Under the regime Americans call “free enterprise” or the “free market”, exceptions are made to the supposed equal treatment of all economic actors.
While private business corporations and lesser entrepreneurs are at least nominally subject to taxes and other charges on their earnings or profits there is a class of institutions that have been exempted by statute from most such levies and impositions. These include charitable organizations and those devoted to education. Whereas in most of those countries constituting today’s European Union education was a state or church activity (amounting the same thing), the issue of tax exemption did not arise.
However in the Anglo-American world where virtually everything is private and a commercial undertaking, the State (or its owners) adopted the mode of tax exemption to negatively support what was a public function in the “Old World”. The renowned collegiate universities of Great Britain, e.g. the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge began under the auspices of the Latin Church, later nationalized as the Church of England.
The constituent colleges were endowed by benefactors for the protection of their souls in an age when salvation and damnation were still marketable commodities. Some endowments were certainly given in lieu of earthly punishment or in return for other favours. In any event the assets delivered to these originally clerical institutions were protected from creditors and other threats by virtue of royal authority, in secular and spiritual union. With the gradual secularization of the State as well as partial disestablishment of religion, the spiritual benefits of funding university education were enhanced or replaced by tax exemption. The colleges of the ancient universities received their foundations and endowments in return for prayers offered by the college members as intercessors for the souls of their benefactors, a relic of this practice can be found in the official prayer each college recites on the occasion of “hall”, the evening meal taken by all the college’s members.
When the souls of the dead declined in importance, the privileges accrued to the living by exempting scholars from the burdens and obligations placed on the rest of society by its rulers. In the United States, its own “ancient” universities were modelled on those in the United Kingdom.
The scholars were initially trained to be clergy in the Non-Conformist denominations that prevailed among the colonizers. These clerically trained graduates were to form the leadership of the several states and then the federal republic. As private, tuition-based colleges, these educational enterprises could have been treated like any other business, once general taxation had become established. However the spiritual benefit of education was still appreciated so the English model was adopted. Instead of funding university education from the general revenues, educational enterprise was granted tax exemption.
However as the American plutocracy evolved it also met resistance from the industrial workforce and the rising middle class anxious to restrain if not eliminate the cumulative abuse of post-Civil War industrialization and economic concentration. Industrial plutocrats sought to save their financial souls by what came to be known as philanthropy, including bequests to colleges and universities.
The wealthiest of the plutocrats, the Rockefeller family, even founded their own university, now the University of Chicago.
Progressives, as the American Fabians were known, accepted this charity as a means of promoting social and political objectives otherwise impeded by the US federal system. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 had created a host of colleges funded by endowment with conquered land held by the federal government. Most became state universities while a few became private institutions. These state colleges were dependent on the mood prevailing in the respective legislatures and the relative wealth of the state’s treasury. Thus accepting grants and bequests from the wealthy was considered an acceptable and often necessary means of continuing operations. As long as there was a generous state government and sufficient economic growth to fund higher education, these private contributions were complementary and considered part of responsible citizenship, even if the term “corporate citizenship” had yet to be invented.
The end of World War 2 and the failure of the Anglo-American campaign to destroy the Soviet Union with German (and Ukrainian) armed force, revealed a nation whose population had been decimated but whose stamina and industrial capacity had not been. The plutocratic oligarchy that had led the war industries machine was desperate to continue its obscene wartime profits.
However after demobilization there was initially no clear and present danger to be sold.
While the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, the impact of the US atomic slaughter was still a closely guarded secret.
It took the Korean efforts to eliminate the division of their country imposed by US occupation to give them the excuse they needed.
(Since then the US has been continuously at war. The open hostilities on the peninsula were only interrupted by a ceasefire and armistice, not a peace treaty.)
When the Soviet Union launched its first unmanned satellite into orbit in 1957, there was panic on the Hudson and the Potomac.
The endemic neglect of public education became an insufferable burden in the hectic attempts to mass produce better scientists and accomplish more spectacular feats than the Soviet Union.
For the first time massive federal funding was injected into university education. The so-called GI Bill sent innumerable veterans of the previous war and those ongoing to colleges and universities. Rising demand for places as well as the federal demand for R&D product beyond the capacity of the established elite institutions, placed universities under strain.
However the imperative of beating the Soviet Union in the science and technology war made those who own the government willing to use public funds to pay the bills. Where corporate contributions were made these were naturally in the national interest, another reason for tax exemption.
When the Soviet Union was finally defeated and dissolved, and with it the anticipation of a different political-economic-social system, the ostensible reason for exempting educational enterprise from income taxes was converted into a means for evading taxes. Moreover the benevolent function of education was reinforced even more explicitly as indoctrination. The one true faith had prevailed. The counter-reformation had defeated heretics and banished heresy forever. Future generations would no longer need to face reformers or radicals. The university became merely another branded product in the infinitely expanding portfolio of the hedge fund class. Instead of pupils/ students paying fees for tuition they render enormous payments to hedge funds whose managers insist that pupils be trained to generate cash flow and tax exempt profits for the real beneficial owners of these tax dodges. All but the very rich become bonded servants of those brands.
At the height of US slaughter in Indochina, with escalating student protests, no university executive took his leave. The somewhat less publicized demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa caused barely a ripple. Divestment was resisted but not criminalized.
The difference became apparent when the presidents of elite university hedge funds were forced to resign for failure to discipline the sources of cash flow adequately. The apartheid in occupied Palestine is even more blatant than that of South Africa. Americans, accustomed to racial segregation, could be excused for finding Cape Town or Johannesburg much like Charleston or Philadelphia. However, the SAP at its worst never subjected townships to military grade aerial bombardment or armoured assault. Clearly the reactions of students to events shamelessly broadcast were only surprising given the high level of distraction to which the “smart phone generation” is exposed.
Thus it is not really the “shock” at student demonstrations that provoked the sacking and resignations at the top tier US cadre schools. Instead this was crass discipline administered to employees of the hedge fund as State.
The chronically problematic term “fascism” needs to be placed in historical context. Mussolini and Hitler, as well as their Anglo-American patrons, introduced industrial fascism.
Although banking played a pivotal role, it was still intermediary. Mussolini’s fascism was the merger of industrial capital and the State to discipline large workforces and deploy large armies as needed. These were still national endeavours, hence their concentration in the last two major national unifications of the 19th century, Germany and Italy.
The Great War had nearly destroyed both states. So fascism was inseparable from national reconstruction- both material and psychological. Today however neither a national entity nor industrial economy is desired by those who have devoted more than a century to reducing the population of “useless eaters”.
Today we have no need for industrial fascism. Financial fascism has matured in its place. Usury has replaced racial superiority as the highest ideological value. The hedge fund that bears the name of a university is its educational pinnacle, its Parthenon, so to speak. The academic CEOs were driven from the temple for failure to protect the moneylenders from apostate zealots.
The university, especially the cadre schools of the Ivy League were almost without exception founded to train the colonial clergy. Their theocratic functions were only diluted by the disestablishment provisions of the US Constitution. In the period of American industrialization they trained the clergy, the bar, the children of the ruling families and the talented ten thousand who could overcome the country’s caste barriers. The so-called Land Grant colleges provided the engineers and other technicians to manage industry and modernize agriculture. With the birth of the Business School, e.g. the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, a new kind of clergy emerged. Economists replaced Boston Congregationalists as the Puritan evangelists of America‘s industrial order. These were followed by the orders of industrial engineers with their doctrinal specializations. Until the eve of the Great War, American political economy was preached by snake oil salesmen, Indian scalpers and immigrant adventurers. These were the itinerant preachers of American political economy. Academically trained experts were rare among entrepreneurs and senior management.
The Great War changed all that. With British imperial ingenuity the US financial system was reorganized along the lines of the Bank of England, founding the Federal Reserve in 1913. Then a similar merger of British imperial and American expansionist aspirations created the Committee on Public Information (aka the Creel Committee) to surreptitiously promote US entry into Britain‘s war against Germany on a nationwide scale. While US press barons like Pulitzer and Hearst had promoted little wars for local interests, like the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines from Spain as well as the Cubans and Filipinos), Creel led the first national psychological warfare campaign for an international war that would lead to the mergers of the British imperial elite with its American subsidiary. This national effort was conducted by a fusion of private business personnel with the civil and military servants of the American state.
Although the Creel Committee was deactivated after the Armistice, the infamous Edward Bernays returned from Versailles to promote himself and his rebranded psychological warfare product for “peacetime use” as public relations. It remains fashionable to attribute the origins of “evil“ propaganda to NSDAP Propaganda Minister Joseph Göbbels. However the modest Rhenish civil servant, raised in the Latin rite, was always aware of what he learned from British and American mass media moguls. While both cinema and TV had their infancy in Germany, it was the mass media cartel in the US, largely financed by the syndicates for which Meyer Lansky kept book, who made propaganda the tool Göbbels wielded.
When the German Empire capitulated in 1945, after failing to destroy the Soviet Union for the West, most of the industrial capacity of western Eurasia had been destroyed; much of its workforce decimated. Yet the task for which all this slaughter had been performed remained unattained. Not only had the Soviet Union survived; it had survived alone. Despite more than twenty million dead at the hands of Western hordes, it had re-industrialized beyond the Urals in a fraction of the time it took the US to become a major industrial power.
British industrial capacity was largely obsolete or dependent on a colonial exploitation cycle undermined by its hypocritical war effort. However those who really ruled the waves had already decided that America was more secure than Albion. For the next forty-five years the US, now the Anglo-American commonwealth Baron Rothschild and Rhodes had envisioned already after the union of South Africa, would plunder not only its traditional vassals in Central and South America but all those dominions and colonies it had infested during WW2. Thus the reconstructed European Economic Community was emasculated as a source of competition for US industry. The subordination of industry to banking, the ultimate metaphysical project of Bretton Woods (the road to New Hampshire that would become the road to Damascus) would not only establish a neo-Latin regime of sin and grace, it would prepare the foundation for the hedge fund domination today.
In the short-term Anglo-American policy had two major objectives: to maintain industrial superiority in the world “marketplace” and to obstruct development and access of Soviet industry to any market beyond its immediate borders. While the world economy has always been a system of international commerce, such commerce was not the only or even primary form of international relations before the 16th century. With technological capabilities for industrial production and rational agriculture generally accessible, the struggle to maintain world domination relied on more than conventional piracy and brigandry. Actual access and control over knowledge and technology had to be exerted.
The campaign to control (suppress) the independent development of the “darker” peoples took two forms. The most obvious, but expensive, was the physical suppression by armed intervention or support for local tyranny. This was effective in the short-term (as long as the Soviet Union was extant). However as the thirty-year war against Vietnamese independence and unification proved, killing everyone who disagrees is a very inefficient means of enforcement. The second form, well-known in Britain and France- if inadequately exploited- is the indoctrination of the elite in the target country. This policy is pursued primarily by the schools and universities who accept pupils and students from the countries subordinated or targeted for subordination. On one hand the graduates become members of a foreign club with privileges and interests that separate them from their places of origin. On the other they are induced to enjoy the benefits of the host country and prefer them to the relatively limited conditions of their home countries. A certain percentage of the best educated are either lost or compromised as often unwitting agents of a foreign power.
The Soviet Union conducted educational programs for the youth cadre of newly-independent states and liberation movements but these could not compete with combined capacity of the US and its Eurasian vassals. Moreover since graduates of Moscow-managed foreign education and training programs could easily be labelled “communist” or “subversive” upon return to their homes, they risked persecution or death in the ongoing regime change operations. By contrast Western indoctrinated professionals could work safely anywhere and usually with higher salaries and status.
When the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and the Yugoslav Federation were dissolved, annexed, demolished respectively, a major change in the imperial business model occurred. By the mid-1980s the Bush-Clinton dynasty (Clintons were still just Arkansas princelings at the time.) had succeeded in negotiating a new “treaty port” system with the government of Chinese CP nationalist Deng Xiaoping (not to be confused with the KMT nationalists on Formosa) whereby the remainder of US industrial plant would be transferred to China. Heavy industry had already been moved to Japan and Korea. This prepared the way for the fulfilment of the Jekyll Island – Bretton Woods scheme for transition from industrial capitalism to financial feudalism. East Asia, including India, had always had the largest source of labour; traditionally at virtually no cost. Therefore the Chinese CP industrialization policy was naturally coherent with the Anglo-American eugenics and de-industrialization policies. For Bush and Deng this was the original “win-win” deal. Deng is long gone but Neil Bush continues to preach the good news of China‘s absorption of US industrial capacity.
Analogous to the 1972 deal between Anglo-American finance capital and the Wahhabi gangster clan Britain put in charge of Arabian oil that traded USD denominated oil for dictatorial decadence, China‘s “treaty ports” (special economic zones) became the hubs for virtually all US-branded industrial output. In order to make that pay- at least until China had its own consumer market- it had to trade this offshore output with the world‘s biggest consumer market. Hence China became, not unlike the Saudis, an indispensable holder of massive volumes of US Treasury bills. Despite the fact that China has used this capital and technology flow to recreate its position as the workshop of the world, the process included a high degree of financial and ideological contamination, far exceeding the environmental waste problems of the last century.
Of course there are different kinds of toxicity. Sugar and tobacco are toxic substances but not necessarily lethal like arsenic or plutonium. Mind-altering (an admittedly confusing term but at least conventional) substances have been deployed/ employed throughout human history to deal with pain and stress or induce levity. Drugs are in that sense a tool like any other. The definition of dysfunction depends on for whom something is a function. For example a dull civil servant charged with administering a warehouse of minors for up to eight hours per day can find a child, who refuses to stay on the shelf, while he or she pretends to teach, dysfunctional and in need of a suitably mind-altering drug, if corporal punishment is impermissible or ineffective. At the same time an industrial workforce can be pacified occasionally with a truncheon but sedatives are more profitable. There is a risk that the sedated will cease to perform efficiently since it was that same aggressiveness that drove the machine as well as the truncheon.
The need to establish means of control over superfluous populations has grown both in the once highly industrialized countries and in those where industrial development has been obstructed or impaired, i.e. the Western Anglo-American Empire. The transformation of the core into a “cash and cocaine centrifuge” has placed an extraordinary burden on the indoctrination and discipline system. The cadre schools are not only entrepreneurially integrated in the “drugs, dollars, daggers, and depopulation” industries. They also have a duty to preserve its ideological (theological) veneer. As the papal-rabbinical offshore of finance capitalism expands brutally to its full potential as the “gnome on the bridge” between late industrialised Asia, the de-industrialized Western peninsula and Americas, and the regularly ravaged African continent, the hedge funds for which it stands must retain a façade of moral legitimacy at all the key nodes of mind control. The masses are managed by personal digital devices and pharmaments. The aspirants and legacies of the administrative-managerial class, i.e. courtiers and bootmakers, have to be corralled and branded at regular intervals. That is the “idea of the university”, John Cardinal Newman notwithstanding.
Someone else already called Harvard a hedge fund that owns a university. But hedge funds are the beneficial owners of nearly everything. The transformation of the theological seminaries seems quite vulgar. Yet it is hardly inconsistent with the role of finance in Christendom. Dealing in debt is just another way of trading with sin, grace and salvation.
In the university the trade begins with extraction from students in terms of fees and charges beyond the capacity of normal wage and salary earners to pay and the statutory bar against bankruptcy protection for students and graduates. They are also active programs for generating conspicuous consumption. In the past these were temporary social rituals, often initiation into subsequent career or status organizations. To this has been added an extensive curriculum of psychological engineering.
On one hand the acceptance, if only selective, of such ideas as indeterminacy, uncertainty and social construction created space to challenge authoritarian dogma of the bourgeois state in its maturation. On the other, the very fungibility of language, combined with objective institutional power, turned this critical potential into narcissistic cannibalism. Semi-literate undergraduates have been taught that it is they who are indeterminate, not the institutions or dogmas of the Establishment. The reconstituted liberal product which was- if hypocritically- pronounced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, the same year millions of Palestinians were deprived of those rights by a settler-colonial terror state) has not been abandoned per se. Instead the subject of those rights, i.e. humans, has been deconstructed beyond recognition. “Human” is merely an underperforming asset bundled into a financial instrument. The human right is worth less than a conventional CDO. Real humans, like the homes or countries they once inhabited are “sub-prime”.
Commercial enhancements are marketed in the range of gender and identity attributes through which the pupil/ student commodifies itself. The old adage that if one has to ask about the mileage on a Rolls Royce then one cannot afford it, applies to gender identities. Only to prove the sincerity of the choice one has to ignore all the lifetime maintenance costs. Does a youth aspire to breast or prostate cancer or osteoporosis when choosing the hormones and wardrobe clichés? And only in the US have a head of state, past and acting, “chosen to be black”.
Of course one cannot really choose one‘s gender. One can only select from the collection of clichés for gender roles like the clothes for Mattel‘s Ken and Barbie dolls. Instead of psychedelics from the 1960s one chews hormones, not unlike cattle stock.
The seminal authors of this fantasy world were the Huxleys. Brave New World anticipates this fusion of narcissism and nihilism in which the defining social activity is sexual gratification, all other needs having been rendered redundant or superfluous.
The absurdity of modern pornography is the unanswered question of what is there beyond sex?
if everyone lives solely for sexual gratification who harvests the grain, sews the clothing, builds the homes or generates the power for heat and light as well as to recharge those personal electronic/ electrical devices?
If the political economy is reduced to that which sustains the bedroom then we must expect- and indeed find- what de Sade described in his Philosophie dans le Boudoir. Libertinism confounds liberty. Any doubts about this can be remedied by examination of conduct by the hedge funds’ “most moral army” as recorded and disseminated through so-called social media platforms. Then there are the thousands kidnapped and sodomized in the prisons of the “Middle East’s only democracy”, if that is insufficient. Indeed there is no need for shock when a nation of victims systematically abuses everyone with whom it has contact. This is the nature of terror, it is the complement to a political-economic-social system run by those for whom the “invisible hand” is always a fist and Adam Smith’s compassion is utterly absent.
The beneficial owners of the university (and everything else) cannot afford any interruptions in their cash streams. Passolini only filmed the foreplay to their obscene dreams. Punishing those who fail to punish is the “trickle down” from the tower of power.
That is wholly consistent with an education devoid of sentimentality in institutions that have become little more than asylums for the voluntarily insane. The faculty serve as account managers and cowherds for the next generation of lab-fed, lactose-free, low carbon, meat.
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Dr. T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Harvard University Widener Library [Photo by Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0]
