Hannah Arendt

Arguably Hannah Arendt was the first target of an organized campaign by the Israeli lobby. As was the case with the late Tony Judt, it did not matter that she was pro-Israel. By stepping outside the bounds of the ideological consensus, she became guilty of Orwellian thoughtcrimes. If for no other reason, this conflict is reason enough to see Margerethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” that opens on May 29^th at the Film Forum in New York. As a film that takes politics and morality seriously, it is like nothing I have seen in a very long time and that makes Spielberg’s film on Lincoln look shallow by comparison. Essentially von Trotta’s film consists of people in their sixties and seventies arguing about Nazism and the right of the Jews to mount a show trial. But what people they were.

As Hannah Arendt, Barbara Sukowa is phenomenal. (It should be stated that her attempt to affect a Hollywood version of a German accent despite being German was a directorial miscue by von Trotta. It was a bit like Marlon Brando’s German accent in “The Young Lions”. Once you get used to it, however, it hardly matters.) This is the kind of role that Sukowa has long experience with. She played Rosa Luxemburg in another von Trotta biopic as well as Mieze in Fassbinder’s masterpiece “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, based on the novel by the leftist Alfred Döblin who also wrote “Karl and Rosa”, about Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

The film begins with Arendt finding out about the Eichmann trial from an article in the NY Times. She then approaches William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker magazine, with a proposal. She would go to Jerusalem and cover the trial.

A salon at her Riverside Drive apartment just before her trip leads to a quarrel between her and her husband Heinrich Blücher on one side and New School philosophy professor Hans Jonas on the other. The Blüchers worry that the Israelis are using the trial for propaganda purposes while Jonas is loath to find fault with Israel on any score. Of course, his decades long Zionist past would explain this.

This salon would have taken place in 1961, at exactly the same time I was enrolled in Hans Blücher’s Common Course at Bard College. This was a required “great books” survey that allowed Blücher—a high school dropout and former member of the German Communist Party—to philosophize about politics and morality. His defense of Socrates galvanized me in a way as nothing had ever before. From the minute I heard his defense of the need to put truth above the exigencies of citizenship, it made it a lot easier for me to become a socialist six years later at the very moment I was a student of Hans Jonas at the New School. Oddly enough, despite Blücher’s anti-Communism, he paved the way for me to become a communist.

When taking a seminar on Kant with Jonas in 1967, I came up with the idea of writing a term paper on Kant’s categorical imperative as an extension of his subject driven epistemology. After getting an A in the course, I was approached by Jonas at a gathering at his home in New Rochelle on a Sunday afternoon and encouraged to continue with my PhD studies. But a few months later I would drop out of the New School in order to focus on my activism in the Trotskyist movement after the spirit of Blücher in the 1920s—an avid reader of Leon Trotsky. I saw my categorical imperative as one of making the socialist revolution. Anything else was an escape from duty.

The film takes up Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger who comes across more as an absent-minded professor than a mouth-breathing Nazi ideologue. In one of the film’s more dramatic moments, you see her and Heidegger strolling through a German forest after WWII where she urges him to beg forgiveness from the world for his evil past.

Although it would be impossible for the film to deal with all of the tangled philosophical connections between the principals, it should be mentioned that Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger’s as well. Furthermore his critique of technology owes much to Heidegger. With respect to Heidegger’s reputation as an anti-Semite and avid National Socialist, Hans Jonas paints an entirely different picture in his memoir and one that is consistent with the somewhat bumbling and pathetic characterization in von Trotta’s film.

Still, I was the only Zionist among his students. At least to my knowledge no one else among the Jewish Heidegger disciples was a supporter of Zionism—on the contrary. I did run into some of them later in Palestine, but they didn’t choose to go at a time when you still had a choice. Probably Heidegger thought there just happened to be such dreamers among the Jews, and his student Hans, on whose dissertation he’d conferred the highest praise teacher could give a student, namely summa cum laude, was one of those dreamers and would eventually go off to Palestine. So a Heidegger student would establish himself in Palestine and perhaps spread his teachings there, The thought that his standing in Germany might suffer as a result of many Jews leaving or being forced to leave apparently didn’t occur to him, Heidegger was in no way prepared for such a thing. I should mention, too, that here and there he even helped Jewish students of his. For instance, Paul Oskar Kristellar later said in New York that he had nothing against Heidegger because when he emigrated to Italy, Heidegger sent letters of recommendation that helped him find a position there.’ No — Heidegger wasn’t personal antisemite. Presumably it felt a little uncanny to him that so many of his students were Jewish, but more in the sense that it was somewhat one sided, that there weren’t enough others who were more like him. The only discussion of antisemitism in his immediate surroundings came up when word got out that his wife had belonged to the nationalist youth movement. Perhaps she nagged him occasionally, saying, “Martin, why do you act deaf and dumb? Why are you constantly surrounded by young Jews?”

After her articles begin appearing in the New Yorker, Arendt becomes a lightning rod. A neighbor in her Riverside Drive high-rise sticks a letter under her door accusing her of being a Nazi. The administration at the New School demands that she stop giving her courses. In defiance she goes ahead with the class. She goes to a meeting about her book where a young Norman Podhoretz denounces her. Her best friend Mary McCarthy makes her entrance just as Podhoretz is at his most venomous and twists him into a knot. Although the characterization of McCarthy veers too far in the direction of comic relief and paints her too much as a gum-chewing, wisecracking Eve Arden type (my younger readers will have to google this for more information), her presence is essential since it is a reminder that there were some intellectuals who had the guts to stand up to the Israel lobby at the time.

Back in 1961 I had no idea that Hans Blücher was married to Hannah Arendt and even less of an idea that she was covering the Eichmann trial. I can’t remember if I was reading the N.Y. Times back then but even if I had I would be far more interested in reviews of jazz musicians or movies than current events.

A few years later as the “sixties” began to erupt, young radicals embraced Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil” even if they may have not been fully engaged with her wariness over the project of revolution. This excerpt from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography gives you a flavor for the mood at the time.

The young Jew who sent Arendt a report on this meeting [about her book] commented that Eichmann in Jerusalem seemed to have stirred up a generational conflict within the Jewish community. This conflict was made public when Norman Fruchter published a piece called “Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity” in Studies on the Left. Fruchter’s was the voice of the young Jewish radicals who found in Arendt’s work both a rebellion against “the myth of the victim which Jews tend to substitute for their history” and an analysis of what “citizen responsibility [is] necessary in every modern state to prevent the reemergence of the totalitarian movement which ravaged Germany.” He wrote at the moment when comparisons between Germany of the 1930s and America of the 1960s were becoming common among the New Left—to the consternation of the Old Left. A year earlier, James Weinstein had published a piece called “Nach Goldwasser Uns?” [After Goldwaer, us?] in which the comparison was made explicit: “There are, indeed, many similarities between American society today and that of Germany in the years before and during Nazi rule.” Eichmann became a symbol: “Like so many American bureaucrats and military men, Eichmann emerges from Miss Arendt’s account as a man of very limited ideological commitment.” Over such speeches as the one Carl Oglesby delivered at the 1965 SANE march on Washington, the New and the Old Left parted company: “Think of all the men who now engineer that war [in Vietnam],” said Oglesby, “those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. “

Finally, the film should encourage those with a critical bent to look deeper into the arrest of Eichmann itself, something that would be beyond the scope of von Trotta’s film. The Mossad’s abrogation of international law through its kidnapping of Eichmann is certainly a precedent for actions that have become synonymous with the “war on terror”, including Obama’s kill-list.

What is of particular interest was the behind-the-scenes arrangement between Israel and West Germany that made David Ben-Gurion’s moral posturing look as hypocritical as any of the words coming out of LBJ’s mouth.

In 2011 secret documents revealed that the German government and the CIA knew the whereabouts of many former Nazis including Hans Globke, who was the Chancellery Chief of Staff and a close advisor to Chancellor Adenauer at the time of the trial. In a quid pro quo deal, the West Germans promised weapons if Globke’s name was not brought up in the Eichmann trial.

Der Spiegel reported:

But Israel needed the financial aid, the submarines and the tanks, and German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, who had also negotiated the arms shipments directly with Ben-Gurion, left no doubt that the Israelis were to protect Bonn’s reputation if they wanted weapons: “I have told my contacts that it is a matter of course that if the Federal Republic supports the security of Israel, it will not be held collectively liable, morally, politically or journalistically, for the crimes of a past generation in connection with the Eichmann trial.”

The Israelis had shown “understanding and responsiveness” for this position, Strauss reported. And so it happened that the question of how the Nazis had managed to involve significant portions of German society in the Holocaust was largely ignored.

“We only introduced information into the trial that was relevant for Eichmann,” says Gabriel Bach, the last remaining member of prosecution team still alive today. The Globke issue, he adds, simply wasn’t relevant.

Bard College and the real world

I have been reminded over the past few months why Bard College was such a special place for me. While I tend to avoid alumni cocktail parties, it has been a kind of virtual reunion as I connect to old friends and classmates through their art. When we were all in our late teens and early twenties, we had dreams of being poets and artists—including me. I took a detour in 1967 that led to little more than a 250 page FBI file but for the others—Richard Allen, Josephine Sacabo, Dalt Wonk, and Paul Pines—who stayed true to their artistic vision, the fruits have been sweeter. I suppose the one thing we all had in common was a willingness to stay true to our youthful dreams even as we confront the American Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks—as Allen Ginsberg put it in “Howl”.

Richard Allen

The first paragraph of Richard Allen’s introduction to “Street Shots/Hooky: New York City Photographs 1970s” certainly puts us in a Moloch frame of mind:

I woke up, New Year’s Day 1970, in a straitjacket. I had no memory, of anything, at least not at first. I was in an asylum on Long Island after taking an overdose of some pills a shrink gave me. Slowly awareness arose. First, I realized had to protect myself. Await… I asked to have the jacket removed and they did. Bit by bit memories came back. I could recall details of my childhood. I remembered I’d married my girlfriend Cathy, months ago, when she turned eighteen. Cathy and I had Peter, a son, now 6 months. In a few days I felt normal. Still, I had no job. But this is not my concern. No, it’s to finish editing a short comedy, completing a film I shot while on TV men landed on the moon. The film hung in hundreds of carefully cut strips an inch to many feet long, like drying fish, unique species, needing me. I had read a book on film editing and had just started when this came along.

I suppose that despite all his flaws, R.D. Laing was on to something when he described insanity as “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” The war in Vietnam, ghetto rebellions, psychedelics, the breakdown of the nuclear family, all worked together to make the case that we were living in an insane world, particularly those among us who were more open to such a perception—in other words, Bard College students.

If the world was going nuts, then Manhattan was the epicenter. Ironically it was also the epicenter of sanity since many of its denizens were striving to lead a life devoted to the arts and to peace. Richard Allen’s book brings back that 70s world to life. Despite all the horrors of the time, New York was a place of astonishing visual poetry. Using mostly black-and-white film and a Leica camera, Richard captured a moment in time. With the city now being taken over by hedge fund employees living in condominiums with Duane Reade pharmacies and nail parlors on the ground floor, you can get a good idea of what things were like 40 years or so from Richard’s collection. Nearly all of the photos are of people, and what’s more interesting than the characters of Manhattan? This is especially true when the photos are accompanied by the subjects’ words. After taking their photo, Richard invited them to identify themselves and offer up their impromptu thoughts. Ivan Bankoff tells Richard that he was once “the world’s greatest ballet dancer.” John Richardson, an African-American huddled against the wind, says, “If this is for posterity, tell them I’ve read Thoreau. And I know that love is the greatest thing.”

Here are some of my favorites:

“Street Shots/Hooky: New York City Photographs 1970s” can be purchased from the Book Culture stores near Columbia University and from BookCourt in Brooklyn. (Plans are afoot to make the book purchasable from amazon.com. I will announce that when it happens.) For those who lived through the 70s and those with a curiosity about a period that still lingers on in many ways, this is a perfect Christmas gift or a gift for all seasons, for that matter.

Josephine Sacabo

Dalt Wonk

On October 26^th I attended an opening for Nocturnes, the first book to be published by Josephine Sacabo and Dalt Wonk’s new venture Luna Press. If you go to the Luna Press website, you can see an intriguing video of a hand thumbing its way through the book.

Here is a photograph titled “Moon” taken by Sacabo:

Dalt wrote poems to accompany the photos. Here is the one he wrote to accompany “Moon”:

Would it be a stretch to say that the city of New Orleans, where they have lived for decades, is a primary influence on their esthetic? Although I have never been to the city myself, it seems that if any city in the U.S. could have inspired a hauntingly beautiful combination of word and image as “Nocturnes”, it is New Orleans.

Back in 1965, Bob Dylan was spending a fair amount of time at Bard. I am not sure if Dalt and Josephine ever ran into him there, but I am sure that they would feel some kinship with his take on their city found in volume one of his memoirs:

Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn’t move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive. The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds-the cemeteries-and they’re a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres-palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay-ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who’ve died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing- spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it.

Nocturnes can be ordered from the Luna Press website.

Paul Pines

I found out about the opening for Nocturnes from Paul Pines, the poet who has kept in touch with Sacabo and Wonk over the years. A month or so before the opening, I attended a reading for Paul’s latest book titled “Divine Madness”, words that evoke both the opening paragraph of Richard Allen’s photography book as well as Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, a poem that served as the anthem for our generation in many ways.

The epigraph to Book Three of Paul’s collection comes from Carl Jung’s “The Red Book”: “…there is a divine madness which is nothing other than the overpowering of the spirit of the time through the spirit of the depths.”

This is an appropriate quote for a book of poems that owes much to mythology, both from the Mayan Indians to the ancient Greeks and Babylonians. Paul spent a fair amount of time in Guatemala, the experience of which helped him to craft his second novel “Redemption” that deals with the genocide against the Mayan peasantry.

Every one of the poems in “Divine Madness” is a jewel but I treasure this one especially:

December sun seeps into the woods orange yolk over bare limbs drips into a grove where woodpeckers tap tiny solos

a net cast

in the wake of the day

Chinese monarch King Wen

tells us the wanderer can progress in little things

when the source of light is farthest from the earth

and bends the prism

like a bow

and he finds himself surrounded by woodpeckers tapping out their eternal question

how to hold

interwoven rhythms

in a net of changing light

“Divine Madness” can be ordered from Marsh Hawk Press.

Some closing thoughts. All of us are now in our sixties and above but it seems like only yesterday when we would be drinking “down the road” at a college pub called “Adolph’s” (named after the owner, born obviously before Hitler made the name taboo). The subject came up all the time about how Bard was totally unlike “the real world”, which for us could have been reduced to the one depicted in AMC’s “Mad Men”.

There’s always a tension between our ideals and the “real world” that in some ways is analogous to Plato’s story of the cave. It is a struggle to hew to our youthful ideals in a world that is fundamentally aligned with the insides of a cave, as testified by news reports that come our way on  a daily basis, the latest of which is the kindergarten massacre in Connecticut.

Of all my  Bertolt Brecht quotes, this is my favorite:

There are men who struggle for a day, and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year, and they are better. There are some who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives, and these are the indispensable ones.

Whether you struggle with a camera or a poet’s pen, or most quixotically with a propagandist’s, it is a Sisyphean task. Here’s my salute to those who never give up. Keep on keeping on.

Bard College, Israel and the Palestinians

Peter Beinart

Walter Russell Mead

The Fall issue of the Bard College alumni magazine came with its regular New Republic type propaganda, this time taking the form of an article by Peter Beinart titled “Israel’s Challenge: Can Democracy and Zionism Coexist?” Sigh, all I ever wanted to find out from an alumni magazine is whatever happened to Shoshana Rosenberg, the art major who liked to listen to Olatunji records when we were having sex. Why do I have to put up with sermons from the right wing of the Democratic Party? I want my tuition money back, all $8000 of it.

Beinart’s article was actually a speech he delivered at Bard last spring on his new book “The Crisis of Zionism” at the invitation of the campus chapter of J Street, a liberal Zionist group that is viewed in AIPAC circles as little different from Hizbollah. To show you how unhinged groups like AIPAC are, J Street is a group that now states:

Israel’s current military operation is a response to the hundreds of rockets that have rained down on Israel from the Gaza Strip over the past year. Every day, Israel’s southern residents carry with them the fear that a sudden Qassam rocket could change their world forever.

It should be said that Beinart has been the target of the American Likudniks as well. When he was invited to speak at the annual Jewish Book Fair in Atlanta, the powers-that-be disinvited him. In my view, this is not so much a sign that Beinart’s views are progressive but that official Judaism is veering ever more sharply to the right. Given time, they will be ostracizing Alan Dershowitz. (Well, maybe not.)

The talk was sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, one in a host of liberal think-tanks largely paid for by George Soros. It is useful to remember what Hannah Arendt once said about the kind of people who run Israel today and the well-funded lobby that speaks on its behalf. This was an open letter to the N.Y. Times on December 4th, 1948 signed by her, Albert Einstein, and other Jewish notables:

TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin”s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Read in full

Breinart’s speech was filled with all the old bromides. I found this one particularly nauseating:

Most of Zionism’s founders were people who originally wanted to live in the countries of their birth in Europe, and who desperately hoped that Europe would live up to the Enlightenment liberal ideals that they believed in fervently. They reluctantly came to the conclusion that they could not live safe, full lives in Europe, and that the Jewish state could be more true to Enlightenment principles than the countries they came from.

Talk about denial. Let’s look at one of these champions of “liberal ideals”, a fellow named Israel Zangwill who was born in London in 1864. At one time he was an advocate of colonizing Palestine but later on favored settling in any territory deemed ripe for a takeover. This was a guy who championed Jewish emancipation, woman’s suffrage, and peace among nations—just the sort of high-minded person Beinart was referring to.

But from Wikipedia we learn:

In 1901 in the New Liberal Review, Israel Zangwill wrote that “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country”.

In a debate at the Article Club in November of that year, Zangwill said, “Palestine has but a small population of Arabs and fellahin and wandering, lawless, blackmailing Bedouin tribes.” Then, in the dramatic voice of the Wandering Jew, “restore the country without a people to the people without a country. (Hear, hear.) For we have something to give as well as to get. We can sweep away the blackmailer—be he Pasha or Bedouin—we can make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and build up in the heart of the world a civilisation that may be a mediator and interpreter between the East and the West.”

In other words, the “democracy” that Beinart blathers on about was democracy for the Chosen People, not the dirty fellahin. If there is any real difference between the original aspirations of the Zionist movement and that of the French in Algeria, it is lost on me. At least the pied-noir spared us liberal, democratic pretensions.

Apparently some students at Bard were not taken in by Beinart’s nonsense. In a profile on Peter Beinart that appeared in New York Magazine a couple of months after his appearance there, we learn:

In late April, Beinart takes an Amtrak train out of Penn Station and heads two hours north, up the Hudson Valley. Like any author flogging a book, Beinart has become a familiar presence on the speaking circuit—although, given his book’s subject, his particular circuit largely consists of synagogues, Jewish community centers, and Hillel houses. Oftentimes, he faces a hostile audience. At the Columbia Hillel, he debated Daniel Gordis—the event was promoted as a “Heavyweight Fight on Zionism”—and was heckled. “I feel like from the clapping I have about a quarter of the room,” Beinart said during a rare moment of applause, “which is better than I expected.”

On this April evening, Beinart’s schedule calls for him to be at Bard College. It is Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, and he has been invited by the school’s J Street student chapter. The mood, however, is anything but festive—although this time he is facing anger from his left. As he walks into the lecture hall, he is handed a flyer by a student protester that reads celebrate ­israeli ethnic cleansing “independence.” He then spends most of his 90 minutes insisting to those in attendance that Zionism is not racism and that Tel Aviv is not the center of all the evil on Earth. When it is over, Beinart looks whipped. “I wish Jeff could have seen that,” he says.

(The “Jeff” referred to immediately above is Jeff Goldberg, another “liberal Zionist” who shares Beinart’s early support for the war in Iraq and tepid criticisms of Israeli policies.)

My guess is that Leon Botstein has probably evolved toward a J Street type of Zionism. He is smart enough to show his new clothing by advising (I’m sure) the alumni magazine to include Beinart’s speech. He has also attempted to burnish his reputation among progressive Jews by defending the right of the International Solidarity Movement to have official status on campus.

Over the past several weeks, Bard College and I as its President have been the object of unsubstantiated, exaggerated, and often vitriolic accusations regarding a student group on campus that has chosen to affiliate itself with an organization called the International Solidarity Movement. Some of those who have posted on blogs and written emails claim that ISM is a “terrorist” organization committed to the destruction of the State of Israel and its people. The information on the Bard ISM student website is being misrepresented to suggest that the college and its students are involved with illicit activities, encouraging and training terrorism.

http://inside.bard.edu/president/letters/bardism/

One can only welcome the president’s stance on this issue. Anything else of course would have been a sign of gross capitulation to the Israel lobby and clearly an unwise course of action.

The latest IDF blitzkrieg on Gaza has elicited a “think piece” by Bard professor Walter Russell Mead, who I have described once as the school’s Thomas Friedman. Titled “America, Israel, Gaza, and the World”, the article attempts to answer the question “Why aren’t the Americans hating on Israel more?”

Mead cleverly tries to make his position more tenable by reducing ostensibly radical positions to a caricature: “Others allege that a sinister Jewish lobby controls the media and the political system through vast power of Jewish money; the poor ignorant Americans are the helpless pawns of clever Jews.” Well, the fact is that the major media is careful to omit any analysis that is to the left of Peter Beinart, but few of us blame this on “Jewish money”—starting with me. Israel gets kid gloves treatment because it is a reliable protector of American imperialist interests in the Middle East. Once upon a time Walter Russell Mead, before he became fat and sloppy at the trough of academic privilege, understood how this worked—at least to some degree.

This is the Publishers Weekly blurb on Mead’s “Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition”, written in 1988, when Mead apparently still had some dim memory of a leaflet he wrote 20 years earlier:

Since the end of World War II, Mead asserts, the United States has maintained the largest empire in history. This neoimperialism, he argues, is built on intervention in the domestic affairs of Third World countries and coercive political efforts to block those countries’ sustained economic growth. Both Nixon and Carter tried to regulate change in underdeveloped nations in ways that would be acceptable to U.S. corporate interests.

Nowadays, Mead enjoys a perch at the American Interest, a magazine with an editorial board including the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Niall Ferguson, Bernard-Henri Levy. What the hell. If you are going to sell out your youthful beliefs, you might as well do it in grand style.

Assuming a kind of professorial neutrality, Mead draws a contrast between most people on earth who are appalled by Israeli barbarism and the “Jacksonian” American people who do not believe in proportionality. This is a reference to Andrew Jackson who did not believe in fighting by the rules. I would say that the fate of the Palestinians and the Cherokees—seen side-by-side—gives some credence to that.

Mead tries to explain the average American’s response:

Thus when television cameras show the bodies of children killed in an Israeli air raid, Jacksonian Americans are sorry about the loss of life, but it inspires them to hate and loathe Hamas more, rather than to be mad at Israel. They blame the irresponsible dolts who started the war for all the consequences of the war and they admire Israel’s strength and its resolve for dealing with the appalling blood lust of the unhinged loons who start a war they can’t win, and then cower behind the corpses of the children their foolishness has killed.

Key to Mead’s presentation of the American mindset is this analogy:

Certainly if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking targets in the United States, the American people would demand that their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed.

But that’s where Mead drops all pretensions of being a James Chase Professor entrusted with the hard-earned $50,000 dollar a year education of Bard students and becomes what he really is beneath the pretensions: a crude propagandist of the sort that pops up regularly in the op-ed pages of the N.Y. Post.

While Mexicans certainly had grievances against American imperialism (the reference to Canada of course was absurd–almost as absurd as Ali G. advising  Brent Scowcroft to bomb Canada), imagine if the American Southern slavocracy had defeated the North and colonized Mexico in order to reproduce the plantation system. To make it work, it would find it necessary to expel the native peasant population into El Salvador and Honduras. At that point, it would be logical for the expelled Mexicans to fight for the right to return to their homeland.

Once upon a time Mead might have understood this. Nowadays he is an addled old sot drunk on his own propaganda.

A conversation with Jeffrey Marlin and Richard Greener

Now into the middle of the third season of “Mad Men” on Netflix, I continue to be bemused by the lofty critiques of the show in places like the London Review of Books and the journal that inspired it, the New York Review of Books. In the October 2008 LRB, Mark Greif complained:

Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged. As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society – ‘Look, they used to burn their witches!’ – while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we’ve managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years’ time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised.

In February 2011, Daniel Mendelsohn told NYR readers that the show was pretty much a load of crap:

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

He also repeats Greif’s charge that the show maintains an ill-deserved superiority complex:

To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating.

When I first posted about Mad Men, after viewing the entire first season, I defended it against such charges, drawing upon my experiences at Metropolitan Life in 1968, on the very floor that served as a backdrop for Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment”. If you’ve seen “The Apartment”, you’ll recognize the similarities between it and “Mad Men” right off the bat. This is no accident since Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, counts this movie as one of his prime influences:

Billy Wilder wrote it with I. L. Diamond – this is like one of the great writing teams of all time, and just the cinema in it, the stuff that’s done…I’d like to claim a relationship to ‘Mad Men’ for that, too. Spoiler alert: Things like the champagne cork going off and you think it’s a suicide. The tennis racket. The compact with the crack in it. The restaurant with the drinks in it. How things are shaping up ‘cookie-wise.’ That’s a contemporary movie. People were seeing people that they knew. It was done in a very sort of classic kind of way. It’s masterful storytelling.

That’s my relationship to it: that it’s one of my favorite movies. I saw it and realized that it was the apex of a period that I had already been fascinated with. I loved the characters, and just writing-wise I always try and emulate that kind of storytelling, where the payoffs are visual and there’s a lot of misunderstanding, but they’re believable. And the bad guys have a reason for what they do. And casting. Do not forget who Fred MacMurray was when they put in that part. The grimiest guy that he had ever been was in ‘Double Indemnity.’ He was the schmuck in that. In this thing he was really a dark character.

If I was really a bit young to be a character in “Mad Men”, that can’t be said about my two old friends from Bard College I interviewed above. A good five years older than me, they are exactly the same age as the junior copywriters who would have worked under the lead character Don Draper.

Both of them had a connection to advertising, one brief and one fairly long term. Jeffrey Marlin’s first job was as a copywriter for a direct mail outfit. Trudging off to work in an office each day (one likely much smaller than Met Life) persuaded him to look for a gig that he could do at home. This led to a very long career with Xerox Learning Systems that ended a few years ago. I understand what went into this decision psychologically since I used to return home from Met Life each day wondering whether I would be able to do this for the rest of my life. Fortunately I found computer programming less of a drag, if not something akin to playing games, than just about any other corporate job.

Richard Greener’s long career in radio started off selling advertising but evolved into a management position, including serving as president of WAOK in Atlanta, a Black radio station that he helped to push in a progressive direction—including sympathetic reporting on Sandinista Nicaragua.

But a good friend of Richard and Jeffrey probably epitomized the “Mad Men” ethos a lot more than either of them. Leonard Leokum, who died about five years ago, was the son of acclaimed author Arkady Leokum and a figure without about the same clout in the advertising business as Don Draper. Although I never really knew Leonard, I used to get a chuckle out of Richard and Jeffrey referring to him as the brains behind the Juan Valdez coffee commercials. We differed on the “political correctness” of the ad, with my friends making the case that Juan Valdez was a subtle symbol of Latin American national aspirations.

In my interview with Jeffrey and Richard, they told me that they had no interest in the show with Richard adding that it would probably make him sick to watch it. After doing the interview, I reflected a bit on the show and what is probably its greatest failing, something not truly addressed in the LRB and the NYRB articles—namely the absence of any character working in the industry who saw through its bullshit.

“Mad Men” has a character or two who spout Marxish comments about advertising but are mainly portrayed as hypocrites whose leftist politics are disjoined from ethical lapses of one sort or another. There are also some characters who seem aware of the beat generation but again don’t truly “get it”. In Bob Dylan’s words:

Something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones

Well, there were people who knew what was happening, especially Jeffrey and Richard (and Leonard as well, I’m sure). At some point during my retirement, I plan to do a series of interviews with ex-SWP members who will be willing to share their experiences with the young activists of today, just as I benefited from conversations with George Novack back in 1967.

But I doubt that any conversation I have with them will be half as stimulating and as eye opening as that I had with Jeffrey and Richard.

By Jeffrey Marlin:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/10/11/the-right-by-jeffrey-marlin/

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/eleven-thoughts-on-the-jewishnational-question/

Jeffrey Marlin has also just released a 1300-page opus on Amazon Kindle. It’s entitled Tales of the Great Moral Symmetry, by J. Marlin, and includes five complete verse-novels: The Three Wicked Pigs; Jack and the Time Stalk; Boots: By Puss Possessed; The Outlaw Rumplestiltskin; and Snow White and the 7 Deadly Sins. You’ll find some more-or-less progressive social commentary around the edges, and whether or not it’s your idea of great literature, I can guarantee you’ve never read anything like it. Comrades with Kindles may want to have a look.

My review of Richard Greener’s “The Knowland Retribution: the Locator”:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/04/02/richard-greeners-the-knowland-retribution-the-locator/

Walter Russell Mead: Bard’s Thomas Friedman

Walter Russell Mead

Receiving the Bard College alumni magazine is a mixed blessing. I do get to find out that Shoshana Goldstein, class of ’68 and an old flame, has just retired from teaching yoga at an Arizona dude ranch after 30 years. (We used to make love in my dorm room listening to Ralph Kirkpatrick playing Scarlatti sonatas.) But I also have to put up with at least one article that reads like it was written for the New Republic magazine, something to be expected from an institution foolish and funding-hungry enough to put Martin Peretz on the board of trustees.

Bard has mutated under Leon Botstein’s presidency-for-life from a relatively honorable left-of-center and underfunded bohemia to what it is today, a citadel of center-right ideology that is crowned by the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA). Unlike the protestors driven into a Starbucks window-breaking frenzy by big money’s control over the planet, Bard higher-ups have global ambitions second to none. My guess is that when Leon Botstein dreams at night, it is most often about putting an outpost of Bard College on the moon.

And to protect the campus from our enemies on the moon, who better to call upon for advice than the speaker from the James Chace Memorial Lecture series at BGIA headquarters on Thursday, March 15. The topic was “Counter Insurgency Operations as Applied in Central Afghanistan – 2002-2011” and the invited guest was James Creighton, who the BGIA website described as having “a wide variety of positions in the US Army for more than two decades including: Commander, Combined Team Uruzgan, Afghanistan; Strategic Planner, ISAF Joint Command Afghanistan; and Deputy Commander, Second Infantry Division.”

I almost decided to show up at this talk to ask GI James what he thought about the massacre that happened the preceding Sunday, when a 38 year old soldier named Robert Bales left his base in the middle of the night and murdered 17 Afghans while they were sleeping in their mud hut. Among them were four women, two boys, and seven girls. That’s basically what globalization is about, after all. As Thomas Friedman once put it:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Apropos of Thomas Friedman, Bard has its own minor-league version, a character named Walter Russell Mead who is James Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine, a center-right magazine chaired by Francis Fukuyama and a board that includes Niall Ferguson and Bernard-Henri Levy. Their names speak for themselves.

Mead’s article, titled “American Grand Strategy in the 21^st Century”, attempts to educate his alumni readers about the need for Friedman’s hidden fist but without using those exact words. Besides the imperialist ideology, what it has in common with Friedman’s op-ed pieces in the NYT is some of the worst prose imaginable.

Gawker.com sums up Friedman’s style nicely:

Mustachioed soothsaying simpleton Thomas Friedman long ago mastered a formula for justifying business trips all over the world by writing columns about them—columns that, while not genuinely insightful or even pleasant to read, contain a sufficient number of plausible-sounding platitudes to enable your average Xerox Corporation regional manager to sound informed during his morning meeting with underlings and sycophants.

Mead’s specialty is using lead-footed metaphors such as these:

When I was growing up, the world was filled with escalators. You got on the right escalator and you would automatically ride up to another floor. You went to a good college, you got in to a good law school, then you stepped on the escalator, and if you didn’t do something stupid like jump off or fall, the escalator would carry you up. These days there’s a bunch of rope ladders. They drop down and if you’re quick you can scramble up, but then the ladder is pulled back up. It’s a much more chaotic economy, with big booms and busts.

The “chaotic economy” is the real subject of interest in Mead’s sorry article but if his solutions are meant to speak for the big bourgeoisie whose lap he sits on, then that class is in big trouble.

The article starts with Mead posing the question “What does America want the world to be like?” His answer is “like Europe”, which means “prosperous”, “peaceful”, and “open to our commerce, investment, and trade.” Mead’s Europe is the idealized version of cold war mythology. He writes:

In 1945, we had all the power that anybody could want in Europe. If they wanted to eat, we had to give them food. The immediate response of Americans was not, “How do we keep this?” We thought, “This won’t last; this will be terrible for our economy.” We immediately set about trying to change what looked like the ultimate accomplishment of the traditional idea of one country’s power over others. I don’t see a hunger for war in either the American government or the American people.

Being more like Europe is a goal that other people like as well. This is not the United States imposing some sort of hegemony on people. It’s not an American Dream for the world; it’s a pretty widespread human dream. Putting it in that form helps crystallize an aspiration. The Europeans, by the way, love this idea. We can go to Europeans and say, “This is what we’re trying to do; how can we do it together?” Rather than trying to impose some American vision on other people, we can enlist partners all over the world who will like our grand strategy and, for reasons of their own, want it to work. I think this is a goal that has tremendous appeal.

The interesting question for me is whether Mead is lying or simply uninformed when he writes, “This is not the United States imposing some sort of hegemony on people.”

Paul Ginsborg’s magisterial “A History of Contemporary Italy” delivers the goods on the lack of respect that America had for Italy’s right to decide its own future after 1945:

The first months of 1948 were entirely dedicated to the election campaign. Never again, in the whole history of the Republic, was a campaign to be fought so bitterly by both sides, or to be influenced so heavily by international events. American intervention was breath-taking in its size, its ingenuity and flagrant contempt for any principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country. The US administration designated $176m of ‘Interim Aid’ to Italy in the first three months of 1948. After that, the Marshall Plan entered into full operation. James Dunn, the American ambassador at Rome, made sure that this massive injection of aid did not go unobserved by the Italian general public. The arrival of every hundredth ship bearing food, medicines, etc., was turned into a special celebration. Every time the port of arrival was a different one – Civitavecchia, Bari, Genoa, Naples — and every time Dunn’s speech became more overtly political. Whenever a new bridge or school or hospital was constructed with American help, there was the indefatigable ambassador travelling the length of the peninsula to speak in the name of America, the Free World and, by implication, the Christian Democrats. Often the goods unloaded from the ports would be put on a special ‘friendship train’ (the idea was the American journalist Drew Pearson’s) and then distributed with due ceremonial at the stations along the line. And just in case the message was not clear enough, on 20 March 1948 George Marshall warned that all help to Italy would immediately cease in the event of a Communist victory.

Of course, people like Walter Russell Mead and all his cohorts at American Interest would smile beneficently on all this. Why should Italian elections be any different than America’s? Shouldn’t higher office go to those with the deepest pockets? If George Soros spends millions to put Obama in power, the best friend hedge fund managers ever had, why shouldn’t George Marshall use America’s great fortunes to make sure that people were elected in Italy who were “open to our commerce, investment, and trade?”

Mead is quite clear on this. Communists and any other enemies of “our commerce” have to be marginalized for the good of society. He writes:

But there are two kinds of obstacles. How we deal with them is going to shape how our policy works out. First, there’s a problem of will: a lot of people either don’t like the idea of Europe as the goal for their societies, or they don’t like the particular way this might conflict with some other ambition that they have. Here are three examples of people who reject the idea that a bourgeois, liberal, free society is where the human race ought to go: terror groups, like Al-Qaeda; religious extremists; and political extremists of different kinds. Maybe they see this goal as the enemy of the visionary, religious order they would like to see. They may be anarchists or communists who have a principled objection to this kind of society, or think that liberal capitalist development needs to be opposed. The way for the United States to deal with these groups is with intelligence and cooperation with other countries. We’ve done a good job of limiting the damage from some of these groups in the last 10 years, and I think we’ll continue to get better results with less policing.

I really get a chuckle out of Mead’s open approval of the need for “intelligence and cooperation with other countries” to keep Al-Qaeda and us commies down. Of course, there was a time when the U.S. relied heavily on Islamic radicals to overthrow a forward-looking Afghan government that favored land reform and women’s rights, but that’s a story for another article. In 1968, shortly after I joined the Trotskyist movement, I got an unsigned postcard at work “reminding” me of the next SWP branch meeting. Years later I discovered through FOIA that the FBI sent the card in order to “embarrass” me and drive me away from radical politics. Is this the kind of “intelligence” that Walter Russell Mead hopes will “deal with these groups”, as if handing out a leaflet opposing the war in Vietnam and flying jets into the World Trade Center were equivalent?

I also see that he is in favor of “less policing” although I doubt that this would apply to President Obama who coordinated police attacks on the dirty anarchists and communists of the Occupy movement last year. Obama was supposed to speak at a Bard Commencement in 2010 but decided against it at the last minute.

Since I was at that commencement, I was disappointed not to see Obama and Botstein on the same dais since they were such a perfect match, like Damon and Pythias or Laurel and Hardy. Both employed a liberal facade in order to foster a center-right agenda in Washington and in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Both were educated at Harvard University, the quintessential finishing school for those who would deny us our democratic rights in the name of democracy.

I understand why people like Mead are fearful of communists and anarchists. With the class divide deepening and more and more young people s facing diminished career prospects—those “rope ladders”—there is a need to keep things quiet. On one hand you get more and more nonsense from people like Thomas Friedman and Walter Russell Mead telling us that prosperity is just around the corner if only we study hard and pick the right major. And on the other you get beefed up police forces that pepper spray peaceful students on a California campus and entrap activists in Chicago.

Mead’s article concludes with a nod to Mitt Romney/Joseph Schumpeter style “creative destruction”:

Thanks to technology, 2 to 3 percent of the population now feeds all of us much better than 150 years ago. In the same way as agriculture, the proportion of the population working in manufacturing is falling. Americans are reaching postindustrial society early, just as we got to some of these other things early, but we don’t have a model for it. We have to invent it, which is what we did in past generations.

All of these hucksters for the capitalist system assure us that it will provide new jobs down the road to replace the ones being destroyed by automation. So far that hasn’t panned out very well in places like Cleveland, Detroit, or Pittsburgh but perhaps the unemployed should just exercise a little patience. Maybe by the 22^nd century things will be booming again in the rust belt.

Thomas Friedman peddles the same line in “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”:

If the defining economists of the Cold War system were Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, who each in his own way wanted to tame capitalism, the defining economists of the globalization system are Joseph Schumpeter and former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who prefer to unleash capitalism. Schumpeter, a former Austrian Minister of Finance and Harvard Business School professor, expressed the view in his classic work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, that the essence of capitalism is the process of “creative destruction” – the perpetual cycle of destroying the old and less efficient product or service and replacing it with new, more efficient ones.

What Friedman and Mead do not get is that normal people, as opposed to those who make a good living justifying the status quo in the pages of the NY Times or American Interest, are not going to wait around for the Messiah bearing new jobs. We have bills to pay and families to take care of. According to the Federal Reserve, the financial crisis wiped out 18 years of gains for the median U.S. household. There was a 38.8 percent plunge from 2007 to 2010, led by the collapse in home prices. Given this reality, it will be harder and harder for hucksters like Friedman and Mead to convince people that the system works. Time to sharpen the old pitchforks…

Erectile dysfunction and a Bard College honorary doctorate

Most people realize that there are two types of honorary doctorates handed out at college commencements each year. The first goes to people who really deserve them, like a Dizzy Gillespie or an Allen Ginsberg. Then you have recipients whose being honored has more to do with the amount of money they lavish on the institutions than anything else. It is a charade that has much in common with the awarding of ambassadorships to major donors of either party. For example, the bootlegger Joseph P. Kennedy was FDR’s man in London and Mel Sembler, a Republican appointee, held posts in Italy and Australia under Bush ’41 and Bush ’43 respectively. Sembler is a shopping mall developer who also ran a drug treatment center that was convicted of the false imprisonment of a 20 year old patient. Nice, very nice.

Since Lynda Resnick is a major donor to the Democratic Party who enjoys throwing lavish parties, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her become ambassador to Liechtenstein or Monaco someday. In the meantime, she is picking up a Doctor of Humane Letters from Bard College, my alma mater, on May 26^th. I wish I could be there to hear the bullshit put forward to justify this award since she is certainly one of the more reprehensible people connected to the school, mostly through her husband Stuart who sits on the board of trustees with other knaves like Bruce Ratner, the real estate developer responsible for foisting an ugly and wasteful megaproject on downtown Brooklyn.

Even though I have supplied dossiers on the Resnicks before (Stuart Resnick as Noah Cross; Bard’s Lumpen Bourgeoisie), I can’t resist drawing from the well of resentment once again. If Colonel Kilgore of “Apocalypse Now” got the juices flowing after smelling napalm in the morning, all it takes for me is an alumni newsletter with the latest outrage from a once-proud institution that Walter Winchell—perhaps apocryphally–called “the little red whorehouse on the Hudson.”

It must be understood above all that when the Resnicks give money to a college or to a hospital, it is in effect a PR exercise. These pay-offs are meant to compensate for their diverting precious water resources in California from working class households into their pomegranate and almond plantations, and from Fiji into their disgusting mineral water business. To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, let them drink piss. All billionaires who fund libraries, hospitals, colleges, operas, et al do it to improve their bottom line in the same way as campaign contributions. They amount to bribes. Shower enough money on the masses and maybe they’ll put down their pitchforks. The robber barons of the 19^th century paved the way for this, with the marauding railroad tycoon and nativist Governor of California Leland Stanford founding Stanford University.

In perhaps a sign that some institutions have higher standards than those prevailing under Bard College’s sleazy President-for-Life Leon Botstein, the UCLA Law School struggled with the ethics of receiving major donations from Lowell Milken and the Resnicks last year. An August 22, 2011 article by Julie Creswell and Peter Lattman titled Milken’s Gift Stirs Dispute at U.C.L.A. Law School  describes the dilemma facing the institution’s legal minds: should they take money from law-breakers? Or, in the case of the Resnicks, law-benders.

In a controversial deal with the government, Michael pleaded guilty to securities law violations after the government agreed to drop criminal charges against Lowell. Michael served a 22-month prison term and paid $600 million in fines and restitution.

As part of a settlement in a related civil matter, the Securities and Exchange Commission permanently barred the two brothers from the securities industry.

Lowell Milken did not admit to any wrongdoing.

Kenneth W. Graham Jr., a retired U.C.L.A. law professor, said it was a mistake to take the gift from Mr. Milken, a 1973 graduate of the school and longtime donor to it. “To say that I was outraged would be something of an understatement,” wrote Mr. Graham in an e-mail.

The Resnicks are described in the article as being little better than the snake-oil salesmen who used to go from town to town back in Leland Stanford’s day:

Mr. Milken is not the only leading donor in the current campaign that has tussled with regulatory authorities. The capital drive also led to the creation of the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Endowed Fund in Support of Public Interest Law. The Resnicks are the Beverly Hills beverage industry entrepreneurs who own Fiji Water and Pom Wonderful.

Last fall, the Federal Trade Commission filed a civil lawsuit against the Resnicks, accusing them and their company, Pom Wonderful, of making “false and unsubstantiated claims” that their pomegranate juice product helped reduce the risk of heart disease and erectile dysfunction.

Don’t you love the business about erectile dysfunction? Who needs Viagra when you can suck down a bottle of Pom juice?

You can read the proceedings of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit here. It is a reminder of how sordid the capitalist system is, with hucksters trying to sell fruit juice on the basis that it can make your dick hard. That’s not the worst of it. The document refers to a youtube clip where Lynda Resnick claims that it can cure Alzheimer’s as well. Naturally, she is the guest of another crook, Martha Stewart.

Listening to WFAN, a sports talk radio station in New York,  through much of the day I get a little nuts having to put up with all the commercials—a good half of which fall into the same category as what got the Resnicks into hot water with the FTC. The Boston Medical Group with its erectile dysfunction cure that paid a $8.5 million fine for making the same kind of bogus claims. That’s not the end of it. There are ads for magic potions that can pump up your testosterone level. I put up with the ads because I want to hear other fans like me putting in their two cents about the NY Knicks.

Lynda Resnick got started as a 19 year old running an advertising agency. Ever watch “Mad Men”? That’s a pretty good take on the role of advertising in the U.S. As products continue to go downhill, from automobiles to the canned goods on your supermarket shelves, you need advertising agencies to con the consumer.

That’s essentially what Lynda Resnick should be honored for, her remarkable ability to con the American consumer. As should be obvious at this point in his illustrious career, Leon Botstein has a remarkable ability for lining up such people to fund Bard College. If he had only half as great an ability to see himself as he really is, and not the idealized portrait that this academic version of Dorian Gray imagines.

Another Bard professor proffers bad advice to OWS

Steven Mazie

Another Bard professor has chimed in with the “damning with faint praise” stance of Roger Berkowitz that I dealt with in a post titled “Bard Professors attack Occupy Wall Street“. This time it is Steven Mazie, a political science professor, who has a web-only NY Times op-ed titled “Rawls on Wall Street“.

Like Berkowitz, Mazie frets over the hatred that the protesters have toward the rich:

Despite providing a remarkable venue for what Al Gore called a “primal scream of democracy,” Occupy Wall Street is leveraged too heavily on the rhetoric of rage rather than reciprocity. Rawls would argue that Occupy is fully justified in its criticism of the political and economic structures that propagate massive concentrations of wealth; he saw the “basic structure” of society as the “primary subject of justice.” But Rawls would lament the tendency of the “99 percent” to misdirect their energies into hatred of individuals in the 1 percent. He would have them save their hostility for the policies and institutions that have permitted only the wealthiest to enjoy significant gains from the past two decades of economic growth.

Whenever I read this kind of sanctimonious nonsense, I feel like I have wandered into Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” by mistake, with its images of Madame LaFarge knitting away furiously. Of course, when you stop and think about it, there’s not much difference between John Rawls and Charles Dickens. This kind of 19^th century moralism is a lot easier to take when you are reading a good story like “A Christmas Carol” but when served up by a political science professor as advice to people who haven’t worked in five years or so and who have lost their homes, it is pretty objectionable.

John Rawls was a perfectly decent man, who despite his British-style Victorian-era pieties was actually an American born in Baltimore in 1921. In 1971 he came out with “A Theory of Justice” that made the case for liberalism at the very moment its reputation was in tatters after six years of imperialist slaughter in Vietnam. The book was typically “philosophical” in its abstraction-sodden prose. Four years earlier I decided to drop out of the graduate philosophy program at the New School and join the Trotskyist movement because philosophy in general—and ethics in particular—was so out of touch with what was going in the world. I had no idea who John Rawls was at the time but had heard more or less the same song and dance from Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”.

For that matter, I had read “Sermon on the Mount” when I was a religion major at Bard College. From the very day homo sapiens began to organize itself into tribes, wise elders understood the need for ethical behavior. You did not need to read John Rawls to understand that we should strive for social justice. The problem was that so many Princeton graduates who had probably studied with Rawls there had gone on to work on Wall Street or with the CIA, where the do-good philosophy they learned from him was conveniently ignored.

As a Rawls disciple, Mazie has applied a tepid meliorism to Israel-Palestinian relations, arguing that Israeli Palestinians deserve better civil rights type treatment without once considering the possibility that a state based on ethnic cleansing can never truly be just. One supposes that this is the kind of advocacy for Palestinian rights that won’t lead to a Joel Kovel type termination.

Mazie’s op-ed piece makes sure that its readers understand that Rawls is a horse of a different color than Karl Marx:

Rawls’s boldest claim — that inequality in society is only justified if its least well-off members fare better than they would under any other scheme — could provide a lodestar for the protests. Rawls was no Marxist: this “difference principle” acknowledges that a productive, free society will be home to at least some degree of inequality. But the principle insists that if the rich get richer while wages and social capital of the poor and middle class are stagnant or falling, there is something seriously wrong.

This idea is built on the premise that in a just society, citizens should be understood as free and equal participants in a system of social cooperation. Some individuals may be more motivated and harder working, and thus can legitimately expect greater rewards for their efforts. But everyone deserves the same bundle of individual rights and liberties, and everyone is entitled to “fair equality of opportunity,” including access to a decent education and a genuine chance of success in pursuing one’s life plans.

I am not sure how some pundits came to the conclusion that John Rawls was one of the greatest philosophers in the 20^th century based on such banalities. At any rate, that there is “something seriously wrong” can hardly be redressed by moral appeals. It will take force, something that is out of the range of possibilities for liberalism unless of course it is deployed against those impudent Third World countries that believe that “a genuine chance of success” is only possible by seizing the means of production and instituting an economy based on human need rather than private profit—heaven forefend.

I have only dealt with Rawls in the past indirectly through a commentary on analytical Marxists who felt compelled for some ungodly reason to engage with him on his own turf.

G.A. Cohen was one of them:

Cohen … feels the need to defend the socialist project from the challenge presented by bourgeois political and ethical philosophy. Liberals like John Rawls and conservatives like Robert Nozick have written a number of books that attempt to defend just societies and the forms of political action necessary to achieve them. They also have a great deal of credence in the academic circles Cohen travels in.

Cohen wants to make socialism appear as a rational choice in the face of their challenges but he ends up conceding much too much to them. The worst concession is that he conceives of political action as the role of the individual rather than classes. While he does not share Elster’s outright hostility to the notion of classes, the overall tendency in Cohen’s work is to wrestle with issues of the class struggle as they appear in the guise of moral dilemmas to individuals.

For example, in chapter 12 of “History, Labor and Freedom” he takes up the question, “Are Disadvantaged Workers who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous Jobs.” What a peculiar subject for an “orthodox” Marxist to be tackling. One would think that Cohen would have had much more interest in class struggle type issues in 1988 when the book was written. Issues such as the approaching civil war in Yugoslavia do not seem to engage his interest.

Most of the chapter is an involved with consideration of the choices before an “imaginary worker in an imaginary situation.” He is one of the 7,000 unemployed people in the town of Hazelton, Pennsylvania (population 33,000), to which the Beryllium Corporation came in 1956, offering hazardous jobs.” “Our worker, whom I shall call John, took one. He was confronted with a choice between employment and health, and he chose the former. Was he forced to take the health-endangering job? did he, in taking it, contract freely?”

Of course the question of the “contractual” basis of justice lies at the heart of John Rawls’ liberalism and one could write at length about how preposterous this notion is and how pointless it is to engage Rawls’ thinking on his own terms.

I will rather conclude with several obvious conclusions. To begin with, the study of individuals and their moral problems is not the subject-matter of Marxism. Marxism studies classes. A proper use of a Marxist’s time would be to study actual rather than imaginary workers in identical situations. It would be useful to explore how capitalism tends to threaten the job safety of the working-class even in the expansionary period of 1956 or 1997 for that matter. It would then consider how the ruling-class parties share in the creation of a legal fabric that allows such plants to be kept going. It would conclude with recommendations about how to abolish such oppressive conditions. This is not to be found in Cohen’s work.

John Roemer was another:

“Egalitarian Perspectives” is a collection of John Roemer’s articles from the years 1981 and 1992. We learn in the introduction that Roemer made a pilgrimage to G.A. Cohen in 1981, like Luke Skywalker to the Jeddi Master, where he learned “the range of questions addressed by modern political philosophy.” The visit emboldened the young acolyte to launch an assault against classical Marxism’s “wrong-headed” surplus value approach to exploitation. Roemer knew what Marx “really meant,” and this was captured by his own property-relations theory.

Roemer states that the purpose of the book is to answer the question of “what egalitarians seek to equalize.” Those who are trailblazers on this question are Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen and John Rawls. If some of you are scratching your heads trying to recall where you last heard these names, trust me that it was not at a trade union conference or a rally for political prisoners. The topic of “egalitarianism” within this circle of professional philosophers is an entirely abstract matter. They chat about it in the same dry and intellectual way that aesthetic philosophers discuss “beauty”.

This collection of thinkers treat question of “egalitarianism” as a subject within the rarefied world of Anglophone political philosophy. It arises out of a debate between disciples of the utilitarian John Stuart Mill on one side and John Rawls on the other, who proposes a “primary goods” theory of justice. A just society according to Rawls is one in which society maximizes the “primary goods” of the worst off members. Roemer enters the fray by trying to adapt Marxist solutions to the problem of “distributive justice.” In essence he is trying to blend liberal and socialist themes. From liberalism he appropriates the concern with welfare, from Marxism he hopes to find a theory that will reveal the underlying economic forces that explain inequality. Somewhere along the line Roemer drops the connection with Marxism, as tenuous as it is.

There is precious little in Roemer’s book that has any relation to the sorts of topics that preoccupy Marxists. Mostly it can be found in the section “Socially necessary exploitation and historical materialism.” Roemer’s definition of exploitation in this section is as follows: “were a coalition able to preserve the same incentive structure, and, by withdrawing with its per capita share of produced assets thereby improve the lot of its members, then it is capitalistically exploited in the current allocation.”

Yeah, I know. This is virtually impossible to understand at first glance. I have been knocking my head against Roemer’s shitty prose for a couple of weeks now, so I think I can provide a translation. He is saying that if a group of workers dropped out of capitalist society and improved their situation, then the situation they dropped out of was exploitative. Now you may ask yourself why I chose the words “dropped out.” Does this mean the same as Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in and drop out”?

Yes, it does and this is exactly what Roemer is talking about in so many words:

Assuming capitalist property relations were necessary to bring about accumulation and technical innovation in the early period of capitalism, then the coalition which has withdrawn will soon fall behind the capitalist society because of the incentives to innovate. Even the proletarians under capitalism will eventually enjoy an income-leisure bundle superior to the bundle of independent utopian socialists who have retired into the hills with their share of the capital, assuming enough of the benefits of increased productivity pass down to the proletarians, as has historically been the case.

Translation from the Roemer-ese: When some workers “drop out” of bourgeois society and go to Vermont with their tools and set up a commune like a bunch of lazy grasshoppers, they will eventually fall behind the industrious ant workers who remain in bourgeois society, and who keep their hair short and drive their cars to their factory job each day where foremen yell in their face and where assembly lines keep speeding up and where they keep losing fingers… The criteria for Roemer is not lost fingers or alienation, it is the bundle of goods you can take home. (What was John Roemer doing in 1967 anyhow? Somebody should have slipped him some acid.)

In terms of Marxism and morality, I can still remember how bowled over I was back in 1967 or so after reading “Their Morals and Ours” by Leon Trotsky. Compared to John Rawls’s weak tea, these are the words to live and die by:

Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.

But do not elementary moral precepts exist, worked out in the development of mankind as an integral element necessary for the life of every collective body? Undoubtedly such precepts exist but the extent of their action is extremely limited and unstable. Norms “obligatory upon all” become the less forceful the sharper the character assumed by the class struggle. The highest pitch of the class struggle is civil war which explodes into mid-air all moral ties between the hostile classes.

Under “normal” conditions a normal” man observes the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!” But if he murders under exceptional conditions for self-defense, the judge condones his action. If he falls victim to a murderer, the court will kill the murderer. The necessity of the court’s action, as that of the self-defense, flows from antagonistic interests. In so far as the state is concerned, in peaceful times it limits itself to individual cases of legalized murder so that in time of war it may transform the “obligatory’ commandment, “Thou shalt not kill! into its opposite. The most “humane” governments, which in peaceful times “detest” war, proclaim during war that the highest duty of their armies is the extermination of the greatest possible number of people.

The so-called “generally recognized” moral precepts in essence preserve an algebraic, that is, an indeterminate character. They merely express the fact that man, in his individual conduct, is bound by certain common norms that flow from his being a member of society. The highest generalization of these norms is the “categorical imperative” of Kant. But in spite of the fact that it occupies a high position upon the philosophic Olympus this imperative does not embody anything categoric because it embodies nothing concrete. It is a shell without content.

This vacuity in the norms obligatory upon all arises from the fact that in all decisive questions people feel their class membership considerably more profoundly and more directly than their membership in “society”. The norms of “obligatory” morality are in reality charged with class, that is, antagonistic content. The moral norm becomes the more categoric the less it is “obligatory” upon all. The solidarity of workers, especially of strikers or barricade fighters, is incomparably more “categoric” than human solidarity in general.

The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilability of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions patronized by religion, philosophy, or that hybrid which is called “common sense”. The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception. The exposure of this deceit which retains the tradition of thousands of years is the first duty of a proletarian revolutionist.

Bard College professors attack Occupy Wall Street

I am in the habit of listening to AM radio at work, including WABC. This is the station that is home to Rush Limbaugh and other ultrarightists. Last Wednesday when listening to Sean Hannity fulminate against Occupy Wall Street, I was startled to hear him reading from a blog post by Walter Russell Mead, the Bard College James Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities.

Walter Russell Mead

Mead, a tireless campaigner for the foreign policy needs of the one percent, is also the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relation. My understanding is that in order to be considered for this chair, you have to piss on a homeless person while he or she is asleep.

In 2003 Mead wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post backing the invasion of Iraq. Unlike other inside-the-beltway pundits, Mead never did a mea culpa as fellow Council of Foreign Relations one-percenter Leslie Gelb just did in the Wall Street Journal, blaming his mistake on “careerism”. Seven years after his initial support for Bush’s war, Mead still urged staying the course. This is clearly a man who is career-oriented as most of Leon Botstein’s hires are.

Mead is the editor of a magazine called American Interest (what else would you expect?) that has an editorial outlook quite similar to The New Republic, that is to say a toxic brew of Democratic Leadership Council positions, including a my country right or wrong support for Israel and hatred for trade unions and what’s left of the welfare state.

Blogging there as Via Meadia, Mead has been heaping all sorts of abuse on Occupy Wall Street. His first dispatch is dated October 13 and contains the observation that “Drums and granola in the park is not news” as part of an attempt to write the occupation off as some kind of hippie sideshow. This of course was before the movement became a model for occupations all over the world and a genuine threat to the one-percenters whose interests the yapping lapdog Mead defends.

Five days later Mead wrote another hostile article. Titled “The Vain And Empty Rituals Of Protest On The Streets”, it once again minimized the importance of the occupation:

In a mass democracy where everyone has a vote, and normal peaceful demonstrations carry no professional cost or personal stigma, if 100,000 people gather in Central Park for a protest rally it means that about 8,000,000 New Yorkers chose not to attend.  It is not really news and it doesn’t mean much about where the city is headed.

A day before Mead wrote these words, a Quinnipiac poll revealed that sixty-seven percent of all New Yorkers supported the OWS goals, a clear indication of where the city is headed despite the James Chace Professor’s snotty remark.

Mead also described the occupiers as “scruffy students” and “angry loners”, in other words just like many of the very people he is paid to teach at Bard College. Fortunately, the Bard College contingent at Zuccotti Park chose to ignore the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Council of Foreign Relations and join other students outraged by the rape of America by hedge fund managers and the like—the very kinds of people who sit on the Bard College board of trustees.

Still obsessed with the dirty hippies, Mead let them have it yesterday with both barrels one last time. This time he was all worked up over a proposal to extend a tax surcharge for New York state residents making over a million dollars that was opposed by Governor Cuomo, a tool of Wall Street as some of us 99-percenters would say. By way of comparison, the latest issue of American Interest has an article in support of replacing a graduated income tax with a Value Added Tax (VAT), something closely related to a sales tax and regarded by many liberals as regressive.

Mead was particularly annoyed with the NY Times editors who stated:

But the Occupy Wall Street movement and the spreading protests it has inspired — scores of people gathered at the Capitol on Saturday, and an occupation is planned in Albany beginning at noon Friday — have reinvigorated lawmakers, organized labor and community groups that advocate for the tax’s extension.

He let the grey lady have it:

Note the deep wishful thinking about OWS.  When a proposal with massive trade union backing can rally only “a few scores” of demonstrators to the union-worker rich state capital, this is not a sign of a political groundswell.  It is just the opposite: a sign of advanced arteriosclerosis and apathy.  Turning out crowds for demonstrations is one of those things that unions do; that they haven’t bothered with more than token crowds is a sign of the weakness of the OWS brand, not, as the Times coverage glibly suggests, its strength. And to suggest that the hacks and timeserving careerists who run the state government lobby groups for powerful vested interests were ‘inspired’ by these protests into actions they weren’t already planning is delusional.  The fight over this tax extension is a central piece of the legislative strategy of the union lobby, and there is no doubt that the lobby would be making a powerful push — OWS or none, tiny demo in Albany or not.

If the movement became qualitatively larger and more influential, Mead’s litany of complaints about OWS would continue. His problem is not that the occupiers are small in number and irrelevant but that they exist. If Mead had a shred of honesty, he would be writing this kind of post:

Look, hardly a member of the right wing conspiracy, the “Liberal” magazine New York did a poll, 34 percent of those “Occupy Wall Street” lunatics are actually convinced the U.S. government is no better than al Qaeda.

And 37 percent say capitalism can’t be saved, it’s inherently immoral. They don’t seem to be telling that side of the story. They think it’s unfair when we’ve actually look at the signs that are being held up there, which are extraordinarily bizarre.

How long does this go on? What is the point in all of this? Do you believe in freedom or in confiscating what other people have? They want to empower their government to confiscate other peoples’ wealth and give it to them. The White House is feeding off of this protest. They’re hoping it becomes the moral equivalent of the Tea Party Movement. What would Rudy Giuliani be doing right now? I doubt he’d be allowing this to go on any further than this.

–Sean Hannity, Fox TV

Roger Berkowitz

While Walter Russell Mead makes few if any pretensions to liberalism, his fellow Professor at Bard College Roger Berkowitz offers a muddle-headed defense of OWS that on balance betrays hostility toward the movement in the “damning with faint praise” vein. Berkowitz runs the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, just one of a host of training centers there designed to turn out the Samantha Powers of the next generation. I first got wind of Berkowitz last year when I stumbled across an article he had written describing undocumented workers as those who “enter this country illegally [and] undermine our system of taxation, reduce the wages for working Americans, and contribute to a culture of corruption and lawlessness”. Wow, that’s a mouthful from someone speaking in the name of Hannah Arendt but then again in a 1956 article on the desegregation of Little Rock schools she had this to say: “It has been said, I think again by Mr. Faulkner, that enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation and this is perfectly true.” When asked by Harper Magazine’s Scott Horton to explain this racist article, Berkowitz replied: “What Arendt defends in the Little Rock essay is a vibrant right to privacy as a space where one can be truly unique and different in ways…” God help Bard College students paying $52,560 per year (11^th highest in the country) to be miseducated by such a fool.

Berkowitz first weighed in on OWS on October 5^th in an article titled “Don’t be Afraid to Say Revolution?” Although happy about the protest, he frets that “One of the ugly aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the indiscriminate anger at all wealthy people, as if being wealthy were wrong.” What a stupid notion. If there is anything that has been made clear down there it is that the resentment is directed at plutocracy, not at rich people per se.

Yesterday in an article that appeared in Michael Tomasky’s “Democracy: a Journal of Ideas”, a kind of upscale version of the pro-Democratic Party babble heard nightly on MSNBC, Berkowitz characterized OWS as “anti-political”. He also repeated the charge that the movement harbored racist tendencies based on the evidence of Atlanta protesters refusing to allow Congressman John Lewis to speak. This is a talking point of the Ann Coulters of the world, it should be understood. It couldn’t possibly occur to Berkowitz that the hostility to the two-party system might have something to do with Lewis being turned down (he spoke later in the day.)

Berkowitz also found himself getting “goose bumps” over the human megaphone used by the crowds at these protests, but not the “good kind”. In his eyes they must evoke Berlin in 1928 or something. One day it is a “mic check”, the next it is breaking the windows of Jewish shopkeepers or something, one supposes.

Mostly what annoys Berkowitz is the refusal of OWS to become political:

To reject leadership, to refuse to govern, to insist simply on talking and debating is not to be political, but is to announce one’s rejection of politics. To engage in politics one must not only rebel and tear down, but one must also found new institutions and build up. It is precisely the concern with foundation—the desire to build responsible institutions with power that would check and other powers and thus guarantee both political power and liberty—that Arendt understood to be the genius of the American Revolution. And it is precisely this political desire to found power that Occupy Wall Street protesters lack.

I for one hope that OWS continues to reject politics of the kind that John Lewis and Michael Tomasky represent. The single most important contribution these young people have made, including a sizable contingent from Bard College apparently, is a loud and clear challenge to the right of the one percent to control political life in the United States and elsewhere.

In my email exchange with him last year, I brought up the names of a number of Bard trustees who certainly fit the description of “one percenters”, all of whom he regarded as “respected people”.

It is difficult to figure out which one of them has abused democracy the worst. Is it Bruce Ratner who used political connections to get the green light for an abysmal development project in downtown Brooklyn and who secretly funded Astroturf “civil rights” groups to back Ratner’s ambitions?

Or is it Stewart Resnick who uses his connections to the Democratic Party in California to divert precious water resources to his pistachio nut and pomegranate plantations, leaving ordinary citizens without clean drinking water and toilets that will not flush? One wonders if this muddle-headed liberal would be so willing to defend the Stewart Resnicks of the world if it was his drinking water that was coming out of the faucet the color of tobacco juice.

Bard trustee Stewart Resnick: a real-life Noah Cross

Stewart Resnick

Noah Cross

Leon Botstein

On July 26^th the New York Times reported on the problems of water banking in California:

Peter Key knew something was strange when the water levels in his tropical fish tank began to go down last summer. Then the washing machine took 40 minutes to fill, and the toilets would not flush.

But even as Mr. Key and neighbors spent $14,000 to deepen their community well here, they had identified a likely culprit.

They blamed water banking, a system in which water-rights holders — mostly in the rural West — store water in underground reservoirs either for their own future use or for leasing to fast-growing urban areas.

So the neighbors’ small local water utility has gone to state court to challenge the wealthy farming interests that dominate two of the country’s largest water banks.

Viewed as test cases for the size and scope of water-banking operations, the lawsuits claim that enormous withdrawals of water by the banks lowered the water table, causing geological damage, service disruptions and costly repairs.

Water managers and the farmers they serve have long been major political players here in Kern County, a center of conservative political power. But even inside these tight circles, there is increasing friction as governments, businesses — especially agriculture — and a population that has swelled by 26 percent in a decade all compete for water. Even a trendy fruit, the pomegranate, plays a role in these water wars.

The minute I saw the word pomegranate I knew instantly that Bard College trustee Stewart Resnick had to be implicated in the inability of Peter Kay to flush his toilet. Sure enough, the article goes on to report:

Pumping out huge amounts of stored water in dry years was thought to have little impact on the underground geology — at least until Mr. Key’s shower head sputtered. Now engineers believe it reversed the area’s underground hydraulic gradient, turning a hill-shaped water table, accessible by shallow wells, into a valley. The trigger for the huge withdrawals was a drought that began in 2007. Kern County’s allocation of water from Northern California was cut. Then, in the 40 months beginning in March 2007, roughly half the banks’ capacity was pumped out to keep fruit and nut trees alive.

“I don’t think anyone fully appreciated the magnitude of the impact they would have,” said Mr. Averett of the Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District.

POM Wonderful, part of the fruit-drink empire owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, makes its profits from pomegranate trees kept green by the Kern Water Bank Authority. The authority, technically a public agency, is controlled by the Paramount Farming Company, which like POM, is a subsidiary of Roll Global, a company owned by the billionaire Resnicks.

If you’ve seen Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”, you will be reminded of the malevolent water utility baron Noah Cross who was guilty of diverting precious water resources to the benefit of agribusiness when he wasn’t busy screwing his daughter, played by Faye Dunaway. Now I have no reason to believe that Stewart Resnick is screwing his daughter (don’t know if he has one), but there is little doubt that he is just as greedy and evil as Noah Cross.

While I am pleased to see the New York Times shining its spotlight on the Resnicks, you really have to go to the Earth Island Institute’s website to get the goods. In an article titled “Lost in the Valley of Excess“, John Gibler does not mince his words:

In a region where so much is burning, nothing is more valuable than water.

No one knows this better than Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of one of the biggest privately held agribusiness corporations in the United States – Roll International – or, as their website proclaims: “the largest privately held company you’ve never heard of.” Roll’s holdings include Paramount Farming, the largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios in the world; Paramount Citrus; Fiji Water; Suterra, a pesticide brand; Teleflora; PomWonderful; and the Neptune Pacific Line, a global shipping company.

A large part of the Resnicks’ billion-dollar business entails growing more than 5 million trees in the cracked and dry Westside soil of the San Joaquin Valley, where rain doesn’t fall and rivers do not flow. Kern County receives only five inches of rainfall a year and most of its aquifers have been depleted, contaminated, or both. None of Paramount’s pistachio or almond trees would survive without the daily application of irrigation water pumped through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and down the length of the California Aqueduct.

Over the past two decades, the Resnicks have been at the heart of the most controversial moves in California water politics. When the Resnicks began buying land here in the 1980s from Mobil and Texaco, they acquired contracts for California State Water Project deliveries from the California Aqueduct. From far behind the scenes they helped rewrite the contracts that govern the California State Water Project, commandeered a $74 million dollar state water bank, and encouraged Senator Dianne Feinstein to intervene on behalf of agribusiness in the conflicts over the ecological collapse of the Delta.

The Resnicks’ political involvement is driven by a simple force: money. The Resnicks have made a lot of it over the past 20 years by hoarding state water resources in ways now being challenged in court. In a land of outrageous poverty, the Resnicks have built a billion-dollar fortune by growing trees with water from an artificial river while the migrant workers who tend the irrigation pumps don’t have access to potable water in their homes.

To ward off the impact of investigative reporting on their skullduggery, the Resnicks have used extensive PR machinery to try to make POM Wonderful look practically like a hippy farming co-op in Vermont. Their website declares:

POM Wonderful’s commitment to wellness also means caring about the well-being of our planet. Our sustainable business practices include:

• Using the latest drip-irrigation technologies in our orchards to minimize use of one of California’s scarcest resources – water.

• Making productive use of every single part of the pomegranate. What’s left over is used as cattle feed – no landfills for us!

• Manufacturing our bottles right next to our filling plant, which means no wasteful transportation of air-filled bottles.

• Employing an intelligent routing system to ensure our products travel the fewest miles possible to reach store shelves.

• LEED Silver certified corporate offices in Los Angeles, CA.

We invite you to enjoy our fresh pomegranates, our 100% pomegranate juice and our growing line of POMx-based products.

I don’t know if the Resnicks really believe their own bullshit, but they have managed to ingratiate themselves to California’s liberal elite, as well as the corporate environmentalist outfit called Conservation International upon whose board Stewart Resnick sits. (Resnick is not the only scoundrel on the board. It also includes Jared Diamond, the “environmentalist” who has hailed Chevron as a “Green” corporation.) If you go to their website, they have a page on Safeguarding Fresh Water that states:

Fresh water also harbors the greatest concentration of life on Earth — greater than either terrestrial or marine biomes. Though it covers less than a fraction of 1 percent of the Earth’s surface, fresh water provides habitat for more than 10 percent of known animals and about one-third of all known vertebrate species. And, more than 40 percent of all fish species are found in fresh water — even though it is, relatively speaking, a drop in the bucket.

The health and abundance of these species is a crucial indicator of the health of freshwater ecosystems. These ecosystems, in turn, play an important role in moderating the location, distribution, and timing of freshwater flows, ensuring that we receive a multitude of benefits and services.

Putting Resnick on the board of a group that is pledged to safeguard fresh water is like putting David Duke on the board of the NAACP.

And it is not just California’s water that this character is hoarding for the pursuit of filthy lucre. He has colonized Fiji for the sole purpose of mining its water to market to the unknowing middle class all too easily seduced by bullshit advertising about the water’s healthiness and the company’s commitment to ecosystems. Last December the Resnicks pulled out of Fiji because their profits were threatened by the government’s decision to impose a new tax of 15 Fijian cents (about 10 cents) a liter on companies extracting more than 3.5 million liters of water a month. Previously, the tax rate was one third of one cent. I would say that Fiji is better off without them, just as California would be. In a world in which the bare necessities of life are becoming supportable on dwindling arable soil, we simply don’t need pomegranates and pistachio nuts, except maybe on special occasions.

The December 1 2010 New Zealand Herald reported on Fiji’s branding:

If Fiji Water’s decision to pull out of the nation stands, it is difficult to see how the product can survive.

The trendy brand is built on the allegedly unique and life-enhancing properties of the underground spring from which it comes, which is said to be particularly pure.

That marketing pitch has been enough to turn Fiji Water into a favourite of the celebrity classes, drunk by everyone from Scarlett Johansson and Justin Timberlake to Nicole Kidman and the Obamas.

Fiji Water has styled itself as an eco-friendly product, claiming it pays to offset all the carbon emissions which come from transporting square plastic bottles from one of the world’s most remote locations to the refrigerators of major cities.

Al Gore swigs it while delivering speeches about global warming, while the firm’s owners are Los Angeles philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick, who have given millions of dollars to progressive causes and Democratic Party politicians.

Critics have scoffed at the notion that bottled mineral water can be environmentally responsible, and point out that many Fijians have no access to clean drinking water, and suffer from diseases such as typhoid.

Others have raised eyebrows at the firm’s corporate structure – court records show that in 2008 it was owned by an entity in the tax haven of Luxembourg, though some assets have recently been transferred to Switzerland.

The Earth Island Institute article makes a point of connecting the dots between the water-starved residents of the land abutting their pomegranate latifundia and their Fiji operations:

Farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley have effectively had their water privatized. Their communities have been left out of the major water projects. The groundwater basins have been depleted and contaminated by pesticides and nitrates from the very agribusinesses that employ them. Little to no state funding makes it to their local water systems, leaving them to buy bottled water at the store or from a vending machine. Meanwhile, the Resnicks, in what would seem a scripted irony, own Fiji Water, “the #1 premier bottled water in the US.”

Conservation International is not the only faux progressive board that Stewart Resnick sits on. He is also on the board of trustees of Bard College, my alma mater. Its president Leon Botstein has a remarkable gift for co-opting sleazebags like Stewart Resnick who are in a position to make major donations to facilitate the school’s ambitious  colonization program of colleges around the world on behalf of board member George Soros’s Popperian ideology, especially when palms are greased in the process.

In a July 6 interview  with Hudson Valley Magazine, Botstein reflected on his achievements at Bard College, where he—like a North Korean despot—is president for life:

Botstein speaks passionately about the need to ramp up scientific literacy in this country. “Increasingly, the issues that face us, politically, have some component of science in them: the environment, energy, employment, tech, health, disease. This country needs more engineers, more scientists; that is crucial for the future of the American economy.”

I am all for ramping up scientific literacy but I am also for ramping down corporate control of our political system, higher education and society in general. For all of Botstein’s glib appropriation of progressive language, this is something that he would militantly resist. After all, his mini-empire is ultimately linked to the fortunes of a decaying imperial system.

George Soros contributes $60 million to Bard College colonial ventures

NY Times May 16, 2011

$60 Million Gift to Bolster Bard College’s Global Work

By LISA W. FODERARO

Bard College, a small liberal arts institution in the Hudson Valley, has received a $60 million gift from the Open Society Foundations in recognition of its global involvement, which includes programs in New Orleans, Nicaragua and Russia, officials are to announce on Tuesday.

The gift from Open Society, which George Soros created in the 1980s to foster democracies around the world, will help the college bring its disparate programs under a new umbrella, the Bard College Center for Civic Engagement, and assure their continuing operation and growth.

“We decided to create an institutional culture of serious, thoughtful and nonpartisan engagement in the world,” said Leon Botstein, Bard’s longtime president. “Bard has really taken seriously all of the John Dewey arguments about the relationship between education and democracy. It can’t be done merely through the curriculum.”

The $60 million grant is enormous for Bard, which has a relatively small endowment of $200 million. It requires the college to raise an additional $120 million from other donors, though the Soros money will begin to flow before that goal is met.

Dr. Botstein has had a close relationship with Mr. Soros for years, serving on boards of the Open Society Foundations and as chairman of the Central European University in Budapest, which Mr. Soros established.

“As a general rule I do not support higher education in the United States,” Mr. Soros said in a statement. “This grant represents a departure that will help Bard in its efforts to transform liberal education and bolster critical thinking worldwide.”

For years, Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., has steadily expanded its academic programs in the United States and abroad. Some programs were begun by faculty members, others by former students; they were institutionalized by the college.

A former student created the Bard Prison Initiative, which brings degree-granting courses into five New York correctional facilities; a professor developed a dual-degree program in liberal arts with St. Petersburg State University in Russia.

Closer to its Hudson Valley campus, the college operates public high schools in Manhattan, Queens and Newark that incorporate college-level coursework. In New Orleans, about 10 percent of high school juniors and seniors take college-level courses through a Bard program created by former students.

Other service-learning projects and education programs are in Nicaragua, the West Bank, Kyrgyzstan and South Africa. “We don’t go where it’s beneficial for Bard; we go where we see a need,” said a college spokesman, Mark Primoff.

* * *

(written in 2000)

Bard College

I just returned from Bard College, where graduation ceremonies for the class of 2000 and a reunion for my graduating class of 1965 were held.

Bard is an interesting institution. Along with Black Mountain College, Bennington, Antioch and Goddard, the school was seen as an experiment in progressive educational philosophy. These schools either involved ambitious, but largely unsuccessful, work-study programs or in the case of Black Mountain expected students to work on the upkeep of the college itself, through gardening for food served in the cafeteria, etc. John Dewey’s progressivism was a strong element mixed with New Deal idealism.

All of these schools went through big financial crises at one point or another and one, Black Mountain– the eagle of the lot–succumbed in the 1950s. Even in its grave, the school was seen as one of the great cultural influences of the 20th century, either through the literary journal edited by faculty member and dean Charles Olsen, or through art classes taught by well-known modernists such as Joseph Albers.

The others hit a brick wall in the 1960s and 70s as American society entered a post-affluence period when the realities of the job market militated against the kind of intellectual hothouse atmosphere of a place like Bard or Bennington. The schools were forced to become more competitive and the financial and curricular restructuring was often quite painful, as indicated in an article about Bennington in today’s NY Times:

Founded in 1932 as a women’s college challenging educational orthodoxy, the upstart developed a history of innovation, a tradition of teacher-practitioners — often cutting-edge figures in art, drama, dance and literature — working in close relationship with their student-apprentices and, in recent decades, academic politics of exceeding viciousness.

But with the college having fallen on hard times by 1994, its niche nibbled away by changes in the Ivy League and other institutions, its student body reduced in quantity and quality, some of its faculty lapsing toward mediocrity and its finances in peril, the trustees, the administration and the faculty came up with a restructuring plan called the Symposium after a two-year agonizing reappraisal.

A third of the faculty — 26 of 79 professors — was fired in a single stroke in 1994.

Bard solved its financial crisis in a less extreme fashion. When Leon Botstein assumed the presidency of the college in 1975 at the age of 28, the youngest such office-holder in the United States, he elected to curb the “excesses” of the old Bard and to restyle the school as a competitive liberal arts college in the mode of Swarthmore, Haverford or Reed. He has been eminently successful. One out of 10 applications are approved today, while back in 1961, when I was a freshman, the ratio was something like 1 out of 3.

Despite Bard’s mediocre reputation, it was an important institution. From 1933-44, it added distinguished European emigres, in flight from fascist Europe, to the faculty. Among them were painter Stefan Hirsch, political editor Felix Hirsch, violinist Emil Hauser of the Budapest String Quartet, philosopher Heinrich Bluecher, economist Adolf Sturmthal, and philosopher Werner Wolff.

Botstein is a well-respected public figure, whose musings appear regularly on the NY Times op-ed page, including a piece on standardized testing today (5/28), to which he is opposed. He is also a mediocre symphony orchestra conductor, who compensates for lackluster performances with his dedication to neglected composers, including Schoenberg about whom Botstein has recently edited a collection of essays.

But Botstein’s real gift is for fund-raising, about whose propriety I have had occasion to take exception to. Botstein has a tremendous affinity for hooking up with very wealthy but very compromised figures, a failing that remains lost on most Bard graduates except the occasionally disgruntled Marxist like myself.

In 1987 I received a mailing from the alumnus office crowing about Botstein’s new appointees to the Board of Trustees. One was Asher Edelman, a leveraged buyout artist and Bard Graduate, whose sleazy behavior served as the inspiration for the Gordon Gecko character in “Wall Street”. Edelman’s takeovers often resulted in the permanent unemployment of “excess” workers. The other appointee was Martin Peretz, the editor of New Republic who used the formerly liberal magazine to stump for contra funding. Since I was heavily involved with sending volunteers to Nicaragua, I blew my stack and wrote Botstein a heavily sarcastic letter congratulating him for sniffing out rich scumbags who would help him balance the school’s books.

Apparently Botstein doesn’t enjoy being criticized in this fashion. He sent me a long angry reply defending his actions. In a way it is easy to understand Botstein’s self-righteousness. In his own eyes, he must appear practically a Bolshevik. After all, didn’t he set up an Alger Hiss chair at Bard (of course, taking the big money connected to the position) and give well-known Marxist and Green activist Joel Kovel the job? In a characteristically Botsteinian gesture, he also set up a Henry R. Luce chair for faculty at Bard at the same time. Critics, according to a NY Times Magazine profile (Oct. 4, 1992) “see the incongruity as opportunism; he sees the essence of free inquiry.” His growled at the interviewer, “People have so little tolerance for dissent. What happened to free thought? Individual ideas? What happened to Thoreau? What happened to this tradition in America?” You’re either for ‘em or agin ‘em. What are we discussing, subtle issues with a meat cleaver?”

Continuing in this vein, Botstein co-opted multimillionaire investor and liberal Leon Levy to set up an Economics Institute at the College, where PEN-L’er Matt Forstater used to work. Levy writes occasionally for the centrist periodical “New York Review of Books,” where his preoccupations about income inequality and “irrational exuberance” on Wall Street serve the same kind of faux progressivist agenda that Felix Rohatyn’s articles used to in the 1980s.

About 5 years ago a trade union organizer wrote to PEN-L asking if there were any Bard College graduates on the list. It seemed that the Levy offspring were owners of an upscale steakhouse in Manhattan whose waiters were attempting to win bargaining recognition. The organizer needed an alumni directory so that letters informing them about the situation could be sent out. It gave me sheer pleasure to send said directory to the union as well as to learn that the administration went ballistic over the “misappropriation” of school property.

In the 1990s Botstein’s recruitment efforts turned up another Golden Goose in the person of Susan Soros, Mrs. George. The Soroses are not to be trifled with, as seen by this London Times May 8, 1991 piece:

A CHAUFFEUR-BUTLER and his cook-housekeeper wife yesterday won their claim for compensation for wrongful dismissal against a multi-millionaire philanthropist whose wife dismissed them without warning.

Susan Soros, the American wife of George Soros, a Hungarian expatriate who is chairman of the Quantum Fund of New York, had told an industrial tribunal in London that Patrick Davison and his wife Nicki had turned her London home into an ‘uninhabitable battlefield’ when she brought a cordon bleu chef from New York.

She said that arguments between her South American chef and the Davisons had kept her awake at night, and that the Davisons had refused to give the chef money to buy ingredients or to show her the food shops.

Yesterday the tribunal unanimously decided that they preferred the Davisons’ evidence to that of Mrs Soros, who they concluded had no legitimate grounds for dismissing the couple.

1991 was a bad year for Susan Soros. Not only did her kitchen staff get uppity, she was turned down for the job of director of graduate education at the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons School of Design. So with $20 million of her husband’s money, she started her own school at 18 West 86th Street. Naturally, she couldn’t get away with calling it the Susan Soros Museum, but Botstein suggested that calling it the Bard College Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts might work. One can only assume that such a generous gesture has benefited Bard College in ways that transcend art.

At yesterday’s commencement, Susan Soros was on hand to present an honorary degree to Ludmila A. Verbitskaya, the first female rector of the State University of St. Petersburg in Russia. Ms. Verbitskaya profusely thanked Botstein for all the help Bard College had made available in the transformation of her institution into one befitting Russia’s new ‘open society’. The Open Society Foundation, as should be well-known at this point, was established by George Soros to foster support for free market fundamentalism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Its victory has ensured that a generation of Russian youth will never enjoy a college education and will likely end up marginalized as alcoholics, drug addicts or prostitutes.

In his commencement address, Botstein urged the class of 2000 to eschew the kind of greed and cynicism that pervaded American society in recent years. I sat there marveling at his breathtaking inability to understand himself and his social role. Do such movers and shakers really take themselves seriously? Perhaps Bard would have been better off with a dreamer and visionary like Charles Olsen in charge. It might have died in the 1970s, but it would have been honored for a glorious lifetime of service to education and humanity.