THE PURDUE/KAPLAN DEAL: A Repost

Monday, June 12, 2017

THE NEXT PHASE OF THE KAPLAN DEAL: DEFINE THAT UNIVERSITY

Harry Targ

As you've heard, Purdue President Mitch Daniels has announced plans to create a new, Purdue-affiliated
institution to address the needs of adult learners. To
do this, Purdue will acquire Kaplan University, which
has extensive experience in online learning.

I’d like to ask for your input as we think about how to
develop the name and identity of this new institution.
(An e-mail from the Senior Vice Provost for Teaching
and Learning sent to the faculty on June 9, 2017,
requesting completion of a survey by June 13, 2017).

Recent History

On Thursday, April 27, 2017,  President Mitch Daniels, Purdue University, announced to the university community a dramatic new program that he and the Board of Trustees had been fashioning in secret for months. Purdue University, a self-proclaimed world class university, would be acquiring Kaplan University, one of several controversial for-profit on-line universities that have emerged over the last twenty years.

The campus community was stunned by the announcement which it learned about through a hastily called special meeting Daniels assembled with selected faculty and an e-mail announcement to the faculty.  One week later, Daniels defended the secret deal before a special meeting of the University Senate. He criticized those who had written about complaints and lawsuits by former Kaplan students who paid enormous tuitions and upon graduation were not able to secure the jobs Kaplan advertising had claimed they would obtain. He also proclaimed that the Purdue/Kaplan connection would serve the millions of non-traditional students in the United States who now would be able to get on-line college degrees.

Among the concerns registered by Purdue faculty were whether professors would have input on educational policy matters concerning degrees granted by the new Purdue/Kaplan partnership. Faculty raised questions regarding the academic integrity of entire degrees offered on-line. Many more questions involved staffing, tenure and promotion, admissions, state expenditures, and the bypassing of the state’s technical and community colleges, and regional campuses. Virtually no answers were given to these questions and the administration has proceeded to seek official approval from a politically-appointed state higher education oversight board. Meanwhile President Daniels claimed that the Purdue/Kaplan venture will cost Purdue nothing, no tax dollars would be used, and the collaboration might bring in profits from the online venture.

The dramatic developments at Purdue University highlight a number of issues that bear upon the mission and purpose of Purdue, a land grant university. The state chapter of The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) expressed many of the concerns faculty and others raised about the new arrangement with Kaplan:

The Indiana Conference of the AAUP objects strenuously to the recently announced Purdue/Kaplan deal, on the following grounds:

1. No faculty input was sought before this decision was made.
2. No assessment of the impact on the academic quality of Purdue was made.
3. No transparency was demonstrated in this process.
4. Faculty governance at what will become the “New University” is practically non-existent.
5. Non-profit institutions serve the public good; for-profit private institutions serve corporate interests. The two should not mix.

The AAUP maintains that: "institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition."

Defining the New University: Soliciting Faculty Input After the Decision Was Made

In the midst of lingering questions about the connections between Purdue and Kaplan Universities and growing skepticism about the impending relationship, articles have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education and elsewhere about Kaplan’s failure to meet the needs of and promises to students. And with an almost total lack of transparency by the Daniels Administration, the faculty is now being asked to identify the special characteristics Purdue can offer this new, as yet ill-defined entity.

A memo was sent to faculty asking their input, not on the arrangement as it has been announced but how to characterize this entity that has never been clearly defined. A three-day window of opportunity to respond was given, again with little or no clarity on what the new academic venture is likely to be. The survey was sent by e-mail to faculty on June 9 (when most faculty were not on campus because of the summer break) with a title, “Purdue Stakeholders Survey, Trade Secret Information, Advisory and Deliberative.”

The survey had eleven questions. The first three asked about the respondent’s location in the university system, her/his college, and length of employment at the university. The substantive input solicited of “stakeholders” began with the fourth question: provide a series of phrases the respondent feels address the value a Purdue/Kaplan education will have for adult learners. Question five asked the respondent to identify a key word from a list of eight that represents the most important task of the new university; such as developing leadership skills, lifetime learning, good citizenship, or access to knowledge.

The questionnaire then briefly asked for the respondent’s degree of support for the new venture including whether the announced arrangement is consistent with Purdue’s land-grant mission and how the connection with the land grant mission can be achieved. The questionnaire asked if the time was right for this venture and what opportunities does Purdue provide for achieving the mission as it was described. It ended with a question about which goals should be uppermost in Purdue’s Kaplan partnership.

The criticisms that have been raised throughout the university community and around the state and nation, have never been addressed. In fact, the specific questionnaire, allowing little room for evaluation of the plan (two questions) presents the Purdue/Kaplan arrangement as already completed. What remains utterly bizarre is that the “stakeholders” questionnaire makes it clear that the Purdue/Kaplan arrangement is a “done deal” but the stakeholders now are being asked what the new university should do, what should be criteria for success, and how it should be “branded” in upcoming public relations announcements.

The only laudable part of the mysterious public discussion of the Purdue venture with an on-line for-profit university with a questionable past is the declaration by the university president that Purdue wants to serve non-traditional students; workers, parents, low-income wage earners, and older persons who want feasible access to education. However, a public discussion of the multiplicity of ways such a goal could be achieved has never taken place. Indiana has branch campuses of its two flag-ship universities; a technical college system; community colleges; existing on-campus and off-campus educational programs, credit and non-credit, in agricultural extension and labor studies. And various colleges and departments at Purdue University offer varying online educational experiences. None of this has been discussed by faculty, students, alums, state legislators, or other citizens of the state of Indiana. (In fact, the Indiana state legislature inserted a provision in an unrelated bill that precludes citizens from inquiring about deliberations concerning Purdue and Kaplan Universities. In other words, while all other public institutions in the state are subject to public scrutiny, the Purdue/Kaplan agreement is not).

In addition, there has been no discussion of the efficacy of on-line education; the appropriate mix of computer-based and on-site education and what subjects would lend themselves to various pedagogies. And since the arrangement was announced there has been no public discussion of whether non-traditional students have access to computers and the internet.

Finally, there has been no discussion of whether the land grant mission of public universities can be fulfilled by for-profit universities. Traditionally public universities have been assigned the task of educating the citizenry for the public good. The survey of “stakeholders” is designed to illicit information about “branding,” or how to sell the Purdue/Kaplan deal to a potentially interested public. That is not about the public good.

OPPONENTS OF GMOs ARE NOT IMMORAL

Harry Targ

In a guest column in the Washington Post, December 27, 2017, Mitch Daniels, former president of the Hudson Institute, senior vice-president of Eli-Lilly, governor of Indiana, and currently President of Purdue University castigated those who, he says, are against “modern agricultural technology” and “are worse than anti-scientific. They’re immoral.” He also condemns the “deep pockets campaign” that has “persuaded a high percentage of Americans and Europeans to avoid GMO products.” These sizable populations, he suggests, have been duped by special interests to buy non-GMO products or what he calls “organic” foods (the quotation marks are his).

In the column Daniels proceeds to condemn the anti-GMO movement as “self-interested” and embedded in rich societies which can afford to “indulge” in “this kind of foolishness.” The bottom line, he argues, is that there are billions of people to feed and only agricultural technology, “miracles in plant production and animal husbandry,” can provide for the needs of an exploding global population. In fact, he argues, agricultural technology, since the dawn of the Green Revolution, has already impacted on the world, reducing poverty and malnutrition.

If the guest column were framed as a debate among scientists and political activists with different points of view it might have made a contribution to the discussion that is going on in higher education, even at his own university. Instead the column was a blanket indictment of those with whom he disagrees without addressing the issues in dispute.

More important than the dismissive attack on those with whom the author disagrees is the absence of any discussion of the economic, political, and cultural ramifications of the new technologically-based agriculture for the majority of the world’s farmers and food consumers. 

For example, new agricultural technologies have been forced upon millions of people whose ancestors built a variety of food systems over thousands of years. Even in the twentieth century, food was still primarily produced for local and domestic consumption. Since the end of feudalism and slavery, systems of small farms have provided modest but acceptable levels of food for local populations. Newer technologies, such as farm implements, when affordable, increased productivity, and reduced labor. Over time agricultural societies became integrated into colonial and neo-colonial systems of production and distribution, systems that were based on the exploitation of the agricultural population by national elites or foreign powers. In the modern era of neoliberal globalization virtually the entire world is interconnected in one massive global food system with disproportionate profits from agriculture accruing to a small number of multinational corporations.

In addition, as the world became more connected, global economic institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization) largely created by the United States and its allies after World War II imposed trade and investment policies on the world. These maximized the wealth and power of the wealthiest countries at the expense of the poor countries. The Green Revolution, for example, initiated a global system of food production for export. Local farmers had to produce more for global markets and less for domestic consumption.

The globalization of agricultural production and distribution has increased dramatically since the 1970s. With the massive increase in the amount of debt that poor countries incurred in the 1970s due to a spike in oil prices, international financial institutions imposed new rules involving trade and investment in debtor countries. These led to the consolidation of farmlands, the shift from small agricultural production for local consumption to production of singular crops for sale worldwide, imports of subsidized food commodities from the rich countries, and increased marketing of GMO seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, in addition to machines. As a result, the world food production system was radically transformed.

By the late twentieth century, agriculturally exporting countries continued to produce commodities, not for home consumption, but for sale on the world market. US consumers buy avocados grown in Honduras, strawberries grown in Mexico, asparagus from Peru, and processed foods from basic fruits and vegetables grown in Asia and Africa. To facilitate mass production of export crops, small landowners become deeply indebted to purchase the new seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides to compete in the world food market. Farmers are forced off the land and agricultural holdings become “factories in the fields.” The former tillers of the soil who cannot compete become the mobile workers who traverse the globe desperately looking for work.

Therefore, while the details and complications of this narrative need to be investigated further by social scientists and experts on geographical regions, the point here is that the problems of the global food system and the provision of nourishing food for more people goes beyond single applications of new technologies. In fact, many social scientists and other policy analysts have argued that the problem of hunger is not a production problem but a food distribution problem. Wealth and income inequality within and between countries has been growing qualitatively for decades. GMOs and other technological fixes cost too much money for the poor farmer and their adoption forecloses cheaper ways to grow food (such as using naturally reproduced seeds), Modest improvements in the reduction of absolute poverty on a global basis has been limited to a few countries such as China, Vietnam, and Cuba while malnourishment still figures prominently in many parts of the world, even in areas where the Green Revolution has had its greatest impact.

In sum, the debate among scientists and concerned citizens continues about GMOs and other technologies. These discussions must include history, economics, culture, politics, and society if we are ever going to reduce hunger, food deserts, malnutrition, and grotesque economic and political inequalities in the world. Given these broader issues, which must be part of the analysis, arguments that superficially dismiss critics of various agricultural technologies do a disservice to the development of solutions to the problem of hunger.

  

The FBI Ordinarily Is Not Our Friend: a Reposted Book Review

Socialism and Democracy

Red Scare: FBI & The Origins of Anti-Communism in the United States

Posted on April 13, 2011 by sdonline

Regin Schmidt Red Scare: FBI & The Origins of Anti-Communism in the United States (University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000).

The young lack a sense of history-of the Cold War, of anti-communism, of the vibrancy of progressive movements in the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, older activists discoursing on their history at first engaged in long needed self-criticism. The self-criticism then shifted, however, to blanket rejection of our progressive pasts-our victories as well as our defeats, our brave and honorable moments, and particularly a recollection of the hegemonic power of the U.S. state as a primary cause of our defeats. Plainly, the horrific record of state repression in America is being forgotten by the older radicals and is unfamiliar to the younger ones.

Regin Schmidt’s book can help enormously in revisiting and reconstructing the role of state repression in manipulating, subverting, jailing, deporting, and killing leftists in the twentieth century. Schmidt has provided us with a data-rich account of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation took on its special role in crushing the left in America. His book is about the origins of the FBI in the old Bureau of Investigation in 1908 and its transformation into a state weapon in the struggle against perceived Bolshevism, anarchism, and communism in the aftermath of World War I. It is also about the continuity of state repression from the era of the Palmer Raids to Cold War America.

Schmidt argues that recently declassified information points to new explanations for the FBI’s rise to prominence. Some researchers view the agency’s rise as a response to mass hysteria, placing the root cause of anti-communism in the public at large. Schmidt, however, shows how popular attitudes about the Bolshevik/communist/anarchist threat emerge only after Attorney General Palmer and the FBI launched their campaigns of harassment, arrest, and deportation. In short, anti-communism as a public ideology was the creation of state institutions.

Another body of scholarly and journalistic literature places primary, indeed sole, responsibility for FBI misdeeds on the shoulders of its long-time director, J. Edgar Hoover. While Schmidt sees Hoover as the major protagonist in the FBI drama, he grounds Hoover’s conduct in the context of state policy and bureaucratic interest.

Further, most studies of the FBI emphasize its role in shaping anti-communism after World War II. Schmidt, however, takes the reader back to the first Red Scare and the Palmer Raids for the origins of anti-communism. And, he claims, the campaign was constant from then through the Cold War period. The FBI and anti-communism are less visible from the mid-1920s until the depths of the Great Depression only because of the diminution of radical activities.

Schmidt clearly states his central thesis early in the book and demonstrates its accuracy through historical examination.

Just as the mushrooming federal agencies, bureaus, and commissions were employed to regulate the economy and ameliorate the most severe social consequences of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, [so also] the state during the first decades of the century increasingly used its resources to control, contain, and, in times of crisis, to repress social unrest and political opposition. Thus, the institutionalization of the FBI’s political activities from 1919 was at bottom a part of the federalization of social control in the form of political surveillance.

This book provides an engaging, rich, detailed history of how the FBI served the social control functions of the state: harassing the left, supporting federal, state, and local politicians in their anti-communist campaigns, and responding with sympathy to corporate requests for assistance. It covers the campaign against the IWW, the 1919 strike wave, the Palmer Raids, the Seattle General Strike, and the deportation of radicals.

Red Scare is an important book. It should be read by older progressives to refresh their memories of real state repression in the United States. The book should be passed along to young activists, most of whom were not old enough to remember FBI harassment of Central American solidarity activists in the 1980s. And this book should be included as supplementary reading in university classes on U.S. history, American politics, and social movements.

Finally, the book makes crystal clear an important reality of struggles for social change. Social movements do not fall apart solely because of ideological rigidity or factionalism or egotism. The errors that come from our ranks have to be understood in the context of a continuous pattern of state repression. The sorry record of the FBI in the United States must not be forgotten. Red Scare will help us remember.

Reviewed by Harry Targ
Department of Political Science
Purdue University

THE "WE MARCH ONWARD RALLY:" Some Remarks

County Courthouse, Lafayette, Indiana, January 27, 2018

Harry Targ

Threats to Peace Today

We are here to reflect on movements for social and economic justice one year into the administration of Donald Trump.

What caught my attention a few days ago was a press conference that was organized by science editors of the esteemed journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This journal began publishing shortly after the end of World War II. Among its most visible tasks has been tracking the probability of nuclear war.

Using its metaphoric Doomsday Clock scientific experts estimate each year how close the world is moving toward nuclear war. The scientists last week moved the dials two minutes closer to midnight (to a dangerous two and one-half minutes to midnight). In other words, over the last year the United States and the world, the scientists say, have moved ever closer to nuclear war.

Reflecting on the policies of the last year that have led to this symbolic prediction of increasing possibility of nuclear war, we can reflect on several developments:

The recently issued National Security Strategy document issued by the Trump Administration indicates US policy would shift from the war on terrorism to homeland security. This shift would be complemented by the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons and a strategy based on the primacy of threats from Russia and China.

The Trump Administration in conjunction with Congress (with support from both parties) has approved a military budget for the coming year in excess of $700 billion, 68 percent of federal discretionary spending.

The Trump Administration is continuing the trajectory of maintaining US troops and private contract armies in 1,000 military installations in anywhere from 70 to 170 countries. The US continues to expand its military presence on the African continent.

The Trump Administration over the last several months has been engaged in a rhetorical war with North Korea, while US and South Korean military forces engage in simulated military exercises. The US has constructed a new provocative anti-missile installation in South Korea as well.

The Trump Administration has threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty with Iran, has announced its intention of expanding troop strength in Afghanistan, and has placed thousands of US troops in Syria.

The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, begun to reverse improved relations with Cuba, and continues to escalate its efforts to destabilize governments such as in Venezuela and Bolivia.

And, President Trump announced that the US embassy was moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a position not only condemned by the Palestinian people but by virtually every country in the world.

All of these historical developments in United States foreign policy are occurring in the context of an international system that is shifting away from United States hegemony to a multipolar world. Countries such as China are experiencing economic development that challenges the economic domination that the United States has held over the global political economy for 100 years. To overcome this declining relative economic power, the United States is pursuing greater advances in military power. This combination of economic decline and military advance makes the world a more dangerous place.

The Historic Role of Women in Peace and Justice Movements

As women and men organized politically during 2017, and come together in January, 2018 to celebrate this mobilization, it is critical to reflect on the centrality of women in the struggle for a peaceful world. Campaigns for social and economic justice and women’s movements, and particularly women’s peace movements, are inextricably connected.

In 1915, 1,200 women from diverse backgrounds met in the Hague to create what became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They opposed World War I and would continue to oppose war in the over 100 years of their existence. They also demanded that women play a role in decision-making about all matters of foreign policy, including decisions concerning war and peace.

WILPF, the oldest peace group in the United States was led for many years by Jane Addams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

In 1961 another women’s peace group, Women Strike for Peace, organized a day-long national strike of 50,000 women in 60 cities demanding nuclear disarmament. They opposed nuclear testing, increased radiation in the atmosphere and marched to the slogan, “End the Arms Race: Not the Human Race.” Women Strike for Peace became early opponents of the escalating Vietnam war. Among its prominent spokespersons was soon-to-be Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

Code Pink is a grassroots women-led organization opposing war and militarism. It was organized in 2002 and includes militant activists such as Medea Benjamin and Colonel Ann Wright. Code Pink advocates peace, a human rights agenda, and demands conversion from military spending to spending for health care, green jobs, and the general welfare. They have been active in campaigns for justice for the Palestinian people and in opposition to United States support for violence perpetuated by Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.

The writing and activism of Jane Addams has been an important inspiration that runs throughout the educational, advocacy, and militant peace activity of women for the last 100 years. Addams’ classic essay, “Newer Ideals of Peace” was originally published in 1907 and reissued with an introduction by Berenice Carroll and Clint Fink in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press.

In this essay, Carroll and Fink indicate that Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go beyond just stopping war. According to Addams,  achieving what peace researchers later called “negative peace,” ending wars, must be coupled with “positive peace.” Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds including patriarchy, paternalism, the criminal justice system, and systems of domination and subordination at the workplace. Addams wrote that there needed to be a theoretical and practical shift from individualism and property rights to community. The spirit of nationalism must be replaced by internationalism. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars.

We move ahead in these troubled times inspired by the great fighters for racial justice including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.

We are also inspired by those who struggled for workers’ rights: Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, John L. Lewis, and Sidney Hillman.

And, as the Doomsday Clock ticks toward midnight, we desperately need to reacquaint ourselves with our foremothers whose ideas and activism have been central to movements for peace and justice throughout the world.

 

Harry Targ on Rag Radio

https://archive.org/details/RagRadio2018-01-19-HarryTarg

THE COMPATIBILITY OF MATERIAL AND MORAL ARGUMENTS: BERNIE SANDERS MEETS REV. WILLIAM BARBER

Harry Targ

An article appeared recently on the internet announcing a public conversation to be held January 19, 2018 at Duke University between Senator Bernie Sanders and Rev. William Barber. The discussion, “The Enduring Challenge of a Moral Economy: 50 Years After Dr. King Challenged Racism, Poverty, and Militarism,” will be moderated by Duke University Chapel Dean Luke A. Powery.

As prior dialogues between them suggest, this conversation will not be a debate but an articulation of parallel theoretical and practical insights about politics by two of the most compelling progressive leaders today.

At root, but not in so many words, Sanders offers a narrative about a class society in which one class, the one percent, exploit and oppress another class, the 99 percent. Implicitly this dynamic is driven by the pursuit of profit. For him the antidote to this system is democracy and socialism.

The Sanders vision draws from the Marxist theoretical tradition but more importantly it is infused with the historic US tradition of populism and the socialism of such prominent and diverse political leaders as Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Sanders prioritizes in his analysis, the capitalist system, autocratic political institutions, “false” ideologies that only recognize individuals, not communities or society, and institutionalized greed and immorality. Change, he believes, requires the mobilization of the 99 percent in the electoral arena and the streets to transform societal institutions.

Rev. Barber’s Moral Mondays movement, begun over a decade ago, was inspired by the dramatic rightward shift in North Carolina (and later national) public policies which effectively increased poverty, diminished access to health care and education, suppressed the right to vote, and in other ways attacked workers, people of color, women, and gays. Moral Mondays catalyzed a variety of groups who were morally outraged about the substantial increase in varieties of pain and suffering of vast majorities of people. And Rev. Barber realized that while groups and communities were angry over a variety of particular issues, their concerns overlapped. He was convinced that various angry constituencies could be brought together to collectively challenge an immoral system that hurt everybody; workers, people of color, women, LBGTQ individuals, and people of spiritual or secular traditions. Thus, the idea of “fusion politics” was articulated.

Moral Mondays was initiated by the spiritual community and it was motivated by the basic proposition that what was happening to people’s lives was immoral. Rev. Barber, therefore, built a movement based upon ethical systems derived from constitutional and/or theological premises that promoted social justice, human rights, and human dignity.

The Sanders campaign was grounded in material reality: economic exploitation, profit seeking at the expense of human development, and the maintenance of an economic system based on institutionalized avarice. Rev. Barber’s campaign was based on an ethical reality; that is that exploitation, poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia were morally wrong. Although the basic constituents of each campaign varied (Sanders supporters tended to come from the working class, labor, and young people interested in socialism while Barber’s constituencies included leading civil rights organizations, faith communities, and issue-oriented advocacy groups) the constituencies overlapped.

At the dawn of 2018, most human beings, workers, people of color, women, gays, and almost everyone alive who lives in a physical space threatened by environmental change, have a stake in resisting the shift toward an apocalyptic economic, political, cultural, militaristic, and environmental universe. They could support a vision of a new society that prioritizes community over individualism, participatory democracy over authoritarianism, and human solidarity over hate.

Consequently, the movements coming out of the two currents (Our Revolution out of the Sanders candidacy and the New Poor People’s Campaign out of Moral Mondays) should join hands in a common struggle. Analyses of public troubles can begin with stances on political economy or public immorality but they cover the same ground AND they propose the same solution; a caring, participatory, just society.

So the vision of this latest dialogue between Senator Sanders and Rev. Barber should be inspirational. It should stimulate both communities to act in unity. That is the political task of 2018.

For an early 2017 conversation between Rev. Barber and Bernie Sanders see:

https://youtu.be/87egB-D2fh4

For another rendition of the theme of unity see the speech below by Nina Turner, President, Our Revolution: https://youtu.be/PXF5lb_2Tj4

"THIS MADNESS MUST CEASE;"a repost from January 15, 2010

Harry Targ

At a critical juncture in the escalation of the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 describing the fundamental connections between war overseas and poverty at home:

“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.”

It is useful to reflect on the historic motivation for United States foreign policy, what Dr. King called "this madness," yesterday and today. And, in the spirit of Dr. King, it is incumbent upon us to continue to reflect also on its impacts on people abroad and at home. Such reflections should encompass venues such as Iraq and Afghanistan where the contemporary impacts are the result of war and countries such as Haiti where the structure of economic and political relations have been as devastating to the people as military occupation (though marines occupied Haiti from 1917 to 1934).

First, according to historians such as William Appleman Williams, the United States has pursued dominant influence in the world ever since the 1890s. After conquering the North American continent and all but exterminating its inhabitants, U.S. policy has been shaped by the pursuit of markets, investment opportunities, cheap labor, and vital natural resources. With the expansion of industrial capitalism, securing access to cheap oil became particularly important. Oil figured prominently in agreements with the ruling oligarchy in Saudi Arabia during World War 11, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, the severing of relations with a radical Iraqi regime in 1958, and the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

Historian Loren Baritz has argued that U.S. policymakers have defined these economically driven global and interventionist policies in moral terms. For example, President Truman spoke of the threat of totalitarian communism to the free world in his famous Truman Doctrine speech of March 12, 1947. However, one week earlier, in a less familiar speech at Baylor University, he asserted that economics and foreign policy were inextricably connected and that the United States was committed to creating a global market economy in the post-war world. Thirty-five years later President Reagan repeatedly referred to the Soviet Communist system as an historical aberration and at the same time borrowed from our Puritan ancestors, declaring that the United States was a “city on a hill.” We were destined by God to transform the world. President Clinton also mixed economics and morality repeatedly reiterating his commitment to create “market democracies” around the world.

The impacts of this century-long search for what Williams called, “the Open Door,” the drive to economically penetrate the globe has meant pain, suffering, and waste for peoples everywhere including the United States. The U.S. sent marines to invade Central American and the Caribbean 25 times between 1900 and 1933. During the fifty years since World War 11 the U.S. threatened to use force or sent troops on at least 40 occasions, spent $3 trillion on the military, participated in wars between 1945 and 1995 in which 10 million people died, and lost at least 100,000 of its own soldiers killed in action with 10 times that number becoming casualties.

It was in this historical context that President Bush responded to the terrorist attack on 9/11 by launching a new global crusade, replacing communism with a “war on terrorism.” He justified “preemptory” attacks on any country or people we would define as a possible threat to U.S. national security. The Pentagon defined an “arc of instability” running from the northern parts of South America through North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia. They said the United States had to develop small, mobile military bases all across the globe (Chalmers Johnson estimates some 700 bases exist in 60 countries) with new technologies that would make the U.S. fighting force more capable of quickly intervening in self-defined trouble spots. Successful operations in Afghanistan and Iraq would solidify the presence, power, and control of strategic resources and institutionalize this strategy of “the last remaining superpower.”

Clinton Administration policies toward Iraq differed in tactics but not in substance from his successor. Clinton sought to increase the U.S. presence in the Gulf by starving the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Economic sanctions led to a 60 percent decline in the GDP of the country and the economic embargo cost the lives of about one million Iraqis, mostly children under the age of five.

However, supporters of the lobby group, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, and other Bush policymakers, demanded that Clinton do more. As soon as 9/11 happened, these neo-conservatives convinced President Bush to attack Iraq even though the latter had nothing to do with 9/11 and everyone knew that Iraq, after a decade of US and British bombing, economic sanctions, and rigorous inspections, had no weapons of mass destruction.

The war on Afghanistan began in October, 2001 and the war in Iraq in March 2003. The impacts have been devastating to these war torn countries.

What can be done about this “madness?” Despite President Obama’s recent decision to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan progressives must continue to demand that the United States deescalate and withdraw all U.S. troops from there and Iraq. U.S. military bases all across the globe must be shut down. This process should be done in conjunction with negotiations with relevant nations and peoples to transform international relations. Americans must pressure their leaders to embrace foreign and domestic policies that promote peace and justice. At the time of his assassination Dr. King was organizing a Poor People’s Campaign, a mass movement to end war, racism, and economic misery. That project still needs to be completed.