Academia

A Call For Radical Transparency in Politics

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My friend Bruce Kesler, who keeps a sharper eye on the fine details of American politics than I do, is dead square right in a recent post at Democracy Project that I reproduce here in full:

Hidden Foreign Contributions Affect US Elections

US election law forbids non-Americans to contribute directly to federal candidates, and qualified donations above $200 are available to public scrutiny. There is a huge loophole – or, more correctly, shroud – over contributions by foreigners to US non-profits, who heavily shape public discussion affecting our elections – and other policies. (There’s, also, some indication that the $200 cut-off for full disclosure of contributions to our campaigns may be another loophole being exploited by some foreigners.)
 
IRS Form 990 generally requires that non-profits list contributors and their addresses who give $5000 or more. However, non-profits are not required to publicly divulge who they are (with the exception of private foundations and 527’s).
 
Non-profits include 501(c)(4)’s, which are estimated to spend in 2008 well more than the $424-million that 527’s spent to influence the 2004 elections.
 
Another area of concern is donations made by foreigners to our universities. Although New York State requires that such contributions be revealed, there is no enforcement and filings are often not made.
 
In Britain, it is estimated, more funding comes from the MidEast for Islamic Studies departments than from the government.

Ministers labelled Islamic studies a “strategic subject” and said the “effective and accurate teaching” of it in universities could help community cohesion and counter extremism.

Similar concerns have been raised in the US about the influence of MidEast contributors on our universities’ curriculums, and the faculty who influence public discussion. See here and here, for examples.
 
Former presidents Carter and Clinton have received tens of millions in donations, and more, from foreign sources for their foundations, yet the public knows very little about from whom or how much. Meanwhile, Carter and Clinton take frequent public stands on public policy and candidates for office.
 
A draft has been released of a revised IRS Form 990. It increases exposure on governance issues, but retains the shroud over contributors to non-profits. At the very least, foreign contributors should be revealed publicly, at least for amounts over the $200 of election laws.
 
You can send your comments to the IRS during the comment period. It’s as simple as an email to Form990Revision@irs.gov

Bravo to Bruce for highlighting this important but generally unrecognized problem.

One of the ironies of Beltway incumbent preferred campaign finance regulation like the odious McCain-Feingold law is that it manages to combine restrictions of the political activities and free speech rights of American citizens while granting opacity to wealthy foreigners who seek to influence political discourse here through generous donations to foundations, educational organizations, think tanks, universities, presidential libraries and other institutions that shape our intellectual life. It is completely understandable, given the potential impact of American policies on the rest of the world that other states and their sundry notables would seek to make their voice heard here. To a certain extent, when it’s above board public diplomacy and cultural exchanges, it’s even a good thing. What’s unacceptable is that foreign interests can often buy such influence – which is what they are really doing – under the radar or even behind the shield of legal secrecy. If some of our finest universities were people then they would have already had to register as foreign agents a long, long, loooooooong, time ago.

The same might be said of some former presidents. Or of presidential candidates.

The answer here is not to go on a fruitless legal jihad to ban foreign money, which at times does get turned toward humanitarian or genuinely educational purposes but to require radical transparency of our think tanks, universities, charities and other institutions enjoying tax deductible status but are dedicated to indirectly influencing the political process or policy formation. If an American institution or scholar wants to shill for the Wahabbi Lobby by working for a tank on the take from a senior Saudi prince, or accept grants from PLA-affiliated Chinese corporations, Japanese billionaires, mobbed-up Russian “businessmen” or other foreign sources, fine, but a highly visible disclaimer to that fact ought to be mandatory. If Carnegie or AEI or Harvard departments are advising presidential candidates on Mideast policy then contributions emanating from that region are relevant to the discussion.

If accepting the check in public is cause for dismay then there’s a word for what’s really going on:

Graft.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

Digressions, again

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Much discussion today has been whether or not Obama should have been willing to sit on a board with Ayers. I can’t see why people should have to justify that kind of connection. But much discussion begs the bigger question, shifts grounds. A wife who sets up panels on which these friends can pontificate, a candidate who announces in the friend’s living room all imply a weightier connection. And the whole board thing seems a less innocuous when it gives charitable money to those who fund a board member’s election bid. And then there is money for Rashid Khalidi, but of course he needs a larger megaphone and Obama recognizes his charitable duty to provide it with other’s funds.

I’d like to point out, though admitting it’s pretty much a distinction without a difference, that Bill Ayers is a professor in an education department and not an English one. Unhappily, this reinforces Lex’s comment to my earlier post – radicals were wise to hi-jack education departments. And perhaps they were most of all wise in making sure that very little understanding of history, political theory, or even literature was rich enough to lead students to the “restlessness” of the educated and aware.

Not that, mind you, my restless students today, taking a long time to find the majesty of Sophocles and the tragedy of Oedipus, didn’t make me long for some Ritalin. (Many were, eventually, moved. I’m no expert on Sophocles or film, but I never tire of Michael Pennington, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud performing the old story. And even my restless students eventually became awed, moved by the inevitability of fate and tragedy.) I would be interested in knowing if others have a version they have enjoyed – those tapes are wearing out. And Obama himself, seem strangely fated – trying to run from the feckless nature of his grandfather, his father and yet denigrating his more dutiful grandmother, leaving his mother out of his narrative. Who is he? Well, he’s half-white, raised by whites. He’s a lot of other things, too. But for all the elegance of the fall of his suits, he doesn’t seem at ease with who he is. The anger from being on-edge leads to tensions; its effect underlies the grievances we heard today.

Dancing Fast and Squinting Hard

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I don’t read Industrial Equipment News on a regular basis (who does?), but they printed a fascinating article by Mark Devlin that is worth checking out.

Mr. Devlin took umbrage at a recent paper written by two sociologist PhD’s in association with the University of Oxford. In the paper, the argument is made that there is something about engineers that causes them to become murderous, right wing radicals in greater numbers than other professions. This is due to the fact that most of the movers and shakers of international Islamic terrorist organizations were trained as engineers.

The 800 pound gorilla that the two sociologists are trying oh-so-hard to ignore is that an engineering degree might just be something sought after by people who are desperate to build bombs and place them where they will do the most damage. Terrorist wannabes will take classes that reveal the weak points in infrastructure and how to use explosives, as opposed to Texas Instruments turning normal college students into monsters with their mind-warping engineering calculators.

Or, as Mr. Devlin so pithily states, “Tough to overthrow much with an English degree.”

But I actually think there are two factors that both Mr. Devlin and the authors of the paper missed.

More than a few terrorist organizations of the Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s were started by, and heavily recruited, disgruntled college students and university professors. It worked back then, why wouldn’t it work now?

(As an aside, I would like to point out that the majority of those Leftist college students who turned to terrorism were enrolled in the soft sciences, mostly philosophy. I think the authors of the Oxford study would get bent out of shape if someone would suggest that the humanities warps the mind and turns people into violent terrorists. I would never do that myself for fear that Ginny, our resident expert on the humanities and former college student in the 1970’s, would decide to retire to her kitchen and assemble something volatile from common household cleaning products.)

It is also no secret that the Arab world is hardly a hotbed of growth and innovation. Seems to me that most of the families which can afford to pay for a modern Western style education would be pushing their spawn to get a degree in the hard sciences, if for no other reason than there is a real need for development through most of the Islamic world.

I corresponded very briefly with our fellow Chicago Boyz and resident engineer Steven den Beste about this article, and he had this to say about well educated terrorists….

“As to them being disproportionately engineers, I would suggest that observation of any large university will show that the vast majority of exchange students are to be found in departments who teach utilitarian subjects. Not too many Arabs are to be found studying postmodern literary theory or art history. And I don’t think you’ll find too many of them in the Women’s Studies department, let alone Queer Studies. Or any other “studies”, for that matter.”

That appears to be sound wisdom to me.

(Hat tip to Ace.)

Digressions

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Just a comment to Lex’s post that got digressive:

We’re used to this inability to understand the “other”    from statists;  Obama merely summarizes “What’s the Matter with Kansas” in a couple of clauses leading to his belief (like Franks) that if yahoos  would see the world correctly – that is, as he does –  they would understand their oppressed nature and the government/Obama  as savior.  They know better:   believing a government can prevent the tragedies of life (whether lung cancer or hurricanes, economic downturns or sin) leads to  bitterness;  believing that a leader can solve the big problems encourages misery (the people)  and  megalomania (the leader).

Refusal to accept limitations in our power also leads to demonizing the “other”. One of my students said she wanted life like it was under Clinton. Before 9/11? I asked.   She said, yes. If we’d just elected Gore. Yeah, right. Things should be perfect; it should be exactly as I want it. It isn’t. Someone is at fault. We’ve spent eight years of BDS; if we listen to Wright and note the subtext of Obama’s campaign, this is just the beginning. Hannity and O’Reilley can take care of themselves and aren’t exactly innocent of demonizing others; still, how many Linda Ramirez-Sliwinskis, indeed, how many like Obama’s grandmother, will be exiled from the great American family? How many will eventually be the subject of “hate time”? We have already seen Obama as unifier and it isn’t heartening.

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“Go, Tell the Spartans!”

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Recently, I finished reading Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World (Vintage) and The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece by Cambridge professor and historian of classical Greece, Paul Cartledge. Scholars of the classical period have to be artists among historians for it is in this subfield that the historian’s craft matters most. While modern historians are literally drowning in documents, classical sources are, for the most part, fragmentary and/or exceedingly well-known, some texts having been continuously read in the West for well over twenty centuries. The ability to “get the story right” depend’s heavily upon the historian’s ability to elicit an elusive but complicated context in order to interpret for the reader or student. Dr. Cartledge acquits himself admirably in this regard.

Thermopylae and The Spartans can be profitably read by specialists yet also serve as an enjoyable introduction to the world of ancient Sparta to the general reader. Cartledge concisely explains the paradox of Sparta, at once the “most Greek” polis among the Greeks yet also, the most alien and distinct from the rest of the far-flung Greek world:

“Again, when Xenophon described the Spartans as ‘craftsmen of war’ he was referring specifically to military manifestations of their religious zeal, such as animal sacrifices performed on crossing a river frontier or even the battlefield as battle was about to be joined. The Spartans were particularly keen on such military divination. If the signs (of a acrificed animal’s entrails) were not ‘right’, then even an imperatively necessary military action might be delayed, aborted or avoided altogether” (1)

“Plutarch in his ‘biography’ of Lycurgus says that the lawgiver was concerned to rid Spartans of any unnecessary fear of death and dying. To that end, he permitted the corpses of all Spartans, adults no less than infants, to be buried among the habitations of the living, within the regular settlement area-and not, as was the norm elsewhere in the entire Greek world from at the latest 700 BCE, carefully segregated in separately demarcated cemetaries away from the living spaces. The Spartans did not share the normal Greek view that burial automatically brought pollution (miasma).”(2)

The quasi-Greeks of Syracuse probably had more in common in terms of customs with their Athenian enemies under Nicias than they did with the Spartans of Gylippus. Cartledge details the unique passage of the agoge and the boldness of Spartan women that amazed and disturbed other Greeks as well as tracing the evolution of “the Spartan myth”. In Cartledge’s work the mysterious Spartans become, from glorious rise to ignominious fall, a comprehensible people.

1. The Spartans, P. 176.

2. Thermopylae, P. 78.

Crossposted at Zenpundit

ADDENDUM:

“Then we shall fight in the shade.”