On Jan. 14, Tea Party Nation put out word that only five conservative media outlets would get full access to the convention. On January 30, they issued an e-mail to their internal list pushing back against “baseless accusations and criticism” from angry Tea Party activists.

National Tea Party Convention organizer Judson Phillips (Photo by David Weigel).

But on the floor of his convention, the paranoid, mysterious Judson Phillips was nowhere to be seen. The real Phillips, a jovial defense attorney, bounded in and out of sessions, across the stage of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel’s Tennessee Ballroom, and from interview to interview. Hardly 15 minutes could go by without Phillips, sporting a rumpled tan suit and day-old shave, shaking the hand of a grateful attendee or being miked for a new interview.

“I’m talking to them,” he said, pointing at a video crew from Time magazine, and asking if he could wait a few minutes to answer questions. “Then I’m talking to them.” He pointed to CNN’s set-up box in the corner of the small convention hall. “Then I have another interview in a half hour. But I will talk to you!”

As this three-day event wrapped up with an hour-long address by and Q&A with Sarah Palin — broadcast live on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and C-Span — it was clear that Phillips’s massive and controversial gamble had mostly paid off. More than 200 members of the media had descended on Nashville to write probing stories on the Tea Party Movement. In the end, said Phillips, the convention would turn a small profit — a step down from his initial hopes to make enough of a profit to launch a 527 that would back conservative candidates, but when compared to the rumors that led up to the convention, a smashing success.

“We’re going to break even, maybe a little bit into the black,” Phillips said. And just as he did from the main stage, Phillips went a little further and ribbed his critics with a joke. “I’m not planning to declare bankruptcy. I had to do that one time – it really sucks when you have to do that.”

To the delight of attendees, the National Tea Party Convention became a coming-out party for a movement that’s always had an oppositional relationship to the press. It was a small event — around half the size of the inaugural YearlyKos convention of liberal bloggers in 2006 — and The Gaylord Opryland location served to make it look even smaller. The entire weekend was contained in a ballroom and three breakout rooms adjacent to a short lobby with media check-in on one end and a raft of cameras on the other, with pundits like The Daily Beast’s John Avlon and RedState’s Erick Erickson doing quick live bits. Getting to the convention floor meant walking through one of two indoor shopping malls, one of them inside a massive dome decked out with greenery and artificial lakes. “I imagined one day I’d meet [Palin],” said conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart in his introduction of the former governor. “I just never knew that it would be in the middle of Tennessee, in a biosphere. Or is it an international space station? Or is it the set of Avatar?”

Inside the main hall, and inside the breakout sessions, there was one member of the media for every three Tea Partiers. During the troubled run-up to the convention, those sessions (and Palin’s speech) were scheduled to be closed to the media, and only a few cloaked-in-mystery “availabilities” would be opened up.

“I think they were the dog that caught the car,” said Erickson, who had been an early critic of the convention. “They got Palin. Who thought they were going to get Palin? They didn’t know what to do next.”

In the final stretch, as coverage of the “intra-Tea Party infighting” reached fever pitch, Phillips put Memphis TEA Party founder Mark Skoda in charge of media outreach. (”I just didn’t want to deal with it,” Phillips said.) It was Skoda, a bombastic radio host and consultant, who started keeping in touch and on top of media requests and letting the world in.

“I jumped in when all the negative press was coming,” Skoda said, “because I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people who want to be bullies. My focus was getting as much video press in here as possible, that show that we’re not a bunch of crazies, OK? So there was a necessity to look at international press. We wanted to give them access because this is truly American. Our president may not believe in American exceptionalism, but I do. And if you look at most of the U.S. press, there’s a national audience — there’s a lot of videography going on. My sense was: Nobody here is wearing crazy outfits, there’s no little pointy hats, no screaming mimis, no signs.”

Skoda’s calculation paid off. The few people in “crazy outfits” did draw cameras toward them as if they were magnetized. One was William Temple, a pastor who donned the revolutionary war garb and British accent he’d broken out at every Tea Party. During speeches, Temple would wave his hat and lead cheers of “Hip, hip, huzzah!” Outside of the main room, he was interviewed with every step he took. But Tea Partiers hardly had anything to fear from the quotable and polite man who co-starred in “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” and led the 9/12 march on Washington.

“Gone were the placards that protesters carried [at Tea Parties] last year with Mr. Obama’s face wearing a Hitler mustache or superimposed on the Joker,” wrote Kate Zernike in a New York Times piece representative of the convention coverage. Many questions to organizers were about the firey speech by former congressman Tom Tancredo that opened the convention; many questions to attendees were about Palin, and whether they’d back her if she ran for president. The controversy surrounding the convention and its speakers led to media coverage of the convention as a mainstream political event, a stop along the road to the rebuilding of the GOP. One sign of how happy Tea Partiers were to see the media there came after Anthony Reese, who’d left the organizing committee of the convention in a huff, staged a press conference with three other angry activists critical of what happened–and then asked Fox’s Carl Cameron for a photo together. Cameron obliged.

“I think the media convinced the media to cover this by playing up the early stories,” said Glenn Reynolds, the libertarian Instapundit blogger who drove to the convention from his home in Knoxville. He was conducting interviews for PajamasTV, the conservative web network that ran some of the earliest coverage of the Tea Party movement, and was allowed to livestream most of this convention. “If I wanted to give Judson Phillips more credit than he deserves, I’d claim he was actually a genius who manipulated the media into giving this more coverage. I mean, this was the front-page, headline story in the Knoxville paper yesterday!”

High ticket prices aside, the Tea Partiers who made it to Nashville made up a representative — if slightly wealthier than average — cross-section of the movement. The overwhelming number of attendees were white, and when World Net Daily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah took a moment in his Friday night speech to ask how many of them were “born between 1946 and 1961,” the vast majority of hands shot up. On Friday night, Andrew Breitbart introduced “Generation Zero,” a splashy documentary that argues that the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues. Footage of dancing hippies and pictures of Saul Alinksy — the radical organizer who has become a household name among Tea Parties — were intercut with conservative writers like Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, historian Victor Davis Hanson, and Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, explaining how left-wing theorists had long wanted to bring down capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. In a breakout session on immigration policy, Tancredo explained to Tea Partiers that Democrats wanted immigration reform in order to enfranchise millions of new voters to put them in perpetual power.

“Remember when Rahm Emanuel said ‘You never let a good crisis go to waste?’” said Lisa Mei Norton, a Tea Party activist and singer who opened the convention on Thursday night. “Now, what did he mean by that?”

Norton said her beef with the media stemmed from how reporters covered things “they think are bad” out of proportion to everything else. She didn’t sing it at the conference, but she’s recorded a song about Barack Obama’s citizenship called “Where Were You Born?” Yes, she had questions about Obama’s citizenship. It was perfectly fine for reporters to write about it when Tea Partiers questioned Obama’s birth certificate. The problem, she said, came when reporters didn’t put that in context.

“Why is it?” she asked. “Is it the media leans left, and wants to only highlight things that put conservatives in a bad light, and downplay negative things that happen on the left?”

For John Ball, a political consultant working for “Ten Commandments judge” Roy Moore — now a candidate for governor of Alabama — understanding how the media covered conservatism was one of the major goals of the convention. After speaking to Moore, Ball asked for some analysis of exactly how and why the media turned conservative quotes into “extreme” gaffes.

“When we talk about the Constitution and getting back to the founders,” said Ball, “you guys are ready to say ‘Oh, the founders who owned slaves? Who wouldn’t let women vote? You want to get back to that?’ I think Tea Party people need to understand how that works.”

The threat of media bias, the way that the press could trip up inexperienced activists, was obvious enough to Amy Kremer. She had split with Tea Party Patriots — she’d been on the board — when she decided to join the Tea Party Express. Unlike Tea Party Patriots, which is run by grassroots activists, her new group is run by Republican consultants. It had been the focus of outsized media attention, more grist for the “Tea Party infighting” narrative. Kremer didn’t care. Neither, she said, did activists. “Nobody who comes to these rallies knows the difference between Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express.”

From her perspective, the coverage of the Tea Party Convention represented the media as it should work. The live network broadcast, she said, was “amazing.”

“You go the media when you have a message to get out,” said Kremer. “We’re our own media resource in this movement. But I think it’s good that they were here so the whole country could see what happened tonight.”

When the convention had ended and the cameras had packed up, Phillips was found rubbing his eyes, summoning the energy to go out with his top volunteers to celebrate. He’d had no idea that the networks had indulged him by running so much of the conference and of Palin’s speech.

“I just assumed that as soon as she sat down, they all would jump out,” said Phillips. “I knew C-Span would stay. That’s C-Span’s thing. But wow! That’s incredible!”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement rallied supporters in the lobby of Wells Fargo's downtown branch (photo by Michael Swanger/Iowa Independent).

While customers and bank employees looked on, five busloads of CCI members quietly streamed into the lobby of Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Des Moines, shouting in unison “Bust up big banks” and “Put the people first.”

“I’m just very angry,” said 81-year-old Ferol Wegner of Des Moines, a widow who lost her retirement savings in the financial crisis. “Everyone here has lost money in their 401ks or retirement funds because the banks have devastated our economy, yet the taxpayers paid for the bailouts of these large corporate banks. I’m here to stand up and see that justice is served.”

After a few minutes in the bank lobby, security and Des Moines police asked the protesters to leave, which they did. Wells Fargo officials were not available for comment.

The protesters, who were also joined by members of the Chicago-based National People’s Action, walked across the street and crammed themselves into the small lobby of Bank of America, where they repeated their protests before once again being asked to leave by police.

No arrests were made at either bank.

“The banks know that we are unhappy with what happened with the financial meltdown. They know it’s their fault,” said Mike McCarthy, a CCI member from Des Moines. “They think it’s business as usual. But it’s unjust for them to think they will continue the way they have been in the wake of the country’s financial meltdown. We are here to see that this doesn’t happen again to our children and grandchildren.”

Tuesday’s bank protests were the culmination of CCI’s “Showdown at the Statehouse,” a day-long event in which CCI members called upon elected officials to rein in corporate power and to support campaign finance reform. But the biggest issue of the day was CCI’s message to the banks.

Protesters rallied outside downtown banks in Des Moines (photo by Michael Swanger/Iowa Independent).

“Big banks, like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, and Wall Street crashed our national economy and our state budgets. They must do their part to fix it,” said Judy Lonning of Des Moines. “We want their bonuses.”

At the heart of CCI’s argument are reports of banks that have received federal government bailout money but are now reporting profits and doling out billions of dollars in bonuses to employees. Last week, it was reported that Wells Fargo in 2009 enjoyed a record-setting $12.3 billion in net income and total revenue of more than $88 billion.

In addition to setting record profits and paying lavish bonuses, CCI claims that big banks are funneling millions of dollars to lobbyists to block meaningful financial reform; increasing consumer fees; failing to modify enough loans to keep families in their homes; and financing payday lenders that “rip off our communities.”

“Wells Fargo and Bank of America are hurting hardworking families,” said CCI member Vern Tigges of Carroll. “Our state budget deficits could be wiped out if the big banks gave their total bonus packages — estimated to be about $140 billion — back to our states. For all intents and purposes, their bonuses are our bonuses because we bailed them out and put them back in working order.”

CCI contends that the $140 billion reported to be paid in bonuses, benefits and compensation by the nation’s six biggest banks — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley — could nearly fill the $142 billion total budget gap for all 50 states in fiscal year 2010.

In Iowa, budget deficits have resulted in across-the-board cuts that have forced layoffs, employee furloughs and cuts to vital services.

“I think it’s wrong what they’re doing,” said Veronica Guevara, an 18-year-old student at Marshalltown Community College, who works part-time at a community bank in her hometown. “We bailed them out and have got nothing in return.”

U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., sponsored an amendment to the Democrats’ health reform bill prohibiting the government from using guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to craft policy. (WDCpix)

The message was clear: More screenings, not fewer, are better for women’s health.

Yet as the dust settles and Washington’s attention shifts elsewhere, some prominent physicians are questioning the wisdom of the congressional decision to swoop in so quickly to dismiss the expert recommendations. Writing this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, these doctors are blasting Congress for politicizing an issue they say is better left to medical science.

It’s not a new argument. Preventive care specialists and some journalists were making it in November. Still, that a respected medical journal has returned to the issue now is a good indication that, even if the Democrats’ plans for health reform have hit a wall after last week’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, the thorny debate over preventive health care is far from dead.

“Screening is not simply about benefit, it also causes important harms,” Steven Woloshin and Lisa M. Schwartz, both physicians at Dartmouth Medical School, wrote in the Jan. 13 issue of JAMA. “To make good decisions about screening, patients should understand the trade-offs.”

In the case of routine mammograms, the authors contend, the benefits for women in their 40s are minimal. Without screenings, 3.5 of 1,000 40-somethings will die from breast cancer over the next decade, they note. With screenings, 3 of 1,000 will succumb to the disease — meaning that it requires 2,000 tests to save one life.

“For most women with cancer, screening generally does not change the ultimate outcome,” Woloshin and Schwartz argue.

On the flip side, they say, the harms can be considerable. In some cases, the test comes back mistakenly positive, subjecting the patient to the devastating, if temporary, thought that she’s got a life-threatening disease. In other instances, the test uncovers slow-growing cancers that, even if never found, pose no threat to the patient through her lifetime. The treatment of those latent cancers exposes women to the harms associated with surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation — as well as the constant fear of recurrence.

Steven H. Woolf, a physician at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, said those harms shouldn’t be taken lightly.

“Advocates of mammography and cancer survivors often belittle these harms, but a moral duty exists when subjecting millions of asymptomatic women to a procedure that benefits relatively few,” Woolf wrote in the same issue of JAMA. “Whether hundreds of women should endure the consequences of inaccurate mammograms to save one woman’s life is a legitimate ethical question.”

The controversy spins around new recommendations, crafted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, suggesting that 40-something women should no longer get routine annual mammograms, but instead should talk first to their doctors about the potential harms associated with those tests. The task force also recommended that routine screenings for older women occur every two years, rather than annually.

[A clarifier is in order here: Routine mammograms refer, under current protocols, to the annual tests given to asymptomatic women aged 40 and up. Diagnostic screenings, on the other hand, occur after a lump or other abnormality is detected. The task force controversy surrounded only the former. Some insurers cover only the latter.]

Many lawmakers defended the guidelines. But others pounced, voicing concerns that private insurers in search of greater profits — or governments in search of leaner budgets — might point to the guidelines as reason to scale back coverage of routine tests. It didn’t help that the recommendations were unveiled in the middle of the most ferocious health reform battle in generations, and that the Democrats’ reform bills would rely on certain task-force guidelines to steer minimum coverage standards for private insurers.

“This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., warned at the time. “This is how rationing begins.”

The irony, of course, was that Blackburn was the bureaucrat accusing an independent panel of preventive-care experts of being bureaucrats — a dynamic which raised immediate questions about the capacity of Congress to weed out unnecessary procedures if lawmakers stand ready to riot each time medical science calls into question the entrenched habits of patients and providers.

“The politicalization of medical care is wrong,” Woloshin and Schwartz warn broadly. “Promoting screening irrespective of the evidence may garner votes but will not create healthier voters. It may do the opposite.”

No matter. Less than three weeks after the guidelines were published, the Senate stepped in with an amendment to the Democrats’ health reform bill prohibiting the government from using them to craft policy. Sponsored by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., it passed unanimously without a tallied vote.

A second amendment, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., bars insurance companies from denying coverage for a host of preventive-care services to be named later by the White House. Aside from mammograms, the provision is designed to cover screenings — at no cost to women — for other prominent diseases, such as diabetes, cervical cancer and heart disease. The Mikulski amendment passed 61 to 39.

“We don’t mandate that you have a mammogram at age 40,” Mikulski said on the Senate floor before the vote. “What we say is, discuss this with your doctor. But if your doctor says you need one, you are going to get one.”

Though mischaracterized in the press and misunderstood on Capitol Hill, that’s precisely what the panel had recommended.

“[T]he controversy was fueled by a chain of false premises,” wrote Woolf, a former member of the task force.

Still, there remains a great deal of disagreement within the medical community about the wisdom of the new guidelines. Wendie A. Berg, a Maryland-based radiologist specializing in breast cancer, said the panel’s conclusions are both “puzzling” and “problematic.”

“There are downsides associated with screening, but most women would not consider these harms,” Berg, also a consultant to Naviscan Inc., a manufacturer of imaging equipment, wrote in JAMA. “The overwhelming majority of women are willing to accept these downsides as part of the process of saving lives otherwise lost to breast cancer.”

The issue might go away for a while. In the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s Senate win in Massachusetts last week, the Democrats no longer have the 60 votes to usher a merged health reform bill through the upper chamber. The astonishing development has left party leaders at a loss for what to do next. Some are suggesting that they move on to other issues and return to health reform later in the year. Whenever they do, Woloshin and Schwartz have some advice.

“It is important for the public to remember that the goal of medicine is to help patients live healthier longer lives,” they wrote. “Sometimes more testing helps to reach the goal, but other times less testing does.

“Suggestions to do less may be as much in an individual’s interest as suggestions to do more.”

Mike Lillis covers Congress for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

And while President Barack Obama may not agree, candidate Obama made it clear during an Iowa campaign stop in December 2007 that it was behind-closed-doors negotiation that doomed health care reform during the Clinton administration.

During a speech to a crowd in Washington, Iowa, Obama said the Clintons failed at health care reform because “they went about it the wrong way, they went behind closed doors and tried to come up with a plan without even including some members of Congress, including members of their own party.”

He went on to say he would try to work differently: “This is all going to be on C-SPAN, the American people will be watching, so it’s not behind closed doors, it’s open.”

Here is an Iowa Independent video of the speech:

Obama followed up his comments during a debate the next month, where he said he favored “broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process.”

Blogging at The Des Moines Register, political consultant Graham Gillette, who attended the above speech, called for Obama to apologize for going back on his promise to hold health care negotiations in public.

“We will never know what price we Americans have paid for these closed door meetings, because the President has opted to govern as usual instead of abiding to the lofty promises he made on snowy days when he was a candidate to bring change and openness,” Gillette wrote. “I know it is silly, but as a person who cheered him that cold day in Washington, Iowa and on countless other days and sites across the country when he said he would open the doors to his White House, I kind of feel he owes me a personal apology.”

Mike Huckabee’s caucus campaign manager takes over Bob Vander Plaats’ gubernatorial campaign.

Bob Krause makes his Daily Kos debut.

The Democratic Governors Association’s big fundraising numbers could be good news for Gov. Culver. The Republican Governors Association’s bigger numbers could be bad news.

Twice as many people (two) spoke at budget hearing Monday than showed up last week’s “public” hearing.

Iowa Catholics take aim at payday lending.

On a conference call just now, senior administration officials provided some details about their plan for detaining Guantanamo detainees at Illinois’ Thomson Correction Center, just across the Mississippi River from Iowa. The facility will be for a “limited number” of detainees, a senior administration official told reporters, for those “who would face trial [in] military commissions.” A different official clarified that “I think the plan would be to hold the military commissions at Thomson.”

But Thomson will not be a way station for out-processing Guantanamo Bay detainees back to their home countries. Nor will it house detainees who will face prosecutions in federal court — those detainees will be transferred the jurisdictions trying them.

Finally, a senior administration official said that while “notionally” it could house detainees for indefinite or preventive detention — the so-called “Fifth Category” of detainees who the administration contends cannot be tried in any forum nor responsibly released — the administration has not yet identified any detainees who fall into that category. Accordingly, neither official told reporters how many detainees at Guantanamo it had identified for transfer to Thomson, saying the process of review remains ongoing.

The Thomson Correctional Center, maximum-security prison built in 2001, is “virtually empty,” the first official said, but inside the prison, non-terrorism detainees will be held in segregation from the former Guantanamo inmates. While the facility is up to the security standards of the Florence, Colo. Supermax prison — with “dual-sided electric stun fencing,” outer and inner towers with armed guards, networked cameras and more –  the U.S. Defense Department will add “extra perimeter security” to make it “the most secure facility in the nation.” Ex-Guantanamo detainees will be allowed to communicate with their lawyers, the International Committee of the Red Cross and law enforcement officials — that is, no friends, and no family.

Finally, the officials couldn’t give a time frame for when the transfers ought to occur — and, accordingly, when Guantanamo will be closed. That will require “some change in law, and some funding, obviously, from Congress.” The officials said they were working with Congress — and particularly the Illinois delegation — to secure that additional money and legal authority, though they did not specify precisely which legal changes were necessary and sufficient for the transfer.

Spencer Ackerman is national security correspondent for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.
]]> http://iowaindependent.com/23757/thomson-will-be-for-%e2%80%98limited%e2%80%99-number-of-detainees-awaiting-military-commissions/feed 0 http://iowaindependent.com/23704/white-house-moves-forward-with-plan-to-bring-gitmo-detainees-to-illinois http://iowaindependent.com/23704/white-house-moves-forward-with-plan-to-bring-gitmo-detainees-to-illinois#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:49:06 +0000 Lynda Waddington http://iowaindependent.com/?p=23704 President Barack Obama and key Illinois elected officials will announce Tuesday that roughly 100 detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will soon be housed at a revamped Thomson Correctional Facility just across the Mississippi River from Iowa.

The plan, which was floated as a possibility in late fall, has already drawn criticism from Iowa’s Republican delegation in Congress. Democratic representatives for the state have taken a more measured approach, but also have not automatically signaled their support.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin. D-Ill., Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and federal officials who will take part in the announcement are expected to tout the potential economic impacts of locating a super-maximum-security federal prison in the small town of Thomson. A Colorado newspaper publisher from the area of the nation’s only existing supermax facility told The Iowa Independent that although economic benefit is possible, local residents shouldn’t expect an immediate influx of funds.

The state correctional  facility, which has been mostly idle since its recent construction, will need to be significantly renovated in order for it to function as a federal supermax correctional facility. The White House is expected to call on Congress to approve the funds necessary for renovation and management of the facility.

Things have changed quite a bit since then, as the spotlight has shifted to lenders and their behavior during the boom. States and cities continue to aggressively pursue subprime lending discrimination suits, and judges across the country are signaling a willingness to move forward with some cases. As the lawsuits wind their way through the court system, more details and allegations about the inner workings of the subprime world are emerging. And as startling as some of the charges already have been — a former loan officer for Wells Fargo testified in one affidavit that employees regularly referred to minority borrowers as “mud people” and called subprime mortgages “ghetto loans,” — there’s even more ahead, said David Berenbaum, executive vice president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“The ’smoking guns’ are coming out,” Berenbaum said, referring to possible evidence that lenders targeted minority communities and borrowers for higher priced loans. “And I expect more and more of these smoking guns to become apparent.”

In the latest development, a Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles recently certified a 2005 lending discrimination lawsuit against Wells Fargo as a class action case. The suit contends that area managers at the bank refused access in some minority neighborhoods to a software program that allowed for discounted prices on mortgage loans. Barry Cappello, a partner with Cappello & Noel in Santa Barbara, which represents some 10,000 to 20,000 borrowers in the suit, said he believes it is the first subprime lending discrimination suit in California to be classified as a class action.

According to Cappello, Wells Fargo introduced a program in 2002 called “Loan Economics,” which gave loan officers the authority to offer discounts to loan applicants. The savings on lower fees and interest rates could be significant, ranging from $500 to as much as $10,000 per loan. The suit claims that the Los Angeles area Wells Fargo manager refused to allow loan officers operating in certain minority neighborhoods to offer the program. Borrowers in predominantly white neighborhoods were given access to the software.

Cappello said the suit stemmed from complaints by black and Hispanic loan officers for Wells Fargo, who said they asked to use the software in their branches but upper management refused.

Wells Fargo is fighting the suit and has denied all the charges. In a statement, the bank said, “We are disappointed in this ruling and intend to vigorously defend this matter as the case proceeds. The decision does not indicate the court believes the underlying allegations have any merit. We feel the allegations represent a complete mischaracterization of our long-standing commitment to responsible lending and the pricing practices and tools we use. The policies, systems and controls we have in place ensure race is not a factor in the pricing or products we offer.”

The case could go to trial in about a year, Cappello said.

More lawsuits are expected in the near future over the treatment of Hispanic borrowers in Arizona and Texas, who were offered high-cost loans they didn’t understand at misleadingly low teaser rates, then refinanced into even more expensive loans than their initial mortgages, Cappello said.

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest home lender, also has been a target of lawsuits elsewhere. Last month, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued the lender, alleging that blacks and Hispanics were sold high-cost subprime loans more frequently than white borrowers with similar incomes. The suit contended loan officers were offered incentives by the bank to steer borrowers into the more expensive loans, and that white borrowers generally received the lower-cost prime mortgages.

Some borrowers thought they were getting prime loans from Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, the suit also charged. But their loans actually came from Wells Fargo Financial, the bank’s subprime unit.

In Iowa, two watchdog groups charged this week that minority homeowners in Des Moines were three times more likely to receive high cost subprime loans from Wells Fargo than white homeowners.

In June, the New York Times reported on affidavits from a 2008 lawsuit by the city of Baltimore against Wells Fargo over subprime lending, which charged that the bank targeted blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime loans. Former loan officers testified in affidavits about using terms like “mud people” and “ghetto loans.” The bank also had an emerging markets unit that pinpointed black churches as fertile ground for selling subprime loans, according to the former officers. And in March, the NAACP filed suits in federal court in California against Wells Fargo and HSBC, alleging minority borrowers were more likely to be issued higher rate subprime loans than white borrowers with similar credit scores and qualifications. Both banks have strongly denied the charges. The NAACP also has pending litigation against nearly a dozen other banks and lenders over subprime lending discrimination.

Should the charges in the lawsuits be proven, it would amount to massive violations of the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and other fair housing and lending laws, Berenbaum noted. Enforcing fair lending laws has been “an issue the government has failed to address over the past decade,” he said. Lenders could face criminal penalties from the government for violating fair housing laws, and they could be subject to punitive damages and fines from government lawsuits.

Big lenders like Wells Fargo and HSBC are obvious targets for suits because of their size and the amount of lending they did. In addition, many other lenders and originators of subprime loans have gone out of business, complicating efforts to address allegations of lending discrimination through lawsuits.

That leaves a major question regarding all the lending still unanswered, Berenbaum said: Where has the U.S. government been? The Federal Reserve reported in 2005 that an analysis of federal mortgage data found that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to receive higher interest rates on mortgage loans – and that it intended to examine the practices of 200 lenders as a result.

But nothing’s happened since that announcement, Berenbaum noted. Instead, as the years go on, and the government takes no action, allegations about price differences in mortgage loans based on the race of borrowers and their neighborhoods continue to grow.

Mary Kane covers the economy for the Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

A state task force is preparing to tour the facilities and meet with local residents in an attempt to evaluate levels of care and cost effectiveness. Specifically, the task force will need to consider if the state would benefit from closing one of the facilities, a duty steeped as deeply in history as it is in state economics.

Kirkbride, a founding member of the organization that would later become the American Psychiatric Association, promoted standardizing not only care for those with mental health issues, but for the architectural design of the facilities in which such persons would be housed. Kirkbride believed that surroundings played a large role in the treatment of those described at the time to be “insane” or “feeble-minded.”

Kirkbride buildings were often sprawling structures that would allow patients to be segregated first by gender and then by degree and intensity of illness. In particular, the philosophy related to the architecture believed that nature — fresh air, sunlight — was an important element to treating mental illness, and many of the asylums based on his philosophy were constructed well outside of urban areas and on large lots where residents would be required to help not only with facility maintenance, but with ground-keeping, farming and other tasks.

The end result was state purchases of large tracts of rural land and construction of hulking brick and mortar facilities. Some of the structures closely resemble castles of Old Europe.

Mount Pleasant Mental Health Institute

The facility in Mount Pleasant was the first built by the state. (Photo courtesy of the IAGenWeb Project)

The Mount Pleasant facility is the oldest of the four state-run facilities that serve individuals affected by mental illness. The state made its first appropriation for the location and erection of the facility in 1855. Kirkbride himself recommended Boston architect Jonathan Preston to design the structure. The 50,000-square foot building formally opened as “The Iowa Lunatic Asylum, Mount Pleasant” on March 6, 1861.

“This is first permanent building erected in the state,” a reporter for the Burlington Hawkeye wrote at the time. “It is of large size. We have not the exact dimensions before us, but it is sufficient to say that when fully completed it will accommodate between 300 and 400 patients and will compare creditably with similar structures in other states…

“Before diminishing the subject, we think simple justice to the Directors and builder, and to all parties concerned, under the circumstances, renders it proper for us to say something further in regard to this building and the manner in which the public have been expended upon it. When we look at its extent, at its massive walls and firm foundations that nothing short of an earthquake could move, at its innumerable rooms and dormitories, all the partition walls being of brick — at its miles of iron pipe for heating purposes, hot and cold water and gas — at is pipes and flues in every part of the building for purposes of ventilation — at its engine and boilers, kitchen and laundry, et cetera, et cetera, our wonder was that so much had been done for the sums appropriated by the State. … We hope, now that it is open and receiving patients, that all citizens of the State who can make it convenient to do so, will visit the Asylum. They will find it a very pleasant place to spend an hour or two, and, notwithstanding its grated windows, and unfortunate inmates, having a cheerful, orderly and happy look.”

Within a year, however, The Hawkeye, began to publish articles on the overcrowded conditions within the asylum, violence and skyrocketing expenses. (According to the American Medical Association, the facility had 11 miles of iron pipes, 425 rooms above the basement, 900 doors, 1,100 windows, a 2,100-foot Artesian well and cost the state $600,000 to construct.) The facility had treated nearly 1,100 people, many of them from other states, during its first 21 months of operation.

In those early years, all of Iowa’s facilities were used for long-term care. Many patients who entered the wards likely never again lived outside an asylum.

According to the Department of Human Services, peak capacity was reached in 1946 at more than 1,500 patients. Since that time, however, and with the invention of better medications and different therapies, most patients’ stays are between 30 and 120 days.

For some time the grounds have been shared by the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison designed to provide treatment to male offenders with character disorders and substance abuse issues. In 1999, a separate facility opened for women offenders who also had such specialized needs.

The Mount Pleasant facility currently provides inpatient treatment to adults, and it is the only dual-diagnosis program — psychiatric and substance abuse — run by the state. Although substance abuse patients throughout the state come to Mount Pleasant for treatment, it’s primary service area is limited to 15 counties in southeast Iowa.

Independence Mental Health Institute

The facility in Independence was Iowa's second asylum, and the structure continues to be used for the same purpose today. (Photo courtesy of KirkbrideBuildings.com)

The second of Iowa’s facilities began in 1868 with a state allocation for land and structure in Independence. The state hired S. Shipman of Madison, Wis., to serve as the architect and the building was given an Italian flair, complete with a mansard roof. It was built from limestone quarries in Epworth, Farley and Anamosa, which was considered to be quite an extravagance despite its local availability, and contained several fire-prevention amenities.

Construction began in 1869, and a portion of the building was opened in 1873, although the entire structure was not opened until 1884. Full cost for the structure, which contained 24 wards and could hold 600 patients, neared $1 million — nearly twice the cost of the Mount Pleasant facility.

Originally known as the “Iowa Hospital for the Insane, Independence,” it is now called the Independence Mental Health Institute, and, according to the Department of Human Services, it provides inpatient psychiatric treatment for adults, adolescents and children. The facility’s specialty, however, is its work with children and adolescents.

This facility currently serves 28 counties in eastern and northeastern Iowa, and children and adolescents from 43 counties primarily to the east of I-35.

Clarinda Mental Health Institute

The Clarinda facility was built by the state in the late 1800s to help alleviate crowded conditions in the other two state hospitals. (Photo courtesy of KirkbrideBuildings.com)

The facility in Clarinda, originally named the “Clarinda Asylum for the Insane,” was began with state appropriations (of $50,000, although many more appropriations followed) in 1884 primarily to relieve over-crowding at the other two facilities. Construction began in July 1885 with plans from Des Moines architects William Foster and Henry F. Liebbe, and patients were accepted beginning in 1888. In the beginning, Clarinda was a male-only facility that sat on 513 acres. By 1933, according to the Clarinda Chamber of Commerce, the complex occupied 1.055 acres.

Clarinda, just like all four of Iowa’s facilities, has also been mentioned in conjunction with American eugenics, which was comprised primarily of compulsory sterilization laws for those deemed “mentally deficient” or criminal. Roughly 1,900 people were sterilized in Iowa, and, although the law allowing the procedure was passed in 1911, most of those occurred between 1941 and 1953, after the 1929 creation of a State Eugenics Board. The 1929 legislation called on the superintendents of state institutions to submit quarterly reports to the eugenics board that listed viable candidates for sterilization, which included members of the general public who were provided free legal counsel, according to author Nancy Ordover.

In 1980 the Clarinda Correctional Facility, a medium-security, all-male prison serving primarily chemically dependent, mentally retarded and socially inadequate offenders, was established on the grounds.

Today, the facility at Clarinda offers a wide range of diagnostic and treatment services through is Acute Psychiatric Program. It is also well-known for its geropsychiatric work, providing nursing home beds for individuals with mental illnesses such as Alzheimer’s. The acute program serves 15 counties in southwestern Iowa. The geriatric program serves the entire state and is the only one of its kind at the state-run facilities.

Cherokee Mental Health Institute

During the mid-1940s the Cherokee facility housed about 1,700 patients. (Photo courtesy KirkbrideBuildings.com)

Just six years after Clarinda opened, the state asked architect Liebbe to plan another hospital in western Iowa. The “Cherokee State Hospital for the Insane” opened in 1902 and was the last of Iowa’s large state-run mental hospitals. Similar to the Mount Pleasant facility, the hospital in Cherokee had a peak population of roughly 1,700 patients in the mid-1940s.

The Cherokee facility, like nearly all state hospitals at that time, was host mid-century to infamous lobotomist Walter Freeman. The man had perfected the technique of completing a lobotomy with a device similar to an ice pick that could be pushed through the thin bone in an individual’s eye sockets and into the brain. Freeman felt that this type of procedure could be especially helpful in the state-run asylums because it did not require drilling holes into the skull or a surgeon.

Freeman, who enjoyed the attention of the media and often invited reporters to watch his surgeries, was performing one such lobotomy at the Cherokee facility when he stepped back to have his photo taken. As a result of Freeman’s camera mugging the patient died, the instrument plunging too far into the brain.

Today, the facility provides both inpatient and outpatient care to adults, adolescents and children. It serves adults in 41 northwestern Iowa counties, as well as children and teens in 55 counties primarily west of I-35. The vast majority of the patients admitted to Cherokee are there by order of the court. A correctional facility is also on the site.

Grassley, on the front lines of the year’s thorny health reform debate, has been impressed by the larger-than-usual public gatherings that have stolen headlines throughout the month, referring to them Thursday as “democracy in action.” Still, the Gang of Sixmember was quick to point out that the future of health reform hinges on the collective experience of Congress, not his alone.

“You need the judgment of all 535 members of Congress on whether or not the town meetings have changed the direction of health care,” Grassley said during a teleconference with reporters. “I think they probably have changed the direction, but it’s difficult for me to say how much.

“But I believe [the bill] will be a little more scaled down than what we were originally thinking when we left for August summer break.”

Mike Lillis covers congress for the Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.