An Alternate Witness

This article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman really stands out for me as encapsulating a large part of the reason why I have come to the Middle East to teach. In this article, Friedman talks about the experience of opening a girls' school in Afghanistan with Greg Mortenson, author of the amazing Three Cups of Tea and builder of more than 200 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Friedman gives us many wise words from Mortenson, including this passage:

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

I was just telling Keri last weekend that one of my goals as a Peace Corps Volunteer was to inspire great mothers, girls who would grow up appreciating the value of education, and, even if they weren't able to pursue it themselves, would push their own daughters to do well in school and go on to University. Someday maybe I'll make the kind of impact Mortenson is making.

Finally, this both surprised and encouraged me:

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

I won't say too much, except that this article says many of the things I've been saying all along about being a critical supporter of Obama, not putting great blind faith in him to fix everything, but believing that he will respond to the will and the best interests of the people more readily than his predecessor, if we tell him what that is! (Thanks, Ryan!)

Published on Saturday, May 16, 2009 by The Progressive
Changing Obama's Mindset
by Howard Zinn

We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he's a politician. He's other things, too-he's a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he's a politician.
If you're a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you-the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don't have to do, if you make it clear to them they don't have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.

Lieberman-who, as you know, was and is a war lover-was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it's not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought-and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents-Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative-followed this thread.

The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.

We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he's been in office only a short time. Some people might say, "Well, what do you expect?"
And the answer is that we expect a lot. People say, "What, are you a dreamer?"
And the answer is, yes, we're dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don't want war. We don't want capitalism. We want a decent society. We better hold on to that dream-because if we don't, we'll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don't want.

Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we've had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn't give people free health care; let the market decide.

Which is what the market has been doing-and that's why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can't pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.

You can't leave it to the market. If you're facing an economic crisis like we're facing now, you can't do what was done in the past. You can't pour money into the upper levels of the country-and into the banks and corporations-and hope that it somehow trickles down.

What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.

This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.

What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren't poverty stricken. The CEOs aren't poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can't pay their mortgages. Let's take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let's take $1 trillion, let's take $2 trillion.

Let's take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.

Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he's not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good-the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.

It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they'll hire people. No-if people need jobs, you don't give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.

A lot of people don't know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn't go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You're out of work? The government has a job for you.

As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.

The government created a federal arts program. It wasn't going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.

And that's just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people's needs. The government can't give the job of representing the people's needs to corporations and the banks, because they don't care about the people's needs. They only care about profit.

In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise-and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.

Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, "It's not just that we have to get out of Iraq." He said "get out of Iraq," and we mustn't forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq-not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.

But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: "It's not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq." What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?

It's the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers-that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.

It's the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we've been at bringing democracy all over the world.

Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don't have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.

This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we've got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.
We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don't really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.

One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, "Oh, we're very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want."
This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they're going to bomb this one house. But there's one problem: They don't know who's in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who's in the car? No.

And later-after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house-they tell you, "Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there's seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists." But notice that the word is "suspected." The truth is they don't know who the terrorists are.

So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we've got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We're the ones who have to tell him, "No, you're on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won't accomplish anything that way, and we'll remain a hated country in the world."

Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.

The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won't even say loved-it'll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we've withdrawn our military bases from all these countries. We don't need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and-this is part of the emancipation-you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn't have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can't pay their rent, build child care centers.

Let's use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people's lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.
What's required is a total turn­around. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That's what we need. This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn't be easily satisfied and say, "Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect."

But you don't respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he's surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, "Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons." No, we have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, "Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln's point of view." Lincoln didn't believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, "We're not going to put ourselves in Lincoln's position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us."

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That's how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That's been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that's what we have to do today.

Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.

I want to thank Gabe for linking to this brilliant column of The Daily Dish that so brilliant utilizes George Orwell, one of my all-time favorite political commentators, to pillory Dick Cheney. It reminds me of the summer I spent house-sitting for my mother's Kiwi friend Pat, the summer I read 1984 in its entirety for the first time. I sat there at the dining room table, stroking the cats and the epileptic dog in turn, and wondering if George W. Bush's speechwriters were cutting and pasting straight from Orwell, and whether they could see the satire in it....

The New York Times

April 19, 2009
Editorial
The Torturers’ Manifesto

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.

But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

The abuses and the dangers do not end with the torture memos. Americans still know far too little about President Bush’s decision to illegally eavesdrop on Americans — a program that has since been given legal cover by the Congress.

Last week, The Times reported that the nation’s intelligence agencies have been collecting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans on a scale that went beyond the broad limits established in legislation last year. The article quoted the Justice Department as saying there had been problems in the surveillance program that had been resolved. But Justice did not say what those problems were or what the resolution was.

That is the heart of the matter: nobody really knows what any of the rules were. Mr. Bush never offered the slightest explanation of what he found lacking in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he decided to ignore the law after 9/11 and ordered the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ overseas calls and e-mail. He said he was president and could do what he wanted.

The Bush administration also never explained how it interpreted laws that were later passed to expand the government’s powers to eavesdrop. And the Obama administration argued in a recent court filing that everything associated with electronic eavesdropping, including what is allowed and what is not, is a state secret.

We do not think Mr. Obama will violate Americans’ rights as Mr. Bush did. But if Americans do not know the rules, they cannot judge whether this government or any one that follows is abiding by the rules.

In the case of detainee abuse, Mr. Obama assured C.I.A. operatives that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal. We have never been comfortable with the “only following orders” excuse, especially because Americans still do not know what was actually done or who was giving the orders.

After all, as far as Mr. Bush’s lawyers were concerned, it was not really torture unless it involved breaking bones, burning flesh or pulling teeth. That, Mr. Bybee kept noting, was what the Libyan secret police did to one prisoner. The standard for American behavior should be a lot higher than that of the Libyan secret police.

At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry — like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

'Nuff said!

It started with Taylor Mali. I wanted to go back and hear "Like Lilly Like Wilson Like," to relive that moment where he says,

And the eighth-grade mind is a beautiful thing;
Like a new-born baby's face, you can often see it
change before your very eyes.

I can't believe I'm saying this, Mr. Mali,
but I think I'd like to switch sides.

And I want to tell her to do more than just believe it,
but to enjoy it!
That changing your mind is one of the best ways
of finding out whether or not you still have one.
Or even that minds are like parachutes,
that it doesn't matter what you pack
them with so long as they open
at the right time.
O God, Lilly, I want to say
you make me feel like a teacher,
and who could ask to feel more than that?

Before I knew it, I was on YouTube, watching Taylor Mali pontificate on "Miracle Workers":



YouTube is addicting, it's no secret, and I got sucked in, watching Taylor Mali work his magic on the first episode of Def Poetry Jam with one of my favorite spoken word pieces, "What Teachers Make":



What can I say? I'm a teacher at heart! But once I was listening to Def Poetry, I was reminded of some of the more weighty poets that I love who have appeared on Def Poetry. I actually saw Amir Sulaiman for the first time at Indiana University - Bloomington at an event hosted as part of Muslim History Month by the Muslim Students Association, where he put 9/11 in perspective with "Danger":



But when it comes to putting 9/11 in perspective, no one has more lyrically expressed a perspective quite like hers better than Suheir Hammad in "First Writing Since":



Please, lose yourself in Def Poetry and other such spoken word on the Internet. I can spend hours listening to this kind of thing!

From the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee:

Yesterday, at around 11:30 a.m. (EST), President Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay detention center. In addition, the order formally:

* Bans torture and inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees by requiring that the Army field manual be used as the guide for terror interrogations.
* Closes the CIA’s secret prisons and ends the Bush administration's CIA program of enhanced interrogation methods that have included abhorrent procedures like water-boarding.
* Provides the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all U.S.-held detainees.
* Establishes an interagency task force to lead a systematic review of detention policies and procedures and a review of all individual cases.

We applaud our new president for taking this important step on his second day in office. UUSC believes that any government-sponsored acts of torture, under any circumstances, are profoundly immoral, unjustified, and illegal. These practices can and must be ended now.

President Obama expressed the values and beliefs of all Americans of conscience in his inaugural speech when he stated, “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Show President Obama that he has the support of the American people to act on his beliefs. Take action — let him know that you support his executive order!

Visit our website to read UUSC’s recommendations to Congress to end torture and illegal detention.

Thank you for supporting UUSC's efforts to restore civil liberties.

Sincerely,

Myrna Greenfield
Director of Outreach & Mobilization

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is (technically, but only loosely) an organization with religious affiliations, but the Unitarian Universalist Association is happy to cooperate with anyone with the same humanitarian intentions. Please support us.

Emily put me on to the fabulous commentary excerpted here, by Najlaa A. Al-Nashi, with Noah Baker Merrill, of Direct Aid Iraq:

You may have heard the news that an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the American president, but as an Iraqi I’d like to share with you a few details about the journalist, and why he did that.

Muntather’s actions have, for these days, united Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. It united Iraqis as Iraqis. And it only took a few seconds. Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders have publicly asked that Muntather not be referred to using his tribal affiliation (Muntather al-Zaidi), because they believe his tribal affiliation now encompasses all the tribes of Iraq: They’ve asked for him to be referred to as “Muntather Al-Iraqi” (Muntather the Iraqi). At the same time, the tribal leaders have said that they hope it is now clear that they have only one enemy — the occupation of Iraq.

The Iraqi response shows clearly that Muntather’s actions have triggered a deep release in Iraqi society. It gives an indication to the outside world how much so many Iraqis oppose the occupation and the ongoing presence of foreign troops in their country, but have been without a voice that cut through the walls of silence and the filtered mainstream media.

It is important to be clear that this action by a single man does not arise from his role as a journalist, or from some specific incident or time in his life. It comes from an Iraqi man who, like all of his people, has suffered greatly from occupation, from the actions of mercenaries like those employed by Blackwater Worldwide, from the torture of Iraqis by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, and from the sectarian violence that the occupation has cultivated, fueled, and allowed to thrive. Muntather himself was kidnapped a few months ago, though thankfully he was released alive.

Unfortunately, Direct Aid Iraq is reporting that he was tortured in the care of Iraqi police, a practice common under the Saddam Regime, and unfortunately not much discouraged by the Americans, Jordanians, Saudis and others who trained those police. It reminds me of what my roommate said when he heard about the incident: "I wonder if they'll kill his whole family for this." I'm happy to see that the shoe-throwing has not fueled the sectarian violence, and that the Americans didn't cart poor Muntather off to Guantanamo for the insult. Nonetheless, it is a vivid example of how ludicrous it is to think that the United States would be able to bring democracy and freedom of speech and expression to Iraq by the means which the Bush Administration has chosen.

It was a cold, dark, wet and miserable Sunday afternoon. I was in my car, driving my 12-year-old daughter and her friend back from a birthday party. I was tired and fed up from being in the car.
"Mummy, mummy," trilled a voice from the back. "I want to phone the pirates."
My daughter had heard me repeatedly trying to get through to the Somali pirates on board the Sirius Star.
They usually picked up the phone but put it down again when I said I was from the BBC. My obsession with getting through to them had reached the point that I had even saved their number on my mobile phone.
"Mummy, mummy, please can I phone the pirates for you?"
"No."
"Pleeeeez."
By this time, with rain battering my windscreen and cars jamming the road, I was at the end of my tether.
"OK", I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car.
"They are under P for pirates."
"Hello. Please can I talk to the pirates," said my daughter in her obviously childish voice.
I could hear someone replying and a bizarre conversation ensued which eventually ended when my daughter collapsed in giggles.
This was a breakthrough. Dialogue had been established.

I guess it's hard to establish contact when you represent the Power Couple of the US and Britain that intervenes half-heartedly in Africa only when intervention sends the right message.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud this reporter for her tenacity, for her determination to get the point of view of the pirates themselves. This is reporting at its most responsible, the kind of reporting I was calling for recently. But it's exactly what she was able to report in doing so that makes my point:

A pirate, who called himself Daybad, spoke in Somali, calmly and confidently. He said Somalis were left with no choice but to take to the high seas.

"We've had no government for 18 years. We have no life. Our last resource is the sea, and foreign trawlers are plundering our fish."

Once upon a time, the United States of America and Great Britain declared that they were not going to stand idly by and watch Somalia fall into ruin. And they continue to warn that the situation in Somalia is fostering anger and radical Islamism and that it is a serious threat in the "War On Terror." Yadda yadda yadda. It sounds great on the airwaves and on the campaign trail. When it comes down to it, though, the US and the UK are completely unwilling to put their resources where their mouths are.

I understand that resources are limited, and now more limited than ever with their Iraqi follies and the repurcussions of Americans' and Britains' unwillingness to live within their means. I also know all too well that, even when we are willing to put our resources where our mouths are, we are not always effective. (Just ask me about a bus station in the southern Madaba governorate of Jordan.) It's just frustrating, when you're on this side of the pond or the Channel, to listen to the talk and know that, not only is nothing going to be done, but that the world's most powerful forces are going to continue doing the selfish, damaging, infuriating things that they have always done, the things that have contributed to the problems that they claim to want to fix.