“In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” -- US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1856-1941
12-5-7-08
CounterPunch.com
How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks
Muslim Revolution
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts12052008.html [1]
We were deeply struck by this ancient theme -- that the polis is the teacher of its citizens -- because it is as true now as it has always been.
But, what of that other institution so terribly important to the education of our citizens and others, our universities, specifically "the greatest public higher education research institution in the world" ... (listen to those trumpets blare) ... the University of California?
Is UC a good teacher?
It teaches its students and the society that pays for it -- because it is so, so, very public! -- that a UC administrators and faculty can quit one job, collect a severance package, and go right on to other jobs with UC at higher salaries, later to collect another severance package. We're talking Wall Street levels of accountability if not salaries here, because UC has got to attract the very best and brightest by these means, which amount to the best and the brightest are the best and brightest at looking out for Private No.1. There are probably unsung examples of public-spirited UC executives that tried not to take advantage of every finance game in their system, but they ran up against the Group, and were no doubt told to take the money and shut up for the benefit of the Group.
What does that teach the young?
Scam the public, rip it off, look down your nose at the public and let UC's superb flakmasters handle the issue with the press. Above all, abuse the power the state gave UC to become the "greatest public higher education research instition in the world."
Merced's Sonny Star, the local gigolo media outlet for the McClatchy Co., has once again been shanghied by the artful Bobcatflakers of UC Merced in to several days of propaganda for a UC Merced medical school. It is a very useful diversion from what is really going on in Merced, foreclosures without end, evictions, homelessness, unemployment and the general tendencies that one associates with economic recessions serious enough to be called a Depression, with all the real ugly things that word entails that are still living memory to people of a certain age, because the Depression didn't end in the San Joaquin Valley as soon as it ended in more economically fortunate regions -- not that that prancing ditherhead, Sonny Star, would know it.
Fresno is the place for a medical school, not Merced. Fresno was the place for the campus, not Merced. Universities are urban institutions. Fresno is a city. When universities get involved with urban real estate speculative booms, they are correctly called "boondoggles" and "nothing but a land deal." Moreover, the sorts of hospitals where doctors are trained, called training hospitals, exist in large cities with populations of indigent people upon whom the infant physicians can practice their arts under the guidance of wise, old, and severe nurses who actually teach medicine to the sleepless, tottering residents on the ward, where and when it counts.
The big argument for UC Merced Med is that there aren't enough doctors in the san Joaquin Valley. For example, the wife of one of UC Merced's greatest legislative boosters, Dennis Cardoza, just moved to Maryland for a job at a medical school.
UC Merced, as it stands, would be a good place for an Indian casino and perhaps a Yokuts senior residence, if there are still enough Native people around the foothills that claim Yokuts blood.
However, it's also time to look at the state Legislature again, 30 of whose 120 members have on-going business or professional careers that frequently create conflict-of-interest votes. Political economic anarchy in California is very advanced -- perhaps if one looks at the state's history, it would be more accurate to say that it was never quite arrested by various waves of reform. The current situation has been going on for some years, apparently, without much or any media attention. But, that is because the term-limited legislature rarely gets much media attention anyway. Covering the legislature in the largest state in the nation requires an investment of time and effort few media corporations make anymore except at times around certain issues, like water.
History rhymes rather than repeating, Mark Twain said. But when the homeless community under the Highway 59 bridge and Bear Creek says that when the cops come it will simply move upstream, out into the country (closer to UC Merced), we are getting back to the Old Valley of informal labor camps, only without the work that supported the camps of 50 years ago.
An elemental clash is going on between those who plan for the San Joaquin Valley to be a huge new urban area and an economy that seems to have other plans of its own. Judging from the reputation of the north San Joaquin Valley in international credit markets, the primary means of creating the sort of urban growth that would support a medical school was done by mortgages that are blowing up all over the world. And, of course, UC Merced is planning a large residential and commercial community next to the campus as the amount of empty residential and commercial space grows in Merced, making this plan more redundant by the day.
Automatically, without the least reflection, UC Merced seeks to lead us into a new urban, high-tech, extremely dangerous future, as if it were intelligent rather than simply powerful; as if it were humane rather than merely lethal; as if it were involved with life rather than with death on the most massive scale. UC Merced was scarcely open before UC Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was trying to site the most dangerous biowarfare lab possible outside of Tracy.
I happened to be sitting in a bus next to a pre-med student attending UC Merced recently. He got on the bus 200 miles from Merced. I asked why he wasn't taking pre-med courses at some excellent nearby public higher education facilities. He said he wanted to get away from home. Those of us deluged by UC Merced flak in early years remember the constant din of offering a UC campus in the Valley because -- the crudity of this still rankles -- Hispanics won't move away from home. This student was Hispanic and there were two UC campuses closer to his home than Merced. This student is by no means the exception and I quite well understand and am not critical of his desire to go to college away from home.
But, what's really going on here? If I understood him correctly, he seemed to be getting his real instruction from contract teaching assistants from Fresno State, presumably masters' students in chemistry and biology (Fresno State only offers two doctoral programs, in physical therapy and educational leadership). The student, whose father he said was a farmworker, seemed like a veritable poster child for the "UC Merced mission" although his educational needs could be met by more rigorous institutions closer to his home.
A week ago a conference was held at UC Merced, convened by something called CURAJ Exchange, which appears to be made up of UC professors and associated camp followers. The conference was facilitated by "Open Space," which presents itself as a world-famous facilitation group with a patented "technology" called "Open Space Technology," (getting a bunch of people from different walks of life into a room to talk real fast about issues of common concern under the eagle eyes of value-free facilitators intend on "capturing" on a large pad of paper some extremely rough idea of what the speaker was trying to say before interrupting him or her to go on to the next person. Environmentalists particularly, should be careful of future use of the term, "open space," because it may now be the privately owned brand of this coven of value-free facilitators.
The conference notes occurred under the heading, "What could we think of to measure and understand for communities to thrive in the Central Valley," which seemed to be its guiding statement. We read through the 90 pages of notes of the discussion sessions on a variety of topics and couldn't find one new idea. Yet, according to the dictates of "open space technology," new ideas are supposed to spring spontaneously from the people thanks to the miraculous process of value-free facilitation. One fact did spring spontaneously from an early discussion: the San Joaquin Valley is not the Central Valley. The Central Valley runs from Redding to Bakersfield and includes the Sacramento Valley. So, here, once again, we run across the absurd propaganda of this misbegotten campus that it is the "first UC campus in the Central Valley" when in fact UC Davis predates it by close to a century. Given that the question was miscast, the results were inevitable.
We were particularly interested in anything the UC Merced function would have to say about natural resources, vernal pools, for example, since the campus has finally applied for its Clean Water Act permit well after it built its first phase without one. (But, legality is one of those value issues shunned by all true value-free facilitators). Under the rubric, "Environmental Justice," we found a discussion about grant applications made on behalf of the town of Fairmead. Under "Natural Resources Mangement and Protected Areas," we found mention of a discussion of forests, mountains and tourism. We could only assume that some of the burning natural resource issues in the Valley -- from air quality to rivers to groundwater -- intimidated the value-free facilitators because it would be difficult to extract all the values from the issues and have anything left to talk about at all. How does one "measure" the Public Trust?
UC Merced is with us and unlikely to depart, much as some would prefer a decent casino on the site. Casinos frequently add needed funds to worthy pubic institutions like public libraries, after school programs, police and fire protection, even programs at UC campuses, in addition to helping Native American families. Nor do casinos create cities around them as UC campuses do. UC Merced will continue to be a very powerful, destructive voice against the natural resources and environmental concerns of the San Joaquin valley in order to justify its location. Since it must simultaneously claim to be the greenest facility since the Garden of Eden, this is going to lead to endless amounts ofdouble-talk that will spread confusion rather than enlightenment for miles around it.
What has UC Merced taught its surrounding communities?
To begin, UC Merced has taught its surrounding communities the full meaning of the term, "political pork barrel." Whether it ever becomes a school remains to be seen. At the moment it is merely a corrupt state corporation that lies, cheats and steals. The politics behind UC Merced gave its surrounding communities a fantastic show of vanity, greed and political sleeze by every political and business leader (including UC regents) from the city council to the governor's office.
UC Merced corrupted the local planning process and it corrupted the UC system planning process. Will the City of Merced ever get back from UC its $8-million "loan" for the UC sewer and water hookup? Will the UC budget allow the Merced campus to be built out in anything less than 250 years?
UC Merced corrupted superior and state appellate courts, which made a series of decisions (never published) detrimental to both regional resources and to taxpayers pocketbooks.
UC Merced propaganda, since 1995, has been a such voluminous source of endlessly repeated half-truths and lies that it has reminded local residents with any capacity to think critically that UC is one of the world's premier Cold War institutions, inventors of the atomic bomb and the top on-going researcher and developer of nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. Once UC decides upon a course, its propaganda kicks in and it will say anything to get its wish. We were astonished at how it exploited the Valley's Hispanic community, including throngs of third graders marched to the state Capitol to demonstrate for the Merced campus. This campus was presented to be primarily for the Hispanic population of the Valley, who, according to some UC "research," were less likely than other ethnic groups to leave home to go to college. These days -- and probably always for internal UC consumption -- the campus mission is described as serving "diverse students from throughout the state" that are financially supported at a level 50 percent higher than students at regular UC campuses, which makes it an extremely expensive, inefficient community college.
Perhaps worst of all, UC propaganda, in order to sell the Merced campus, tried to convince every child and parent in the area that without a UC degree, they were pretty much worthless. The inflation of the value of academia in life was particularly nauseating in a region filled with people involved in productive agriculture who may have relatively little or no college education. It was a grotesque act of urban snobbery that raised class issues in the Valley with a propaganda violence no other campaign before it ever had.
UC Merced is a relentlessly urbanizing institution that has turned the mind of every farmer in the region away from the value of agricultural production to the value of land for speculative real estate purposes.
UC Merced's only achievement has been to be the anchor tenant for a huge speculative real estate boom that busted and put Merced and surrounding counties on the global finance map for their foreclosure rates. As the state budget diminishes, it is possible UC Merced will be the victim of the corrupt finance, insurance and real estate special interests and their bought politicians behind its founding.
A possible ending to the UC Merced saga would be the collapse of the "green" campus as the gigantic WalMart distribution center rises on the interchange on Highway 99 created for the Campus Parkway. The WalMart project will cause more local air pollution, in the worst air-pollution basin in the nation, than any project before it. The land on which the distribution center will be located is owned by Bill Lyons, Jr. Lyons got the City of Merced to annex it about the time he became secretary of the state Department of Food and Agriculture, thanks to financial contributions to former Gov. Gray Davis, and not long before UC Merced was certified a "done deal" by the state Legislature and was put on an environmental permit fast-track by the Davis administration. Land speculation among public officials became spectacular, ending finally in an apparent shakedown of a landowner incarcerated in the county jail that allegedly involved the DA and the sheriff, among other parties. However, the true extent to which public officials, directly involved in land-used decisions, benefited from UC Merced will probably never be known. It would make an excellent research project in value-free, quantitative measurement.
A worry, for those who have value-laden concerns for their community, is that UC Merced, desperate to justify its existence, will attempt to become a refuge for some of the dirtier science in the UC system. Nearby residents recognize that UC practices some of the dirtiest, most dangerous science in the world, right over the Altamont Pass in Livermore. When the Lab was established, Livermore was a cowtown, too.
Finally, the state of democracy in Merced County. The founding of UC Merced and the speculative real estate boom it stimulated in the area was the work of finance, insurance and real estate corporations, hand-in-hand with local elected officials, the only authorities that could have even challenged the process from boom to bust. This "process" of corruption passed entirely over the heads of the public-at-large. The propaganda of UC and the real estate industry, obediently broadcast by all local media, was overwhelming to most citizens who do not spend much time investigating political economic issues in their communities. In fact, today there are probably bankers in Shanghai and Berlin, examining slivers of foreclosed subprime mortgages from Merced, that may have pieced together more of the story than the former homeowner even knew about what hit him.
Because the only opposition to the project and the speculative boom came from local environmentalists, fairy shrimp lovers and the like, criticism could be easily dismissed as the usual knee-jerk reaction. In fact, the full responsibility for political economic analysis fell on people committed for 30 years to economic, social and environmental justice in the Valley. The predictive quality of their analysis was excellent. The larger problem during the boom was that UC Merced and real estate propagandists had managed entirely to erase reason from public discourse. Democracy went south with reason. Even now, in the bust, we can only think of one real challenge to a local incumbent and that challenge lost, decisively.
Oh, well. Whatever.
Links:
[1] http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts12052008.html