Bob Feldman 68

Columbia SDS Founder & 1968 Columbia Strike Leader David Gilbert's Autobiography Published By PM Press

2011-12-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

The long-awaited autobiography of U.S. and New York State political prisoner David Gilbert, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, was recently published by the West Coast-based PM Press publishing group.

Prior to his arrest and imprisonment on October 20, 1981 in Rockland County, New York, Gilbert was a founder of the Columbia University and Barnard College chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a New School SDS organizer, and a staff member of National SDS’s New York City Regional Office during the 1960s. He also co-authored National SDS’s sequel to its earlier Port Huron Statement, the Port Authority Statement , in 1967. And during the 1970s, Gilbert was an anti-imperialist activist in the Weather Underground (who would later be featured in a 21st-century documentary film about the Weather Underground that was nominated for an Academy Award).

As PM Press observes in its website description of Gilbert’s Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond book:

“David Gilbert arrived at Columbia University just in time for the explosive '60s. From the early anti-Vietnam War protests to the founding of SDS, from the Columbia Strike to the tragedy of the Townhouse, Gilbert was on the scene: as organizer, theoretician, and above all, activist. He was among the first militants who went underground to build the clandestine resistance to war and racism known as “Weathermen.”

“…And he was among the last to emerge, in captivity, after the disaster of the 1981 Brinks robbery, an attempted expropriation that resulted in four deaths and long prison terms. In this extraordinary memoir, written from the maximum-security prison where he has lived for almost thirty years, David Gilbert tells the intensely personal story of his own Long March from liberal to radical to revolutionary.

“Today a beloved and admired mentor to a new generation of activists, he assesses with rare humor, with an understanding stripped of illusions, and with uncommon candor the errors and advances, terrors and triumphs of the Sixties and beyond. It’s a battle that was far from won, but is still not lost: the struggle to build a new world, and the love that drives that effort. A cautionary tale and a how-to as well, Love and Struggle is a book as candid, as uncompromising, and as humane as its author.”

Columbia Student Supporters of Occupy Wall Street Protests Expose Columbia's Wall Street Connections in 2011

2011-10-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

(The following column by Yoni Golijov and Sumayya Kassamali was first posted on the Columbia Daily Spectator student newspaper website at Columbia University on October 13, 2011)

OCCUPY COLUMBIA

by Yoni Golijov and Sumayya Kassamali

Let’s not kid ourselves about how the beautiful space that is our university is paid for. Despite the tuition you are paying, the accumulated largesse of oligarchs of Manhattan continues to fund a large share of Columbia’s operations. The slew of named buildings and endowed chairs reflects how much Columbia University’s endowment is the combination of illicit wealth it has accumulated from Caribbean slavery in the past all the way to the financial crisis in 2008.

This larger fact is the background for many smaller connections between Columbia and Wall Street. Columbia’s endowment depends on good relations with the financial Masters of the Universe. For example, all of the five vice chairs of the board of trustees are financiers, from Goldman Sachs to real estate. Then there is the infamous Columbia Business School, where professors of finance reap enormous salaries from outside consulting gigs and positions on corporate boards of directors.

“Inside Job” did well at revealing some of the dodgy conflicts of interest surrounding the business school faculty. But it missed something that’s perhaps deeper. Many of the business school faculty would probably peddle the interests of the ultra-wealthy for free—they really believe it. Glenn Hubbard, the dean, was chair of the Republican Council of Economic Advisors, championed the first Bush tax cuts, and has repeatedly come out in favor of more and bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans as the surest route to growth.

Moving along, there are the various cross-affiliations with the law school. Most immediately, Michael Sovern, former university president and a professor at Columbia Law School, is chairman of the board of Sotheby’s, the luxury art and real estate dealer. Sotheby’s is currently locking out its workers, members of Teamsters’ Local 814, and is demanding that all new hires work temp jobs with no benefits. The lockout has been going on for 10 weeks.

Finally, there is the conflict of interest of President Bollinger’s chairmanship of the board of the New York Federal Reserve. Bollinger was appointed to fill the shoes of Denis Hughes, state president of the AFL-CIO, to “represent the public” in the Fed. But how can Bollinger, whose job involves befriending the ultra-wealthy and convincing them to write checks to the University, carry out responsibilities that could endanger that very wealth (like pushing for higher inflation or large-scale student debt relief)? This is just the tip of the iceberg, and many more connections could be discussed. One ironic consequence of Columbia’s allegiance to the wealthy is that the endowment could actually swell with an increase in high-income and capital gains taxes. The endowment is a tax-exempt foundation, and evidence suggests that donations to such things increase when taxes go up. But the more fundamental problem is the dependence of Columbia’s prestige on the goodwill of the ultra-wealthy. While public universities like CUNY/SUNY are starved of funds, Columbia’s opulence remains, courtesy of a cozy relationship with Wall Street.

Yoni Golijov is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics-philosophy. Sumayya Kassamali is a Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Columbia and Barnard Anti-War Students Oppose Return of ROTC To Columbia University Campus In 2011

2011-04-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

On their "No ROTC" blog, the anti-war students at Columbia University and Barnard College who have been opposing the undemocratically made decision of the Columbia Administration of Washington Post Company board member, Federal Reserve Bank of New York board member and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to begin training U.S. military officers for the Pentagon's endless war in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan-(and Libya) on Columbia's campus indicated why ROTC and NROTC should still be banned at Columbia University in 2011:

"The Coalition Opposed to ROTC is deeply dismayed to learn of the Senate resolution calling for the return of ROTC to Columbia, which was circulated in campus media on Monday, March 21st. Here, we challenge the primary assumptions used to justify this resolution.

1. `Whereas the Yellow Ribbon program gives veterans opportunities to study at Columbia'
Yes, and this is incredibly valuable. Yet having veterans study in class, as students, is completely different than having military officers trained on campus, where Columbia will allow Armed Forces personnel to equip uniformed students with the relevant skills necessary to lead military units– be this in weapons usage, counterinsurgency tactics, physical prowess, or other forms of training that are markedly different than the classes those who participate in the Yellow Ribbon program attend.

2. 'Whereas Columbia’s military engagement has been commended by the military'
Since when has wining plaudits from the military become something a university should be proud of? But more importantly, “military engagement” as it already exists on campus, with current and former members of the military studying in large numbers at Columbia, is completely separate from ROTC. Such students are valuable members of the Columbia community, but ROTC represents a radically different type of relationship, and embracing of the military as an institution (and not as diverse individuals associated with it).

3. 'Whereas the Task Force discovered broad support on campus for increased military engagement in 2005'
As mentioned above, the overarching phrase “military engagement” does not equate to support for ROTC. To engage with the military can mean anything from organizing classes, seminars, or lectures on the military, to expanding support for the G.I. Bill. Each instantiation of this engagement must be considered in its specificity. Moreover, it is disturbing that the resolution ignores the outcomes of the discussions on campus in 2008, when strong opposition to ROTC was recorded across campus, partly, but certainly not exclusively due to DADT.

4. 'Whereas there is an off-campus ROTC program'
Yes, there is. In fact, the Solomon Amendment prevents Columbia from obstructing participation in ROTC or military recruitment on campus, under threat of the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, so this is a non-issue. Moreover, for individuals to support an off-campus ROTC program is essentially to think that everyone should have the right to choose what to do with their lives – just as many students pursue jobs, internships and other courses off campus. It is the militarization through ROTC of Columbia, our campus and our community, that we oppose.

5. 'Whereas DADT was repealed'
Yes, it was. The previous existence of DADT is not the reason for our opposition to ROTC. Discrimination (including against transgender individuals), sexual violence, obedience to authority, and the harsh disciplining of those who speak out still characterizes the military. The military, the defensive apparatus of the state, will never be an ideal employer, no matter what changes its internal policy undergoes. A more egalitarian military will not change its fundamental role in asserting American power abroad by force and violence.

6. 'Whereas Obama, a Columbia alumnus, called on college campuses to embrace military recruitment and ROTC'
If every famous Columbia alumnus had some say over Columbia’s decisions, university governance would be in absolute disarray. If the President of this country is a guide for our decisions, this sets a dangerous precedent for the autonomy of academic institutions. And when it comes to the military alone, Obama has seen the expansion of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the escalation of indiscriminate drone attacks in Pakistan, the recent bombardment of Libya, and the incarceration and likely torture of military whistleblower Bradley Manning, among many other things. Surely the White House is not the source of inspiration for Columbia’s policy.

7. 'Whereas the Tien Special Committee in 1976 decided that the Senate will make decisions relevant to military engagement'
This point is indeed entirely accurate. We will wait and see what happens when this goes to vote in the larger Senate body on April 1st. However, it is clear this push is *not* coming from the elected Senate as a whole but a very specific group of people with a clearly biased interest in pushing this decision through as quickly as possible.

8. 'Whereas the Task Force “has conducted a broad and representative process” showing widespread support for expanding Columbia’s ties with the military and ROTC'
This final point amounts to the most egregious statement in the entire resolution put forth by the Executive Committee. Multiple faculty and students, whether proponents of, opponents to, or indifferent over ROTC, have pointed out the numerous procedural flaws in the Task Force process. Not once was information disseminated with regards to the details of what ROTC would mean. It is still not clear how the University expects to maintain the right to control curriculum, faculty appointment, and the provision of space for ROTC training, when this was the precise reason for ROTC leaving Columbia in the first place. It is still not clear whether ROTC will bring increased military recruiters to campus or to the Harlem community. It is still not clear what the details of financial aid will be for students who enroll in the program, what their commitment to service upon graduation will consist of, and what the consequences might be for a student who chooses to drop out part-way. Not once was the military publicly consulted to see whether they would even want to return to Columbia, and if so under what conditions. No one has explained why the urgency and rapid pace with which this decision is moving forward. The public hearings conducted provided no space for discussion, dialogue, or debate, and Task Force members individually refused to answer questions posed to them afterwords. The opening speech of Dean Moody-Adams at the second hearing blatantly advocated for the return of ROTC, and members of the Task Force have previous histories of taking explicit positions in support of ROTC, yet the Task Force purported to maintain some pretense of neutrality. No one was told how the hearings would be weighed in terms of the final report, and those of us who attended each session in fact recorded a small majority of speakers at each hearing voice opposition to ROTC.

As for numbers, the poll conducted by the Task Force was open to less than half of Columbia’s schools, excluding over 50% of the student population (approx. 26,400) including all non-professional Graduate Students, as well as Columbia’s approximately 3,600 faculty members (not to mention 11,000 staff). Out of the 44% of students who were even eligible (11,629), 19% participated (2,252), and 60% (1,351) recorded support for ROTC’s return to campus. This amounts to approximately 5% of Columbia students supporting ROTC’s return. It is as outrageous for the resolution to refer to this proportion as “widespread support” as to claim that the Task Force conducted a “broad and representative process”.

9. 'Be it Resolved that Columbia constructively engage the military and educate future military leaders'
The first conclusion of this resolution simply acknowledges that Columbia currently engages the military in some capacity (and educating American citizens implies educating future military and political leaders both). As noted above, constructive engagement does not necessitate the return of ROTC. In fact, as we have argued, any desire to uphold the integrity of Columbia’s education and the principles of teaching, critical debate, and committed research that characterize this institution must preclude such a partnership.

10. 'Be it further resolved that Columbia welcomes the opportunity to explore further mutually beneficial relationships with the military, including ROTC'
We are greatly concerned that this resolution not only welcomes ROTC back, but attempts to set a precedent for the further entrenchment of the U.S. military at Columbia. It is not incidental that this call is being made at a time when America is engaged in two highly unpopular, deeply violent and costly wars. Columbia should certainly continue an open conversation about what forms of relationship with the military are most beneficial to its values. However, this process must be one that is truly accessible and inclusive, something the recent work of the Task Force was not. Moreover, for whom exactly is this relationship ‘mutually beneficial’? Economically underprivileged students, who rather than accessing unconditional financial aid must sign an advanced contract and be willing to risk both their own lives and the lives of others in order to access a premier education? American students who want to participate in ROTC, and will now be saved a short commute across the city in exchange for what will necessitate a significant restructuring of standard Columbia curriculum, hiring practices, and the use of campus space? International students, many of whom have intimate experiences of or connections to the destruction wrought by the U.S. military around the world in the past century, and others who are grateful to have left countries where the violence of military rule permeates day-to-day life? We are left to wonder.

11. 'Be it further resolved that Provost will maintain control over questions of academic credit, appointment, governance, etc. and nothing will contravene the University’s current policies'
In fact, the U.S. law that governs the ROTC program, most recently updated in February, 2010 states otherwise. In the general military law, part 3, chapter 103, which is the ROTC portion, under section 2012 on establishment of ROTC programs, Part B reads: “No unit may be established or maintained at an institution unless (1) the senior commissioned officer of the armed force concerned who is assigned to the program at that institution is given the academic rank of professor. (2) The institution fulfills the terms of its agreement with the secretary of the military department concerned, and (3) the institution adopts as part of its curriculum a four-year course in military instruction or a two-year course of advanced training of military instruction or both, which the secretary of the military department concerned prescribes and conducts” [1]. If this is the case and Columbia invites ROTC to its campus, the university must adhere to these laws should ROTC decide to enforce them.

12. 'Be it further resolved that any further relationships with the Army will be subject to periodic review'
There is no doubt that such periodic review is important. However, we categorically and unequivocally reject this entire resolution, both flawed and politically biased as it is, and will continue to voice our opposition to the reintroduction of ROTC at Columbia as this highly undemocratic process unfolds before us.'

[1]. 10 U.S.C. § 2102 : US Code – Section 2102: Establishment

ROTC Must Still Be Banned At Columbia University In 2011: Excerpt from a Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Interview

2011-04-12T10:51:00.001-07:00

In a recent interview with a journalism student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, I indicated why the Columbia University Administration should not bring ROTC or NROTC back to Columbia University's campus in 2011:

What objections, if any, do you have regarding the return of the ROTC today?

Bob Feldman [BF]:The return of a ROTC program to Columbia’s campus would represent a decision by the Columbia Administration to, on an institutional level, contribute to the Pentagon’s military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011. If you think it’s moral for the U.S. government to continue waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it probably would seem o.k. morally to you for Columbia University to start training U.S. military officers on its campus.

But what if, like me, you think that it’s immoral for the U.S. government to continue waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Then wouldn’t it also be then immoral for Columbia University to contribute to prolonging this U.S. military intervention by training U.S. military officers who will be participating in this unjust and endless war?

In recent years, for example, 80 percent of all students who were trained on Cornell University’s campus by that Ivy League School’s ROTC program have served as U.S. military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, if you check out the Wikipedia entry for “Reserve Officers Training Corps,” it seems to indicate that in recent years U.S. university ROTC programs have been producing 39 percent of all active-duty officers for the Pentagon—20 percent of all active duty U.S. Navy officers, 41 percent of all officers for the U.S. Air Force which has dropped bombs that kill civilians on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and 56 percent of all active duty U.S. Army officers (many of whom have—after being trained by U.S. universities—been involved in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example).

Or to put my objections another way. Imagine that you were a German student at a German university in late 1940 and you were examining the ways that German universities were contributing to the German war effort and occupation in Poland and France, for example. One way might be that science professors at German universities were doing research for the German Ministry of Defense. And another way might be that German universities were training some of their students to serve as German military officers in the German war machine that bombed and occupied Poland, France and other countries.

And imagine that you had discovered in 1940 that thousands of civilians had been killed in Poland and elsewhere by the same German military that the science professors at the German university you attended were doing research for; and that the German university you attended was training some of its students to be military officers for the German military? Wouldn’t you then feel that you had an internationalist moral and humanitarian obligation to do all that you could to stop the German university that you attended from training officers for the German military on your campus?

In addition, even if you don’t object to what’s been done overseas to foreign civilians and to the foreign soldiers, foreign insurgents and U.S. soldiers who have been casualties of the endless Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan military intervention by the U.S. government, an objection to the return of ROTC can be made on the philosophical basis that U.S. universities should be in the business of the pursuit of knowledge and the promotion of humanism and pacifism; and not be involved in training its students in ROTC courses like “the art of war” and the killing of the people that the U.S. government decides is now “the enemy.”

Before the DADT law was in place, what were the guidelines barring ROTC from being a campus activity: in other words, what do you see was the reason for its absence in the 1970s and 1980s?

BF:The official grounds for barring ROTC from being a campus activity before the DADT by most of the Ivy League administrations and their faculty committees may sometimes have been that the ROTC courses may not have conformed to the academic course accreditation criteria required by some of these Ivy League schools. But I think the real reason for ROTC’s absence in the 1970s and 1980s from places like Columbia was because anti-militarist student and faculty sentiment was still high, due to the campus political consciousness that had developed during the Vietnam War Era. And administrators at places like Columbia probably felt it made no political sense to disturb the relative campus calm of the post-1973 era by provoking its by then generally politically passive anti-war student body and politically passive anti-war professors into a potential new wave of campus protest--comparable to what happened in the 1960s—by trying to push ROTC back onto their campuses.

What do you think would happen if the ROTC was allowed to return to campus—at Columbia and elsewhere?

BF: Both the Pentagon and the U.S. corporate media—including the New York Times—would probably highlight it as an historical reversal of one of the legacies of the Vietnam War Era and the 1968 Columbia Anti-War Student Strike fall-out and the Sixties Anti-War Movement. And it would probably be utilized by the U.S. government as evidence that—under the Democratic Obama Administration—the alienation of U.S. college students from the U.S. military has decreased and that current U.S. college students—even at a bastion of anti-war sentiment historically like Columbia and Barnard—now have less objection to the continued endless U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan than did U.S. college students during the Republican Bush Administration.

The folks on the U.S. right-wing who don’t see anything morally questionable about the militarism of U.S. foreign policy will probably also feel more emboldened about bringing their pro-militarist agenda onto Columbia’s campus and re-militarizing Columbia to the point where they would eventually demand that the ban on secret military research on Columbia’s campus also be lifted.

And I suspect that some more juicy, lucrative Department of Defense research contracts would tend to get thrown Columbia’s way much more, if ROTC were now allowed to return to Columbia’s campus. So Columbia might once again, eventually, become “The MIT of West Harlem”—in terms of the degree to which it once again started to become dependent on Pentagon contracts for nearly half its budget, like it was in the mid-1960s.

Of course, once students wearing ROTC uniforms started marching around on campus and holding military-oriented ceremonies again on Columbia’s campus, it’s also possible that eventually—if the endless U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan isn’t ended or if an additional U.S. military intervention in Iran, North Korea or Venezuela is eventually started over the next few years—some anti-war students at Barnard College and Columbia College might mobilize eventually in larger numbers to again demand that Columbia stop training U.S. military officers for the U.S. power elite’s endless wars abroad.

What is your perspective on the acceptance, with faculty, alumni and current students?

BF: If you check out the chapter, titled “The Military Ascendancy,” in former Columbia University Professor C. Wright Mills’ book The Power Elite, J.W. Fulbright’s The Pentagon Propaganda Machine book or the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon from the 1970s—and also Al Jazeera TV’s recent documentary on YouTube on the way the Pentagon uses Hollywood to promote support for U.S. military adventurism around the globe—you’ll see that since World War II there’s always been a big public relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. military-industrial-university-media complex to get people in the USA to feel that it’s “unpatriotic” to be opposed to the militarization of U.S. society and a U.S. foreign policy that is militaristic or to call for huge cuts in the Pentagon’s defense budget. And U.S. supporters of a pacifist U.S. foreign policy and the demilitarization of U.S. society and of U.S. universities like Columbia generally don’t get much mass media TV exposure—except when anti-war and anti-racist students occupy buildings in large numbers at places like Columbia in 1968 or when anti-war activists—like the Chicago 8—went on trial in Chicago during the 1969-1970 academic year.

So it wouldn’t be unexpected if current Barnard College, Columbia College students and faculty—as well as current Columbia Journalism School students and faculty—end up accepting passively the return of ROTC to places like Columbia in 2011. Especially if it’s marketed as “a way to influence the U.S. military in a more humanitarian direction”; or as something that only students and professors who are “soft on terrorism” or “stuck in a 1960s mentality,” or “politically naïve pacifists” would have moral objections about.

On the other hand it could be that the now-imprisoned Private Manning’s morally courageous de-classification of those Wikileaks cables and documents have revealed to enough people on campuses like Columbia that what the U.S. military is doing around the world contradicts the humanistic values and democratic moral values that most students and professors and workers at Columbia and Barnard have, historically, been brought up to adhere to. And that, therefore, the U.S. military still does not belong on Columbia University’s campus in 2011.

Mark Rudd Opposed ROTC In 2009 `Toward Freedom' Interview

2011-04-07T06:40:00.000-07:00

Mark Rudd was the chairman of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] at the time of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt; and Rudd’s autobiography, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen was finally published in March 2009.

In a 2009 email interview for the Toward Freedom anti-war website, Rudd responded to some questions about how U.S. pacifists might consider responding to the role U.S. universities play in the current historical era of “permanent war abroad and economic depression at home” and about his new book. And he also indicated, at that time, that he still opposed the training of U.S. military officers on U.S. university campuses.

(1) In 2009, some U.S. pacifists seem to regard elite universities like Columbia as institutions that have, both historically and currently, opposed war and opposed racism—since they hire both anti-war and African-American professors and administrators, implement affirmative action hiring programs, set up “peace studies” and “African-American studies” departments, steer foundation grants and scholarship money in the direction of students from historically oppressed communities and to local community groups, and provide free or low-rent meeting room space for anti-war students and off-campus pacifist groups.

Yet in the preface to your book, you write that between 1965 and 1968 you were “a member of SDS at Columbia University” and “made as much noise and trouble as possible to protest the university’s pro-war and racist policies.” In what ways were Columbia University’s policies “pro-war and racist” in 1968 and in what ways are the policies of Columbia University and other elite U.S. universities “pro-war and racist” in 2009?

Mark Rudd [MR]: The specific demands we raised leading up to the spring of 1968--training and recruitment of military officers for the war in Vietnam, weapons research for the war, the building of a gym in public park land--were only the tip of the iceberg of Columbia's policies. Within months of the strike, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) produced a book entitled "Who Rules Columbia," in which they detailed the military, State Dept., and CIA contracts and connections with the School of International Affairs, the various geographical "area studies," such as the East Asia Institute, as well as the revolving door between Columbia and the government; also Columbia's expansion into the surrounding community at the expense of non-white residents. Most of these connections and policies are still in place; almost all major research universities are still major war contractors. The point is that student activists have their work cut out for them to research and expose what's correctly called the military-industrial-academic complex.

(2) In chapter 1 of your book, titled “A Good German,” you recall that when you first met the then-chairman of Columbia’s Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) anti-war student group--current U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert—in early 1966, Gilbert mentioned that in May 1965 his group had “held an antiwar protest at the Naval ROTC graduation ceremony” at Columbia. And later in the “A Good German” chapter you mention that in March 1967 you had “taken part in a sit-in at a Naval ROTC class” at Columbia.

Why did you oppose Naval ROTC at Columbia in the 1960s? And do you think U.S. pacifists should consider opposing ROTC on U.S. university campuses in 2009?

MR: The issue is fundamentally moral. Is the training of people to wage war against other countries, carrying out a criminally aggressive military policy, appropriate in an institution that pretends to seek the truth? Our answer to this question was NO, because we believed in the necessity to oppose U.S. violence as a moral value. Remember, too, that the time we lived in was essentially post-World War II, and the problem of values in society was still being debated in the aftermath of Nazism. I have no doubt that contemporary students will be taking this up again in the near future.

(3) In chapter 2 of your book, you mention that anti-war students at Columbia protested against recruitment on campus by external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines. Why did you think that it was morally wrong for Columbia University to allow external organizations like the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus in 1967? And do you think U.S. pacifists in 2009 should also protest against U.S. universities that allow the CIA and the U.S. Marines to recruit on campus while the Pentagon’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan continues?

MR: Same response as #2 above. Whether recruitment is "external" (e.g., Marine recruiters) or "internal" (Military Science Dept. training future naval officers), it amounts to the same thing. The resources of the university are being used to help wage war.

( 4) In chapter 3 of your book, titled “Action Faction,” you write that on March 27, 1968 “SDS had fifteen hundred names on a petition calling for the severing of “ Columbia University’s “ties with the Pentagon think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA);” and “IDA…became the shorthand symbol for Columbia’s huge network of complicity with the war.”

In 2009, IDA still exists. Do you think that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that IDA be finally shut down by the Democratic Obama Administration and that U.S. pacifists should consider demanding that U.S. universities like Columbia, MIT and Harvard stop performing war research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] in 2009?

MR: I believe that the entire US military budget should be cut back and the money used for social needs both in this country and around the world. Security would be much better served by the development of true international law, not more nuclear weapons. If that doesn't happen in the 21st century, we're doomed. All war research should immediately stop everywhere and the money be put into peace, diplomacy, law, and sustainable energy development. To do less now is not only suicidal, it's downright dumb.

(5) In your book, you mention that you and Abbie Hoffman were both arrested at a November 1967 anti-war protest in Midtown Manhattan against the Foreign Policy Association giving an award to then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

April 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Abbie’s death. How would you characterize the role that Abbie Hoffman played in U.S. anti-war movement history and his historical relationship to U.S. pacifists and non-violent anti-war activists like Dave Dellinger?

MR: Abbie was essentially a comedian and an organizer. He was not at all violent; he always encouraged mass organizing, though often in the form of provocative guerilla theater, like the Yippies nominating a pig for president in 1968. I forget how he and Dave Dellinger got along in Chicago, both in 1968 and during the conspiracy trial the next year. My guess is that they respected each other. Perhaps you know more specifics.

(6) Speaking of Abbie Hoffman, how would you respond to Professor Jonah Raskin’s assertion in his review of your book which was posted on The Rag Blog that “like Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd wasn’t suited for the underground life—he needed attention, and attention is, of course, the last thing that any fugitive wants;” and “Underground suggests, implies, and shows that Rudd is up there, along with Abbie, near the top of the list of 1960s radicals who wanted attention, and who received far more attention than they needed…It undid Abbie, and it also helped to undo Rudd.”?

MR: I wonder if Jonah actually read my book.

(7) Why do you think the right-wing media monitoring pressure group” Accuracy In Media” [A.I.M.] apparently attempted to pressure Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing firm to not promote your book, according to the” Accuracy In Media” web site?

MR: Just another way for the far right to try get at Obama, but it's so indirect that it makes zero sense to anybody else. There was a tiny connection between Obama and Bill Ayers, but that fact gained no votes for John McCain. These people are so stupid that they're still pursuing a tactic that's already failed. I find that a rather comforting fact.

(8) Do you think it’s likely that Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board will decide to give you a Pulitzer Prize for writing Underground—after Columbia University’s current president--a current board member of the Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate named Lee Bollinger—reads what you’ve written about Columbia University?

MR: I'm a shoe-in.

Fordham Law School Forum On Columbia University West Harlem/Manhattanville Construction Project: Weds. March 30, 2011

2011-03-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Battle for Harlem. Gentrification, eminent domain, & the historic neighborhood's struggle with Columbia University

Date(s): 03.30.11 | Wednesday
Time: 4:30-6pm
Location: Room 203

Produced by Stein Scholars; co-sponsored by Housing Advocacy Project; all law school community invited.
Gentrification, eminent domain, & the historic neighborhood's struggle with Columbia University.
FLS Professor Brian Glick will moderate a discussion with panelists:
Larry English, Chair of Community Board 9 (West Harlem);
Tom DeMott, Harlem resident, Coalition to Preserve Community member;
Ramon Diaz, business owner, Floridita Restaurant;
Peter Marcuse, planner & lawyer, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning @ Columbia.

The residents of West Harlem have long fought a battle for community preservation and affordable housing. Columbia University’s plan to expand its campus gradually over the next 25 years involves the use of eminent domain. Parts of Manhattanville are rezoned for mixed use to encourage investment by expanding the campus and providing new development, which may economically revitalize the area. Some businesses, such as Floridita Restaurant, have been relocated and community members in West Harlem fear the plan poses a threat to the gentrification of residents and other businesses. The Battle for Harlem event presented by the Stein Public Interest Program and co-sponsored by the Housing Advocacy Project will bring all sides of the debate, such as attorney, residents of Harlem, board members and more, together to discuss concerns and a way forward.

Contact: Andrew Chapin
Telephone: 212-636-7849
Email: achapin@law.fordham.edu

Community Protest Against Columbia University's Kravis Business School Construction Project: March 8, 2011

2011-03-07T06:42:00.000-08:00

WHERE ARE THE JOBS?

1,500 JOBS ARE GONE BECAUSE OF THE COLUMBIA EXPANSION *

COLUMBIA HAS PROMISED 7,000 JOBS
JOIN OUR PROTEST TO DEMAND THOSE JOBS!

* EXAMPLE: COLUMBIA HAS RELOCATED FLORIDITA TO A BUILDING IT OWNS THAT IS FULL OF ASBESTOS AND FLORIDITA'S 40 JOBS ARE UNDER THREAT.

COME DEMONSTRATE WITH US TO DEMAND COLUMBIA GIVE US NUMBERS, NOT WINDOWDRESSING ABOUT JOBS AND JOB TRAINING NOW THAT CONSTRUCTION HAS BEGUN.

COME SUPPORT FLORIDITA’S WORKERS AND ITS LAWSUIT AGAINST THE UNIVERSITY'S EVICTIION PROCESS.

PROTEST AT: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY “EMPLOYMENT OFFICE”
Broadway just below 125 St., east side of the Street
Tuesday, March 8th 4:00---6:00 P.M

Students Protest Against Columbia University's Landgrabbing Expansion Policies In 21st-Century

2011-02-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

In the 21st century, some students at Columbia University and Barnard College have contined to protest against the institutionally racist campus expansion policies of the tax-exempt, "non-profit" Columbia University "Real Estate Development Corporation of West Harlem--as indicated, for example, by the following video from 2007

Community Protest Against Columbia University's Kravis School Construction Project: December 7, 2010

2010-12-05T07:03:00.000-08:00

THIS IS THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF THE CITY COUNCIL‘S AND BOROUGH PRESIDENT STRINGER’S APPROVAL OF COLUMBIA’S EVICTION PLAN.

Come out and support our protest this Tuesday, Dec. 7th, 3:30 – 5:30PM, against Columbia’s failure to address issues it promised to resolve when the Borough President and City Council sold out the Harlem community.

Where are the jobs? Where is the job training promised by Columbia and the West Harlem Local Development Corp so Harlemites in Boards 9, 10, 11 and 12 could work from the very beginning?

Why does Columbia still insist that residents facing eminent domain must be out of the expansion area by 2018? Why does Columbia not leave the last two property owners alone and let them, and other businesses who still have leases, stay under the 197A philosophy of sharing the community? (The Sprayregens and the Singhs are still fighting against eminent domain, and we still expect that CB 9 would be supporting them according to the CB 9 position against eminent domain, but check out the CB 9 Chair’s statements below.)

Why do the politicians, and the West Harlem Environmental Action group, support Columbia’s biohazard lab #3 business park – spurred on by military defense contracts - in our residential community? Here is how Community Board 9 is approaching this situation – two quotes from Chairperson Larry English in the Columbia Spectator :

“In West Harlem right now and in Harlem in general, there is not a vibrant, entrepreneurial, economic class, and that is crucial to everyone living in West Harlem,” English said in an interview in October.

“Obviously, the last four years caused a lot of tension between the Columbia and the community, but as a community board, we’ve ruled that we’re turning the page. We don’t want to do anything that’s gonna inhibit the project.”

Somehow the whole notion of the 197-a plan, 10 years in the making, is absent from CB 9 Chair Larry English’s language and apparently from his scope of vision. It is a radical shift on the part of CB9; it goes right along with the CU concept of “all or nothing” that CU has pushed relentlessly. All along this dispute with Columbia has been about their illegal conflict of interest regarding how they used the threat of eminent domain as a scare tactic that worked.

A CPC member reacted to English’s comments as follows:

“This guy is really a politician in the making – he’s just changed the language of everything and has conveniently forgotten all of the key points CB9 was defending. He’s dropped the validity of 197-a plan which was ALWAYS what the Community had as an organized response to the real deficiencies in how the neighborhood is being unfairly treated while Columbia grabs land on the cheap.”

COME OUT AND STAND UP FOR THE COMMUNITY PRINCIPLES OUTLINED IN THE 197 A PLAN OF SENSIBLE DEVELOPMENT.

COME OUT AND DEMAND REAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE JOBS COLUMBIA HAS PROVIDED TO THOSE WHO HAVE COME TO ITS “EMPLOYMENT CENTER” OVER THE LAST FIVE OR MORE YEARS.

NO DISPLACEMENT, NO BIOHAZARD LEVEL #3 LABS, NO EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE. COLUMBIA HAS SAID IT WILL DISPLACE 5,000 PEOPLE IN A TEN BLOCK RADIUS OF ITS EXPANSION AREA. YEAH, CHAIRMAN ENGLISH, WE DO WANT TO “INHIBIT” THAT… AND THE USE OF EMINENT DOMAIN, AND LAB #3’S…

YO COLUMBIA, GIVE UP THE INFO ON THE CENTER AND TELL US, WHERE ARE THE JOBS? SEE FLYERS BELOW IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH AND IF YOU CAN HELP DISTRIBUTE FLYERS, Thanks from the CPC.
----------------------------------------------------------
COALITION TO PRESERVE COMMUNITY -
United for an Open and Strong Community
POST OFFICE BOX 50 - Manhattanville Station
365 West 125th Street
NEW York City, New York 10027

WHERE ARE THE JOBS?

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY EXPANSION PLAN WAS APPROVED BECAUSE IT WOULD PROVIDE JOBS. WHERE ARE THEY?

COLUMBIA PROMISED JOB TRAINING AND 7,000 JOBS. CONSTRUCTION HAS BEGUN. WHAT TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT HAS GONE TO THE COMMUNITY?

JOIN US IN A DEMONSTRATION TO DEMAND NUMBERS, NOT WINDOWDRESSING.

PLACE: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY “EMPLOYMENT OFFICE”
Broadway just below 125 St., east side of the Street
Tuesday, December 7th 3:30 – 5:30 P.M.

And hey Columbia: drop your eminent domain abuse* & no biohazard #3 labs in residential Manhattan
* Let businesses and residents stay - support the 197A
NO DISPLACEMENT - AND REAL EMPLOYMENT
For additional information contact Coalition to Preserve Community: write: CPC, PO Box 50, Manhattanville Station, NY, NY 10027. Visit our website: www.stopcolumbia.org ESPANOL – OTRO LADO
----------------------------------------------------------
COALITION TO PRESERVE COMMUNITY -
United for an Open and Strong Community
POST OFFICE BOX 50 - Manhattanville Station
365 West 125th Street
NEW York City, New York 10027

Community Resistance to Columbia University's "Kravis Business School Building" Construction Project In West Harlem Continues: November 2010 Update

2010-11-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

As the text of a recent email from the West Harlem-based Coalition to Preserve Community group of neighborhood activists indicates, community resistance to the Columbia University's 2010 landgrabbing and Kravis business school building/campus expansion project in West Harlem apparently still continues:

"CPC Meeting 11/22, Eminent Domain, evictions & rats & NO JOBS

TO CPC MEMBERS AND OTHERS INTERESTED: Nov. 18, 2010
The next cpc meeting will be this Monday, nov. 22, at 6:30pm at St. Mary’s church. (see flyer below for details).
Our next protest against Columbia’s deceit and eviction plan will be on Dec. 7, starting at 3:30pm – details to follow.
The Sprayregens and the Singhs are still fighting for their rights.
Columbia is after them, and after us. Join in and help us resist this elitist and racist gentrification process.
And the rats are already invading the buildings surrounding the construction site, dining inside garbage bags 8 at a time, and eating at car engine hoses for dessert.
For more info, see flyer below.
Also below is a letter cpc wrote to the chair of community board 9,larry english, asking for jobs information from columbia that we have been requesting for five years. Mr. English has suggested that a “partnership” with columbia is the way to go.
We cite columbia’s “partnership” at harlem hospital as a good reason to talk about the facts of the eviction plan and not soft soap The bleeding. So where are the jobs? So why not leave the last two property owners alone? So why have bio-hazard labs here?

---------------------------------------------------------
COALITION TO PRESERVE COMMUNITY -
United for an Open and Strong Community
POST OFFICE BOX 50 - Manhattanville Station
365 West 125th Street
NEW York City, New York 10027
---------------------------------------------------------

Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC) meeting – Monday, November 22,
6:30pm
St. Mary’s Church, 521 West 126th St. (bet. Broadway and Amsterdam)
Do you need a job? We had about 2,000 jobs in Manhattanville before Columbia’s expansion began. The University promised 7,000 jobs.
Where are they?
Would you like to stay in your apartment? Will you loose it because of eminent domain, gentrification or the privatization of public housing? STAND UP FOR YOUR HOME!
*Columbia continues to deregulate apartments in the buildings it owns. Some 7,000 have been lost.
*3333 Broadway was taken off the Mitchell-Lama program.
Hundreds have already been displaced and more than a thousand are threatened with the loss of their subsidies.
*Public Housing is under attack as privatization becomes ever more real.
Join us (1) on Nov. 22 to discuss what’s happening and (2) on December 7th for a jobs protest against Columbia.

Hon. Larry English
Chair
Community Board 9 – Manhattan Nov. 15, 2010
Dear Mr. English:
Since 2004, Columbia University has emphasized the employment opportunities that will result from its proposed Manhattanville expansion for Harlem residents and others. The figure of 7,000 jobs has frequently been mentioned in public relations statements.

Ever since Columbia opened an employment center on Broadway and 124th
Street, not long after President Lee Bollinger made Columbia’s initial presentation at the Board, CB 9 members and community residents have requested basic information about the effectiveness of this center – that is, some hard quarterly numbers on who is getting the jobs that the center offers as well as job training that Bollinger suggested was in the cards. We have lost more than 2,000 jobs in the businesses and
in the area surrounding the expansion site since Columbia started its quest to re-zone West Harlem and end the employment development concepts we outlined in the CB 9 197A community plan.

Former Chair Jordi Reyes-Montblanc advised members of the Coalition to Preserve Community that he had tried for years to follow up on our requests for job statistics from this center. He said that he constantly got the run-around every time he raised the issue.

We were disheartened to read your statement in the Columbia Spectator that the entrepreneurial spirit in Harlem is lagging, and your suggestion that building a partnership with Columbia is the pragmatic way to proceed.

We intend to mount a campaign in early December to focus on Columbia’s job promises and we would like to know what the facts are. The employment center has been operating for years and they consistently refuse to disclose how many community residents were able to obtain jobs there, or any other basic statistical information about who has gotten a job as a result of coming to the center.

The Community Board itself has requested this information. The Coalition to Preserve
Community has requested this information. In the interests of honest community advocacy and cooperation, we are repeating our oft made request that the Board once again demand this information which should be a matter of public record and should be
made available forthwith.

Please let us know what the results are. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Tom Kappner Tom DeMott Nellie Bailey Luis Tejada
For the Coalition to Preserve Community Action Committee
cc. Perkins"

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Conclusion

2010-10-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

Like George W. Bush [II]’s father and grandfather, Henry Kravis’s father—a Tulsa, Oklahoma petroleum engineer and oil industry investor named Ray Kravis—was also extremely interested in Republican Party national politics (although he had worked for President Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy in the 1940s by investing Kennedy Dynasty money in southwestern oil properties). By the 1970s, Henry Kravis’s father regularly gave about $40,000 a year to the Republican Party’s national and senatorial committees.

In the 1970s, Henry Kravis’s father was also worth about $50 million [in 1970s money]. And in the 1970s, the Tulsa businessman also “began launching the next generation, working his network of New York cronies to position his son for great things to come,” according to The Money Machine.

Henry Kravis’s father had gained entry into the U.S. Establishment after he discovered a tax loophole which enabled investors in oil properties to be taxed at a greatly reduced rate; and, in addition to working for President Kennedy’s father, Ray Kravis also became friendly with Gustav Levy, the then-senior partner of Goldman Sachs & Co. and Co. and with Cy Lewis, a Bear Stearns senior partner. Coincidentally, after Henry Kravis secured his MBA from Columbia University’s Business School in 1969, his father’s friend, Cy Lewis of Bear Stearns, offered him a high-paying job at Bear Stearns.

When an older Bear Stearns partner named Jerry Kohlberg decided that money could be made quicker if he founded his own partnership to specialize in leveraged buy-outs [LBOs], Henry Kravis and his cousin George Roberts (who was also then a Bear Stearns partner) decided to become Kohlberg’s partners in the 1976-founded Kohlberg-Kravis-Robersts [KKR] firm. By the late 1980s, however, Jerry Kohlberg decided he wanted to leave the firm, and did so, although it still bears the Kohlberg name.

Although Henry Kravis and his cousin George Roberts each increased their individual personal wealth too over $325 million by the late 1980s as a result of KKR’s 1980s business activity, some critics of KKR held the firm responsible for breaking up U.S. companies unwisely, destroying thousands of jobs and loading up companies with irrational amounts of debt. By 1989, other critics were warning that “because Kravis and other takeover artists typically finance their deals with enormous amounts of debts…the highly leveraged financial structure of the corporations…may come crashing down at the next recession with dire consequences…for the economy at large,” according to 1989 Current Biography Yearbook. And James Ledbetter characterized Kravis in the Village Voice’s May 26, 1992 issue as “the takeover magician whose greed-driven mergers and acquisitions helped wreck the U.S. economy in the 1980s (a point that even Fortune magazine conceded in a recent issue).”

Kravis’s 1980s business activity was also criticized on ethical grounds by at least one business journalist. In her The Money Machine book, for example, Sarah Bartlett wrote:

“…Was it good public policy for [Oregon Investment Council Member] Roger Meier to be able to commit several hundred million dollars of other people’s money to KKR and then several months later move into a position where he was personally enriched by the firm?...Did it make sense for KKR to be the largest source of financial support to state treasurers or comptrollers who, after their election, were in a position to assign to KKR state employees’ money?

Ironically, despite his enormous wealth, Kravis’s first marriage apparently fell apart in the late 1970s, after he fathered three children, because “he was so preoccupied with work that he barely noticed his wife’s growing frustration” and “some times the only time she would see Henry was when he would come staggering into their bedroom very drunk, and collapse fully-clothed onto the bed” and his wife “found out that Henry was fooling around with a barmaid at a downtown restaurant,” according to Sarah Bartlett’s The Money Machine.

After divorcing his first wife, Kravis began seeing a dress designer named Carolyne Roehm, whom he married in 1985. In the early 1990s, Kravis and his second wife shared a $5.5 million duplex apartment in Manhattan, a farmhouse in Sharon, Ct., a ski house in Colorado and a home on Long Island. In addition, in the early 1990s Kravis also owned a personal jet, a personal helicopter and a $14 million painting, besides also being a member of many exclusive country clubs.

[But after divorcing his second wife in 1993, Kravis then married a politically conservative Canadian policy wonk named Marie Josee Drouin-Kravis, who currently sits on the executive committee of the right-wing Hudson Institute think-tank’s board of trustees and on the corporate board of Ford Motor Company. In addition, the wife of the billionaire who's paying for the new business school building on Columbia University's new campus construction project in West Harlem--in which Columbia hopes to train more Wall Street executives--is also currently the president of the Museum of Modern Art.].

(end of article)

(Downtown, 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 4

2010-10-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

“…When his [Meier’s] dual role was revealed in the local newspapers many Oregonians were outraged.

“It was, and still is, a violation in Oregon for anyone to use his or her public position for private gain.”

After the outrage over his accepting board slots on newly-acquired KKR subsidiary companies—following the approval of the utilization of Oregon public pension funds to finance KKR’s acquisition of these same companies—forced him to resign his Oregon Investment Council membership post, “Meier became an investor in certain companies in KKR’s portfolio” and “was also offered stock in one KKR company at a price that led one to wonder whether it was a sweetheart deal,” according to The Money Machine. He was sold 3,000 shares of U.S. Natural Resources [USNR] by KKR in the Fall of 1986 at $100 a share and by the early 1990s a share in USNR was worth $400, giving Meier a profit on paper of around $900,000 on his 1986 stock purchase from KKR.

When Oregon State Treasurer Bill Rutherford replaced KKR subsidiary director Meier on the Oregon Investment Council, KKR continued to treat kindly an Oregon public official with the power to let KKR use Oregon public funds to serve KKR’s special interests. It invited Rutherford to a KKR sponsored conference in New York City and paid over $800 of the Oregon public official’s conference expenses. Three weeks after this conference, the Oregon Investment Council voted to commit $600 million more of Oregon’s state funds to finance more KKR acquisitions.

To insure that Oregon’s public pension funds continued to be used in support of KKR’s special private interests, KKR intervened in Oregon politics in other ways during the 1980s. It contributed $6,000 to Rutherford’s 1984 campaign for Oregon State Treasurer when he ran against a candidate who opposed investing state funds in KKR’s deal-making operation. Another $20,000 was contributed to Oregon State Treasurer Rutherford’s 1984 campaign by three KKR subsidiaries: Daw Forest Products, U.S. Natural Resources [USNR] and PacTrust, making Kravis’s KKR firm “the largest contributor to Rutherford’s campaign by far,” according to The Money Machine. Not surprisingly, the KKR-sponsored Rutherford then won the 1984 election for Oregon State Treasurer.

Henry Kravis’s KKR—and his cousin and KKR partner, George Roberts—also used their financial power to help influence the outcome of the 1986 election for Oregon’s governor, who was the public official responsible for appointing members of the Oregon Investment Council. KKR gave the Democratic candidate for Oregon governor, Neil Goldschmidt, $6,000 for his primary campaign and $10,000 for his general election campaign. KKR also gave his Republican opponent in the general election, Norma Paulus, $35,000 in campaign contributions through individual donations from George Roberts or KKR subsidiary company donations.

Kravis’s firm also attempted to use its financial clout to influence the 1986 election in New York State for state comptroller, where then-State Comptroller Edward Regan had the sole authority to invest New York’s public pension funds. KKR contributed $50,000 to New York State Comptroller Regan’s re-election campaign chest in 1985 and 1986, making KKR the second-largest contributor to Regan’s campaign. KKR also gave then-New York State Comptroller a $15,000 post-election campaign contribution. Coincidentally, in 1986 then-New York State Comptroller Regan provided KKR with $55 million in public pension fund money for its acquisition program and in 1987 Regan gave KKR another $370 million in public funds for more KKR deal-making activity.

After some economists began to argue that KKR’s way of doing business was harmful to the U.S. economy, some political pressure to limit the use of KKR’s leveraged-buy-out [LBO] method of taking-over U.S. corporations began to develop in the U.S. Congress. To counter this political pressure, KKR hired five different lobbying firms in Washington to prevent passage of legislation that might reduce merger or LBO activity and limit the tax benefits of such activity.

In addition, KKR partners Roberts and Kravis began to pump more of their surplus profits into funding other nationally-known politicians, in addition to George Bush I. After 1987, KKR partner George Roberts made campaign contributions to then-members of the Senate Finance Committee such as Lloyd Bentsen, John Danforth, Robert Dole and Bill Bradley; and he also gave $100,000 in 1988 to Team 100, which was the Republican National Committee’s group of largest contributors. The Senate Finance Committee has jurisdiction over tax issues affecting KKR and 9 of the 20 senators on the committee received campaign contributions from either Henry Kravis, George Kravis or Henry Kravis’s second wife during the late 1980s. The Money Machine reported that Henry Kravis “gave over $80,000 to an assortment of senators, congressmen, Regular PACs and the GOP’s national committee” in 1987; and he gave another $100,000 to the Republican National Committee’s Team 100 in 1988, like his cousin and KKR partner George Roberts had done.

(end of part 4)

(Downtown 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 3

2010-10-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

As long ago as the late 1980s, Henry Kravis’s KKR controlled one of the largest industrial empires in the world. As The Money Machine by Sarah Bartlett noted, “Not even J.P. Morgan in his heyday tried to amass an industrial empire on the scale of KKR’s.”

To acquire this economic empire between its founding in 1976 and 1989, the KKR investment banking partnership raised $62 billion from a variety of investor sources. Among the U.S. corporations gobbled up by Kravis’s KKR prior to its purchase of New York magazine in the early 1990s (in addition to Storer Broadcasting and Golden West Broadcasters) were the following: RJR Nabisco; Duracell; Stop & Shop; Safeway; Beatrice Foods; Owens-Illinois; Jim Walter; Union Texas Petroleum and Amstar.

A large proportion of the funds that KKR utilized after 1980 to acquire its privately-controlled economic empire came from the public funds of various state governments which were controlled by U.S. public officials, as well as from “nonprofit” institutional investors in KKR’s acquisition deals (like Harvard, Yale and the Salvation Army), from banks and from the sale of high-risk “junk-bonds.” In 1981, for example, KKR acquired the Fred Meyers company for $420 million “with a large slug of public pension money, courtesy of the State of Oregon,” according to The Money Machine. By 1986, KKR was using public money provided by the state pension funds of Washington, Oregon, New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, Michigan, Minnesota and Utah to secure the capital required to increase the size of its economic empire by additional “leveraged buy-outs.” One year later, public pension funds from the same 11 states provided 53 percent of the $5.6 billion which KKR used to take private control of RJR Nabisco, according to The Money Machine. The same book also noted that “Over the years…KKR and the state funds came to be more like partners.”

In the course of acquiring its economic empire during the 1980s, KKR executives made millions of dollars in super-profits in a variety of ways:

1. After going heavily into debt to acquire a company that was built up by other people’s labor, KKR usually laid off a significant number of employees of the acquired company and sold off portions of the company;

2. KKR charged an exorbitant management fee to those nonprofit institutions and state government pension funds who invested in its deal-making funds; and

3. KKR pocketed huge acquisition transaction fees. From its 1986 acquisition of Beatrice Food Companies, for example, “KKR earned $45 million in management fees alone and many times that in transaction fees and profits,” according to 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.

(end of part 3)

(Downtown 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 2

2010-10-09T07:39:00.000-07:00

"The gala affair, which was held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, was attended by about one thousand people, most of whom were Republican Eagles, the group that gives at least $15,000 a year to the Grand Old Party...In his remarks that fun-filled night, Bush [I] took the time to single out Henry [Kravis] as one of `those who did the heavy lifting on this.'"

Kravis told The Money Machine author Sarah Bartlett in the early 1990s that Bush I "writes me handwritten notes all the time and he calls me and stuff, and we talk" and Barlett also revealed in her book that "when Bush [I] is mulling over a financial issue, he will seek out Henry's opinion." Bush I also offered Kravis some U.S. ambassadorship posts before Kravis agreed to accept an appointment by Bush I to a national trade commission. Kravis also contributed funds to George W. Bush II's uncle, Jonathan Bush, when Bush II's uncle was the financial chairman of New York State's Republican Party organization. New York Republicans named Kravis as their "Man of the Year" and then-Republican Vice-President Quayle gave a keynote speech at a Republican Party dinner which honored Kravis in either the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Coincidentally, Kravis's father--Ray Kravis--was a friend of George W. Bush II's grandfather--Prescott Bush of the Brown Brothers Harriman investment banking partnership. According to The Money Machine, "When his son George [Bush I] graduated from Yale and was looking for a job, Prescott asked Ray if he would give George [Bush I] a job. Sure, was Ray's response."

(end of part 2)

(Downtown, 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 1

2010-10-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

"Last week a partnership controlled by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, the New York financial firm famous for engineering takeovers like RJR, Nabisco's, announced it would buy most of the U.S. magazine holdings of Rupert Murdoch...The $650 million deal (which came just days after KKR announced it would back Fleet/Norstar's $625 million acquisition of the failing Bank of New England) calls for the KKR group to buy nine publications. The list includes the Daily Racing Form--the most profitable--and New York, Seventeen and Premiere." (Newsweek magazine on May 6, 1991)

"Henry R. Kravis...has...been characterized as impatient, aggressive, and hard-edged. His longtime friend Michael Douglas is said to have copied some of his mannerisms for his role as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street...An early supporter of George Bush [I], he donated $100,000 to Bush's presidential campaign and, as the candidate's New York co-chairman, raised many times that amount." (1989 Current Biography Yearbook)

In its Sept. 5, 1989 issue, New York magazine published an article on the Kohlberg-Kravis-Roberts [KKR] investment banking partnership which concluded: "KKR has been one of the most self-consciously private and publicity-shy firms on Wall Street." Coincidentally, less than two years later, KKR's K-III Holdings Corp. subsidiary purchased control of New York magazine from the then-debt-burdened Fox Television Network/TV Guide Owner Rupert Murdoch. Shortly after KKR's April 1991 purchase of New York magazine, a New York media analyst named Richard MacDonald predicted: "I bet there won't be any Henry Kravis covers on New York."

In addition to purchasing New York magazine, Seventeen, Premiere and the Daily Racing Form, in the early 1990s, the KKR firm of New York's 1988 Bush-for-President campaign co-chairman, Henry Kravis, also purchased Soap Opera Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, European Travel & Life, Automobile and New Woman from Murdoch in 1991. The Weekly Reader and Funk & Wagnalls encylopedia were also owned by KKR prior to 1992.

Besides owning magazines, Kravis's KKR also owned commercial television stations in the early 1990s. In 1983 it had purchased Golden West Broadcasters and in 1985 it had raised $2.4 billion to gain control of Storer Communications. Consequently, KKR owned 15 percent of Storer/SCI Television--which operated commercial television stations in such places as San Diego, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee--in 1992. That same year, New York magazine's then-parent company also "made an agreement with an upstate New York cable" commercial television company "to acquire up to $1 billion in cable systems," according to the May 26, 1992 issue of the Village Voice.

In addition to having a special interest in the world of commercial television in the early 1990s, Bush I's 1988 campaign co-chairman in New York was the chairman of the board of trustees in the late 1980s of the New York City area's publicly-funded local PBS television station--WNET/Channel 13. In The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power And Profits, Sarah Bartlett noted how Kravis reacted after gaining more control over Manhattan's "non-commercial'television station:

"Today, Henry sits in his magnificent 42nd floor office exuding the satisfaction of a man who has conquered...`Chairmanship of Channel 13,' he says, clearly savoring the sound of it. `That's going to be a kick. I can bring my business background to that, my interest in television, my interest in education, and I'm having a lot of fun.'

But prior to 1992, Kravis apparently attempted to use his special influence to censor journalists who showed too much curiosity about how his KKR firm operated. As freelance journalist Sarah Barlett recalled in The Money Machine:

"The journalists who tried to raise questions about KKR's behavior toward its investors were met with a combination of intimidation, personal attack, and disinformation.

"In my own case, after I wrote two stories in the New York Times in August of 1989 about KKR's troubled deals and [former KKR Partner Jerry] Kohlberg's lawsuits, Henry [Kravis] called the newspaper's [then-] publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, to complain. Henry knows Sulzberger...through the Metropolitan Museum, where Sulzberger is [was] chairman. The Met, of course, is where Henry donated $10 million for the Kravis wing.

"On Friday, Sept. 15, Henry [Former WNET-Channel 13 lawyer] Dick Beattie, and another KKR partner, Paul Raether, had lunch with Sulzberger, Max Frankel, the [then-] editor of the paper, the managing editor, and an assistant managing editor who oversees the business section. I never heard afterward from any of the editors who attended the meeting."

(end of part 1)

(Downtown, 7/22/92)

A People's History of Afghanistan--Conclusion: 2001-2010

2010-09-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

By November 13, 2001, the U.S. government and NATO-backed Northern Alliance coalition of right-wing Mujahideen groups had marched into Kabul and taken control of Kabul from the Taliban’s Afghan government. But apparently the U.S. government-supported Northern Alliance militias also committed a number of war crimes in Afghanistan in late 2001. As Guilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending book recalled:

“Enemy military losses…went unrecorded. However, a number of war crimes were committed by allies of the United States. For example, on 25 November hundreds of Taliban prisoners were killed in the prison at Mazar-i-Sharif, after a revolt in which a CIA agent who had been interrogating prisoners was killed. Apparently many prisoners were summarily executed once they had been recaptured. The most serious incident concerned the deaths of Taliban and foreign prisoners who were suffocated inside containers. According to a meticulous inquiry, around 3,000 Taliban prisoners were massacred by Northern Alliance forces, an atrocity which by some accounts was perpetrated in the presence of American soldiers. Despite the gravity of these reports, and the known locations of communal graves, the UN declined to carry out an inquiry in order not to embarrass the Afghan and U.S. government…”

After the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul, an agreement to eventually begin construction of the proposed Unocal [which became a subsidiary in 2005 of a company-- Chevron Texaco--on whose corporate board former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat before joining the Bush II Administration) pipeline project in Afghanistan was soon reached. A former Unocal consultant, Zhalamy Khalizad, was named as the Bush II Administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan; and a former Unocal consultant, Hamid Karzai, was soon brought back to Afghanistan by the Bush II Administration to be the new Afghan president in Kabul. As Revolution Unending observed, “his exile in the United States …enabled Karzai to gain the backing of the U.S. government and therefore achieve his present position.” According to the same book, Karzai “is the son of a…Pashtun family from Kandahar ” and is “related to the royal family” of Afghanistan, whose members controlled the government of Afghanistan until the 1970s. But outside of Kabul, “local warlords and militia commanders…were able to take de facto control of their respective areas,” and “Karzai’s tolerance of the warlords has been seen by Afghans in general as a weakness,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Since 30 to 50 percent of the recruits in the Karzai regime’s new Afghan Army of 6,000 troops deserted in 2003, in 2004 the Pentagon still had to spend $11 billion a year on U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in 2004 in order to prop up the Karzai regime. As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed:

“…The balance of armed forces was weighted heavily on the side of the warlord militias, variously estimated at between 60,000 full time fighters to over 100,000, if one includes `part-timers’ from the swollen ranks of the unemployed…

“As before, warlords have been able to expand their financial base by imposing customs duties and other taxes on their own account. Some have benefited substantially from smuggling and drug trafficking…The opium crop earned Afghan farmers and traffickers some $2.3 billion, or around 50 percent of the gross domestic product…The crop in Afghanistan accounted for over 75 percent of the world’s illicitly grown opium in 2003…The New York-based Human Rights Watch has produced detailed documentation of the abuses committed with impunity by militia leaders and their followers…”

The U.S. soldiers first sent to occupy Afghanistan in late 2001 (who now number between 70,000 and 100,000) were apparently seen by many people in Afghanistan as yet another set of the foreign invaders that have attempted to manipulate Afghanistan’s internal affairs since the 19th-century. As Revolution Unending observed in 2005:

“The U.S. forces are unwelcome, especially in the Pashtun areas, where the civilians have complained of harassment. Regularly and predictably, military operations result in civilian casualties…For instance, 42 Afghans died and 181 were wounded on the night of June 30-July 1 2002 when four villages near Kabraki in the province of Uruzgan were bombed during a marriage ceremony…The treatment of prisoners of war also does not measure up to international standards. In a communique on January 28, 2003 the World Organization Against Torture stated that Taliban detained by the Americans had been subjected to torture in CIA interrogation centers, particularly at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and on the island of Diego Garcia …”

Around 1,025 U.S. soldiers have been killed and around 5,275 have been wounded in Afghanistan since October 2001 (along with around 500 troops killed from other nations whose governments agreed to send troops to fight with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] —which, besides its 70,000 to 100,000 U.S. soldiers, now includes 38,000 troops from other nations). But the number of Afghan civilian casualties produced by the Pentagon’s war in Afghanistan since October 2001 has been far greater. As James Lucas’s “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan” article, for example, noted, “since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, according to an estimate made by University of New Hampshire Professor Mark Herold.”

In his “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan ” article, Lucas also summarized what life is apparently like for the people of Afghanistan in 2010:

“Today the ordinary Afghan is caught between three forces: the U.S., the Taliban, and the puppet government composed of former members of the Mujahideen whom many Afghans would like to have tried as war criminals. Also, the Upper House of Parliament is not a democratic institution, its members being appointed by the President…Up to 60% of the deputies in the Lower House are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses.

“Under the newly established government in 2001, women were allowed to once again work and go to school. Nevertheless, the abuse of women continues, since the government is too weak to enforce many of the laws, especially in the rural areas.

"According to Human Rights Watch, `The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying `blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her.’…

“…About one in ten Afghans is disabled, mostly due to the wars and landmines. Their life expectancy is about 43 years…

“Although more than 3.7 million Afghan refugees have returned to their homes in the past six years, several million still live in Pakistan and Iran. About 132,000 people are internally displaced as a result of drought, violence and instability. Furthermore, there are reportedly about 400,000 orphans in Afghanistan.

“ Afghanistan suffers from an unemployment rate of 40 percent and most of those who have jobs earn only meager wages. Many youth joined the Mujahideen or Taliban in order to receive some food, shelter and income. The average educational level of Afghans is 1.7 years of schooling, which severely limits their job opportunities. As many as 18 million Afghans still live on less than $2 a day.

“…On their land there are still about 10 million mines which cause loss of life and limbs and reduces the amount of land available for farming….”

But the Turkmenistan government is apparently still “interested in moving forward with a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan,” according to a Feb. 15, 2010 UPI article. The same article noted that the proposed 1,044-mile Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India [TAPI] pipeline “is seen as a rival to a long-delayed natural gas pipeline from the Iranian South Pars gas field” and “TAPI is favored by Western powers over the South Pars option because of diplomatic concerns with dealing with Iran.” And since much of the $230 billion that the U.S. War Machine has spent on the endless war in Afghanistan between October 2001 and the end of 2009 has gone to private war contractors, the recipients of the Pentagon’s lucrative war contracts have also apparently profited much more from the 21st-century historical situation in Afghanistan than have the people of Afghanistan.

So, not surprisingly, the Pentagon is still using some of the additional 30,000 U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan in 2010 in a military offensive against the Taliban in Kandahar during 2010 that it has nicknamed “Operation Omid.”

The word “omid” means “hope” in the Dari language of Afghanistan. Yet—as this people’s history of Afghanistan indicates—people in Afghanistan are not likely to hopefully accept the endless presence in their country of still more foreign troops. Whether they come from the UK, from India, from Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia, from Russia, from the United States, from Canada, from NATO or from the ISAF. So it’s not necessarily historically inevitable that a Taliban guerrilla force of about 25,000 Afghan fighters will be easily defeated militarily by the Obama Administration’s troops in 2010, if the U.S. troops continue to be seen as foreign invaders by most people in Afghanistan in 2010. As an Afghan farmer in Kandahar named Abdul Salaam recently told the Global Post (April 19, 2010): “You cannot bring peace through war.”

(end of series)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 14: 1998-2001

2010-09-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

Ironically, despite Unocal and the Democratic Clinton Administration’s tacit support for a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan’s government prior to 1996, Taliban Leader “Mullah Omar’s government never had any intention of allowing U.S. firms to construct an oil pipeline,” according to Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie’s Forbidden Truth book. So after Unocal’s pipeline deal with the Taliban government in Afghanistan fell through, the Administration of Secretary of State Clinton’s husband used the August 7, 1998 bombings—apparently by armed right-wing Islamic fundamentalist groups--of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (which killed over 200 people) as its pretext to order the U.S. War Machine’s initial bombing of Afghanistan on August 20, 1998.

From Pentagon warships in the Indian Ocean, 67 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched which struck camps in Khost and killed 20 people in Afghanistan. The Clinton Administration then froze all U.S. assets of the Afghan government and banned all commercial and financial dealings with the Afghan government on July 6, 1999. By October 15, 1999, the Clinton Administration had also succeeded in getting the UN Security Council to pass a resolution (1267) which imposed economic sanctions on Afghanistan. And shortly before it was replaced by the Republican Bush II Administration, the Clinton Administration also was able to get the UN Security Council to pass a resolution (1393) on December 19, 2000 which froze all foreign assets of the Afghan government. Yet in 2000, the Taliban regime still controlled 85 percent of Afghanistan and the U.S. government-backed Northern Alliance of Mujahideen groups only controlled 15 percent of Afghanistan’s territory.

So soon after the January 2001 presidential inauguration of George W. Bush, negotiations between the Republican Bush II Administration and representatives of the Taliban regime’s Afghan government about reviving the proposed pipeline project in Afghanistan were apparently held between February and April 2001. And after an aide to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar met with the CIA in Washington,D.C. in March 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced in April 2001 that the Bush II Administration was going to give $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, according to the November 19, 2001 issue of the Irish Times.

But when Taliban regime negotiators apparently refused to agree to the Bush II Administration’s proposals related to the pipeline project and the establishing of a new coalition government in Afghanistan at a July 2001 meeting in Berlin, a U.S. government representative at the meeting apparently “evoked the option of a military operation against Afghanistan,” according to Forbidden Truth.

What happened on September 11, 2001 in Downtown Manhattan and at the Pentagon was then used as a pretext by the Bush II Administration (and its Blair Administration military ally in the UK) to launch an October 7, 2001 aerial attack on all cities in Afghanistan--which killed 400 Afghan civilians during the first week of Pentagon bombing alone. As Michael Parenti recalled in a December 2008 article, “in sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia;” and “… 9/11…provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.”

Yet as Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie’s Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace observed, “there was no explicit agreement under international law for the USA to go to war,” in a now overt and direct way, against the people of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.

But after the September 11, 2001 events, the Bush II Administration claimed it was morally justified for the U.S. War Machine to start bombing Afghanistan in October 2001 because Osama Bin Laden was “responsible” for what happened on September 11, 2001 in the United States. Yet as Guilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending book noted, “Bin Laden’s role in Afghan politics was minimal” in 2001.

Ironically, Osama Bin Laden (a multi-millionaire son of an extremely wealthy Saudi Arabian construction contractor) had apparently previously begun working in partnership with the CIA in Afghanistan in 1979—-the same year that the Democratic Carter Administration signed an official order that authorized its CIA to work for regime change in Afghanistan (by providing covert aid to the right-wing Afghan Islamic guerrilla fighters who were being trained by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] agency). After leaving Saudi Arabia and joining the Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1979, Bin Laden, for example, apparently helped the CIA and the ISI organize the Mujahideen guerrillas to wage the CIA’s 1980s proxy war in Afghanistan between 1980 and 1986. And in 1988, Bin Laden apparently created his al-Qaeda group--which recruited foreign fighters and raised money for the anti-feminist Mujahideen guerrilla groups in Afghanistan—before he left Afghanistan in 1989. As Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “according to Milt Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan in 1986 to 1989, Bin Laden and other fund-raisers for the Afghan jihad were bringing in between 20 and 25 million dollars a month from the Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war” against the Soviet military-supported Afghan government.

During the same period when Unocal, the CIA and the Clinton Administration were apparently supporting the Taliban group’s campaign to gain control of the Afghan government in the summer of 1996, Bin Laden also “reportedly contributed 3 million dollars to the Taliban war chest,” according to Forbidden Truth. But although “the CIA gave Osama free rein in Afghanistan, as did Pakistani intelligence generally,” the “CIA seems to have…turned against its former partner Bin Laden in 1995 and 1996,” according to John Cooley’s Unholy Wars book. Coincidentally, between 1982 and 1997, the Bush II Administration’s Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs in 2001, Christine Rocca, had also “worked with the CIA as an agent reporting to the director of Intelligence Operations;” and “in this capacity, for several years she coordinated relations between the CIA and the Islamic guerrillas, and supervised some of the deliveries of Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen fighters,” according to Forbidden Truth.

Prior to the Bush II Administration’s illegal attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Taliban’s Afghan government proposed that Bin Laden just be deported from Afghanistan to another Muslim country and just be placed under surveillance, since—as CNN reported on September 21, 2001--“Bin Laden…denied he had anything to do with the attacks, and Taliban officials repeatedly said he could not have been involved in the attacks;” and the Bush II Administration failed to provide any international court with concrete evidence that Bin Laden had actually been “responsible” for what happened on September 11, 2001 in the United States. In addition, even the BBC News reported on October 5, 2001 that there was “no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks.”

Yet “the American government preferred to give the Taliban an ultimatum rather than negotiate, hence the refusal to provide any kind of proof of Bin Laden’s implication” in the September 11, 2001 events, according to Revolution Unending.

When the Taliban’s Afghan government refused (as anticipated) to accept the Bush II Administration’s illegal ultimatum to “hand over Bin Laden” (or the U.S. War Machine would attack Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban regime), the Pentagon (and its UK military junior partner) then began its “Operation Enduring Freedom” military campaign in Afghanistan (which was subsequently joined by soldiers from the military forces of other members of NATO)--that people in Afghanistan are still having to endure over 8 years later. And according to the Afganistan: The Mirage of Peace book:

“By the end of October 2001…there was a switch in strategy to carpet bombing of frontlines…Sub-atomic bombs were dropped on Taliban frontlines in the Shamal plains north of Kabul…In addition, a quarter of a million deadly bomblets were scattered from the cluster bombs that the USA dropped throughout the country…”

The Bush II Administration then sent large numbers of U.S. ground troops to invade Afghanistan in late November 2001; and by the end of December 2001, the Pentagon had dropped over 12,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Although the U.S. army refused “in principle to estimate” the number of Afghan civilian casualties created by the direct U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan by the end of 2001, it “probably amounted to several thousand,” according to Revolution Unending.

(end of part 14. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Conclusion: 2001-2010")

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 13: 1992-1998

2010-09-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

Since October 2001, the Pentagon has been waging an endless war in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime. Yet after the Taliban guerrillas first marched into Kabul in September 1996, an editorial in the October 8, 1996 issue of the New York Times stated that the Taliban regime “has brought a measure of stability to the country for the first time in years.”

In Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie indicated why the coalition of CIA and ISI-organized Mujahideen guerrilla groups that initially replaced the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] regime in Afghanistan in April 1992 failed to bring “stability to the country,” when they described what happened after the Mujahideen militia groups marched into Kabul:

“…Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes…The public services that the Najibullah regime had maintained were soon a thing of the past…

“About 20,000 people died in the fighting between April 1992 and December 1994 that followed the `liberation’ of Kabul. Almost three-quarters of those who survived were forced to leave their homes and move across the city, or flee to squalid camps for the displaced in Jalalabad…Kabul continued to be the focus for rocket attacks from the outside until 1995…”

In August 1992, for example the Mujahideen leader whose armed group had received the most military aid from the CIA in the early 1980s, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “launched a barrage of rockets against Kabul from his bases north and east of the city that killed over a thousand civilians,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also noted that in January 1994, Hekmatyar’s Mujahideen group also “unleashed the most ferocious artillery and rocket attacks that Kabul had ever experienced” and “these attacks destroyed half the city, took some 25,000 civilian lives, and caused tens of thousands of Kabalis to seek safety in Pakistan or in the north” of Afghanistan.

The situation of women in Kabul also worsened dramatically after the CIA and ISI-organized armed Islamic groups entered Afghan’s capital city. As Guilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending noted:

“The arrival of the Mujahideen in 1992 inaugurated a range of restrictions from the wearing of the veil to the ban on women appearing on television…In Kabul all the armed groups…were guilty of rapes and kidnappings, leading sometimes to the suicide of young girls who had been dishonored. The very few women who dared to dress in the western style in the modern part of Kabul were harassed by the Mujahideen. All this was a new departure, and a contrast, since Afghan women had seldom before been threatened with deliberate acts of violence and certainly not with rape…”

But, according to John Lucas’s “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan” article, although the Mujahideen now set up a “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” to “control women’s dress codes and the length of men’s beards,” under the Mujahadeen government “women were still allowed to work” and were still able to be employed in professional jobs in Kabul.

Outside of Kabul, the Afghan countryside was pretty much ruled by Afghan warlords and Afghan drug lords. And by 1994, the country in the world that produced the most heroin was now Afghanistan.

But in November 1994 a new anti-feminist, Islamic guerrilla group of Afghan Pashtun tribes that was apparently backed by Saudi government money and Pakistani government weapons--the Taliban--initiated its military campaign to gain control of Afghanistan’s government. As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “the heavy Pakistani involvement in arming, training and even providing logistical support in Taliban field operations was no secret to informal observers as early as 1995” and “the generous Saudi funding was also well known.” The Democratic Administration of Secretary of State Clinton’s husband also apparently wished, during the mid-1990s, to see the Taliban obtain control of the Afghan government, after one of its diplomats, Ms. Robin Raphael, held a meeting with Taliban representatives. According to the same book:

“The United States …was not an uninterested party. An eventual take-over by the Taliban…served both the U.S. political strategy of `containing’…Iran…, as well as its economic interests in fostering…an alternative land route through Afghanistan and Pakistan for the exploitation by U.S.-led companies of the seemingly inexhaustible oil and gas reserves of Central Asia.”

Dator Zayar’s “Afghanistan: An Historical View” article also asserted that “the Taliban were the creation of the Pakistan military and intelligence establishment with the active support of the CIA” and “U.S. imperialism is directly responsible for the Taliban reaction in Afghanistan.”

Less than three weeks after Taliban guerrilla fighters from Pakistan captured in two days the Afghan city of Kandahar on November 3, 1994, the number of Taliban guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan had rapidly increased to 2,500. And, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, many of these Taliban insurgents were “armed with brand-new weapons that could only have come from Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] warehouses in Pakistan.” So, by February 1995, the Taliban forces were able to capture the base near Kabul of Hekmatyar’s Mujahadeen forces.

Although the Taliban apparently began to act more independently of the Pakistani government in March 1995, during the summer of 1995 the Pakistan government’s ISI agency trained more Taliban guerrillas; and, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, there is “no doubt that Pakistan through its ISI had played a key role in reinforcing the Taliban capacity to wage war.” The Afghan city of Jalalabad was then captured by the Taliban on September 12, 1996; and by September 26, 1996, the ISI-trained Taliban troops now controlled Kabul. By 1998, over 90 percent of Afghanistan’s territory was now controlled by the Taliban’s new Afghan government.

Coincidentally, after an October 21, 1995 agreement was signed between Turkmenistan President Saparmurad Nizazov, Unocal and Unocal’s business partner—the Saudi-owned Delta oil company—to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, Unocal (which became a subsidiary of Chevron Texaco in 2005) began to handle “public relations for the Taliban and sponsored visits to Washington and Houston during the mid-1990s," according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. As the same book explained:

“Behind… U.S. acquiescence in an eventual Taliban takeover, engineered by its Pakistan and Saudi allies, lay the Unocal game plan. Unocal was a consortium of U.S. oil companies formed to exploit the hydrocarbon reserves of Central Asia. Unocal and its Saudi partner, Delta, had hired every available American involved in Afghan operations during the jihad years, including Robert Oakley, a former ambassador to Pakistan, and worked hand-in-glove with U.S. officials. Unocal staff acted for a time as an unofficial lobby for the Taliban and were regularly briefed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. In U.S. eyes, the most important function of the Taliban would have been to provide security for the roads, and potentially for the gas and oil pipelines that would link the Central Asian states to the international markets through Afghanistan rather than Iran…The U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asian Affairs, Robin Raphael, went so far as to state that the Taliban capture of Kabul was `a positive step.’”

Following the September 1996 takeover of Kabul by the Taliban regime, Unocal Vice President Chris Taggart also said on October 2, 1996 that “if this leads to peace, stability, and international recognition, then this is a positive development.”

Support for the Taliban by the Clinton Administration apparently became “an economic priority,” after Unocal executives signed its October 21, 1995 agreement with the Turkmenistan president, based on potential gas exports evaluated at $8 billion, according to Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie also observed in their Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace book:

“… Afghanistan potentially offered advantages over all the alternative pipeline routes…The Clinton administration weighed in heavily on behalf of Unocal…In February 1997, and again in November of that year, Taliban representatives were in Washington meeting both Unocal and State Department officials. Unocal estimated it had spent some $15-20 million on the pipeline project…It hired…Zalmay Khalizad…a member of the National Security Council…Hamid Karzai…in 1997 represented Unocal in negotiations with the Taliban leadership…”

Yet for Afghan women in Kabul, the victory of the Unocal, Clinton Administration, Pakistani government and Saudi government-backed Taliban in September 1996 apparently “represented the triumph of the most fundamentalist tendency,” according to Revolution Unending. The same book also observed that the “earliest victims” of the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan “were educated women, who were mainly in Kabul and numbered around 165,000.” As a March 1998 article by N.O.W. vice president Karen Johnson noted:

“…On Sept. 27, 1996, the Taliban issued an edict that forbade women and girls from working or going to school. The edict took effect immediately, and women who tried to go to work the next day were beaten and forced to return home….On Sept. 26, 1996, women were 70% of the school teachers, 40% of the doctors, 50% of government workers and 50% of the university students…A woman must be accompanied by a male relative in order to leave the confines of her home…In the city of Kabul alone there are 40,000 widows who can no longer work to support themselves and their families…The Taliban asserts that the prohibitions for women and girls are religious and protective in nature…”

But, according to Revolution Unending, for “country women” in Afghanistan “the principal effect of the arrival of the Taliban was an end to insecurity,” since rural Afghan women already lacked the educational and work opportunities that urban Afghan women lost after the Taliban militias entered Kabul in September 1996.

At least one writer has questioned the assertion that all actions of the Taliban regime’s Afghan government between September 1996 and November 2001 deserved condemnation. For example, in his book, The World Is Turning, Don Paul wrote that “the Taliban…rebuilt schools and hospitals,” “eliminated (according to a year 2000 United Nations drug Control Program study) opium cultivation in their territory,” and “barred the selling of women as chattels.” In addition, the Taliban (according to a speech by their roving Ambassador, Sayyid Rahmatullah Hashemi, at the University of Southern California on March 10, 2001) claimed that it allowed women to “work in the Taliban’s Ministries of Health, of Education, of the Interior, of Social Affairs” and allowed” more women than men” to “attend the schools of Medical Science that the Taliban had re-opened in all of Afghanistan’s major cities.”

Another early victim of the Taliban occupation of Kabul on September 26, 1996 was the Afghan government leader whose regime had collapsed in April 1992, Najibullah. Between April 1992 and September 1996, Najibullah had enjoyed sanctuary at the United Nations diplomatic premises in Kabul. But “one of the Taliban’s first acts after entering Kabul was to violate the United Nations diplomatic premises” to “torture and execute” Najibullah “and two companions in a particularly gruesome manner and expose their mutilated bodies in a Kabul square,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Datar Zayar’s “ Afghanistan: An Historical View” article also observed that, additionally, the Taliban regime “unleashed a reign of terror with ethnic cleansing in Bamiyan and Mazar-e-Sharif and severe repression against oppressed religious minorities and nationalities” in Afghanistan.

(end of part 13. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 14: 1998-2001"

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 12: 1987-1992

2010-09-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

In 2010 more than 600 individuals were still imprisoned by the Democratic Obama Administration at its Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan; and many of these Bagram prisoners have apparently been held without access to lawyers or an opportunity to legally challenge the basis of their imprisonment for as long as six years. Yet none of the U.S. government officials responsible for escalating the covert and overt U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan since the 1970s have ever been held legally accountable for the morally disastrous humanitarian effects their policies have had on the history of people in Afghanistan.

Yet in April 1986, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan[PDPA]-Parcham faction leader who had been installed in late December 1979 by Soviet troops as the head of the PDPA regime in Afghanistan--Babrak Karmal—was replaced by the former head of the PDPA regime’s secret police, Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, after Najibullah was elected by the PDPA’s Central Committee to be its new general secretary. Subsequently, on January 1, 1987, the new PDPA regime head of state attempted to bring peace to the people of Afghanistan and negotiate an end to the 1980s Afghan war by announcing a “program of `national reconciliation’ comprising three key elements: a six-month unilateral cease-fire, the formation of a government of `national unity’ and the return of over 5 million refugees from Pakistan and Iran,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also recalled:

“An `Extraordinary Supreme Commission for National Reconciliation’ was set up and branches were opened all over the country. Their job was to make contact with refugees…in exile or fighting with resistance groups, pass on the message of peace, and distribute essential relief items for the use of returning refugees. Other inducements offered were tax concessions, the return of confiscated property and the deferment of military service. Radio Kabul started calling the Mujahideen fighters `angry brothers’ rather than `bandits.’ Some 4000…prisoners were released. Six months later, just before the expiring of the 6-month ceasefire, Najibullah was able to claim that 59,000 refugees had returned; tens of thousands of men were negotiating with the government; 4,000 representatives of the opposition had been included in the reconciliation committees; and coalition governments had already been formed in several villages, sub-districts, districts and provinces.”

But the alliance of seven U.S., Pakistani and Saudi government-sponsored anti-feminist Afghan political parties apparently “turned down with disbelief and contempt” the January 1987 peace proposals of the PDPA regime in Afghanistan. As the same book explained:

“The Islamic parties…claiming to represent the Mujahideen resistance had developed into vested interests that were not receptive to power-sharing arrangements. They and their Pakistani sponsors, replete with funds and weapons generously contributed by `the international community’, developed their own agendas for a post-Soviet Afghanistan…The parties owed their `influence’ to the fact that they served as somewhat porous conduits for the U.S. and Saudi funds and weapons channeled to the resistance fighters inside Afghanistan by Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Service Intelligence]…”

Ironically, “a survey among Afghan refugees conducted in 1987 by one of Afghanistan’s outstanding academics and intellectuals, Professor S.B. Majrooh, found that less than half a percent of those polled would choose one of the seven” Afghan Islamic political party “leaders to rule a free Afghanistan,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Coincidentally, the Union of Mujahideen (a coalition of these seven unpopular Islamic parties) apparently then arranged for Professor Majrooh to be assassinated in his office in Peshawar on February 11, 1988, shortly after his survey results were made public.

Yet despite the rejection of its January 1987 peace proposals by the U.S., Pakistani and Saudi government-sponsored Islamic parties, the PDPA regime extended its unilateral January 1987 ceasefire in Afghanistan for another six months in June 1987; and it invited its right-wing Afghan political opponents to suggest changes in the draft of a proposed new Afghan constitution which it published in July 1987. The proposed new Afghan constitution--that set up a democratic, multi-party parliamentary political system in Afghanistan in which Islam was the state religion—was then formally approved by the PDPA regime’s parliament [jirga] in November 1987.

On February 8, 1988, the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union next announced that on May 15, 1988 it would start to withdraw the 85,000 Soviet troops still in Afghanistan; and it would have all Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan by March 15, 1989. Parliamentary elections were then held in Afghanistan in April 1988 in which the National Fatherland Front [NFF] and other newly formed Afghan parties won more seats in the new, democratically-elected Afghan parliament than did the PDPA—which just won 22 percent of the parliamentary seats. In addition, 25 percent of the seats in the lower house of the new Afghan parliament were left vacant for representatives of the Islamic opposition parties in Afghanistan--that were still unwilling to negotiate an agreement in 1988 that would finally bring peace to Afghanistan.

A peace agreement between the Pakistani government and the Afghan government-- guaranteed by both the Reagan Administration and the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union --was, however, signed on April 14, 1988. But after the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan was completed in February 1989, Pakistan’s “ISI drew up the battle plans and arranged the logistics, the intelligence and the communications,” for a March 7, 1989 attack from Pakistan by its Afghan Mujahideen units, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Although the Mujahideen quickly “captured the government base of Samarkhel, 12 miles south-east of Jalalabad,” their march to the local airport “ran into heavy resistance.” As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “despite human wave assaults and a heavy bombardment of the city that cost over 2,000, mostly civilian lives, the Muhajideen could not advance any further. And in July 1989, the Afghan government military forces were able to easily retake its Samarkhel base, where they found that 70 captured Afghan army officers had been murdered by the ISI-organized Mujahideen.”

Without the support of any Soviet troops, the army of the Najibullah regime’s Afghan government in 1989 was also able to defend Jalalabad “against the most massive attack ever undertaken by the Mujahideen during the whole war,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. And, despite a failed coup attempt by the Minister of Defense of the Afghan government regime in March 1990, Najibullah’s regime did not collapse until there was a successful 1992 Afghan military coup which, according to Dator Zayar’s October 2001 “Afghanistan: An Historical View” article, was “planned by the CIA and ISI” and “prepared the way for the capture of Kabul by the Islamic fundamentalists.” Afghan President Najibullah then announced in early April 1992 that he would resign as part of a UN-brokered transition of power and “ Kabul now became the scene for a power struggle between four main armed” Mujahadeen “groups,” according to Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace by Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie.

By April 1992, the commanders of the various Mujahideen guerrilla groups were also deriving a major source of their personal income from Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade. As Trinity College Professor and International Studies Program Director Vijay Prashad wrote in his “War Against The Planet” article that was posted on the CounterPunch website:

“The opium harvest at the Pakistan-Afghan border doubled between 1982 and 1983 (575 tons), but by the end of the decade it would grow to 800 tons. On June 18, 1986, the New York Times reported that the Mujahideen `have been involved in narcotics activities as a matter of policy to finance their operations.’.”

In his Killing Hope book, William Blum also wrote:

“…Mujahideen commanders inside Afghanistan personally controlled huge fields of opium poppies, the raw material from which heroin is refined. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport some of the opium to the numerous laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border, whence many tons of heroin were processed with the cooperation of the Pakistani military. The output provided an estimated one-third to one-half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe ….”

(end of part 12. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 13: 1992-1998)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 11: 1981-1987

2010-09-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

On March 29, 2010, the Associated Press reported that “a senior military official” in Washington “who was not authorized to speak publicly on the operation” said that “NATO forces...will make a long-planned assault on the Taliban’s spiritual home in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar;” and that “military officials say they expect `several thousand’" of the 30,000 extra troops that Barack Obama recently ordered to Afghanistan “to be sent to Kandahar.” But long before the Republican Bush II Administration ordered Pentagon ground troops to begin the endless war in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Republican Reagan Administration was involving the U.S. government even more deeply in the internal political affairs of Afghanistan.

The CIA’s SOVMAT program of arming anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas, for example, continued to operate after the Democratic Carter Administration was replaced by the Reagan Administration and William Casey (a former Capital Cities Communications media conglomerate board member who also then owned over $3 million worth of stock in companies like Exxon, DuPont, Standard Oil of Indiana and Mobil-Superior Oil) became the new CIA director in 1981. As Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History observed:

“Bill Casey’s CIA procurers scoured the globe in search of Soviet-style weapons. Egypt, which had large stockpiles of automatic weapons, land mines, grenade launchers and anti-aircraft missiles delivered by the Soviets was the first source…Other sources were Israel, which had a supply of Soviet-made weapons—captured during the Six-Day War and from Syrian troops and Palestinians in London—and China. Using Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] as a go-between, the CIA contracted with the Chinese government to manufacture rocket launchers, AK47s and heavy machine guns in return for hard currency and new equipment. China became a major source of supply. As the requirements grew, the CIA arranged for copies of Soviet weapons to be manufactured in factories in Cairo and in the US , where one leading firm was given a classified contract to upgrade SAM-7-anti-aircraft missiles…”

The CIA’s covert military intervention in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s represented “the biggest single CIA covert operation anywhere in the world,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The money the U.S. government’s CIA secretly spent on giving weapons and military aid-- via its Pakistani ISI middle-men--to the Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas grew from $30 million to $280 million-per-year between 1981 and 1985. In addition, Reagan Administration CIA Director Casey also persuaded “Arab governments to contribute to a reserve fund that could be kept secret from Congress and the State Department” during the early 1980s, according to the same book. As a result, in late 1981 the repressive Saudi Arabian monarchical regime “began to match the CIA dollar for dollar in the financing of purchases of weapons for the Afghan resistance,” “funneled more than half a billion dollars to CIA accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands,” and made “substantial direct contributions of cash and weapons to its own favorites among the Mujahideen parties” in Afghanistan.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International [BCCI] in Geneva was the financial institution secretly used by the CIA and the Saudi government in the 1980s to manage the special “Afghan War” accounts--from which the CIA and Saudi government payments were made to the various arms dealers who supplied the weapons needed for the CIA’s covert military intervention in Afghanistan. By 1989, around $13 billion had been spent by the U.S. and Saudi governments on subsidizing the CIA and ISI’s Mujahideen militias in Afghanistan; and around 50 percent of U.S. government-supplied weapons had been distributed to Hekmatyar’s extremely anti-feminist Hizb-I Islami guerrilla group.

Ironically, one of the strongest proponents for the escalation of the Republican Reagan Administration’s escalation of Casey’s covert war in Afghanistan in the early 1980s was a Democrat: a now-deceased Democratic Congressional representative from Texas named Charles Wilson. As John Cooley’s Unholy Wars recalled:

“The single U.S. Congressman who emerged as CIA Director William Casey’s champion Congressional ally, especially for appropriating money was Democratic Representative Charles Wilson of Texas, one of the most colorful figures of the Afghan jihad…Always ready to promote the interests of the Texas defense contractors who supported him, he got seats on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee…

“Wilson made 14 separate trips to South Asia…In 1982, he began intensive work in secret hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee to inject more and more money into the Afghan enterprise. On one trip in 1983 he crossed into Afghanistan with a group of Mujahideen…

“Wilson ’s best ally for money decisions below Casey’s level in the CIA was John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director since June 1982…

“McMahon did support Wilson’s efforts for more money for the jihad, after setting up, during Stanfield Turner’s watch as CIA Director [during the Democratic Carter Administration], many of the original financing and supply arrangements for the Mujahideen…”

In late 1984, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, the U.S. Congress, “in a rare show of bi-partisanship, and prompted by friends of the Afghan resistance such as Charles Wilson, Gordon Humphrey, Orin Hatch and Bill Bradley, also took the lead in voting more money for the Mujahideen than the Reagan administration requested, sometimes by diverting funds from the defense budget to the CIA.” And CIA Director Casey personally visited three secret training camps in October 1984 to watch some of the Mujahideen guerrillas being trained in Pakistan to wage war in Afghanistan.

The CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989 who was apparently responsible for arming the Mujahideen was Milton Bearden, according to James Lucas’ “ America’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article. In Bearden’s view, “the U.S. was fighting the Soviets to the last Afghan,” during the 1980s. And around 1.5 million to 2 million Afghans would be killed during the CIA-sponsored Afghan war, before all Soviet troops were eventually withdrawn by the Gorbachev regime in the late 1980s. Thousands of Afghan civilians were apparently killed, for example, as a result of the Soviet military’s bombing of apparently 12,000 rural villages in Afghanistan (as part of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] government’s “counter-insurgency” campaign) during the 1980s.

As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “all pretenses that the United States was not directly involved in the Afghan war were dissipated at a stroke late 1984,” when Republican President Reagan then publicly authorized “the delivery of Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the Mujahideen.” The delivery of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Mujahideen by the CIA “would begin to turn the tide of the” Afghan “war in 1985” against the Soviet military forces and Afghan armed forces that supported the PDPA regime in Afghanistan, according to Unholy Wars. As James Lucas noted in his “America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article:

“Between 1986 and 1989, the U.S. provided the Mujahideen with more than 1,000 of these state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launchers which by some accounts prevented a Soviet victory. Stinger missiles were able to destroy low-flying Soviet planes which forced them to fly at higher altitudes, thereby curtailing the damage they could cause."

By 1987, the U.S. government was giving the anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas nearly $700 million in military assistance per year; and were it not for the involvement of the CIA and the Pakistani government’s ISI in the 1980s war in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen might not have eventually succeeded in violently overthrowing the PDPA regime by the early 1990s. As Afghanistan: A Modern History noted, “the greatest advantage that the Mujahideen as a guerrilla force had were the safe havens in Pakistan to which they could withdraw from time to time to rest and refit, gather the supplies that they needed, receive training in the use of the increasingly sophisticated weapons that the United States was delivering, and be briefed on the superior intelligence…that the CIA was providing through the ISI.”

The same book revealed some details of how the CIA and ISI organized their military units of Afghan refugees to attack Afghanistan—in violation of international law—during the late 1970s and 1980s:

“Within the ISI, the Afghan Bureau was the command post for the war in Afghanistan and operated in the greatest secrecy, with its military staff wearing civilian clothes. Its head reported to [then-ISI Director General] Akhtar [Abdur Rahman], who also devoted some 50 percent of his time to the affairs of the Bureau and reported directly to [Pakistani President] Zia. The respective roles of the CIA and the ISI’s Afghan Bureau are best summed up by the army officer personally selected by Akhtar in October 1983 to head the Bureau, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf:

“`To sum up: The CIA’s tasks in Afghanistan were to purchase arms and equipment and their transportation to Pakistan; provide funds for the purpose of vehicles and transportation inside Pakistan and Afghanistan; train Pakistani instructors on new weapons or equipment; provide photographs and maps for our operational planning; provide radio equipment and training, and advise on technical matters when requested. The entire planning of the war, all types of training for the Mujahideen, and the allocation and distribution of arms and supplies were the…responsibility of the ISI, and my office in particular.’”

Around 80,000 Mujahideen Afghan guerrillas were trained, for example in camps in Pakistan between 1984 and 1987. At the ISI Afghan Bureau’s 70 to 80 acre Ojhri Camp in Rawalpindi—not too far from Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad—were barracks, training areas, mess halls and a warehouse from which 70 percent of the weapons used by the Afghan Mujahadeen were distributed, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The anti-feminist Afghan combatants were mostly recruited by the ISI and CIA from the over 3.2 million Afghan refugees who settled in Pakistan and the over 2.9 million Afghan refugees who settled in Iran between 1980 and 1990.

Yet despite the opposition of the anti-feminist Mujahideen, the PDPA government refused to scrap its program for female equality and female emancipation in Afghanistan during the 1980s. As Gilles Dorronsoro wrote in his 2005 book Revolution Unending: Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present:

“…The regime maintained the proportion of women members of the party at around 15 percent…In addition, there were women members of the party militias, especially in Kabul and in some of the northern towns. The most marked changes were in public education…In Kabul half of the holders of the public teaching posts were women, as were the majority of the staff of the Ministries of Education and Health. Similarly, 55 percent of the students were girls…Dress codes showed the beginnings of a break with traditional practices, although these innovations were mostly restricted to the modern areas of the capital and to a lesser extent of Jalalabad and Mazar-I Sharif…”

In the Afghan countryside, however, “the Mujahideen imposed an order that was much more conservative or even fundamentalist,” the “prohibition of women’s participation in public activities became stricter,” and “opposition from fundamentalists…restricted the educational opportunities for girls,” according to the same book.

(end of part 11. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 12: 1987-1992)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 10: 1979-1981

2010-09-08T20:32:00.000-07:00

In 2010 the Democratic Obama Administration is spending over $95 billion on the Pentagon’s endless war in Afghanistan. Yet many viewers of PBS-affiliated television stations or readers of Rolling Stone magazine in the USA still probably know more about the history of rock music since the 1950s than about the hidden history of Afghanistan since 1979.

In September 1979, for example, supporters of People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]-Khalq Premier Noor Mohammad Taraki discovered that PDPA-Khalq Deputy Premier Hafizullah Amin was plotting to kill Taraki—after political disagreements between the two PDPA-Khalq government leaders developed between March 1979 and July 1979; and Amin apparently began appointing just members of his own family to fill important Afghan government posts. But Amin was still able to force Taraki to resign as Afghan prime minister on September 15, 1979, following Taraki’s return from abroad after attending a conference of leaders of Non-Aligned nations. And Amin apparently then arranged for former PDPA-Khalq leader Taraki to be killed on October 8 or 9, 1979.

When Taraki had visited Moscow in March 1979 to first request that Soviet ground troops be sent into Afghanistan to help his government’s Afghan army defeat the anti-feminist Mujahdeen guerrillas, the Brezhnev regime had refused to send large numbers of Soviet troops across the border into Afghanistan at that time. But Taraki—who, along with Amin, had personally signed in Moscow the December 5, 1978 Treaty of Friendship between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan—had apparently been considered friendlier to the Soviet Union than the Columbia University Teachers College and University of Wisconsin-trained Amin. So after Taraki was killed, the Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union apparently decided that the PDPA-Parcham faction leader that Amin had demoted in late June 1978—Babrak Karmal—should replace Amin as Afghan head of state (if large-scale Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was required to prevent the U.S. and Pakistani-backed Afghan Mujahideen militias--which by then controlled 23 of Afghanistan’s 28 provinces--from quickly overthrowing the increasingly unpopular government that had been established by the April 1978 Saur Revolution).

On December 12, 1979, the Brezhnev regime did decide to order large numbers of Soviet ground troops to cross the Soviet-Afghan border and march into Afghanistan on December 23, 1979. One result of this internationally unpopular December 1979 decision was that 13,369 members of the Soviet military would subsequently be killed (and 35,578 troops would be wounded), according to official Soviet government casualty figures.

On December 27, 1979, 300 Soviet commandos then surrounded and attacked Amin’s residence at 7 p.m.--at the same time that other Soviet troops seized Kabul ’s radio station. An apparently recorded message from PDPA-Parcham faction leader Karmal, announcing that he was the new head of the Afghan government, was then broadcast over the radio--while Amin and Amin loyalists unsuccessfully fought until 1 a.m. against the 300 Soviet commandos who were attempting to arrest Amin. After being taken to Soviet military headquarters in Kabul, Amin was apparently then executed.

The Democratic Carter Administration next used the Brezhnev regime’s internationally unpopular military response to the Pakistani and U.S. governments’ covert support for regime change and the right-wing Mujahadeen insurgency in Afghanistan as a pretext for once again requiring U.S. men between 18 and 26 years of age to register for a future U.S. military draft. As Democratic President Carter explained in his January 23, 1980 State of the Union speech:

“…The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.

“This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come….It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East…

“…I believe that our volunteer forces are adequate for current defense needs, and I hope that it will not become necessary to impose a draft. However, we must be prepared for that possibility. For this reason, I have determined that the Selective Service System must now be revitalized. I will send legislation and budget proposals to the Congress next month so that we can begin registration and then meet future mobilization needs rapidly if they arise…”

Former Columbia University Professor and then-National Security Affairs Advisor Brzezinski then visited Pakistan in February 1980 and “met with General Akhtar, the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence ] chief, as well as with [then-Pakistan] president Zia-al-Haq and with CIA station chief in Islamabad John J. Reagan,” according to John Cooley’s Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism.

But because covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance fighters violated international law, “both Washington and Islamabad went to extraordinary lengths to cover up their” increased military “assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also noted that “for this reason it was decided that only Warsaw Pact weaponry would be delivered, as such weapons could not be traced back to the US …”

So “the Cold Warriors in Langley, Virginia ” then “developed…a top-secret program, codenamed SOVMAT,” which “was probably unknown even to President Zia al-Haq and the holy-war commanders in Pakistan’s ISI,” according to Unholy Wars. The same book also described how the CIA’s secret SOVMAT program of the early 1980s operated:

“…Working with a vast army of phony corporations and fronts, the CIA under the SOVMAT program would buy weapons from East European governments and governmental organizations…Their acquisition and testing by the U.S. military and the CIA facilitated development of counter-measures, such as improved anti-tank weapons used by the Mujahideen…

“…Officials running the CIA’s SOVMAT program provided wish lists for CIA and ISI officers operating from Pakistan, who sent their Afghan mercenaries to ransack Soviet supply depots…Some Afghan fighters were taught in their CIA-managed training by the ISI in Pakistan to strip Soviet SPETZNAZ or special forces soldiers of their weapons…”

(end of part 10. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 11: 1981-1987)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 9: 1978-1979

2010-09-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

As the New York Times (4/26/10) observed, “small bands of elite American Special Operations forces have been operating with increased intensity...in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan ’s largest city, picking up or picking off insurgent leaders…in advance of major operations, senior administration and military officials say.” So if you’re a U.S. anti-war activist, perhaps now might also be a good time for you to revisit the post-1978 history of people in Afghanistan?

Following the April 27, 1978 “Saur [‘April’] Revolution” in Afghanistan, for example, a Revolutionary Council of the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan [PDRA]was established on May 1, 1978 with People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]-Khalq faction leader Noor Mohammad Taraki as its President and Premier, PDPA-Parcham faction leader Babrak Karmal as Vice President, 30 PDPA civilians as members and 5 pro-PDPA military officers as members; and on May 6, 1978, Taraki announced that Afghanistan was now a non-aligned and independent country. Soon afterwards, however, control of the post-April 1978 revolutionary government of Afghanistan was shifted to the PDPA’s Politburo.

According to an article by John Ryan, titled “Afghanistan: A Forgotten Chapter,” which appeared in the Nov./Dec. 2001 issue of Canadian Dimensions, labor unions “were legalized, a minimum wage was established, a progressive income tax was introduced, men and women were given equal rights, and girls were encouraged to go to school,” by the post-April 1978 revolutionary government in Afghanistan. All debts owed by Afghan’s peasants and small farmers were also abolished; and 200,000 rural families were scheduled to receive redistributed land in accordance with the PDPA government’s land reform program. In addition, the PDPA government elevated the Uzbek, Tucoman, Baluchi and Niristani minority languages to the status of national language in Afghanistan, deprived members of the Afghan royal family of their citizenship and began building hundreds of schools and medical clinics in the Afghan countryside. A female member of the PDPA/PDRA’s Revolutionary Council, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, also wrote, in a May 28, 1978 Kabul Times editorial, that “privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country;” and “educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention.”

Once the PDPA had gained control over the Afghan government, however, internal party conflict between the leaders of its Parcham faction and its Khalq faction developed again; and at a June 27, 1978 PDPA Central Committee meeting, “Karmal and other leading Parchamis were shunted off to lives in glorified exile as ambassador” and “virtually ousted…from the government” by the Khalq faction, according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. A number of Parcham activists were then also imprisoned by the PDPA-Khalq faction’s regime. Besides Taraki, the PDPA-Khalq faction in late June 1978 was also now being led by Hafizullah Amin--the Columbia University Teachers College graduate (who some Afghan leftists subsequently claimed may have been previously recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency when he studied in the United States--during the Cold War period when the Afghan monarchical government was considered by the CIA to be too friendly with the Soviet Union).

Karmal, who had been appointed Afghanistan’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia, apparently then met with “Parchamis who were still in place, notably Defense Minister Qadir and the Army Chief of Staff, General Shahpur Ahmedzai;” and a PDPA-Parcham faction internal coup against the PDPA-Khalq faction’s Taraki-Amin regime was planned for September 4, 1978, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. But in August 1978, Amin learned of the planned coup, arrested Qadir and Ahmedzai, and “went on a witch-hunt for Parchamis, eliminating them and their sympathizers from key government and party posts and filling the jails with them,” according to the same book.

Right-wing Islamic opponents of the Taraki-Amin regime in rural Afghanistan, meanwhile, also began to soon organize against the mixing of sexes in the classrooms of the post-Saur Revolution’s literacy campaign and against its democratic reform of Afghan’s marriage laws--which would now abolish forced marriages, now insure freedom of choice of marriage partner and now make 16 years the minimum age for marriage. But the anti-feminist rural Afghan religious leaders, rural village heads, and rural elders who opposed the literacy campaign and marriage law reforms--along with their followers--were also either repressed in large numbers by the PDPA-Khalq regime in 1978 or fled to Pakistan during the last 6 months of 1978. As James Lucas’s recent “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan ” article recalled:

“…Efforts to introduce changes involved a degree of coercion and violence directed mainly toward those living in areas outside of Kabul where the vast majority of the population lived in mountainous, rural and tribal areas where there was an exceptionally high rate of illiteracy. Steps to redistribute land were initiated but were met by objections from those who had monopoly ownership of land.

“It was the revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed orthodox Muslim men in the Pashtun villages of eastern Afghanistan to pick up their guns. Even though some of those changes had been made only on paper, some said that they were being made too quickly.

“According to these opponents, the government said their women had to attend meetings and that their children had to go to school. Since they believed that these changes threatened their religion, they were convinced that they had to fight. So an opposition movement started at that point which became known as the Mujahideen, an alliance of conservative Islamic groups.”

The anti-feminist Afghan alliance of Sunni Islamic party groups, also known as the “Peshawar Seven,” soon called for a jihad, or holy war, against the post-April 1978 revolutionary government in Afghanistan. And by the end of 1978, some 80,000 Afghans from the eastern half of Afghanistan had reached Pakistan;” and “eight training camps were established in the North West Frontier Province” by Pakistan’s right-wing military dictatorship “to turn simple Afghan refugees into guerrilla fighters,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

A report in the February 1979 issue of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung indicated that the CIA apparently initially provided Pakistan’s military dictatorship with the money needed to purchase weapons for the anti-feminist Afghan refugees that it began training in late 1978. According to John Cooley’s 2001 book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism, “Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] officers and a few key Afghan guerrilla leaders were first secretly schooled in the service training centers of the CIA and the US Army and Navy Special Forces in the United States” and “main training took place under the watchful eyes of the Pakistanis and sometimes a very few CIA officers in Pakistan…”

In response, the Taraki-Amin regime signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the government of the neighboring Soviet Union on December 5, 1978, which then agreed to provide more Soviet military advisors and Soviet military aid for the PDPA-Khalq government in Afghanistan. Yet “in January 1979 a first contingent of some 500” anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas, “under the banner of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizbi-i-Islami” group," still “entered Kunar province, attacked Asadabad, its principal town, and captured a strategically located government fort,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Hekmatyar’s followers had initially “gained attention” in Afghanistan “by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil” according to journalist Tim Weiner.

In the western half of Afghanistan, Afghan Shiite Islamic party groups also had prepared for armed resistance to the post-April 1978 revolutionary government; and in February 1979 the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was taken hostage by an anti-government Shiite Islamic group that demanded the release by the PDPA-Khalq government of a political prisoner. The U.S. Ambassador was then killed during a shootout between Afghan police and his anti-government captors. The following month, hundreds of Afghan government officials (who were in charge of introducing the women’s literacy program in the western city of Herat ) and their Soviet advisors--along with members of their families—were apparently killed by rebellious local Afghans and a garrison of mutinous Afghan government soldiers in Herat on March 24, 1979. Major attacks were then made in Jalalabad, in Pattia province, and in Gardez during April 1979, “by Mujahideen organized from Pakistan by Syyed Ahmd Gailani and Mujaddidi,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Even before Democratic President Carter secretly signed a July 3, 1979 directive to officially provide covert military aid to the anti-feminist Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan (that Pakistan’s ISI agency had covertly trained to seek a regime change in Afghanistan), both the Tarkai-Amin regime and the government of the Soviet Union had accused Pakistan’s military dictatorship of illegally intervening in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, in violation of international law. As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “both Kabul and Moscow were convinced, not without reason, that the spreading insurrections in Afghanistan were encouraged, armed and directed by Pakistan.”

Yet Pakistan ’s military dictatorship apparently lied about its role in illegally intervening in the internal affairs of Afghanistan following the April 1978 Saur Revolution in Afghanistan. As Afghanistan: A Modern History recalled:

“Whenever such charges were publicly leveled at Pakistan, they were flatly denied. Pakistan was able to maintain the fiction…The whole support program was a very covert operation from beginning to end, conducted in…secrecy by the ISI whose chief, General Akhtar, reported directly to [then-Pakistani Dictator] Zia…The fiction was maintained even when the level of support reached massive proportions after the United States became involved…”

Prior to the introduction of large numbers of Soviet troops into Afghanistan by the Brezhnev regime in December 1979, the Carter Administration apparently also was not completely honest about the degree to which it was working for a regime change in Afghanistan by illegally intervening in Afghanistan’s internal affairs in early 1979. For example, as Steve Galster observed in his “ Afghanistan : The Making of U.S. Policy 1973-1990” article:

“According to a former Pakistani military official who was interviewed in 1988, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had asked Pakistani military officials in April 1979 to recommend a rebel organization that would make the best use of U.S. aid. The following month, the Pakistani source claimed, he personally introduced a CIA official to Hekmatyar who… headed what the Pakistani government considered the most militant and organized rebel group, the Hizbi-i Islami…”

And according to John Cooley’s 2001 book, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, during “the summer of 1979…National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski got Carter to sign a secret directive for covert aid to the Mujahideen resistance fighters.” As Brzezinski--a former Columbia University Professor of Government and former policy advisor to Barack Obama--confessed in a January 15, 1998 interview with the Paris newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur:

“…According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul . And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”

The Unholy Wars book also observed that “Charles Cogan, until 1984 one of the senior CIA officials running the aid program…agrees with Brzezinski…that the first covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance fighters was actually authorized fully 6 months before the Soviet invasion—in July 1979…” As a then-classified U.S. State Department Report of August 1979 stated, "the United States larger interests…would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan," according to James Lucas’ recent “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article.

(end of part 9. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 10: 1979-1981)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 8: 1977-1978

2010-09-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

Right-wing anti-feminist Islamic parties and Mujahideen or Taliban militias have exercised a special influence in Afghan politics since the 1980s. But the history of people in Afghanistan between 1977 and 1978 indicates that the radical secular left People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] also played an historically significant role in Afghan politics.

In July 1977, for example, Noor Mohammad Taraki’s PDPA-Khalq faction/party and Babrak Karmal’s PDPA-Parcham faction/party agreed to form one, united PDPA party, with a 30-member Central Committee in which each faction would be represented equally. After Mohammad Daoud seized control of Afghanistan’s government in 1973, the Khalq faction of the now-united PDPA had apparently been successful in persuading more members of the Afghan military to join the PDPA. A key role in the PDPA-Khalq faction’s recruitment of members of the Afghan military into the PDPA was apparently played by a graduate of Kabul University, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University Teachers College named Hafizullah Amin, who had lived and studied in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

But between July 1977 and April 1978, Afghan ruler Daoud was apparently “moving towards a one-party dictatorship by banning all political parties and opposition newspapers and by setting up his own National Revolutionary Party,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. Yet 85 percent of Afghanistan’s 15 million people in March 1978 were still “either peasants who made a precarious living off the land, or nomads.” The same book also indicated how the standard of living for most people in Afghanistan under the Daoud regime compared to the standard of living existing in other countries of the world in March of 1978:

“…The economic and social indicators relative to Afghanistan were the worst in the world. Per capita income was $157…It was the most backward country in the world with respect to energy consumption, with almost the entire rural population having no access to electricity. The country also ranked among the lowest in the world in terms of public health facilities, with one doctor for every 16,000 Afghans, 80 percent of the doctors being concentrated in Kabul …76 percent of Afghan children had not received any education, with no more than 4 percent of rural girls having ever attended a primary school. Afghanistan occupied the 127th place in the world in terms of literacy…”

While 45 percent of Afghanistan’s cultivated land in March 1978 was owned by just 5 percent of all Afghan landowners (who owned between 25 to 50,000 acres each), 60 percent of all landowners were still impoverished peasants who each only owned between 5 to 10 acres of cultivated land, from which they earned little money.

But after the autocratic Daoud regime apparently imprisoned or executed numerous PDPA-Parcham leaders and activists--and following the assassination of a leading PDPA-Parcham faction activist and Afghan Marxist intellectual, Mir Akbar Khyber (by the two gunmen who had led him out of his house), on April 17, 1978--Afghan government ruler Daoud was killed on April 28, 1978 during Afghanistan’s “Saur [April] Revolution” of April 1978. Yet according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, the April 27, 1978 Afghan Revolution “was in fact a military coup carried out by leftist officers of the” Afghan “armed forces under the direction of the PDPA without any popular participation.”

Following the murder of PDPA activist Mir Akbar Khyber (who was the editor of the Parcham faction’s Parcham newspaper), the PDPA had organized a funeral procession and demonstration by 15,000 supporters at which PDPA leaders Babrak Karmal and Noor Mohammad Taraki each gave anti-imperialist speeches. But the Daoud regime had responded to the demonstration by arresting Karmal, Taraki and a few other PDPA leaders during the night on April 25, 1978 and early hours of April 26, 1978. According to Afghanistan: A Modern History, however, “the arrests of the PDPA leaders implied that their sympathizers in the armed forces had to take urgent action to forestall their own arrests and certain execution by Daoud.”

So, after first taking over the armories, command centers and radio station in Kabul on April 27, 1978--and announcing on Radio Kabul that a military council led by a pro-PDPA-Parcham faction Afghan Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Abdul Qadir Dagarwal, now controlled Afghan’s government—supporters of the PDPA-Khalq faction within the Afghan military (led by Lt. Col. Mohammad Raf of the Fourth Armored Corps and his troops) overcame the resistance of Daoud’s 2,000-man presidential guard (most of whom were apparently killed in the fighting); and seized Afghanistan’s presidential palace in the early hours of April 28, 1978. After Daoud apparently resisted arrest by wounding one of the pro-PDPA military officers who attempted to arrest him, Daoud and his family were then “killed in a burst of gunfire” by other pro-PDPA military officer-led troops, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also notes that “except for a strong note…protesting against the arrests of the PDPA leaders…there was no Soviet involvement in what was purely an Afghan affair, not-withstanding Cold War-biased Western reports to the contrary.”

(end of part 8. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 9: 1978-1979)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 7: 1968-1976

2010-09-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Since Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, between 500 and 800 people have been killed by Pentagon drone attacks in Pakistan, as a by-product of the U.S. War Machine’s endless military intervention in Afghanistan. Yet much of the history of people in Afghanistan since 1968 may not still be widely-known, even by many readers of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

In 1968, for example, when student revolts broke out in the United States at Columbia University, in France, in Mexico and in other countries of the world, student revolts also broke out in Afghanistan and “student strikes that began in Kabul spread to provincial centers, where students who had returned to teach and work had become carriers of a new politically radicalized militancy,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. The following year, Afghan workers also struck for better pay and better working conditions in the few places in Afghanistan where some factories existed. Between 1965 and 1973, two thousand meetings and demonstrations—mostly led by activists of the secular leftist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] factions/parties—were held in Afghanistan which demanded more democratic reforms and modernization efforts in Afghanistan.

But right-wing Islamic opponents of democratic reforms and modernization efforts in Afghanistan also mobilized between 1965 and 1973 in Afghanistan. In 1971, for example, the University of Kabul “was closed for six months as a result of the bitter confrontation between Islamic and leftist radicals,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also recalled that in the early 1970s in Afghanistan:

“The Islamic backlash also took the form of attacks instigated by the mullahs on women wearing Western dress. They were incensed by the campaigns for female literacy and women’s rights led by the All-Afghanistan’s Women’s Council. According to a senior leader of the Council interviewed by George Arney, the mullahs declared in 1971 that women should stay in the house. Reactionaries sprayed acid on women’s faces when they came out in public without a veil. And when women wore stockings they shot at their legs with guns with silencers…”

By the early 1970s, dozens of Afghan political groups existed on campus at the University of Kabul. In addition, around 2,500 people in Afghanistan were also members of the PDPA faction/party [Khalq] led by Noor Mohammad Taraki and 1,500 to 2,000 Afghans were members of the PDPA faction/party [Parcham] led by Babrak Karmal. The number of people in Afghanistan who were members of the secular Maoist party was also between 1,500 and 2,000 in the early 1970s. But the Islamic party in Afghanistan still only had between 1,500 and 2,000 members. Yet, as James Lucas noted in an article, titled “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan”, that was posted on March 5, 2010 on the www.antiwar.org site, “according to Roger Morris, National Security Council staff member, the CIA started to offer covert backing to Islamic radicals as early as 1973-1974.”

Nearly all the members of the PDPA faction/parties, the Maoist party and the Islamic party in Afghanistan in the early 1970s, however, were still just members of the educated urban middle-class; and all of these political groups still did not have much of an organizational presence or mass base outside of Kabul, in the rural areas of Afghanistan.

Yet many people in the countryside were suffering from the effects of a drought in Afghanistan between 1964 and 1972, which developed into a famine in 1971 and 1972. One result of this famine in Afghanistan in 1971 and 1972 was that between 50,000 to 500,000 people starved to death because of the famine. And 75 percent of Afghanistan ’s land was still owned by only 3 percent of Afghan’s rural population in 1973.

Backed by Afghan military officers, Mohammad Daoud (the brother-in-law of Afghan King Zahir Shah who had previously been the Afghan monarchical regime’s autocratic prime minister between 1953 and 1963) then seized control of the Afghan government from the Afghan king (who had been sitting on the throne since 1933) in a July 17, 1973 coup—while Zahir Shah was on a holiday in Europe. After his 1973 palace coup abolished the monarchy, Daoud next “set up an authoritarian regime which made the government isolated” and “moved rapidly to undermine all the representative institutions” in Afghanistan “and, in particular, Parliament,” according to Revolution Unending: Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present by Gilles Dorronsoro. The same book also recalled that “to avoid any challenge Daud systematically suppressed the opposition, both legal and illegal” in Afghanistan and “following the coup the former Prime Minister and leader of the social democratic Hezb-I Demokrat-I Mottarki party, Dr. Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal ,who had been in power in 1965-67, was arrested in September 1973 and executed.”

Yet long before the U.S. government began to covertly arm the anti-feminist Mujahideen guerrillas during the Democratic Carter Administration—following the 1978 Afghan Saur (‘April’) Revolution and prior to the December 1979 Soviet government’s military intervention in Afghanistan—even the non-communist, autocratic Daoud monarchical regime and the post-1973 non-communist Daoud authoritarian regime felt that it was in Afghanistan’s national economic interest to align itself with the Soviet Union during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. As Afghanistan: A Modern History recalled:

“…Economic hardships caused the Afghans to turn to the Soviets for help…A four-year barter agreement was signed in July 1950, with the Soviets providing petroleum products, cement, cotton cloth and other essentials in return for wool, raw cotton and other Afghan products. The Soviets also agreed to the free transit of Afghan exports through their territory, and offered to invest in oil exploration…”

After lending the Afghan government money to construct a grain silo, a flour mill and a bakery in Kabul in 1954, for example, the Soviet government followed-up with loans for constructing an oil pipeline and three oil storage facilities, for road-building equipment, and for an asphalt factory and equipment to pave Kabul’s streets. Nearly $1.3 billion in Soviet economic assistance, mostly in the form of loans, was given to the non-communist Afghan government between 1956 and 1978; and an additional $110 million was received by the Afghan government from other Eastern bloc governments during the same period.

The U.S. government, in contrast, only began to provide some economic assistance to the non-communist, autocratic Afghan monarchical regime in 1956; and, after 1956, also began awarding some Afghan students grants to study at certain U.S. universities. But, according to James Lucas’s recent “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article:

“The CIA…recruited Afghan students in the U.S. to act as agents for them when they returned home. During this period at least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA), Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the U.S. and later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit, Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the U.S. `are either CIA-trained or indoctrinated.’”

Coincidentally, the Afghanistan Student Association [ASA] also apparently received part of its funding from the CIA’s Asia Foundation conduit [on whose board sat then-Columbia University President Grayson Kirk] during the Cold War Era.

In addition, between the mid-1950s and 1978, the Teachers College of Columbia University—under a U.S. Agency for International Development [AID] government contract—was involved in training teachers, developing educational curriculum and producing textbooks for the autocratic Daoud monarchical regime’s Ministry of Education in both Afghanistan, at the Ibn Sinn Teacher Training Institute in Kabul, and at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City.

Military assistance was also given by the Soviet Union to the non-communist, autocratic monarchical Afghan regime during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Between 1956 and 1978, for example, the Afghan government “received the equivalent of $1.24 million in military aid from the USSR , mostly in the form of credits” and “by 1978 some 3,725 Afghan military personnel had been trained in the Soviet Union,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

But after the Shah of Iran’s regime agreed to provide the Afghan government with $2 billion in economic aid in 1975 and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Kabul, Afghanistan in August 1976, the non-communist, authoritarian Daoud regime apparently began to reverse Afghanistan ’s post-1950 policy of aligning with the Soviet Union.

(end of part 7. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 8: 1977-1978")

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 6: 1953-1967

2010-09-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

In 2010, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are still displaced from their homes as a result of the U.S.-led or U.S.-supported military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have taken place since the Pentagon began its endless war in Afghanistan in October 2001. Yet most graduate students in history at U.S. universities were apparently never even required to take a course in the history of Afghanistan when they were undergraduates.

But in a 1953 palace revolution in Afghanistan, for example, Afghan Prince Mohammad Daoud--a cousin and brother-in-law of King Zahir Shah--became the Afghan monarchical regime’s Prime Minister, with the backing of the Afghan royal family; and Daoud then governed Afghanistan in an autocratic way between 1953 and 1963. As a result, “avowed Marxists like Dr. Mahmodi…spent the entire Daoud decade in jail” and other Afghan leftist dissidents, like Mir Akbar Khyber and Afghan leftist student dissident Babrak Karmal, “were released in 1956 on condition that they did not persist in their political activities,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam.

But after being released from prison in 1956, serving two years in the Afghan military and then becoming a student again, Babrak Karmal—the politically radicalized son of an Afghan general and provincial governor—began to recruit dissident left-wing Afghan intellectuals and activists to begin meeting in secret “study circles” inside Afghan private homes during the early 1960s. Four secret Afghan study circles of radical left Afghan dissidents were formed, one of which was led by Karmal. Another one of the four secret Afghan study circles during the early 1960s was led by an Afghan writer named Noor Mohammad Taraki, who had become politically radicalized while working in India between 1934 and 1937, when India was still a UK colony.

After Daoud involved the Afghan government in a dispute with Pakistan’s government that provoked a closing of the Afghan-Pakistan border (which led to a decline in Afghan government revenues), Daoud was forced to resign as prime minister on March 9, 1963. A new, more democratic constitution was then drafted and promulgated in 1964 by the Afghan monarchical government.

Meanwhile, in January 1965, 30 members of the four secret study circles of dissident radical left Afghan intellectuals and activists met at Noor Mohammad Taraki’s house to secretly form the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] a/k/a Khalq (“Masses”) and to elect a 7-member Central Committee and four alternate Central Committee members. In 1965 an election was also held in Afghanistan to choose members of a two-house Afghan parliament and Mohammad Yusuf was chosen to succeed Daoud as the new Afghan government’s prime minister.

Running as individuals, 4 members of the PDPA were then elected to parliament in the early 1965 Afghan elections. In Kabul, for example, two PDPA members were elected to the lower house of Afghan’s parliament: Babrak Karmal and Dr. Anahita Ratebzad. An Afghan woman physician, Dr. Ratebzad won through election one of the only four Afghan parliamentary seats in the lower house that were reserved for Afghan women in 1965. Both Karmal and Ratebzad also led the Afghan student demonstrators outside the opening session of parliament which demanded further democratization of Afghan political life and that the open formation of political parties in Afghanistan now be legalized.

But in October 1965, Afghan government troops opened fire on protesting students who were shouting slogans outside the home of Afghan Prime Minister Yusuf; and three of the students were killed. Dr. Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal, the leader of the Hezb-I Demokrat-I Mottarki social democratic party (which was less politically radical than the underground PDPA), was then named to replace Yusef as the new Afghan prime minister in November 1965.

In 1965—the same year that the PDPA was formed—a group of professors and teachers who were led by the head of Theology of Kabul University, Gholam Mohammad Niazi, started the Society of Islam (“Jamiat-i-Islam”). These leaders of the Society of Islam in the late 1960s were on the Afghan monarchical government’s payroll; and the Society of Islam’s student group, the Organization of Muslim Youth, “operated openly, organizing demonstrations and fighting” leftist Afghan students in the late 1960s, before winning student elections at Kabul University in 1970, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Within the radical leftist PDPA between 1965 and 1967, meanwhile, two factions developed: one faction led by Karmal and one faction led by Taraki.; and in May 1967, the original PDPA split apart into two parties calling themselves the PDPA, with each party having its own central committee and general secretary (Karmal and Taraki). Karmal’s PDPA faction/party was called Parcham (named after its newspaper, Parcham/”Banner”), while Taraki’s PDPA faction/party was called Khalq (named after its newspaper, Khalq/”Masses”). Following the release from prison and death in 1966 of the “doyen of Afghan Marxism,” Dr. Abdul Rahman Mahmoodi, some followers of Mahmoodi also formed a smaller pro-Beijing Maoist party in Afghanistan, which gained some support for awhile from Afghan industrial workers that enabled it to lead some strikes of workers in Afghanistan .

(end of part 6. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 7: 1968-1976)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 5: 1933-1953

2010-09-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

The U.S. War Machine has been bombing Afghanistan for over 8 years in its endless war against the Taliban regime’s Afghan government. Yet over 80 percent of Afghanistan’s territory in early 2010 was apparently still controlled by the Taliban regime and other armed Islamic guerrilla groups in Afghanistan that are apparently now allied with the Taliban. One reason neither the Republican Bush II Administration nor the Democratic Obama Administration has been able to quickly achieve a military victory in its endless war in Afghanistan might be because most members of the Militaristic U.S. Establishment’s foreign policy-making elite apparently still don’t know very much about the history of the people of Afghanistan.

Nadir Shah’s successor as Afghan King, Muhammad Zahir Shah, sat on the Afghan throne, for example, from 1933 to 1973—although he apparently never received as much U.S. mass media coverage in the USA during his 40 year reign in Afghanistan as did either Queen Elizabeth II or Princess Di of England. But in the 1930s, “fascist intelligence agents…succeeded in penetrating the government apparatus and particular branches of the Afghan economy as `consultants,’ `advisers’ and `experts,” according to The Truth About Afghanistan by S. Gevortom. The same book also noted that:

“The German colony in Afghanistan…greatly increased on the eve of the Second World War…Hitler’s agents Schenk, Fischer, Wenger and Knerlein…infiltrated the war ministry and the ministry of public works of Afghanistan…Nazi Germany managed to spread its influence among tribes in the south of Afghanistan and in the north-western border areas.”

And apparently Nazi agents in Afghanistan encouraged increased anti-Semitism in Afghanistan during World War II; so that the economic situation of the remaining Afghans of Jewish background deteriorated when Zahir Shah’s monarchical government restricted their economic activity to local trading only and removed them from the foreign trade positions some had previously held.

But Zahir Shah’s government did not align Afghanistan with Nazi Germany during World War II. Instead, Zahir Shah's government announced in November 1941 that--like the Irish government of Eamon DeValera--it would remain neutral during World War II.

Yet during Zahir Shah’s forty-year reign, demands for more democratization and modernization in Afghanistan began to also be made by some people in Afghanistan.

A secret society of supporters of constitutional reform and democratization, the People of the Afghan Youth (“ Halqa-yi-Jawani-I Afghanistan ”) was formed and then broken up by the monarchical regime. But after Zahir Shah appointed his uncle, Shah Mahmud Khan, to be the Afghan monarchy’s prime minister in 1945, Shah Mahmud ordered the release of all Afghan political prisoners.

The first student union in Afghanistan , the Union of Students, was then founded in 1946 and its political orientation was liberal reformist and anti-imperialist. The following year, the anti-monarchist, Awakened Youth [“Weekh--Zalmayan’] group of Afghan nationalists was started, which openly discussed the ideal of setting up a democratic republic in Afghanistan.

Then, in 1949, a parliamentary election was held and 40 percent of the elected members of the new Afghan parliament favored democratization and modernization reforms. So, not surprisingly, the Afghan parliament next passed a 1949 law which finally legalized freedom of the press in Afghan society.

Predictably, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam, “the enactment of laws permitting freedom of the press led to the appearance of newspapers and other publications whose favorite targets became the” Afghan “ruling family oligarchy and” Afghan “conservative religious leaders.”

At the same time, between 3,500 and 5,000 Afghans of Jewish background still lived in Afghanistan in 1949--with more than 2,000 of them residing in the city of Herat and deriving their family incomes from the Persian carpet trade or from employment as tailors and shoemakers. But aside from a few wealthy families of Jewish background, most of the Afghans of Jewish background were forbidden to leave the country between 1933 and 1950. After 1951, however, they were allowed to emigrate from Afghanistan.

So by 1966, many Afghans of Jewish background had moved to either India or Israel/Palestine and only about 800 people of Jewish background now lived in Afghanistan; and by 1967 nearly 4,000 people of Afghan background now lived in Israel/Palestine.

By December 1969, only a few dozen Afghans of Jewish background still lived in either Herat or in Kabul; and, in all of Afghanistan, there were now only about 300 Afghans of Jewish background. And by 2005, according to the New York Times, only one Afghan of Jewish religious background apparently still lived in Afghanistan.

At Kabul University, meanwhile, during the early 1950s, the Union of Students “became a forum for free-wheeling debate and attacks on the status quo” in Afghanistan, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. A Movement of the Enlightened Youth, the TNB (“Tehrik-i-Naujawanan Baidar”), was also started by young students in Afghanistan which, in its manifesto, called for: 1. granting legal rights to Afghan women; 2. a democratic Afghan government which was accountable to an elected Afghan parliament; 3. eradication of official corruption in Afghanistan; 4. the formation of political parties in Afghanistan; and 5. the economic development of Afghanistan’s economy.

After a 1952 demonstration was held by these groups which demanded that people in Afghanistan be allowed to form political parties, however, the monarchical Afghan government prevented any further protest by these dissident political groups. According to Afghanistan: A Modern History, for example, just before a 1953 palace revolution in Afghanistan, the Movement of the Enlightened Youth/TNB group of young political dissidents “was suppressed” by the Afghan monarchical regime and “some of its more vocal leftists were jailed.” The same book also recalled that among the Afghan leftist dissidents imprisoned in 1953 were included Dr. Abdul Rahman Mahmoodi (who was “the doyen of Afghan Marxism”), an Afghan historian named Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghubar and an Afghan Marxist intellectual named Mir Akbar Khyber.

(end of part 5. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 6: 1953-1967)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 4: 1924-1933

2010-09-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

Between January 2009 and late March 2010, nearly 400 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in the Pentagon’s endless war in Afghanistan. Yet the history of people in Afghanistan is still unknown to many people in the USA.

In July 1928, for example, Afghan King Amanullah, for a second time, attempted to enact a series of democratic reforms in Afghanistan by convening a loya jirga—a meeting of Afghanistan’s leading tribal and religious leaders—and urging it to support the following reforms: 1. establishment of a Western-style constitutional monarchy, a cabinet of ministers, an elected lower legislative house of representatives and a nominated upper legislative house; 2. separation of religious and state power; 3. legal emancipation of women and abolition of polygamy; 4. compulsory education for all Afghans; and 5. establishment of co-educational schools.

Most of Amanullah’s July 1928 proposed modernization and democratic reforms were rejected, however, by the members of the loya jirga meeting. So Amanullah then convened a new loya jirga meeting that only included his own political supporters, which then approved all his reform proposals and also banned slavery, declared Afghanistan to be a secular state and legally abolished the use of a chadar or veil by Afghan women. But agents of the UK government in Afghanistan such as T.E. Lawrence (a/k/a “Lawrence of Arabia”) apparently then encouraged the religiously conservative Afghan tribal leaders who opposed Amanullah’s democratic reform program--because it reduced their power, privileges and special influence within Afghan society--to start another uprising against Amanullah’s regime. According to The Truth About Afghanistan book by S. Gevortom:

“In late 1928 by bribery and deception British agents managed to provoke a rebellion among certain tribes in the eastern part of Afghanistan . A British Intelligence agent, Col. T.E. Lawrence, arrived in the north-western province of India. Under the alias of aircraftsman Shaw he became very active in arranging meetings with Afghan opposition leaders and virtually directed anti-government activities in Afghanistan …”

By November 1928 Shinwari Pashtun tribesmen in Afghanistan had burned down Amanullah’s winter palace and were marching on Kabul to overthrow his regime. So after fleeing to Kandahar, Amanullah then abdicated in favor of his brother Inayatullah Khan, before eventually going into exile in Italy. But, ironically, the Shinwari Pashtun tribesman had also burned down the UK government’s consulate in the city of Jalalabad before marching on to Kabul.

So, not surprisingly, British agents then created “another center of rebellion in northern areas of Afghanistan where their henchman Bacha Saquo was operating,” according to The Truth About Afghanistan. The same book also recalled:

“On the eve of his force’s attack on Kabul his envoys had a secret meeting with British ambassador Humphreys to clarify details of the planned seizure of the Afghan capital. On February 28, 1929, the British Daily Mail wrote that Britain’s representative in Kabul, Humphreys, had helped…Bacha Saquo to come to power…Supporting the rebels…British military aircraft time and again violated the air space…British planes flew over Kabul…”

So only three days after Amanullah’s abdication in January 1929, Saquo--a Tajk bandit from northern Afghanistan--entered Kabul with his followers and “seized Kabul, overthrew the…government and proclaimed himself” the Afghan king, according to The Truth About Afghanistan. But, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam, the UK government-backed Saquo then “subjected the city and its…inhabitants to nine month reign of terror” in which there was much looting, pillage and raping of women by his troops.

Not surprisingly, in response to the 9-month reign of terror in Kabul, armed Afghan opposition to Saquo’s regime soon developed within Afghanistan and though, initially, “strongly supported by the imperialist and internal reactionary forces,” according to The Truth About Afghanistan, Saquo did not remain in power for long. After the UK government apparently ended its support for Saquo--and began to back the Afghan tribal army of General Mohamad Nadir Khan and his Afghan clan—Saquo’s troops were soon defeated.

The Afghan tribal army of Nadir Khan and his Afghan clan then occupied Kabul in October 1929; and Saquo and his leading followers were publicly hanged in November 1929--“despite a pledge to spare Bacha Saquo’s life and a promise of safe passage signed on a copy of the Koran by the victorious general,”when Saquo had agreed to surrender the previous month, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Nadir Khan then was placed on the Afghan throne, himself, by his tribal army; and in September 1930 a jirga was convened which officially proclaimed Nadir Khan as Nadir Shah, the new Afghan king. Nadir Shah then built up a regular Afghan army of 40,000 men, opened up the Afghan economy to privately-owned corporations and promulgated a new Afghan Constitution in 1931--before being assassinated by an Afghan high school student in November 1933.

Under the Afghan Constitution of 1931, an autocratic monarchical political system linked to Afghan religious conservatives was re-established and the religious law of the Hanafi School of Sunni Islam was decreed as the official law of Afghanistan. The imams of Afghan mosques were then put on the Afghan government payroll during Nadir Shah’s brief reign and relatives of influential Afghan religious figures were all appointed by Nadir Shah to lucrative government positions.

It was also during Nadir Shah’s four-year reign that the first Afghan higher educational institution, the Faculty of Medicine, was set up in 1932. But, prior to his assassination in 1933, “there was a perception that Nadir Shah leaned towards” UK imperialism too much, because the UK government had “granted him 170,000 pounds” after his seizure of power in 1929, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Following Nadir Shah’s assassination in 1933, the remaining Afghans of Jewish religious background were only allowed to live in Herat , Balkh or Kabul and were prohibited from living in other towns in Afghanistan. In Herat, Balkh and Kabul, Afghans of Jewish background apparently also only now lived in separate neighborhoods from the neighborhoods in which Afghans of other religious backgrounds lived. In addition, after 1933 they were not allowed to leave Herat, Balkh or Kabul without a permit and were required to pay a special yearly poll tax. Between 1933 and 1950, people of Jewish background in Afghanistan were also not allowed to obtain jobs in the Afghan monarchical government’s civil service; and their children were not allowed to attend Afghan government schools.

(end of part 4. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 5: 1933-1953)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 3: 1901-1924

2010-09-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

Over 2,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in the endless war in Afghanistan since Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. But the U.S. mass media news departments still seem to pay more attention to the individual deaths of Israeli civilians in war than to the individual deaths of Afghan civilians in war. Yet--although many Afghans of Jewish religious background emigrated during the second half of the 19th century--in the early 20th century around 12,000 people of Jewish background still lived in Afghanistan. According to the 2007 edition of Encyclopedia Judaica:

“…The Jewish communities of Afghanistan were largely composed of… Meshed Jews…Economically, their situation in the last century was not unfavorable; they traded in skins, carpets, and antiquities…”

Some of the wealthiest Afghans of Jewish background derived their wealth from having special economic interests in neighboring Czarist Russia. But after their foreign investments in Russia were nationalized by the revolutionary government in Russia following the October Revolution of 1917 and Afghan’s monarchical government began monopolizing the foreign trade which had previously been a source of wealth for Afghans of Jewish background, they became increasingly pauperized. So more of them then emigrated; and only between 3,000 and 4,000 people of Jewish background still lived in Afghanistan by the 1930s.

But after inheriting the Afghan throne in 1901, Abdur Rahman’s son, Habibullah Khan, was (like his father) paid an annual subsidy by the UK government—even after a 1905 treaty between Afghanistan and the UK removed the official right of the UK government to control Afghan foreign policy. And Habibullah controlled the Afghan government from 1901 until he was assassinated in February 1919.

During the reign of Afghan King Habibullah, some intellectual criticism of both UK imperialism and the nature of Afghan’s antiquated feudalist society in the early 1900s began to develop. A then-46-year-old Afghan intellectual named Mahmud Tarzi, for example, began to publish in 1911 a bi-monthly newspaper, Seraji-al-Akhbar, that “became a vehicle for his critical views on imperialism, the need for the modernization of Afghan society, and on the resistance to change of Muslim clerics” in Afghanistan, according to Angelo Rasanayagam's Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Then, when Habibullah was assassinated after about 18 years on the Afghan throne, the son who succeeded him on the Afghan royal throne, Amanullah Khan, began to be advised by the anti-imperialist Seraji-al-Akhbar publisher-journalist Tarzi. Both Tarzi and the top Afghan army generals—whose support following his father’s murder enabled Amanullah to succeed his father as ruler—urged Afghan King Amanullah to proclaim the complete independence of Afghanistan on April 13, 1919. But in response to this declaration of Afghanistan’s independence, UK military forces bombed the Afghan monarchical government’s military encampment at Dakka on May 9, 1919, killing 20 to 30 Afghan soldiers and Afghan tribesmen. The Afghan monarchical government then declared war on UK imperialism on May 13, 1919; and on May 15, 1919 the Afghan War of Independence (a/k/a the Third Anglo-Afghan War) began.

After three columns of Afghan troops marched towards India (which was then still a colony of UK imperialism that also included what is now Pakistan and Bangla Desh), British military planes next began to bomb the Afghan cities of Jalalabad and Kabul. The Afghan War of Independence was then soon ended in August 1919 by the Treaty of Rawalpindi, in which the UK government--despite dictating the terms of the treaty-- again officially agreed to allow the Afghan government to control its own foreign affairs and officially recognized Afghanistan’s independence.

During 1919, Amanullah also established a Council of Ministers and appointed Tarzi to be the Afghan government’s foreign minister. Four years later Amanullah also promulgated a new Afghan constitution that was modeled on the 1906 Persian/Iranian constitution, retained his position as King under the new constitution and attempted to institute some democratic reform and modernization internally in Afghanistan. But Amanullah’s 1923 proposals for the emancipation of Afghan women, compulsory education for all Afghans and co-educational schools in Afghanistan were opposed by Afghan’s religiously conservative tribal leaders. At the same time, the independent foreign policy pursued by Amanullah’s government—which had signed a friendship treaty with the government of the neighboring Soviet Union on February 28, 1921-- displeased the UK government.

So, according to the book The Truth About Afghanistan by S. Gevortom, the UK government then “hatched plots,” “resorted to such tried and tested means as bribing” Afghan “tribal chiefs and religious leaders and supplying arms and ammunition to” Afghan “tribes,” and "actively supported the extreme right of the Moslem clergy which was in opposition to Amanullah.” British agents, in the spring of 1924, then “succeeded in organizing a major tribal uprising in Khosta, a region of Afghanistan bordering” on UK imperialism’s then-colony of India. The same book also noted:

“The uprising spread to some other regions of Afghanistan. The insurgents demanded the repeal of progressive laws and reforms adopted by Amanullah’s government and insisted on a pro-British line in Afghan policy.”

Amanullah’s supporters within the Afghan army, however, were able to suppress this UK government-backed Afghan uprising of 1924. But Amanullah still lacked as strong an army or as strong a government bureaucracy as the Turkish leader Ataturk had at his disposal, when Ataturk was able to introduce some secular democratic reforms in Turkey ( during this same historical period). So Amanullah was unable to immediately move forward with his democratic reform program, even after the 1924 revolt in Afghanistan was suppressed by his Afghan army supporters.

(end of part 3. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 4: 1924-1933")

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 2: 1876-1901

2010-08-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

(This article was previously posted on the Austin-based Rag Blog alternative news blog earlier in the year).

The Democratic Obama Administration’s Pentagon spent nearly a billion dollars in 2009 on the Afghan War contracts it awarded for construction projects that were mostly on U.S. military bases across Afghanistan. Yet most U.S. taxpayers still probably know little about the 19th-century history of people in Afghanistan or about the wars that were fought in Afghanistan during the 19th century.

After occupying Quetta in Baluchistan in 1876 and converting it into a military base, UK imperialism, for example, launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War by again invading Afghanistan. The UK government then replaced Sher Ali Khan as Afghanistan’s king by putting Sher Ali’s son, Yaqub Khan, on the Afghan throne. Yaqub Khan was then forced by the UK government to sign the Treaty of Gandamak in May 1879.

As a result of the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak, the feudalist monarchical regime agreed to let the UK government control Afghanistan’s foreign affairs and establish UK diplomatic missions in Kabul and other Afghan cities. It also gave the British control of large areas of Afghanistan west of the Indus River in exchange for the UK government agreeing to now pay the new Afghan king, Yaqub Khan, an annual subsidy of 60,000 British pounds per year.

But, naturally, most Afghans who lived in Kabul did not support the terms of the May 1879 Treaty of Gandamak and were against giving the UK government so much special influence in Afghanistan. So in September 1879 the UK government’s diplomatic representative in Kabul was murdered “by mutinous Afghan soldiers who had been assigned to protect him,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. In retaliation, a British general named Roberts moved his troops into Kabul on October 12, 1879 and forced Yaqub Khan to abdicate. Then General Roberts “became the virtual ruler of Kabul , instigating a rule of terror that was bitterly resisted” until “the British forces found themselves under siege,” by Afghan resistance fighters, according to the same book.

But after being defeated in open battle by Afghan resistance fighters on July 27, 1880 at Maiwand, near the Afghan city of Kandahar, UK troops were finally withdrawn from Afghanistan in April 1881, thus ending the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Yet before withdrawing its troops, the UK government began supporting an Afghan feudal warlord, Abdur Rahman Khan, after Rahman had marched on Kabul and declared himself the new Afghan king in Charikar on July 20, 1880. In this way, the UK government insured that Afghanistan would continue to be a British protectorate whose foreign policy would be controlled by the UK government, instead of being a fully independent state.

Known as the “Iron Amir,” Afghan King Abdur Rahman ruled over people in Afghanistan in a repressive way. Afghanistan: A Modern History described how this British imperialist-backed monarch governed Afghanistan:

“In almost continuous warfare during his 20-year reign, rebellions were punished by mass executions, or deportations, such as the forced resettlement of thousands of Ghilzai Pashtun tribesmen…He established a ruthless police force to subjugate suspected opponents and uncooperative officials.”

Not surprisingly, the UK government whose special interests he served provided Rahman’s repressive regime in Afghanistan with “substantial supplies of arms and ammunition,” according to the same book. And, like the previous 19th-century Afghan kings, Abdur Rahman also was paid an annual subsidy by the UK government during his reign of nearly 20 years. Between 1.2 million and 1.85 million Indian rupees per year were paid to Rahman between 1882 and 1901 by the UK government; and Rahman used a portion of his annual subsidy from the British imperialists to fund his recruitment of the Afghan troops he required to continue to rule people in Afghanistan in an undemocratic way.

(end of part 2. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 3: 1901-1924))

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 1: 1838 to 1876

2010-08-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

(This article was previously posted on the Austin-based Rag Blog alternative news blog earlier this year)

The number of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan has increased from 51,000 to between 70,000 and 100,000 since Barack Obama’s inauguration as U.S. president in January 2009. And there are still between 60,000 and 101,000 armed private contractors--as well as 38,000 combat troops in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] from countries other than the USA-- in Afghanistan in 2010. Yet if you grew up in the USA, your high school social studies teacher was likely to know more about the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than about the history of Afghanistan.

But although no people of Jewish religious background lived in Afghanistan prior to the 19th century, by the end of the 1840s (after the Anglo-Indian army of UK imperialism which had invaded Afghanistan in 1838 was driven out by the Afghan people in the early 1840s) about the same number of people of Jewish background then lived in Afghanistan as then lived in the United States. As Raphael Patai noted in her book Tents of Jacob, “the number of Jews in Afghanistan in the mid-nineteenth century was estimated at 40,000.”

Yet the aim of the UK government’s military occupation of Kabul between 1839 and 1842, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, was just mainly to prop up an ineffectual and unpopular leader named Shah Shuja, whom the UK government had put in power, in place of Afghan King Dost Mohammad Khan, as Afghanistan ’s ruler.

UK troops in Afghanistan, however, found the Afghan people to be opposed to their presence in Afghanistan; and, between 1839 and 1842, there were “increasingly effective armed attacks on the British garrison” in Kabul, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. The UK troops were soon forced to retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad, “through narrow mountain defiles and passes in the harshest wintry conditions, with the long columns of soldiers” and their civilian camp followers “being continuously shot at and ambushed by ferocious Ghilzai tribesmen from the surrounding hills,” according to the same book. As a result, around 9,500 (including 600 English officers and their families) of the primarily Indian troops of UK imperialism and 12,000 Indian civilian camp followers lost their lives when they were defeated militarily by people in Afghanistan during the 1839-1842 Anglo-Afghan War.

In revenge for being defeated in the First Anglo-Afghan War, however, UK troops returned to Kabul in 1843 and sacked Kabul . But because of its defeat in the 1839-1842 war, the UK government agreed to invite Dost Mohammad Khan to return to Kabul and resume his position as Afghan King. Twelve years later, on March 30, 1855, a treaty of friendship was signed between the UK government and Dost Mohammad’s feudalist government.

The UK government then started to pay King Dost Mohammad an annual subsidy of 10,000 British pounds to help protect its strategic interests in that area of the world. Dost Mohammad remained on the Afghan throne until 1863; and between 1863 and 1878, Dost Mohammad’s son, Sher Ali Khan, was Afghanistan’s ruling monarch.

After the UK army again intervened in Afghanistan in October 1856 to force the Persian/Iranian government troops that had occupied the city of Herat in western Afghanistan to withdraw, the UK government did not openly intervene in Afghanistan’s internal affairs again until 1876. But as the book Afghanistan: A Modern History noted, “when Disraeli became [ UK ] prime minister, the tacit policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Afghanistan ended, and was replaced by the `forward policy’…”

(end of part 1. "A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 2: 1876 to 1901" to soon follow).

Remembering 40th Anniversary of Kent State Massacre

2010-05-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

May 4th marked the 40th anniversary of the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University by members of Ohio's National Guard. Barry Levine was the boyfriend of Allison Krause, one of the slain students. In his eulogy for her, Levine described what happened on May 4, 1970 in Kent, Ohio:

"...We stood for a few seconds watching the soldiers move out behind a screen of gas, before deciding to retreat with the crowd of students.

"...A gas cannister landed at our feet, exploding in our faces...

"After a few seconds of recovery, Allison turned in her tracks and froze. She stood in the path of the pursuing troops screaming at the top of her lungs...The hand drawn to her face, holds a wet rag used to protect herself from the gas, and her other hand holds mine, with which I pulled her over the hill and into the parking lot, a safe distance from the troops.

"For several minutes we stood in the parking lot watching these men threaten us with their rifles...And then they turned..."

In his 1981 book Mayday: Kent State, J. Gregroy Payne also noted the following:

"In the fall of 1980, additional information from the FBI investigation on Kent State housed at the National Archives was released to the public. This information revealed that President Nixon instructed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover--who thought the four victims `got what they deserved'--to find information in the fall of 1970 to substantiate the Guardsmen's claims about the incident. Nixon's directive was issued during the FBI's investigation of the incident. Despite the recent shocking revelations, thousands of pages of the FBI report remain classified, therefore, unavailable for public scrutiny..."

(Downtown 4/27/94)

Exxon Mobil & The U.S. Mass Media Historically

2010-05-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

In the early 1990s, before Exxon was allowed to merge with Mobil (despite U.S. anti-trust laws which are supposed to prevent corporate monopolies from being created within the U.S. economic system), Mobil was then the U.S. corporation with the largest direct investment in Saudi Arabia. It was then involved in two huge joint ventures with the Saudi Government: a refinery and a petrochemical complex. Each Mobil-Saudi business project cost more than $1 billion to construct.

In addition, 12 percent of Mobil's imported crude oil came from Iraq before Saddam Hussein decided to annex Kuwait's oilfields in August 1990, in his failed attempt to increase his bargaining power with Mobil and the other transnational oil companies at that time.

Coincidentally, in 1990 a member of Mobil's board of directors, J.Richard Munro, was also the then-chairman of the Executive Committee of Time Warner's corporate board.

Mobil had long been represented on the corporate board of Time magazine's parent company. As early as 1967, for example, Mobil's president at that time, Rawleigh Warner, also sat on Time Inc.'s board of directors.

Despite its historic ties to Time magazine, Mobil was not reluctant during the 1980s to take legal action against U.S. mass media institutions over which it had no control. According to a 1988 book by former Time-Life Broadcast Chairman Richard Clurman, entitled Beyond Malice: The Media's Years of Reckoning, in the 1980s Mobil created a new $10 million insurance policy for its top 100 executives "to cover their costs should any of them find a reason to sue for libel" any U.S. mass media institutions that print articles about them which the Mobil executives don't like.

Newsweek magazine's parent company, The Washington Post, was sued for $100 million by then-Mobil President William Tavoulareas in the 1980s, for example, after the newspaper printed a front-page article which, according to Clurman's Beyond Malice book, charged Mobil's then-president "with setting up his 24-year-old son in a multimillion dollar oil shipping business, which profited mightily from its special relationship with Mobil."

In 1987, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. found the Washington Post story on Mobil's then-president "substantially true" and ruled that "an adversarial stance"--even in relation to Mobil--"is fully consistent with professional investigative reporting." When the then-Mobil president appealed this court decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to even consider reviewing the anti-Mobil, pro-freedom-of-the-press verdict.

(Downtown 10/24/90)

65th Anniversary of Nazi Germany's Military Defeat

2010-05-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

This May marks the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany's military defeat in Europe, following its launching of a world war which claimed the lives of over 50 milliion people, 50 percent of whom were civilians. After Nazi Germany's military surrender, Hitler's successor as Nazi party fuehrer--Martin Bormann--apparently "made it to South America," according to Martin Bormann: Nazi In Exile by Paul Manning. In 1981, this same book noted the following about the state of the exiled Nazi Party organization in the early 1980s:

"As the Fuehrer in exile guards the party treasury, and keeps a close eye on the investments and corporations controlled through stock ownership by the organization, the leadership in position today remains relatively young and viable...

"The Bormann organization continues to wield enormous influence. Wealth continues to flow into the treasuries of its corporate entities in South America, the United States and Europe. Vastly diversified, it is said to be the largest landowner in South America and through stockholdings controls German heavy industry."

Some of the former Nazis and their collaborators who didn't quickly change into civilian clothes and sneak into Argentina apparently ended up being hired by the U.S. government, after Nazi Germany surrendered militarily. As Blowback: America's Recruitment Of Nazis And Its Effects On The Cold War by Christopher Simpson observed:

"The fact is, U.S. intelligence agencies did know--or had good reason to suspect--that many contract agents that they hired during the cold war had committed crimes against humanity on behalf of the Nazis. The CIA, the State Department, and U.S. Army Intelligence each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing selected former Nazis and collaborators to the United States. Other projects protected such people by placing them on U.S. payrolls overseas."

(Downtown 4/19/95)

40 Years Ago: Kent State and Jackson State Massacres

2010-03-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

May 4, 2010 will mark the 40th anniversary of the firing by Ohio National Guard troops of 67 shots on the campus of Kent State University, after the Guard broke up a student anti-war rally there. As a result of this shooting, four Kent State students were killed and nine students were wounded. Ten days after the Kent State massacre, two African-Americans (Phillip Gibbs and James Green) were killed and 12 were wounded on the campus of Jackson State College on Mississippi, after local police started firing near a student dormitory. Following the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, many U.S. campuses were simultaneously shut down for the rest of the month by mass student protests.

The Kent State massacre came to be symbolized by a photograph of Jeff Miller's dead body, beneath the tortured face of a long-haired woman with outstretched arms. Miller had grown up on Long Island. According to The Kent State Coverup by Joseph Keiner and James Munves:

"Jeff Miller had transferred to Kent State in Jan. 1970, just four months before he was killed. He was a gregarious young man...He had gone to Woodstock and suddenly adopted the youth culture of the late 1960s, wearing a fringed jacket, beads, and headband and spending long hours in his room practicing on the drums.

"His mother saw him off to Kent State an the end of the winter-break, just before his 20th birthday at the end of March..."

After Miller was killed by the Ohio National Guard troops, an Ohio National Guard captain apparently planted a gun on Miller's dead body so the troops could claim they shot Miller in self-defense.

(Downtown 4/19/95)

40th Anniversary of Fred Hampton's Murder

2010-03-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

Dec. 4, 2009 marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Illinois Black Panther Party [BPP] leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. The 1993 book Still Black, Still Strong noted that Hampton and Clark were "murdered in Chicago by police raiders from State Attorney's Office, in cooperation with the FBI," "Hampton, 21, was drugged beforehand by an agent provocateur who had infiltrated the BPP," and "Clark, 22, was killed as he answered a knock on the apartment door." In the same book, an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad appeared, in which the former New York Black Panther Party leader recalled:

"At first it was reported that it was a shoot-out between the Black Panthers and the police, and the police were just defending themselves. But subsequently it was found out that there was only one shot fired by the Black Panther Party members who were in the house...So Fred Hampton's murder became the clearest example of the escalation of the repression of the Black Panther Party."

In an April 27, 1969 speech, Hampton had reminded his audience that "you can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution" and "you can murder a liberator, but you can't murder liberation."

(Downtown 11/23/94)

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Conclusion

2009-12-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 6

2009-12-09T09:25:00.000-08:00

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 5

2009-12-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 4

2009-12-06T20:59:00.000-08:00

Besides writing the book, Busy Dying,

http://www.obenzinger.com/books_busyDying.html

Hilton Obenzinger is a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. Following is the text of a recent email interview with Busy Dying author Obenzinger. (See below for parts 1 to 3).

In what way is `Busy Dying’ different or similar to Professor Stefan Bradley's recently-published book,` Harlem vs. Columbia University’, from both political and literary point-of-view?

Hilton Obenzinger: Stefan Bradley’s book is not at all fictionalized, and it’s not memoir like Mark Rudd’s book; the book is history, based on interviews and archives, and projects a historian’s analysis of events, strategies, and motivations.

The book provides a needed revision of the distorted accounts of 1968, situating members of the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) and other black students, along with Harlem, as central players in how events unfolded. This is wonderful, as well as Bradley’s extension of his analysis of other black student-community eruptions at that time in elite universities, such as at Harvard, Yale, and Cornell, and the struggle for African American Studies at Columbia and other universities.

Professor Bradley’s work was also well-served by the April 2008 conference. I have some disagreements with his account, particularly his account of the white students, but that does not take away from the book as a major accomplishment.

There’s still more to do: I hope Ray Brown, Jr., Cicero Wilson, and the other leaders of the black students in Hamilton Hall write their accounts of the occupation and strike; and there’s certainly room for other historians to explore Columbia 1968, pulling together an account and analysis of all the threads of the story.

In 1968 many white Columbia and Barnard students protested against the Columbia University Administration's attempt to grab a few acres of Harlem parkland in order to build a new gym for Columbia students. Yet at a 40th anniversary reunion of '68 student protesters in 2008 there didn't seem to be that much discussion about Columbia's current attempt to grab 17 acres of West Harlem land, north of West 125th Street, for its latest campus expansion project. In what ways do you think people who participated in the 1968 Columbia protests have generally changed politically and philosophically since 1968? And in what ways do you think U.S. universities like Columbia University have changed or not changed since 1968?

Hilton Obenzinger: For the conference in 2008, the ad-hoc organizing committee assessed the situation of Columbia’s expansion, talking with a number of people involved, including Manning Marable, who heads up Columbia’s African American studies program.

We reached the conclusion that we--the conference organizers and the attendees--had no basis as an organization--if you could call it an organization!--to take a position on the decades of controversy surrounding Columbia’s plans. But we also decided to encourage everyone’s positions and discussion, and it was distressing to see Columbia President Lee Bollinger leave one panel he participated in just when questions were opened from the floor.

When we had our initial meeting with Pres. Bollinger, we pointed out that there were parallels between 1968 and today – Vietnam/Iraq, Gym/Manhattanville – and he said that Columbia is different today, and in terms of expansion, they were working with the community, with Harlem leaders. I’m sure that many would dispute that.

I had not followed the controversies and felt ill prepared to take a position, and I didn’t want to take a knee-jerk position that everything Columbia does is evil, tempting as that may be. Others I spoke with thought it was too late to stop the project, that gentrification involves a lot more players than Columbia and the community needed to pressure Columbia to win concessions (such as housing and jobs), while others thought it was a betrayal of 1968 to invite Bollinger to the conference when Columbia was once again engaging in what many consider a land grab.

Our goals for the conference – one of which was to insist that 1968 be accepted as part of the university’s history with our active involvement and not have our role erased or distorted – meant that we welcomed a tactical relationship with the university (which helped us with space and the participation of many sympathetic faculty) while encouraging a wide range of views on the current situation. I think we were successful in this regard.

Bollinger ended up getting attacked by a right-wing columnist in the Daily News who was outraged that the university president would participate in “an all-Bolshevik affair.” Hilarious.

I don’t think I can talk of how all the people involved in 1968 have changed politically. About 400 people were involved in the conference, but there were thousands of people involved in the anti-war, anti-gym side of the conflict (not counting those against us or in the middle), and they have probably gone in many directions.

A great many who came to the conference or who signed up on our on-line discussion group have continued their progressive political stances, although most do not adhere to radical views popular in the 60s. Quite a few shaped their lives to a great degree around their commitments to change in whatever career they took up – people who are academics in women’s studies and African American studies and other fields, union and community organizers, activists in social movements such as the women’s, environmental, anti-war, anti-racist movements, writers with left politics, lawyers and physicians for change, and more.

It’s probably safe to say that the majority opposed the war in Iraq (if not at the outset, at least by the time of the conference). As a generation at Columbia in 1968, I would say that, as far as the people I know and those who participated in the conference, we have been mainly true to our roots.

Universities have changed enormously as a result of Columbia and the whole student movement of the 60s. Universities now have ethnic studies, women’s studies, GLBT studies as separate programs emerged, and a lot more social consciousness in teaching and research. Not enough, but things are very different. Ivy League schools are now co-ed, students are regularly invited to contribute to university deliberations.

A lot has changed, but elite universities like Columbia are still instruments of the ruling elite, and particularly when it comes to military research, most are as deeply involved as ever, if not more.

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 3

2009-12-02T21:29:00.000-08:00

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 2

2009-12-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

Besides writing the book, Busy Dying,

http://www.obenzinger.com/books_busyDying.html

Hilton Obenzinger is a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. Following is the text of a recent email interview with Busy Dying author Obenzinger. (See below for part 1).

Why do you think anti-war students at Columbia University in 1968 did not also protest against the U.S. government's support for Israeli militarism in 1968?

Hilton Obenzinger: When the 1967 war broke out I was very confused and conflicted and ignorant. To illustrate: Edward Said was my teacher but I didn’t know he was a Palestinian – I didn’t know there was such a thing as a Palestinian. I didn’t even know he was an Arab – I thought he was Jewish!

We later became friends and colleagues in terms of literary studies and working on Palestinian rights, and we joked about that moment.

I stayed up one night during the war, upset about it, and in the early dawn sat on the Sundial in the center of the campus to read the NY Times, weeping. Wasn’t Israel sort of socialist? Weren’t they advanced, democratic and progressive? Why did the Arabs want “to push the Jews into the sea”?

My moment of awakening was in 1969 when Moshe Dayan went to Vietnam on a fact-finding tour and offered complete support for the US war. This was cognitive dissonance in a big way – and I either had to be consistent with my principles or begin fudging them out of some sense of ethnic loyalty (and fudging became the process for many progressive, anti-war, pro-civil rights Jews, trying to support their principles while apologizing for Israel – ultimately, an untenable position).

When I taught on the Yurok Indian reservation in 1969-70 I began a process of understanding settler colonial societies. In the 1970s, I studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sympathizing with the Palestinians as a national liberation movement, and I began to speak out.

Then, in the mid Seventies, I was working with the American Indian Movement, and I was going to collaborate with the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz on a book on how history made it so that we both ended up in California. Simon quickly realized he had to get the hell out of California, and he returned to New Mexico where he wrote a terrific book about his early experiences working in uranium mines.

I ended up writing This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, a collection of poems and sketches about Jews, Indians, and Palestinians that invokes a Jewish American sensibility free of Zionist assumptions – and that became the basis for my support of Palestinian rights. While writing that book I helped to establish a Jewish group in the Bay Area in order to protest the Israeli occupation and to provide a clear ideological alternative to the Zionist consensus that even held the left in thrall.

The book received the American Book Award, and I was invited to campuses to speak about what it means to be a Jewish American critical of Israel and Zionism. At this point I would be regularly attacked as a “self-hating Jew” and would have my life threatened.

That book appeared in 1980, and in 1981 I was invited to Beirut as part of an American delegation to the PLO to investigate the bombing attack by the Israelis on Fakhani, in downtown Beirut, a prelude to the 1982 invasion.

From that point Palestine became the focus of my political work through the first intifada, and eventually the “Holy Land” and the study of comparative settler colonial societies became the main interest in my scholarly research, which culminated in the cultural and literary study American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania, and continues today with a book I am working on called Melting Pots and Promised Lands: Zionism and the Idea of America.

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Part 1

2009-12-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

`Columbiagate': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 18

2009-11-29T18:39:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 17)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] colluded with Columbia, asking it to provide a basis for the finding of blight and allowing it to create conditions that could be used to try and establish such a basis.

“ESDC colluded with Columbia in hiring Columbia’s consultant AKRF to perform the blight study, in tailoring with AKRF the methodology of such a study to achieve a predetermined result, and in allowing Columbia to participate in and control the gathering of evidence, and in allowing Columbia to review and direct such a study.

“ESDC engaged in deception in its allegations of the neutrality of Columbia’s consultant AKRF…ESDC engaged in deception in its repeated misrepresentation of what records it possessed in relation to the Columbia Project…

“…The City Planning Commission [CPC]…failed to consider impacts of the threatened use of eminent domain in driving sales to Columbia, and consequent loss of businesses and jobs, and in causing the neglect of building repairs, and in fueling speculative run up of real estate prices in the wider West Harlem area…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 17

2009-11-28T21:47:00.001-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 16)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it failed to determine the public purposes of the project prior to selection of Columbia for the overwhelming benefit of such a project.

“ESDC failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it failed to consider any competing proposal to Columbia’s General Project Plan [GPP], including as-of-right development under the Community Board [CB] 9 197 (a) plan.

“ESDC failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it placed no limitation on Columbia’s GPP…limiting its displacement of current West Harlem business and residents or preventing it from defeating the intent of the community as expressed in the CB 9 197 (a) plan.

“ESDC made no effort to achieve public benefits proportional to the private benefits likely to flow from Columbia’s proposal.

“ESDC, together with NYC Economic Development Corporation [EDC], Department of City Planning [DEP], the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Development, the New York City Law Department and other agencies worked to keep planning secret…and time the project for Columbia’s convenience and political advantage…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 16

2009-11-27T21:49:00.001-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 15)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“…Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] has cooperated in a developer driven project, conceived by Columbia, initiated by Columbia, configured and defined by Columbia to maximize its own private benefit, and timed and directed by Columbia.

“ESDC, together with Economic Development Corporation [EDC] and Department of City Planning [DCP], failed to prepare a carefully considered plan when it showed favoritism to Columbia over other development proposals, cooperating with it in secret to subvert prior public planning commitments, allowing Columbia to choose the dual prong re-zoning and General Project plan [GPP] strategy, and assisting Columbia in developing such a strategy so as to maximize Columbia’s chances of realizing its maximal private benefit…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 15

2009-11-26T21:39:00.001-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 14)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“…Article I, section 7 of the New York State Constitution and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution limit takings to public use. Under the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Kelo v. City of New London, the majority limited the reliance upon economic development as public use, benefit or purpose to projects that are the result of a carefully considered plan. 54 U.S. 469, 478.

“The deciding concurring opinion of Justice Kennedy further required courts to be vigilant against pretextual purposes and favoritism in developer driven development projects…

“The stated public use, benefit or purpose of redeveloping a substandard and insanitary, or blighted, area is null and void because the finding that the Manhattanville industrial area was blighted was made in bad faith, in error of law, and without basis, and what blight-like symptoms are present are overwhelmingly caused, maintained or exacerbated by Columbia with Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC]’s knowledge and consent…

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 14

2009-11-25T20:08:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 13)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“…Calling privately funded and directed academic research a `civic purpose’ is…inappropriate when the knowledge gained from such research is not required to be made public, but in fact, through partnership with private pharmaceutical companies and other for-profit entities is proprietary and subject to patent.

“Further alleged civic purposes such as widening of street walls, increasing sight line and 125th street access to the Hudson waterfront, planting, and transparency requirements, and creation of a 12th Avenue market area cannot be civic purposes of the Project because they are already mandated in any development pursuant to the Re-zoning of December 18, 2007…

“Additional alleged civic purposes associated with the project are not only incidental, but pretextual because they were extraneous to the dominant use and purpose of the project…

“Such pretextual `civic purposes’ include the operation subsidy for a largely Columbia used waterfront park, lighting improvements, subway escalator improvements, funding of certain Harlem…organizations, a playground, rent free lease of other property on which New York City Department of Education may or may not build a school, the provision of a $20 million housing fund that will at most cover the cost of relocating residential tenants directly displaced from the area, limited use of Columbia facilities, and various scholarships and health, educational, business development and legal assistance programs, all amounting to no more than $200 million in value, or 3% of the total project cost…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 13

2009-11-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 12)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“There is no legal precedent recognizing private institutions of higher education as a civic facility, or an entity carrying out a community, municipal, public service, or other civic purpose. The term `civic’ implies use and participation of the public, and has heretofore required at least use by invitees from the public.

“A private university, with selective admission, charging high tuition, and offering its graduates valuable credentials for their private advantage, cannot qualify as a civic facility or provider of a civic purpose. If it did, there is no project sought by or benefiting…any land hungry private university that would not also qualify as a `civic purpose.’.

“In so far as `educational’ services or purposes can constitute civic purposes, the education must be for public education, open to the public, and subject to public governance.

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC]’s finding of need for educational facilities in New York City and State is made in bad faith, and without rational basis, for it has not established any public duty to provide private university facilities…”

`COLUMBIAGATE: Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 12

2009-11-23T19:48:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 11)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] acted in bad faith when it hired Columbia’s consultant AKRF to produce a study allegedly to ascertain whether the area was blighted, then collaborated with Columbia’s consultant AKRF to design, or consented to the use of, a methodology that would yield a predetermined conclusion.

“AKRF’s methodology excluded evidence the area was not blighted, that ignored causal links, such as that between Columbia ownership and vacancy, or between building condition and Columbia acquisition, management or control, and inferred causality without basis, such as between building conditions and supposed disinvestments in Manhattanville, even as Columbia itself was aggressively investing in Manhattanville.

“By excluding the ownership and occupancy history and economic context of the Manhattanville industrial area, AKRF, with ESDC’s knowledge and consent, deliberately engaged in an effort to color the evidence, and shape it to fit the pre-determined conclusion that the area was blighted…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 11

2009-11-22T19:47:00.001-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 10)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] acted in bad faith when it continued to participate in advancing Columbia’s Project when it knew in December, 2004 that the…Urbitran blight study did not adequately show the area to be blighted, when it communicated that concern to Columbia’s attorney…

“ESDC acted in bad faith, and in illegal delegation of its authority to make public findings, when it asked Columbia on August 1, 2005 to provide a `basis for a finding of blight,’ and when it requested a progress report on Columbia acquisition in Manhattanville.

“In doing so ESDC effectively communicated to Columbia that the realization of Columbia’s project would depend upon Columbia’s acquiring as much as Manhattanville as possible, and by direct control of the property, creating the conditions that could be used as a basis for a finding.

“Columbia proceeded to do so, refusing to renew leases, pressuring tenants to leave, and intentionally not performing adequate maintenance and repairs on buildings, even when economical to do so and minor repairs would ensure long productive lives of the buildings…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 10

2009-11-20T21:01:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 9)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Though Columbia held a series of three meetings with community leaders in 2004 and 2005 that it called `community consultation,’ Columbia treated them merely as informational meetings to present the alleged benefits of the project. Participants alleged Columbia was unresponsive to concerns expressed in those meetings…

“Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC]’s finding that the area was blighted was made in bad faith and violated its statutory authority, the New York State Constitution and the United States Constitution (UDCA Sec. 10 c; Article 1, section 7 of the New York State Constitution; 5th and 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution)…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 9

2009-11-19T19:37:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 8)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“From the outset, Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] let Columbia define the scale, scope, and design of the Project solely for Columbia’s benefit…

“From the outset, Columbia dictated the area it wished to control and the square footage it wished to build…

“Why Columbia must control the entire Manhattanville area, or why it must have precisely the number of square feet it desired was never questioned by ESDC…

“This Project has only been about what Columbia wants, not what the public needs…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 8

2009-11-18T20:46:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 7)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Overwhelmingly, the West Harlem community has consistently opposed the Columbia project so long as it was premised upon the use of eminent domain.

“On September 23, 2005, West Harlem Community Board 9 opposed the use of eminent domain in Manhattanville by a resolution adopted 29-0…

“…In August 2007…Community Board 9 voted 34 to 3 against the project…

“Community Board 9’s 197 (a) plan called for the creation of an entity which could negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement [CBA] with Columbia. The West Harlem Local Development Corporation [LDC] was established in 2006…

“…Columbia…was unwilling to negotiate over the scale, configuration, or program use of its Project…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 7

2009-11-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 6)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“…Compared to most of the rest of New York City, Manhattanville is not deprived of open space.

“Not only would the Project contribute little open space suitable for West Harlem community use, but the Project, by its height and the shadows it cast, would degrade existing Manhattanville Houses and Shieflin Park open space…

“Additional allegedly `civic and community benefits’ were offered in the Modified General Project Plan [GPP] of which Columbia would be the principal beneficiary. These include 12,000 square feet of ground floor retail space, for which Columbia will collect market rents, a $500,000 per year subsidy for 24 years for the operation of the Harlem Piers Park, the use of which will likely be more Columbia’s than West Harlem’s, lighting improvements under the Riverside Drive viaduct, or free wireless access throughout its campus…

“What all of these alleged `civic community benefits’ share in common is that they are extraneous to the dominant uses, benefits and purposes of the project…

“The total value of all these `goodies’ amount to no more than $200 million, or approximately 3% of the $6.5 billion projected cost of the Project.

“This package of `goodies’ was not agreed upon by the local community as adequate compensation for the impact of Columbia’s proposed project…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal--Part 6

2009-11-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 5)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“In summary, Allee King Rosen and Flemming [AKRF] provided a study with a methodology effectively tailored to deliver the result that the area was blighted, despite a fundamental absence of background economic conditions associated with blight. AKRF, with the knowledge, participation and approval of Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC], suppressed contrary evidence, avoided evaluation of casual relationships, and, most importantly, avoided any accounting for activity, omissions, and responsibility of the single most important player and causal factor in Manhattanville: Columbia’s activity as a purchaser, owner, and operator of over 75% of the properties in the area.

“…The New York State Supreme Court, Justice Shirley Kornreich presiding, found AKRF to not only be serving an advocacy function on behalf of its client Columbia, but also that AKRF itself had an interest in ESDC’s adoption of Columbia’s General Project Plan [GPP]…ESDC took an appeal to the Appellate Division, First Department.

“On July 15, 2008, this Appellate Division issued its decision…finding AKRF’s relationship with Columbia to be `tangled.’…

“…Of the 37 buildings AKRF…determined to be in poor conditions, at least 16, or 43%, are likely to have crossed that line during the time of Columbia’s ownership or control due to Columbia’s discontinuation of maintenance and its failure to perform repairs…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 5

2009-11-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] decision to allow the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 4)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Columbia did undertake cosmetic interior renovations in certain properties, but left underlying waterproofing conditions unaddressed, allowing structural elements to deteriorate…

“Columbia also posted on buildings it owned `For Rent’ signs, creating the appearance of available commercial rental property and flagging demand, even as Columbia had no intention of renting its vacant properties. Calls to the phone numbers listed on such signs, by both Manhattanville owners, and other prospective renters, yielded only answering machines and unreturned calls. In May, 2007, an attorney representing a number of businesses being forced out of a Columbia owned building upon inquiring as to the possibility of relocation into one of the vacant Columbia owned buildings in the area was informed by Columbia’s attorney that `There is no space available in Manhattanville.’

“In late March, 2006, Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] turned to Columbia’s Consultant, Allee King Rosen and Flemming, Inc. [AKRF,] to perform a new blight study of Manhattanville.

“In sworn affidavits, AKRF and ESDC stated that in retaining AKRF, ESDC had required the erection of a `Chinese Wall’ separating employees working on the Blight Study for ESDC from those working on the environmental review for Columbia, and that such separation had been strictly maintained…On May 19, 2008, ESDC admitted that such a wall had not in fact been maintained. Billing records indicate that as many as six AKRF employees worked on both sides of the alleged barrier…

“Far from keeping the study confidential from Columbia, ESDC permitted Columbia to control access to the properties, accompany surveyors, review and comment on reports, and to be present at meetings and reviews…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhatanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 4

2009-11-12T21:03:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“In properties Columbia acquired, Columbia allowed or maintained accumulation of garbage and trash.

“In most buildings it acquired, Columbia refrained from attending to even minor repairs or preventive maintenance, causing existing conditions from water infiltration to become significantly exacerbated. At 635 West 125th Street, for instance, for failure to repair a broken pane in a skylight, sufficient water entered the building as to cause flooring to buckle and ceilings to collapse, such as a building identified as in `fair’ condition in 2006 was in `poor’ condition by 2008. At 623 W. 129th Street, a roof drain was left clogged, causing significant water damage in the building below.

“On the basis of Petitioner’s review of individual building reports, it appears that in 34 out of 51 Columbia owned buildings, or 66.6%, conditions were allowed to deteriorate significantly over that period…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 3

2009-11-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Manhattanville is a riverfront community in West Harlem…

“…The number of jobs in the area was rising until Columbia began buying the area up in 2002.

“…At least since the 1960s Columbia has been looking to expand beyond the confines of its Morningside Heights campus, to acquire land and to build in Manhattanville and West Harlem. Already in 1960 Columbia was seeking to take over the Manhattanville industrial area with a…development scheme. Columbia’s attempt to take over part of nearby Morningside Park to build an athletic facility brought community relations to a boil in 1968…

“After 2002, Columbia’s acquisition activity in Manhattanville accelerated. By the end of 2005 it had acquired or entered into contract on 28 of 67 properties in the area. In approaching property owners, Columbia sought to portray the use of eminent domain as certain and inevitable, urging owners to sell now at the low price they were being offered or have their property taken by eminent domain.

“As Columbia acquired property, it applied pressure to remove all tenants except for the few it intended to incorporate into ground floor retail spaces in its proposed campus.

“Columbia refused to renew leases except on commercially unreasonable one year terms, and with provisions effectively providing for summary termination at Columbia’s sole discretion.

“Columbia exaggerated alleged building defects as a pretext to require tenants to relocate, but in relocation, offered smaller spaces and covered only a fraction of relocation costs.

“Columbia refused to perform repairs when asked by tenants. At 609 West 125th Street, for example, Columbia refused to repair major leaks from skylights and roof over the space rented by the Eritrean Community Center of Greater New York, a tenant it sought to remove, even while it replaced the roof over the section of the same building rented by Floridita, a restaurant it had designated for incorporation into the new project.

“Columbia refused to conduct façade repairs, and left in place indefinitely sidewalk sheds obscuring tenants’ store fronts and signage, without compensation.

“Columbia added inappropriate charges to rent, including for structural repairs that were the owner’s responsibility, and refused to recognize lease modifications by the prior owner.”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 2

2009-11-09T20:54:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“This case raises the question of whether allegedly public purposes attributed to a project long after it was fully conceived, and that involve almost no use of the land or facilities proposed to be developed, or that are diminutive in relation to the private benefit conferred by the project, constitute `civic’ or `public’ purposes, or whether they are not, in fact, pretext.

“This case presents the question of whether the desire of any private university to expand, or the acquisition of proprietary knowledge, constitute a `civic’ purpose.

“And this case raises the constitutional question of whether the use of eminent domain for economic development alone, under the Supreme Court of the United States’s 2006 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, constitutes a public use, benefit or purpose in the absence of a carefully considered plan with public purposes determined prior to selection of a developer and reached through a transparent and accountable public process.

“…Columbia and Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] have refused to compromise, and ESDC…has condoned and enabled Columbia in its drive to achieve 100% physical, economic, and cultural control of the entire area…For Columbia’s preference to have it all is what this struggle is being fought for. Columbia’s preference to have it all does not constitute a public use, benefit or purpose…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 1

2009-11-07T20:11:00.000-08:00

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“This case is about the abuse of the government’s power of eminent domain to secure for a developer a contested area of West Harlem it had long sought to control and for which it had formed a fully blown plan.

“This case is about the secret collaboration between Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] and New York City agencies in a complex plan to give that developer, an elite private university, everything it wanted, without compromise or limitation, while evading public review and accountability.

“This case is about favoritism shown to an elite private university over community interests, clearly and consistently expressed through the local Community Planning Board, over multiple well established public planning processes, and over competing development proposals for existing local business and property owners, for purposes that in the end amount to no more than the speculative estimation that what is good for Columbia University is good for New York.

“And this case is about how ESDC, in its determination to maximize Columbia’s private benefit, overreached its statutory authorization, made findings in bad faith, and fabricated pretextual purposes to cover up the illegality of its dominant purpose…”

Columbia University's Goldman Sachs Connection & West Harlem Construction Project

2009-11-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Columbia University Trustee Armen Avanessians is Goldman Sachs' director of FICC Strategies, Equity Strategies, Investment Banking and Financial Group Strategies and became a partner in Goldman Sachs in 1994.

In addition, Columbia University Trustee Ann Kaplan is a member of the Goldman Sachs Bank USA board of directors and Columbia University Trustee Esta Stecher is Goldman Sachs Group's executive vice president and general counsel.

Also, Columbia University Trustee Richard Witten was a Goldman Sachs partner and managing director from 1990 to 2002.

Coincidentally, if Goldman Sachs merges with the M&T Bank Corporation, the head of the Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] which approved the use of eminent domain in Columbia University’s 17-acre West Harlem-Manhattanville construction project, M&T Bank Corporation CEO Bob Wilmers, may personally benefit from a business relationship with the Columbia University-linked Goldman Sachs firm.

As Thomas Hartley observed in the October 1, 2008 issue of the Baltimore Business Journal, one of Ireland’s largest independent securities firms, NCB Stockbrokers, noted in a 2008 report that: “Remember that M&T’s CEO, septuagenarian Bob Wilmers, has been at the bank for 25 years [and] might be tempted to roll his 10 percent holding into something larger driven by Goldman Sachs.”

Speaking of the latest real estate development and land grabbing project of the tax-exempt “Goldman Sachs University of Morningside Heights,” an interesting article by Damon W. Root, was posted on the www.reason.com website. In his February 9, 2009 article, titled “Exposing Columbia University’s eminent domain abuse,” Root noted:

“Consider the following: In 2006, the Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] hired the planning and engineering firm Allee King Rosen & Fleming, Inc. (AKRF) to perform an `impartial' neighborhood blight study. AKRF was certainly a bold choice, given that the firm was already on Columbia's payroll and actively working on the contested Manhattanville plan. According to billing records that…civil libertarian Norman Siegel, turned up via the state's Freedom of Information Law, as many as six AKRF employees worked on both the blight study and the redevelopment project, which is practically the definition of a conflict of interests.

“The report itself proved to be just as flawed. For starters, AKRF failed to mention that Columbia owns 76 percent of the neighborhood and was thus directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of blight that the report alleged, ranging from overflowing basement trash heaps to major roof and skylight leaks. (Columbia has been performing maintenance on several buildings it plans to preserve for their historical significance.) As numerous tenants have now reported, the university refused to perform basic and necessary repairs, which both pushed tenants out and manufactured the ugly conditions that later advanced Columbia's long-term interests….

“AKRF admitted as much in preliminary findings delivered to the ESDC, which identified `Open violations in CU Buildings' and `History of CU repairs to properties' among its `issues of concern.' On top of that, AKRF relied on misleading and in some cases inappropriate evidence, including irrelevant crime statistics and building code violations that had zero relationship to actual physical conditions (such as the failure to file an annual boiler inspection).

“In fact, the ESDC-Columbia redevelopment scheme fails to meet even the generous standards set by the Supreme Court's notoriously eminent domain-friendly decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which permitted the transfer of property from one private party to another so long as the taking was part of a `comprehensive redevelopment plan.’ But as Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurring opinion in the case also made perfectly clear, `transfers intended to confer benefits on particular, favored private entities, and with only incidental or pretextual public benefits, are forbidden by the Public Use Clause.’… “

1968 Columbia SAS Leader Bill Sales: A 1995 Interview by Meg Starr

2009-10-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

In its August/September issue of 1995, the anti-imperialist Love & Rage newspaper published the following interview with former Columbia Student Afro-American Society [SAS] Leader Bill Sales by long-time anti-imperialist and anti-racist prisoner solidarity activist Meg Starr. This interview was originally posted in the archives section of the Love & Rage website at the following link:

http://www.loveandrage.org/?q=node/33

During the 1960s Bill Sales was a radical student activist. His experiences show how the Black student movement was shaped by the overall Black liberation movement, and how Black students in turn helped shape the white student movement.

It is interesting to compare Bill’s version of the early stages of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Columbia Strike (an important occupation of buildings at New York City’s Columbia University by Black and white students in 1968) with more mainstream and white-centered accounts of the same period. His stories also bring to life the incredible radical diversity and power of the Black Liberation movement. Readers interested in learning more should read Bill’s latest book, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (South End Press, Boston, 1994).

U of Penn and the NAACP

Meg Star [MS]: How did you become an activist as a student?

Bill Sales [BS]: “I was involved with the student chapter of the NAACP at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. I had first come in contact with the movement on that campus through some people who were members of RAM. [The Revolutionary Action movement was a semi-clandestine organization that, beginning in 1963, attempted to combine mass direct action with the tactics of self-defense to push the movement towards revolutionary politics.] Two members in particular were friends of mine: Max Stanford [Muhamed Ahmed] and Stanley Davis. I knew Max from high school, and Stanley was a student at Penn before we became active. We all ran track together, believe it or not.”

In 1962 the Penn Chapter of the NAACP invited Malcolm X to speak on campus, and they picketed Democratic Party Headquarters in Philadelphia to support Robert Williams. Williams had been the president of the NAACP in Monroe County, NC until 1959, when he called for armed defense in the face of growing KKK violence. During the next several years James Farmer, the Rev. Leon Sullivan, and many other Civil Rights leaders also spoke on campus.

BS: “Then I went to the march on Washington and was very impressed by all the goings on. I wanted to come back and assume the leadership of the NAACP on campus; I wasn’t satisfied with its level of activism.”

In the meantime, during the summer of ‘63, CORE [The Congress of Racial Equality was a direct-action-oriented civil-rights group that emphasized community based actions in Northern cities.] and the NAACP were confronting de facto segregation of construction sites in Philadelphia. Bill’s two radical friends were arrested after being beaten by the police at one site. U of Penn was undergoing major renovation, so the students confronted the university’s own hiring practices.

“Now all during the four years at Penn I was being exposed to different ideological currents, both in the Civil Rights Movement and in what came to be the New Left. I didn’t have the slightest idea that that was what it was at the time. In my senior year, protesting segregation, I came in close contact with CORE and the NAACP. I can put it this way: I developed a greater appreciation for CORE and an utter disdain for the NAACP.”

Black Students Organize

When Bill graduated from Penn he went to Columbia University to do graduate work. He arrived in the fall of 1964, the fall after African-American students organized on campus.

“A year after I left Penn, Bob Brand, a white student from the NAACP, got in touch with me. He asked my permission to convert that chapter into an SDS chapter because at that point the only people left were white students who were very much interested in the anti-war situation. Many of those guys who became important in SDS got their first exposure in civil rights activity.”

Bill arrived at Columbia in 1964, the same semester that the Students Afro-American Society was founded. In the mid-’60s campuses that for centuries had been lily-white were opening the doors to Black students for the first time. Columbia, Harvard and Yale were a little ahead of the majority of campuses.

“A whole lot of debate was going on about identity, about who we were as Black students, and what was our responsibility to the movement.”

The numbers of Black students were increasing every semester and the class base of the students accepted by the college was becoming more working class, which affected the level of militancy.

“There was a basis for effective group action. People sensed that potential, and also, no Black person at this time could get away without defining their lives at least in part in terms of the struggle that was going on in the larger society.”

While Bill studied Swahili and met African leaders in the internationalist community around Columbia, he also reunited with Max Stanford.

“Max had been working with Malcolm in the OAAU period [the Organization of Afro-American Unity] and I ran into him shortly after Malcolm was assassinated. Max helped me get oriented to the scene in NY.”

“Gym” Crow & Early Alliances

In ‘68 the off-campus and on-campus movements were to come together. Columbia University had admitted Black students while continuing to be a smug and racist institution, completely out of touch with the neighboring Harlem community. The university occupies a small area of land, one side of which is a cliff overlooking the public Morningside Park, which is used primarily by the Harlem community. Columbia worked out an arrangement through its shady Board of Trustees’ ruling-class connections to lease public land for the site of a new gym. Originally the gym was intended to be in Morningside Park, and to be completely closed to community residents. When the community objected to that Columbia started construction of two gyms: a large one for Columbia students and a smaller one for the community residents. Protesting the “Jim Crow Gym” brought together many different insurgent communities.

Already alliances between SDS and the African American students organization had developed through two experiences. By 1967 the university had allowed the student athletes to be developed into a right-wing firing squad that attacked SDS demonstrations.

“So one day Black students went out there. We had our own beef with these cats because they were racists. So we joined in to help the SDS guys because those people just didn’t know how to fight. Not that they weren’t game, they just didn’t know what to do in that kind of situation. So we went out and knocked heads with these jocks.”

CORE was trying to organize a union among the mostly African-American and Latino workers on campus. Black students and some of SDS became involved.

“Ted Gold, one of the activists that got blown up in the townhouse [a member of Weatherman who was killed during an explosion at a safe house in NY on March 6, 1970], was very active in that. We all knew Gold long before we knew Rudd and those cats. The hell with them! They were off on some trip, but we knew the folks that were down. They were down long before it was fashionable to be down.

“One of the things that really got to me about Rudd was how you write a book confessing all the things you did were wrong. That’s bullshit! It wasn’t wrong just because you lost and it didn’t work. There’s a difference between winning and losing and being wrong.”

Alliances off-campus were also very important to the Black students. In ‘67 there was a Black Power Conference in Maryland that had a special meeting for student activists.

“There were no more than 10 or 15 people in the place, but the following spring we were all involved in building takeovers on our different campuses. Herman Ferguson [an important Black activist and political prisoner, Ferguson was involved both in the Republic of New Afrika and the OAAU] was there that day; he was already on the lam.”

Bill became involved in an underground student group called “cadre.” The members were at different campuses. They took karate, studied, and made contact with various groups in Harlem.

MS: Why were you clandestine?

BS: “This was an era when people got shot. H. Rap Brown was already underground. Some of the people we worked with were underground. It wasn’t as if we were planning to blow things up. But we felt that what we were doing was objectively revolutionary. And you just didn’t run around in a public organization. We assigned ourselves public organizations on campus to be in.”

The Columbia Strike

In April and May of 1968 Columbia University exploded into the famous strike and blockade. During those months over 1,000 students occupied four buildings on campus, fought the police, and held a dean hostage (briefly).

The role of the Black students in these events has been somewhat eclipsed in popular accounts. After describing the alliances on campus and off-campus that had been developed over the previous years, Bill described the day the decision was made to occupy the first building.

“1968 in some ways appeared to be spontaneous. On the day the takeover occurred none of us had planned a takeover.”

Bill and his friends went down to an SDS demonstration at the sundial [a central location on the main part of the Columbia campus] to fight the jocks and to support the new president of the Afro-American Students Organization who was speaking.

“When I got there I swear there were 5,000 people. It was a total shocker. I expected 200 people or so—the usual demonstration. The jocks were completely neutralized. The demonstration started by trying to take some demands into the president of Columbia University, but he closed his office building. The Black students wanted to storm the building, but Rudd said no. Someone in Progressive Labor said: ‘Let’s charge the gym site.’ So we all ran down.”

Community activists and campus activists had recently been arrested demonstrating at the site.

“We ran down 1,000 strong and all hell broke loose. It’s the first and only time I ever got into actual combat with the police. We should have all been dead but there was a sergeant who pulled his forces back. At that time I was trying to break this cop’s thumb because I said “If he gets his gun out I’m a dead person.”

“I had only jumped him because one of his associates had started hitting one of our guys and then one of CADRE punched him out. This guy was facing me so I grabbed his wrist and twisted him around. I didn’t want to fight this cat and he didn’t want to fight me. I said I can take this guy; he’s scared of me. He’ll shoot me out of fear if he gets his gun out. People don’t realize how things escalate. Lethal confrontations that nobody means to happen—people were all fighting and this sergeant comes down and tells his men to back off and leave us alone. He recognized that it was Harlem and if they grabbed a bunch of Black students all hell would break loose.”

Bill stressed how many different people had their own organizations then and were prepared for confrontation. The Black women on campus, repulsed by the sexism of the African-American students group, had their own organization with their own community contacts.

“They didn’t want to get everything through the guys. That meant that independently they had come to the same decisions we had come to, and they had a structure for functioning. When the shit hit the fan they weren’t tailing behind the men.”

After the confrontation at the gym site SDS and the Black students occupied the first building. While SDS leaders remained ambiguous about the decisions to occupy buildings for several days, the Black Students were firm from the beginning and influenced the actions of the rest of the campus.

The Movement Today?

When asked about the Black movement today Bill said:

“There is no Black movement today. There are a number of different people who are struggling as organizations or individuals, but a movement would imply a consensus on some very basic demands; a clear understanding of who the enemy is and some notion of what the future would look like. We don’t have that yet. I hope we’re building to it...

MS: Is there anything you’d like to say about white solidarity?

BS: “I think there are some obvious errors that white leftists have made that they don’t need to make again! The arrogance and paternalism in relationship to the Black movement—to assume that you know what’s right for everyone because you have a revolutionary analysis of society, etc., etc. To see a certain kind of division of labor—you provide the intellectual muscle and the troops come from various Third World communities—that’s disastrous.

“A second thing that we really want is to build up a left inside of white working-class communities. We need to develop another pole in the communities that have been conceded to the fascists. That has been very difficult to do and very dangerous. That’s why it’s not done much! It’s actually easier for a white person to work in communities of color. Once they know you’re for real, people aren’t hostile to you, whereas in the white communities you can get murdered!

“A third point is not to get manipulated by feelings of guilt. There are a whole lot of opportunists in the Black and Latino communities who’ll try to manipulate you because you are white. You have to stand up for what you believe in.

“And then of course it’s important to study hard, be humble, and really listen. I know that as a 52-year-old one of the really frustrating things is trying to pass on your knowledge to the generation coming behind, because they think they know more than you already. But without an open mind you can screw up and repeat past `mistakes.’”

`Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s'--Review of Stefan Bradley's new book

2009-09-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

HARLEM VS. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Black Student Power in the Late 1960s
By Stefan M. Bradley
Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press (2009)

In the epilogue of his great new book on the historic 1968 student revolt at Columbia University , Harlem vs. Columbia University,

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/69erx5xt9780252034527.html

which “attempts to draw out some of the important factors that contributed to the 1968-69 uprisings,” St. Louis University Professor of History and African American Studies Stefan Bradley notes that “although many of the participants have since passed on, the issues at Columbia seem to linger.” This was borne out at a 2008 commemoration event held on Columbia’s campus to mark the 40th anniversary of the student revolt. A Harlem Tenants Council activist denounced the Columbia Administration's current 17-acre campus expansion project in the neighborhood north of West 125th St. and passed out a flyer in which the Coalition to Preserve Community group of community residents vowed to stand against Columbia ’s “ West Harlem eviction plan.”

Professor Bradley also observes that over 40 years after the student revolt, some of the black students who participated in the non-violent student occupation of Hamilton Hall in April 1968, “bristle at the image of the Columbia demonstration that media sources often invoke” and “are dismayed at the representation of the rebellion as one where raucous white youth defied their parents and authority by taking over buildings…”

A key reason why the white students at Columbia and Barnard who were active in its Students for a Democratic Society [SDS) chapter were able to mobilize large numbers of white students to help shut down Columbia a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination was because a political alliance developed between Columbia SDS and the black students who were most active in the Student Afro-American Society [SAS] campus group. So a book like Professor Bradley’s book, which focuses more on the role that the black students who occupied Hamilton Hall played in the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt than on the role of Mark Rudd and the white student demonstrators, is long overdue.

By examining the 1968 confrontation between the Harlem community (and its student supporters at Columbia) and Columbia’s board of trustees, Bradley attempts to: (1) explain how it was possible for Columbia to take land and power from black people before 1968; (2) determine the effects of the confrontation method that the 1968-69 student protesters used; (3) explain why the black and white student protesters separated after Columbia’s Hamilton Hall was jointly seized by them; and (4) explain why Columbia eventually capitulated to some of the demands of the student demonstrators. The first part of Harlem vs. Columbia University explores Columbia’s historic relationship to Harlem’s people and land, while the second part of the book examines the historic role students played in attempting to change Columbia’s institutional policies.

The first part of Harlem vs. Columbia University includes an interesting history of the Harlem and Morningside Heights neighborhoods surrounding Columbia’s campus and explains why community resident opposition to Columbia developed. Bradley recalls that “there was only one full-time black faculty member at Columbia by the mid-1960s;” and, during the 1960s, 9,600 tenants, “approximately 85 percent of whom were black or Puerto Rican,” were pushed out of the Morningside Heights and West Harlem apartment buildings or Single-Room Occupancy [SRO] residential hotels which Columbia University purchased and demolished or converted for its own institutional use.

Bradley next focuses more specifically on Columbia’s plan to construct a gymnasium for its students in Harlem’s Morningside Park and the history of community protests against this project. We learn, for example, that in a January 29, 1966 editorial, Harlem’s African-American newspaper, the Amsterdam News warned:

“If Mayor Lindsay permits Columbia University to grab two acres of land out of Morningside Park for a gymnasium it will be a slap in the face to every black man, woman and child in Harlem…Columbia University, one of the richest institutions in the nation, only admits a handful of Negro scholars each year and its policies in dealing with Negroes in Harlem have been described as downright bigoted…Why then should the parents of Harlem give up their parkland to Columbia? What has Columbia done to merit such favoritism?”

Thirty-one years before, W.E.B. DuBois had also written in his classic 1935 book Black Reconstruction In America that “the Columbia school of historians and social investigators have issued between 1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according to the same method: first, endless sympathy with the white South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro…”

By digging up flyers of various 1960s community groups and articles that appeared in various neighborhood newspapers and the local African-American press, Bradley indicates that between April 1966 and March 1968 there were at least four community rallies against Columbia’s gym construction project and at least 25 arrests of anti-gym protesters before April 1968. As Bradley observes:

“After realizing that they would receive access to only 15 percent of the proposed structure that Columbia University would control, and be forced to use a different entrance, many black residents in the community saw that things were once more separate, but hardly equal…Instead of fighting against Jim Crow, the community now fought against Gym Crow…”

In the second part of his book, Bradley relates the growth of the New Left and Black Power movements on U.S. university campuses during the 1960s and describes the initially integrated protest effort of the black and white student demonstrators at Columbia on April 23, 1968, on campus and at the Morningside Park gym construction site as well as inside Hamilton Hall during the first few hours. He goes on to show how the black student protesters in Hamilton Hall won some concessions from the Columbia Administration by aligning themselves with off-campus Black Liberation Movement groups and the Harlem community. Bradley also provides a good description of what happened inside Hamilton Hall, after the white student demonstrators were told to leave Hamilton Hall and explains the political and strategic rationale of SAS leaders for their decision to separate themselves from their white student allies.

Bradley goes on to indicate the supportive role of SDS and its objective of increasing white student support for the Black Liberation Movement at Columbia and includes a description of what happened when a thousand New York City police were called in by the Columbia Administration on April 30, 1968, to arrest student protesters.

Bradley breaks some new ground in late 1960s Columbia historiography by showing how, “at Columbia, the strategies and goals of Black Student Power continued into the spring of 1969 as the black student group, with the support of SDS, called for changes in admission policies” and observes that in the 1960s Columbia’s black students “were regularly stopped by the security guards…to have their identifications checked while most white students were not stopped.” Bradley is among the first historians to write a detailed historical summary about black student activism on Columbia’s campus during the 1968-69 academic year. He also provides a concise summary of black student protests at Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania and Cornell (that received less mass media publicity than did the 1968 Columbia student protests) which reveals to readers that Columbia University was “not the only Ivy League university to be impacted by Black Power” in the late 1960s. Yet as late as 1984 there were still only three tenured black professors at Columbia and the university did not recognize a black studies program until 1987.

One very useful feature of the book is a collection of rare photographs of some of the black participants in the 1968 Columbia uprising and the excavated gymnasium construction site in Morningside Park that weren’t included in most previously-published books about the student revolt. But there are also a few omissions or inaccuracies in the book. For example, it inaccurately states that Mark Rudd “decided not to return to school” in the Fall of 1968, when--as Rudd notes in his recent autobiography, Underground-- he was actually expelled from Columbia. In addition, although Bradley notes that “SAS and SDS participated in student-supported on-campus demonstrations throughout the month of May”, readers of the book would not learn that on May 21, 1968, the Columbia Administration called police onto its campus a second time, the police rioted again and, a leader of SAS, Ray Brown, was clubbed to the ground and then kicked systematically by a crowd of cops.

Despite these few omissions or inaccuracies, Harlem vs. Columbia University does a much better job than previously published books about the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt of-- from a deeper anti-racist perspective-- highlighting the relationship of the late 1960s Black Power Movement, the history of the Harlem community, the Black radical left and left nationalist intelligentsia and the role of Black students and Harlem community activists to what happened at Columbia in 1968 and 1969 and the current position of African-Americans in the Ivy League academic world. So if you’re interested in the history of 1960s movements, Harlem and Columbia University or if you’re a 21st-century opponent of institutional racism at Columbia University and at other Ivy League universities, Harlem vs. Columbia University should be considered required reading.

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 12

2009-09-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 11

2009-09-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 10 of article).

As a result of their 100 percent ownership of the Reader’s Digest Association’s voting stock, both DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace became quite wealthy during their lives [before both dying in the early 1980s]. Fortune magazine estimated DeWitt Wallace’s worth at nearly $300 million [in 1960s money] in 1968 and this made the Reader’s Digest co-founder among the 31 wealthiest men in the United States at that time, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. The same book also noted that, at the time of her death in 1984 at the age of 95, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace “was the richest woman in the United States,” with a net worth of at least $250 million [in 1980s money] that was “two and a half times the size of the estate left by Henry Luce” of the Time-Life magazines media conglomerate.

As early as 1935, Mr. & Mrs. Wallace had pocketed a huge fortune from their Reader’s Digest publishing hustle and they used part of this fortune to buy 105 acres of land in Mount Kisco, New York, upon which the childless couple built a 22-room castle called “High Winds”—during the height of the Great Depression. Although Mr. & Mrs. Wallace were quite eager to spend $277,336 [of 1930s money] in the 1930s to build their “Reader’s Digest Castle,” in 1936 their Reader’s Digest Association only donated $4,418 to 13 organizations, including “a check for a mere $10” to the American National Red Cross, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The same book noted, however, that “As the Digest’s fortune grew, Wally and Lila…established trust funds for numerous members of the Wallace and Acheson families.” But over $500,000 [in 1930s money] per year from their Reader’s Digest Association’s gross income was personally taken home by Mr. & Mrs. Wallace in the form of salaries during the late 1930s.

To reduce their federal income tax bills, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace apparently utilized the “non-profit” philanthropic foundations which they established. As Theirs Was The Kingdom revealed in the early 1990s:

“Wally’s greatest vulnerability lay with his philanthropies, which he often used as a cover to pad the retirement or compensation packages of favored employees…He arranged for Digesters to serve on the boards of organizations to which he gave money. But honorariums, free travel, and other perquisites—many of them nontaxable—were often involved. Another of Wally’s tax-evading ploys was to arrange for the children of privileged Digesters to travel abroad courtesy of the Reader’s Digest Association’s Foreign Study League…”

(end of part 11)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

Firefighter Appeals For New 9/11/01 Investigation

2009-09-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

On the Fire Fighters For 9-11 Truth blog

http://firefightersfor911truth.org/

, a retired firefighter named Anton Vodvarka recently made the following appeal for a new investigation of what actually happened on 9/11/01 in Downtown Manhatan:

An Appeal to Firefighters, Present and Past

Fellow Firefighters, A great tragedy befell our community on September 11, 2001, an unprecedented 343 deaths in the line of duty. As horrible as that toll is, if there were a rational explanation for it, we could accept it and mourn. We all understood the risk we accepted when we took the oath of office, that chance might cut short our lives when we placed ourselves in harm’s way in the public’s service. This is what we are paid for and it is our honor. However, in short, the official explanation of the events of that day are not only insufficient, they are fantastic and cannot bear rational examination. We are asked to believe that on that day three structural steel buildings, which have never before in history collapsed because of fire, fell neatly into their basements at the speed of gravity, their concrete reduced to dust. We are asked to believe that jet fuel (kerosene) can melt steel. We are asked to believe that the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, that responded to sixty-eight emergencies in the year prior to 9-11 in less than twenty minutes allowed aircraft to wander about for up to an hour and a half. We are asked to believe that the steel and titanium components of an aircraft that supposedly hit the Pentagon “evaporated”. There is much, much more if anyone cares to look into it. Trade Tower #7 by itself is the “smoking gun”. Not hit by an aircraft, with only a few relatively small fires, it came down in a classic crimp and implosion, going straight into its basement, something only very precise demolition can accomplish, which takes days if not weeks to prepare. The 9-11 Commission actually stated the they DIDN’T KNOW WHY IT COLLAPSED AND LEFT IT AT THAT. Brothers, I know that the implications of the above are hard, almost unthinkable, but the official explanation is utter nonsense, and three hundred and forty three murdered brothers are crying out for justice. Demand a genuine investigation into the events of September 11!

-Anton Vodvarka, Lt. FDNY (ret)

Lt. Vodvarka served on FDNY Ladder Co 26, Rescue Co. 3, Rescue Co. 1, Engine Co. 92, Ladder 82 and Ladder 101. He was awarded the Merit Class 1 award, the Prentice Medal

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 10

2009-09-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 9

2009-09-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

“In the five years from 1939 through 1943, the Digest planted articles in more than 60 publications…Of 47 articles reprinted from Harper’s, eight were Digest plants; of 39 furnished by the Atlantic Monthly, eight were plants;…of eight taken from The Nation, five were plants; of 26 credited to the New Republic, eight were plants and 13 others were on the Digest’s presses before the New Republic appeared on the stands with them…The Digest gave Commonwealth credit for nine reprinted articles; all were plants…”

By 1962, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “articles planted in other magazines for reprinting later in the Digest now constituted 70 percent of every issue in the U.S. edition.” Its policy of subsidizing and planting articles in other magazines before re-printing them in Reader’s Digest “gave the Digest power to propagandize its right-wing political views across a broad spectrum of the periodical press,” according to a reference book titled The Magazine In America. (end of part 9)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

African-American Male Worker Jobless Rate Under Obama Regime: 17 Percent

2009-09-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for African-American male workers over 20 years-of-age under the Democratic Obama Regime jumped from 15.8 to 17 percent between July and August 2009; while the rate for African-American female workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 11.7 to 11.9 percent in August 2009, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all African-American workers (which also takes into account the 34.7 percent jobless rate for African-American youth between 16 and 19 years of age) increased from 14.5 to 15.1 percent between July and August 2009.

Between July and August 2009, the official “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Hispanic or Latino male workers over 20 years of age increased from 11.2 to 12.3 percent. For all Hispanic or Latino workers over 16 years of age (which takes into account the 34 percent “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latino youth), the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate increased to 13 percent in August 2009.

For white male workers in the United States over 16 years of age, the official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate increased from 10.5 to 10.9 percent between July and August 2009, while the rate for white female workers over 16 years of age increased from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.

The “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Asian-American workers did decrease from 8.3 to 7.5 percent in August 2009. But the official “seasonally adjusted” national jobless rate for all U.S. workers increased from 9.4 to 9.7 percent between July and August 2009.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September 4, 2009 press release:

“In August, the number of unemployed persons increased by 466,000 to 14.9 million, and the unemployment rate rose by 0.3 percentage points to 9.7 percent…

“In August, the number of persons working part time for economic reasons was little changed at 9.1 million. These individuals indicated that they were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job…

“About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August…

"These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey...

“Among the marginally attached, the number of discouraged workers in August (758,000) has nearly doubled over the past 12 months. (The data are not seasonally adjusted). Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them….

“Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 216,000 in August….

“In August, construction employment declined by 65,000...

“In August, manufacturing employment continued to trend downward, with a decline of 63,000…Motor vehicles and parts lost 15,000 jobs in August…

“Financial activities shed 28,000 jobs in August, with declines spread throughout the industry…

“Wholesale trade employment fell by 17,000 in August. Employment in information continued to trend down over the month…

“The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from -443,000 to -463,000, and the change for July was revised from -247,000 to -276,000…”

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 8

2009-09-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

70th Anniversary of World War II

2009-08-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2009 marks the 70th anniversary of German imperialism’s bombing and invasion of Poland. As Hammer or Anvil? Modern Germany 1648—Present by Heoger Herwig recalled, “at 4:45 a.m. on the morning of September 1, 1939, the German armored cruiser Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Polish fortifications near Danzig as German troops crossed the border into Poland.”

According to the book The Second World War: A World In Flames:

“By 16 September [1939] the German forces had the Polish capital, Warsaw, surrounded, and they proceeded to bombard the city from the air and the ground…Warsaw eventually surrendered on 27 September [1939] with around 40,000 civilian casualties…The Poles…did manage to inflict significant casualties on the Germans. They…killed 13,000 German soldiers, wounding a further 30,000…

“The Polish campaign had been blighted by numerous acts of cruelty by German formations—SS and police units mainly…Now with Poland defeated, these isolated acts of cruelty were approved in the highest quarters of Nazi German and were formalized into a program of terror…During the years of the German occupation, six million Polish citizens died…

“As the German war machine moved eastwards, overrunning territory and population, it also encountered millions of Polish and Russian Jews. Some were shot in mass killings and many others were corralled into walled areas of major cities known as ghettos.”

The Hammer or Anvil? book also noted:

“Stuka dive bombers attacked major concentrations of Polish forces and civilian centers…Covered by a special amnesty issued by Hitler and General von Brauchitsch, five special SS execution units (Einsatzgruppen) roamed the Polish countryside and murdered preselected doctors, priests, civil servants, country squires and merchants. Reinhard Heydrich of the Security Forces [SD] crowed as early as September 27 [1939] that only 3 percent of the Polish intelligentsia survived…On September 21 [1939], Heydrich developed his initial blueprint for the Polish [and later European] Jews. The Jews were to be herded into special `reservations’ through the auspices of Councils of Jewish Elders (Judenrat) for eventual concentration in…ghettos at Warsaw, Craw, Lublin, Radon…”

The same book also recalled that “in Berlin, Adolf Hitler began the war with a lie, informing the Reichstag that regular units of the Polish army had fired on German territory.”

According to The Second World War: A World In Flames book:

“Despite Hitler’s ambition and confidence, the Germans went through an elaborate charade in order to convince the world that Germany was provoked. Men from the…SD department of the SS, under the overall direction of Reinhard Heydrich, planned an operation to precipitate the war that Hitler wanted. This operation, code-named Hindenburg, involved three simultaneous raids: the first was on the radio station at Gleiwitz, the second on the small customs post at Hochlinden, and the third on an isolated gamekeeper’s hut at Pitschen. The raids were to be conducted by men dressed in Polish uniforms, and at Gleiwitz the plan was that the attack would be heard live on radio—with the attackers’ voices, speaking in Polish and declaiming Germany, being broadcast live over the air to maximize their impact…

“…Four condemned men from the Sauchsenhausen concentration camp and a single German (a local Polish sympathizer) were murdered to provide evidence for the Polish incursions—the corpses, dressed in Polish uniforms, were photographed to complete the provocation. Despite the planning, the radio attack failed to be broadcast because of the poor strength of the transmitter. Hitler was nevertheless able to announce to the Reichstag on 1 September [1939] that `Polish troops of the regular army have been firing on our territory during the night [of 31 August/ 1 September]. Since 05.45 we have been returning that fire.’ The Second World was up and running..”

As a result of World War II, 55 million human beings were killed. The same book summarized the World War II casualty figures in Europe in the following way:

“During the five-year conflict, Germany incurred 2.8 million military and 2 million civilian deaths, including 500,000 by Western Allied strategic bombing. The Soviets suffered the worst, with 6.3 million military and perhaps 17 million civilian deaths. Europe’s other populations suffered a further 1.8 million military and 10.5 million civilian deaths, the latter including 5.5 million Jews. The three Western Allied powers incurred 700,000 military deaths in the European theater…”

Remembering Kennedy Dynasty's Historic Time-Warner/CNN Media Conglomerate Connection

2009-08-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

Although Henry Luce’s Time Inc. [n/k/a/ Time-Warner/CNN] media conglomerate endorsed Richard Nixon during the 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy presidential contest, Henry Luce was also a close friend of JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Luce had utilized the Time Inc. media empire during the 1950s to transform John F. Kennedy into a media-star and Democratic Party presidential nominee [in a similar way to how Time-Warner/CNN transformed the Kennedy Dynasty-backed Barack Obama into a media-star and Democratic Party presidential nominee in recent years].

According to Henry R. Luce And The Rise of The American News Media by James Baughman, in the 1930s “Joseph Kennedy began a family tradition of winning allies in the fourth estate.” Luce’s Time Inc. publications “had usually treated Joseph Kennedy and his family admiringly” and Time Inc. Founder Henry Luce wrote the introduction to John F. Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept. The Henry R. Luce And The Rise of The American News Media book also noted that on “the night John Kennedy delivered his acceptance speech before the Democratic convention, his father watched the event on Luce’s television set in New York” and at JFK’s inaugural ball Henry Luce and his wife, Claire Booth Luce, “”sat in Joseph Kennedy’s box.”

The Right Places, Right Times book by former Time magazine editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan noted that “Time Inc. was in some respects closer to the Kennedy Administration than to the Eisenhower Administration.” The same book also revealed that during JFK’s Administration “the White House got a special copy of Time a day ahead of the rest of Washington” and U.S. President Kennedy would complain about “a picture caption or an unflattering photo angle.” Luce would then usually attend “to Kennedy’s complaints” personally “by mail or a visit to the Oval office.”

(Downtown 1/29/92)

Remembering Kennedy Dynasty's 1980s Wealth--Part 2

2009-08-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

According to the 1983 book by Harrison Rainie and John Quinn, Growing Up Kennedy, prior to his death in 1990, Steve Smith managed the family trusts and parceled out individual payments through the Park Agency to the 29 grandchildren of Joseph Kennedy. The Park Agency is “in effect a private family bank” which was managed by the late Steve Smith, according to the same book.

Growing Up Kennedy also noted that “there is a deliberate effort to obscure rather than reveal the extent and disposition of family funds” which are dished out to Kennedy Dynasty members, but indicated that Joseph Kennedy’s 29 grandchildren received their handouts according to the following procedure:

“Upon reaching 18, each grandchild begins receiving between $15,000 and $20,000 a year. The full inheritance income begins at age 21, when each grandchild collects up to $30,000 a year. Each cousin’s personal capital is said to be about $300,000. Some also share in their parents’ portions, and Caroline and [the now-deceased] John have separate income from earnings on their [now-deceased] mother’s $20-million share from the estate of Aristotle Onassis. A major advantage of the trust arrangement is that the Park Agency pays the taxes, so that each cousin gets spendable income, equivalent to a taxable salary of at least $50,000.”

The same book also revealed that several of Joseph Kennedy’s grandchildren “drive BMW sport cars” and all 29 of the grandchildren “take regular and spectacular vacations, which they arrange simply by calling a number at the Park Agency.”

One of Joseph Kennedy’s grandchildren, former Congressional Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts, used $250,000 of his handout money to make a loan to his own congressional campaign fund when he ran for U.S. Congress in 1986, according to The Best Congress Money Can Buy by Philip Stern. Another grandchild of Joseph Kennedy, Maria Shriver [the wife of Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger] used to be seen reading the news on the Establishment’s television screen—although she didn’t often read us news about the latest developments at the Kennedy Dynasty’s Park Agency.

(Downtown 12/25/91)

Remembering Kennedy Dynasty's 1980s Wealth--Part 1

2009-08-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

In his book The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster, John Davis described how the Kennedy Dynasty’s family holding company, Park Agency Inc., and its Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation operated in the early 1980s:

“The Kennedy enterprises that are managed in room 1850 at 125 Park Avenue represent money accumulated by Joseph P. Kennedy during the years 1920 to 1969 and consists of trust funds the patriarch established for his wife and children, several charitable foundations, and a string of businesses that feed those trusts and foundations. The aggregate value of these enterprises, which, taken together, constitute `the Kennedy fortune,’ has never been revealed, but it is thought to amount to something in the neighborhood of $350 million [as of 1983]...

“Since John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy [and Edward M. Kennedy] are dead, their trusts have passed on to their children. John F. Kennedy Jr. [now-deceased] and Caroline Kennedy receive income from Kennedy trusts worth from $7.5 million to $10 million each, in addition to the substantial trusts established for them by Aristotle Onassis, and the children of Robert F. Kennedy receive income off trusts worth about $1 million…

“Feeding the Kennedy trusts, foundations, and memorials are the various Kennedy-owned businesses that are either held or managed by the Park Agency.

“The largest of these, by far, is the Merchandise Mart, a 24-story structure in Chicago with 1,000 tenants, currently [as of 1983] worth about $200 million, which generate an annual income of about $25 million a year. Other Kennedy businesses include the Corpus Christi-based Mokeen Oil Corporation, and the Kenoil Corporation, worth around $20 million, with oil-producing properties in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and California. These are the principal moneymakers. Other Kennedy-controlled businesses include the Park Agency’s considerable real estate holdings, the Sutton Producing Corporation, a small oil company based in San Antonio, and the Forest Oil Corporation of Bradford, Pennsylvania, which is [was] wholly owned by [the now-deceased] Senator Edward Kennedy. Finally, rounding out the Kennedy holdings is a substantial portfolio of stocks and bonds containing such standard blue chips as Exxon, IBM and Eastman Kodak.”

(Downtown 3/25/92)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 7

2009-08-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 6 of article).

Reader’s Digest was first published in February 1922 by DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, after a $5,000 [in 1920s money] loan from Mrs. Wallace’s brother—Barclay Acheson—was obtained. The initial issue consisted of 31 articles which the then-32-year-old “Wally” had clipped from old magazines in the public library, and then condensed for his own magazine’s use.

The son of a Minnesota college president, DeWitt Wallace was from St. Paul, Minnesota and “belonged to an elite that had virtually nothing in common with the masses who were to be his future audience,” according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. But the same book also asserted that during the 1920s the Reader’s Digest publisher “packed his magazine with articles pandering to the most reactionary elements among his readers” and by 1929 the adless magazine’s circulation had reached 216,000, “thanks to relentless direct-mail solicitations.” Between 1922 and the 1990s, the corporate headquarters of Reader’s Digest was always located in the Pleasantville-Chappaqua area of Westchester County, in suburban New York.

The Magazine In America: 1741-1990 reference book attributed the Reader’s Digest’s almost immediate success in attracting subscribers in part to the fact that “Wallace was offering his customers the `best’ from the periodical press, shortened to an easy length…for a bargain price.” But, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “a critical factor in the Digest’s…prosperity was that Wally paid nothing for the articles he selected and condensed from other publications—in other words, the entire contents of his magazine” and “Wally for years limited his direct mail promotion to points beyond a 500-mile radius of New York” so “no editor or publisher was likely to…discover that it was stealing copyrighted material wholesale.”

The same book also recalled that “for the first eight years of its existence, DeWitt Wallace took great care to hide the extraordinary success of his magazine” and “since it did not carry advertising, he did not have to submit to an annual circulation audit.” Among the articles the Reader’s Digest published during the Roaring Twenties was an article in its January 1926 issue which was entitled “The Klan: Defender of Americanism” and the magazine also exhibited “an almost rabid hostility towards immigrants and Catholics” during the 1920s and 1930s, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The Reader’s Digest also was profitable enough to start publishing an edition in Braille for the visually-impaired in 1928. (end of part 7)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 6

2009-08-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 5 of article).

Reader’s Digest was also connected, historically, to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—one of the giant “Big Five” insurance companies which apparently stood to benefit most from the 1990s Clinton administration’s [initial version of the Democratic Obama Administration’s] health care reform plan. During the early 1990s, the then-chairman of the board at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Robert Schwartz, also sat on the board of the Reader’s Digest Association’s corporate board and another Reader’s Digest Association board member in the 1990s, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense named Melvin Laird, also sat on Metropolitan Life’s corporate board in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the “non-profit” Metropolitan Museum of Art then owned about 11 percent of the nonvoting stock of the then-highly profitable Reader’s Digest. In 1991, for example, the net income of the Reader’s Digest Association exceeded $200 million and it was then the 209th largest corporation in the United States.

Coincidentally, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1990s—George Grune—was then the chairman of the board of the Reader’s Digest Association and he took home an annual salary of $1.2 million in the early 1990s. In addition to being Reader’s Digest’s board chairman at that time, Grune also sat on the corporate of Chemical Bank in the early 1990s.

Downtown telephoned the Communications Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art three times in the Fall of 1993 to ask a museum spokesperson to characterize the nature of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s historical connection to Reader’s Digest. But no one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Communications Department was available to communicate any comments about its historical Reader’s Digest connection in the Fall of 1993.

Sitting next to then-Reader’s Digest board chairman Grune on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees in the early 1990s was the then-New York Times Company Board Chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. In the early 1990s, Sulzberger was the chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees and Sulzberger’s son—Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—held the post of New York Times publisher. Another New York Times Company board member in the 1990s—former IBM corporate board chairman John Akers—also sat next to then-Reader’s Digest Association board chairman Grune on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees in the early 1990s.

The then-Reader’s Digest Association Chairman Grune also sat next to the following other “art lovers” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art board of trustees in the early 1990s: then-CBS Chairman of the Board Laurance Tisch; then-CBS Director James Houghton; then-New York magazine owner Henry Kravis; and Kissinger Associates Chairman Henry Kissinger. (end of part 6)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 5

2009-08-23T07:56:00.000-07:00