Sunday, September 4, 2016
The Koch Brothers' Right-Wing Trojan Horse: Institutes for "Well-Being"
Thursday, 01 September 2016
Truthout | Op-Ed
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37447-the-koch-brothers-right-wing-trojan-horse-institutes-for-well-being
It is essential that all of us
-- current scholars and teachers, public leaders of thought and those
supporting learners at all levels -- examine the connections of well-being to
higher education: what that means, what it suggests and why it is important to
all involved. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of editing a volume of 35
original essays by leaders of thought in higher education that does just that: Well-Being and Higher Education.
As a former college president
and current director of a higher education nonprofit, I have long been
interested in the issue of well-being on college campuses, so I was alarmed to
learn from Jane Mayer's New Yorker article "New
Koch" that the Koch brothers and their conservative network are
funding a long-term effort to promote the right-wing fundamentalist free-market
ideology by presenting it "as an apolitical and altruistic reform movement
to enhance the quality of life -- as a movement for well-being." And
I was dismayed to learn that the Koch brothers intend to implement that
strategy with a particular strain of "well-being institutes,"
spreading them to multiple universities.
Mayer quotes Allen Brooks of
the American Enterprise Institute as claiming that Republicans just needed
different packaging for their message: "In other words, if you want to be
seen as a moral, compassionate person, talk about fairness and helping the
vulnerable." Professor James Otteson, the executive director of the
BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism at Wake Forest University, which
runs the Koch-funded Eudaimonia Project, is quoted by Mayer in his enthusiasm
about the persuasive possibilities: "Who can be against well-being?"
This strategy, playing on the
proclivity of institutions of higher education to accept gifts, uses its
seemingly noble and apolitical movement in pursuit of well-being as the benign
cover -- the Trojan Horse -- hiding its underlying message that a "free
market" and reduction of government involvement will "forge a path to
happiness."
Just a few months later, Rob
Schofield's article in NC Policy Watch echoed this
sentiment, describing the Koch brothers' efforts to ideologically
"frame" well-being so as to advance the "hard right market
fundamentalist ideology by cloaking it in a warm and fuzzy language and to
thereby grace it with the veneer of academic legitimacy."
It appears that Schofield and
Mayer are right in describing the strategy and the intent. However, they
overlook an even more damning critique of this deceptive and manipulative
tactic. The ascription of the fundamental source and values of well-being to
the market ideology of the far right, and the lodging of its practice in the
academy by establishing "Well-being Institutes" ignores the history,
the community of practices, the research and the multiple available analyses of
the complexity of well-being.
Furthermore, the Kochs'
strategy misconstrues the very meaning of well-being -- failing
(perhaps purposely) to recognize the reductive narrowness and transient nature
of defining it solely through dimensions of "feelings," including
feelings of financial success. Their strategy ignores what constitutes the
manifestations of well-being expressed in experiencing higher learning. In so
doing, it also ignores what institutions of higher education can do to
facilitate those manifestations of well-being in students: connecting them to
higher education's core purposes of open inquiry, the practice of civic and
moral responsibility, and self-realization through the fulfillment of one's
human, individual and communal capacities.
The effort being made in
funding these institutes to ideologically frame (better, capture) the meaning
and implications of well-being is simplistic and shallow. This effort assumes
that if this framing is voiced frequently enough and offered without
examination, it will stick as the adopted framework. This is the logic of
propaganda. When a university agrees to open an institute that is established
to promote an ideology -- be it the ideology of unregulated free enterprise, or
one espousing state control -- it has abandoned the principles of academic
inquiry and critical thought that give it legitimacy, prejudging the very
questions it would claim to investigate.
It is worth noting the
discussion surrounding the significance of the recent nomination of John
Schnatter (founder of Papa John's Pizza and the namesake of Ball State's
well-being Institute) to the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville
by the conservative governor of Kentucky, following Schnatter's and the Koch
brothers' combined $12 million donation to the University of Kentucky. Does
that discussion, and the many others that will likely occur in regards to other
campuses, get contextualized as part of a pattern? Isn't vigilance needed when
any gift appears? Shouldn't we ask how a gift to a university will influence
the integrity of the institution's core purposes?
Institutions of higher
education are, at their essential level, about the pursuit of knowledge,
evidence, truth, justice and well-being. Colleges and universities are unique
in upholding these qualities and must do so with integrity. Doing so should
reveal (contrary to what the Kochs and their network may assume) that complex
constructs, such as these, rest on neither market values, nor individual
self-interest. Rather, constructs such as justice and well-being are rooted in
relational experience and the values of open exploration and the common good.
That is just what the serious
examination of the rich trans-historical and cross-cultural meanings of
"well-being" suggests. True well-being is antithetical to the
propagandizing provided by the gift of these Trojan Horse institutes. We must
contextualize the Kochs' effort to capture "well-being" and
distinguish it from altruistic efforts to further the real purposes of higher
education.
Copyright, Truthout. May not
be reprinted without permission.
Donald W. Harward is president
emeritus of Bates College and has directed the Bringing Theory to Practice Project since
its founding in 2003 with S. Engelhard Pingree.
Hillary Clinton, the Podesta Group and the Saudi Regime: A Fatal Menage a Trois
SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
If I told you that Democratic
Party lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta chairs Hillary
Clinton’s presidential campaign, is a registered foreign agent on the
Saudi government’s payroll, you’d probably think I was a Trump-thumping,
conspiratorial nutcase. But it’s true.
The lobby firm created by both
Tony and John Podesta in 1988 receives $140,000 a month from the Saudi
government, a government that beheads nonviolent dissidents, uses torture to
extract forced confessions, doesn’t allow women to drive, and bombs schools,
hospitals and residential neighborhoods in neighboring Yemen.
The Podesta Group’s March 2016 filing,
required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, shows that Tony
Podesta himself oversees the Saudi account. At the same time, Tony Podesta is
also a top campaign contributor and bundler for Hillary Clinton. So while one
brother runs the campaign, the other brother funds it with earnings that come,
in part, from the Saudis.
John and Tony Podesta have
been heavyweights in DC insider politics for decades. John Podesta served as
President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the influential DC think tank
Center for American Progress (which regularly touts Saudi “reforms”), and was counselor to President
Obama. Tony Podesta was dubbed by The New York Times as “one of Washington’s
biggest players” whose clients “are going to get a blueprint for how to succeed
in official Washington.”
The brothers seem to have no
problem mixing their roles into the same pot. Tony Podesta held a Clinton
campaign fundraiser at his home featuring gourmet Italian food
cooked by himself and his brother, the campaign chairman. The fundraiser, by
the way, came just days after Tony Podesta filed his Saudi contract with the
Justice Department, a contract that included an initial “project fee” payment
of $200,000.
The Saudis hired the Podesta
Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian
casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political
dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in
prison and 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam.” Since then, Tony Podesta’s
fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington
DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh
Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming
sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper
with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.
The Podesta-Clinton-Saudi
connection should be seen in light of the recent media exposes revealing the
taudry pay-to-play nature of the Clinton Foundation. Top on the list of foreign
donors to the foundation is Saudi Arabia, which contributed between $10 million
and $25 million.
What did the Saudis get for
their largesse and access? Wikileaks revealed a 2009 cable by then Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton saying: “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains
a critical financial support base for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar e-Tayyiba
and other terrorist groups.” Instead of sanctioning the Saudis, Clinton did the
opposite: She authorized enormous quantities of weapons to be sold to them. On
Christmas Eve in 2011, Hillary Clinton and her closest aides celebrated a
massive $29.4 billion sale to the Saudis of over 80 F-15 fighter jets,
manufactured by Boeing, a company which coincidentally contributed $900,000 to
the Clinton Foundation. In a chain of enthusiastic emails, an aide exclaimed
that it was “not a bad Christmas present.” I’m sure the Yemenis at the
receiving end of the Saudi bombings would not be so enthusiastic.
The Clintons have said that if
Hillary Clinton gets elected, the foundation will stop taking foreign
donations. But what about no longer taking campaign contributions from people
who are paid by the Saudi government to whitewash its image? The Podesta Group
should be blacklisted from contributing to Clinton’s campaign until they drop
the monarchy as a client and return their ill-gotten gains. If Hillary Clinton
wants to be a meaningful symbol for human rights and women’s empowerment, her
campaign must live up to the values she claims to represent, and this would be
one step in the right direction.
Medea Benjamin is the
co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human right organization Global
Exchange. Follow her on twitter at @MedeaBenjamin.
US Arms Makers Invest in a New Cold War
September 1, 2016
Exclusive: Behind the
U.S. media-political clamor for a new Cold War with Russia is a massive
investment by the Military-Industrial Complex in “think tanks” and other
propaganda outlets, writes Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
The U.S. military has won only
a single major war since the end of World War II (the Gulf War of 1990-91). But
U.S. military contractors continue to win major budget wars in Congress nearly
every year, proving that no force on earth can resist their lobbying prowess
and political clout.
Consider the steady march to
victory of the biggest single weapons program in history — the planned purchase
of advanced Lockheed-Martin F-35 jets by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines at a
total projected cost of more than $1 trillion.
The Air Force and Marines have
both declared the Joint Strike Fighter ready for combat, and Congress is now
forking over billions of dollars a year to acquire what is slated to become a
fleet of 2,400 jets.
Yet the world’s most expensive
fighter bomber still doesn’t work properly and may never perform as advertised.
That’s not “dezinformatsiya”
from Russian “information warfare” specialists. That’s the official opinion of
the Pentagon’s top weapons evaluator, Michael Gilmore.
In an Aug,
9 memo obtained by Bloomberg News, Gilmore warned senior Pentagon
officials that the F-35 program “is actually not on a path toward success but
instead on a path toward failing to deliver” the aircraft’s promised
capabilities. He said the program “is running out of time and money to complete
the planned flight testing and implement the required fixes and modifications.”
The military testing czar
reported that complex software problems and testing deficiencies “continue to
be discovered at a substantial rate.” As a result, the planes may fail to track
moving targets on the ground, warn pilots when enemy radar systems spot them,
or make use of a newly designed bomb. Even the F-35’s gun may not function
properly.
Devastating Assessments
The internal Pentagon
assessment was just the latest in a long list of devastating
critical assessments and development setbacks for the plane. They
include repeated groundings of the plane due to fires and other safety issues;
the discovery of dangerous engine instability; and helmets that can cause fatal
whiplash. The plane even got soundly beaten in a mock engagement with a much
older (and cheaper) F-16.
Last year, an article in
the conservative National Reviewargued that “the biggest threat the U.S.
military faces over the next few decades is not the carrier-killing Chinese
anti-ship ballistic missile, or the proliferation of inexpensive quiet
diesel-electric attack subs, or even Chinese and Russian anti-satellite
programs. The biggest threat comes from the F-35 . . . For this
trillion-dollar-plus investment we get a plane far slower than a 1970s F-14
Tomcat, a plane with less than half the range of a 40-year-old A-6 Intruder . .
. and a plane that had its head handed to it by an F-16 during a recent
dogfight competition.”
Likening the F-35 to a
previous failed fighter jet program, retired Air Force Colonel Dan Ward observed
last year, “Perhaps the truly best scenario for the Joint Strike Fighter is
for it to follow in the footsteps of the F-22 and provide a combat capability
that is irrelevant to actual military needs. That way, when the whole fleet
gets grounded because of an unsolvable flaw, the impact on our defense posture
would be nil.”
Lockheed’s “Pay-to-Play Ad
Agency”
Coming
to the program’s defense most recently was military analyst Dan Goure,
in the blog of the respected magazine, The National Interest. Goure
belittled critics in the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation Office as
“green eyeshade people, like the goblins at Gringott’s in the Harry Potter
series.”
Describing the F-35 as “a
revolutionary platform,” he declared, “Its ability to operate undetected in
hostile airspace, gathering information and even targeting data on enemy air
and ground targets, before launching surprise attacks demonstrates a decisive
advantage over existing threat systems. . . . The Joint Strike Fighter test
program is making progress at an accelerated rate. More to the point, even
before it has completed the rigid performance template laid out by DOT&E,
the F-35 has demonstrated capabilities that far exceed any current Western
fighter.”
If that reads a bit like a
Lockheed-Martin marketing brochure, consider the source. In his article, Goure
identified himself only as a vice president of the Lexington Institute, which bills itself as
“a nonprofit public-policy research organization headquartered in Arlington,
Virginia.”
What Goure didn’t say — and
the Lexington Institute doesn’t generally disclose — is that “it receives contributions
from defense giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and others, which
pay Lexington to ‘comment on defense,’” according to a 2010 profile in Politico.
Earlier the same year, Harper’s contributor
Ken Silverstein called the
widely quoted think tank “the defense industry’s pay-to-play ad agency.” He
added, “Outfits like Lexington produce the press conferences, position papers
and op-eds that keep military money flowing to defense contractors.”
Goure’s indirect association
with Lockheed gives a hint as to why programs like the F-35 continue to thrive
despite performance failures, gigantic cost overruns, and schedule delays that
would otherwise trigger headline-grabbing congressional investigations and
produce streams of indignant rhetoric from Fox News commentators about
government failure.
Promoting the New Cold War
Think tanks like the Lexington
Institute are prime
movers behind the domestic propaganda campaign to revive the Cold War
against the diminished Russian state and justify weapons programs like the
F-35.
As Lee Fang observed
recently in The Intercept, “The escalating anti-Russian rhetoric
in the U.S. presidential campaign comes in the midst of a major push by
military contractors to position Moscow as a potent enemy that must
be countered with a drastic increase in military spending by NATO countries.”
Thus the Lockheed-funded
Aerospace Industries Association warns that
the Obama administration is failing to spend enough on “aircraft, ship and
ground combat systems” to adequately address “Russian aggression on NATO’s
doorstep.” The Lockheed- and
Pentagon-funded Center for European Policy Analysis issues a stream ofalarmist reports about Russian military
threats to Eastern Europe.
And the highly influential
Atlantic Council — funded by
Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, the U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and even
the Ukrainian World Congress — promotes articles like
“Why Peace is Impossible with Putin” and declares that
NATO must “commit to greater military spending” to deal with “a revanchist
Russia.”
Origins of NATO’s Expansion
The campaign to portray Russia
as a menace, led by contractor-funded pundits and analysts, began soon after
the Cold War ended. In 1996, Lockheed executive Bruce Jackson founded the
U.S. Committee on NATO, whose motto was “Strengthen America, Secure Europe.
Defend Values. Expand NATO.”
Its mission ran directly
contrary to promises by
the George H.W. Bush administration not to expand the Western military alliance
eastward after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Joining Jackson were such
neo-conservative hawks as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Robert Kagan. One
neocon insider called Jackson — who went on to co-found the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq — “the nexus between the defense industry and the neoconservatives.
He translates us to them, and them to us.”
The organization’s intense and
highly successful lobbying efforts did not go unnoticed. In 1998, the New
York Times reported that
“American arms manufacturers, who stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of
weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate
approves NATO expansion, have made enormous investments in lobbyists and
campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington. . . .
“The four dozen companies
whose main business is arms have showered candidates with $32.3 million since
the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the decade. By
comparison, the tobacco lobby spent $26.9 million in that same period, 1991 to
1997.”
A spokesman for Lockheed said,
”We’ve taken the long-term approach to NATO expansion, establishing alliances.
When the day arrives and those countries are in a position to buy combat
aircraft, we certainly intend on being a competitor.”
The lobbying worked. In 1999, against
Russian opposition, NATO absorbed the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
In 2004, it added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and
Slovenia. Albania and Croatia joined next in 2009. Most provocatively, in 2008
NATO invited Ukraine to join the Western alliance, setting the stage for the dangerous
conflict between NATO and Russia over that country today.
The fortunes of American arms
makers soared. “By 2014, the twelve new [NATO] members had purchased close to
$17 billion worth of American weapons,” according to
Andrew Cockburn, “while . . . Romania celebrated the arrival of Eastern
Europe’s first $134 million Lockheed Martin Aegis Ashore missile-defense
system.”
Last fall, Washington
Business Journal reported that
“if anyone is benefitting from the unease between Russia and the rest of the
world, it would have to be Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp.
(NYSE: LMT). The company is positioned to make large profits off what could
very well be an international military spending spree by Russia’s neighbors.”
Citing a big contract to sell
missiles to Poland, the newspaper added, “Officials from Lockheed aren’t
explicitly declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adventurism
in Ukraine is good for business, but they aren’t shying away from recognizing
the opportunity that Poland is presenting them as Warsaw continues to embark on
a massive military modernization project — one that has accelerated as tensions
grip Eastern Europe.”
Lockheed’s Lobby Machine
Lockheed continues to pump
money into the American political system to ensure that it remains the nation’s
largest military contractor. From 2008 to 2015, its lobbying
expenditures exceeded $13 million in all but one year. The company sprinkled
business from the F-35 program into 46 states and claims that it
generates tens of thousands of jobs.
Among the 18 states enjoying a
claimed economic impact of more than $100 million from the fighter jet is
Vermont — which is why the F-35 gets the support even of Sen.
Bernie Sanders.
As he told one town hall
meeting, “It employs hundreds of people. It provides a college education for
hundreds of people. So for me the question is not whether we have the F-35 or
not. It is here. The question for me is whether it is located in Burlington,
Vermont or whether it is located in Florida.”
In 1961, President Eisenhower
observed that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large
arms industry” had begun to influence “every city, every State house, every
office of the Federal government.”
In his famous farewell address
to the nation, Eisenhower warned that “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.”
How right he was. But not even
Ike could have imagined the extravagant costs to the nation of failing to hold
that complex at bay — ranging from a trillion-dollar fighter jet program to the
needless and far more dangerous resurrection of the Cold War a quarter century
after the West achieved victory.
Jonathan Marshall is author or
co-author of five books on international affairs, including The
Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford
University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were
“Risky
Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons
Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi
Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The
Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi
Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The
US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden
Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]
Using human shields as a pretext to kill civilians
By claiming that the other
side is using human shields, the attacker provides itself with a pre-emptive
legal defence.
Human shields have been making
headlines for some time. Before the recent fray between the Islamic State of
Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and Iraqi army in Fallujah, the
United Press International released an article entitled “Iraqi forces halt
Fallujah advance amid fears for 50,000 human shields”.
Indeed, not a day has passed
in the past several months without an array of newspapers mentioning human
shields in different theatres of violence: Fom Syria, where ISIL fighters fled
Manbij in convoys apparently using human shields; through Kashmir, where “army and police used civilians as human shields
in operations against militants”; to Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists were accused of using international observers as
shields.
Moreover, the phrase human
shields is not only used to describe the use of civilians in the midst of war,
but to depict civilians in protests, from Ferguson in the United States, to Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.
Liberal democratic states are
not the only ones who are warning the world of the increasing use of human
shields; rather authoritarian regimes as well as a variety of local and
international organisations of different kinds, from the Red Cross and human
rights NGOs to the United Nations, are invoking the term.
In a recent confidential UN
report, Houthi rebels were blamed for concealing “fighters and equipment in
or close to civilians … with the deliberate aim of avoiding attack.”
Allowing killing
Although different forms of
human shielding have probably been conceptualised and mobilised since the
invention of war, its quotidian use is a completely novel phenomenon. Why, one
might ask, has this term suddenly become so pervasive?
Legally speaking, human
shields refer to the use of civilians as defensive weapons in order to render
combatants or military sites immune from attack. The idea behind the term is
that civilians, who are protected under international law, should not be
exploited to gain a military advantage.
While most people will
undoubtedly be familiar with this definition, less known is the fact that
international law not only prohibits the use of human shields but also renders
it legitimate for militaries to attack areas being “protected” by human
shields.
The US Air Force, for example, maintains that “lawful targets shielded with protected
civilians may be attacked, and the protected civilians may be considered as
collateral damage, provided the collateral damage is not excessive compared
with the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by the attack.”
Along similar lines, the 2013
document on joint targeting published by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff
underscores the importance of the principle of proportionality, it also notes
that, “otherwise lawful targets involuntarily shielded with protected civilians
may be attacked … provided that the collateral damage is not excessive compared
with the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by the attack.”
(PDF)
What all this means, quite
simply, is that human shields can be legally killed so long as the deployment
of violence does not breach the principle of proportionality – which requires
belligerents to refrain from causing damage disproportionate to the military
advantage to be gained.
It now appears that police
forces the world over are adopting a similar perspective as they confront
protests and riots.
The motivation behind the
adoption of such guidelines by domestic and international actors is clear: It
allows security forces to relax the rules of engagement, while framing those
who deploy shields as morally deplorable and in breach of international law.
Pre-emptive legal defence
Given the strategic and
pervasive adoption of the phrase human shields, it seems clear that the term is
not only being deployed as a descriptive expression to depict the use of
civilians as weapons, but also as a kind of pre-emptive legal defence against
the accusations of having killed or injured them.
Put differently, if any one of
Fallujah’s 50,000 civilians is killed during an anti-ISIL onslaught, then it is
not the US-backed attacking forces that are to blame, but rather ISIL itself,
which illegally and immorally used civilians as shields.
Moreover, it increasingly
appears that it is enough to claim – in advance – that the enemy is using human
shields in order to warrant the killing of non-combatants.
Even though it is undeniable
that many militaries and non-state armed groups do, in fact, use human shields,
the potential ramifications of the mere accusation are extremely worrisome.
In other words, by claiming
that the other side is using human shields, the attacking force provides itself
with a pre-emptive legal defence.
To understand fully the
implications of this framing it is imperative to take into account that urban
areas, as Stephen Graham from Newcastle University put it, “have become the lightning conductors for our
planet’s political violence.”
The fact that warfare
currently shapes urban life in many areas around the globe means that civilians
occupy and will continue to occupy the frontlines of much of the fighting.
This leaves them extremely
vulnerable to being framed as human shields, since it would be enough to say in
advance that the residents of a city are shields for their deaths to be legal
and justified.
Insofar as this is the case,
then the pre-emptive legal defence may very well be used as part of a
horrifying process aimed at legalising and normalising the massive slaughtering
of civilians.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LsLdQnwYzk
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