Saturday, October 18, 2025

How to Dismantle a State University System

 (The rich and diverse programs, including university newspapers at both Purdue University and Indiana University are being dismantled.)

University History
Purdue University is  a Big Ten university, a land grant institution and one of two large and well known public universities in the state of Indiana (there are several public and private universities in the state). It has been known historically for strong programs in agriculture and engineering.  To its credit and largely because of the nationwide ferment in the 1960s  the university committed itself to create vibrant programs in other disciplines, many in the College of Liberal Arts.
Among the many programs developed over the last fifty years included a nationally recognized graduate program in American Studies, important programs, both undergraduate and graduate in African American and Gender and Women’s Studies, and programs of excellence in research and teaching in English, History, Sociology, Political Science, and Psychology, just to name a few. And even students who came to study engineering, computer science, agriculture, or business appreciated and enrolled in the many liberal arts courses mentioned above. And, of course, every administration and faculty from the 1960s til quite recently recognized the inextricable connection between STEM related fields of specialization and a broad liberal arts education.
In addition, administrators, faculty, and students recognized that the history of the nation, the state, and even the university and its community had inadequately served minorities. And it was the job to make higher education accessible to students who historically had been denied such education because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Former Purdue President Mitch Daniels said it well in a ceremony renaming residence halls to African American students of the 1940s who had been denied access to housing:
“Purdue University and its land grant sisters around the country were put here more than a century ago to start lowering and removing barriers and promote the upward mobility of free peoples and that has been our history ever since,” Daniels said. “We’ve been too slow about it in many ways and many times, but the progress has always been forward. Sometimes, it takes courageous and resolved people, like the Parker sisters, to push things further – and thank God they did.”
It All Changed on May 30, 2025
On this date Purdue University announced that all DEI programs would end. Offices were closed. Websites were taken down. Even the closure of DEI programs was announced at a retirement party of a DEI supervisor in the College of Technology.
In addition, It was announced that the university would no longer be cooperating with the school newspaper, The Purdue Exponent. While the Exponent was a non-university corporation the university had for years provided spaces for distribution of the paper on campus and helped distribute the paper to those locations. The university indicated also that the newspaper should take the “Purdue” name off the logo of the newspaper.
Finally, shortly thereafter, it was announced that some 40 undergraduate and/or graduate programs with low enrollments, as defined by the Indiana legislature, would be cancelled. While these programs existed across the university a majority of them were in the liberal arts, including programs addressing substantive issues involving race, gender, and class.
Among the concerns raised by members of the faculty, students, and community are the following:

"The Grass is Greener:" A radio discussion of the rise of the Global South

 https://soundcloud.com/user-240416425/2025-10-14-2000-grass-is

Monday, October 13, 2025

Essays on Venezuela: The US Assault Continues

JUDGING THE JULY 28, 2024 ELECTION IN VENEZUELA FROM A PEACE MOVEMENT PERSPECTIVE

Harry Targ

Sunday, August 11, 2024

“And so, on election day, just after polls closed and before any official results had been released, Machado and Washington, as if in concert, began to bleat about fraud, building on a line of attack that they had been establishing for months. Machado’s followers immediately took to the streets and attacked symbols of Chavismo…” (*from V J Prashad).

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/venezuela-elections-2024/

PRESS RELEASE: National Lawyers Guild electoral observers praise fairness, transparency of Venezuelan election process; condemn the U.S. backed opposition’s refusal to accept the outcome of democratic election

https://nlginternational.org/2024/07/press-release-national-lawyers-guild-electoral-observers-praise-fairness-transparency-of-venezuelan-election-process-condemn-the-u-s-backed-oppositions-refusal-to-accept-the-outcome-of-de/

“The US secretary of state has said there was "overwhelming evidence" Venezuela's opposition won the recent presidential election.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1d10453zno


Since the Venezuelan elections many pundits and politicians have spoken about the outcome of the Venezuelan elections. The US statement by Secretary of State Blinken sounds like the scripts that he and others have trotted out before. These scripts have paralleled embarrassing US efforts to identify and support candidates running against the Venezuelan revolutionary governments,  unsuccessful economic embargoes designed to starve the workers and peasants into surrender, and US policies designed to serve the rich minorities of Latin Americans, at home or in Florida.

In V J Prashad’s essay he suggests that supporters of the founders of the Bolivarian Revolution, particularly deceased Hugo Chavez and later Nicholas Maduro, built masses of organized support through workplace communes, community political organizations, and programs designed to reduce poverty. And it is these people who have rallied in defense of the Maduro victory in the recent elections. Prashad wrote:  “During the massive marches to defend the government in the week following the elections, people openly described the two choices that faced them: to try and advance the Bolivarian process through Maduro’s government or to return to February 1989 when Carlos Andrés Pérez imposed the IMF-crafted economic agenda known as the paquetazo (packet) on the country.”

And as Prashad suggests, the rallies protesting the election outcome are largely representatives of the wealthy classes, inspired and supported by the United States.

In sum, before we pass judgement on the Venezuelan elections, we need to remind ourselves that United States policy ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 200 years ago has been committed to crushing popular movements in the Western Hemisphere and returning wealth to the minority of the rich.

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

US IMPERIALISM IN LATIN AMERICA CONTINUES: Now it is Venezuela

Originally posted on Thursday, January 24, 2019


 Harry Targ

The world again enters an economic, political, and military crisis in the Western Hemisphere. It remains important to historicize and contextualize this week’s call by the United States and 10 hemisphere countries for President Nicholas Maduro to step down as President of Venezuela. The sub-text of statements from the United States, the Organization of American States, and numerous right-leaning governments in Latin America is “or else” or “all options are on the table;” meaning that there might be a military intervention to overthrow the government of Venezuela. For many who are learning about US imperialism for the first time, it is important to revisit the history of the Western Hemisphere and to contextualize a regional crisis which is misrepresented throughout the mainstream media.

A Brief History

As Greg Grandin argues in “Empire’s Workshop,” the rise of the United States as a global empire begins in the Western Hemisphere. For example, the Spanish/Cuban/American war provided the occasion for the United States to develop a two-ocean navy, fulfilling Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt’s dreams. After interfering in the Cuban Revolution in 1898 defeating Spain, the United States attacked the Spanish outpost in the Philippines, thus becoming a global power. Latin American interventionism throughout the Western Hemisphere, sending troops into Central American and Caribbean countries thirty times between the 1890s and 1933, “tested” what would become after World War II a pattern of covert interventions and wars in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The Western Hemisphere was colonized by Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and France from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The main source of accumulated wealth that funded the rise of capitalism as a world system came from raw material and slave labor in the Western Hemisphere: gold, silver, sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa, and later oil. What Marx called the stage of “primitive accumulation,” was a period in world history governed by land grabs, mass slaughter of indigenous peoples, expropriation of natural resources, and the capture, transport, and enslavement of millions of African people. Conquest, land occupation, and dispossession was coupled with the institutionalization of a Church that would convince the survivors of this stage of capitalism’s development that all was “God’s plan.”

Imperial expansion generated resistance throughout this history.  In the nineteenth century countries and peoples achieved their formal independence from colonial rule. Simon Bolivar, the nineteenth century leader of resistance, spoke for national sovereignty in Latin America.

But from 1898 until the present, the Western Hemisphere has been shaped by US efforts to replace the traditional colonial powers with neo-colonial regimes. Economic institutions, class systems, militaries, and religious institutions were influenced by United States domination of the region. (Already in the 1840s, a large part of Mexico had been appropriated by the United States).

In the period of the Cold War, 1945-1991, the United States played the leading role in overthrowing the reformist government of Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), and gave support to brutal military dictatorships in the 1970s in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Also the United States supported dictatorship in Haiti from 1957 until 1986. The Reagan administration engaged in a decade-long war on Central America in the 1980s.  In 1989 the United States sent 23,000 marines to overthrow the government of Manuel Noriega in Panama. (This was a prelude to Gulf War I against Iraq).

From 1959 until today the United States has sought through attempted military intervention, economic blockade, cultural intrusion, and international pressures to undermine, weaken, and destroy the Cuban Revolution.

Often during this dark history US policymakers have sought to mask interventionism in the warm glow of economic development. President Kennedy called for an economic development program in Latin America, called the Alliance for Progress and Operation Bootstrap for Puerto Rico. Even the harsh “shock therapy” of neoliberalism imposed on Bolivia in the 1980s was based upon the promise of rapid economic development in that country.

The Bolivarian Revolution

The 21st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to the drive for global hegemony and the perpetuation of neoliberal globalization. First, the two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.


On the Latin American continent, under the leadership and inspiration of former President Hugo Chavez Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, with his Bolivarian Revolution. He planted the seeds of socialism at home and encouraged Latin Americans to participate in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The Bolivarian Revolution stimulated political change based on varying degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neoliberal economic policies to economic populism. A Bolivarian Revolution was being constructed with a growing web of participants: Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba.

It was hoped that after the premature death of Chavez in 2013, the Bolivarian Revolution would continue in Venezuela and throughout the region. But the economic ties and political solidarity of progressive regimes, hemisphere regional institutions, and grassroots movements have been challenged by declining oil prices and economic errors by Maduro; increasing covert intervention in Venezuelan affairs by the United States; a US-encouraged shift to the right in the prior decade by “soft coups” in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador; and a more aggressive United States foreign policy toward Latin America. Governments supportive of Latin American solidarity with Venezuela were undermined and/or defeated in past elections in Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and now attacks have escalated against what former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton called “the troika of tyranny;” Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.  As Vijay Prashad puts it: “Far right leaders in the hemisphere (Bolsonaro, Márquez, and Trump) salivate at the prospect of regime change in each of these countries. They want to eviscerate the “pink tide” from the region” (Vijay Prashad, thetricontinental.org, January 20, 2019).

Special Dilemmas Latin Americans Face

Historically all Western Hemisphere countries have been shaped and distorted in their economies, polities, and cultures by colonialism and neo-colonialism. They have also been shaped by their long histories of resistance to outside forces seeking to develop imperial hegemony. Latin American history is both a history of oppression, exploitation, and violence, and confrontation with mass movements of various kinds. The Bolivarian Revolution of the twenty-first century is the most recent exemplar of grassroots resistance against neo-colonial domination. Armed with this historical understanding several historical realities bear on the current threats to the Venezuelan government.

First, every country, with the exception of Cuba, experiences deep class divisions. Workers, peasants, the new precariat, people of color, youth, and women face off against very wealthy financiers, entrepreneurs, and industrialists, often with family ties, as well as corporate ties, with the United States. Whether one is trying to understand the soft coup of recent years in Brazil, the instability in Nicaragua, or the deep divisions in Venezuela, class struggle is a central feature of whatever conflicts are occurring.

Second, United States policy in the administrations of both political parties is fundamentally driven by opposition to the full independence of Latin America. US policy throughout the new century has been inalterably opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution. Consequently, a centerpiece of United States policy is to support by whatever means the wealthy classes in each country.

Third, as a byproduct of the colonial and neo-colonial stages in the region, local ruling classes and their North American allies have supported the creation of sizable militaries. Consequently, in political and economic life, the military remains a key actor in each country in the region. Most often, the military serves the interests of the wealthy class (or is part of it), and works overtly or covertly to resist democracy, majority rule, and the grassroots. Consequently, each progressive government in the region has had to figure out how to relate to the military. In the case of Chile, President Allende assumed the military would stay neutral in growing political disputes among competing class forces. But the Nixon Administration was able to identify and work with generals who ultimately carried out a military coup against the popular elected socialist government of Chile. So far in the Venezuelan case, the military seems to be siding with the government. Chavez himself was a military officer.

Fourth, given the rise of grassroots movements, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela began to support “dual power,” particularly at the local level. Along with political institutions that traditionally were controlled by the rich and powerful, new local institutions of popular power were created. The establishment of popular power has been a key feature of many governments ever since the Cuban Revolution. Popular power, to varying degrees, is replicated in economic institutions, in culture, and in community life such that in Venezuela and elsewhere workers and peasants see their own empowerment as tied to the survival of revolutionary governments. In short, defense of the Maduro government, depends on the continuing support of the grassroots and the military.

Fifth, the governments of the Bolivarian Revolution face many obstacles. Small but powerful capitalist classes is one. Persistent United States covert operations and military bases throughout the region is another. And, perhaps most importantly, given the hundreds of years of colonial and neo-colonial rule, Latin American economies remain distorted by over-reliance on small numbers of raw materials and, as a result of pressure from international financial institutions, on export of selected products such as agricultural crops. In other words, historically Latin American economies have been distorted by the pressure on them to create one-crop economies to serve the interests of powerful capitalist countries, not diversified economies to serve the people.

Finally, and more speculatively, United States policy toward the region from time to time is affected by the exigencies of domestic politics. For example, during the Trump Administration verbal threats against Venezuela were articulated as the president’s domestic fortunes were challenged by the threat of impeachment and confrontations with the new Congressional leadership. War often masks domestic troubles. In the Biden years, foreign policy spokespersons warn of the spread of Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere. US policies toward Lating American become features of the New Cold War with China.

Where do Progressives Stand

First, and foremost, progressives should prioritize an understanding of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the role of Latin American as the “laboratory” for testing United States interventionist foreign policies. This means that critics of US imperialism can be most effective by avoiding “purity tests” when contemplating political activism around US foreign policy. One cannot forget the connections between current patterns of policy toward Venezuela, with the rhetoric, the threats, the claims, and US policies toward Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and in the new century, Bolivia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.

Second, progressives need to show solidarity with grassroots movements in the region, support human rights, oppose military interventions, and demand the closure of the myriad of United States military bases in the region and end training military personnel from the region. (When citizens raise concerns about other countries interfering in the US political system, it is hypocritical for the United States to interfere in the political and economic lives of other countries in Latin America.)

And finally, as tensions rise again in the hemisphere there are two growing dangers of violence spreading throughout Latin America. By attacking “the troika of tyranny,” the United States is increasing the likelihood of class war throughout the region. And, given growing Chinese and Russian economic and political involvement in the Western Hemisphere, it is not inconceivable for regional war to escalate to global war.

The time has come to stand up against United States imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.

(A useful history of United States interventionism can be found in Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Henry Holt, 2006).

 

Saturday, October 11, 2025

TWO AMERICAS IN CHICAGO: THE RICH AND THEIR MILITARY VERSUS THE PEOPLE: and New York Times Update

Harry Targ

A group of people protesting

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Protestors demonstrating against ICE and National Guard deployment gather Downtown on Oct. 8, 2025. ( Credit: Mustafa Hussain for Block Club Chicago)


From Carl Sandburg “Chicago,” 1914

(HOG Butcher for the World,
    Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
    Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight
    Handler;
    Stormy, Husky, Brawling,
    City of the Big Shoulders)

 

As I watch from afar the efforts of the ICE armies and the National Guard to invade my hometown, Chicago, I weep from within and at the same time think back to the history of the city with pride. The proud thoughts come from the education, formal and informal, I received about my hometown (an education incidentally that President Trump and his rightwing followers want to expunge from public discourse).

Sandburg correctly identified the centrality of Chicago for the growing national political economy of the late 19th century and what followed. Chicago became the center of continental distribution of goods with the construction of the railroad system. Agricultural goods were transported eastward from the rail hub of Chicago and goods produced in the East were moved westward across the continent. The “hog butcher” referred to the emerging meat processing, with the invention of the refrigerated railroad car, and continental distribution. With the meat packing industry came finance, manufacturing, and architectural innovations. The Chicago ruling class wanted the world to know of the city’s centrality to the new world order of capitalist innovation and architecture and put together the World’s Fair of 1892, celebrating the 400 years since Columbus “discovered” America.

But big capital did not qualitatively change the United States alone through its Chicago venue. Also, Chicago was the site of the mobilization of the modern working class. The eight-hour day movement culminated in 1886 with the Haymarket Affair, protestors victimized by violence, and their leaders tried, and some hanged for phony allegations of violence. Almost a decade later, 1894, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Pullman to break the Eugene Debs led, railroad workers strike. Meanwhile, Hull House which opened in 1889 by Jane Addams offered social services to the poor and immigrants.

Despite the victimization of the working class in the city, workers’ movements grew. The IWW was founded to organize the working class in a convention held in the city in 1905.  Men’s clothing workers walked out of manufacturing facilities to protest wage cuts in 1909. Members of the Socialist Party met in the city before and during World War One.

And in the Depression years workers associated with the new Communist Party launched Unemployment Councils to protect workers from evictions. And CIO organizing, occurring all around the country, was visibly manifested in the packinghouses and farm equipment manufacturing plants in and near the city. Chicago, along with being a hub of big capital, was also a major site of working-class militancy.

After World War Two, Chicagoans were both on the side of urban racial segregation and militantly opposed to it. Meatpacking union locals and unions in steel, auto, and farm equipment manufacturing participated in the rising national civil rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s. And in addition, Bronzeville artists and musicians, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots, and the Young Lords were leading players in the Northern struggles against racism. And the 1968 Democratic convention symbolized the congeries of ruling class violence and resistance that epitomized US political history.

So today, Chicago is again a visual manifestation of political struggle. The Trump Administration and the Right seek to crush the residues of progressivism that still exist in multi-cultural, class conscious, and racially diverse venues. If the resistance that has represented the best in the US experience can be crushed in Chicago, the thinking goes, then the entire nation can be controlled.

On our side, progressives, workers, anti-racist and feminist activists, members of the peace movement, and those supporting single-payer healthcare, environmental sustainability, and humane people every-where must oppose state violence in Chicago. People’s struggles in Chicago are the struggles for all of us. And that broader, historical consciousness is why today we mobilize rallies in support of No Kings.

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

New York Times

October 16, 2025


Chicago crackdown

Author Headshot

By Julie Bosman

I’m the Chicago bureau chief.

During a recent run near Lake Michigan, I watched a black S.U.V. make a U-turn and chase down three young men. Two armed immigration agents, their eyes peeking out from behind their balaclavas, jumped out and approached them. One asked what visas they held.

“H-1B,” they responded, looking bewildered. That’s the visa for foreign workers with special expertise.

Nothing that I could see would have attracted the attention of the agents, except for the fact that the men had brown skin. After questioning them, the agents let them go.

This scene is now unfolding across Chicago every day.

Federal immigration agents have been asking people about their legal status outside churches, homeless shelters, apartment buildings, parks and even a cemetery. Officers have questioned both U.S. citizens and legal residents, asking for passports and visas as proof of identity.

The presence of officers from Border Patrol and ICE has brought forth an intense backlash. Chicagoans are shouting at immigration agents, calling them fascists and Nazis, throwing objects at them and chasing their unmarked S.U.V.s or minivans, honking their horns to warn bystanders of ICE’s presence.

In response to what a Homeland Security official called “a surge in assaults,” the officers are using increasingly aggressive tactics. In recent days, they’ve hurled tear gas, pepper balls and smoke bombs at the public, protesters, journalists and even Chicago police officers, often without warning. Today’s newsletter is about the conflict on the streets of Chicago.

The intervention

A federal agent, surrounded by smoke, kicks a canister of tear gas as another agent looks on.
Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

The Trump administration began a crackdown on illegal immigration here five weeks ago, promising to help the city by arresting “criminal illegal aliens.” But the tactics are unusual.

Schools. Officers are lingering just off campus in some places. So principals have ordered “soft lockdowns,” keeping students in classrooms until the agents are gone. Last month, ICE tried to arrest a father after a day care drop-off; in the confrontation, he was shot and killed. Now some schools use neighborhood volunteers, at parents’ request, so white adults can walk Latino children home.

Restaurants. Kitchens are often staffed by undocumented immigrants, and ICE knows it. Workers are afraid to leave their homes, and many have cut their hours. One Mexican spot I like keeps its door locked — even when it’s open — as a shield against ICE, allowing customers in one at a time.

Public spaces. Many people, even those with legal status, are asking friends to do their grocery shopping for them. Streets are quieter. One man with legal residency got a $130 ticket for not having his papers, The Chicago Tribune reported.

Why here? It is not surprising to people here that the administration has focused on Chicago, which calls itself a sanctuary city. That means it doesn’t help the federal government deport undocumented immigrants. Half a million Chicagoans, nearly one-fifth of the population, were born outside the United States, and support for immigrants is generally strong in the area. Local police officers won’t ask suspects about their immigration status.

Trump and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, have an adversarial relationship, and Trump regularly criticizes Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Brandon Johnson. The president wrote online that they “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” City and state leaders said they were receiving no communication from the Department of Homeland Security or the White House about the operations.

The backlash

A crowd standing close to helmeted federal agents in camouflage. One woman is remonstrating; others hold up phones.
Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

The fury over immigration enforcement has expanded in the last few days. After a car chase and crash involving agents, more than 100 people came out of their homes and shouted, “ICE go home.” At least one person threw eggs at the agents, hitting an agent directly in the head. (Trump ordered National Guard troops into Illinois over Pritzker’s objections, but a federal judge blocked their deployment last week.)

In response, federal officers released tear gas on the crowd, including 13 Chicago police officers who had been called to the scene. For weeks, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have disbursed people filming and shouting at them by shooting pepper balls and tear gas.

This is very different from norms of modern policing: Officers typically release chemical agents only in extreme situations, and only after warnings. Agents have pointed guns at people who get in their way.

On Wednesday, Pritzker complained that ICE was causing “mayhem” and warned that other cities would face the same fate. In the Oval Office yesterday, Trump named San Francisco. He said, “We’re just at the start. We’re going to go into other cities.”



 

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Challenging Late Capitalism