Essays on the Ukraine War and the United States: 2022

 https://d.docs.live.net/9576d2290f69b52f/Documents/Ukraine%20latest.docx 

Imperial Decline and the Threat of a New Cold War With China

 Revisiting a Book Review in the Context of Rising Tensions

Harry Targ

Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, Haymarket Books, 2017.

Researchers affiliated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who regularly assess the danger of nuclear war declared that the probability of nuclear war has increased over the last year. Using their “doomsday clock” as a metaphor the dial was recently moved to 100 seconds to midnight; midnight signifying the onset of nuclear war. The scientists believe that the danger of nuclear destruction and devastating climate disaster is greater now than at any time since the early 1980s.

The context for this grim prediction is well-reflected in a 2017 book  by University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century.  The author describes the twentieth century emergence of the US as the global hegemonic power based upon economic superiority and overwhelming military power. However, this economic and military dominance is being challenged today.

Perhaps the most critical challenge to the American empire, he suggests, is the rise of China, particularly as an economic successor to US control of the global political economy: Chinese domestic development, Chinese trade and investment with countries on every continent, and an Asian financial and trading system that challenges the historic US presence in the region. In economic terms the global system is changing from unipolarity to multipolarity.

In response to this decline McCoy suggests that the United States has embarked on a program to expand militarily programs around the globe and in outer space including preparing for cyber space war, occupying space, developing biometrics to identify potential enemies, increasing drone warfare capabilities, and the creation of a whole panoply of weapons that exceed the imagination of science fiction. In sum, therefore, the new militarism is designed to forestall and overcome declining empire.

This book is a must read for the peace movement because it indicates the dangerous world in which we live, the emergence of a New Cold War with China, and the increased probability of global destruction. It suggests that peace activists must continue to oppose militarism and develop a public discourse that celebrates the emergence of a multi-polar world, a world in which more countries can participate in global policy-making. The alternative could be, as the atomic scientists warn, a nuclear apocalypse.

As to an older narrative of challenges to United States hegemony during Cold War I see:

http://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2018/05/strategy-of-empire-in-decline-cold-war.html

A Radio Discussion of "the horrors of socialism" versus the reality of socialism: a one hour broadcast discussion

 https://soundcloud.com/user-240416425/2023-02-11-1500-grass-is-greener-targ-on-community-or-the-horrors-of-socialism?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Building a New Society

Harry Targ 

November 8, 2011, The Rag Blog, reposted.

(“Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America. Passed the House of Representatives February 2, 2023.” While not their intention, Congress did the American people a service by raising for conversation the meaning, purposes, and visions of “socialism” today. The essay below written a decade ago remembers visions of socialism that animated the thinking and actions of young people 50 years ago. And these visions of socialism go back years before that. They involve a passion for public purpose, real not corporate democracy, economic equality, an end to racism, sexism, and the exploitation of all workers, and perhaps most of all the creation of a society based on the best of US history that maximizes the potential of each and every human being. Let us have more conversations about socialism). 

                      Paul Goodman. Image from Zeitgeist Films / Sam Falk for The New York Times. 

A powerful concept animated the vision of young people in the 1960s, the idea of community. Many of us came to that decade with little interest in politics. We were not “red diaper” babies, but we became outraged by Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and war. Our education had communicated an early version of Margaret Thatcher’s admonition, “there is no alternative,” and our impulses told us then that “another world was possible.”

New and old ideas about a better world began to circulate from college campuses, the streets, some churches, and popular culture. A whole body of engaging literature caught the fancy of young people. 

For me Paul Goodman’s description of youth growing up in the sterile 1950s, Growing Up Absurd, resonated. He wrote about alternative possibilities in such books as Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. Perhaps most startling to a young reader was the earlier analysis Goodman published with his brother Percival, Communitas. In that book the Goodman brothers argued that societies, big and small, were products of values. Architecture and the organization of space, social, and political forms, and the ease with which people could communicate and interact with each other varied. And the variations created in space and social forms affected whether communities valued life and sociability or consumption and profit maximization. 

The Goodmans opened up new intellectual doors for me. I looked at earlier anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, who argued that humans -- if not separated by time, space, and power structures -- often lived in solidarity with their neighbors. A “mutual aid” principle was natural to human existence. And, as a result “the state" sought to stamp it out and replace it with top-down authority. 

Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, identified a “centralistic political principle” that emerged when groups and states sought control of markets and natural resources and “the most valuable of all goods,” the lives of people who lived with each other changed as “...the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of...” being human “...hires itself out as a functionary.” The alternative for Buber was what he called a decentralized social principle, or community which is “...never a mere attitude of mind” but of “...tribulation and only because of that community of spirit; community of toil and only because of that community of salvation...” 

In 1974, I wrote in summation about these theorists and many others that the architectural forms and social structures of the Goodmans can profitably be blended with the spiritualism and socialism of Buber to construct a synthesis of all that the utopians and anarchists set out to achieve. The Goodmans show how community can be created in the industrial age and Buber illustrates how the best features of the entire community tradition fit together. 

The ideas of community, empowerment, and social justice spread from these and other sources. They were articulated for the Sixties in the Port Huron Statement, written by founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. While written by and for a relatively privileged sector of disenchanted youth in a period of booming economic growth and military expansion, the document spoke to the passion for justice, participation, and community, and an “…unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” It called for the creation of “human interdependence,” replacing “...power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance...” by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.” 

By the late Sixties many of us were identifying a new society that must be built on core principles. These included:

-local control and participatory democracy

-racial justice 

-gender equality 

-equitable distribution of resources and the collective product of human labor 

-commitments to the satisfaction of minimal basic needs for all of humankind 

-the development of an ethic that connects survival to human existence, not to specific jobs 

-human control over technology; and 

-a new “land ethic” that conceives of humankind as part of nature, not in conflict with it. 

Many of us began to explore the impediments to the construction of a society based on human scale that would celebrate both individual creativity and community. Growing familiarization with the critique of capitalism suggested that the capitalist mode of production, dominant over two-thirds of the world, was based upon the exploitation, oppression, dehumanization, and repression of the vast majority of humankind. Incorporating an understanding of the workings of capitalism did not contradict the vision that Buber called the decentralized social principle and the many eloquent calls by others for “community.” It did suggest that building a new society entailed class struggle which would manifest itself in factories and fields, in rich and poor countries, and in political venues from the ballot box to the streets. 

Bringing about positive change was a much more complicated affair than activists originally thought, but the sustained and sometimes brutal opposition to our visions validated the general correctness of them. Today, new generations of activists, along with older ones, are reflecting and participating in diverse social movements in our cities and towns. They observe with enthusiasm the mobilizations, the militancy, and the passion for justice still unfolding in the Middle East. The efforts of Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and the Cubans who inspired us so much over the years are applauded. Important debates about social market economies, workers’ management of large enterprises, this or that candidate or political party, are occurring on the Internet and in the streets. 

Although the times are so different from the 1960s, perhaps the vision of community that animated our thinking then (which we in turn learned from those who preceded us) may still be relevant for today. Without creating new documents or dogmas perhaps it can be proclaimed that we remain committed to the sanctity of human life, to equality, to popular control of all our institutions, to a reverence for the environment, and to the idea that the best of society comes from our communal efforts to make living better for all.

BREAKING NEWS

BALLOONGATE: US MILITARY DEFENDS THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES FROM BIRTHDAY BALLOON

 

 

A thirteen-year-old boy in Bejing was celebrating his birthday Wednesday when a helium balloon filled with candy flew out the window of his house and took off over the skies of China. Because of high winds the balloon sailed across the Chinese mainland, traversed across the Pacific, and was spotted by the crack US radar system over the state of Montana.

Debate in the Biden Administration ensured about how to respond to this birthday balloon’s clear penetration of US air space. Hawks in the administration argued that the balloon had to be immediately destroyed before American children heard about the sweets in the balloon. More patient advisors from the State Department took the view that maybe the US should keep the lid on informing the media about the birthday balloon until it sailed across the Atlantic. Then the world’s greatest air force could shoot down the balloon and confiscate the evidence of the Chinese birthday party without Americans seeing what was in the balloon.

Finally, the balloon was shot down off the coast of North Carolina. Retrieved from the shootdown was much of the contents of the balloon: candy corn, milk duds, M and Ms, Baby Ruth candy bars, and popcorn and 42 packages of cherry Life Savers.

Biden spokespersons accused the Chinese of trying to embarrass the United States in the eyes of the world by showing off their typical birthday presents. The Chinese claimed, on the other hand, that if the window in the apartment where the party was held had been closed, the birthday balloon would never have flown into the sky and drifted toward the Western Hemisphere.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy charged that the Biden Administration knew of the birthday balloons, charging that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a CEO in a balloon manufacturing company. Others pointed out that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken did not write down his scheduled Chinese visit and just plain forgot about it.

Meanwhile two Senators, one from Indiana and another from Arkansas have called for an additional $100 billion increase in the 2023 military budget, called the Balloon Production and Distribution Act. The CEO of the Happy Balloon Company of Battle Ground, Indiana said that the BPD Act is vital to US national security. If US “kids”, he said, learn about Chinese birthday parties they will mobilize against their own government.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was quoted as saying on a “breaking news” special that this balloon attack is the biggest story since Pearl Harbor.

When asked about whether this crisis could lead to nuclear war between the US and China: Biden said: “Maybe Not.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Essays in the Transformation of Higher Education: Dan Morris and Harry Targ

 

 From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University (lulu.com)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Macro and Micro Analyses of Higher Education

 

Chapter Two: Discourses On Ideology

Chapter Three: Branding

Chapter Four: What Do Universities Do?

Chapter Five: Universities and War:

 

Conclusion

 

Appendix

 

Introduction

In the following pages, you are going to find a lot of specific information about what is happening at one major public research university, but we believe what is happening at Purdue is analogous to a canary in a coal mine.   We believe that Purdue under Mitch Daniels, a former George Walker Bush administrator and Governor of Indiana, is becoming a high profile and influential spokesperson for the transformation of public higher education in the 21^st century in directions that we find dangerous and that go against how we value higher education.   We realize that, while we address extensively institutional changes and policies at Purdue, Indiana’s Land Grant University, our interest is in using this case study to illustrate larger patterns and issues that should be of concern to readers who care about the future of higher education in a broader sense.

Harry Targ's pieces do tend towards a wider-angle perspective than do those by Dan Morris, although both of us rely on our "boots on the ground" level understanding of Purdue to  counteract and contest official media versions of what is happening at Purdue.  We write at a moment when there is something of a "media desert" in terms of local news coverage of higher education in small markets such as Lafayette, Indiana.  We have both tried to work to rectify the "media desert" landscape in our community by contributing to the Lafayette Independent,  an electronic newsletter.  We appreciate efforts by local journalists such as Dave Bangert and the student staff of the Purdue Exponent to offer coverage of the university in ways that are more substantial, and, often, more critical, than what one finds in the area's only mainstream newspaper, the Journal and Courier, and main local TV news source, and the Purdue NPR radio station, whose ownership in the last year has been mysteriously transferred to an Indianapolis corporation. Paradoxically the richest data for many of the essays below come from the official daily public relations newsletter from Purdue called   Purdue Today.  This public relations source celebrates Purdue’s latest connections with multinational corporations, the military, and state politics, and provides links to editorials published by Purdue’s President and other officials in the national press. Ironically, oftentimes what Purdue celebrates becomes the data for our more analytical and discursive writings. 

Like alternative media sources, we see this book as another intervention in offering an alternative view of what is happening at our campus, but we also write with the hope that readers can apply the readings we bring to Purdue to begin conversations   about the promise and problems of contemporary higher education on campuses. The authors wish to praise and encourage further research and activism around the transformations of higher education in general. We identify with what some scholars have referred to as Critical University Studies (CUS). The essays below, we believe, are part of this emerging tradition of critical and self-reflective scholarship.

The authors also wish to identify at least three major elements of the transformation of higher education. First, Purdue, like many other universities, is once again pursuing research contracts with huge corporations, and perhaps most importantly, the Department of Defense. As essays below suggest, Purdue research is increasingly justified as serving the interests of United States “national security.” Often this is conceptualized as helping the United States respond to “the Chinese threat,” rarely identifying what exactly is the threat, or considering the possibility that contributing to a new arms race with a perceived adversary may increase, rather than reduce, the possibility for conflict between nations.

Second, the work below and other writings in CUS, highlight the purposive transformation of the content of higher education. Universities are moving resources away from the liberal arts, creating new programs in “artificial intelligence” and “data science,” and in response to political pressures are diminishing programs that emphasize interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and the structural problems of race, class, gender, and sexual preference in history and contemporary society. Essays below on “civics literacy” suggest that leading administrators at Purdue, while refusing to defend its universally praised Writing Lab after it was ridiculed on Fox News for its recommendation that student writers select gender-neutral terms such as postal worker when writing about occupations, seek to avoid the controversaries around Critical Race Theory by requiring all students to study in some fashion “civics literacy.” President Daniels has made it clear that the study of civics literacy will illustrate the “vitality” of US political institutions (as opposed to over-emphasizing the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the North American continent or the history of slavery and white supremacy).

Third, the essays below do not dwell enough on the transformation of the university as a workplace. While there have been attacks for years on the tenure system, a system of job security which was initially designed to protect faculty from external political pressures, recent additions to the transformations of the university as a work site should be noted.

Adjunctification is a term that refers to the qualitative increase in the hiring of various forms of part time instructors:  full-time instructors for a set time period,  instructors to teach less than a full complement of courses, and instructors with various arrangements that limit their work life, their ability to do research and prepare for their class time, and their time to serve the many needs of students. The fundamental trend in higher education is to “cheapen” and make insecure instructors, ultimately to destroy the job security that comes with academic tenure. In many cases this impacts negatively on the quality of the educational experience. (In colleges and universities in general about 70 percent of classes now are taught by instructors who are not tenure-line faculty).

And finally, every effort is made by universities to limit and derail the workplace concerns of non-teaching staff, particularly opposing their right to form unions.

One positive development from all of this-destroying the tenure system and job security, adjunctification, increased exploitation of graduate students, and finally restricting the rights and the wages and benefits of staff has been the rise of labor militancy. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and various unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the United Electrical Workers (UE) with a history of militancy have been organizing graduate students and staff.

Finally, the authors acknowledge that in the months after we completed our manuscript, Purdue administrators and trustees have announced a series of initiatives without an appropriate level of input from university stakeholders and the wider Lafayette area community:

1. Purdue is building a housing complex near the Discovery Park part of campus to attract higher income earning technologists to relocate in West Lafayette. To encourage new high-income residents, the West Lafayette city government has authorized $5,000 cash incentives for any purchasers of these new housing units adjacent to Purdue. Such offers are not available to lower income earners or students.

2. To deal with record enrollments, Purdue has purchased a privately constructed apartment complex across from campus at a price well more than the cost of its construction.

3. Purdue officials have expanded partnerships with Saab, Rolls Royce, the Raytheon Corporation, one of the world’s five largest military contractors, and undertaken a controversial business mission with the Indiana governor to Taiwan to pursue research and production of semi-conductors, in part to respond to what Purdue officials have described as a ”Chinese threat” to national security in the United States.

4.The College of Liberal Arts has announced it will be partnering with the College of Science to develop a new interdisciplinary degree program  in artificial intelligence. CLA calls its “new field” of interest, “sociogenomics.”

5. Purdue received an award recognizing its “excellence in counterintelligence,” one of only four such award recipients in 2022. Purdue joins those few universities which protect “sensitive national information from foreign adversaries.” The award announced in Purdue Today, August 24, 2022, noted that the university continues to work with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and the FBI.

In short, the transformation of Indiana’s Land Grant university continues at a rapid pace. And while the essays below concentrate on the developments and forces leading to these changes, the broader point of this collection of essays is to suggest that higher education in the twenty-first century is changing in a rapid and largely deleterious way. The appended essay by Carl Davidson reflects a similar critique of the university during the height of the Cold War. What we are witnessing today is a revitalization of that trend.

For those who value the university as a site for informing students about the world and debating the value of changes occurring in it, the developments highlighted in these essays are a warning. And for faculty and students alike the antidote to the militarization of the university, the transformation of the curricula, and the disempowering of those who work in universities is organizing against those elements of change that are antithetical to the educational process.

*******************************************************************************************

And More:

 “The Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue has created a category of its own. As part of the nation’s leading national security university, it is rapidly becoming the world’s premier institution focused on Tech Statecraft, a new model of diplomacy bridging the gap between technology experts, government officials and policymakers, and business leaders to ensure tomorrow’s tech secures our freedoms,” said (Daniel) Kurtenbach. ‘I’m excited to contribute to the Krach Institute’s already-impressive momentum by enhancing and building its innovative partnerships and relationships to achieve our shared vision of a future that prizes individual freedom through trusted technology.’ ”

https://www.citybiz.co/article/378157/krach-institute-for-tech-diplomacy-at-purdue-names-daniel-kurtenbach-as-chief-growth-officer/

Homepage - Tech Statecraft (techdiplomacy.org)

 

 

Thank you for the good wishes: I posted this essay on my birthday 2010.

 https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2010_01_30_archive.html