Main Menu
Search Site

powered by FreeFind
hatching the matrix
And remember Obama went to Harvard:

http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/harvardpamphlet.html#UNHOLY%20TRINITY:%20THE%20UNIVERSITY,%20THE%20BANKS,%20AND%20KILLER%20POLICE

HARVARD: KEY INSTRUMENT OF U.S. IMPERIALISM

Harvard is far worse than an unfair employer. Funded by the owners of the nationīs biggest corporations, Harvard leads the academic establishment in providing the ideological underpinnings of U.S capitalismīs deadliest crimes. For centuries, research, theorizing and teaching carried on in Harvardīs ivy-clad halls has justified and enabled genocidal U.S. wars of imperialism abroad and racist assaults on workers at home.

In other words, Harvardīs arrogant contempt for the workers it employs is no aberration or mistake. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party make a class analysis of institutions. Harvard serves specific interests. Itīs not neutral. It is the instrument of the class that holds state power. It can be nothing else. The interests of billionaire capitalists can never coincide with those of the working class. The Harvard campus workers should get as big a raise as they can. However, no pay hike can change Harvardīs character. The universityīs long, murderous history proves the point.

Harvard bears a large measure of guilt for the killing of 3 million Vietnamese workers and 55,000 U.S. troops in the Vietnam War. As a key advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy insisted on building U.S. forces to over 500,000 and on escalating attacks on North Vietnam. Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington devised the \"strategic hamlets\" program, under which the U.S. set up concentration camps to imprison Vietnamese workers and peasants. Anyone not in them was considered an enemy, worthy of assassination by death squads like Bob Kerreyīs Navy Seal Unit. When it became clear that U.S. rulers were losing the war, former Harvard professor and Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger improved the U.Sīs bargaining position by orchestrating the infamous Christmas bombing of Hanoi. Napalm, the U.S.īs most barbaric weapon in the war, had been invented by Harvard chemist Louis Feiser who was assisted by Harvard president James Conant, an early apostle of the A-bomb.

The bloody tradition continues. In the past few years, Harvard has transformed its Kennedy School of Government from a refuge for washed-up liberal politicians into a major policy factory. It focuses on retaking the Middle Eastīs oilfields by force and on helping U.S. imperialism prevent the rise of Russian and Chinese rivals as threats to its world supremacy. Robert Zoellick, a research fellow at the Kennedy School and senior advisor to George W. Bush throughout his campaign, \"proposed seizing control of parts of Iraq as a way of undermining President Saddam Hussein\" (AP, 5/19/00). General Bernard Trainor uses his status as a Kennedy School fellow to broadcast his disappointment that \"we didnīt beat up the Iraqi army enough [in the Gulf War]\" (WBUR radio, 2/20/01).



\"VERITAS\" OR EXXON U.?

The Rockefeller family and its allies (i.e., the Eastern Establishment) cemented their ties to Harvard in the 1930s. These owners of the Standard Oil companies were then consolidating their position as the dominant bloc of U.S. capital. To ensure that the economy and other key aspects of society would work in their interests, the Standard Oil heirs acquired Chase Manhattan and other big banks and made massive donations to major universities like Harvard. Standard Oil money actually transformed Harvardīs physical appearance in the 1930s, when Standard heir Edward Harkness plunked down $13 million to build the undergraduate residence houses. Harvard became a prime recipient for the philanthropy of the Rockefeller family and its various foundations.

But, however powerful, oil companies, banks, and universities were not enough. The Rockefellers and their allies in the Eastern Establishment had to employ military might against foreign rivals. At this time, their faction gained control of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the single most influential think-tank formulating U.S. foreign policy. Often working jointly with Harvard, the CFR has helped guide U.S. imperialism from World War II to Kosovo. David Rockefeller, a generous Harvard benefactor, long-time Harvard overseer and the CFRīs chairman emeritus, recently headed a CFR delegation to Havana to begin figuring out ways to put U.S. business investment back in now-capitalist Cuba.

If anything, the Rockefeller-Big Oil-CFR forces have only tightened their grip on Harvard, as the old Standard companies have reunited into Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco, and Chase has swallowed up its old nemesis J.P Morgan. Incoming Harvard president Larry Summers, when he was Clintonīs Treasury Secretary, praised these mergers as \"Darwinian, with the fittest surviving.\" Of the seven members of the Harvard Corporation today, six, including Summers, belong to the CFR. The seventh, Robert Stone, is married to a Rockefeller. One member, James Houghton, sits on the boards of both Exxon and Chase J.P. Morgan. Another, Hanna Gray, was a Morgan director.



KENNEDY SCHOOL PROFESSORS HELP DRAW BLUEPRINT FOR BOSSESī WARS

Another commuter from Cambridge to the war-rooms of Washington, Kennedy School professor Richard Falkenrath, has recently joined Bushīs National Security Council. A CFR member, Falkenrathīs research covers all the main threats to U.S. imperialism. He studies nuclear proliferation, Russiaīs influence in Europe, Europeīs military readiness and the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. Falkenrath writes extensively about the growing possibility of massive terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. As the reports of the governmentīs Hart-Rudman Commission reveal, U.S. rulers fear such assaults in the near future but are also counting on them to mobilize the nation, Pearl Harbor-style, for a major war.

Oil looms large on the Pentagonīs radar screen and Harvardīs. The Kennedy School has begun a Caspian Studies Program, which \"analyzes the geopolitics of the Caspian Basin border states as well as their strategic importance to the U.S.\" A consortium of companies led by Exxon Mobil and Chevron \"makes the program possible.\" Harvardīs goal here is clearly to stem Russiaīs growing influence in the oil-rich region. [Peter: What is taking place today with the war in Georgia] The current International Security, a joint MIT-Kennedy School publication, has a lead article focusing on \"the assessment of Chinaīs overall future military power compared with that of the United States.\" China is building a \"blue water\" navy to challenge the U.S. Navyīs control of increasingly strategic oil routes from the Persian Gulf to the Far East.



HARVARD AND \"COMMUNITY POLICING\" FASCISM

Through its hand-in-glove support of MassInc, a relatively new but highly influential think-tank, Harvard fosters racist police terror in Greater Boston. Needing tighter control of the urban working class, Bostonīs bigger capitalists have employed MassInc to develop a fascistic \"community policing\" system. In it, churches and other community groups funnel information to the cops on \"criminal activity\" in their areas. The arrangement has reduced street arrests because it allows cops to haul off \"criminals\" directly from their homes and workplaces. Most of those jailed are young black and Latin workers suspected of petty, non-violent offenses.

In 1996, MassInc, which lists Harvard as a major sponsor - along with financial powerhouses Fleet, Fidelity, and State Street - issued a report demanding that \"we build new jails and fill them.\" Community policing and merciless sentencing laws, it said, would bring \"safer neighborhoods.\" State and local officials quickly got with the program. By 1999, MassInc was gleefully reporting that prison construction was booming and conviction rates more than doubling.

Harvardīs complicity in this shift towards fascism runs deep. MassIncīs founder and chairman Chris Gabrieli is both an advisor to Harvardīs Board of Overseers and a director of its school of Public Health. MassInc counts no fewer than six Harvard faculty members among its directors and advisors. Some of these, like Business School professors Michael Porter and Rosabeth Kanter, also advise giants of U.S. imperialism such as GM and IBM.



UNHOLY TRINITY: THE UNIVERSITY, THE BANKS, AND KILLER POLICE

Another, Ira Jackson of the Kennedy School, personifies the union of Harvard, the banks, and racist cop terror. While pursuing his masterīs at the Kennedy School in the mid-1970s, Jackson served as a top advisor to Bostonīs Mayor Kevin White. At the time, racist politicians and thugs used school desegregation as an excuse for a flood of assaults on black workers and their children. Counseled by Jackson, White punished the victims of racist violence, ordering his cops to protect the racists and attack their opponents - especially our Party and its allies in the Committee Against Racism. Harvard made Jackson a dean at the Kennedy School as soon as he left Whiteīs employ. After a decade at Harvard, Jackson worked as an executive of BankBoston for 12 years, directing its notoriously racist community lending. Now Jackson is back at Harvard, and helping to guide MassIncīs war on workers.

Greater Boston is just a laboratory for a much wider design. Harvard plays a leading role both in developing fascistic community policing ideologically and in implementing it in cities across the nation. Harvard has bestowed upon George Kelling, community policingīs chief theoretician (now at Rutgers), the title of research fellow, as well as invaluable assistance in research and publishing. William Bratton, community policingīs best known practitioner, was also rewarded with a Kennedy School fellowship after his reign of terror as New Yorkīs police commissioner. Bratton criminalized poverty. Under him, panhandling or failing to pay a subway fare became grounds for incarceration. Under the pretext of reducing petty crime, the Harvard/Bratton vision of \"community policing\" has turned growing numbers of working class neighborhoods into occupied territories, in which itīs a felony to be poor and non-white.



RACISM: HARVARDīS MAJOR FIELD OF CONCENTRATION

Harvardīs contempt for campus workers reflects its history of furnishing ammunition to generations of \"Master Race\" ideologues in the service of big capital. One of the earliest, a \"Teutonist\" named Prescott Hall, along with a Harvard climatology professor named Robert DeCourcy Ward, co-founded the Immigration Restriction League.

Official Harvard jumped on this racist bandwagon. Vice-presidents of the First International Congress of Eugenics, held in London in 1912, included Charles Eliot, Harvard president - emeritus, and Charles Davenport, a Harvard biologist who became director of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, NY.

Under Davenport, the ERO practiced murderous social Darwinism. In addition to justifying U.S. government policies that both limited immigration and called for terror against immigrants residing in the United States, Davenportīs ERO found convenient \"hereditary\" explanations for various diseases of poverty. Pellagra was the deadliest example. Pellagra can be cured with a vitamin-rich diet. Denying evidence, Davenport and the ERO said the disease was caused by genetic factors affecting poor people of \"inferior stock.\" This lie allowed the US government to justify denying food supplement programs to farm workers in areas with high pellagra incidences. Millions of pellagra-related deaths in the United States during the first third of the 20th century can thus be directly charged to Davenport, the ERO and the Harvard laboratories that helped spawn them. The ERO also played an important role in forcing thousands of U.S. workers to undergo thousands of sterilization procedures during the 1920s and 1930s.



HITLER LOVED HARVARD EUGENICISTS

All this was a mere warm-up. Harvardīs racist eugenical theorizing really came into its own with the rise of Adolf Hitler. The connection between U.S. and Nazi eugenics has been well documented. Harvard students, faculty, and workers would be well advised to read Allan Chaseīs The Legacy of Malthus and Stefan Kühlīs The Nazi Connection to learn more about it. One example will suffice here. The inventor of the modern phrase \"under-man\" (meaning genetically inferior races) was no German, but Harvardīs own Lothrop Stoddard, holder of a Harvard history Ph.D. and Law School degree, and author of The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man. This racist babble was applauded by President Harding and used in the drive to limit integration. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s also picked it up and celebrated it.

So did Hitler and Co. The Führer told Stoddardīs sidekick, Madison Grant (a Yale product), that Grantīs book The Passing of the Great Race, had become his \"bible.\" Stoddardīs ravings were particularly prized by Hans F. K. Günther, Hitlerīs chief \"raceologist.\" The Nazis freely acknowledged that Stoddardīs views on forced sterilization had inspired them to write the Nüremberg race laws. Stoddard attended a Nazi Eugenics Court as an honored guest - and proceeded to criticize it for showing excessive mercy in refusing to order the immediate sterilization of a seventeen year-old girl (Chase, p. 351)!



\"GENES ÜBER ALLES\" TAKES ON A MODERN CRIMSON HUE

For a few years following World War II, revelations of Nazi mass murders cramped the public style of Harvard eugenicists. By 1969, however, they had returned to a place of favor. The winter 1969 Harvard Review of Education published an article by Stanford educational psychologist Arthur Jensen which is entitled \"How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?\"

Jensen explained that IQ was inherited, that black people had fewer \"intelligence genes\" than whites, and that therefore spending money on compensatory education programs was pointless. This new version of the old Big Lie helped Nixon slash education budgets. It also sugar-coated the viciously racist police terror that big city mayors were unleashing at the time against rebellious black workers.

Jensenism found many enthusiastic advocates at Harvard. One was Daniel Moynihan, a former Harvard professor, who had made a name for himself by explaining that the main problem in black working class neighborhoods was the \"matriarchal structure\" of black families. Moynihan also \"discovered\" that poverty was no longer a serious problem in the United States and that the governmentīs best attitude toward it was one of \"benign neglect.\" Moynihan approvingly stated that the \"winds of Jensen were gusting through the capital with gale force.\" For this racism, he was rewarded by the bosses with a lustrous political career, which culminated in a New York Senate seat.



HERRNSTEIN AND BANFIELD PAVE WAY FOR CLINTON/BUSH ASSAULTS ON WORKERS

Hot on the heels of Jensen and Moynihan came Richard Herrnstein, Harvard Psychology chair, who announced in the Atlantic Monthly (1971) that America was a \"meritocracy\" in which socioeconomic status varied directly with genetically inherited intelligence. Herrnstein wrote a series of books to develop this drivel. The last was The Bell Curve, co-authored with Harvardīs Charles Murray in 1995, which also argued the racist lie that black people were genetically less intelligent than whites. Another was a collaboration with police-ologist James Q. Wilson which is entitled Crime and Human Nature. Herrnsteinīs collected works have not only played an instrumental role in helping various presidencies justify drastic cuts in social services, they have also provided the theoretical underpinning for contemporary policing and prison policies that view crime as a genetic trait. The brutal, racist \"Violence Initiative,\" backed by several presidential administrations and sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, owes a large debt to Herrnstein.

No survey of modern Harvard racism would be complete without mentioning the contributions of the late Edward Banfield, Harvard government professor and author of The Unheavenly City. This is pure Social Darwinism. Banfield called for repealing the minimum wage, as well as for reducing the age of compulsory schooling. The reason, according to the learned professor, is: \"The lower-class individual…does not care how dirty or dilapidated his housing is…Features that make the slum repellent to others actually please him. He finds it satisfying in several ways.\"

This racist, anti-worker nonsense got Banfield a slot as advisor to several presidential administrations. Most significantly, Banfieldīs policy recommendations paved the way for the Clinton White Houseīs \"welfare reform, known as workfare,\" a fascistic policy that forces former welfare recipients to work for slave labor wages. New Harvard president Lawrence Summers was a Clinton Treasury Secretary intimately involved in moving Banfieldīs welfare theories from theory into practice.



WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: HOW LIBERAL IDEOLOGY ASSISTS THE GROWTH OF FASCISM

In addition to Herrnstein and Banfield, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson provided Clinton with useful ideological justifications for the abolition of welfare. Wilson was an influential advisor to Clinton. As an author of four influential books, including The Declining Significance of Race, and advisor to key politicians, Wilson has made the racist term \"underclass\" popular, legitimized liberal racism and justified the abolition of welfare, affirmative action and other \"racially targeted programs.\" Wilson described welfare as an example of a racially targeted program that could not command popular support. He urged welfare reform and workfare as a means to rehabilitate the \"underclass\" by instilling in them a work ethic and other middle class values. Often misinterpreted as a Marxist because of his emphasis on class, not race, Wilson in fact is a black reincarnation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan who prescribes capitalist super-exploitation of low wage workers (i.e., racism) as the cure for ghetto related behavior.

Wilson wrote about the \"Living Wage Campaign\" in his most recent book, The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics. On pp. 83-85, Wilson described the LWC as \"an excellent example of what can happen when local leaders are able to forge coalitions to rally behind an issue that concerns all races, in this case economic justice.\" Wilsonīs argument is that fighting racism is divisive. He claims \"race-specific\" or \"racially targeted\" demands or campaigns cannot create a basis for progressive multi-racial coalitions. Demanding a \"living wage\" for all workers is a good example of a campaign that particularly benefits minority workers yet makes a \"universalistic\" appeal.

Contrary to Wilsonīs lies, the capitalist class needs racism. From racist discrimination in hiring, to racial profiling, to racist police murder, to disproportionate sentencing laws, to attacks on affirmative action, the ruling class continues to push racism. Workers of color receive the most vicious treatment under racism, and the ruling class reaps enormous profits from their super-exploitation (e.g., lower wages on average than white workers). However, racism is the bossesī most potent and valuable ideological weapon for dividing workers. Because the systematic division of workers and students by race and nationality keeps us easily divided and exploited, all workers and students are hurt by racism. Wilson spreads the lie that racism is not a serious problem and should not be fought. However, all workers and students have an absolute need to fight to eliminate racism.

Wilson helps U.S. imperialism by advocating a multiracial reform coalition under the leadership of Democratic politicians and the sectors of the capitalist class who control the Democratic Party (i.e., the Eastern Establishment). If college students, faculty and workers enlist in the coalition Wilson advocates, they will be helping Democratic politicians and labor union leaders maintain racist wage slavery and build support for fascism and imperialist war.



\"SOCIOBIOLOGY\" ONCE AGAIN PUTS HARVARD AT CENTER OF RACIST STENCH

This brief, incomplete overview of racist Harvard theorists ends with the most dangerous modern version, Professor Emeritus of Biology E.O. Wilson. Wilsonīs Sociobiology hit the bookstores in 1975. In Sociobiology, he revived the social Darwinian view that all human social behavior is genetically determined. Having made a living as an entomologist, Wilson applied his notions about ants to his right wing view of society. All social organization, he opined, had a biological basis. Therefore, one could find a gene for everything from \"creativity\" to \"entrepreneurship\" to \"territoriality.\" The media went wild. Wilson became a star. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his vulgarized version of Sociobiology, entitled On Human Nature. The open racists, including the anti-busing thugs who were being allowed to run amok in Boston in 1975 - and who were stopped only by our Party - claimed Wilson as one of their own, as did the Klu Klux Klan. But his most dangerous application was, and remains, the use made of his garbage by the ruling class and its successive governments. Change a word or two, and this is \"Master Race\" and \"Under-Man\" all over again. Wilson isnīt sitting on his poisonous laurels. He has updated Sociobiology and given it a new name: \"consilience.\"

The unifying concept of \"consilience\" is human nature. According to Wilson, human nature \"is the_hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction_and thus connect the genes to culture.\" Therefore, in all human societies we favor our own family, ethnic and religious group, impose male dominance, create hierarchies of status, rank, and wealth and rules for inheritance, promote the territorial expansion and defense of our society, and enter into contractual agreements. Recycling the main ideological assertions of Sociobiology, Wilson claims that racism, religious hatred, sexism, and war are not inevitable features of capitalism, but universal traits of our genetically evolved human nature. The natural sciences, Wilson claims, have discovered these truths, and the social sciences and the humanities must adopt them in order to achieve \"consilience.\"

The rulers have lovingly embraced \"consilience.\" As our Partyīs newspaper, CHALLENGE-DESAFIO, reported this past spring, Rockefeller University has widely promoted it. Wilson has dined with the CEO of American Express, the President of Texas Tech and Steven Rockefeller, to plan a national promotional campaign on college campuses. If the bosses have their way, \"consilience\" will be the curriculum of the future, and once again, Harvard is at the center of the racist stench.

According to this racist mythology, the criminalization of unemployment is justified, because \"crime is in the genes,\" and therefore the U.S. government is right to keep building jails to house the worldīs largest prison population. If \"territoriality\" is in the genes, then US imperialist foreign policy has a biological basis. If social hierarchy is in the genes, then trying to eliminate capitalismīs inequalities is pointless. In this \"survival of the fittest\" world according to Harvardīs Wilson, itīs even bad to demand that Harvard pay its workers a living wage, because theyīre earning the wage their genes deserve. In recent years, thanks to Wilson and others, the capitalists have worked, with some success, to get workers, students, and professionals to believe that the causes for poverty, mental illness, alcoholism, violence - in other words, the worst of the problems caused by the profit system - are genetic.

Racist and fascist theories and statements put forth by Harvard professors lend credibility to U.S. government policies of racist police terror and mass incarceration of mostly black and Latin workers. Blaming youth for the problems of the racist education system, and drugging them as punishment, has become standard policy. In order to get away with the massive attacks that they have launched against workers, students, and professionals, the bosses have needed to win people to believe these ideas. They serve to keep people divided and passive in the face of fascism.

As one of U.S. capitalismīs major universities, Harvard will continue to spew forth racist ideology and policy blueprints. It can never change its character as an instrument for the super-profit of billionaires. The administrationīs anti-worker arrogance in the present struggle accurately reflects the universityīs essence.

2008-11-14