Visions  

NSFWCORP / By Mark Ames

The True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda

 

Before Milton Friedman was earning plaudits as an economic genius, he was a shill for the real estate industry and an early pioneer for big business propaganda known as libertarianism. 

 

 

September 6, 2013  |  

 

This is an adapted version of an article that first appeared on NSFWCORP. Published daily online and monthly in print, NSFWCORP is The Future of Journalism (With Jokes). For more features, or to subscribe, click here.
This important article kicks off what will be a focus of coverage of AlterNet over the next few months on the corporate-funded "pro-market" arm of  libertarianism in America and the sophisticated methods of inserting business propaganda into the public debate.

***

Every couple of years, mainstream media hacks pretend to have just discovered libertarianism as some sort of radical, new and dynamic force in American politics. It’s a rehash that goes back decades, and hacks love it because it’s easy to write, and because it’s such a non-threatening “radical” politics (unlike radical left politics, which threatens the rich). The latest version involves a summer-long pundit debate in the pages of the New York Times, Reason magazine and elsewhere over so-called “libertarian populism.” It doesn’t really matter whose arguments prevail, so long as no one questions where libertarianism came from or why we’re defining libertarianism as anything but a big business public relations campaign, the winner in this debate is Libertarianism.

Pull up libertarianism’s floorboards, look beneath the surface into the big business PR campaign’s early years, and there you’ll start to get a sense of its purpose, its funders, and the PR hucksters who brought the peculiar political strain of American libertarianism into being — beginning with the libertarian movement’s founding father, Milton Friedman. Back in 1950, the House of Representatives held hearings on illegal lobbying activities and exposed both Friedman and the earliest libertarian think-tank outfit as a front for business lobbyists. Those hearings have been largely forgotten, in part because we’re too busy arguing over the finer points of “libertarian populism.”

Milton Friedman. In his early days, before millions were spent on burnishing his reputation, Friedman worked as a business lobby shill, a propagandist who would say whatever he was paid to say.  That's the story we need to revisit to get to the bottom of the modern American libertarian "movement," to see what it's really all about. We need to take a trip back to the post-war years, and to the largely forgotten Buchanan Committee hearings on illegal lobbying activities, led by a pro-labor Democrat from Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan.
What the Buchanan Committee discovered was that in 1946, Milton Friedman and his U Chicago cohort George Stigler arranged an under-the-table deal with a Washington lobbying executive to pump out covert propaganda for the national real estate lobby in exchange for a hefty payout, the terms of which were never meant to be released to the public. They also discovered that a lobbying outfit which is today credited by libertarians as the movement’s first think-tank — the Foundation for Economic Education — was itself a big business PR project backed by the largest corporations and lobbying fronts in the country.

It starts just after the end of World War Two, when America’s industrial and financial giants, fattened up from war profits, established a new lobbying front group called the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) that focused on promoting a new pro-business ideology—which it called “libertarianism”— to supplement other business lobbying groups which focused on specific policies and legislation.

The FEE is generally regarded as “the first libertarian think-tank” as Reason’s Brian Doherty calls it in his book “Radicals For Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement” (2007). As the Buchanan Committee discovered, the Foundation for Economic Education was the best-funded conservative lobbying outfit ever known up to that time, sponsored by a Who’s Who of US industry in 1946.

A partial list of FEE’s original donors in its first four years— a list discovered by the Buchanan Committee — includes: The Big Three auto makers GM, Chrysler and Ford; top oil majors including Gulf Oil, Standard Oil, and Sun Oil; major steel producers US Steel, National Steel, Republic Steel; major retailers including Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field and Sears; chemicals majors Monsanto and DuPont; and other Fortune 500 corporations including General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, BF Goodrich, ConEd, and more.

The FEE was set up by a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive named Leonard Read, together with Donaldson Brown, a director in the National Association of Manufacturers lobby group and board member at DuPont and General Motors.

That is how libertarianism in America started: As an arm of big business lobbying.

Before bringing back Milton Friedman into the picture, this needs to be repeated again: “Libertarianism” was a project of the corporate lobby world, launched as a big business “ideology” in 1946 by The US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. The FEE’s board included the future founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch; the most powerful figure in the Mormon church at that time, J Reuben Clark, a frothing racist and anti-Semite after whom BYU named its law school; and United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle.

The purpose of the FEE — and libertarianism, as it was originally created — was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founding father of libertarianism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.

According to Congressional hearings on illegal lobbying activities 1946 was the year that Milton Friedman and his U Chicago cohort George Stigler arranged an under-the-table deal with a Washington lobbying executive to pump out covert propaganda for the national real estate lobby in exchange for a hefty payout, the terms of which were never meant to be released to the public.
The arrangement between Friedman and Stigler with the Washington real estate lobbyist was finally revealed during a congressional review of illegal lobbying activities in 1950, called the Buchanan Committee. Yes, there was something called accountability back then. I only came across the revelations about Friedman’s sordid beginnings in the footnotes of an old book on the history of lobbying by former Newsweek book editor Karl Schriftgiesser, published in 1951, shortly after the Buchanan Committee hearings ended. The actual details of Milton Friedman’s PR deal are sordid and familiar, with tentacles reaching into our ideologically rotted-out era.

False, whitewashed history is as much a part of the Milton Friedman mythology as it is the libertarian movement’s own airbrushed history about its origins; the 1950 Buchanan Committee hearings expose both as creations of big business lobby groups whose purpose is to deceive and defraud the public and legislators in order to advance the cause of corporate America.

The story starts like this: In 1946, Herbert Nelson was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president for the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and one of the highest paid lobbyists in the nation. Mr. Nelson’s real estate constituency was unhappy with rent control laws that Truman kept in effect after the war ended. Nelson and his real estate lobby led what House investigators discovered was the most formidable and best-funded opposition to President Truman in the post-war years, amassing some $5,000,000 for their lobby efforts—that’s $5mln in 1946 dollars, or roughly $60 million in 2012 dollars.

So Herbert Nelson contracted out the PR services of the Foundation for Economic Education to concoct “third party” propaganda designed to shore up the National Real Estate lobby’s legislative drive — and the propagandists who took on the job were Milton Friedman and his U Chicago cohort, George Stigler.

To understand the sort of person Herbert Nelson was, here is a letter he wrote in 1949 that Congressional investigators discovered and recorded:
"I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever."

It’s an old libertarian mantra, libertarianism versus democracy, libertarianism versus women’s suffrage; a position most recently repeated by billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel — who was Ron Paul’s main campaign funder in his 2012 presidential campaign.

So in 1946, this same Herbert Nelson turned to the Foundation for Economic Education to manufacture some propaganda to help the National Association of Real Estate Boards fight rent control laws. Nelson chose to work with the FEE because he knew that the founder of the first libertarian think-tank, Leonard Read, agreed with him on a lot of important issues. Such as their mutual contempt for democracy, and their disdain for the American public.

Leonard Read, the legendary (among libertarians) founder/head of the FEE, argued that the public should not be allowed to know which corporations donated to his libertarian front-group because, he argued, the public could not be trusted to make “sound judgments” with disclosed information:

"The public reporting would present a single fact—the amount of a contributor’s donation—to casual readers, persons having only a cursory interest in the matter at issue, persons who would not and perhaps could not possess all the facts. These folks of the so-called public thus receive only oversimplifications or half-truths from which only erroneous conclusions are almost certain to be drawn. If there is a public interest in the rightness or wrongness of corporate or personal donations to charitable, religious or education institutions, and I am not at all ready to concede that there is, then that interest should be guarded by some such agency as the Bureau of Internal Revenue, an agency that is in a position to obtain all the facts, not by Mr. John Public who lacks relevant information for the forming of sound judgments...Public reporting of a half-truth is indeed a significant provocation."

So in May 1946, Herbert Nelson of the Real Estate lobby, looking for backup in his drive to abolish federal rent control laws on behalf of landlords, contacted libertarian founder Leonard Read of the FEE with an order for a PR pamphlet “with some such title as ‘The Case against Federal Real Estate Control’,” according to Karl Schriftgiesser’s book The Lobbyists.

What happened next, I’ll quote from Schriftgiesser:

"They were now busily co-operating on the new project which the foundation had engaged Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler to write. It was to be called Roofs and Ceilings and it was to be an outright attack on rent controls. When Nelson received a copy of the manuscript he wrote Read to say, “The pamphlet...is a dandy. It is just what I wanted."

The National Association of Real Estate Boards was so pleased with Milton Friedman’s made-to-order propaganda that they ordered up 500,000 pamphlets from the FEE, and distributed them throughout the real estate lobby’s vast local network of real estate brokers and agents.

In libertarianism’s own airbrushed history about itself, the Foundation for Economic Education was a brave, quixotic bastion of libertarian “true believers” doomed to defeat at the all-powerful hands of the liberal Keynsian Leviathan and the collectivist mob. Here is how libertarian historian Brian Doherty describes the FEE and its chief lobbyist Leonard Read:

"[Read] would never explicitly scrape for funds... He never directly asked anyone to give anything, he proudly insisted, and while FEE would sell literature to all comers, it was also free to anyone who asked. His attitude toward money was Zen, sometimes hilariously so. When asked how FEE was doing financially, his favorite reply was, “Just perfectly.”... Read wanted no endowments and frowned on any donation meant to be held in reserve for some future need."

 

And here is what the committee’s own findings reported—findings lost in history:

"It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Foundation for Economic Education exerts, or at least expects to exert, a considerable influence on national legislative policy....It is equally difficult to imagine that the nation’s largest corporations would subsidize the entire venture if they did not anticipate that it would pay solid, long-range legislative dividends."
Or in the words of Rep. Carl Albert (D-OK): "Every bit of this literature is along propaganda lines."

The manufactured history about libertarian’s origins, or its purpose, parallels the manufactured myths about one of big business’s key propaganda tools, Milton Friedman. As the author of The Lobbyists, not knowing who Milton Friedman was at the time, wrote of Friedman’s collaborative effort with Stigler:

“Certainly [the FEE’s] booklet, Roofs or Ceilings, was definitely propaganda and sought to influence legislation....This booklet was printed in bulk by the foundation and half a million copies were sold at cost to the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which had them widely distributed throughout the country by its far-flung network of local member boards.”
There's no idealism here. The notion that libertarian ideas have captured the political imagination of millions in this country is a root problem: if we're going to escape the corporate oligarchy that is running this country--their ideas can't possibility be the alternative solution. This movement has to be recognized for what it is.

Published daily online and monthly in print, NSFWCORP is The Future of Journalism (With Jokes). For more features, or to subscribe, click here.

Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com and Not Safe for Work Corporation. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

Six Filthy Facts About the Rich

Monday, 26 August 2013 14:54

Six Filthy Facts About the Rich

        

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT


First of all, who are they? Mostly the 1%. But the top 2-5% have also done quite well, increasing their inflation-adjusted wealth by 75 percent from 1983 to 2009 while average wealth went down for 80 percent of American households. The rest of the top 20% have been prosperous, realizing a 32 percent gain in inflation-adjusted wealth since 1983. The facts to follow are primarily about the richest 1%, with occasional dips into the groups scrambling to make it to the top.

1. Accumulating almost all the wealth

As evidence of the extremes between the very rich and the rest of us, the average household net worth for the top 1% in 2009 was almost $14 million, while the average household net worth for the bottom 47% was almost ZERO. For nearly half of America, average debt is about the same as average asset ownership.

The extremes are just as filthy at the global level. The richest 300 persons on earth (about a third of them in the U.S.) have more money than the poorest 3 billion people. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

2. Increasng their own wealth without doing anything

In another alarming testament to wealth at the top, the richest 10% own almost 90 percent of stocks excluding pensions. Consider what that means. The stock market has historically risen three times faster than the GDP itself. Since the recession, as the U.S. economy has "recovered," 62 percent of the gain was due to growth in the stock market, which surged as much in four years as it did during the "greatest bull market in history" from 1996 to 2000.

Many stock owners see a couple thousand dollars added to their fortunes every time they go online.

But that's not enough for the very rich. Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the world's wealth has doubled in ten years, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion, and is expected to reach $330 trillion by 2017. The financial industry has figured out how to double or triple its buying power while most of the world has proportionately less.

3. Taking ALL the income gains

If the richest 1% had taken the same percentage of total U.S. income in 2006 as they did in 1980, they would have taken a trillion dollars less out of the economy. Instead they tripled their share of post-tax income. And then they captured ALL the income gains in the first two years of the post-recession recovery.

4. Donating a smaller share than the poorest Americans

Two dependable sources provide pretty much the same information. Barclays reported that those with earnings in the top 20% donated on average 1.3 percent of their income, whereas those in the bottom 20% donated 3.2 percent. And according to the New York Times, the nonprofit Independent Sector found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes, while those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.

5. Making enough to feed 800 million people

India just approved a program to spend $4 billion a year to feed 800 million people. Half of Indian children under 5 are malnourished.

In 2012, three members of the Walton family each made over $4 billion just from stocks and other investments. So did Charles Koch, and David Koch, and Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos.

It's not the obligation of any one of these individuals to feed the world. The disgrace is in the fact that our unregulated capitalist system allows such outrageous extremes to exist.

Here's more to provoke outrage. The 400 richest Americans made $200 billion in just one year. That's equivalent to the combined total of the federal food stamp, education, and housing budgets.

6. Taking two-thirds of a trillion dollars in subsidies

Even all that is not enough for the very rich. About two-thirds of nearly $1 trillion in individual "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers. An astounding 75 percent of dividend and capital gain subsidies go to the richest 1%.

And that doesn't include business subsidies, like the $16.8 billion per year in agricultural benefits paid out to big companies and to wealthy individuals who happen to have farms in their portfolios. The filthiest fact, in terms of detestable extremes, is that much of Congress wants to cut the $4.35 a day food benefit to hungry Americans, almost half of them children, so that money can keep flowing to the top.
Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, a writer for progressive publications, and the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org).
(Photo: Propaganda Times)

How school privatization hawks Teach For America promote Israel

The Electronic Intifada          

 

Opinion/Editorial

How school privatization hawks Teach For America promote Israel

Max Blumenthal

 

The Electronic Intifada

 

 

20 August 2013

 

 

 

Dozens of schools have been closed and approximately 850 teachers and staffers have lost their jobs in Chicago, a boon to Teach For America. (sierraromeo/Flickr)


 

Teach For America (TFA) is best known for dispatching hundreds of idealistic college graduates to work in inner cities across the United States each year, but it also sends selected members on free, religious-themed tours of Israel.

Called The Reality Israel Experience, the TFA-sponsored trips bring idealistic young American teachers into contact with Israeli politicians and military personnel while “introducing [TFA] corps members to Israel’s education and social justice systems.”

According to testimonies featured on Reality Israel’s official website, participants are at times led by a “military tour guide,” visit with Israeli military educators at an army base “near Jerusalem” (in the occupied West Bank?), and enjoy “ATV off-roading all over the Golan Heights,” an Israeli-occupied region of Syria.

The Reality Israel Experience is largely a project of Lynn Schusterman, the wealthy widow of the oil and gas tycoon Charles Schusterman. Since taking control of her husband’s fortune, she has established a reputation as one of America’s most aggressive backers of pro-Israel campus advocacy, funding campus-oriented ventures like Birthright Israel and The David Project.

As publicly-funded, privately-operated charter schools expand their reach and their wealthy advocates gain increasing influence over public education, boundaries between religion and state have blurred. This has opened avenues for ideologues like Schusterman to advance their political and religious agenda among a population of needy and impressionable children.

With an eye on promoting Israel advocacy in public schools, Schusterman has begun injecting millions into TFA, the advance guard of the education privatization movement.

 

Backed by billionaires

 

Since its birth in 1990, TFA has become a Wall Street-backed behemoth at the forefront of a movement that is rapidly placing large sectors of America’s public education into private hands.

With at least $350 million in assets, including substantial support from billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the heirs to the Walmart fortune, TFA has taken advantage of education reforms introduced under President George W. Bush and accelerated under the administration of Barack Obama. Thousands of its corps members are being moved into cities where certified, union-affiliated teachers are being laid off by the thousands.

Unlike certified teachers, TFA members must only complete a five-week summer training program before they enter the classroom. They work for lower salaries than certified teachers and must accept weaker health and pension benefits, a prime arrangement for libertarian-minded governors and mayors seeking to hollow out the public sector.

Since TFA requires only a two-year commitment from its teachers, more than half of TFA members leave their positions after a brief stint in the classroom. Some take advantage of a TFA partnership with Goldman Sachs to seek jobs at the investment firm, which recently paid much of a $247 million settlement with homeowners victimized by foreclosure abuse.

As a revolving cast of inexperienced, culturally uninitiated teachers drift in and out of inner city classrooms, many schools have been thrown into chaos.

Dissent is building within the ranks of TFA, with some veterans openly conceding that they were used as foot soldiers in a concerted assault on unions and public schooling.
 

But the organization’s recruitment efforts remain strong; over 10,000 members hold TFA jobs across the country, taking advantage of opportunities for personal advancement not available to their certified colleagues.

Among the most coveted perks available to TFA members is Reality Israel, an all-expenses-paid, ten-day tour of the Holy Land. Unfortunately, not every teacher has what it takes to qualify.

 

Embracing Israeli discrimination

 

Though a few gentiles have been accepted to Reality Israel, its application process clearly offers preferential consideration to Jews. According to Reality Israel’s website, participants are required to “have affiliations with or interests in Jewish life.” Such language is likely to deter non-Jews, especially Muslim and Arab TFA members.
 

The criteria for acceptance seems to contradict TFA’s stated non-discrimination charter, which claims to adhere to “a policy of equal treatment and opportunity in every aspect of its relations with its applicants, corps members, and staff members.”

Even if they are accepted to a Reality Israel trip, Arab and Muslim-American teachers may be denied entry to Israel by the country’s interior ministry, which deports as many as 100 American citizens per year, mostly for unexplained “security” reasons. Tellingly, most Americans rejected for admittance through Israel-controlled frontiers are non-Jews — Muslims, Arabs and non-Jewish peace activists.

One of the most highly publicized deportation cases was that of Nour Joudah, a 25-year-old Palestinian-American teacher at the Quaker-affiliated Friends School in the occupied city of Ramallah.

Last January, when Joudah attempted to return to Ramallah after a trip to Jordan, she was interrogated by Israeli security officers and sent back.

A month later, when she tried to enter again, she was detained and asked to list the names of every Palestinian she knew in order to build surveillance files for the Israeli security agency Shin Bet. When Joudah refused, Israeli forces deported her.

“As far as my students,” Joudah told The Electronic Intifada after her deportation, “they’ve been following everything, every minute, and they are totally devastated.”
 

TFA national spokesperson Steve Mancini responded to my question about whether Reality Israel’s admissions policy squares with TFA’s non-discrimination charter by claiming that Reality Israel is “open to all Teach For America corps members, regardless of their ethnicity and religion (see eligibility requirements). While the trip is designed for those who have affiliations or interests in the Jewish community, a significant number of accepted applicants do not identify as Jewish. During their two weeks in Israel, participants are exposed to a variety of different perspectives on equity and social justice.”

Mancini added that TFA provides “identity-based leadership experiences” to other corps members, including summits for African-American males and Latino staff and alumni.

He did not respond to my questions about whether TFA was aware that Reality Israel participants tour through territory illegally occupied by Israel.

 

“Replace parts of the local culture”

 

According to Adam Simon, who helps oversee Reality Israel trips as associate national director of the Schusterman Foundation, Israel presents TFA corps members with “a microcosm of all the issues we have in the US, the same challenges around minority populations, the transfer of knowledge between generations, the opportunity disparity.”

In this peculiar reading of shared US-Israeli values, the mostly African-American communities (“minority populations”) that TFA operates within assume the role of Palestinians, a restive “challenge” to the enlightened, orderly Israeli majority, while the mostly white, highly educated TFA members are designated as civilizers imparting their values to the backwards natives.

Many TFA members work in charter schools like the Harlem Children’s Zone and Knowledge Is Power Program’s No Excuses program, which was founded by TFA alumni.

These schools operate according to a model “that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values,” according to David Whitman, now the lead speechwriter for US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “[While] these schools reinforce middle-class mores, they also steadfastly suppress all aspects of street culture,” Whitman explained approvingly, marveling at the strict regime of discipline imposed on the black and brown students.

In a disturbing op-ed that likened residents of Harlem to Voodoo-practicing Haitian earthquake victims, the neoconservative New York Times columnist David Brooks echoed Whitman, cheering paternalistic charter schools for rooting out African-American cultural traditions through the imposition of “middle class” values (“The underlying tragedy,” 14 January 2010).

“It’s time to promote locally led paternalism …,” Brooks wrote, “… the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism. These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.”

Brooks concluded that the only way to enforce change on “progress-resistant cultural influences” was through “major traumas” like earthquakes.

 

A union-busting “colonial project”

 

Though no earthquake struck inner-city America as Brooks apparently wished, the destructive impact of Hurricane Katrina prompted the firing of 7,500 education workers in New Orleans, the conversion of most of the city’s schools to charters, and a nearly 20 percent decline in the share of black teachers working in the district. Meanwhile, TFA expanded its operations in the city, moving about 300 new members into teaching positions.

“I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina,” US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan remarked.

In Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel has shuttered nearly fifty public schools, mostly in predominately African-American neighborhoods, approximately 850 teachers and staffers have lost their jobs. The man-made disaster has been a boon to TFA, which is pouring into Chicago with hundreds of non-union replacement teachers. “The added influx of TFA corps in the city means they now compete head-to-head for jobs with traditional teachers,” noted journalist Emily Brosious.

“TFA basically now is a replacement worker organization,” Branden Rippey, a Newark, New Jersey-based public high school teacher and leader of his city’s New Education Workers caucus, told me. “They are a scab-running company; they lay off tenured teachers and bring in scab workers. The [TFA] kids are so young, they haven’t had experience, they haven’t had conflict with their bosses, they don’t understand what’s happening and don’t know what they’re being used for.”

Echoing criticism of TFA heard in cities across America, Rippen described the organization as the spearhead of a “colonial project” that is throwing schools and communities into chaos.

In some cases, TFA members work in gleaming charter schools that occupy space seized from traditional public schools still operating under the same roof. School reformers call the practice “co-location.” Dave Levin, a TFA alumnus and the Knowledge Is Power Program’s co-founder, highlighted the propaganda value of co-location with a revealing comparison.

“Sometimes the tensions of co-location — a door or a line down a hall separating the two sides — are like Israel and Palestine,” Levin told journalist Steven Brill. “But when you have visitors and see the two sides, you really don’t have to say much about what this is really about” (Steven Brill, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools).

 

Public funding to promote Israel

 

In 2009, the first year of Reality Israel, Schusterman began investing heavily in the charter school movement, donating $2 million to TFA and later establishing a TFA institute in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma that aimed to transform the city into “the epicenter of the education reform movement.” The move complemented Tulsa Public School Superintendent Keith Ballard’s firing of around 300 public school teachers, who were mostly replaced with TFA corps members.

A year before Schusterman began supporting education privatization, Michael Steinhardt, the hedge fund manager who commits millions each year to Birthright Israel, and who has declared, “There were no Palestinian people,” initiated an effort to establish a network of Hebrew-language charter schools that promoted Israel on the public dime.

By 2010, Steinhardt’s 35-year-old daughter, Sarah Berman, was in charge of the Hebrew Charter School Center, a charter network that drew support from public financing and from wealthy ideologues like Schusterman, who has contributed at least $250,000 to schools operating in its sphere.

According to the principal of Brooklyn’s Hebrew Language Academy — the first charter in the center’s nationwide network — the school’s goal “is to foster a love for the country of Israel in all of its diversity.”

Reporters Nathan Guttman and Naomi Zeveloff of the Forward reported that the Israeli flag stands beside the American flag in classrooms of the Hebrew Language Academy (45 percent of the school’s students are non-white). Despite criticism from the New York Civil Rights Coalition, which accused the charters of skirting the constitutional separation of religion and state to “transmit cultural values and identity,” the publicly-funded network has expanded across the country.

One new school in the Hebrew Center’s network, the Kavod Elementary Charter School in San Diego, California, was founded by Jennie Starr, an official with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In 2011, Starr highlighted the new academy as a kind of pro-Israel activism mill, writing, “A passionate, Israel-oriented, Hebrew speaking community will almost certainly support Israel and stay connected to Judaism.”

According to a 2011 segment on Public Radio International’s program The World, this is how children at the Hebrew Language Academy in Brooklyn begin each school day:

[Teacher is heard saying]

 

“Hands at your side like a soldier…”

 

[Students begin to sing.]

PRI reporter: It’s not just any song … it’s the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem.

As the billionaire-backed, bipartisan movement for education privatization sets its sights on inner cities across America, pro-Israel ideologues like Schusterman are riding the momentum. And it seems that little can stop them from imposing their agenda, not even the US constitution.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. His next book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, will be published by Nation Books in October.

A Plutocracy Ruled by Self-Centered Jerks

Connecting the Dots

A Plutocracy Ruled by Self-Centered Jerks?

August 27, 2013

by Joshua Holland

Hassan Nemazee, the wealthy Manhattan investment banker, steps over a security chain as he leaves federal court in Manhattan after being sentenced to 12 years in prison for bank fraud. (AP Photo/Larry Neumeister)

Two studies released last week confirmed what most of us already knew: the ultra-wealthy tend to be narcissistic and have a greater sense of entitlement than the rest of us, and Congress only pays attention to their interests. Both studies are consistent with earlier research.

In the first study, published in the current Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Paul Piff of UC Berkeley conducted five experiments which demonstrated that “higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.” Given the opportunity, Piff also found that they were more likely to check themselves out in a mirror than were those of lesser means.

Piff looked at how participants scored on a standard scale of “psychological entitlement,” and found that those of a high social class — based on income levels, education and occupational prestige — were more likely to say “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others,” while people further down the social ladder were likelier to respond, “I do not necessarily deserve special treatment.”

In an earlier study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Piff and four researchers from the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments which found that “upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.” This included being more likely to “display unethical decision-making,” steal, lie during a negotiation and cheat in order to win a contest.

In one telling experiment, the researchers observed a busy intersection, and found that drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut off other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians crossing the street than those behind the wheels of more modest vehicles.  “In our crosswalk study, none of the cars in the beater-car category drove through the crosswalk,” Piff told The New York Times. “But you see this huge boost in a driver’s likelihood to commit infractions in more expensive cars.” He added: “BMW drivers are the worst.”

Summing up previous research on the topic, Piff notes that upper-class individuals also “showed reduced sensitivity to others’ suffering” as compared with working- and middle-class people.

Lower-class individuals are more likely to spend time taking care of others, and they are more embedded in social networks that depend on mutual aid. By contrast, upper-class individuals prioritize independence from others: They are less motivated than lower-class individuals to build social relationships and instead seek to differentiate themselves from others.

These findings may appear to represent a bit of psychological trivia, but a study to be published in Political Science Quarterly by Thomas Hayes, a scholar at Trinity University, finds that U.S. senators respond almost exclusively to the interests of their wealthiest constituents – those more likely to be unethical and less sensitive to the suffering of others, according to Piff.

Hayes took data from the Annenberg Election Survey — a massive database of public opinion representing the views of 90,000 voters — and compared them with their senators’ voting records from 2001 through 2010. From 2007 through 2010, U.S. senators were somewhat responsive to the interests of the middle class, but hadn’t been for the first 6 years Hayes studied. The views of the poor didn’t factor into legislators’ voting tendencies at all.

As Eric Dolan noted for The Raw Story, “The neglect of lower income groups was a bipartisan affair. Democrats were not any more responsive to the poor than Republicans.” Hayes wrote that his analysis “suggests oligarchic tendencies in the American system, a finding echoed in other research.”

Hayes’ study is consistent with earlier research, including Princeton University scholar Larry Bartels’ 2005 study of “Economic Inequality and Political Representation.”

There are a few of ways of looking at these findings. They could be the result of genuinely held ideological beliefs which happen to justify inequality and privilege.

According to OpenSecrets, the average net worth of senators in 2011 was $11.9 million, so it could be a matter of legislators advancing their own interests and those of the people with whom they socialize and associate.

But MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who co-authored Why Nations Fail with Harvard’s James Robinson, says that this kind of political inequality is a product of widening economic disparities. “It’s a general pattern throughout history,” he told Think Progress. “When economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor. And that sort of political inequality is the real danger that’s facing the United States.”

The Scariest Man in America

Published on Monday, August 19, 2013 by Common Dreams

The Scariest Man in America

by Paul Buchheit

 

Scary because he claims "We don't have the power to coerce anybody" while providing massive funding to organizations that attack public education, social programs, worker salaries, business regulations, and the environment.



Photo: Matt Leonard/cc/flickr


Scary because he refers to himself with words like 'integrity' and 'principles' while saying "I want my fair share -- and that's all of it."

Scary because he declares, "I want my legacy to be...a better way of life for...all Americans."


Here is some of the legacy of Charles Koch:

1. Environment

In Crossett, Arkansas, local waterways have been filled with toxic chemicals by the nearby Georgia-Pacific plant, a likely contributor to the surge in cancer and other illnesses in their community. A spokesman for Georgia-Pacific called the allegations "sensationalized." But the EPA reported that the Crossett plant released 136,000 pounds of toxic chemicals to nearby waterways, and buried over 444,000 pounds in the soil to degrade. A USA Today study ranked Crossett in the top percentile of communities for schoolchildren's exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.

More recently, the besieged city of Detroit has become the dumping ground for a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block near the Detroit River. The pile is owned by Koch Carbon, a company controlled by Charles and David Koch. The mound of toxic matter has been spewing thick black "fugitive dust" over the homes of nearby residents.

Koch Industries was ranked as one of the top air polluters by the Political Economy Research Institute.

2. Government

Rampant cronyism threatens the economic foundations that have made this the most prosperous country in the world. -- Charles Koch

In a 2012 essay Charles Koch further criticized crony capitalism, saying "This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of our culture." Yet Koch Industries is one of the biggest beneficiaries of oil subsidies and government contracts. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the company has spent an average of almost $12 million per year from 2008 to 2012 on oil and gas industry lobbying.

There's more. Over 100 bills introduced in 2013, backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and heavily funded by the Kochs, seek to drive down wages, benefits, and worker rights.

3. Social Needs

The Nation reported that free-market libertarian Charles Koch coached economist Friedrich Hayek in the acquisition of publicly-funded retirement insurance and health care. Said Koch, "You are entitled to Social Security payments [and to] hospital coverage."

Koch-funded organizations like The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, and The Reason Foundation oppose Social Security, climate change science, gay marriage, and the Affordable Care Act.

4. Inequality

If you earn over $34,000 a year, you are one of the wealthiest 1% in the world. -- Koch Foundation

With stunning condescension toward lower-income Americans who are one emergency away from financial collapse, the Charles Koch Foundation recently released a commercial that ranked a near-poverty-level $34,000 family among the Top 1% in the world. The Economic Policy Institute calculated that a U.S. family of three would require an average of about $48,000 a year to meet basic needs.

5. Minimum Wage

The minimum wage often hurts workers with the least experience. -- EconomicFreedom.org, Charles Koch Institute
Charles Koch wants to eliminate the minimum wage, apparently believing that "economic freedom" applies to people struggling to survive on a minimum wage annual income of $14,500. He sermonizes, "Anything that people with limited capital can do to raise themselves up, they keep throwing obstacles in their way. And so we've got to clear those out. Or the minimum wage. Or anything that reduces the mobility of labor."

Regarding that $14,500 per year, each Koch brother made that much from his 2012 investment income in 17 seconds at the office.

6. Education

The Koch Brothers' contribution of millions of dollars to higher education, at first glance a magnanimous gesture, betrays less noble motives upon examination. The funding comes with a stipulation for control over faculty hiring and curriculum. As an extension of think tank media control, Koch's surreptitious entry into over 150 colleges has guided academic decisions toward a libertarian, Ayn-Rand-like philosophy. As an example, an agreement with Florida State University stated, "Professorship Positions will be recruited and hired in a manner consistent with both the...Faculty Handbook and CGK Foundation's intent to support the...Program."

7. Taxes

I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington. -- Charles Koch

Charles Koch may believe he can best decide how people should live. He insists that "Much of what the government spends money on does more harm than good." But as ThinkProgress notes, Koch's investments "at best advance Koch's political ideology and at worst misinform American voters. Either way, they are hardly a replacement for 'government spend[ing]' on things like food assistance and basic medical service."

8. Business Ethics

Charles Koch offered a definition of integrity: "When the other person is vulnerable and you're in a position to take advantage of them and you don't do it."

According to a 1989 report by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, "Koch Oil, the largest purchaser of Indian oil in the country, was engaged in a widespread and sophisticated scheme to steal crude oil from Indians and others through fraudulent mismeasuring and reporting."

Charles elaborated on his business management philosophy: "Every leader needs to be a role model for these principles, because people will spot hypocrisy a mile away."
Scary.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

The Raw Story Bernie Sanders: Walmart family’s ‘obscene’ wealth subsidized by taxpayers

Bernie Sanders: Walmart family’s ‘obscene’ wealth subsidized by taxpayers

By David Ferguson

Saturday, August 3, 2013 20:45 EDT

Topics: bernie sanders ♦ senator bernie sanders ♦ Walmart

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” on Saturday and scoffed at the idea that major corporations like Walmart can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage and that to raise the U.S. minimum wage would be bad for the economy.

Sanders said that the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population believes that the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is “obscene” and a “starvation wage.” He said that he hopes to mount a strong push in the Senate to raise the minimum wage and that if enough grass roots support builds around the country, “we can force the House to do the right thing.”

“We have to create millions of new jobs” to help the economy, he said, “but we also have to make the minimum wage a living wage.”

The Senator laughed when host Ed Schultz asked what he would say to people who insist that mega-corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s can’t afford to raise their wages.

“Ed, do you want to hear one of the great obscenities of our time?” Sanders asked. “The wealthiest family in this country is the Walton family. They are worth about a hundred billion dollars. That’s more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”

“One of the reasons that the Walton family, the owners of Walmart, are so wealthy is that they receive huge subsidies from the taxpayers of this country,” he said. “When you pay, at Walmart, starvation wages, you don’t provide benefits to your workers, who picks up the difference? The answer is that many of the workers in Walmart end up getting Medicaid, they get food stamps, they get affordable housing paid for by the taxpayers of this country while the Walton family remains the wealthiest family in America.”

“If that is not obscene, I don’t know what is,” Sanders concluded.


Watch the video, embedded below via YouTube:

Power And Compassion Mutually Exclusive?

Are Power And Compassion Mutually Exclusive?

 

Individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another's suffering, compared to low-power individuals, a new study suggests. (Credit: iStockphoto/Nicole Waring)

 

Dec. 23, 2008 — The fact that many cultures emphasize the concept of “noblesse oblige” (the idea that with great power and prestige come responsibilities) suggests that power may diminish a tendency to help others. Psychologist Gerben A. van Kleef (University of Amsterdam) and his colleagues from University of California, Berkeley, examined how power influences emotional reactions to the suffering of others.

A group of undergraduates completed questionnaires about their personal sense of power, which identified them to the researchers as either being high-power or low-power. The students were then randomly paired up and had to tell their partner about an event which had caused them emotional suffering and pain. Their partners then rated their emotions after hearing the story. In addition, the researchers were interested in seeing if there were physical differences in the way high-power people and low-power people responded to others’ suffering; specifically they wanted to test if high-powered individuals would exhibit greater autonomic emotion regulation [or respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity]. When we are faced with psychological stress, our RSA reactivity increases, resulting in a lower heart rate and a calmed, relaxed feeling. To measure RSA reactivity and heart rates, all of the participants were connected to electrocardiogram (ECG) machines during the experiment.

The results, reported in the December issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another’s suffering, compared to low-power individuals. In addition, high-power individuals’ RSA reactivity increased (as indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner’s distress.

Analysis of the participants’ final surveys (where they rated their thoughts about their partners) revealed that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner. In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals. This idea is supported by the fact that the distressed participants reported less of a social connection with high-power partners compared to low-power partners. The authors suggest that powerful people's tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.

These results do not just apply to how powerful people react to strangers; the authors note that this study “suggests that high-power individuals may suffer in interpersonal relationships because of their diminished capacity for compassion and empathy. The many benefits enjoyed by people with power may not translate to the interpersonal realm.”

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

Share on stumbleupon Share on linkedin Share on pinterest_share Share on blogger Share on digg Share on delicious Share on newsvine | 36

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.