there is little hope that the economy will improve. Now the powers-that-be must face a question:

Are we looking at a future in which a significant portion of the workforce is permanently unemployed?

The answer is almost certainly yes.

If 20 percent-plus of Americans will never be able to find a job, what do we do with them? Do we let them starve? Or do we pay them off?

The obvious solution is to follow the model of 1970s Great Britain, which bought social stability–or at least Revolution B Gon–by providing its permanently un- and underemployed working classes with a generous array of social benefits.

Margaret Thatcher’s England refused to invest in the economy. But it feared riots and other social upheavals. So its “dole” included weekly checks as well as subsidized housing.

Did the UK’s dole, as Republicans allege about unemployment benefits in the U.S. today, encourage idleness? By most accounts, yes. Oral histories of the punk rock movement laughingly describe how the dole unwittingly subsidized one-chord wonder band members while they worked on their music and tried to land record deals. The broader point, however, is that it did not increase unemployment. England in 1977 couldn’t create enough jobs for those who wanted them. If anything, it was good that some kids preferred to hang out in squats.

Personally, I think the current American political and economic system is so corrupt and impotent that the best solution is to overthrow it and start from scratch. So, on some level, I hope our excuses for leaders commit political suicide by allowing unemployment benefits to lapse. Tens of millions of dispossessed Americans will lead us into a better future.

If I were one of them, however, I would copy the Thatcherite example. Pay people not to work. Otherwise it’ll be 1968 all over again.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

If the U.S. Can’t Help Afghanistan, Who Can?

DO AB, AFGHANISTAN–Afghanistan has more infrastructure than it did in 2001. But Afghans also have less soul.

In many ways, Afghanistan was a more dangerous country nine years ago. There were more mines, more random acts of violence, warlordism everywhere. U.S. warplanes were bombing everything that moved. But, particularly in the Tajik-dominated north, there was also boundless optimism, a feeling that anything was possible. Good times might not be right around the corner–not exactly. But soon.

If anyone could fix Afghanistan, people thought, the United States could. The superpower colossus! A nation so rich that Afghans couldn’t begin to measure, much less really understand it. Rebuilding Afghanistan from the ground up would be chump change for mighty America.

The U.S. media did nothing to temper Afghan optimism. An October 2001 piece for Slate was typical: “Terrorism, the most ardent proponents of intervention argue, can’t be defeated without a complete reconstruction of Afghanistan’s government, infrastructure and society,” wrote Damien Cave. “In effect, what is needed is a 21st century version of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.” (Cave’s piece now reads like Cassandra. If only we’d followed the advice of a certain Joe Biden back then.) Nation building? We were all for it. Everyone–especially right-wing media types–promoted the “Marshall Plan for Afghanistan” meme.

Back then, Afghans were brave. When I needed a driver to take me to the front–the front! where bombs were falling by the thousands! where the Taliban were shooting at us from a hundred yards away!–I’d have a dozen guys vying for the job.

Now, alas, Afghans are utterly demoralized. The Taliban, in bands from 40 to 400 each, terrorize whole provinces. No one–not even the cops–dare travel outside the major cities. Where the suburbs begin, so does fear. Whenever I go somewhere, Afghan officials ask me: Where are my bodyguards? Where is my body armor? Why am I outside Kabul? “If you were a real journalist,” a police official told me, typically, “you’d be traveling in a truck full of U.S. soldiers with big guns.” (Funny me, I thought it was the other way around.)

I’m not afraid. But Afghans, those bad-ass Afghans, are. I looked for drivers everywhere–at taxi stands, through personal contacts, the UN and even the military. No one would take me outside a city. Price didn’t matter. In a country where a civil servant earns $30 a month, I offered drivers $500 a day–and got turned down. “It’s just too dangerous,” people kept saying–too dangerous to be seen with foreigners, and too dangerous without them too. (Messing with Westerners can cause trouble. In Afghanistan in 2010, everything causes trouble.)

Even allowing for the risk of Taliban attacks, Afghan highways are safer than they were in 2001. Thanks to paved roads, you can go faster and evade ambushes if need be. There are government gun nests every few kilometers. Unlike ’01, you don’t have American jets bombing everything that moves on Afghan highways. Yet Afghans are far less willing to take chances now than they were then. What happened?

The Afghan sense of what was possible has narrowed. When it came to bombs and high-tech gadgets for killing Afghans, the U.S. spent like there was no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the construction budget was less than one-half of one percent. Of which most was never spent. And what actually did get spent got stolen. For a while, Afghans concocted elaborate conspiracy theories to explain this insane set of misplaced priorities. They couldn’t believe that America the Superpower was so stupid, incompetent and/or corrupt.

They believe it now. And the effect has been devastating. “If America, with its unchallenged military power and massive material wealth, cannot or will not help Afghanistan,” a college student named Mohammed told me at the Friday Mosque in Herat, “who can? If they can’t build houses, who can? Why can’t they catch the Taliban?”

I have been hearing this a lot: from NGO workers who have been here for years, Western journalists, and Afghan citizens. We were Afghanistan’s last hope, and we blew it.

Now that political support for the war is waning in the U.S., the Obama Administration is looking to start pulling out next year. Actually, that isn’t adding to Afghans’ sense of hopelessness. They gave up on the U.S. years ago. Even if we were to stick around, people here say, they don’t believe that we’d suddenly start helping ordinary Afghans or lift a finger to provide basic security.

They’re screwed and they know it.

Killing Afghans’ hope for a better future may be an even more vile crime than the hundreds of thousands of Afghans the U.S. has murdered with bombs and bullets. As the U.S. stands by and watches, the security and economic situations continue to deteriorate. So Afghan psychology is reverting to survival skills learned during the Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban period. People are keeping their heads down, not taking chances.

Without optimism, after all, courage is illogical.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

Nine Years Later, Afghanistan Looks Much the Same: A Mess

HERAT, AFGHANISTAN–OK. The roads are impressive. Specifically, the fact that they exist. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, more than two decades of civil conflict had left the country bereft of basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges and tunnels had been bombed and mined. What didn’t blow up got ground down by tanks. Maintenance? Don’t be funny.

It took them too long to get started, but U.S. occupation forces deserve credit for slapping down asphalt. Brutal, bone-crushing ordeals that used to take four days can be measured in smooth, endless-grey-ribboned hours. Bridges have been replaced. Tunnels have been shored up. Most major highways and major city streets have been paved.

But that’s about it.

As of 2008 the U.S. claimed to have spent $1.3 billion on construction projects in Afghanistan. Where’d it all go? Roads don’t cost that much.

That’s the Big Question here. As far as anyone can tell, the only sign of economic improvement is a building boomlet: green and pink Arab-style glass-and-marble McMansions, guarded by AK-47-toting guards and owned by politically connected goons, are going up on the outskirts of every Afghan city. Most Afghans still live in squalor that compares unfavorably to places like Mumbai and Karachi. Beggars are everywhere. Most people haven’t gotten any help.

“Assistance is coming to Afghanistan, but we don’t know how it is spent, where it is spent,” Amin Farhang, the Afghan minister of economy, said at the time.

Afghan officials tell a similar story now. “When the Americans came after the 11th of September, we thought ‘good, they will rebuild our country,'” Ghulam Naider Nekpor, commander of Torgundi, a dusty town near the Turkmen border, told me. “Instead of help, they send soldiers. And not only that, they send weapons and money to the other side–Pakistan.” (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency finances and arms the Taliban.)

“We thought Americans were to help. Now we see they came to take, and take, and take from us.”

There are three big problems.

First: Instead of construction, money was wasted on troops. As of 2009–before the Obama surge–the Defense Department had blown through $227 billion in Afghanistan. Bear in mind, the World Bank estimated back in 2002 that the country could have been put on solid economic footing for about $18 billion.

“Please stop sending soldiers” is a standard plea here. “Can’t you send help instead of soldiers?”

The money we wasted on blowing up wedding parties and killing Al Qaeda Number Twos could have rebuilt Afghanistan 12 times over–or transformed it into a First World country.

As for those soldiers, they aren’t doing much. The Taliban range freely over the countryside, raiding and kidnapping at will. The Afghan National Police have ceded most of the country–everything outside the big cities–to the Taliban.

Ninety-nine percent of U.S. troops are either sitting on their butts on military bases surrounded by blast walls and concertina wire or fighting in remote areas along the sparsely populated border with Pakistan. There are supposedly 140,000 U.S. troops here. But most of the country never sees one.

Why aren’t Predator drones being used to take out the Taliban bike gangs that rule the countryside and attack motorists? Why don’t U.S. troops attack Taliban strongholds in the north, west and center of Afghanistan? If we’re going to spend a quarter of a trillion bucks on troops here, they ought to provide security.

Afghan cops say they know where the bad guys are. But they don’t even have the basic tools, like helicopters, needed to go after them. The U.S. military does–but they ignore Afghan requests for help.

Second problem: Corruption and American stupidity. They go together; stupid American organizations like US AID pick U.S. contractors or fly-by-night outfits connected to the Karzai regime and fail to audit their expenses. Bills are padded to spectacular extents. Work, when it gets done, is shoddy. Highways paved three years ago are already warped due to inferior roadbeds.

Moreover, work often takes place without consultation with, or the benefit of, locals. No one asks villagers what they want. Outsiders do the work; locals sit and watch. Areas that need a hospital get a road. Those that want a road get a school.

The Frontier Post, a Pakistani newspaper based in the Afghan border towns of Quetta and Peshawar, editorialized: “Afghans have little to be grateful to America for. It may have pumped in billions of dollars in aid–but only theoretically. Practically, much of that has been siphoned off and ploughed back by American contractors, making them rich while Afghans get only lollipops.”

Third: The Afghan people are last priority.

In a war for hearts and minds, there’s no place for the trickle-down approach. But that’s what the U.S.–when it makes a serious effort, which is rare–does. I wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan in the first place, but if I were put in charge here I would deploy the “trickle up” approach: direct financial assistance to the people who need it most. Help subsistence farmers buy their own plots of land. Build new houses and apartment blocs for the homeless. Invite bright children to attend colleges and universities tuition-free. Above all, don’t let people starve.

We have spent $229 billion here. Meals cost less than a dollar. No Afghan should be starving–yet millions are.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

Please Spare Me the Hypocritical Obituaries

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN—I am researching a book, a follow-up to “To Afghanistan and Back,” which in 2002 became the first book published about the U.S. invasion. Accompanied by fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, I am traveling from Kunduz to Heart via Mazar-i-Sharif and Mainana. By the time you read this, I should be about to turn south toward Zaranj, on the Iranian border.

Nimruz province is a challenging August vacation destination: lows in the 100s, highs in the 130s, scorpions and sporadic insurgent attacks at no extra cost. But political commentators have a duty to check things out for themselves. Sadly the U.S. doesn’t invade places like France and Italy anymore.

I could die.

I probably won’t. Thousands of Americans and other Westerners go to Afghanistan every year. Only a few get killed. But it is a dangerous place. The roads are awful. There are bandits. Everyone has guns. I’ve been shot at. Turn on a satellite phone, and you become a target for Predator drones. Did I mention scorpions?

The possibility of death is something you have to consider when you go to Afghanistan, especially when you leave Kabul. Last time around, three of my colleagues came back in coffins.

Yes, I’ll probably be fine. But if I die, I would like to ask my colleagues in the media—those assigned to write my obituary, should I be deemed to rate one—to spare me hypocritical bullshit praise.

I’m not talking about the hundreds of publications and broadcast outlets who have been kind to me over the years. I am amazed and humbled that anyone likes my stuff; I am still humbled when I see my name in print. I’m talking about the outlets that have always snubbed me.

Which is their right. Go ahead, snub like the wind! But don’t pretend you’re sad when I croak.

I don’t believe in an afterlife. Still, whatever remains of my spirit would be incredibly annoyed if The New York Times were to give me the Howard Zinn treatment. Zinn, the brilliant leftist historian who wrote “The People’s History of the United States,” was lauded both in a Times obit and an op-ed column by Bob Herbert.

When Zinn was still alive, however, you’d never know it by reading the Times. The Paper of Record repeatedly ran comments on political events from mainstream dullards, discredited neoconservatives and admitted plagiarists. They never ran Zinn. If they got reviewed at all, his books got short shrift. He was correct about most things, and thus too far left for the Times.

This is typical. Whenever an artist or writer tries to challenge the status quo, the establishment media boycotts his or her work. After they die (c.f. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mickey Siporin) they get lionized.

As bad as it is for edgy cultural figures to be a victim of economic censorship, it sucks more to be dead. If they had any decency, the minions of the mainstream press would resist the temptation to steal your reflected (now safe in the grave) glory.

During the 1990s I was the most frequently reprinted political cartoonist in The New York Times. They ran my op-eds. Then 9/11 happened. Editors got scared. Publishers started sucking up to Bush and his right-wing supporters. I vanished from the print edition. Amusingly and Orwellianly, for several years, a black square appeared at NYTimes.com where my cartoons used to run.

I’m not whining. It’s their paper. If they want to publish the worst political cartoons in the country (ever Sunday in the Week in Review), they can.

But, Times editors, please don’t sing my praises in the obituaries. Don’t talk about how I was once the youngest syndicated cartoonist in the country, how I won a bunch of awards, how I helped revolutionize an art form, how my work was controversial and widely discussed, how cool it was that I went to Afghanistan and Central Asia. If you really thought I was great, you would have run my stuff. You didn’t. You thought I sucked. Or you didn’t have the guts to deal with angry readers.

Either way: shut the @#$% up.

This also goes for USA Today, which wallows in cartoon crapitude day after day. You never ran one of my cartoons. I’ve done more than 4,000 of them. Not one ever appeared in USA Today. Not one in 20 years. If you mention my death, please include an explanation of why I’m worth mentioning but not worth publishing.

If your explanation somehow involves peanut butter that would be cool.

Newsweek deserves special mention as well. Their weekly cartoon round-up is highly influential. Also, it sucks. Newsweek publishes the worst cartoons by the worst cartoonists. If I die in Afghanistan, one advantage of being dead will be that I never have to lay eyes on that p.o.s. again. They ran me one time. Once! And it was a terrible cartoon: as all political cartoonists know, a guy watching the news on TV is a lazy cliché.

Attention Newsweek editors: If you print an obit, and it says nice things about my work, I am totally going to haunt your lame asses.

Special you-ignored-me-my-entire-career-so-don’t-suck-up-after-I-die shoutouts also go to The Washington Post, which canceled me in response to a write-in campaign by right-wing extremists, and The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and every newspaper in my home state of Ohio. When I shed my mortal coil and shuffle off to the great open bar full of funny cartoonists and loose women in the sky, whenever that happens, I beg you to do me one last favor: say that I suck. Or, better yet, don’t mention me at all.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

In a Deteriorating Afghanistan, a New Breed of Terror

KABUL–“In squads of roaring dirt bikes and armed to the teeth,” Joshua Partlow reports in The Washington Post, “Taliban fighters are spreading like a brush fire into remote and defenseless villages across northern Afghanistan.”

Two other cartoonists and I were a day away from heading to Faryab–a remote, rural, Uzbek-dominated province in the northwest known for its brutally entertaining matches of buzkashi–when Partlow’s piece appeared. He described a phenomenon that deploys novel tactics out of a bizarre 1970s action flick.

It was years after the 2001 U.S. invasion before the Afghan national police began to take control of the country’s major highways. Now there are government-run gun nests every few kilometers.

Insurgents have responded to government control of the highways by basing themselves in rugged villages far away from the freshly-paved asphalt. Riding Pamir motorcycles supplied by Pakistani intelligence–thus paid for by American taxpayers–Taliban bike gangs swoop across the desert, taking one village after another.

“They move constantly on unmarked dirt roads outside the cities to ambush Afghan police and soldiers and to kidnap residents. They execute those affiliated with the government and shut down reconstruction projects,” wrote Partlow.

They now control every district in Faryab province, a vast region that borders Turkmenistan. But Afghan sources across the country say their reach is far broader. Talibikers control the center of the country in a north-south axis that begins with Faryab and Baghlis and runs all the way down to Helmand and Nimruz.

Their checkpoints and raids along the three main east-west traffic arteries have effectively bifurcated the country. Whether it’s government officials, members of NGOs or the media, you have to fly if you want to get from Kabul to Herat or vice versa.

Partlow’s article, and his personal feedback, prompted us to cancel our plan to travel to Herat via Faryab. We left Mazar-i-Sharif for Kabul. Now we’re looking for a driver willing to take us via the Central Route to Herat: a scenic, bucolic, previously calm stretch of unpaved road that begins at Bamiyan, site of the ruined Buddha statues, and runs west via Ghor province. So far, no luck.

“I wouldn’t take you there for $10,000,” is a typical response. “Why do you want to die?” runs second.

The average Afghan earns $40 a month.

South of Mazar we noticed our driver nervously scanning the desert. Several recently charred trucks testified to the presence of the Taliban. “The Taliban,” our driver said, “here they come on motorcycles.”

I asked: Even during the day?

“Even during the day,” he confirmed.

Like “Mad Max.”

What’s really worrisome is the behavior of these self-described Talibs. Like the Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, they enforce an extreme form of Sharia law. In village after village, they have been stoning people accused of adultery and shooting those accused of working for the Karzai puppet regime. But the similarity stops there.

The first-gen Taliban led by Mullah Omar practiced what they preached. They were scrupulously honest. Living ascetic lives, they didn’t tolerate corruption or dishonesty among their own ranks.

The so-called neo-Taliban were the second generation: the madrassa kids, many of them orphans, who grew up in the refugee camps in Pakistan during the war. Less worldly and completely uneducated, this coarse bunch came to dominate the anti-U.S. resistance from 2003 to 2009.

Here comes Taliban Mark 3: the Taliban biker gangs from hell. They’re still radical Islamists. But they’re also gangsters, brazen thieves who have adopted the thuggish behavior of the warlord class during the so-called “mujahedeen nights” of the early 1990s.

These aren’t your father’s Taliban. They don’t follow the rules: certainly not the Koran.

Like the “moojs,” Talibikers set up checkpoints and ambush points to catch motorists. They’re yanked out of their cars, robbed at gunpoint, and sent on their way–if the victims are lucky. Many have been shot to death.

“Taliban” and “bandit”–once mutually exclusive, even opposite terms–are now used interchangeably.

Everyone expects the Taliban to control most, if not all, of Afghanistan by next year. Whether it happens then or it takes longer the question is, which Taliban? As the U.S. presence wanes and influence of the Karzai regime fades even further, I foresee a clash, perhaps even a civil war, between the “real Taliban” (sales pitch: we’re tough but honest) and these self-branded Talib-cum-robbers (motto: shut up and pay up).

In the meantime, this new breed of fanatically religious desperadoes goes to prove something Afghans have always known. As bad as things seem, they can always get worse.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

Nine Years Later, Afghan City is Buzzing But Still Menacing

TALOQAN, AFGHANISTAN–Nine years ago, when I was using this provincial Afghan capital as a base to cover the battle of Kunduz, Taloqan was a dangerous place with medieval charm. Donkey carts and horse-drawn carriages, their steeds decked out with red pom-poms, plied muddy ruts that passed as roads. The only motorized transport belonged to Western NGOs. Commerce consisted of a few sad huts you’d recognize as primitive convenience stores and an outdoor bazaar where 90 percent of economic activity was attributable to sales of opium paste.

In 2001 I wrote that good roads would change everything. And they have. Some time after 2005, when The New York Times reported that the U.S. hadn’t laid an inch of pavement in the entire country, road building happened–at least here in Takhar and in neighboring Kunduz province.

It’s impressive. Based on my 2001 experience and the absence of media reports that anything had changed, I had budgeted three to four days to travel from the Tajik border to Taloqan. Cruising down smooth two-lane highways at 80-plus mph–Afghan drivers apparently had a long-repressed need for speed–we made it in half an afternoon. Towers for high-tension conduits (the wires haven’t been strung yet) line the road, promising an electrified future.

The ghosts of ’01 are here–burned-out armored personnel carriers, lumps of earth where villages stood, tank treads used as speed bumps–but hard to find. Khanabad, the blood-soaked eastern front line during the battle of Kunduz, where my fellow journalist had the skin torn off his body by Taliban POWs using their bare hands, is a farm community marked by the kind of green-and-white reflectorized sign you’d see in the Midwest.

Most of Taloqan is paved. The donkeys and horses are gone. The soccer field used by the Taliban for stonings and by a Northern Alliance warlord as a helicopter landing pad is filled with kids playing on green grass. There are traffic jams (of cars and Indian-style motorized rickshaws) and white-gloved traffic cops to direct the mayhem. Business is booming. America is finished, but Taloqan is looking good.

Asphalt made a difference. But the basics–the social and political situation that in December 2001 prompted me to declare the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan doomed–remain the same.

Time magazine recently declared that the Taliban would sweep back into power after a U.S. withdrawal, brutalizing them and stuffing them back under burqas. But the Taliban never left. Neither did the repression. In Taloqan every woman but one wore the burqa, turning her head away so we couldn’t see her eyes through the netting as we passed.

Where are the Taliban? “They are all around us,” said my driver’s cousin, the campaign manager for a Canadian-Afghan actor running for parliament next month. “During the day, it is OK. They come at night.”

Indeed they do. The week before our arrival they stormed a small NATO garrison staffed by German troops at the airport here, killing seven. Cellphone signals go dead at night in deference to Taliban strictures.

In 2001 I stayed with a pharmacist in the center of town, across the street from the Red Crescent. Now Afghans are strictly prohibited from receiving foreigners as overnight guests. Only one hotel, the gaudy Ariana Hotel and Wedding Banquet Hall, can accommodate non-Afghans. “The situation in Taloqan is not good,” continued the campaign manager. “At night.”

We have the Ariana entirely to ourselves. Compared to the Spartan conditions we endured nine years ago–bed lice, outhouse guarded by a mean rooster–it’s a palace. Air conditioning, real beds, no parasitic bites as far as I can tell. There’s a generator to supplement the four hours a day of electricity supplied to the city.

But it’s a gilded cage, one surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire and guarded by a caffeinated man brandishing an AK-47. We can’t go out at night, and neither do most Afghans. There’s more prosperity. But it’s even less safe.

Money is exchanging hands. But the one thing Afghans wanted most in 2001–security–remains elusive. Though it is not a historical novelty, it is ironic that people are turning to those who create the threat in order to resolve it.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

Chase Bank and Obama’s “Make Home Affordable” Scam

SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN—It isn’t surprising, what with the world falling apart and all, that the world scarcely noticed that I lost my job as an editor in April 2009. Why should it? I was one of millions of Americans who lost their job that month.

But it mattered to me.

It wasn’t all bad. No more early morning commutes. And no more Lisa. Lisa was my boss. My mean boss. My mean and crazy boss. In the long run, I stand to save thousands of dollars on therapy.

In the meantime, however, one visit with HR cost more than half my annual income. (My ex-employer, the Scripps media conglomerate, offered just four weeks severance pay—if I agreed not to work as a journalist for the rest of my life. Needless to say, I refused.) Just like that, I was broke.

The bills, of course, kept coming. Including my home mortgage. Unlike many people, I was conservative. When I bought, in 2004, I put down more than 50 percent of the purchase price. Refusing an adjustable-rate mortgage, I took out a vanilla 30-year fixed-rate mortgage from Chase Home Finance LLC.

My monthly nut, a combined payment of $2200 for the loan plus local property tax, didn’t seem so bad in ’04. But property taxes went up. Now I’m shelling out over $2700—on half the income. I’m still making my payments on time, but only by borrowing from a home equity line of credit.

I’m not in foreclosure. But it’s easy to see how, if this keeps up, I will be. The credit line isn’t limitless. The more I borrow, the higher my payments on that. My cash flow is a disaster.

So I asked Chase for help.

Responding to political pressure to cut distressed homeowners a break, the big banks who destroyed global capitalism in 2008—including Chase—agreed to the Obama Administration’s request to create a program to assist distressed homeowners. The result was “Make Home Affordable.” (Nice name.)

From Chase’s website: “No matter what your individual situation is, you may have options. Whether your want to stay in your home or sell it, we may be able to help.”

Key word: “May.” Translation: “May” = “Won’t.”

As I can now attest from personal experience, “Make Home Affordable” is a scam. MHA is cited by bank ads as evidence that they get it, that their “greed is good” days are over, that we don’t need to nationalize the sons of bitches and ship them off to reeducation labor camps.

In reality, it exists solely to give banks like Chase political cover. They deliberately give homeowners the runaround, dragging out the process so they can foreclose. As of the end of 2009, only four percent of applicants received any help. By June 2010 the vast majority of that “lucky” four percent had lost their homes anyway—because the amount of relief they got was too small.

I was a banker in the ’80s. I often travel to the former USSR, where sloppy paperwork gives the police the right to rob you blind. So I know how to navigate bureaucracy. I’m careful. Thorough. When, among other things—many, many other things—Chase asked me for copies of my bank statements, I knew to send the blank pages too.

I explained my situation to an officer at my local Chase branch. “As someone who recently lost a job and thus a substantial portion of your income,” she said, “you clearly qualify for Make Home Affordable. But you have to keep making your payments on time. Don’t fall behind or you’ll be disqualified.”

Chase Home Finance’s lists qualifications for MHA; I easily fulfilled them. I was excited. To make sure I didn’t become the ten millionth American to lose his house since 2008, Chase would work to reduce my monthly payment. First, they would lengthen the repayment period. If that wasn’t enough help, they’d cut my interest rate. They might even reduce the principal.

I carefully filled out the forms. I copied all the financial records they demanded. I mailed them off to a brand-new loan center in Colorado that, Chase promised, had been set up to expedite the processing of HFA applications. The package was more than 100 pages thick.

That was in January.

About a month later, Chase sent me a letter asking for the same exact documents I had already sent them. I was perplexed. The application was in the same package as the supporting papers. How could they know I wanted to apply for HFA, yet not have that stuff? They also asked for another bank statement—for the month that had passed between their receipt of my application and the date of their letter.

They did it over and over. They’d confirm receipt of an item, then demand it again. They asked for one particular month’s bank record three times—after telling me that they’d gotten it twice.

Want a good laugh? Try navigating Chase’s phone tree. It’s at (866) 550-5705.

I called in March. Happy day! After submitting 318 pages of records, most of them redundant, my application was finally complete. An Actual Living Human would be in touch shortly to tell me whether I’d been approved and, if so, how much of a break I’d get. I also got a letter. Application complete! Application complete! What were all those pissed-off Chase Home Finance customers on the Internet whining about? All you had to do was be thorough. And persistent.

Alas, April brought more melancholia. Another letter: my application still wasn’t complete again. Why hadn’t I sent in the same documents I’d already sent in four times and had confirmed three times? And what about the bank statement that arrived between March and April?

I sent in the stuff along with a pissy cover note threatening to contact my Congressman if they didn’t shape up.

So what happened? Democracy works! One week later, on May 18th, I received a rejection letter. The Reason: I had not suffered any loss of income.

“If it is determined that you are not eligible for a Home Affordable Modification,” their website assures, “we’ll evaluate you for other workout options to keep you in your home or advise you of other foreclosure alternatives.” Never heard from them.

As a former banker, I wondered: How could they say that I hadn’t taken a hit? Then it came to me. Chase only asks for records that show income: W-2s, pay stubs, income statements, bank statements. They don’t look at your debt: credit cards, home equity lines of credit, other mortgages. Like most people whose income drops, my debts went up as I struggled to pay my bills. Indeed, I offered to send that stuff. They refused it!

At this time I would like to express my unvarnished admiration for the ruthless cynicism that led the executives at Chase Home Finance to conceive of a fake lending branch entirely dedicated to increasing foreclosures, improving their public image, and driving distressed homeowners crazy.

“The foreclosure-prevention program has had minimal impact,” says John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “It’s sad that they didn’t put the same amount of resources into helping families avoid foreclosure as they did helping banks.”

I would also like to volunteer for the firing squad if and when these scumbags get what they deserve.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL