The Grass Is Greener 2021-07-16 - Harry Targ on the Campus as Ideological Arena by WXRW riverwestradio.com 104.1fm

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THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY CONTINUES

Harry Targ

Nancy MacLean in her groundbreaking 2017 book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” addresses one of the central problems facing the American people, indeed majorities of people around the world; the contradiction between democracy and capitalism. As we look to the 2022 elections, the seemingly successful efforts of state governments, with support from the court system, to suppress voting, gerrymander districts, and in other ways to squelch the voices of the people, threatens majority rule. In addition, media consolidation, the creation of “news deserts,” restricting what is to be taught in the education system from grade one through the university, all are part of the concerted threat to fully inform publics. This too is a threat to democratic participation and majority rule. Consequently, it is useful to revisit MacLean’s main arguments.

MacLean begins by analyzing central premises of the so-called Austrian school of economics. Nineteenth and twentieth century luminaries from this tradition, particularly Van Mises and Hayek, articulated the view that the main priority of any society, but particularly democracies, is the extent to which markets are allowed to flourish, unencumbered by governments.

According to this view in a truly free society markets remain supreme. In fact, “liberty” exists in a society to the extent economic actors are unrestrained in the marketplace. Virtually all limitations on economic liberty so defined constitute a threat to “real” democracy. Governments exist only to maintain domestic order (the police power) and to defend the nation from external aggression (defense of national security). Governments provide police protection and armies. And that should be all. In sum, as President Ronald Reagan expressed the market vision: “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”

To further illustrate, MacLean describes the brutal dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende, a socialist, was elected by a plurality in the 1970 presidential election in that country and in the spring, 1973 in municipal elections held across the country, Allende’s coalition of parties drew even more votes for their candidates than did Allende in 1970. The United States, based on directives from President Nixon, had already moved to make the Chilean economy “scream” and had initiated contacts with Chilean generals who would be prepared to carry out a military coup against the popular government.  The military coup, ousting Allende from power, was launched, ironically on September 11, 1973.

As MacLean points out, in the aftermath of the coup, General Augusto Pinochet rounded up and killed thousands of Allende supporters, destroyed the long tradition of electoral politics, abolished trade unions, and began the process of ending government involvement in the economy and public institutions. Social security and education were privatized. Policies of nationalization of key industries were reversed. The shifts to what the Austrian school called economic liberty were imposed on the Chilean people with the advice of University of Chicago economists, such as Milton Friedman, and later, George Mason University economist, James Buchanan, who was instrumental in recommending “reforms” to the Chilean constitution making return to democracy more difficult. Subsequently only a few other dictatorships in Latin America showed any sympathy for the Pinochet regime with most of the world condemning its domestic brutality. But as MacLean reports, Milton Friedman and his colleagues never condemned the Chilean regime and Buchanan regarded it as a paradigmatic case of economic liberty, a model which the world should emulate. (And today, the Chilean people are rising up to rewrite the Pinochet era constitution that suppressed democracy).

Although the Chilean case represents an extreme example of dictatorship and free market capitalism, she uses it to illustrate a central point. In most societies, and the United States is no exception, majorities of people endorse government policies that can and often do serve the people. Ordinarily, citizens support public transportation, schools, highways, libraries, retirement guarantees, some publicly provided health care, and regulations to protect the environment, as well as police and military protection. The problem for Buchanan and his colleagues is that each one of these government programs. except for the police and military, constrains the “liberty” of entrepreneurs to pursue profit.

To put it simply, if citizens of the United States were asked if they support public programs, majorities would say “yes.” Although there have been extraordinary constraints on majority rule, even enshrined in the US constitution, the history of the United States can be seen as a history of struggles to improve and achieve majoritarian democracy. Demands for voting rights for women, African/Americans, non-propertied and low-income workers, released prisoners, and others have been basic to the American experience. The great anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century all across the globe were premised on the vision of individual and collective sovereignty of the people. If economic liberty is conceptualized as inversely related to majoritarian democracy, then capitalism and democracy are incompatible.

Nancy MacLean, based on this fundamental contradiction, develops a narrative of efforts by celebrants of economic liberty, the Koch brothers and their allies, to build campaigns in virtually every state and locale to disenfranchise people. ALEC affiliates in state legislatures over the last decade have promoted legislation to suppress the right to vote, eliminate the rights of workers to unionize, disempower city councils, eliminate the right of local governments to make fiscal decisions, and to enshrine in curricula in K to 12 education systems and the universities ideologies about the virtues of economic freedom. There are powerful political pressures to privatize every existing public institution. And these pressures have increased and today come from almost the entirety of the Republican Party and some of the Democratic Party as well (including efforts to defeat progressives within their ranks). Again, the best government is no government (except for the maintenance of police force to squelch demands for change and military power to protect the nation at home and abroad).

Nancy MacLean is warning us that there is a powerful drive, based on wealth and power, in the United States to destroy democracy. This democracy, while flawed, has been fought for since the founding of the United States. Its continuation, leaving aside its need for improvement, is under fundamental threat. 

LIES AND WAR: From Truman to Rumsfeld and Beyond

 Harry Targ

Post-modernists talk about “discourses,” “narratives,” “tropes,” and verbal “deconstructions.” They should be commended for suggesting how words are used to mobilize, inspire, deceive, promote self-interest, and, too often, justify killing everywhere. Former Arkansas Senator, J. William Fulbright in describing how he was tricked by his old friend President Lyndon Baines Johnson to support a resolution authorizing escalating war in Vietnam said: “A lie is a lie. There is no other way to put it.”

The story can begin any time. As World War Two was ending, the Greek government constructed by Great Britain after the Nazis were defeated sought to crush a rebellion by activists who objected to their newly imposed rulers. The Greek rebels included former anti-fascists freedom fighters, some of whom were Communists or Socialists. The British, no longer able to support the repression of the Greek Left in what was a civil war, called on the Americans for help.

In February,1947, Truman foreign policy advisers met to discuss what to do about the Greek civil war and the threat of “Communism” spreading along the Mediterranean. The Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, attending the meeting. said he would support U.S. military and economic aid for the unpopular Greek government. But, he said, tell the President he better “scare hell out of the American people.”

One month later, President Truman gave his famous Truman Doctrine speech to the Congress and the American people. He warned the American people, who until that time still had positive feelings toward the Soviet people, that the United States and the “free world” were going to be engaged in a long-term struggle against the forces of “international communism.” The Truman Doctrine was not about nations and movements with different interests and ideologies but rather a global struggle between the forces of good threatened by the forces of evil.

United States administrations ever since have justified aggressive foreign policies by lying and distorting the realities behind complex international relationships. In addition, when a politician, a journalist, a scholar, or a whole peace movement criticizes targeting nations and movements as diabolical and security threats, these critics are challenged as weak, indecisive, cowardly, and even worse, stalking horses for the vile enemy or enemies.

Campaigns of propaganda masquerading as truth have been a constant feature of international relations, particularly since World War Two. The reality of U.S. struggles against demonized enemies tells a sobering story. Deaths in wars and interventions in which the United States participated from 1945 until 1995 totaled about ten million people. These figures, extracted from the valuable research of Ruth Sivard, (World Military and Social Expenditures, 1996) do not include injuries and forced migrations of millions of people fleeing combat zones. Nor do these figures include the wasteful trillions of dollars of military expenditures and environmental damage resulting from a war system.

Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Team Continued the Tradition of Lying to Make War

 …Don Rumsfeld is, to use a phrase that is used too loosely but that certainly applies in this case – a ‘great American’ – and has been for decades. And if you want to look for a genuine model and prototype for your own careers, you could not have chosen a better role model than him. Mitch Daniels interviewed at the Rumsfeld Foundation, November 4, 2020.

https://www.rumsfeldfoundation.org/blog/detail/service-series-a-conversation-on-leadership-with-governor-mitch-daniels

Neoconservatives, celebrants of war, have had a long and growing presence in the machinery of United States foreign policy. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense in the Truman Administration, was a leading advocate for developing a militaristic response to the Soviet Union in the years after World War II. As historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out, Forrestal was one of the Truman administrators who sought to create a “permanent war economy.” He was, in Bacevich’s terms, a founding member of the post-World War II “semi-warriors.”

Subsequent to the initiation of the imperial response to the “Soviet threat” — the Marshall Plan, NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the arms race — other semi-warriors continued the crusade. These included the Dulles brothers (John and Allen), Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and prominent Kennedy advisors including McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow, architect of the “noncommunist path to development,” in Vietnam.

Key semi-warriors of our own day, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, and others who formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s, gained their first experience in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The PNAC view of how the United States should participate in world affairs is to use military superiority to achieve foreign policy goals. The key failure of Clinton foreign policy, they claimed, was his refusal to use force to transform the world. For starters, he should have overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The neoconservative policy recommendations prevailed during the eight years of the George Walker Bush administration. International organizations were belittled, allies were ignored, arms control agreements with Russia were rescinded, and discourse on the future prioritized planning for the next war.

And concretely the United States launched long, bloody, immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the US war, thousands were displaced, and violence spread throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf. And despite the 2003 Office of Management and Budget office prediction of Mitch Daniels that the war would cost $60 billion, recent estimates suggest the true cost of the Iraq war approached $3 trillion. Cost estimates, claims that the US troops would be welcomed as liberators, and the war would be over quickly all turned out to be false. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s declaration before the world that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction proved false as well.

Subsequent to the Iraq War, the United States has been engaged in overt and covert war, economic embargoes to bring down governments it does not find to its liking (Libya, Syria, Iran, the Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba), and has spent billions more on the military (over 800 military bases in 39 countries) while its domestic infrastructure declines. Now, the Biden Administration is ramping up support for confrontations with China and Russia.

Lies and War Are a Testament to Citizen Skepticism

Getting back to Senator Vandenberg’s advice to President Truman about how to gain support of the American people for moral/military crusades, leaders and media are warning about a new global terrorist threat, this time cyber attacks and space weapons, and a renewed post-Soviet threat from Russia and China, a new Cold War. The intensity of the selling job is testament to the good sense of the American people who continue to say “no more wars.”  

 

UNIVERSITIES AND POLITICAL CONFLICT (originally posted July 10, 2012)

(The post pandemic crisis has escalated the conflicts over the very character of higher education: substance, governance, employment, and specifically whether universities should address the ugliness of United States history as well as accomplishments. It does us well to revisit the issue of higher education and whose interests it serves).

Harry Targ

Since Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement almost every institution in American life--financial, corporate, political party, media, military, and religious--has appropriately become subject to scrutiny and evaluation. In each case analysts and activists have begun to raise questions about what these institutions look like, whose interests they serve, and how they contribute to the well-being of society.

Until recently colleges and universities have been largely above reproach. Research and education have been seen as the cornerstone of American democracy and economic development. 

Institutions of higher education have traditionally performed four tasks in the service of maintaining and enhancing the development of the other institutions referred to above. First, universities, particularly since World War II, have provided research resources to produce the products and technologies that have stimulated the capitalist system. Often basic research has fed into major enterprises in society, from promoting a global food system, to building sophisticated armies, to developing new high speed systems of communication that maximize control of economies and peoples. Major universities bring together talented research scholars and public and private research dollars to create inventions that promote greater control of nature and people and to expand profit.

Second, universities train work forces. Some graduates will become the research scholars who will continue the tradition of study and economic development to advance the economy and the polity further. Others will be provided the skills to work in the private and public sectors to carry out the work of institutional perpetuation. Corporate managers, computer specialists, tourism experts, and employees in the public sphere are trained at the modern university. And, increasingly universities train the soldiers who will fight the wars that the United States continues to fight.

Third, universities provide an education that in the main facilitates the transfer of legitimated knowledge to consumers of that knowledge. Particular attention is given to the promotion of a scientific worldview that reduces physical and social reality to a multiplicity of “variables” that can be studied with statistical rigor. Knowledge is primarily scientific knowledge.

Legitimated knowledge that is passed along to college students also includes highly selective portraits of how economies work, what constitutes democratic political institutions, and what constitutes standards of quality in the arts. In subtle forms, universities pass along celebratory, often uncritical, images of the society in which students live.

Finally, universities are credentialing institutions. They reward students with degrees, recommendations, and honors, which can be used as licenses to participate in the other institutions in society. Even when political and economic elites receive prestigious degrees through family connections, it is the degree that helps the accumulation of power.

The four functions --research, training, legitimizing, and credentialing--have changed concretely over time. For example, in the United States, the development of the modern university paralleled the industrial revolution. Prestigious universities, such as Harvard, initiated modern departments at the dawn of the twentieth century replacing the primacy of theology and law with economics, business administration, and industrial engineering. Training in fields such as education was designed to create a literate work force that could staff the factories of modern society. And social sciences were created to develop theories that comported with industrial development, such as Social Darwinism. These theories largely justified the distribution of wealth and power within societies and in the international system.

After World War II higher education took on vital functions in new ways. The GI Bill funded college education for veterans to train the scientists and managers of the new age. Also, higher education would credential students to be placed in higher paying jobs so that they could earn enough to buy the goods that a booming American economy was producing.

By the 1960s, higher education experienced enormous growth. For University of California President Clark Kerr, the “multiversity” was the institution critical for the development of a new global economy, scientific and technological advances, and the invention of new tools to fight the Cold War. In addition, social scientists and economists, studying development, would generate theories to guide public policy, particularly in poorer countries experiencing revolutionary ferment.

The massive growth in higher education from the 1960s to the new century led to increased university budgets, higher tuition costs, over-trained and underemployed college graduates, and a layer of overpaid administrators who had taken over the operations of most universities from the professor ranks. In addition, many non-professional workers at the university kept universities operational and were paid a living wage with justifiably secure benefits.

Now, in the midst of a deep economic crisis, political and economic elites are lobbying to create new structures of power in higher education while still supporting research, training, legitimating, and credentialing. The approach that is increasingly promoted by political leaders, educational foundations, and most important, Boards of Trustees of universities, is what Kevin Phillips labeled “market fundamentalism.”

The market fundamentalist approach emphasizes cutting public support for higher education and reducing financial support for students, particularly underrepresented students. In other words, as opposed to the era of the GI Bill, the operant vision is ultimately to reduce access to higher education which will contribute to the increasing inequality in wealth and income in the United States.

Also, market fundamentalism relies on the market to induce “competition” to reduce costs among universities. It encourages new profit-based universities that can sell college degrees cheaply, primarily by substituting on-line courses for campus experienced-based education. In addition, market fundamentalists call for forcing universities to make every academic unit in the university pay for itself.

What is new about the crisis in higher education today, what appointment of new presidents represents, is that economic and political elites wish to continue the traditional functions of the university while reducing costs in higher education.

They want to transfer continuing costs to students and workers at the university.

They are working to streamline university education to research on corporate agriculture, medicine, computer technology, military developments, and allied fields.

And they want to cut educational programs that link research, education, and community service. This may entail eliminating programs that cannot be linked to the making of profit, such as in literature, the arts, and various social sciences and cultural studies. This is probably what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce meant when it warned of “growing skepticism about whether those lucky enough to graduate have acquired the skills and knowledge necessary for success in the 21st century economy.”

And finally, since politics has never been absent from debates about higher education, in today’s context corporate elites including those in the media, wish to eliminate the enduring tradition of “academic freedom” which has celebrated the view that the university must be a venue for the pursuit of “the marketplace of ideas.”

Expect the university to be another emerging site for contestation and political struggle.

THOUGHTS ON HIGHER EDUCATION: 2021

 Harry Targ

(State legislatures, prominent politicians, special interest groups, and university administrators and boards of trustees have placed the character of higher education on the public agenda for the first time in years. Unfounded criticisms of the teaching and study of racism in US history, shifting to online education, further encroachments by university administrators on what is taught and how, all necessitate a serious reexamination of the transformation of the university in incremental and non-transparent ways. For example, even the teaching of STEM courses is being examined with a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation at one prominent university.

(https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/instruction-during-pandemic-provides-foundation-for-future-stem-education.htm

 The materials below were written a few years ago but reflect some of the issues that are currently being raised, and decided, without sufficient public discussion and without input from most educators. (Some organizations, such as the American Association of University Professors, have committed themselves to stimulating a broad-based public discussion of higher education in the 21^st century.  See for example the emerging discussion of a New Deal for Higher Education which addresses the process and content of higher education and the support for students pursuing higher education. The campaign includes the idea that higher education is a public good. https://newdealforhighered.org/)

 

REMODELING LIBERAL ARTS IN THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

Harry Targ

In the recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean traces the intellectual development of the libertarian right and its connection with the Koch Brothers and state programs to promote an ideologically-driven policy agenda.  She argues that many of the libertarian right’s policy proposals would be opposed if public discourse and majoritarian democracy prevailed. Consequently, she suggests, efforts are made to limit transparency, public discussion, and legislative and electoral participation in major public policies.

Public universities are among the institutions in which the lack of transparency is becoming the norm. The tradition of shared governance is being trampled on. Educational decisions are being made by politicians, and administrators and boards of trustees without any advice and consent from educators and taxpayers. Under the guise of a “business model” driven by metrics and profit-making, many years of educational practices are being overturned by administrators with little educational experience. Great state universities such as those in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana are being reconstructed. Programs of teaching and research are being uprooted. Sometimes ongoing programs are abolished. And new liberal arts curricula measure success by creating narrowly trained job seekers. Further, research is increasingly channeled to meet the needs of corporations or the military.

The Vision of the 21st Century University

The President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, on October 12, 2018 received the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education presented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Daniels reported with enthusiasm that Purdue University is the third “most STEM-centric school in the country,” with over 60 percent of its undergraduate students matriculating in engineering, chemistry, physics, and agricultural and biological sciences. And he implied that there is a struggle going on in great universities everywhere about what should constitute liberal arts (Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. “Re-liberalizing the Liberal Arts,” Washington, October 12, 2018, goacta.org.) From Daniels’ point of view, administrators cannot wait for liberal arts programs in the twenty-first century to transform themselves. This is so because liberal arts education today consists of “conformity of thought, intolerance of dissent and sometimes an authoritarian tendency to quash it, a rejection of the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines.”

Daniels then railed against the “one-sided view of the world” being presented in liberal arts classrooms in opposition to critical thinking. He appropriately celebrated the “clash of competing ideas,” but characterized liberal arts curricula and research as dogmatic and authoritarian. (Many liberal arts educators would argue that old ideas are always revisited bringing new, diverse, perspectives to bear on traditional disciplinary formulations in the social sciences and humanities). In other words, while most scholars and students appreciate the openness and creativity of education and scholarship that has resulted from the last fifty years of ferment, debate, and thought characteristic of the intellectual life of higher education, Daniels advocates to the contrary that the newer scholarship and education should be challenged and expunged (Daniels referred in his lecture to some of his intellectual mentors including Charles Murray and Jeb Bush).

Daniels added that the tenure system protects dogmatists rather than what he would regard as free thinkers. He characterized modern liberal arts education as “the celebration of mediocrity;” the liberal arts as the home of “illiberal viewpoints;” and as the transmitter of “conformity of thought.” He condemned what he called “shoddy scholarship” as well. “Hopelessly abstruse, jargon-laden papers from so-called ‘studies’ programs read like self-parodies.” He claimed, with no evidence, that “…fewer than half the published studies across the social sciences can be replicated.”

And the final and most damaging claim Daniels made was that practitioners of liberal arts make their subject matter boring. He asserted that histories are written without heroes, excitement, “…glory, the human elements…”

All this, Daniels suggested, requires reform of liberal arts from outside the clutches of the educators in the various fields he condemned. At Purdue University change is occurring because of a program called Cornerstone which brings STEM students to specially crafted liberal arts courses. “Enrollees will read Locke, Hobbes, and Jefferson as well as other works in the Great Books tradition.” Reading the great books, which according to Daniels are not already being taught in existing courses, and offering various dual degree and fast track three-year degrees, he said, are responses to the needs of the business community for liberal arts graduates.

And as to free speech on campus, Daniels castigated students who, he asserted were coached by faculty, made unwarranted demands on him to denounce fascist and racist flyers on campus. And without any sense of irony, Daniels quoted 1960s Chancellor of the University of California system of higher education Clark Kerr who said that a proper university “is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” He apparently did not recall that students at the University of California launched the Free Speech Movement on their campus in 1964 because Kerr’s administration banned literature tables on campus.

Discussions of Higher Education Are Held in Secret

Lastly, Daniels praised the work of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). ACTA, formed in 1995, says it works “…to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.” Henry Giroux has characterized ACTA as “…not a friend of academic freedom, nor is it comfortable with John Dewey’s notion that education should be responsive to the deepest conflicts of our time…” (Henry Giroux, The University in Chains, Paragon Publishers, 2007, p. 161).

ACTA, while claiming to be independent, is an associate member of the State Policy Network. SPN is a “think tank” with affiliates in 49 states. SPN groups are affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which was a creation of the billionaire Koch brothers and rightwing organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, to promote a radical libertarian policy agenda in virtually every state. Jane Mayer, Nancy MacLean and others have shown that ALEC, SPN, and ACTA leaders realized that public discourse and transparency in political and other institutions might lead publics, often majorities, to reject their anti-government, “free-market” agendas.

Universities historically have had public discussions about curricula and most universities, including Purdue University, have institutionalized mechanisms for decision-making on educational policy matters. Faculty Senates, curricula committees, and promotion and tenure committees, have been the lifeblood of higher education. And, appropriately enough, as a result of student movements on college campuses, students have been included in conversations about educational matters as well. And some state universities value the input of citizens and a broad representative array of alumni from their universities, not just the wealthy who become the core of boards of trustees or the small number who can afford to donate millions of dollars.

What the speech represents is a capsule summary of the Daniels vision of what liberal arts should be. It is largely a series of claims about modern liberal arts programs, diametrically opposed to the reality. It is a policy brief for his campus that Daniels presented to the non-transparent ACTA, an affiliate of a larger covert institutional network with a presence in every state. The network is committed to a radical transformation of economic, political, and educational institutions, a radical libertarian America. Since the liberal arts tradition includes a rigorous conversation about this and other visions, questions of the direction of higher education at Purdue University deserve a rich diverse public conversation among educators, students, and citizens. Private conversations within and between organizations that restrict this conversation violate the spirit of higher education.

 

21st CENTURY UNIVERSITIES: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND CORPORATE POWER

(This essay, originally posted in June,2014, reflects the continuing and growing debate about the vision and purpose of higher education. As Purdue University celebrates its 150-year anniversary, conversations about the purposes of higher education are in order).

The university is a site for intellectual excitement: debate about new theories and hypotheses; rigorous examinations of competing ideas; and research, teaching, and community service. Most men and women who pursue a career in the academy are inspired by intellectual curiosity, the prospect of educating and inspiring students, and serving diverse communities of citizens.

Moreover, the Morrill Act passed by Congress in 1862 committed the United States to construct and support state universities which would serve the people, in those days largely rural populations. Great state-funded public universities grew over the subsequent 150 years to facilitate the education of a growing population.  They enriched that population with varieties of knowledge and the tools to improve the lives of the citizenry and, as a result, helped build a more vibrant democracy.

But there are darker truths about the growth of the modern university. First, higher education is stimulated by, and financially beholden to, governments, political processes, corporations, and banks. These institutions affect what research is done and what subjects are taught in the university.

Second, and related to the first, conceptions of disciplines, bodies of knowledge, appropriate methods, ideas accepted as unchallengeable truths in various fields, and the basic principles of whole universities are shaped by economic interests and political power.

Third, professional associations, journals, forms of peer review, and general procedures for validating the quality of academic research and teaching are also affected by the same economic and political interests that dominate universities.

Fourth, therefore, in the main, the university as an institution is, and has always been, designed to serve the interests of the status quo, a status quo again that is governed by economic and political interests.

The following examples are from one university, Purdue University. Similar examples can be found at virtually every large and prestigious university in the country. David Smith and Scott Bauer (The Lafayette Journal and Courier, “Daniels: Georgia Trip Was Good for Purdue,” May 1, 2014) reported on Purdue President Mitch Daniels’ attendance at a conference of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Daniels said he attended the meeting to learn and to touch base with one of Purdue’s biggest donors.

The meeting, held every year since 1982, was populated by presidential candidates, and conservative governors from Michigan and Florida. Other attendees included former Vice-President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director David Petraeus, and former Amway President Dick DeVos, and current or former CEOs from TD Ameritrade, Apple, and Google. Karl Rove, premier Republican operative, also attended. Inadvertently highlighting the connection between corporate and political power and the university President Daniels said: “I considered this a trip of use to Purdue.”

Academic advocates for large-scale government and corporate commitments to increased space exploration, such as President Daniels, who served as co-chair of the National Research Council, can be seen as serving the economic needs of research universities. The NRC issued a 286-page report in May, 2014, suggesting that a huge and redefined commitment would be needed to land on Mars by the 2030s (Reed Sellers, “Report Calls for Increased NASA Budget,” The Exponent, June 9, 2014). Despite the document’s skepticism about the possibilities of achieving new goals in space, Daniels said “human space exploration remains vital to the national interest for inspirational and aspirational reasons that appeal to a broad range of U.S. citizens.”

The report outlined a range of steps that would be needed to achieve long-term goals in space, from a one-year mission of persons living on the international space station, to flight tests, rovers exploring Mars, and the development of new technologies involving health, transportation, robots, vehicles, and many other components of space travel. These multi-billion-dollar research-based programs could occupy the research agendas of academic departments in universities such as Purdue for decades and enrich the biggest corporations in America.

Daniels was not the only university affiliated spokesperson of note who recently made news. Board of Trustees member Don Thompson, President and CEO of the McDonald’s Corporation, weighed in on the debate about raising the minimum wage for fast food workers after a nationwide set of protests against McDonald’s on May 22, 2014.

Thompson at a shareholders’ meeting declared that “McDonald’s is often a first job for many entering the work force. About one-third of our employees are 16 to 19. We are proud that we open doors to opportunity” (Bruce Horowitz, “McDonald’s Plays Offense on Wages,” USA Today, May 23). Thompson praised his corporation for being a worker-friendly employer and added that it was the largest employer of veterans in the nation. Later he hinted at the possibility of raising the minimum wage at McDonald’s. However, protestors argued that the median age of fast-food workers was 29, most worked at today’s minimum wage, and economic survival on McDonald’s wages was virtually impossible.

Finally, the Purdue news service has announced increased collaboration of the university with the notorious Duke Energy Corporation, most recently in the news because of its responsibility for a coal ash spill in North Carolina that coated 70 miles of the Dan River along the North Carolina and Virginia border with 60,000 tons of toxic sludge. A North Carolina judge ordered Duke Energy to immediately eliminate the source of groundwater pollution from company coal ash dumps. A criminal investigation of links between the spill and Duke Energy and state government officials in North Carolina is still underway.

Purdue News (June 11, 2014) reported that the university would collaborate on the expansion of an education program to create the Duke Energy Academy at Purdue, a six-day instructional program to inspire high school students and teachers to work in STEM-related disciplines related to energy. The article erroneously claimed that “the amount of students entering the STEM fields is declining.” Other co-sponsors of the six-day educational experience include Bowen Engineering, General Electric, Kidwind Project, Siemens Energy, and Windstream Technologies Inc.  

Higher education is at a fork in the road. One path is to maintain its traditional mission to educate and inspire students while sharing knowledge with communities at home and abroad. Another path is to expand the needs of special interests, political and corporate, at the expense of the traditional role of higher education. Growing social movements should include demands that universities continue to serve the needs of the people, rather than politicians and corporations.

 

 

The Ideological Justifications for the Permanent War Economy and the Globalization of Empire Continue

Harry Targ

(President Biden reinitiated G7 collaboration and rekindled the NATO alliance while raising the specter of the spread of Russian and Chinese “authoritarianism.” And the corporate media continues the same narrative that was developed after World War II: eternal enemies, threats to our virtuous society, the need for continued military preparedness, and American exceptionalism. As Pete Seeger long ago wrote: “Oh when will they ever learn?” )

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Ideological Justifications for the Permanent War Economy and the Globalization of Empire (originally posted on February 12, 2009)

Constructing and maintaining a permanent war economy was a policy commitment made by virtually every U.S. administration and Congress since the 1940s. It meant that budget decisions would be based on the primacy of military spending. And, military spending served ever since World War II as an economic stimulus to overcome recessionary dynamics in the economy as a whole and to support secure contracts for huge corporations engaging in military production and service.

The permanent war economy paralleled and supported the fifty year development of U.S. capitalism on the world stage. During this time frame global capitalism shifted economic activity from direct investment in goods and services at home and abroad to financial speculation. Those corporations which continued to manufacture goods for domestic and international consumption shifted their productive operations to poor countries where lower wages could be paid. These changing features of the international political economy were extended by globalization, the dramatic increase in cross-national economic, political, and cultural interactions. In short, the global political economy of the last fifty years has been significantly shaped by the building of a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization.

While these processes are critical to understanding the U.S. role in the world, scholars, pundits, and most importantly politicians explained the U.S. role in the world in different ways. The American people were told that the U.S. faced diabolical enemies, that our place in world history was special, and that we had an obligation to bring the American experience to the world.

The ideological campaign for the Cold War was articulated in speeches by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1946 and President Harry Truman in 1947. The former, addressing a college audience in Fulton, Missouri warned that “…from the Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” One year later, President Truman in his famous Doctrine speech argued that there were two ways of life in the world, one based on freedom and the other tyranny. The United States, he said must defend the forces of freedom against “totalitarianism.” Of course, the threat came from the Soviet Union.

Three years later, an “in-house” document, National Security Council Document 68 (NSC 68) was drafted and circulated in the Truman administration by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. It recommended that military spending be the number one priority of every administration. And the recommendation was necessary because the Soviet Union constituted a military threat and an economic challenge. When the Korean War started, NSC 68 became publicly articulated policy and vision (even though the document itself remained classified until the 1970s).

The ideological construct, “good versus evil,” “freedom versus totalitarianism,” was rigidly imposed on a frightened public in the 1940s and 1950s as anti-communism pervaded the society. What came to be known as “McCarthyism,” imported images of domestic traitors, subversives, and foreignness into the American cultural stream. The threat was so great at home as well as abroad that state repression was justified to protect the nation.

In addition, academia contributed to the public face of this ideology through its development of “modernization theory.” Economic historian and Kennedy and Johnson foreign policy advisor Walt Rostow described what the world faced: Communism was “…a kind of disease which can befall a transitional society if it fails to organize effectively those elements within it which are prepared to get on with the job of modernization.” The disease must be expunged so that poor countries could develop market-based economies as did Europe and the United States. The ideological ground was laid for Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Central America, and Iraq and Afghanistan in our own day.

And, of course, we can reflect on the words of President Reagan who proclaimed shortly before he left office:

“We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, 'The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.’ We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.”

And finally in our own day, and when the Soviet “evil empire” was long gone, a new enemy, “international terrorism” was identified. And, like the former Soviet Union, this enemy threatened our being and necessitated a strong military response. President Bush said in 2002 (and again in a similar way just days before he left office):

“But the best way to secure the homeland is to find the enemy wherever they try to hide and bring them to justice. The best way -- make no mistake about it. You should not be confused about the nature of the people we're dealing with. They hate us, because we're free. They hate the thought that Americans welcome all religions. They can't stand that thought. They hate the thought that we educate everybody. They hate our freedoms. They hate the fact that we hold each individual -- we dignify each individual. We believe in the dignity of every person. They can't stand that.

And the only way they know to express themselves is through killing, cold- blooded killing. And so we need to treat them the way they are, as international criminals. And that's why my defense budget is the largest increase in 20 years. You know, the price of freedom is high, but for me it's never too high because we fight for freedom.”

In sum, while American imperialism has its roots in military spending, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization, it has been explained to the American people in terms of high moral principle, coupled with a sense of the special mission that American brings to the world. For Puritan America, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, America is “a city on a hill.” While peace activists need to work against military spending, oppose the speculative economy, demand worker rights at home and abroad, and oppose unbridled “free trade,” they must challenge the ideological justifications that have served to mobilize a troubled and pliant citizenry to support US policy for decades.

 

OPEN BORDERS: A PROGRESSIVE RESPONSE TO THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS (a repost)

Harry Targ

(Taking a modified "world system perspective,' leads us to view human migration as a global process that is intimately connected to the global political economy, particularly the mobility of capital and war (now hybrid), which lead to millions of people fleeing violence and starvation. These are intimately connected to the US and the global political economy. In sum, migration is a foreign policy issue as well as a political economy issue, Vijay Prashad updates the story as follows:  
https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/migration-underdevelopment/)

Why Migration

People migrate from one place to another for a variety of reasons. A good part of that migration has to do with international relations, national economies, and the increasingly globalized economy. Literally millions of people have moved from one geographic space to another in the twenty-first century, in most cases for reasons of physical fear or economic need. Two prominent causes that “push” people to leave their communities and homeland relate to “hybrid wars” and neoliberal globalization.

Hybrid wars refer to the long-term policies of imperial powers to systematically undermine political regimes that pursue policies and goals that challenge their global hegemony. Over long periods of time imperial powers have used force, covert operations, supporting pliant local elites, and funneling money to disrupt local political processes. If targeted countries still reject outside interference the imperial power uses force to overthrow recalcitrant governments. In the 1980s all these tactics were used by the United States to crush revolutionary ferment in Central America. Of course, the US hybrid war strategy has been a staple of United States policy in the region ever since President Franklin Roosevelt declared the policy of “The Good Neighbor.”

 Neoliberalism  refers to the variety of policies that rich capitalist countries and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization have imposed on debt-ridden poor countries. These policies require poor countries to cut back on public services, deregulate their economies, reduce tariffs that protect their own industries and agriculture, and in other ways insist that poor countries open their economies to foreign investment and trade penetration. The impacts of neoliberalism have been to impose austerity on largely marginalized populations. Their agriculture and industries have been undermined by subsidized agribusinesses from the Global North and global investors. Since the initiation of neoliberal policies in the 1970s gaps between rich and poor nations and rich and poor people within nations have grown all across the world, with a few exceptions such as China.

In sum, peoples everywhere have experienced the creation of repressive regimes and economic policies that have shifted vast majorities from modest survival to deep poverty. (Susan Jonas once wrote that the Guatemalan people lived more secure lives before the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the fifteenth century than ever since). The globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference), increasing income and wealth inequality and poverty, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere, has led to massive emigration. Some estimates indicate that 37 million people left their home countries (some 45 countries) between 2010 and 2015 for humanitarian reasons.

One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century. But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade and selected periods of history, the movement of people has been illegal. (Sometimes branding migrants as “illegal” has been a device to cheapen their labor). The idea of national sovereignty has been used to justify categorizing some human migrants as “illegal.” If capital is and has been legal, the movement of people should be legal as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any human beings as “illegal.”

 

The Concept of Open Borders

This sketchy analysis of the “root causes” of emigration suggest the need to oppose imperialism, both in the form of hybrid wars and promotion of neoliberal economic policies. This traditional task of peace and anti-imperialist campaigns is ongoing and needs to continue. And the analyses of the deleterious effects of hybrid wars and neoliberalism should be linked to movements fighting against  cruel and inhumane immigration policies in recipient countries, such as the United States. In addition, drawing on history, law, ethics, and a humane and socialist vision of the universality of humankind, progressives should expand on a conversation raised by some about the concept of “open borders.”

The idea of open borders has not been sufficiently discussed as the immigration crisis in the United States and Europe has unfolded. The core concept, with much room for discussion of implementation, suggests that, as a recently endorsed Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) statement calls for, there should be an “uninhibited transnational free movement of people….and a pathway to citizenship for all non-citizen residents.”  The idea of open borders implies that no human being by virtue of her/his presence in any geographic space can be defined as “illegal” and that the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights apply to everyone, everywhere.

In a 2017 article Aisha Dodwell, Global Justice Now, wrote in defense of open borders (Aisha Dodwell, “7 Reasons Why We should Have Open Borders,”   New Internationalist, November 29, 2017, https://newint.org/blog/2017/11/29/why-open-borders) . Among her arguments are the following:

-Borders are tools to separate the rich and powerful from the poor.

-Borders do not stop efforts to emigrate but exacerbate violence against already victimized people.

-Immigrants are erroneously blamed for declining employment and jobs when, in fact, it is the demonization of immigrants that divides workers from each other.

-Open borders would allow for emigres to return home when the brutal repressive and economic conditions that led them to flee were reduced.

-Open borders would lead to greater employment, increased earnings, rising demand for goods and services, and through income repatriation, more money sent back to families in countries the emigres fled. In short, open borders would be a stimulus for economic growth in both the country of origin and the host country of emigres.

-Open borders would mean the equalization of the rights of people to emigrate; thus avoiding the current policies that allow for immigration of certain populations (such as skilled workers) and not others.

-Historically, open borders have always existed for corporations, banks, the super-rich, tourists and other select populations who are beneficiaries of the global capitalist system.

Earlier Roque Planes, Latino Voices, (“16 Reasons Why Opening Our Borders Makes More Sense Than Militarizing Them,” Huffpost, September 2, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/open-borders_n_5737722?guccounter ) adds to the list of reasons justifying open borders. Planes quotes an immigration expert who has argued that, with glaring exceptions such as Asians, open borders existed until the 1920s. “‘Legally’ meant something very different then than it does now. At the time, the United States accepted practically everyone who showed up with few restrictions other than the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and a brief health examination. The foreign-born share of the population, 12.9 percent, is lower today than it was during the entire period from 1860 to 1920, according to data published by the Brookings institution.”

Planes posited arguments pertaining to open borders:

-Today capital and goods flow across borders but not always labor.

-Rich people have the privilege of open borders.

-the US immigration system is broken.

-Open borders within the European Union, while increasingly volatile politically, did not lead to the collapse of European economies.

-‘Illegal’ immigration is a direct resultant of US policies. Planes sites overthrowing governments, financing militaries in poor countries, promoting policies that destroy domestic agriculture in poor countries, and, he could have added, the war on drugs.

-Open borders increase the possibility of immigrants returning to their homelands.

-Immigrants, in the main, are not the cause of stagnant wages in the United States. Using anti-immigrant and racist policies divert attention from the primary causes of economic exploitation.

-The broken immigration system has provided huge profits for the prison/industrial complex and large budgets for law enforcement agencies.

As to the last point, Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion if the U.S. Border Around the World,  Verso Books, 2019, argues that United States policy is “pushing out the border,” such that allies tighten their own borders to serve the needs of expanding imperial control. In addition, by pressuring other countries to tighten their own border security, the U.S. is expanding its border security apparatus, to include new special forces and expansion of State Department and other agency activities. 

A reviewer of Miller’s book, (Cora Currier, Pushing out the Border: How the U.S. is Waging a Global War on Migration,”  Portside, August 4, 2019, https://portside.org/2019-08-04/pushing-out-border-now-us-waging-global-war-migration) quotes Miller who writes that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “has trained new patrol and homeland security units for Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan borders.” The reviewer points out from Miller’s study that “…the U.S. Department of Homeland Security can be found assisting border projects in the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, India, Poland, Turkey, and Vietnam.” In addition the Border Patrol has offices in Mexico and Canada and a presence in Puerto Rico to oversee the Caribbean. Quoting Miller: “Hundreds of millions in U.S. funds have flowed to Central American borders to turn them into U.S.-style defensible zones.” And soldiers from around the world are flown to the U.S. southwest to gain experience in border control. Clearly, Miller is describing a growing military/corporate/immigration complex. The ideological glue justifying this massive enterprise are claims about national sovereignty and presumed racist threats that people fleeing repression and starvation represent.

What To Do?

Along with the panoply of proposals for immigration reform, campaigns to combat racism, and the movements to provide sanctuary to desperate migrant peoples, progressives need to look at the history/ theory/ and practice of anti-immigrant policies. A central conclusion that needs to be raised is to call and work for open borders as suggested by the DSA resolution on open borders.

In sum central elements of a truly radical and humane response to the immigration crisis in the United States and the world should include:

-Increased efforts to challenge imperialism everywhere in both its political/military dimensions and its intrusive neoliberal economic policies

-Rejection of the idea that people can be deemed “illegal.”

-Mobilizing around the concept of opening borders to people fleeing repression and economic deprivation, similar to the U.S immigration policies of the early part of the twentieth century.

-Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a guide to law and practice all across the globe.

-Revitalizing programs of humanitarian assistance on a global basis including revisiting the possible value of instituting economic regulations of global capitalism that were once proposed in the United Nations, referred to as “The   New International Economic Order.”

-Work to dismantle the military/corporate/immigration complex.

While these larger demands will be difficult to achieve, working for them and articulating a vision of the world where human beings are not deemed illegal will add clarity to the reasons behind more modest demands for reform.