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The heart-breaking loss of 8-year-old Eli Hill has left a Kentucky family and community in deep sorrow. On Monday morning, Eli was playing basketball in the driveway of his home when the backboard detached and struck him fatally in the chest, sending him to the local hospital. Eli ultimately succumbed to his injuries despite the hospital’s efforts and was eventually declared dead.

Eli’s father, Adam Hill, took to social media with a plea for prayers for his son; at the same time, Eli’s family courageously decided to donate his organs, eager to keep his spirit alive and buoyed by the promise he had been a child with a “heart of gold.”

The First Baptist Church of Corbin opened its doors to those who were grief-stricken by Eli’s sudden and untimely passing. Church officials found it “impossible to process and to make sense of” such a tragedy.

The death of Eli Hill cautions us to be aware of the impermanence of life and to cherish every moment we have with our family and friends. It also serves as a reminder of the selfless gift of organ donation, which Eli’s extraordinary family has given to potentially save the lives of others. May Eli Hill rest peacefully in the presence of angels, and may his memory be a blessing.

Porter Halyburton, Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of Stories By a Vietnam War POW — Naval Institute Press, 2023

On October 17, 1965, Lt. (jg) Porter Halyburton, USN, was shot down over North Vietnam. It was his 76th mission. His squadron, VF-84, known as the “Jolly Rogers,” on the USS Independence was part of a strike force ordered to cut off a major supply line between China and Vietnam by destroying a railway and road bridge north of Hanoi. The backseater of an F-4B fighter-bomber, Halyburton and his pilot, Lt. Cdr. Stan Olmstead were tasked with taking out antiaircraft guns protecting the bridge. While enroute to the target, however, groundfire struck Halyburton’s plane.

Halyburton was listed as killed in action. His family mourned. They held a memorial service for him in his hometown. His wife and infant child looked ahead to a future without him. Eighteen months later, information from a clandestine source revealed he was alive and being held captive.

He would be held for seven years, three months, and twenty-eight days. Halyburton’s Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of Stories By a Vietnam War POW is a collection of fifty short stores about his experiences in a number of detention camps, including the infamous Hanoi Hilton. At an event this week at the US Naval Academy, Lessons of Heroism, Porter Halyburton spoke movingly about the profound hardships he and other POWs endured, but also about the surprisingly beautiful elements as well: the deep and abiding friendships, humor, creativity, the courage—the unbelievable courage, the indomitable human spirit, the importance of hope, and the criticality of moral leadership.

At both the Naval Academy discussion as well as in his book Halyburton reflects in depth about how these elements came together in a team of American POWs and how they worked to help each survive and, incredibly, even to flourish. Much of Halyburton’s story feels familiar. I have often written about my preoccupation, many years ago, with the Shoah and with the literature and memoirs that came out of that terrible chapter in the sordid history of man’s inhumanity to man. While different in both obvious and important ways, Halyburton’s POW experience shares characteristics with those who endured the lager system. Among the similarities is the critical realization of the importance of choice, more than merely circumstance, in determining the quality of our life—or, when that is impossible, at least the quality of our death. Even when one’s tormentors seemingly have the power to take everything from you, it remains that they cannot take everything. They cannot take your faith, for instance, even when they can take nearly every occasion to practice it. They cannot take away your love for your family, even they can they can rip every member of it away from you.

In Halyburton’s case, the Vietnamese authorities could not away Halyburton’s determination to flourish, even in the Hanoi Hilton, as honorably as he could. He writes:

In the aftermath of long captivity, suffering, and difficult times, I thought a lot about how we were able to survive—and not only to survive but to “Survive with Honor” and to “Return with Honor,” as had become our creed. I tried so hard always to stay active—mentally, physically, and spiritually—and I think this was a very important aspect of my survival. Along with the other POWs, I also made it my daily mission to deny the Vietnamese the control over our lives that they tried to establish through propaganda, indoctrination, degradation, intimidation, fear, deprivation, threats, isolation, boredom, pain, and lies.

Stressing the importance of choice, even when most occasions for choosing much of anything at all were taken away, Halyburton recalls how the POWs first line of resistance was to refuse to do or say anything that might harm or shame their country, families, or fellow POWs. The POWs’ defiance was grounded in a sharp recognition of their duty. The US Armed Forces Code of Conduct, established in 1955, guided the conduct and responsibilities of US service members should they be faced with capture or imprisonment during war. Among much else, the Code under which Halyburton was bound hammered into his consciousness the commitment to “die rather than give more [information] than is permitted by [the Code’s] Article V,” which, as is well known, is limited to name, rank, service number, and date of birth. And so, taking a literalist’s approach in the early days, Halyburton would suffer greatly giving no more information than that.

Over time, however, reality proved this duty to be essentially impossible to keep and compelled Halyburton to reassess his understanding of the nature of is duty. In response to the POWs’ defiance the Vietnamese proved capable of cruelty beyond Halyburton’s imagination that would bring detainees to their limits. And so, in what seemed like a violation of the Code, the POWs formed a second line of defense. “When [your] limit was reached,” Halyburton writes, “and you had to do or say something, the “Second Line” reminded you that there was usually something that you could do in order to render their tactics useless in turning public opinion against the war, especially in America. Ultimately, torture and mistreatment did not serve them well.”

Two things to note here. First, even giving useless information suggested to Halyburton a betrayal of the Code. Throughout Reflections in Captivity, Halyburton dwells on this inability—if only sometimes seeming inability—to adhere to one’s sense of duty. He wrestles with the idea that the moral life is not always able to be lived in strict compliance with the literal letter of one’s duty or a literal interpretation of moral rules. There is a grey zone, between strict compliance and, on the other extreme, dereliction of duty—or, as is often the case, moral cowardice. It is in this grey zone that much of life—including the moral life—is lived. The poles that demarcate the grey zone are important to grasp, for actions within the grey zone do not signal an actual betrayal of the duty or moral rule. Rather, they are efforts to manifest the moral rule or duty within the limits of reality. They are efforts to follow the rule as closely as possible. This was a critical realization for Halyburton, as it ought to be for all of us. Much of the moral life is mired in moral conflict—circumstances in which one or more moral goods are in tension and in which performing one duty seems to violate another duty. How we work that out without becoming silly idealists or jaundiced cynics is tricky.

The second thing to note comes out of my added emphasis, above, to the word “usually.” Halyburton’s use of the word suggests that it was not, in fact, always possible to do something that rendered the Vietnamese tactics useless. Sometimes, in fact, the Americans said or did things they did not want to do or say. These genuine breaks with moral responsibility or duty hurt. It didn’t matter to the POWs that their breaking under torment was understandable. They still felt the shame. It’s here that Halyburton highlights the criticality of good moral leadership. Admiral James Stockdale was part of a cohort of exemplary moral leaders that helped shape the moral fiber of the POW community in Hanoi. In an earthy and oft’ told anecdote, Stockdale once consoled a POW who had broken under torture. “There are no virgins here,” Stockdale reassured him. Nobody, Stockdale implied, is pure. We all fail. Stockdale simultaneously acknowledged both the POWs moral failure and offered absolution. Both were critical in dealing with the moral shortcomings in the POW experience. Both are critical for dealing with them now.

Halyburton’s imprisonment all those years took much from him. While in captivity he lost his grandparents with whom he had grown up. He lost his mother too. He also lost much of his daughter’s childhood as well. Dabney was five days old when Halyburton deployed for Vietnam. He would not see her again in any way until the end of 1969 when the Vietnamese finally permitted a package from home to actually be given to Halyburton. Included in that much-pilfered parcel was a picture of his wife and daughter. By then she was almost five years old.

While overwhelming, the picture reminded Halyburton of everything he had to live for. In response, he wrote the following poem:

Yesterday on meeting you,

Hoping without knowing you,

Knowing without asking you,

Loving without telling you.

.

The young and misty two of us,

Sharing each the best of us,

Accepting too the worst of us,

And we so good for both of us.

.

And as for me the faulty one,

The wild and hungry needy one,

To spend my life in search of one,

And finding you the perfect one.

.

And so we shared our pastel days,

Our soft and glowing magic days,

And you with child within those days,

And then our few but perfect days.

.

Now two of you to wait for me,

To love, to hope, to pray for me,

And I still feel you part of me,

Though you and she so far from me.

.

The future still so bright for us,

For you, for me, for three of us,

And she the best of each of us,

Will fill the lives of both of us.

.

At the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, on the day that Halyburton was finally released, he overheard other Americans plotting revenge on their captors. Porter relates how he, instead, turned back to look at the prison gates and said, “I forgive you.” He really appeared to actually mean it. He recalled, “all that hatred, all that armor, fell away.” The hatred had, during his captivity, been a mechanism for survival. It was a form of defense. “Hatred,” Halyburton insisted, “had become an armor against the Vietnamese.” Now, it seemed, perhaps, merely a burden. It had taken hold and had a power over them. Halyburton insisted, “I was not going to take that home. These people were never going to adversely affect my life again.” That pronouncement of forgiveness, Halyburton asserted, “was the most liberating thing I ever did.”

In a way that his mere physical release could never have accomplished, Halyburton was no longer a captive of the Vietnamese.

And that, too, was a choice.

The post Reflections On Captivity (And Freedom): A Review appeared first on Providence.

Geopolitics

US-NATO confrontation directed against the People’s Republic of China consists in the militarization of the South China Sea as well as the reinforcement of U.S. military presence in East and South East Asia. 

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After bailing out Silicon Valley Bank, the federal government is considering the rescue of First Republic Bank. But just two months ago, First Republic pressured regulators not to adopt rules to minimize the risk of government bailouts for insolvent banks.

Exterior view of a First Republic Bank branch on March 13, 2023 in West Palm Beach City, Florida. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

After bailing out Silicon Valley Bank last week, the federal government is reportedly considering the rescue of a second struggling institution whose deposits are largely uninsured. But just two months ago, that bank, San Francisco–based First Republic, pressured regulators not to adopt new rules to minimize the risk of government bailouts for insolvent banks, calling such enhanced regulation “unnecessary.”

First Republic Bank is best-known for its role at the center of a major Donald Trump scandal. Its board of directors includes major Trump donor and ally Tom Barrack, who is reportedly spearheading efforts to save the company.

Only months before the rescue talk began, the bank waged a battle to deter federal banking regulators from considering stronger measures to prepare for the potential failures of regional banks like First Republic.

Under laws passed after the 2008 financial crisis, large banks are already required to show that, if they fail, the process of shutting them down will not imperil the broader financial system or rely on taxpayer money.

A 2018 regulatory rollback reduced many requirements on regional banks, including that they draw up annual plans, known as “living wills,” to safely wind down failing banks. But as those banks rapidly ballooned in size, federal regulators solicited public comment last fall on whether additional precautions were needed to limit the risk of financial contagion in the event of “uninsured depositors suffering loss” at one bank.

That is the very prospect now facing customers of First Republic, about two-thirds of whose deposits are uninsured because they surpass the $250,000 guaranteed by the federal government.

The proposal drew predictable opposition from bank lobbying groups, but First Republic CEO Michael Roffler also weighed in personally, saying the measures were “unnecessary” for banks without complex corporate structures, including First Republic. Existing regulations, which require the bank to submit a so-called resolution plan for its insolvency every three years, were sufficient, he argued.

“In the unlikely event of insolvency of the bank, the resolution process should be straightforward,” wrote Roffler in January, arguing that his bank should not be required to hold additional capital or issue additional “loss-absorbing” unsecured long-term debt, one of the measures under consideration by regulators to add to banks’ financial cushion in times of crisis.

Now, less than two months later, First Republic is on the brink of insolvency and struggling to raise emergency capital following some $70 billion in depositor withdrawals in recent weeks.

The bank staved off collapse this month with an unprecedented $30 billion emergency infusion from other banks, but still faces a hole in its books. Industry leaders and federal officials are now discussing the possibility of government backing for a rescue deal, according to Bloomberg News.

First Republic Bank declined the Lever’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), one of the two agencies considering the enhanced resolution requirements, said it does not discuss open and operating institutions. A spokesperson for the other agency, the Federal Reserve, declined to comment.

“Trigger-Prone” Depositors

First Republic Bank’s financial woes are similar, though not identical, to those of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Both institutions held long-term assets hit hard by the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate hikes, and both had large numbers of uninsured depositors — two key risk factors that put nearly 190 other banks at risk of the same fate as SVB, according to a recent academic study.

First Republic and SVB also share a Silicon Valley pedigree. While SVB was the go-to banker and lender for start-up businesses, First Republic found its niche among well-heeled individuals in tech, operating a branch inside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters and giving CEO Mark Zuckerberg a $6 million mortgage-loan at an interest rate of 1.05 percent.

While First Republic built a loyal following among some of its clientele — the founder of a male fertility–focused start-up called AlphaSperm told the San Francisco Chronicle that he planned to weather the storm — its elite customer base also posed a special risk.

“These depositors are particularly trigger-prone,” Boston College law professor Patricia McCoy told CNN of the bank run on First Republic that began in the wake of SVB’s collapse, which was itself precipitated by a rapid exodus of venture capitalists like Peter Thiel. “They’re sophisticated, they know they have other options, and they have mechanisms in place to move money quickly.”

SVB both lent heavily to and invested directly in venture capital funds. While these activities made up less of First Republic’s business, the bank has $10 billion of such loans on its books.

First Republic is using nearly all of its deposits to fund its lending activities, according to Morningstar, increasing the risk that it could run out of cash to cover withdrawals.

First Republic and SVB share another key commonality: they both had assets sitting just below the $250 billion threshold at which banks are subject to annual stress tests and other enhanced regulations.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law set that threshold at $50 billion, but a 2018 bipartisan deregulatory law raised it. SVB CEO Greg Becker personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of regional banks like his own, as the Lever reported earlier this month.

“Before They Fail”

In the wake of the 2018 law and the subsequent relaxation of oversight by the Federal Reserve, both First Republic and SVB grew rapidly, part of a new wave of consolidation in the banking sector.

With advocates raising the alarm that mergers and rapid growth among regional banks now posed risks to the financial system, banking regulators in Joe Biden’s administration suggested last year that they would consider increasing oversight.

In October, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC issued a rulemaking notice seeking public input on whether some of the stringent requirements used to shield the financial system from the failure of so-called “global systemically important banks” should also be applied to so-called midsize banks that have, in fact, grown quite large.

Stronger safeguards may be especially important, the agencies noted, given that “some large banking organizations have increased their reliance on large uninsured deposits to fund their operations over the past decade.”

While the largest banks also had high levels of uninsured deposits, existing regulations require them to submit annual living wills and to maintain a larger financial cushion.

Financial reform groups said they support improved precautionary measures. But they took issue with the specific measure being contemplated by the Federal Reserve and the FDIC: requiring large banks to issue forms of long-term debt that could be converted to equity in the event of failure, thereby forcing investors to take losses but sparing taxpayers.

The group Better Markets commented that this approach was itself risky and urged higher capital requirements on large banks as well as stronger stress testing by the Federal Reserve. “The agencies’ primary focus should be on strengthening the financial resilience of these giant banks before they fail so they don’t fail,” wrote President Dennis Kelleher.

Bank lobbying groups, including the American Bankers Association and the Bank Policy Institute, opposed new measures.

One of just a handful of banks to weigh in individually, First Republic CEO Roffler wrote that large banks like his should not be subject to enhanced capital, long-term debt, “or any other additional resolution requirements proposed” by the agencies, “because their operations do not pose the same, if any, financial stability risk or present complex resolvability issues” as the largest banks subject to the enhanced requirements.

Roffler added that, should the bank ever fail, “the FDIC would take and control the entire organization as receiver, without involvement of a bankruptcy court or foreign courts and receivers.”

The public comment period closed in January. The Federal Reserve and the FDIC have not issued any further rulemaking notices on the subject.

Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate at the group Public Citizen, told the Lever that federal regulators should force banks to fund their activities with more shareholder capital. The largest banks already finance their assets with more than 94 percent debt, Naylor noted in a comment to regulators.

Without such reforms, the problem of “Too Big to Fail” persists with banks like First Republic, Naylor said. “Right now, on the table are a whole bunch of bad options.”

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On this day in 1980, El Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero was murdered by US-backed assassins. Only weeks before, he had written to US President Jimmy Carter to withhold support from El Salvador’s military dictatorship. We reprint the letter here in full.

Óscar Romero in 1979. (Chip HIRES / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

On February 17, 1980, just weeks before his death at the hands of US-trained assassins, San Salvador archbishop Óscar Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter imploring him to prohibit US security aid to the Salvadoran military dictatorship. Carter never responded, and Romero was gunned down during mass on March 24, 1980.

Carter had restricted military assistance to El Salvador over human rights concerns, but the July 1979 Sandinista victory in neighboring Nicaragua struck fear into the heart of Washington’s Cold Warriors. After a reformist military-civilian junta took power in El Salvador in October, Carter quickly restored “nonlethal” military aid, hoping to stave off revolution.

The junta soon collapsed, its civilian members resigning in the first days of January 1980 as repression against popular protest and the Left continued. In October of that year, the country’s five leftist political-military organizations united to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, formalizing the onset of a twelve-year civil war.

Carter’s nonlethal military assistance included the Huey UH-1H helicopters that rained casings down on anthropologist Philippe Bourgois as he and hundreds of Salvadoran families fled through the northern mountains from an eleven-day scorched-earth military operation in November 1981: “The only difference between ‘nonlethal’ helicopters and military-grade ones was the removal of the external machine-gun parapet with its 360-degree pivot,” writes Bourgois. “Instead, the gunners had to open their side door when strafing civilians from their ‘human rights’ helicopters.”

It wasn’t until the Salvadoran military abducted, raped, and murdered four US churchwomen — three Maryknoll nuns and one lay missionary — that Carter relented, severing US support in December 1980. That bout of conscience was short-lived. After a major January 1981 guerilla offensive, Carter reauthorized military assistance, initiating a massive flow of funds, weapons, training, and advisers to a bloodthirsty dictatorship that would go on to murder and disappear some eighty thousand people by the civil war’s close in 1992.

In 2018, Romero was made a saint by the Catholic Church, formalizing the canonization long since bestowed upon the martyry by El Salvador’s liberation theology–guided Christian base communities. As Carter nears death, far more cynical forces will launch their own unofficial canonization of the ex-president.

Whatever the merits of Jimmy Carter the man, he is also accountable for his service at the helm of the US empire. Romero’s letter below, reprinted in full, is a powerful moral call that Carter chose not to answer.

— Hilary Goodfriend

San Salvador
February 17, 1980
His Excellency
The President of the United States
Mr. Jimmy Carter

Dear Mr. President:

In the last few days, news has appeared in the national press that worries me greatly. According to the reports, your government is studying the possibility of economic and military support and assistance to the present government junta.

Because you are a Christian and because you have shown that you want to defend human rights, I venture to set forth for you my pastoral point of view concerning this news and to make a specific request of you.

I am very concerned by the news that the government of the United States is planning to further El Salvador’s arms race by sending military equipment and advisors to “train three Salvadoran battalions in logistics, communications and intelligence.” If this information from the papers is correct, instead of promoting greater justice and peace in EI Salvador, your government’s contribution will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect for their most basic human rights.

The present government junta and, especially, the armed forces and security forces unfortunately have not demonstrated their capacity to resolve in practice the nation’s serious political and structural problems. For the most part, they have resorted to repressive violence, producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than under the previous military regime, whose systematic violation of human rights was denounced by the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights.

The brutal form in which the security forces recently evicted and murdered the occupiers of the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party, even though the junta and the party apparently did not authorize the operation, is an indication that the junta and the Christian Democrats do not govern the country, but that political power is in the hands of unscrupulous military officers who only know how to repress the people and promote the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.

If it is true that last November “a group of six Americans were in EI Salvador . . . providing $200,000 in gasmasks and flak jackets and instructing about their use against demonstrators,” you should be informed that it is evident since then that the security forces, with better personal protection and efficiency, have repressed the people even more violently using deadly weapons.

For this reason, given that as a Salvadoran and as archbishop of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, I have an obligation to see that faith and justice reign in my country, I ask you, if you truly want to defend human rights:

to prohibit the giving of this military aid to the Salvadoran government;
Guarantee that your government will not intervene directly or indirectly with military, economic, diplomatic or other pressures to determine the destiny of the Salvadoran people.

In these moments we are living through a grave economic and political crisis in our country, but it is certain that it is increasingly the people who are awakening and organizing and have begun to prepare themselves to manage and be responsible for the future of El Salvador, as only they are capable of overcoming the crisis.

It would be unjust and deplorable if the intrusion of foreign powers were to frustrate the Salvadoran people, were to repress them and block their autonomous decisions about the economic and political path that our country ought to follow. It would violate a right which we Latin American bishops meeting in Puebla publicly recognized when we said: “The legitimate self-determination of our people that permits them to organize according to their own genius and the march of their history and to cooperate in a new international order” (Puebla, 505).

I hope that your religious sentiments and your feelings for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my petition, avoiding by this action worse bloodshed in this suffering country.

Sincerely,

Oscar A. Romero
Archbishop

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Jewel, the singer-songwriter, recently made a shocking revelation on a podcast about her mother. According to Fox News, she revealed that her mother had stolen over $100 million from her, leaving her in millions of dollars of debt.

On the “Verywell Mind Podcast,” Jewel spoke of her mother, who was also her manager, and how she was unaware of the embezzlement until she was in her thirties. Jewel said, “I was astonished to find out that she had taken all of my money, over $100 million. At the age of 34, I realized I was $3 million in debt, and my mom had taken it.”

Having released her debut album in 1995 at age 20, Jewel achieved gold, platinum, multi-platinum, and diamond-selling records. On the same podcast, she spoke of her parent’s relationship and the abuse she experienced as a child.

She explained that her parents divorced when she was 8, leaving her and her siblings with her father, who was an alcoholic and became abusive. Jewel said, “My mom seemed the complete opposite – she was gentle, never yelled, and never hit me. I didn’t recognize that I was being abused in other ways at the time.”

In her 2016 book “Never Broken,” Jewel delved further into how her mother controlled her finances, leading to her debt and taking the money she made from her success. To focus on youth mental health, she created a non-profit organization in the early 2000s, and in 2023, she launched a mental health app called “Innerworld.” This app provides an anonymous interactive platform for people to discuss various mental health issues.