US Foreign Policy, International Relations, and Militarism Today

Harry Targ

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND MILITARISM TODAY.pptx

 

The Peace Movement Today

 The history of the peace movement is complicated, with successes and failures. First, the history of peace movement solidarity has been intimately connected to anti-racist, pro-labor, women’s, and environmental struggles for decades. When Dr. King and Mohammed Ali connected the evils of Vietnam with racism and poverty at home proponents of peace and social and economic justice gained in strength.

 Second, the relative strength in number, message, and organization of the peace movement has varied significantly over time. Since the onset of the Cold War peace and solidarity activities have been most vibrant during the Vietnam War, the wars against Central America, Gulf War One, the bombing of Serbia, the Iraq War, Israeli bombing of targets in Gaza, and threats of bombing Syria in 2013.

 Today the movement is muted because of peace activist energies being targeted against threats to whatever remains of democracy after the Trump administration. Paradoxically, with the continuation of war and terrorism on the world stage, the systematic use of hybrid war techniques to starve populations in states defined as enemies, to the spread of new high technology instruments of slaughter, the danger of the return to big power conflict, and continuing increases in military spending, the voices of the peace movement have been dispersed and hence weakened. This is a dilemma not only for peace but for economic justice, saving the environment, and ending racism and sexism. 

During this disturbing period in world history the end of the Trump Administration and its replacement by the new President Biden foreign policy influentials long associated with prior Democratic and Republican administrations continue their roles. Therefore, it is useful to step back and analyze “the time of day” on a worldwide basis: as to global class forces and their ideologies; contemporary techniques of empire and their consequences for the lives of billions; individual global crises; and where President Biden stands on issues of war and peace and foreign policy in general. Much of the material below was first assembled in the summer, 2016 in anticipation of an electoral victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton.  While that prediction was incorrect, the issues involving the United States in the world remain remarkably (and sadly) the same today, as the new year, 2022 unfolds.

 The Ruling Class Agenda for the United States Role in the World

 From a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:

HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving, and it is worth reminding ourselves why: It generated unprecedented global prosperity, lifting billions of people out of poverty; democratic government, once rare, spread to more than 100 nations; and for seven decades there has been no cataclysmic war among the great powers. No wonder U.S. engagement with the world enjoyed a bipartisan consensus.

 The Washington Post editorial of 2016 quoted above still clearly articulates the dominant view envisioned by US foreign policy elites: about global political economy, militarism, and ideology. It in effect constitutes a synthesis of the "neocon" and the "liberal interventionist" wings of the ruling class.

 First, it is inspired by the necessity of 21^st century capitalism to defend neoliberal globalization: government for the rich, austerity for the many, and deregulation of trade, investment, and speculation.

 Second, the Post vision of a New World Order is built upon a reconstituted United States military and economic hegemony that has been a central feature of policymaking at least since the end of World War II even though time after time it has suffered setbacks: from defeat in Vietnam, to radical decolonization across the Global South, and to the rise of competing poles of power in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. In addition, despite recent setbacks, grassroots mass mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and austerity policies have risen everywhere,  including in the United States. The Washington Post speaks to efforts to reassemble the same constellation of political forces, military resources, and concentrated wealth, that, if anything, is greater than at any time since the establishment of the US “permanent war economy” after the last World War.

 Historian, Michael Stanley, in an essay entitled “‘We are Not Denmark’: Hillary Clinton and Liberal American Exceptionalism,” (Common Dreams, February 26, 2016) pointed to the ideological glue that has been used by foreign policy elites, liberal and conservative, to justify the pursuit of neoliberal globalization and militarism; that is the reintroduction of the old idea of American Exceptionalism, which in various forms has been proclaimed by elites since the foundation of the Republic. 

 The modern version, borne in the context of continental and global expansion, serves to justify an imperial US role in the world. Along with posturing that the United States is somehow special and has much to offer the world, American Exceptionalism presumes the world has little to offer the United States. The only difference between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy is whether the exceptionalism still exists and must be maintained or has dissipated requiring the need to “make America great again.” Leaders of both parties, however, support the national security state, high military expenditures, and a global presence—military, economic, political, and cultural. With the election of Joe Biden, the corporate media in the main has reiterated the idea that the United States remains the “indispensable nation” in the international system, despite temporary setbacks resulting from Trump foreign policies.

 Techniques of Empire Today  

 Although the imperial agenda, and the ideological precepts justifying it, has remained the same for two hundred years the techniques of empire have changed as growing resistance at home and abroad and new technologies dictate. Changes in warfare, other violence, and imperial expansion include the following:

 -Wars are internal much more than international and casualties are overwhelmingly civilian rather than military.

-The global presence of some form of the United States military is ubiquitous-between 700-and 1,000 military bases, in anywhere from 40 to 120 countries

- US military operations have been privatized. A 2010 Washington Post report found 1,911 intelligence contracting firms doing top secret work for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites. Ninety percent of such work is being done by 110 contractors.

-More “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” have been used to kill alleged enemies over the last eight years as the entire prior period of US military operations. Drones have come home as their use by the Dallas police recently showed.

-US agencies, such as the CIA, have been engaged in the increased use of assassinations and efforts to undermine governments. One report indicated that there are 13,000 assassination commandoes operating around the world.

-So-called “humanitarian assistance” is used to support United States policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. For example, a New York Times story reported that at least 40 American groups received $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.

-The United States increasingly has used economic tools—economic blockades, trade sanctions, covert financing of pro-US politicians in other countries, and condemnations by some international organizations to undermine, starve, and ultimately, it is hoped, to entice people to overthrow their governments. These techniques, often labeled “hybrid war,” are being used against Venezuela, Cuba, and some thirty other countries.

 Some generalizations we can draw from the new techniques of war are the following:

-Imperial rule has become global.

-The Military/industrial complex has expanded beyond President Eisenhower’s wildest nightmares. Large sectors of military operations—from cooking and cleaning to killing—have been privatized.

-Military operations continue and expand without “boots on the ground.” Empires can kill with impunity.

 Nick Turse and colleagues reported on data indicating that the United States has been engaged in secret military training of personnel in many countries, what they called ‘a shadowy network of U.S. programs that every year provides instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel.”  (Douglas Gillison, Nick Turse, Moiz Syed, “How the U.S. Trains Killers Worldwide,” Portside, July 13, 2016).

Their report is worth further quoting:

 “The data show training at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries…involving on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies, civilian agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military units, private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of five states.” Perhaps most important for the peace movement is the following: Despite the fact that the Department of Defense alone has poured some $122 billion into such programs since 9/11, the breadth and content of this training network remain virtually unknown to most Americans.”

 Impacts of 21^st Century Imperialism

 By any measure the pain and suffering brought by 21^st century imperialism is staggering. US Labor Against the War reported that sources estimate 1.3 million people, mostly in the Middle East and South Asia, have died due to the war on terrorism initiated in 2001. They quote a research report that estimates that one million Iraqis have died since 2003 and an additional 220,000 citizens of Afghanistan and 80,000 from Pakistan. Other sources claim these figures are too conservative and remind us of the untold thousands upon thousands who have died directly from war and violence in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.

 These figures, of course, address deaths directly attributed to war and terrorism but do not include economic sanctions, massive flight of peoples from war zones, persecution by authoritarian regimes, environmental devastation and drone strikes and assassinations. Large areas of the globe centered in the Middle East and North Africa are ungovernable with foreign intervention and anomic domestic violence on the rise. In a troubling essay by Patrick Cockburn the author asserts that:

 “We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars-in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover.” (Patrick Cockburn, “The Age of Disintegration: Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World,” The Unz Review: Mobile, June 28, 2016).

 Cockburn suggested that this fragmentation had core features: no winners and losers, deconstruction of states, massive population upheavals and migrations, religious fundamentalism   replacing socialist and/or nationalist politics, and outside interventions. The Global South project Vijay Prashad described so well in The Darker Nations has been superseded by competing fundamentalist projects.

 Specific Cases

 NATO/Ukraine/New Cold War

 In 2016 leaders of the 28 NATO countries met in summit in Poland to reaffirm their commitment to the military alliance that was established in 1949 for the sole purpose of protecting the European continent from any possible Soviet military intervention. With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, rather than dissolving, NATO took on the task of policing the world for neoliberal globalization and the states ‘victorious” in the Cold War. NATO was the official operational arm of military operations in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the military force that would destroy the Gaddafi regime in Libya. 

 After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, NATO incorporated the states in Eastern Europe that had been affiliated with it. Now Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic States remain the frontline in the ongoing hostilities with Russia. They and western financiers from Ukraine, with substantial assistance from the United States, engineered the coup that ousted a corrupt but elected President in Ukraine. This set off an ongoing civil war between those in the population who wanted to continue ties to Russia and others who wanted Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO. The instability in Kiev was orchestrated by high US state department officials who advocated a New Cold War with Russia. Some US diplomats involved in the Ukraine story may return to the Biden diplomatic team,

 At the NATO summit of 2016 it was agreed to establish four battalion-sized “battle groups” in Poland and the Baltic states. To use the language of the Cold War, this small force could serve as a “trip wire” that could precipitate an “incident” and a major war with Russia. NATO agreed to bolster the Ukraine military. The alliance would commit to establishing a controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe.  And NATO countries promised to spend two percent of their budgets on the military. The continued commitment of the United States was affirmed by President Obama. After the Trump period of reduced commitment to NATO, President Biden wishes to resuscitate the alliance.

 The Asian Pivot

 In 2011, US spokespersons announced that the country would shift resources and attention to Asia from the Middle East, an area with demanding security and economic interests. Although US/Chinese dialogue continues the United States has criticized China’s repositioning of what it regards as its possessions in the South China Sea. The United States has expanded military relations with Vietnam, reestablished military bases in the Philippines, and has generally avoided criticizing efforts by ruling Japanese politicians to revise their constitution to allow for a full-scale remilitarization. The United States has threatened North Korea over their military maneuvers and has bolstered the South Korean military. While Trump did reach out to North Korea, tension reduction on the peninsula was short-lived. On the economic front the United States was instrumental in building support for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) to challenge Chinese economic hegemony in the region. While Trump rescinded the TPP approach, he launched a trade war against China and engaged in attacks on Chinese corporations operating in the West. Both Trump and Biden spokespersons have made it clear that a New Cold War against China is ramping up. Corporations engaged in military production and research universities have used the China threat as a justification for increased military spending, research and development, cyber-security and a whole panoply of tools to fight twenty-first century wars.

 The Middle East

 Most American politicians express their belief that the US must maintain a special relationship with the state of Israel. One of the few active mobilizations for peace today is the worldwide campaign to demand governments, corporations, and other institutions boycott, and divest holdings in what is regarded as an apartheid state, Israel, which oppresses its Arab population and those living in the Occupied Territories. The campaign is so effective that along with national politicians, governors and state legislatures have taken stands against the BDS campaign. Israel continues to expand its occupation of Palestinian land, repress Palestinians within Israel, and is currently not distributing the covid-19 vaccine to Palestinian people, while other Israel citizens are inoculated.

Next to the historic US ties to Israel, most analysts see the deconstruction of the Middle East that Cockburn wrote about as a direct result of the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Over the next decade, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries have been torn apart by civil war fueled by western, primarily US, intervention, continuing US support of Saudi Arabian militarism, and the fractionalization of states in the region. The Trump administration increased the threat of  war  with Iran. President Biden might be open to returning to the Nuclear Treaty with Iran from which Trump withdrew.

 This ten year war on the Middle East has created a growing terrorist response directed at western targets and an ideological campaign, including calls to violence, against all the traditional imperial powers who dominated the region for one hundred years. With this as a backdrop, the United States response to violence has been stepped up high-tech killing justified by a public campaign that demonizes Muslim people in the United States and everywhere in the world.

 AFRICOM

 Nick Turse described the growing US military presence on the African continent. A special command structure, AFRICOM, was established in 2008 to oversee US security interests on the continent. Initially, Turse reported, the Pentagon claimed that it had one larger base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But enterprising researchers discovered that the US military had a dense network of “cooperative security outposts,” bases and other sites of military presence, at least 60 across the continent, in 34 countries. The US has defense attaches in 38 countries. 

 An Oxford researcher was quoted by Turse on the new oversite of the African continent.

 “AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces…Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft. There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases…so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary” (Nick Turse, “America’s Empire of African Bases,” TomDispatch.com, November 17, 2015).

 Latin America

 United States foreign policy toward Latin America has taken a variety of forms since the onset of the 21^st century. The United States, in the older mold, encouraged and assisted in the failed military coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 and gave at least quiescent support to the military overthrow of Honduran President Zelaya in 2009. At the same time the United States has curried the favor of upper class opponents of the regimes transformed by the Bolivarian Revolution: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Two larger countries Argentina and Brazil have experienced domestic political turmoil in recent years, to some extent driven by internecine politics and corruption. The United States, in all these cases has networked with opposition political forces, sometimes encouraging wealthy citizens of countries such as Brazil and Venezuela to launch votes of no confidence or impeachment proceedings against their governments that have stood against the US neoliberal economic agenda. Some have referred to the new US strategy in the region as one of creating “silent coups.”

 The influence of the United States has weakened since the onset of the Bolivarian Revolution and the distain Latin Americans hold toward the United States because of its long-standing efforts to isolate Cuba. President Obama in collaboration with President Castro announced a new opening of relations between the two countries in December, 2014 and until 2017 US economic constraints on travel, trade, and investment were reduced (although the blockade remains) until Trump reinstated new draconian sanctions. Whether in the Obama Administration or during the Trump presidency, what remained similar to past US policy toward Cuba, however, was the stated aims of United States policy: the promotion of democracy and markets. It was no mere coincidence that President Obama visited Cuba in March, 2016 and then flew to Argentina to negotiate with the newly elected neoliberal President Macri of Argentina.  The Trump Administration reversed the Obama “soft power” approach to Cuba, returned to sanctions and tightened them further than they had been for years. In addition, Trump escalated “soft coup” attempts and economic sanctions against Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. Biden spokespersons have spoken in favor of “more effective” sanctions against Venezuela. It is unclear whether Biden will pursue the “soft power” diplomacy with Cuba that Obama initiated. Meanwhile most of the countries of the world have called for an end to the US blockade of Cuba.

  The Idea of the National Security State

 The contradiction that still needs an explanation is the fact that for the most part the American people oppose wars and intervention. This is particularly so in the twenty-first century when so much pain and suffering has been caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008 Americans elected Barack Obama, in part because he had opposed the war in Iraq and had called for a new American foreign policy based on respect for other nations and peoples. He promised to use diplomacy not war as the primary tool of international relations and in some instances has tried to do that. He probably wanted to end the two awful wars and show some respect for others, even while promoting a neoliberal global agenda in a world of diverse centers of power and wealth. But why have Obama’s cautious efforts to promote United States economic and political interests been contradicted by the patterns of interventionism and the rhetoric of military globalization so common over the last few years?

The answer can be found in a variety of explanations of United States imperialism including what Mike Lofgren has called the “deep state.” Lofgren defined the “deep state” as  “… a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.”  (Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the ‘Deep State’: Hiding in Plain Sight,” Online University of the Left, February 23, 2014).   Others have examined invisible power structures, including class, that rule America (from C. W. Mills’ classic The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 2000 to Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong, and David Wright, The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).  

 The roots of analyses like those above are that power to make critical decisions reside not in the superstructure of the political process; the place were competitive games are played for all to see, but in powerful institutions embedded in society that can make decisions without requiring popular approval. Over and over again, the “deep state” apparatus  of the national security state has led the American people into war or covert interventions that destroyed the rights of people in other countries to solve their own problems. In the end these nstitutions have involved the United States in death and destruction all across the globe. And ironically as majorities of Americans feared that President Trump might stage a domestic coup to stay in office or make war on Iran to regain his popularity they hoped that sectors of the national security state would reject presidential orders to carry out such egregious acts.

And Military Spending Continues (see the power point link above)

("The spending on contractors continues today at the same rapid clip, accounting for more than half of average Pentagon spending each year. And with Congress poised to approve a $778 billion one-year spending package (that would be around $7.8 trillion over ten years, even without further increases) for the military, the contractors stand to gain again. Democrats are slashing the Build Back Better bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over ten years. Meanwhile, Pentagon contractors have received $3.4 trillion over the past decade." (Lindsay Koshgarian, "U.S. Military Contracts Totaled $3.4 Trillion Over 10 Years,” Institute for Policy Studies, October 28, 2021)

 So Where Does the Peace Movement Go From Here?

 Analyses of what is wrong are easier to develop than thinking through ways to respond. This essay opened with a dilemma; a broken peace movement locally and nationally. It then argued that the foreign policy elites have had a hegemonic vision of the role of the United States in the world yesterday,  today, and tomorrow. And these elites and institutions of the national security state have at their disposal 21^st century military technologies to maintain their power in the world. The consequences of force and intervention have been horrific for billions of people. 

 Having outlined the scope of the problem, we have briefly described current US foreign policy “trouble-spots:” Russia and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Phyllis Bennis wrote in 2016 that: “An anti-war position, in the broadest sense of reducing military budgets, calling for diplomacy over war, condemning the ‘inevitable’ civilian casualties, calling out how military assaults create rather than destroy terrorism…these are enormously unifying principles among progressives….movements matter.” (Phyllis Bennis, “What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War,” Portside, July 8, 2016).

 Approaches the peace movement can take in the near term include the following:

 1.Develop a theory, a conceptual scheme about the multiplicity of connected issues that affect peoples lives linking economics, politics, militarism, and culture. Think about a diamond shaped figure. At the base is an economic system, at this point in time finance capitalism and the exploitation of workers. Above the base at the two side points are militarism on one side and racism and sexism on the other. At the top add destruction of nature. Conceptualizing the war problem in this way we begin to see the connections between the 21^st century state of capitalism as a global system and war, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction.

 2.Use the theory or schema to develop an educational program that begins with efforts to understand the fundamentals of the war system (direct and structural violence as peace researchers put it). Use the schema as programs on specific issues are prepared. Always relate the specific issue at hand: Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, undermining regimes in Latin America for example, to the diamond.

 3.Participate in grassroots organizing in solidarity with others, always linking issues to the war/peace paradigm. One error participants in the various Moral Mondays campaigns have made is to accede to the idea that Moral Mondays should only be about state legislative issues, not national or international ones. And work to network with peace groups all across the nation to rebuild the national peace movement that so effectively fought against war and imperialism in the past.

 4.Engage in global solidarity. The analysis above has emphasized the forces of global hegemony, or imperialism. It is critical to be aware of and support the grassroots ferment that is occurring all across the globe; from Arab Spring; to the Bolivarian Revolution; to anti-austerity campaigns in Greece, Spain, Quebec, and elsewhere, and the broadening climate change movement that encompasses the globe.

 The tasks of a 21^st century peace movement are not different from those of the past. They involve education, organization, and agitation. With the growth of worldwide resistance to neoliberal globalization, austerity, racism, sexism, and destruction of nature, it seems natural to incorporate concerns for peace and the right to national and personal self-determination to the budding radical movements of our day.

  

Season for Hope, Season for Struggle

 A Reposted Essay for the Season

https://youtu.be/n0xzyhoeu1Y

‘I swear it’s not too late’

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)

There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time for every purpose, under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
(repeat chorus)

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
(repeat chorus)

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
(repeat chorus)

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

(Words from Ecclesiastes; text adapted and music by Pete Seeger)

We received a wonderful Chanukah present the other day, a children’s book called Turn! Turn! Turn! It is an illustrated adaptation by designer Wendy Anderson Halperin, of words from the Old Testament and music by Pete Seeger.

This present rekindled for me emotions, as I am sure it does for others, as I remembered things past; youth, family, naïve images of peace and tranquility. There is poignancy for us now too as we move towards the holidays at the same time that we struggle over the range of issues that will shape the destiny of humankind: peace, saving the environment, jobs, and health care reform.

This season progressives are debating whether we have been betrayed by this or that politician,  how to revitalize the peace movement, fight climate change, combat racism, and defeat fascism.

But then “Turn, Turn, Turn” reminds us that “to everything there is a season.” The song suggests that the ebbs and flows of history are not bound by calendars, dates and times, and heroes and villains. A “season” is defined by its historic projects.

And these historic projects, the words suggest, include “a time to reap,” “a time to build,” “a time to break down,” “a time to cast away stones,” and “a time to gather stones together.”

Our projects, our seasons, entail defeats and victories, tears and laughter, but the seasons go on and encompass “a time to love” and “a time to hate.” And in the end the song declares, “I swear it’s not too late.”

So if we are inspired by the song, as we were in the 1960s, we remember that the struggles for peace and justice are not about individuals, political parties, and calendar deadlines but about the continued commitments which we have made to create peace, save the planet, put people back to work, and provide secure health care for all.

 Sometimes We Have to Sing

Harry Targ

The banks are made of marble

https://youtu.be/ZzTT5fXquTo

I first heard two Weavers Carnegie Hall albums in the winter, 1958. I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx seriously until the 1970s when  I started teaching Marx and political economy.. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard those Weavers albums. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Joan Baez and later Paul Robeson, Josh White, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

From time to time I reminisce about all this as I still listen to the music that makes me mad, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine-tuned lectures I listen to and even give myself, on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization, and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home.

The deficit battle, which is a farce except for the pain the outcome will cause working people, reminded me of the Weavers blasting out “The Banks Are Made of Marble.” They sang of travels around the country seeing all the suffering that the capitalist system was causing; “the weary farmer,” the idle seaman, the miner scrubbing coal dust from off his back, “heard the children cryin” as they froze in their shacks, and the suffering of workers everywhere.

Why does the song suggest there is so much suffering all across America? The answer is so simple:

...the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

The song, written by Les Rice in 1948 said the antidote to this situation was workers getting together and together making a stand. He predicted that the result would be a good one:

Then we’d own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we’d share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for

Pretty Boy Floyd and Christmas

I also was thinking about an old Robin Hood song written by Woody Guthrie in the 1930s about an Oklahoma legend, Pretty Boy Floyd. According to Woody’s rendition, Pretty Boy Floyd got into a fight with a deputy sheriff and killed him. Floyd was forced to flee and allegedly took up a life of crime. At least authorities and journalists blamed Floyd for every robbery or killing that occurred in the state of Oklahoma. “Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.”

But in true Robin Hood fashion Pretty Boy Floyd stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Floyd, the outlaw, paid the mortgage for a starving farmer. Another time when Floyd begged for and received a meal in a rural household, he placed a thousand-dollar bill under his napkin when he finished dinner. One Christmas Day Floyd left a carload of groceries for starving families on relief in Oklahoma City.

And in these days of massive unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, criminal wealth, and staggering poverty, through the voice of Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie tells the wrenching story of capitalism that today is not too much different from during his time.

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

 

https://youtu.be/G4YKUJZI5Bg

 

Maybe we ought to revisit the old songs and sing them as we hit the streets, get out the vote, organize workers, and build a vast and powerful peoples’ organization.

 (An early version of this essay was published in The Rag Blog August 10, 2011.) 

A power point presentation: RETHINKING THE UNIVERSITY IN AN AGE OF EDUCATIONAL CRISIS

 Harry Targ

Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Purdue University

Rethinking the University in an Age of Educational copy.pptx

A Radio Interview on the crisis in higher education: (from the 33 minute mark)

 

December 16

GUEST: Dr. Harry Targ, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, and a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, talks about how Koch funded neoliberalism is becoming hegemonic in higher education.

www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

Diary of a Heartland Radical

Also wonderful music and commentary by Fred Nagel on the Korean War. classwars.org

SONG: Pete Seeger, Seeds: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 3 ... Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)
SONG: Steve Earle, Washington Square Serenade ... Steve's Hammer (For Pete)

NEOLIBERAL ATTACKS ON LIBERAL ARTS

Harry Targ

(an earlier version of this essay was posted on September 22, 2016)

“… if we wait for reform from within the ranks of today’s liberal arts fields, we may wait forever, or at least a fatally long time. The concerns most often voiced about the current university scene—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—these and other problems are not unique to the liberal arts departments, but a host of surveys document that they are most common and most pronounced there. A monotonously one-sided view of the world deprives students of the chance to hear and consider alternatives, and to weigh them for themselves in the process we call “critical thinking.” … Incidentally, the widely criticized policy of lifelong tenure was created to protect diverse viewpoints from discrimination; where is its rationale in schools where everyone thinks so exactly alike? “(Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. “Liberalizing the Liberal Arts,” Remarks Accepting The Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education, October 12, 2018, Washington D. C.  

https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/Re-liberalizing-the-Liberal-Arts.pdf

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 by the Koch brothers as an organization of corporations, lobby groups, and state-level politicians to propose and implement model legislation, prioritizing such policies as promoting educational vouchers and charter schools, limiting the role of trade unions, restricting environmental regulations, and instituting voter identification rules. In addition, ALEC has established networks of think tanks to address a multiplicity of other public policy questions.  

A key issue addressed by this rightwing network of organizations is education. And to that topic the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), to which Purdue President Daniels spoke, was created 25 years ago. ACTA defines itself as “… the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.” Major funders of ACTA, which was co-founded by Lynne Cheney and former Senator Joe Lieberman, include the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Family, Donor Trust, the John Olin Foundation, and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. These and others constitute a “who’s-who” of sponsors of rightwing so-called “libertarian” organizations.

Professor Stanley Fish reports that ACTA believes that curricular changes in higher education,  must be made at the administrative level because, as Fish wrote, professors “...cannot be trusted” to be “responsive to public concerns  about the state of higher education.” In short, ACTA, which claims to be committed to academic freedom, is committed to circumventing faculty participation in matters of educational substance in their universities.

In a 2015 article Lindsey Russell, an ALEC Director of its Education Task Force, wrote an essay entitled “STEM-Will It Replace Liberal Arts?” In it he reports Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that from 2012-2022 there will be a growth of 13 percent in the STEM related workforce. As a result, he poses the question reflected in the title of his article. His answer, although he does not say so directly is a qualified “yes.” Russell quotes a Forbes magazine article that suggests that STEM graduates need “critical thinking skills” to pursue their careers. These skills, the article asserts, along with those in communication, are what a Liberal Arts education can provide. In an interesting statement he says about STEM and Liberal Arts:

“STEM is the present and the future, and STEM related fields are projected to grow by more than 1 million by the year 2022…Liberal arts education may seem irrelevant today, but it is necessary if America’s youth are to become successful members of today’s STEM-dominated workforce.”

In the Daniels speech quoted above, the Purdue President pridefully declared that “At Purdue, by our land-grant heritage and by our current conscious strategy, the so-called STEM disciplines predominate; more than 60% of our undergraduates and an even higher share of our graduate students pursue engineering, chemistry, physics, agricultural and biological science, and the like. We are by that measure the third most STEM centric school in the country.” While Daniels, in his speech recognized the importance of the Liberal Arts, he made it clear that existing faculty in Liberal Arts fields are very unlikely to be responsive to any need for changes in the substance of education; in fact, liberal arts faculty, he asserted are monotonous, dogmatic, and authoritarian, and, reject “…the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines.”

The controversies over Liberal Arts, shared governance, and the vitality of non-STEM curricula resurfaced recently when the Purdue University student newspaper reported that the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts was freezing faculty hires in the English Department, downsizing popular programs in the department such as Creative Writing, and requiring the reduction of the numbers of admissions of new graduate students to its various programs. Budget cuts imposed on the department threaten the survival of The Sycamore Review, a highly regarded literary journal run by graduate students. Faculty in STEM fields, Liberal Arts colleagues, and alumni of the Department of English have publicly communicated their frustration with the Dean’s decision to reduce funding for the English Department. https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_b04b6564-5772-11ec-8b9e-7f950e2bb4d0.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share

While debates continue about how much STEM fields should be prioritized in the educational process, a more important discussion should involve the substance and role of what usually is called “the Liberal Arts.” Should Liberal Arts be seen as only a training ground for honing critical thinking and communications skills or does the Liberal Arts project go much deeper?

Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMasters University, Hamilton, Ontario, posted an essay he called “Neoliberal Savagery and the Assault on Higher Education as a Democratic Public Space,” on September 15, 2016. His critique of the growing connections between higher education and market needs, as reflected in the public policy stances of Koch Foundation organizations such as ALEC and ACTA seem relevant to the Purdue case. Political pressures to change and marginalize Liberal Arts have their roots in the theory and practice of neoliberal ideology, an ideology based on a crude vision of markets, privatization of public institutions, and the reduction of all of social life to commodification. Reinstituting older curricula celebrating markets and the efficacy of United States political institutions are part of the mantra of these pressure groups as opposed to what Daniels called “unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines,” presumably curricular innovations that revisit issues of race, gender, class, the environment, and war/peace.

The most important element of Giroux’s essay is his assertion that the university represents a “public trust” and a “social good.”  He correctly asserts that in an age of media concentration and a profusion of unsubstantiated information on the internet, the university remains a scarce and valuable venue for exposing young people to rich, complicated discourse and analyses of society—past, present, and future. Giroux’s suggests that the university is “a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the civic imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility, and the struggle for justice.” Giroux quotes Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, and Leonidas Donskis, a social philosopher: “how will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumental university is like?”

https://cafedissensus.com/2016/09/15/neoliberal-savagery-and-the-assault-on-higher-education-as-a-democratic-public-sphere/

The tasks cultural theorists such as Giroux lay out do not, or should not, suggest that only through Liberal Arts can the civic responsibility of the university be maintained. But, and this is critical, Liberal Arts should be seen as necessary partners in the curriculum of every university, so that students are prepared to be vibrant contributors to the larger society in which they live.

Conceiving of Liberal Arts as just a limited instrumentality of a narrowly defined STEM education, as advocates such as the ALEC spokesperson and their colleagues in ACTA suggest, demeans not only the fundamental importance of the Liberal Arts for pursuing an intellectually curious and socially just society but the basic project of higher education. And English Departments remain an important part of this project.

What Ails American Democracy: a podcast from China Plus

 http://chinaplus.cri.cn/podcast/detail/1/2698671

RED SCARES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: REWRITING THE NARRATIVE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Harry Targ

Purdue University has become the first public institution of higher education to adopt a free speech policy called the ‘Chicago principles,’ condemning the suppression of views no matter how ‘offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed’ they may be. (Tyler Kingkade, “Purdue Takes A Stand For Free Speech, No Matter How Offensive Or Unwise,” Huffington Post, May 15, 2015).

Colleges and universities often boast of their diversity in terms of race, sex, gender or sexual orientation, but too often they fail to encourage diversity of thought. (Kathleen Parker, “In Name of Free Speech at Purdue, Beyond,” Lafayette Journal and Courier, Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7A).

Cliches, however shopworn, can retain their usefulness provided they continue to describe their object with some accuracy. One cliche that has lost almost all value is “speaking truth to power.” These days, it almost invariably is attached not to an act of genuine courage but to its opposite, the spouting of some politically favored bromide. (Mitch Daniels, “This climate change contrarian gives us an important reminder about science in general, ”Washington Post, October 12, 2021).

To its credit, the Purdue University Board of Trustees in 2015 passed a resolution defending free speech on its college campus. The new policy was strongly endorsed by the Purdue President Mitch Daniels who, quoted by Parker, condemned universities that spawn “a bunch of little authoritarians with an inverted view of our basic freedoms.”

While the policy is correct, the implied narrative of the threat to academic freedom and diversity of thought as coming from the Left, progressives or liberals, constitutes an extraordinary rewriting of the experience of a hundred years of higher education. Any serious revisiting of the history of the modern university shows clearly that the ideas, disciplines, purposes of higher education have been shaped and transformed by money, power, the perceived needs of United States national security, and conservative ideology.

For example, Ellen Schrecker documented the enormous impact that the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s had on higher education in her book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1988).  She interviewed academic victims of McCarthyite attacks on faculty at prestigious universities.  They were subpoenaed to testify before state legislative or Congressional committees about their former political affiliations and associations.  As was the requirement of the times, those ordered to testify could not just admit to their own political activities but were obliged to give witness against others whom they may have known.

Some victims were former members of the Communist Party, others were signatories to petitions supporting the Spanish loyalists during their civil war, and still others had supported banning atomic weapons.  Perhaps the most troubling element of the Red Scare story was the fact that university administrations refused to defend those of their faculty who were attacked. Furthermore Schrecker reports that some university officials demanded that their faculty cooperate with these committees.  Her subjects reported that they received little or no support from administrators because officials wished to protect their universities from funding reductions.

Since the end of the Cold War, some scholars have begun to examine other aspects of the anti-communist hysteria as it related to the academy. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, in Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism: 1945-60, addressed the multiplicity of ways in which funding priorities, rightwing assaults, official pronouncements from government officials, lobbying efforts by big business groups, and shifting electoral political currents affected and formed the content of academic programs since World War II. 

For example, disciplines then, and now, have been shaped by dominant "paradigms," or approaches which have included assumptions about the subject, aspects of the subject that deserved study, theories that were most appropriate for understanding the subject of the field, and the methods that should be used to study subjects in the field.  Most important, all the social sciences and humanities adopted views of their disciplines that did not challenge ongoing U.S. Cold War assumptions about the world. In each case, dominant paradigms of the 1950s and beyond constituted a rejection of 1930s and 1940s thinking, which were shaped by the labor and other struggles of the Depression era.

In the words of scholar Henry Giroux, the military-industrial-academic complex influenced personnel recruitment and retention and the substance of research and teaching.  Disciplines with more ready access to research dollars -- from engineering to psychology -- defined their research agendas to comport with the interests of the government and corporations.

However, students in the 1960s began to demand new scholarship and education.  Opposition to the Vietnam War particularly stimulated demands on professors to rethink the historical character and motivation of United States foreign policy.  William Appleman Williams and his students, the historical revisionists, articulated a view that the United States practiced imperialism ever since it became an industrial power.  Classrooms where international relations and foreign policy were taught became "contested terrain" for argumentation and debate between the older and more benign view of the U.S. role in the world and the view of the U.S. as an imperial power. 

The contestation spread.  Students demanded more diverse and complicated analyses of race and racism in America, patriarchy and sexism in gender relations, and working-class history. Every discipline and every dominant paradigm was subjected to challenge.  The challenges were also reflected in radical caucuses in professional associations and even in some of the more upright (and "uptight") signature professional journals. As a result, there was a diminution of Red Scares in higher education, for a time.

The spirit of ideological struggle in the academy diminished after the Vietnam War and especially after Ronald Reagan became president.  Reagan brought back militant Cold War policies, radically increased military expenditures, declared Vietnam a "noble cause," and developed a sustained campaign to crush dissent and reduce the strength of the labor movement.  The climate on campus to some degree returned to the 1950s.

However, a whole generation of 1960s-trained academics were now tenured faculty at universities around the country.  They institutionalized programs in African American Studies, Women's Studies, Peace Studies, and Middle East Studies.  Critical theorists populated education schools, American Studies programs, and other pockets of the university. Faculty continued the debate with keepers of dominant paradigms, created interdisciplinary programs, and developed programs shaped by key social issues such as racism, class exploitation, gender discrimination, the environmental crisis. and war.

But by the 1990s, a new version of the Red Scare was surfacing.  Some conservative academics and their constituencies talked about declining standards they said were caused by the new programs.  Others criticized what they regarded as an insufficiently rosy view of United States history.  They claimed that the United States was being unfairly condemned for the killing of millions of Native Americans or because slavery and racism were presented as central to the history of the country.  They formed academic associations and interest groups to defend against critical scholarship.

David Horowitz came along.  Overseeing a multi-million-dollar foundation funded by rightwing groups, Horowitz launched a campaign to purify academia of those who had records of teaching, research, and publication that he saw as unduly critical of the United States, ruling political or economic elites, or the global political economy.  He opposed those scholar-activists who participated in political movements or in any way connected their professional and political lives.  And he opposed those academics who participated in academic programs that were interdisciplinary, problem-focused, and not tied to traditional fields of study.  

Horowitz published a book in 2006, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which he presented distorted profiles of illustrative faculty whom he believed violated academic standards.  Most of those identified either engaged in political activity and/or participated in interdisciplinary scholarly programs that he found offensive: Middle East Studies, Women's Studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, and Peace Studies.

In conjunction with the book and similar assaults on those he disagreed with on his electronic news magazine, Horowitz encouraged right-wing students to challenge the legitimacy of these professors on college campuses and encouraged conservative student groups to pressure state legislatures to endorse so-called "student bill-of-rights legislation."  Such legislation would have established oversight by state legislatures of colleges and universities, especially their hiring practices.

Campaigns led by Lynn Cheney, the former vice-president's wife, and former Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, included the creation of an organization called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.  As Giroux summarized it, ". . . ACTA actively supports policing classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the autonomy of teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic freedom" (Giroux, The University in Chains, Paradigm, 2007, 162).

Horowitz, ACTA, and other conservatives who attacked the university targeted visible academics for scrutiny and persecution.  Ward Churchill, a provocative professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, was fired after a university committee was created to review his scholarship because of controversial remarks he made off campus.  Norman Finkelstein, a DePaul University political scientist who had written several books critical of interpreters of Israeli history and foreign policy, was denied tenure after a coordinated attack from outside his university led by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.  Distinguished political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt became the subject of vitriol and false charges of anti-Semitism because they published a long essay and book analyzing the "Israeli lobby." More recently, the University of Illinois reversed its contractual relationship with Professor Steven Salaita who posted electronic messages strongly critical of the state of Israel.

In addition, the new Red Scare has reinforced and legitimized the dominant paradigms in various academic disciples and created an environment of intellectual caution in the academy. While the impacts are not easily measurable, untenured faculty cannot help but be intimidated by the public attacks on their senior colleagues.  The system of tenure and promotion in most institutions is vulnerable to public pressures, individual reviewer bias, and honest disagreements among faculty about whether published work and teaching is worthy of promotion and tenure.  Therefore, just as the administrators and faculty of the 1950s felt vulnerable to outside assault on their institutions, those passing judgment on today's faculty might see the necessity of caution in hiring and retaining faculty whose perspectives are new, different, radical, and engaged.

In short, the real threats to academic freedom and free speech on college campuses have almost always come from those who wish to defend the status quo in scholarship, teaching, advocacy, foreign and national security policy, and the way the economy is organized. 

Furthermore, in a recent book Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, (“Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War,” Pluto Press, 2021), argue that today the most fundamental question that supporters of real academic freedom should address is what politically motivated and economically powerful forces are raising the issue of academic freedom and individualism and what newer supporters mean by these terms. From the standpoint of these authors, vast resources of the Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, their think tanks and support groups, advocate an higher education that celebrates individual freedom and the virtues of western civilization “while denying the existence of actual material and historical legacies of racial, gendered, and class-based exclusions, marginalizations, and violences.”

In short, Wilson and Kamola argue, these powerful economic interests in US society today seek to remake higher education to celebrate “individuals maximizing utility within the freedom of immaculately self-regulating markets.” And, for them, “manufacturing a campus free speech crisis” uses the traditional language of academic freedom to stifle scholarship and debate on issues and traditions of scholarship that have been growing to equip students with a more accurate understanding of the past and the present. And educational spokespersons like President Daniels, cleverly misuse the apt phrase “speaking truth to power” to defend those who wish to stifle real debate on issues of educational and public policy significance.

 One would hope that the new defenders of free speech and academic freedom, such as Kathleen Parker and the Purdue University Board of Trustees did in 2015, will defend faculty who are critics of various public policies and the prevailing distributions of wealth, income, power, and unequal privileges based on class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. This would be an historic change from the practice of silencing progressive voices in higher education.

An earlier version of this essay was posted on May 21, 2015.