Guest post by Dr Danny Weil

(In this final of 6 guest posts, Weil describes the need for direct action in fighting Wall Street’s effort to end public education as we know it.)

The shock doctrineers have moved stealth like, quickly and quietly, under the auspices of democratic change, crisis and benevolent largess clothed in frothy rhetoric when in fact their aims are malevolent and their largess the result of looted monies from both worker exploitation, in the case of say, Bill Gates, and/or debt income in the case of Lumina and Sallie Mae (http://www.minyanville.com/business-news/politics-and-regulation/articles/SLM-NNI-CIT-Sallie-Mae-SLM/5/31/2012/id/41365).

They have used religious reactionaries who do not even want knowledge of the human body to be taught to students, let alone critical thinking/reasoning, to drum up support for their plans and herd the masses under the guise of faith-based charity and similar schemes (http://www.dailycensored.com/high-school-teacher-in-idaho-under-investigation-for-saying-vagina-during-anatomy-lesson-and-encouraging-critical-thinking-on-climate-change/).

If students, faculty, working people, the disabled and indeed the majority of us who seek to create school as a ‘home for the mind’, are to beat them at their offensive game, then we must wake up and see how they operate.  This will take meticulous and arduous critical analysis for they far outnumber us in both capital to assure their plans are put in place, and access to the microphone of a deracinated culture from which they operate, celebrate and broadcast their rancid strategies.  And they are moving fast now, not just here in the US but all over the world (http://www.dailycensored.com/lumina-foundation-pushing-privatization-of-education-in-mexico/).

They are smart, ruthless and own the armed forces and the police who work to assure there will be no resistance to their plans.

Simply signing petitions, writing letters to corporate newspapers or calling on corporate democrats to step up to the plate and such, will never work.  In fact, it is a strategy that is playing right into the neo-enclosure colonist’s hands, for this is the exertion that the new Masters want the working class to engage in – to come to the throne with petitions, handwringing and pleas while the masters yawn, host large country club dinners to create more havoc, secretly bivouac in fancy hotels to launch new neo-enclosure plans and move quickly across the terrain, saddled up with a lynch posse for anything public, be it schools or hospitals.

No, now is the time to create working class and community ties that can then be harnessed to the development of class-based organization and development of political parties and massive resistance.  Only with direct action can we hope to win.  For as Chris Hedges and other notable scholars and activists have noted, liberalism is dead and I would add, it is the real problem.

Only a mobilized class-conscious-left has the chance to take on these hoaksters and hustlers who seek to reduce humanity to robotization and create the oppressive Brave New World where we become “Insolvent Green’.  Getting rid of the road dogs, the surplus population no longer needed under capitalism, is their goal and they will use any force to accomplish it for they know angry and class-conscious masses are the biggest threat to their dominance.

Once again, the plans for the wholesale privatization of education and elimination of educational opportunities for American students, is clear in the Lumina report, of which there are many:

If we are to create an environment that can stand up to these disastrous “shock doctrineers” in an Age of Irrationality and an environment of ignorance, we must understand how social class works and what is in store for all of us if we fail.  This means understanding how the bankrupt and debt ridden capitalist class operates maliciously worldwide to seed and then harvest a new world of both manipulation and repression.  Without a clear understanding of the historical as it exists in the present moment, we will find our contemporary life littered with a growing surplus population that must be manipulated and eventually repressed — a future owned and harnessed by ‘them’.

This then is our mission: education, mobilization and tying our understanding and our wakening lives to clear organizational goals that stand up to the farce being perpetrated in the name of freedom.

City College of San Francisco is in progression and their efforts are a site for growing resistance and understanding.  Now is the time to turn up the volume, organize communities of power and enlightenment and begin the long, arduous march towards creating a better world.  We either accomplish this feat, or we enter the new Digital Dark Ages.

photo credit: Son of Groucho via photopin cc

Reposted from Daily Censored

Dr. Danny Weil is an investigative journalist, author and public interest attorney who practiced public interest law for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He now lives in Ecuador.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy was the first, in 1967, to investigate the use of the Ford Foundation and other foundations as “conduits,” “pass-throughs,” and “fronts” to disguise CIA funding for domestic operations (it’s technically illegal for the CIA to operate on US soil under federal law). The investigation ended with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 but in 1976 was taken up by the Church Committee, a Senate Select Committee formed in the aftermath of Watergate. The Church Committee found that between 1963-1966, 164 foundations gave out 700 grants over $10,000. Of these, 108 involved partial or complete funding by the CIA (Frances Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War)

Saunder’s work was the first, in an impressive body of research by progressive academics and investigative journalists:

• Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) by British historian and journalist Frances Stonor Saunders
• Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (2003) by New Hampshire political science professor Joan Roelof
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (2007) by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
• The Shock Doctrine (2007) by Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein
• Towers of Deception: the Media Cover-up of 911 (2006) by Canadian journalist, documentary producer and political activist Barry Zwicker
• Barack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography (2008) by historian and journalist Webster Tarpley

CIA Funding of Alternative Media

Most of the research into left gatekeeping foundations involves the funding of so-called alternative media outlets, largely based on information derived from tax returns. The most prolific writer in this area is Massachusetts-based investigative journalist Bob Feldman. Feldman published the bulk of his research in a paper in Critical Sociology “Report from the Field: Left Media and Left Think Tanks – Foundation-Managed Protest?” Although Critical Sociology charges a fee to download this paper, Feldman and others have republished excerpts elsewhere on the Internet. Edward Ulrich published a helpful digest of Feldman’s work in March 2011 at his blog “News of Interest” at http://www.newsofinterest.tv/politics/media_issues/demnow_npr_controlled.php

The History of CIA/Ford Foundation Collaboration

Feldman starts (http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html) by recapping the history Frances Sanders lays out in Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War).

The Ford Foundation was created in 1936 from the immense Ford family fortune. Historically its governance and mission has been conservative and pro-corporate, in line with its namesake Henry Ford, a rabid anti-Semite who admired Adolph Hitler and helped finance his rise to power.

The International Jew by Henry Ford

***

The CIA-Ford Foundation collaboration began in 1953, when John McCloy, another Nazi sympathizer, because the director of the Ford Foundation. McCloy’s corporate credentials include serving as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, Westinghouse, AT&T, Allied Chemical and United Fruit Company. As a lawyer, he served as chief counsel to Standard Oil of New Jersey, Mobil, Texaco and Gulf I.G. Farben (German chemical company that was Hitler’s primary German sponsor and which developed the nerve gas used in the mass execution of European Jews). Mcloy watched the 1936 Berlin Olympics from Hitler’s box seat and as the Assistant Secretary of War, blocked Jewish immigration to the US, as well as the bombing of railroads leading to Nazi concentration camps. As High Commissioner of Germany following the war, he pardoned a large majority of Nazi war criminals and assisted in their secret repatriation in the US and South America. Finally in 1963-64 he served on the Warren Commission, which like the 911 Commission, played a critical role covering up FBI, CIA and Pentagon involvement in the JFK assassination.

McCloy publicly advocated for the Ford Foundation to cooperate with the CIA. He argued that open collaboration was a better alternative than having the Agency secretly infiltrate the Foundation’s lower echelons and subvert their work. McCloy also chaired a three man committee that had to be consulted every time the CIA wanted to use the Foundation as a pass-through.

Ford Foundation archives reveal a raft of joint Foundation-CIA projects. The most prominent of these CIA fronts are the Eastern European Fund, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and International Rescue Committee (where William van den Heuvel, father of Nation editor and publisher Katrina van den Heuvel, was a long time board member). The Ford Foundation has also been the primary funder of two secret elite planning groups, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

Alternative Media Outlets Funded by the Ford Foundation

According to Feldman, the so-called alternative media outlets receiving Ford Foundation funding (based on their tax returns) include:

• Democracy Now!
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and their radio program Counterspin
• Working Assets Radio
• The Progressive
• Mother Jones
• South End Press (Z Magazine)
• Alternative Radio
• Ms. Magazine
• Political Research Associates (run by rabid anti-conspiracist Chip Berlet)

As Feldman points out, each of these outlets has systematically marginalized independent researchers who have systematically studied 9-11 and the JFK and other political assassinations. Feldman currently blogs at “Where’s the Change?” http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/

To be continued.