ONE-SIDED CURRICULA AND A PROBLEMATIC ECONOMIC MODEL

Harry Targ

The 2026 conference, Spirit of 1776: Advancing Opportunity, Innovation, and Free Markets, is September 29-30 on Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus announced:

“In recognition of the 250th anniversary of the United States, the conference will examine the political, philosophical, and historical foundations of freedom and capitalism and explore their enduring impact on innovation, entrepreneurship, opportunity, and principled leadership.

Through thought-provoking presentations and discussions, attendees will engage with ideas that continue to shape business and society today”

https://business.purdue.edu/events/cornerstone/schedule-of-events.php

https://business.purdue.edu/events/cornerstone/speakers.php

 Some Thoughts

As we have listened to the debate about the salience of the building of a semiconductor factory, SK Hynix, in our community for economic development reasons, I was reminded of similar promises by leaders of both parties as to economic growth which is in stark contrast with the realization that for years almost half of Hoosier families have been living at or below a livable wage. Data indicates that Indiana politics and economics and the "free market" currying of big investors has not worked for most Hoosiers. It is time to listen to those who call for investment in schools, healthcare, local businesses, and repairing our environment. There are no quick fixes but the economic model preached in higher education and government does not work for the vast majority of working people.

Purdue Today posted announcements of  conferences in 2025 and 2026 (see above) co-sponsored by its business and liberal arts colleges. While we should celebrate the communications of all bodies of scholarship (aside from clearly the voices of those who celebrate racism, sexism, and nativism), it is worthy, in this time of reflection about higher education, to be clear about the differences between ideology and empirical reality.

One keynote speaker at the 2025 conference indicated her expectations: “My hope is that everyone in attendance will leave the conference with a better understanding of the uniqueness of the American capitalistic system and a renewed commitment to ensuring that the American ideals of freedom and capitalism are inherited by the next generation,”

Attendees at the 2025 heard speakers from The National Review Institute, The National Constitution Center, the Liberty Fund, and the Mercatus Center had "a deep discussion about free markets and morality.” 2026 keynote speakers from the American Enterprise Institute and the Business RoundTable will share a similar perspective.

The 2026 Conference was advertised as the “Cornerstone for Business.” Cornerstone refers to the much-touted transformation of what used to be a vibrant program in Liberal Arts to a pastiche of courses that are alleged to be interdisciplinary. The 2025 conference and the upcoming one seek to integrate the business school with what was left of liberal arts at Purdue University.

While diversity of perspectives on a university campus is commendable, one wonders if these conferences are not so much about scholarship and reflection as about the promotion of a narrow economic ideology.

For example, data below indicates that majorities of working people in Indiana have not been beneficiaries of the “market,” the “pursuit of profit,” and economic concentration. In fact, as the United Way survey mentioned below suggests almost 40 percent of Hoosiers struggle to get by economically. It could be added that there has been a systematic assault on workers, and their organizations, for at least 20 years in the politics of the state.

On the Hoosier Economy

Hoosier politicians and corporate/university elites suggest that the Indiana economy is booming and will only improve with less taxes, more support for industrial projects like LEAP, and a general reliance on the "free market." The United Way ALICE reports suggest that economic circumstances of large percentages of Hoosiers have worsened over the last decade.

A recent United Way Alice Report suggests that the number of households in Indiana living below a livable income have increased since the last decade.

https://www.idsnews.com/article/2023/07/2023-alice-report-indiana-monroe-county-financial-struggles-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR3CmyN48IbLpgir3dDJ095QODjPmMvpbOV92rzLrcTDpQR8JXevR-FqwaA#:~:text=Out%20of%20the%202.7%20million,to%20the%202023%20ALICE%20Report

  Previous Data on the Indiana Economy

The centerpiece of Indiana public policy since 2004 has been corporate and individual tax cuts and reduced budgets for education, health care, and other public services. Indiana was one of the first states to begin the privatization of the public sector, including transferring educational funds from public to charter schools. It established a voucher system to encourage parents to send their children to private schools. Also, Indiana sold public roads; privatized public services; and recruited controversial corporations such as Duke Power to support research at the state’s flagship research universities. Meanwhile the manufacturing base of the state shifted from higher paying and unionized industrial labor (automobiles, steel, and durable goods) to lower paying service jobs and non-union work such as at the Amazon distribution center.

The United Way published a revised ALICE survey in 2020 concluding that “In 2018, eight years after the end of the Great Recession, 37% of Indiana’s 2,592,262 households still struggled to make ends meet. And while 13% of these households were living below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), another 24% — almost twice as many — were ALICE households: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These households earned above the FPL, but not enough to afford basic household necessities.” https://iuw.org/alice/

In 2022  Aaron Renn wrote that “The Hoosier state has had a Republican governor since Mitch Daniels was elected in 2004. It has been a Republican “trifecta” state, with GOP majorities in both houses of the legislature, since 2011… its average disposable income had actually declined to 89.5 percent of the national level….When Daniels was elected, Indiana’s per capita disposable income was only 90.5 percent of the U.S. average.” Aaron Renn, "Indiana under Republican Rule: ‘Pro-Business’ Policy Disappoints outside the Sunbelt” American Affairs, Winter 2021 / Volume V, Number 4

But a recent Alec (the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch Foundation economically libertarian lobby group) co-sponsored study Rich States Poor States says the following: “Indiana is currently ranked 7th in the United States for its economic outlook. This is a forward-looking forecast based on the state’s standing (equal-weighted average) in 15 important state policy variables. Data reflect state and local rates and revenues and any effect of federal deductibility.” The Rich States, Poor States  variables used to rank states included personal property, and corporate tax rates, levels of workers compensation, whether the state was a so-called “right to work state’, minimum wage laws, and other pro-business measures. The more beneficial to business, the higher the ranking the state was given. https://www.richstatespoorstates.org/states/IN/ 

In contradiction to this ALEC sponsored report,  David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly said that “Indiana’s focus for so long, over so many years of Republican leadership, has been to create a tax climate and a regulatory structure that is friendly enough to business that companies can’t help but consider Indiana for major projects.” He referred to national data indicating that the cost of living and business climate in Indiana were strong but, in his words, “Our education attainment in the state is not good. The ability to reskill the workforce, I think, could improve. Health, life and inclusion, overall, I think, conditions rank poorly nationally in our state. And also workforce preparedness, also related to reskilling, is a liability for us.” https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/lilly-ceo-takes-critical-stance-against-indiana-economy/

In Conclusion

In other words, Indiana’s economy, particularly in the years of Republican one-party rule is one of prioritized tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, and business incentives at the expense of education, health care, wages, worker rights, and public institutions, And this is the contradiction: Indiana being “currently ranked 7th in the United States for its economic outlook” versus the dramatic ALICE estimate that 37 percent of Indiana households live below a livable wage. As Renn summarizes it: “since 2000, the state ranks a dismal forty-sixth in median wage growth, and the growth in median earnings has been at only half the rate of the rest of the country. Only 42 percent of workers in the state earn a living wage (adjusted for cost of living) and have employer-provided health insurance.”

Assessing a variety of studies over the last several years leads to the conclusion that an evaluation of the current state of the Indiana economy depends upon where one is located in terms of economic, political, or professional position. Those Indiana men, women, and children who come from the 37 percent of households who earn less, at, or slightly above the poverty line probably have a negative view of their futures. For them, the tax breaks for the rich and the austerity policies for the poor are not positive. 

And, of course, this analysis could be coupled with the history of the genocide against Native peoples, racism, and segregation, and war that have been prominent in US and Indiana history as the so-called “free market.” In other words, it is incumbent on the Colleges of Business and Liberal Arts to present a more scholarly analysis of US economic and political history going beyond celebrating the “free market” to understanding the American experience.

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 Harry Targ

ADOPTING A PROGRESSIVE AGENDA

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The data is clear. Americans want affordable healthcare, livable wages, communities that are not destroyed by data centers, police repression and technological spying. And Americans oppose war and militarism. WE progressives are the ones who support what the American people, largely a working class, want.

And Peace:

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THE RISING OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE BUILDING OF THE MODERN LABOR MOVEMENT: a book review

 HarryTarg

 John Hanson, Fight & Win: Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, 1934, Hardball Press, 2026.

Minnesota Digital Library

1934 was an apocryphal year for the modern labor movement. Uprisings occurred in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. Workers wanted fair wages and just working conditions. They wanted the right to form unions. And when unions existed the rank and file wanted their unions to stand up for worker rights.

The Wagner Act was passed in 1935 giving workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively and more. The CIO, a confederation of industrial unions, was formed. And in 1936-37 auto workers launched a sit-down strike in Flint Michigan for union recognition. While history is replete with starting dates, 1934 was significant. And the events in Minneapolis were pivotal. That is what this excellent informative memoir is about.

Jon Hanson tells the reader the story of a workers uprising in Minneapolis, primarily trucker drivers, who built a union out of a small group of overworked and superexploited trucker drivers to a citywide general strike involving multiple unions and work forces, women’s auxiliaries, and citizens at large to bring the city to a halt. A general strike was met with police violence, including the killing of picketers by police, and the mobilization of the National Guard to “reestablish order.”

Minnesota Digital Library

Workers withstood the violence, repression, lukewarm support of the workers by a liberal Governor to achieve union recognition, bargaining and negotiations, and improved wages, benefits sand working conditions.

The story is told in vivid detail by Hanson’s father ( also named John) who played an instrumental role in organizing Local 574, serving on its strike committee and bringing to the struggles his own knowledge and sympathies for the predecessors from the Industrial Workers of the World.

As John’s father reminisces about the details of the struggle he emphasizes the importance of worker solidarity. And as suggested above, similar struggles were occurring around the country which had a lasting impact on federal legislation and a new militancy among broad sectors of the industrial working class.

The narrative begins with John’s father’s youth, growing up on a modest farm. All the children in the household had farm chores each day, from feeding the livestock to cleaning their living spaces, to preparing them for market, to working in the fields.  The account vividly portrays farm life for a reader (like me) who had no experience with farm life.

Because of economic crisis, the family had to give up the farm and John’s father was forced to “ride the rails” to earn a living for the family doing odd jobs. Here again, for those with no such experiences (except for the lyrics to old folk tunes) the reader learns about the varieties of workers who were forced to be itinerate workers and how the experience shaped John’s father’s knowledge of the working class. This knowledge shaped his consciousness as he returned to work in Minneapolis as a truck driver. The pain and suffering of the working class and the IWW sensibility which was imprinted on his mind shaped his activism in Local 574.

After the rich personal biography, the bulk of the volume describes the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, strike committee strategizing, city and state repression, bargaining and negotiations, sand the final settlement. The reader learns in detail of most of the dimensions of a labor/management dispute, including the organized efforts of the business class to crush the union drive.

The book ends with brief discussion of the impacts of the 1934 narrative, on the labor movement and labors’ struggles today (some gains and some losses).

Finally, in addition to this important narrative for labor scholars and activists, the author presents brief descriptions of his father’s reactions over twenty years later as he tells his story of 1934. It is clear that the general strike not only affected the labor movement in Minnesota, but it affected John’s father as well.

 

                                                Fity.club

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE AND THE WAR SYSTEM

 Harry Targ

“2026 Theme: Invest in Peace - For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day

"On 21 September, the world marks the International Day of Peace.

Today, amidst staggering volatility, the search for peace feels overwhelming—but it has never been more urgent.

Peace is more than the absence of war; it is the foundation necessary to collectively tackle humanity’s challenges. It is the lived experience of safety, dignity, opportunities and cooperation in our daily lives.

Under the theme Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day, this year’s International Day of Peace honours the 'everyday architects of peace'—people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability, and building a lasting peace from the ground up.

Remember, peace isn’t just built in conference rooms—it is shaped by everyone, everywhere, every day.

Everyone, everywhere can do their part for peace. Take one small step for peace every day” https://www.un.org/en/observances/international-day-peace

The Capitalist System is a War System

Marx and Engels declared in their famous 1848 manifesto that capitalism was a world system.  Due to cutthroat competition every corporation, every bank, every small business would need to expand, or it would be defeated in the marketplace by more successful competitors. Therefore, competition would lead to consolidation, a shift from many economic actors to declining numbers of them. This process of capital accumulation extended to the entire globe.

Lenin argued that by the dawn of the twentieth century, competition had led to monopolies within countries. States driven by monopolies expanded all across the globe. Competing states often engaged in war. Their expansion also generated resistance, rebellion and revolution around the world. In sum, the capitalist system by its very nature was a war system.

In addition, capitalist economies, particularly imperial powers such as the United States, required natural resources, cheap or slave labor, land, customers for products, and opportunities to invest accumulated profits in overseas corporations, and banks. In the post-World War II period, capitalist expansion even required the establishment of a global debt system that would increase the possibility of penetrating the economies of countries that incurred debts.

The realities that Marx identified in the nineteenth century are relevant today in two ways. First, given technological advances, what economists call neoliberal globalization is the logical extension of his insight that capitalism needs to “establish connections everywhere.”

Second, given episodes of resistance to capitalist expansion, conflict and violence in the global system are likely to occur from time to time among capitalist states (each seeking to enhance their own monopolies), between capitalist states and emerging socialist states that reject the very premises of capitalist economics, and between capitalist states and marginalized people who rebel against capitalist/imperialist intrusion.

In the twentieth century hundreds of wars and covert interventions resulted in deaths exceeding 100 million people. Between 1945 and 1995 the United States alone was involved in wars, civil conflicts, and covert operations that cost more than 10 million deaths. Most of this violence was justified as a response to a demonic Soviet Union and “international communism” threatening “the free world.” The defense of the “free world” usually was fought out in the Global South. In fact, in the twentieth century the vast majority of victims of the capitalist war system were people of color, primarily non-combatants. And adding to the direct human cost have been the devastation of the land, the extraction of basic resources, and the destruction of the environment. 

Impacts of the Capitalist War System in Imperial States

Foreign policy has always been inextricably connected to the struggles for social and economic justice; including worker and human rights. And, as a consequence, foreign policy has always been used as a tool to distract, divide, and cloud the consciousness of working people everywhere. Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party and four-time candidate for president of the United States, was jailed for his speech in Canton, Ohio decrying United States participation in World War I because of its profoundly negative consequences for the working class at home.

Debs pointed out that American “democracy” allowed no real opportunity for workers, the people who fought its wars, to determine whether to go to war or not. Workers were not allowed to hear and read all about the consequences of military participation. Before and during World War I, the United States government created a propaganda arm, The Committee on Public Information, to disseminate information to the citizenry promoting the United States entry into the war in Europe. Opponents of the war, such as Debs, were silenced. 

It was during the war that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and began to establish an alternative to the capitalist war system. President Wilson and his Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned of the danger of this threat to “democracy” and “freedom.” 

As Debs implied, the capitalist war system needed impressionable military recruits to fight the wars in the name of a higher good while banks and corporations expanded their presence on a worldwide basis. But the capitalist war system which recruited foot soldiers also required the accumulation of money capital to pay for the wars and the capacity to develop “connections everywhere.” And after the second world war, during the Cold War, trillions of dollars have been wasted on the establishment of a worldwide network of military bases and outposts; troop deployments; space, drone, aircraft, and nuclear technologies; and a security apparatus that has its electronic and personnel tentacles in virtually every other country.

In addition, the development of a military capability to maintain and expand the capitalist system became a profitable business in its own right. What President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” is a dense network of profitable connections between huge corporations, banks, universities, think tanks, and manufacturing facilities in virtually every city, town, state, and most importantly, Congressional District. The United States after World War II created what Andrew Bacevich, international historian, called a “permanent war economy.”

Economic Consequences of the Capitalist/War System

Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.

Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures. Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current.  And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists.

“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.” Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.

 The Meaning of the Capitalist/War System for Today’s Progressive Movements: Bringing the Peace Movement Back In

Paradoxically, the left and progressive forces in the United States are intuitively aware of the points long ago proclaimed by Marx, Debs, and King. Libraries are full of analyses and data that corroborate the basic arguments made above. But the recent resurgence of a new socialist left and an energized progressive majority, have not developed analyses and programs that make the necessary connections between capitalism and human misery at home and the war system abroad.

First, many grassroots activists, seeing the need to target their energies to local and state politics, and single issues nationally, have taken the view that adding foreign policy to the agenda, complicates movement building. In fact, the exciting campaigns of Bernie Sanders also dealt only marginally with foreign policy. And Sanders mostly spoke of foreign policy when his opponents raised questions about his visits to Nicaragua and Cuba in the 1980s. In retrospect, it seems obvious that progressives should link the possibility of a financially sustainable health care system or free tuition for college to reductions in military spending.

Second, progressives have tactically avoided pressing necessary conversations about the past and present, and how a progressive United States government could participate in the future international system. For example:

There needs to be a serious discussion of twentieth century socialism: both governments and movements. Sectors of the left in the United States have been unwilling to have a textured analysis of the strengths as well as the weaknesses of socialist regimes, what some refer to as “really existing socialism,” and how distortions of those systems were connected to US imperialism.

There needs to be a serious conversation about twenty-first century developments in Cuba, Vietnam, China, the state of Kerala in India, and what remains of the Bolivarian Revolution in Latin America and the growing prominence of the Global South and  such organizations as the BRICS. As long as such conversations are avoided, the progressive base will be diverted by the twentieth century trope about the “evils of communism.”

There needs to be detailed analyses of military spending. Much of that work is being done by the War Resisters League, The Cost of War Project, and others, but little of it finds its way into grassroots campaigns for progressive politicians or campaigns in support of single-payer health insurance.

Finally, there is a need to address important questions not often discussed. Two stand out: first the doctrine of the inevitability of war which cripples everyone’s political consciousness; and second, the celebration of grotesque violence in popular culture. These are not abstract issues that belong only in the classroom or the church sermon. They need to be highlighted. And the writings and speeches of Marx, Debs, and King would support the view that assumptions about the inevitability of war and the glories of violence are intimately connected to the capitalist/war system.

In short, the emerging socialist movements, the burgeoning progressive campaigns, and the peace movement must reconnect in fundamental ways: theoretically and practically. War, the preparation for war, and human misery everywhere are inextricably connected. And these ideas should be part of our conversations this International Day of Peace.

                                    Veterans for Peace

 

Arlo Guthrie, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRuzCgaDL4I&list=OLAK5uy_mC9-gOlcikHD4sbTNi1zjr_XPEWOfSqa4&index=10

THE UNIVERSITY SHOULD BE A SITE FOR CONTESTED TERRAIN

 Harry Targ

Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university.

Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others.

The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education. In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for deciding on their own what interpretations of subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples,  patriarchy, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted.

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions, compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions.

He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

https://znetwork.org/zvideo/the-peoples-historian-dave-zirins-new-book-explores-remarkable-life-of-howard-zinn/

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few.

ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events included Governors  such as Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, and John Kasich. ALEC legislative programs included lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers' unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that denied climate change, and more effectively celebrated the "successes" of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded million of dollars to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws, traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Recipients of the organization’s 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” included Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News.

Associations which lobbied for restricting academic freedom in higher education included David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS has sought to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia.

NAS  former president Peter Wood contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.” Presumably he today would endorse legislation, state and national, that regulates what ideas could be discussed in higher education, for example on questions of class, race, and gender.

Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples, and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university. And today the Trump Administration and its allies in states are transforming the very meaning of higher education, precluding contentious ideas as suggested by scholars like Howard Zinn.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.

 

THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY, THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND WARS TODAY

Harry Targ

Within days of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and continued until 2021.

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March 2003. 

Over the last decades, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died. Meanwhile the United States has maintained over 800 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras and Venezuela and Ecuador in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters halfway around the globe.

Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act extended the prerogatives of government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy and most recently rounding up and kidnapping thousands of men, women, and children deemed "illegal" for deportation. And some who protest the activities of ICE have been shot and killed.

Domestically, the decades since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. employment, and health care benefits. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality.

Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan administration that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, has been starved even more resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.

Not all have had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being.

Trump and the "New" Imperialism

A factional dispute among foreign policy elites began to emerge in the 1970s about the best strategies and tactics which should be pursued to maximize the continued global economic, political, and military dominance of the United States in the international system. The dispute was not over whether the United States should continue to pursue empire but rather how to continue to achieve it. 

The debates were occasioned by the rise of the countries of the Global South, the societally wrenching experience of the Vietnam War, the growth of power and influence of the former Soviet Union, and since its collapse, the emergence of China as a new global economic, political and military power. In addition, the new international economy was becoming more global, that is to say more interconnected. 

Debates about strategy, tactics, surfaced between the neoliberal globalists who emphasized so-called free trade, financial speculation, and the promotion of a neoliberal agenda that advocated for the privatization of all public activities by states and the development of austerity policies that would shift wealth from the many to the few. The international debt system would be the vehicle for pressuring poor and rich countries to transform their own economic agendas. This faction dominated United States foreign policy making for generations, particularly from Reagan to Clinton to Obama. In political/military terms, they have sought to push back challengers to neoliberal capitalism: Russia, China, populist Latin American countries, and they have advocated advancing US economic interests in Asia and Africa. Many of the institutions of the neoliberal globalists, sometimes called the “deep state” included the CIA, NSA, and other security agencies.

The other faction represented by President Trump and some of his key aides prefer economic nationalism, restricted trade, building walls, avoiding diplomacy, and they are driven by a deeply held white supremacist ideology. They believe, as political scientist Samuel Huntington argued, that we are engaged in a civilizational conflict with Islam, a fourth world war. The neoliberal globalists undermined Ukraine, put more NATO troops in Eastern Europe and want to depose Putin and weaken Russia. This is not on the Trump agenda.

The forbearers of the current generation of Trumpian economic nationalists, came from the so-called “neo-conservatives,” historically organized around the 1990s lobby group, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and in the 1950s and 1970s of The Committee for the Present Danger (CPD). Both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives share a common vision of a global political economy controlled by the United States but the former prefer selective use of military force and greater use of economic and diplomatic pressure and covert interventionism while justifying policy on humanitarian grounds, including expanding democracy. Since, they say, the United States represents the hope of democracy in the world, it is as Madeleine Albright called it. “the indispensable nation.” 

The neoconservatives, in a sense more frank, argued that with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States was the hegemonic power. With that power PNAC argued, the United States should have imposed a world order and state regimes that comported with US interests and ideology. Over the years, the policies of the two factions converged; hence economic penetration, covert interventions, occasional wars, and support for expanding military spending. But, often for reasons of domestic rather than international politics, conflicts between the two factions resurface.

Now the United States, under President Trump, has relaunched trade wars, advocated a trillion-dollar military budget, kidnapped the President of Venezuela and taken over the entirety of its economy, escalated the brutal economic blockade of Cuba and supported Israel's genocidal war on the Palestinian people and has launched brutal bombing of Iran. "Humanitarian interventionism" has been supplemented by the militarism proposed by the neoconservatives of the 1990s. While we mourn the tragic deaths of 9/11, we must remember that the "war on terror" since then has been rationalized by it.

HORRIFIC MOMENTS IN UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY

 Harry Targ

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Image from Dr. Martin Luther King.net.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

Political upheaval in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia is reshaping migration trends in Europe. The number of illegal border-crossing detections in the EU started to surge in 2011, as thousands of Tunisians started to arrive at the Italian island of Lampedusa following the onset of the Arab Spring. Sub-Saharan Africans who had previously migrated to Libya followed in 2011–2012, fleeing unrest in the post-Qaddafi era. The most recent surge in detections along the EU's maritime borders has been attributed to the growing numbers of Syrian, Afghan, and Eritrean migrants and refugees. Jeanne Park, “Europe’s Migration Crisis,” CFR Backgrounder,  September 23, 2015, www.cfr.org/migration/eurpes-migration-crisis)

The Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder recognized the massive crisis of migration brought on by upheavals all across the Global South. It identifies the massive migrations from Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and the Horn of Africa. But, interestingly enough the title suggests that the focus of concern was not as much about the pain and suffering of the people forced to migrate as the problem migration presented to the countries of the European Union.

A dispassionate analysis of the causes of this twenty-first century wave of migration should inevitably lead to what may be referred to as “horrific moments in United States foreign policy.” These horrific moments, since the late 1940s, are central to understanding the pain and suffering of millions of people around the world. Horrific refers to human tragedies of such magnitude that they have left millions killed, injured, displaced, or unable to sustain life because of forces external to their ideas and actions. Moments refers to key policy decisions that reasonable persons can view as instrumental to the development of these human tragedies. United States foreign policy suggests that the United States has made policy decisions that have been inextricably connected to the human tragedies of the last sixty years.

Six such horrific moments in United States foreign policy need to be recognized for their consequences for humankind. First, in 1950 the United States embarked on global military operations in response to conflicts on the Korean peninsula. Korean political life was in disarray after World War II and the United States and the former Soviet Union stepped into the fray to “temporarily’ occupy the North and South. The growing conflict between Koreans was not started by the two powers but was the result of internal political struggle among the Korean people. The point here is that after North Korean troops invaded South Korea, the United States, officially supported by the then pro-US United Nations, launched a large-scale military response. And, in violation of the UN resolution, the United States took the war to the North. 

The end result of the expanded Korean War was that it set the precedent for United States sending troops anywhere in the world. The war justified dramatic increases in military spending. And it made military spending a permanent fixture of US economic and political life. Most importantly, it destroyed the Korean peninsula, particularly the economic infrastructure in the North; led to millions of Koreans killed, wounded, and displaced; and 37,000 US soldiers killed. The Korean War was the first instance of many in which the United States and the Soviet Union would be fighting the Cold War in the Global South.

Second, the Korean War established the principle that the US would engage in major wars elsewhere as circumstances were seen as necessary. The next war was in Vietnam. The war began in 1950 and the “moment” continued until 1975.  The long agonizing experience involved repeating decisions escalating war: from funding the French colonial overseers of Vietnam; to creating and training a new government in South Vietnam; to sending thousands of specially trained counter-insurgency fighters; to transferring over 500,000 US soldiers to Vietnam; to massive bombing; the dropping of napalm; the killing of 3-4 million Vietnamese people; and unleashing genocidal violence in neighboring Cambodia.

Third, following multiple military and covert operations, the Reagan Administration embarked on a war against Central American peoples leading to about 200,000 deaths, injuries, and thousands set afoot seeking economic and military survival through desperate migrations to the north. Nicaragua was targeted for attack because the President’s neoconservative policy advisors regarded that country as a surrogate of the dreaded Soviet Union. US money and military advisors were allotted to help a dictatorship try to defeat a peasant guerrilla movement in El Salvador. The United States funded Guatemalan militarists who were engaging in a genocidal policy against the indigenous people of that country. Honduras was armed and became the military base for the wars of Central America. And the brutal blockade of Cuba, begun in 1960, continues to this day.

Fourth, in the twenty-first century the Bush administration waged war against Afghanistan and Iraq.  The Taliban, who came to power in the 1990s after a long civil war in Afghanistan which began in 1979, created relative stability but were alleged to be partners to the crimes of 9/11. President Bush ordered the Afghanistan government to release Osama Bin Laden to US authorities or face war. When they refused the US attacked that country and thus created permanent instability. The war on Afghanistan was to become América’s longest war. And Afghanistan is poorer and more devastated, now than in October, 2001, when the war started.

The lies about why the United States had to make war on Iraq are common knowledge. Even if morality and international law are not brought to the analysis, everything the United States did in Iraq was wrong. After nearly a decade of war, The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) emerged with powerful military force and some popular support and challenged the Iraqi government, the Kurds, the Turkish government, the Syrian government, and any other outside forces.

Fifth, if the regional instability brought on by the Afghan and Iraq wars were not enough, the Obama administration, with NATO collaboration, led a massive bombing assault that destroyed the relatively stable Libyan regime setting in motion, internal violence, instability, and emigration.

Sixth, and throughout this time, the United States has transferred billions of dollars to Israel. And after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the latter launched a genocidal war on all Palestinian people and targeted populations in Lebanon, Syria, and more recently Iran. Israel’s attack on Iran was coupled with a Trump Administration war on Iran, which now has evolved into a regional war with global economic consequences.

Several lessons can be drawn from these “horrific moments in United States foreign policy.” The pursuit of United States hegemony has generated violence across the globe. This violence has destabilized stable political regimes, led to mass slaughter of the peoples of these countries, created opposition forces which now are targeting American citizens and institutions in the affected areas. In addition, the United States and other arms merchants have increased the flow of armaments to Asia, the Persian Gulf the Middle East, and Latin America. The overwhelming casualties of war since the end of World War II have been citizens of the Global South, people of color. In addition, these horrific moments have cost Americans billions of dollars and probably almost one million deaths and injuries sustained by United States soldiers. 

Finally, referring to the migration problem that the Council of Foreign Relations Backgrounder referred to above, much of it is due to the horrific moments in United States foreign policy. The Korean and Vietnam Wars legitimized war strategies and military interventionism to achieve US global goals. These strategies continued in Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Iran creating a worldwide and desperate population of people fleeing war, ethnic hatreds, and poverty.

 

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