We Invent Enemies to Buy Bombs--Eisenhower's Fears Came True

Friday, June 17, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
Britain faces no serious threat, yet keeps waging war. While big defence exists, glory-hungry politicians will use it
by Simon Jenkins

Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?

Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defense spending. He said NATO had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialize in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.

This call was echoed by NATO's chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who pointed out how unfair it was that US defence investment represented 75% of the NATO defense expenditure, where once it was only half. Having been forced to extend his war on Libya by another three months, Rasmussen wanted to see Europe's governments come up with more money, and no nonsense about recession. Defense to him is measured not in security but in spending.

The call was repeated back home by the navy chief, Sir Mark Stanhope. He had to be "dressed down" by the prime minister, David Cameron, for warning that an extended war in Libya would mean "challenging decisions about priorities". Sailors never talk straight: he meant more ships. The navy has used so many of its £500,000 Tomahawk missiles trying to hit Colonel Gaddafi (and missing) over the past month that it needs money for more. In a clearly co-ordinated lobby, the head of the RAF also demanded "a significant uplift in spending after 2015, if the service is to meet its commitments". It, of course, defines its commitments itself.

Libya has cost Britain £100m so far, and rising. But Iraq and the Afghan war are costing America $3bn a week, and there is scarcely an industry, or a state, in the country that does not see some of this money. These wars show no signs of being ended, let alone won. But to the defense lobby what matters is the money. It sustains combat by constantly promising success and inducing politicians and journalists to see "more enemy dead", "a glimmer of hope" and "a corner about to be turned".

Victory will come, but only if politicians spend more money on "a surge". Soldiers are like firefighters, demanding extra to fight fires. They will fight all right, but if you want victory that is overtime.

On Wednesday the Russian ambassador to NATO warned that Britain and France were "being dragged more and more into the eventuality of a land-based operation in Libya". This is what the defense lobby wants institutionally, even if it may appall the generals. In the 1980s Russia watched the same process in Afghanistan, where it took a dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev, to face down the Red Army and demand withdrawal. The west has no Gorbachev in Afghanistan at the moment. NATO's Rasmussen says he "could not envisage" a land war in Libya, since the UN would take over if Gaddafi were toppled. He must know this is nonsense. But then he said NATO would only enforce a no-fly zone in Libya. He achieved that weeks ago, but is still bombing.

It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defense was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a corporate military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defense establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes".

I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today's US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defense industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."

The devil makes work for idle hands, especially if they are well-financed. Britain's former special envoy to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, echoed Kennan last week in claiming that the army's keenness to fight in Helmand was self-interested. "It's use them or lose them, Sherard," he was told by the then chief of the general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt. Cowper-Coles has now gone off to work for an arms manufacturer.

There is no strategic defense justification for the US spending 5.5% of its gross domestic product on defense or Britain 2.5%, or for the NATO "target" of 2%.

These figures merely formalize existing commitments and interests. At the end of the cold war soldiers assiduously invented new conflicts for themselves and their suppliers, variously wars on terror, drugs, piracy, internet espionage and man's general inhumanity to man. None yields victory, but all need equipment. The war on terror fulfilled all Eisenhower's fears, as America sank into a swamp of kidnapping, torture and imprisonment without trial.

The belligerent posture of the US and Britain towards the Muslim world has fostered antagonism and moderate threats in response. The bombing of extremist targets in Pakistan is an invitation for terrorists to attack us, and then a need for defence against such attack. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of appeasing the complex is astronomical. Eisenhower remarked that "every gun that is made is a theft from those who hunger" – a bomber is two power stations and a hospital not built. Likewise, each Tomahawk Cameron drops on Tripoli destroys not just a Gaddafi bunker (are there any left?), but a hospital ward and a classroom in Britain.

As long as "big defense" exists it will entice glory-hungry politicians to use it. It is a return to the hundred years war, when militaristic barons and knights had a stranglehold on the monarch, and no other purpose in life than to fight. To deliver victory they demanded ever more taxes for weapons, and when they had ever more weapons they promised ever grander victories. This is exactly how Britain's defense ministry ran out of budgetary control under Labour.

There is one piece of good news. NATO has long outlived its purpose, now justifying its existence only by how much it induces its members to spend, and how many wars irrelevant to its purpose it finds to fight. Yet still it does not spend enough for the US Defense Secretary. In his anger, Gates threatened that "future US leaders … may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost". Is that a threat or a promise?

The Corporate Dream: Teachers as Temps

Sunday, May 29, 2011 by Black Agenda Report
by Glen Ford

As Democrats hustle to shovel a billion dollars into President Obama’s campaign coffers – making promises to rich people and their corporations every step of the way – America’s billionaires are spending even more money to seize control of the nation’s public schools. Although super-wealthy capitalists like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, fellow computer mogul Michael Dell, real estate magnate Eli Broad, and the rapacious owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton Family, would like people to think of them as philanthropists, they are nothing more than down-and-dirty investors who hope to reap much more than they sow. This mega-buck mafia's goal is to gain access to the $600 billion per year that taxpayers pump into public schools, and then to profit in perpetuity by shaping the nation’s educational system to their corporate needs. The corporate education project has nothing to do with growing new generations of smarter, socially aware, independent-thinking citizens, but is designed to raid public treasuries through wholesale contracting-out of public schooling.

Teachers are the biggest obstacle in the way of the corporate educational coup, which is why the billionaires, eagerly assisted by their servants in the Obama administration, have made demonization and eventual destruction of teachers unions their top priority. Corporations hate collective bargaining, or working people’s power of any kind, but their vision goes way beyond simply neutralizing teachers unions. The billionaires, and the politicians they have purchased, want nothing less than to destroy teaching as a profession. Plutocrats like Bill Gates and politicians like Barack Obama may make noises about respecting teachers' life-long commitment to learning, but their actions prove the opposite. At every opportunity, whenever a real or manufactured educational crisis presents itself, the corporate gang champions charter schools and imports platoons of young, mostly white, inexperienced rookies from programs like Teach for America. Most of these neophytes have no intention of making teaching a career, so they accept low wages, turnover is high, and they have no long term interest in any particular school, or school system, or the profession in general. They are temporary teachers – which is precisely the point.

Just as corporations have revamped the private white collar workforce, replacing full-time, salaried personnel with “temporary” workers – a system in which some managers are officially temps – such are the prospects for teachers in the brave new corporate world of education “reform.”

The billionaires' propaganda machinery claims the corporatization of American education is necessary to make the United States “competitive,” internationally. But teachers in most of the countries that lead the U.S. in learning are highly respected, if not revered, and relatively well compensated. Under the guise of “reform,” the United States is moving in exactly the opposite direction as the rest of the world. The American people are being conned by billionaire hustlers who are stealing the public schools – and the national future – right in front of our eyes.

Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 by Texas Observer

by Robert Jensen

 

Hi, I’m Robert Jensen, a provider of educational products to consumers at the University of Texas at Austin.

I used to introduce myself as a UT professor, but that was before I attended a Texas Public Policy Foundation session last week offering more exciting “breakthrough solutions” to the problems of higher education.

At that session in a downtown Austin hotel, I learned that these very real problems—escalating costs and questionable quality of undergraduate instruction—can be solved in the “free market.” You know, the free market, that magical mechanism that gave us the housing bubble/credit derivative scam/financial meltdown. The free market that has produced growing inequality in the United States and around the world. That good old free market.

The solutions offered by representatives of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in the morning’s first session focused on ending public subsidies for higher education and treating it like any other business. These insights come on the heels of the much-hyped “seven breakthrough solutions” that TPPF has been pushing. (Read about them here, and for a satirical treatment, watch this.

Not surprisingly, both panelists spoke in the language of the market, turning education into a commodity. Panel moderator William Murchison, a conservative syndicated columnist, chimed in during the discussion, referring to “consumers of the educational product.”

I think that means students.

That pithy phrase led me to the microphone in the Q&A period, where I asked whether in this mad quest to turn higher education into a business the panelists might not be promoting efficiency so much as guaranteeing the final destruction of what’s left of real education. I said that I found it difficult to understand my teaching— which focuses on how citizens should understand concentrations of power in government and corporations, and on how journalists should respond—as “an economic exchange,” in the words of Cato’s Neal McCluskey.

Both McCluskey and Matthew Denhart from CCAP responded with more of the market mantra and didn’t seem to recognize, or care, that commodifying education might have implications not just for how we organize institutions and evaluate professors, but for learning itself. Denhart responded that the “product” doesn’t have to be solely job training, but would include instruction in “esoteric concepts.” Those apparently are the two alternatives in college classrooms: purely practical or interesting irrelevance.

That got me thinking about my favorite class, “Critical Issues in Journalism,” the large introductory course I teach in the School of Journalism. The course tries to examine—rigorously, but in plain language using clear concepts—the nature of democracy and the role of the news media. My goal is to model the critical thinking that is crucial for citizens and journalists in a world facing multiple crises (political and economic, cultural and ecological) with dwindling hopes for a smooth transition to a just and sustainable future. Rather than accept the shallow platitudes of American democracy or the self-serving claims of American mainstream journalism, I encourage students to challenge the conventional wisdom (and me).

My students can speak to how well I do that, but my interest here is in how I understand the nature of what I do. When I think of when the class seems to work best -- the moments that students seems to be most engaged with these crucial questions—it’s difficult to think of myself as delivering an educational product or of my students as consumers.

Instead, I’m happy with being a professor. I profess.

“Profess” can be used in different ways—to make a disingenuous statement (“He professed to like his boss”) or to announce religious commitments (“She professed her faith in God”). But I use it in the sense of making a public claim to knowledge, with an openness to respond to critiques of that claim. When it really works, students not only listen to professors but learn to profess themselves. When it works, I’m just an older—and, one hopes, at least slightly wiser—version of my students.

That experience can happen in vocational training as well as in courses more philosophically focused. Good journalism writing teachers, for example, know the joy of professing the love of the craft and helping students discover that joy. The presumed division between training and intellectual work occurs only when teachers accept that false divide and abandon efforts to bring the two together.

I don’t want to appear naïve; I realize that much of what happens in American college classrooms (including mine, of course) falls short of these ideals on any given day. The question is not whether we sometimes fail, as we all do, but why failure sometimes becomes routine. On this count, ironically, I agree with some of the critiques coming from the TPPF.

After 19 years of full-time teaching at the University of Texas, I’ve heard a lot of legitimate student complaints about professors who don’t care about teaching. I’ve complained myself about the irrelevance and inanity of so much of the “research” produced in the disciplines I know in the social sciences and humanities. I played that research game for my first six years to pass inspection and get tenure, but after that I dropped out of the scholarly publishing arena to concentrate on writing for a general audience. Shortly after that I stopped teaching graduate courses out of frustration with the self-indulgence of so much of the research/theory crowd in the study of media and mass communication. These days, I enjoy the challenge of connecting with undergraduates, writing about political and social matters, and speaking in public.

Let me be clear: This is not an anti-intellectual screed or an attack on systematic thinking and inquiry. I have learned a lot from the work of other scholars, which is reflected in the courses I teach, and such thinking and inquiry is more needed than ever to face these deepening crises. My writing for general audiences is rooted in research, defined more broadly. But the critics of the university have a point. Increasingly, the academic game that most professors play is so self-indulgent that ordinary people—not just reactionary ideologues with libertarian fantasies—will not, and should not, support it indefinitely. Education is not a commodity, but economics are relevant in the sense that we don’t live in a world of endless resources.

But here’s where I part company with the critics: Instead of pretending to be able to measure faculty output and draining the life from teaching, we need to embrace the ideals of the university rather than capitulate to the false promises of failed market ideology. The obsessions with measurement and testing have nearly destroyed K-12 public education, and if applied to higher education it will have similar effects.

That model may be particularly attractive to those on the right precisely because it is so effective at undermining the kind of critical thinking some of us are trying to encourage in our classes. As U.S. society has moved steadily to the right over the past three decades, conservatives have been eager to eliminate the few remaining spaces in the culture where critiques of power—especially concentrated economic power in a society marked by obscene wealth and indecent inequality—can flourish. Some parts of the modern university—especially those teaching business, advertising, and economics—are devoted to propping up that power, and much of the rest of the campus is not far behind. The corporatization of the modern university—both in internal organization and reliance on funding from corporations and corporate-based foundations—has done much to eliminate critical thinking that is connected to struggles for political and economic justice. The victory of the market model would be the end of real education, if by education we mean independent inquiry into the power that structures our lives.

I’m encouraged that UT President Bill Powers—who appeared on the second panel of the day, and had to endure the self-aggrandizing ramblings of fellow panelist and TPPF Senior Fellow Ronald Trowbridge—supports faculty in this debate and recognizes the threats to academic freedom embedded in this market madness. I have disagreements with the university administration about many things, but we faculty would make it easier for administrators in that debate if we not only press the institution to support us but engage in critical self-reflection about ourselves.

In hallway conversations, faculty members will express frustration about bad teachers (though there is not always agreement on which colleagues are the bad teachers) who are allowed to continue to muddle along. Many worry that the demands for scholarly production have become so focused on quantity rather than quality that much of what is published in academic journals is of little value, even for specialists in a disciple.

Acknowledging these systemic failures doesn’t detract from all the good teaching done in universities, nor does it lessen the value of the important research of many faculty members. Instead, it should simply remind us that we owe it to the state, our students, and ourselves to confront these issues. If we don’t, the reactionary forces that increasingly dominate the culture will take care of it for us, and instead of breakthroughs in higher education we will witness an accelerating breakdown.

One View of the American Crisis

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Consortium News
by Robert Parry
Some readers tell me that I devote too much time to the historical context of the American political/media crisis. They say I should focus more on its current manifestations, especially when there are so many to address. And these readers have a point.

However, I think that without the context – and without understanding how the various U.S. political/media forces evolved over the past several decades – much of what is happening today doesn’t make sense, nor are the solutions readily apparent.

Only by analyzing how the country got into its current mess can there be any hope of figuring a way out. In that sense, this history is like the thread that the Greek hero Theseus unrolled as he made his way through the Minotaur’s maze and then rewound the thread to guide himself out.

So, from my six-plus decades on this planet and my three-plus decades as a Washington-based journalist, here is my ground-level view of what has happened to the United States:

Generally speaking – and with a number of glaring exceptions – the post-World War II period was a time when the institutions of the Republic functioned along the lines of what we learned in our public school civics classes.

The federal government drew from the lessons of the Great Depression and the New Deal to improve the country’s general welfare by creating conditions that helped expand the middle class.

After World War II, government programs helped veterans buy homes and get educated. Construction projects, like President Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, brought the country together and increased productivity.

President John Kennedy’s space program pushed the scientific frontiers, propelling the United States into the world lead in computer technology. President Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare for senior citizens whose health needs were being ignored by for-profit insurance companies.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal courts also began to address the shameful history of racial segregation, as a violation of the U.S. Constitution and particularly the 14th Amendment’s mandate for equal protection under the law. As the civil rights movement pressed the issue in the streets, the courts began striking down Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination.

In the 1960s and well into the 1970s, the U.S. press corps also functioned closer to its ideals of skepticism toward power. Correspondents covering the Vietnam War warned the nation of the folly, and the New York Times and other newspapers braved the wrath of President Richard Nixon by publishing the Pentagon Papers, with the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Nixon’s anger over the Pentagon Papers spilled into his political paranoia, the White House “plumbers” were soon planting bugs in Democratic headquarters at the Watergate. After Nixon’s burglars were arrested and the President mounted a cover-up, the Washington Post led the way in defying White House power and exposing the scandal.

With Congress conducting serious Watergate investigations and federal prosecutors demanding Nixon’s internal tapes of his own conspiracy, the Supreme Court again sided with the institutions of justice, rejecting Nixon’s arguments of an imperial presidency. Nixon was forced to resign.

Functioning Institutions

So, by the mid-1970s, it could be said that the institutions of the Republic were operating, more or less, as intended. There were real checks and balances. The rights of citizens, especially racial minorities and women, were finally being protected; the press was exposing wrongdoing; accountability was imposed on the Executive for constitutional and legal violations.

Of course, these institutions had been pushed by popular movements, millions of citizens demanding redress of longstanding grievances. There was also a vibrant “underground press” and other outlets for disseminating information when the mainstream media didn’t. It was Dispatch News that exposed the My Lai massacre and Ramparts that revealed CIA penetration of student groups.

Yet, while this progress toward a more perfect union made undeniable headway in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the changes also bred resentment in the South and in many white areas of the North.

The demand for racial justice was viewed as infringing on traditions of white preference and superiority. Many men objected to the women’s movement, too. Meanwhile, social conservatives hated the “counter-culture” and the sexual revolution.

As early as the 1950s, the pushback from the Right was evident in calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the physical assaults on blacks seeking to integrate schools, lunch counters and other public institutions. White segregationists denounced the press as “liberal” for its coverage of the civil rights struggle. The federal government was viewed as infringing on states’ rights.

The resistance grew in the 1960s as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other right-wingers rallied blue-collar whites against “hippies,” feminists, “uppity” blacks, academics, environmentalists and “unpatriotic” journalists. These Americans saw their traditional way of life under siege, and they were backed by wealthy businessmen who worried that their dominance of the economy might be threatened.

Though the Right decried the national press corps as “liberal,” it actually was run by businessmen who were mostly conservative and protective of the establishment. Many top news executives chafed against the era’s progressivism and the anti-establishment tone of reporters as much as other businessmen did.

By the 1970s, the American Great Backlash was gaining strength. Well-placed conservatives, such as Lewis Powell (who later became a Supreme Court justice) and William Simon (who was Nixon’s Treasury Secretary), were calling for massive investments in a right-wing infrastructure of media, think tanks and attack groups to reverse the nation’s progressive trends.

Simultaneously, as the Vietnam War was winding down, the Left largely dismantled its own media infrastructure that had become a powerful grassroots force in the 1960s and early 1970s but was deemed too expensive.

In a short time, the vibrant “underground press” of the Vietnam era disappeared; flagship publications, like Ramparts and Dispatch News, were closed; popular radio outlets, like WBCN in Boston, were bought up by media conglomerates; key liberal outlets, like The New Republic, fell into the hands of neoconservatives.

Much of the Left bought into the notions that media was not essential; that working inside the Washington system was corrupting; and that “local organizing” was the key to the future. Other leftists fell victim to the vanity of perfectionism, putting their own political purity ahead of any practical idea for improving the lives of average citizens.

Competing Trends

So, in the mid-to-late 1970s as the Right was shifting its focus to national battles and investing more and more in getting its messages out to every corner of the country, the Left was dismantling its media, decamping from Washington, and dreaming that somehow “organizing” around local issues would create a grassroots movement for revolutionary change.

These two trends – the rise of the Right’s national propaganda machine and the collapse of the Left’s ability to reach the broad public – consolidated with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Though now viewed through the gauzy mythology that surrounds his legacy, the real Reagan was a rigid right-winger who had opposed many of the social advancements of the era.

Reagan denounced Medicare as socialist tyranny; he cracked down on the anti-war movement while governor of California; he aided and abetted right-wing death squads in Latin America; he opposed environmentalism and other government regulations; he worked to roll back civil rights, especially affirmative action aimed at ameliorating the legacy of discrimination against minorities and women.

Upon taking office in 1981, with the Senate under Republican control, Reagan and his team began systematically deconstructing the institutional safeguards that had defined the New Deal and post-World War II-era.

The Reagan administration took special aim at the federal appeals courts, especially the most influential one in the District of Columbia, installing right-wing and neocon ideologues as judges, the likes of Laurence Silberman. Reagan also appointed environmental “regulators” who detested regulations and civil rights attorneys who opposed efforts to improve the lot of blacks and other minorities.

Reagan emphasized, too, expanding the Right’s propaganda capabilities, coordinating with the growing network of right-wing media and attack groups that went after troublesome journalists and intimidated political critics.

Meanwhile, without the competitive pressure from the “underground press,” the mainstream media charted its own rightward course following the prevailing winds, often with a conservative or neoconservative at the helm.

At the Associated Press, where I worked, the top executive, general manager Keith Fuller, hailed Reagan’s election in 1980 as a worthy repudiation of the excesses of the 1960s:

“As we look back on the turbulent Sixties, we shudder with the memory of a time that seemed to tear at the very sinews of this country,” Fuller said during a 1982 speech in Worcester, Massachusetts, adding that Reagan’s election had represented a nation “crying, ‘Enough.’ …

“We don’t believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and Eve in the eyes of Creation. We don’t believe that people should cash welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don’t really believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest in the classroom.

“We’re sick of your social engineering. We’re fed up with your tolerance of crime, drugs and pornography. But most of all, we’re sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.”

Fuller’s sentiments were common in the executive suites of major news organizations, where Reagan’s reassertion of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy also was widely welcomed.

At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal, an early neocon, vowed to steer his newspaper back “to the center,” by which he meant to the right. At the Washington Post, neocons also began asserting control over the editorial policies of that newspaper.

Losing the Thread

In short order, the institutions of the Republic, which had checked Nixon’s crimes, ceased to function in that way. Instead, the institutions reversed roles, becoming cheerleaders – and enforcers – for the powerful.

The “professionals” of Official Washington quickly sniffed the change in the air. Many learned to survive by honing their senses on where the safe boundaries were. Those who didn’t or wouldn’t go along – ethical journalists, diligent civil servants and some independent-minded members of Congress – soon found themselves on the outs.

Yet, even as the nation’s institutions stopped providing meaningful checks and balances in the 1980s, some individuals continued to do their jobs.

During much of the decade, the failure of the Republic’s institutions was masked somewhat by the fact that some individuals stepped into the breach. There were still a few courageous investigators on Capitol Hill; a handful of journalists who would risk their careers to get out important stories; and some civil servants who believed in doing their jobs honestly.

Perhaps the most striking case of this was the work of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a traditional Republican conservative who nevertheless took seriously his responsibility to investigate the Reagan administration’s worst scandal, the secret sale of weapons to Iran and the diversion of profits to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

Despite Walsh’s establishment pedigree, Official Washington turned on him en masse. Especially after he broke through the Iran-Contra cover-up in 1991, he was subjected to withering attack – from leading Republicans, such as Sen. Bob Dole, and from the right-wing news media led by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times.

But Walsh also faced ridicule from the mainstream news media, such as the Washington Post where he was mocked as some crazed Ahab pursuing a white whale or as some out-of-control weirdo who would leave Washington a “perceived loser.”

Indeed, by the early-to-mid-1990s, there was little distinction between the mainstream news media and the right-wing press. Even when documented evidence emerged shedding light on the criminality of Reagan and his team, there were no institutions – and by then few individuals left within those institutions – daring to take note.

First the institutions failed; then the individuals who had dared to fight on disappeared.

Planting a Flag

It became clear to me that trying to get the mainstream news media to publish important information was a losing battle if that information went against the grain of right-wing orthodoxy or mainstream conventional wisdom.

In fact, I had grown tired of trying to convince editors and producers who feared losing their jobs that they had a responsibility to take on such stories and such risks. Beyond exhaustion, I felt guilt when I looked into their eyes and saw how scared they had become, a fear that would sometimes translate into anger at even the suggestion.

My reaction to this grim reality was to look for a place where the flag of honest journalism could be planted and defended. I thought I might have found such a spot with the emergence of the Internet and our creation of the Consortiumnews.com Web site in 1995.

Of course, the downside was that the journalism would not have the large audiences that my work did when I was at the AP or Newsweek or PBS “Frontline.” But I thought readership might grow significantly if I were able to raise the necessary money to ensure that our stories got more attention.

That, however, proved more difficult than I had expected. Wealthy progressives remained locked into the thinking of the late 1970s, which held that expenditures on information were wasteful; that reporting the news was somebody else’s job. Maybe they believed – or wanted to believe – the Right’s propaganda about the “liberal” media that, in reality, didn’t exist.

Instead, they favored either direct giving (such as helping the poor or buying up endangered wetlands) or support for "organizing" efforts (such as seeking some regulatory change, like curbing money in politics).

I argued instead that the scarce money available should be invested in creating honest content and courageous outlets.

While direct giving was surely noble, it ignored the power of the Right’s propaganda machine to undermine any worthy cause. By destroying the New Deal and Great Society, right-wing legislators could create more poor people than any well-intentioned liberal benefactor could feed and house.

Regulation, like restricting money in politics, also might sound good but was either impractical or easily reversible by right-wing judges and politicians. All the money that progressive foundations invested in campaign finance reform was negated in 2010 by one 5-4 decision of a Supreme Court dominated by appointees of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.


The hard truth is that there are no shortcuts to correcting the imbalance that now exists in the U.S. political/media system. It will take money, time and energy to build an infrastructure that can successfully challenge the propaganda from the Right. It will also require many on the Left to admit that their judgments over the past three decades have been faulty.

But the consequences of the Right’s strategy – and the Left’s miscalculations – are apparent in the audacity of today’s congressional and statehouse Republicans in proposing the virtual repeal of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and even Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive era.

The Right feels it is strong enough to impose its Ayn Rand vision of a winner-take-all society and deploy its vast resources to prevail on Election Day.

It is possible that the Republicans have overreached this time, with their ambitious agenda of slashing domestic spending, replacing Medicare with a voucher system, and lavishing more tax reductions on the rich.

But the fact that the Republicans and the Right would even dare undertake such a radical approach is itself proof of how far they believe they have come in controlling government institutions and media outlets, how successfully they have negated the Republic's checks and balances.

To find a route out of this political/media maze, the Democrats and the Left may have to start rewinding the string of history and retracing the steps that got them so lost in the first place.

Eisenhowers grim warning on 'corporate military industrial complex' rings true 50 years later

50 years later, Eisenhower’s grim warning on military profit rings true
By Daniel Tencer
Monday, January 17th, 2011

The term (corporate) "military-industrial complex" entered the American lexicon 50 years ago today, when President Dwight Eisenhower warned of its dangers in an unusually frank farewell speech to the nation.

Ike said in a televised address on January 17, 1961:

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society."

 "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

(Read Eisenhower's entire speech here.)

For years, that warning -- issued by a hero of World War II and a Republican president -- was heralded by anti-war activists as a sign that "the very structure of our society" was indeed threatened by the merger of weapon-making and profit.

And in 2011, as the US -- with some 5 percent of the world's population -- spends nearly half of all the money spent in the world on defense, the warning seems prescient to some -- and perhaps even too tame for others.

At The Independent, Rupert Cornwell argues that Ike had it right.

Adjusted for inflation, US national security spending has more than doubled since Eisenhower left office. Year after year, the defence budget seems to rise – irrespective of whether the country is actually fighting major wars, regardless of the fact that the Soviet Union, the country's former global adversary, has ceased to be, and no matter which party controls the White House and Congress.

But while Cornwell argues that things could actually be worse -- the US spends about 4 percent of its GDP on national security, compared to about a third for the Soviet Union prior to its collapse -- others argue that the US's situation has outgrown even what Eisenhower imagined.

The corporate military industrial complex "has become a 'Permanent War State,' with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future," writes Gareth Porter at FireDogLake.

Porter argues that the corporate military industrial complex suffered two significant setbacks in the years since Eisenhower -- one in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the US turned against a disastrous Vietnam War and demanded a less militarily active foreign policy, and another in the 1980s and 1990s, when the fall of Soviet communism allowed for a "peace dividend" in the form of reduced defense spending.

But that ended with two historical events, Porter argues: The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which led to the Gulf War and the expansion of US military presence in the Middle East, and 9/11, which provided "the biggest single boon to the militarist alliance."

From that point on, Porter argues, the US's military might broke free of almost all constraints:

• The CIA sought and obtained virtually unlimited freedom to carry out drone strikes in secrecy and without any meaningful oversight by Congress.

• The Pentagon embraced the idea of the “long war” – a twenty-year strategy envisioning deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of countries, and the Army adopted the idea of “the era of persistent warfare” as its rationale for more budgetary resources.

• The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest explosion of military spending since the early 1950s – and now accounts for 56 percent of discretionary federal spending.

• The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false.

But not all is lost, Porter argues: Just as US public opinion turned against defense spending in the past, so too can it turn against it today. "The only thing missing from this picture is a grassroots political movement organized specifically to demand an end to the Permanent War State," he writes.

At The Independent, Cornwell suggests a different solution.

"George H.W. Bush was the last commander-in-chief to have tasted war and its horrors. His son famously had not, and – perhaps to make up for it – gave the military everything it wanted, and more. So maybe there is only one answer. America should elect a general as commander-in-chief. Like Dwight D. Eisenhower."

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50 Years Since Ike's Warning

The Corporate-Military-Industrial Complex
By HARRY TARG



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This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience….


In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.


We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes….

Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961, farewell address).

We have become so drugged by politicians that we often fail to reflect on the power of their words. Seeing books on library shelves with titles like "Speeches of Great Americans" culls up in our minds Readers Digest, the History Channel, Sunday morning sermons, and all the hyperbole that passes for political discourse in the 21st century. Every once in a while though, a politician says something that is rich with theoretical insight and inspiration and begs for action.

When President Eisenhower gave his final address to the nation on January 17, 1961, 50 years ago, he warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" of a military/industrial complex. He originally included the word "academic" but later eliminated it, for reasons of length. He was alerting Americans to the breadth and scope of military power over the world and American society.

The President's words constituted a shocking challenge to the soon-to-be Kennedy era defense intellectuals who criticized the outgoing president's reluctance to spend more than the $40 billion he invested on the military. Even Eisenhower's direct orders to subordinates to overthrow Iran's Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala's President Jacob Arbenz in 1954 and his declaration of the Middle East as a free-world sanctuary was not interventionist enough for the 1960s theorists and practitioners of "modernization," "development," and "democracy."

Although Eisenhower warned us about the corporate military/industrial complex he could not foresee the dramatic impacts of America's drive toward empire on foreign policy and public life.

He only dimly saw the changes that would occur in the techniques of empire. The expansion of the use of CIA money and American intelligence and military forces engineered the creation of brutal military coups. Military advisors revamped armies and repressive police forces in countries threatened by revolutionary change. In the 1980s in the face of an increasingly skeptical public, the United States used "low intensity conflict," that is, covert operatives, to train anti-government reactionaries to fight against regimes out of favor in places such as Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. And then to mollify domestic critics, the U.S. initiated the privatization and outsourcing of the military as an adjunct to the more than 700 U.S. military bases in more than 40 countries that exist today. Most recently, high tech weapons, including unmanned but armed aerial vehicles, are used to kill people without endangering U.S. soldiers. Technological advances and the globalization of U.S. violence continue.

Eisenhower was unalterably opposed to the militarization of the U.S. economy. While he was willing to allot $40 billion in 1950s currency, he resisted the demands from Beltway liberals and defense contractors to double military spending. By the 1960s, half of the federal budget began to go to the military and one in ten workers derived wages from defense contracts. And that continues, but with less public criticism.

Finally, Eisenhower spoke to the militarization of American culture. The university became a research arm of the complex. Students were taught about the virtues of military "readiness," the threat of "communism," the problem of how "human nature" leads to perpetual war, and, more recently, the endless danger of "terrorism." Virtually every large corporation, producing such products as toothpaste, toys, breakfast cereal, medications, automobiles, electronics, or energy, is steeped in military contracts. The public airwaves, the Internet, movies, and sports are laced with war, violence, killing, and competition. As Eisenhower put it: "Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved: so is the very structure of our society."

What another great American, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said in reference to the military/industrial complex and the Vietnam War seven years after President Eisenhower's dramatic statement still holds today:

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

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

11 Cute Costumes For Corporate Giants (Sell-out-itosis)

By Jason Notte 10/15/10 The Street

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- How does a big, scary corporation make itself look gentler to a nervous populace? By buying and putting on a mask.

Sometimes it's hard being a multinational corporation. Competitors are always gunning for you, regulators henpeck you about your every move and those underfed little activists think you're out to turn the world into a Dumpster and grind the mountains into your private parking lot. Sometimes you just want to hide out and remind people what they liked about you in the first place -- what good thing made you into the big bad creature that you are.

This is why Starbucks(SBUX_) lovers chuckle a little bit when friends say they prefer Seattle's Best -- which Starbucks bought in 2003. This is why Bud drinkers don't get too upset with beer snobs who sneer at them from behind pints of Boddington's or Bass -- which Bud maker Anheuser-Busch Inbev(BUD_) also owns. It's why someone who offers a coworker a Life-Savers mint and is rebuffed in favor of another coworker with a can of Altoids can hold their head high, as their halitosis-stricken workmate just turned down one Mars mint for another.

With Halloween little more than two weeks away, TheStreet took a quick stroll among the retail shelves and found 11 big bad companies hiding in the cutest little costumes. As is the case with most store-bought Halloween disguises, some do a better job of hiding one's identity than others:

Costume: Tom's of Maine 

Company: Colgate-Palmolive(CL_)

For starters: Yep, Colgate-Palmolive makes vegan toothpaste. The bucolic back story features Tom and Kate Chappell starting up Tom's in Kennebunk, Maine, in 1970 with $5,000 in seed money. They made toothpaste, soap and deodorant without animal testing and without animal product. They also took $100 million from Colgate-Palmolive for an 84% stake in the company, but kept the remaining 16% to ensure the products and formulas would remain intact. The Chappells get a nest egg and their integrity, Colgate-Palmolive gets to put some polish on its environmental image. Consumers seem none the wiser.

Costume: Kashi

Company: Kellogg(K_)

Ah, Kashi. Back in 1984, the company wanted to change the world -- or at least the American diet -- through the power of whole grain and seeds. Its seven whole grains and sesame became a status symbol for self-aware but easily stereotyped consumers across the country. By the end of the millennium, however, even the big boys wanted a piece of the "natural foods" movement that the La Jolla, Calif.-based company was selling. Kellogg bought Kashi in 2000 and, while Kashi remains "independently operated" -- meaning it's really hard to find a reference to Kellogg on its boxes -- it's still fun to picture Tony the Tiger yelling "They'rrre grains!" or the look on Toucan Sam's face when his nose takes a wrong turn into the sesame silo.

Costume: Nantucket Nectars

Company: Dr. Pepper Snapple Group(DPS_)

One day back in 1990, a couple of guys named Tom (First and Scott) who'd graduated from Brown University the year before went down to Nantucket, Mass., and opened a floating convenience store called Allserve. They started mixing juice in a blender and, in seven years, expanded their business from a few flavors to a $30 million enterprise. The take was up to close to $60 million by 2002,when Cadbury Schweppes backed a truckload of cash up to the door opened by the Toms and the Ocean Spray collective. The brand ended up in the hands of Dr. Pepper Snapple Group years later and, while the Toms' Juice Guys Juice Bar still stands on Nantucket and their voices still grace the product's commercials, the drinks and their organic counterparts are now brewed and bottled in containers similar to Snapple's at the Snapple facility in Rye Brook, N.Y. While that's little more than 250 miles away from its place of birth, Nantucket Nectars is far removed from its humble roots.

Costume: Stonyfield Farms

Company: Groupe Danone

Roughly 27 years ago, Stonyfield Farm was just a little organic farming school in Wilton, N.H. In 2001, Groupe Danone -- makers of the Dannon yougurt and Evian water brands -- bought 40% of the company. That stake was kicked up to 85% in 2003, but the company maintained its healthy organic image by donating a 10th of its proceeds to environmental causes and maintaining a pesticide-free 130,000 acres of family farmland across America. The company's packaging, website and mission still screams down-home organic, but some of the company's recent stumbles resemble those of a multinational. In 2008, Stonyfield voluntarily recalled several batches of blueberry yogurt after consumers complained about finding plastic and glass bits in the mix. Last year, the company recalled containers of its plain yogurt because it could contain food-grade sanitizer.

Costume: Schwinn

Company: Dorel Industries

Once a successful, iconic American bicycle brand, Schwinn doesn't have one model manufactured in the U.S. After declaring bankruptcy in 2001, Schwinn was sold to Pacific Cycle. Pacific, in turn, was bought by Dorel Industries, a Canadian company that also makes furniture and baby products. The Schwinn bikes consumers see today at Wal-Mart(WMT_), Target(TGT_), the Sports Authority and elsewhere are built in Taiwan and China and have little in common with the company's history -- besides a nameplate.

Costume: Ben & Jerry's:

Company: Unilever(UL_)

Every once in a while, the nation gets a reminder that Ben & Jerry's isn't a funky, freewheeling ice cream company from Vermont, but a small cog in a very big system. The last clue came in September, when Ben & Jerry's vowed to stop referring to its ice cream and frozen yogurt as all-natural when the Center for Science in the Public Interest found corn syrup and other less-than-natural ingredients in its Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey, among other varieties. It's been nearly 10 years since Unilever bought up shares of the company and effectively supplanted Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, and while moves to make the brand more eco-friendly and continued commitment to flavors such as the Barack Obama-themed "Yes Pecan" and the gay marriage-supporting "Hubby Hubby" keep the brand rooted, Unilever still casts a cold shadow over the ice cream icon every once in a while.

Costume: Stowe Mountain Resort

Company: AIG(AIG_)

What, surprised another big company can hide out in Vermont? If U.S. taxpayers ever feel like they're not getting enough out of the $47.5 billion it paid to get AIG out of the mess it created by churning out credit default swaps, they should just head up to lovely Mount Mansfield in Stowe, Vt., to reap the benefits of the AIG-owned resort's recent $400 million overhaul. (Technically the resort is owned by an AIG spinoff that is, itself, owned by AIG.) There's skiing, snowboarding, shopping, dog sled tours, a spa, a performing arts center and more, with lift tickets starting at $71 for latecomers and topping out at $655 for 10 days of mountain trails and moguls. Is it worth it? It should be, considering the ownership. Fewer companies know more about going downhill fast than AIG.

Costumes: Zappos and IMDB.com

Company: Amazon(AMZN_)

If it's sometimes hard to put the two together, it's because Zappos hasn't really changed much since Amazon bought it out of its financial troubles for $1.2 billion last year. Amazon seems to like Zappos just the way it is. With free shipping to and fro, a yearlong return policy and a 24-hour call center, what's not to love? Don't go changing, Zappos.

If it's hard sometimes to remember Amazon started out by selling books, you can start by remembering how long ago it started selling videos and DVDS: 1998. That's also when it happened to buy the Internet Movie Database, or IMDB.com, the Web's premier spot for tracking the careers of everyone from Johnny Depp (appeared as Glen Lantz in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984) to Ray Garcia (key grip on Inception). The site, which is just about to turn 20, is a model for other sites (there's an Internet Broadway Database too) and now hosts original content, lots of streaming clips and plenty of ads for Amazon -- and itself owns two movie-related sites, Withoutabox and Box Office Mojo.

Costumes: Red Hook, Widmer, Goose Island and Kona

Company: Anheuser-Busch InBev

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Anheuser-Busch doesn't own the Craft Brewers Alliance(HOOK_)!" Settle down, beer nerds, we're well aware that Anheuser-Busch InBev only has a 35% stake in the operation and the Craft Brewers Alliance pays A-B InBev a fee for distribution. That said, that's an extremely helpful arrangement for the Alliance, especially considering that A-B InBev just cut its fee by 30% this year so the Alliance can invest the difference into marketing its brands. There's been speculation that A-B InBev may just buy the Alliance outright, with craft beer sales growing 10.3% last year amid a 2.2% drop in overall U.S. beer sales, according to the Brewers Association. Yet while Red Hook, Widmer, Goose Island and Kona stay independent and retain their local ties, they're still being brought to the bar and the liquor store in Bud trucks.

Costumes: Old Style, Rainier, Ballantine, Stroh's, Schlitz, Lone Star, Olympia, Old Milwaukee, Schaefer, Piel's

Company: Pabst (with a big assist from MolsonCoors(TAP_))

Yes, Pabst was just sold to food investor C. Dean Metropolous for $250 million this summer, but Metropolous won't be getting a brewery as part of that purchase. He'll be getting the portfolio of brands bought over the years by the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation. Who's brewing those brands today? Miller. It's under contract, so when Schlitz reverted to its old formula last year, Miller just followed the instructions. Nevertheless, Schlitz is technically a Miller product, as are all of the above brands and an expansive collection of malt liquors. It's little wonder Miller High Life has mounted a challenge to Pabst Blue Ribbon for the hipster beer throne, considering they were both raised from the same stock.

Costume: Diaspora

Company: Facebook

If Diaspora ever becomes the next Facebook, it'll have Facebook to thank. Still under development, the project is the brainchild of four students from New York University who wanted to create an open-source Web server that would allow users greater control over information and content -- in other words, more of the privacy users felt had been violated by Facebook. An April announcement on fundraising site Kickstarter collected $200,000 from more than 6,000 donors ... including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who thought it was a "cool idea." The group's multimedia sharing, Voice over Internet Protocol and instant-messaging platform went live less than a month ago, so any judgment should be reserved for Diaspora's first controversy.

Ike warns the US about the rise of the corporate military industrial complex

(Was he prophetic? Or did he just see so much of what he warned us against, he felt compelled to warn future generations? Well, based on the trillions of dollars we've spent fighting one war that was begun under false pretense (Iraq), a war we can't possibly win (ask the Russians--Afghanistan), and two wars that are in the advanced stages of planning (Iran and N Korea), it seems like his dire warning has come true to the letter. The American Empire is defined by the corporate military industrial complex. They own the mainstream media, which has been a united voice for propaganda supporting each one of these wars (for example, GE owns NBC and its affiliates and also owns General Dynamics, one of the nation's largest defense contractors). How different would our world be if only we had listened to him. These words he speaks haunt me by their immediate influence on world events, but more haunting is my imagined world that heeded Ike's warning and kept the corporate military industrial complex in check. sigh...--jef)

***

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The Lost Soul of Higher Education

Corporatization: the Assault on Academic Freedom
and the End of the American University
Friday 28 May 2010
by: Eleanor J. Bader, t r u t h o u t | Book Review

Ellen Schrecker, a history professor at New York City's Yeshiva University, starts "The Lost Soul of Higher Education" with a blunt assessment: "In reacting to the economic insecurities of the past forty years, the nation's colleges and universities have adopted corporate practices that degrade undergraduate instruction, marginalize faculty members, and threaten the very mission of the academy as an institution devoted to the common good."

It's depressing stuff. And sadly, there is a wealth of evidence to support Schrecker's assertion. She starts by introducing the concept of academic freedom - the notion that teachers should be able to present ideas, both popular and not, without fear of reprisal.

Sounds great. Yet, reality, Schrecker writes, is somewhat different, for while rhetoric in support of academic freedom is plentiful, neither pedagogical nor personal autonomy have ever had free rein on campus. Howard Zinn, for one, was fired from Spellman College 50 years ago for supporting sit-ins against then-rampant racial segregation. More recently, Professor Norman Finkelstein, a prominent critic of Israel, was denied tenure at DePaul University following a campaign led by Harvard Professor Alan M. Dershowitz. Similarly, Native-American studies Professor Ward Churchill lost his post at the University of Colorado after a campaign by right-wing ideologues slammed his scholarship as inauthentic. Other examples abound and Schrecker makes clear that "tenure cannot protect a controversial professor when an institution wants him out ... Contrary to common assumptions, tenure does not grant its holders guaranteed life time employment."

Never was this clearer than during Joe McCarthy's witch hunts. Schrecker zeros in on three University of Washington professors who were fired because of purported ties to the Communist Party. Two of them admitted membership; the third, Ralph Gundlach, did not. Gundlach's dismissal, Schrecker writes, was the first test of academic freedom in the early 1950s. "Other institutions soon followed and before the anti-communist furor abated in the mid 1950's, more than one hundred college teachers lost jobs or were denied tenure because of their politics."

Two things are particularly striking about the University of Washington's actions. The first is that in none of the cases was teaching an issue. "It was the off-campus political activities of these men and particularly, their insistence that the institution's investigations not only violated their academic freedom but also interfered with their First Amendment freedom of speech and association that cost them their jobs," Schrecker concludes. Secondly, the fact that their colleagues allowed these dismissals to happen, with nary a peep of protest, is shameful. At the same time, Schrecker reminds us that despite right-wing assertions, the academy is not now and has never been a bastion of left-wing sentiment. In fact, only a handful of faculty members have ever been militant activists. "In an influential 1969 Carnegie Foundation study of the professoriate, Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset found that only five percent of the more than 60,000 professors they surveyed were willing to identify themselves as radical," she writes. Forty-one years later, there is nothing to suggest that the number has increased.

Schrecker's sweeping historical overview also makes another important point: Unlike the politically reactionary 1950s, the 1960s gave rise to numerous social movements which led to unprecedented campus activism. These movements made it possible for at least some faculty members to voice political opinions and speak out about issues like the Vietnam War, racism and educational equity.

Call it the heyday of academic freedom, a time when a cadre of professors and graduate teaching assistants - prompted by student activists - took it upon themselves to push for the creation of ethnic and women's studies departments and classes in such fast-developing disciplines as queer theory. Furthermore, alongside student groups, they demanded expanded financial aid and open enrollment. Their goal, they argued, was to literally change the complexion of higher education.

Not surprisingly, a few years down the road, the backlash that led Richard Nixon into the White House hit academia and, almost overnight, nontraditional courses were under attack for promoting specious, "dumbed down," intellectual discourse.

A small number of university faculty members opted to unionize - or try - as a way of maintaining their toehold on power, but most did not. As a result, by the mid-1970s, campus activism was waning and men like Allan Bloom, Donald Kagan and James Reston found media outlets eager for their audience-grabbing rants about on-campus immorality and the left-wing indoctrination of unsuspecting kids. Conservative donors were overjoyed by this outpouring and rushed to create groups including The American Enterprise Institute, The National Association of Scholars [NAS], The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni [ACTA]. Schrecker calls this confluence a catalyst and writes that it "accelerated the rate at which neoconservative and market-oriented studies were produced and gave them far more visibility and influence than they night otherwise have received."

Suddenly, the term "political correctness" was part of everyday discourse and "white man as endangered species" went from punch line to cause for alarm. A host of right wingers grabbed prime-time slots on both the radio airwaves and TV news hours.

Flash forward three decades and a racist, anti-immigrant backlash is in full flower.

So, too, are attacks on the many academic programs that have brought black, brown and Asian students and faculty into campus life. ACTA's campaign against Ward Churchill, Schrecker writes, is but one example. His outspoken critique of US foreign policy following the terrorist attacks on 9/11 "gave Colorado's partisans of traditional higher education a perfect opportunity to take on an unpopular department," she continues. While Schrecker acknowledges that Churchill's scholarship was oft times faulty, she notes that numerous faculty members at other schools - people she characterizes as plagiarists and charlatans - were not fired, but were instead given short-term suspensions.

But another change was also brewing. On top of selective crackdowns on leftists, feminists, ethnic studies proponents and queer theorists that began in the 1970s, colleges across the country were simultaneously being hit with budget cuts. Thanks to state and city budget shortfalls, government investment in higher education was dwindling and schools - even those with huge endowments - were scrambling for funding. Despite hefty tuition hikes, trustees and administrators were wringing their hands at the calamities that would ensue if more money was not forthcoming. "As colleges and universities struggled to keep afloat, they looked to the business sector for financial solutions, often bringing in managers from private companies to handle their affairs," Schrecker writes.

The price, of course, has been steep. Some corporations, she reports, require grant recipients to stifle findings that might damage their bottom line. Others limit research to subjects that have potential remunerative value. Equally appalling, as full-time faculty seek outside finding to support their research - or in some cases to insure that they receive tenure - upwards of 70 percent of teaching has shifted to part-time contingent faculty who typically juggle multiple adjunct jobs to make ends meet.

On the losing end are students who often can't find their teachers to discuss ideas or get in-person clarification of what is expected for completion of the next assignment.

"The Lost Soul of Higher Education" posits no solutions for loosening the corporate hold on education or for ensuring that a wide cross section of students are given the means to enroll. Likewise, it does not suggest ways to restructure higher ed to ensure that good teaching is ranked above grant acquisition or publishing, or for getting faculty members to understand the importance of collective bargaining.

All told, it's a grim read. But don't be deterred. Schrecker shines a bright light - one that should not be ignored - on everything that is wrong with the academy. If history teaches us anything, it's that social movements have the power to force social change. As Frederick Douglass reminded us more than 100 years ago, "power concedes nothing without demand." The question is what to ask for first.

Eisenhower's Nightmare Arrives

Eisenhower's Nightmare Arrives
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
President of the United States
Farewell Address, 17 January 1961

As I indicated in CounterPunch on 3 February 2010, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) just released by the Obama Pentagon is a bad joke. That bad joke is about to be given the good housekeeping seal of approval by a special panel appointed jointly by the Secretary of Defense and the defense barons of the Armed Services committees in Congress. When this happens, rest assured, any desire to get control of the out-of-control defense budget will plunge far below its already low level. Chalk up another victory in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex’s (MICC’s) war on the Constitution, the American taxpayer, and programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are hallmarks of civilized society.

To understand why this QDR review panel is gearing up to paint lipstick on the QDR pig, it is first necessary to describe what the QDR did not do.

Today, the Pentagon is now spending more in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time since the end of WWII to support a military force structure that is much smaller and older than at any time since the end of World War II. But the QDR did not even acknowledge the three mutually reinforcing problems that are now combining to produce a catastrophic meltdown of the Pentagon’s budget plans, let alone the cynical modes of conduct that virtually guarantee even more force structure reductions, even if defense budgets will continue to increase:

First, with a few exceptions, the Obama QDR approved a defense budget and a long range program plan that will not buy enough new weapons to replace the weapons in the inventories of the military forces in a timely manner. Consequently, the average age of these weapons, already at a post WWII high, will continue to get older at an accelerating rate. Given this situation, the only way to reduce the growth in average age will be to retire the oldest weapons without replacement, thereby shrinking the size of the forces yet again, in effect continuing a devolution that began as early as 1957 (seeDefense Death Spiral, especially pps. 21-25).

The economic roots of the force structure meltdown lie in the MICC’s obsession with modernizing with ever more costly and technically complex weapons. This obsession creates a political economy wherein unit costs (i.e., the cost of the “parts”) always rise faster than budgets (i.e., the cost of the “whole”). This creates a situation a little like cancer cells metastasizing in a body; something has to give.

The asymmetric economics of defense lead to the declining production rates and age growth described above which, in turn, create extortionary political pressure (caricatured by vacuous slogans such as the “hollow military” in the late 1970s or the so-called “procurement holiday” in the mid 1990s) to justify increases in the total defense budget. But increasing the budget, as we did after 1976 and after 1994, actually accelerates the rate of cost growth and thus restores the cancerous asymmetry between cost and budget growth, albeit at a higher budget level. This sets the stage for yet more political pressure to increase the defense budget even further, as the extortionary loop folds back on itself to amplify itself -- over and over. Over time, cynical gaming strategies, evolved though trial and error, create and/or exploit this pattern of economic behavior that benefits the “parts” at the expense of the “whole.” Whether these strategies, now known as front loading and political engineering, are the “chicken” or the “egg” is now immaterial, because today, they are ubiquitous and lie at the center of an organic, self-regulating devolution.

So, the asymmetric economics of cost growth greater than budget growth create continual political pressure to bail out a collapsing modernization program. There are essentially two short-term ways for responding to this pressure: (1) decision makers can reduce current readiness for combat in order to transfer money out of, or by slowing the future rate of money growth into, the operating budget (by reducing training tempos, purchases of spare parts, etc.) and then pump the “savings” into the modernization budget, or (2) they could simply increase the total defense budget. Generally, decision makers opt for a combination of both in the short term, but over the long term, the only option is to change their obsessions, which is unthinkable, or to increase the budget, which is the real name of the game.

Second, the Obama QDR also failed to address how the modernization problems described above (i.e., increasing technical complexity + increasing age of weapons) mutually reinforce each other to compound the DoD’s economic problems by creating a phenomenon known as the rising cost of low readiness. This makes it ever more difficult to rob the readiness budget to pump up the modernization budget. The subtle cause and effect relationships underpinning the rising cost of low readiness are explained in the Defense Death Spiral, especially pps. 24-45. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that the net result is that unit operating costs (i.e., the cost of operating the “parts”) also grow faster than defense budgets (i.e., the cost of the “whole”) and the economic effect becomes a variation on the cancerous theme described above.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Obama QDR failed to even acknowledge, let alone address, the related problems posed by unauditable, corrupt, financial management systems -- by this I mean both the historical accounting systems and the program planning systems of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System or PPBS.

As I explained in both the Defense Death Spiral and my last statement to Congress, not to mention in a public hearing over nineteen years earlier, in March 1983, before the Armed Services and Budget committees of of the Senate -- a hearing that resulted in a cover story for Time Magazine (7 Mar 83 issue), cynical bureaucratic gaming strategies systematically corrupt the information flowing though the Pentagon’s central management information system (i.e., the PPBS), which in any event is logically flawed (see, for example, my statement to Congress, beginning on page 15). This makes it impossible to assemble the information needed to sort out the first two problems and to devise appropriate recovery strategies that are based on an understanding of those problems. In this sense, the corruption of the Pentagon’s PPBS can be thought of as bureaucratic grease lubricating the political-economic engine that is protecting the status quo. So, it should not be surprising that our political system is unable to shape rational defense policies and strategies in response to changing conditions, such as adapting our forces while providing a peace dividend to reflect the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War.

Put bluntly, the Pentagon’s corrupt bookkeeping system is the turd in the national security punchbowl. All the players in Versailles on the Potomac have known about it for years, but no one wants to do anything about it, because flushing it out would end their party.

It is not fair to blame President Obama’s political appointees in the Pentagon for this state of affairs, because as I have endeavored to show, it has very deep roots. On the other hand, it is eminently fair to blame Obama’s inept Office of the Secretary of Defense, particularly the spectacularly incompetent Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, for not even acknowledging these problems in a QDR it spent almost a year putting together.

It would be absurd for the Obama Pentagon to plead ignorance for its obscene omission.
After all, Obama’s QDR is only the most recent variation of a bad joke begun in the Clinton Administration with its publication of the fatally- flawed first QDR on 19 May 1997. Of course, the Clinton Administration was merely continuing the pathological planning practices of the Reagan Administration, which I described in excruciating detail during the March 1983 congressional hearing. And bear in mind, the Reagan Pentagon was merely continuing the bureaucratic pathologies the military reformers began to document in the 1970s -- behavioral pathologies that we now know reached back at least to the inception of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1961 and probably earlier.

Given the staying power of the defense power games, no one should be surprised that the end of the Cold War resulted only in temporary marginal reductions in the defense budget; nor should we be surprised that twenty years later, the United States is spending more on defense than it did at the height of the Cold War, when we stood toe to toe with the Soviet nuclear-armed superpower, yet had enough extra resources to fight very hot wars in Korea and Vietnam; nor should we be surprised that today we are spending as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Bear in mind, as I showed in my 2002 statement to Congress, the so-called global war on terror has very little to do with this current budgetary state of affairs. It should be clear, therefore, that the Pentagon has deep systemic problems, and that the most recent QDR, like its predecessors, papered them over, to put it charitably.

Now, with this background in mind, let’s turn our attention to the QDR review panel that is about to “fix” this disastrous state of affairs. Congress created a special review board in 2006 to analyze the 2010 QDR in order -- don’t laugh -- to provide the Congress with what it called an independent alternative view of the QDR. The 20 members of this review board were to be appointed by the Defense Secretary (12) and the senior Republicans and Democrats of the Senate and House Armed Services committee’s (8).

On 1 March 2010, Ray Locker and Ken Dilanian of USA Today authored a front page report that described and analyzed the makeup of the 20 members of the QDR review committee. Locker and Dilanian showed that “eleven out of twenty members “work for defense contractors as employees, consultants or board directors,” raising obvious questions of conflict of interests. Foremost among these is the panel chairman, William Perry, a long time Democratic defense operative who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and made a fortune in the defense industry when he moved back and forth through the revolving door. Perry has been one of the most vocal and slickest salesmen of high tech defense systems, especially robots. While Secretary of Defense, Perry did nothing to correct the three problems described above, and in fact, he made them far worse by promoting new cold-war inspired high complexity, high-cost weapons just as the Cold War was ending -- most significantly, the problem-plagued Joint Strike Fighter, which is on track to be the most expensive program in the Pentagon’s history. Today, the Obama administration’s Pentagon is well populated with Perry’s proteges.

Locker and Dilanian did an adequate job of identifying contractor connections for the eleven members of the panel; that is bad enough, but their report dropped the ball on highlighting the likely biases of the other members.

In addition to the eleven members who are affiliated with the defense industry, at least six other members work or have worked as defense “intellaaaaactuals” for pro-defense not-so-thinking thinktanks:

* Center for New American Security (CNAS): John Nagl, president. Nagl has been closely tied to the Obama administration’s advocacy of the AFPAK war and his organization serves as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon's war policies. There is no indication Nagl knows anything about the decision making pathologies discussed above. But his predecessor as president of CNAS, Michelle Flournoy, is now the Under Secretary for Policy in the Pentagon and can be regarded as the key architect of the QDR.

* The Center for American Progress (CAP): Senior vice president, Rudy De Leon, is a former Deputy Secretary of Defense in in Clinton Administration. De Leon did nothing to clean up the Pentagon’s bookkeeping mess as DEPSECDEF, even though he was well aware of these bookkeeping problems from the mid-1980s forward, when he worked for Congressman Nick Mavroules (who ended up in the slammer for racketeering).

* Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA): Eric Edelman was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy between 2005 and early 2009. In this role, he was responsible for the vapid, unmemorable 2006 QDR, which is perhaps why Congress demanded the establishment of an independent review panel to “analyze” subsequent QDRs. Now he serves as Distinguished Fellow at CSBA, an organization long associated with promoting the Pentagon’s equally flawed theory of a high-tech, high-cost Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), whose contemporary incarnation in using robotic drones in a collateral-damage-prone strategy to assassinate Taliban and al Qaeda leaders is creating enemies faster than we can kill them.

* Heritage Foundation: James Talent, the former Senator from Missouri and long time porker for McDonnel-Douglas-Boeing (St Louis), one of our largest defense contractors. The Heritage Foundation has ceaselessly flogged the “benefits” of ever growing defense budgets, since it produced its only critical report, “Ending Defense Stagnation” in 1982. Since then, to the best of my knowledge, it has not produced a study that questioned the Pentagon’s inability to pass financial audits in accordance with the requirements of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, not to mention the Constitution -- apparently setting aside the supposed conservative predilection of preserving the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution.

* Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA): General Larry Welch, former Chief of Staff of the AF, did nothing to fix the Air Force’s airplane aging problem when he had a chance to shape the Air Force’s future. As President of IDA, he headed up a not for profit organization whose main customer was the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. During his tenure, the IDA economic analysis office produced no recommendations that would have made the Pentagon’s books more auditable or dealt constructively with the power games causing the meltdown, particularly the cynical use of “learning curves” to support the Pentagon’s front loading operations.

* Center For Naval Analysis (CNA): A not for profit thinktank that is effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Navy.

So, there we have it: 17 out of 20 members of the QDR review panel have close ties to the status quo Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, has ever discussed, much less analyzed, the three interconnected problems that have produced the Defense Death Spiral or the stunningly flawed QDRs. None of these people have ever tried to step up to the hard decisions needed to fix these problems. Of the remaining three members of the panel, the only one I have any familiarity with is Lt General Paul Van Riper, a former reformer and I believe a truth teller (even reformers occasionally make general). But even if he tries to fix things and the other two members side with him, my guess is that the three of them will be voices in the wilderness and have little or no impact on the outcome -- too much money is at stake, and the 17 other members of the panel are card carrying protectors of the status quo.

A QDR review panel where at least 17 out of 20 members have a vested interest in protecting the status quo certainly will not ask the question: Is there an alternative to protecting the status quo?

For what it is worth, here is my answer.

Probably the only way to incentivize the Pentagon to really clean up its act will be to take the money away and force it to think.

Setting aside the question of ending our misbegotten wars (an issue I have discussed in several Counterpunch articles), we should freeze the core, i.e., the non-war related, defense budget in current dollars, or better, reduce that level by two percent a year. Keep this policy in place at least until the Pentagon can pass an audit in compliance with the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and the Constitution. (This is only a starter; we could do much more: Readers interested in one way the Pentagon could go about producing the information needed to fix the mess can read the last section of my statement to Congress at the aforementioned link. No doubt, there are other ways.)

Some naysayers might argue that we can not freeze the defense budget, because we are at war, and we must support the troops. This is an emotional red herring. It is a suicidal logic that implies we should continue a dysfunctional status quo that will make us ever weaker, because we are at war. If deemed necessary, we could always continue a variation of Mad King George’s practice of paying for these wars on a pay as you go basis through supplemental appropriations (which in contrast to my proposal, he used to protect the self-destructive status quo by pumping up the core budget).

Other naysayers might argue that reducing the budget by two percent per year will gut the Pentagon, because the Pentagon is not required to pass an audit until 2018, and the compound effect of -2% per a year for eight years would be devastating. This kind of claptrap is precisely the kind of non-thinking that works to perpetuate the status quo.

With deadlines like 2018, the Pentagon has no incentive to clean up its act.

Moreover, the MICC has a habit of pushing inconvenient deadlines ever further into the future. Consider the track record of how the Pentagon routinely “bow waved” its auditing problems into the future: John Hamre was Chief Financial Officer (i.e. Comptroller) of the Pentagon in the early 1990s during the Clinton Administration; in that capacity, he promised Congress he would fix the books by 1997, a promise that was conveniently forgotten when 1997 arrived. When Dov Zakheim became the first DoD Chief Financial Officer in Bush administration in 2001, he promised to fix the books by 2007. Zakheim’s successor in the Bush Administration, the inept and eminently forgettable Tina Jonas, extended Zakheim’s promise to fix the books by 2016. Congress has now told Obama’s Comptroller, Robert Hale, to fix the books by 2018.

So, given the Pentagon’s behavior and the makeup of the panel, how much do you want to bet that the QDR review panel even mentions, let alone tackles a bookkeeping issue that is widely acknowledged but has been treated with contempt by decision makers in the Pentagon and Congress for at least fifteen years? This behavior is nothing less than a systematic assault on the Appropriations and Accountability Clauses of the Constitution (see Article I, Section 9, Clause 7), which each member of the Defense Department has taken a sacred oath to defend and uphold.

That is why the MICC’s desire to feed its voracious appetite by continuing its assault on the Constitution reflects exactly the kind of misplaced power that President Eisenhower warned America about in his farewell address.