Top Papers Quoted More Wine Importers Than Union Leaders on Port Strike

By Paul Hedreen

October 5, 2024

Source: FAIR

At midnight on October 1, over 45,000 port workers across the Eastern US began a strike that was to last for three days. This labor action was only the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between workers and bosses in North America, but corporate media never seem to get better at reporting on such disputes.

In this particular case, the workers’ main demands were pay increases and assurances that automation will not replace them. But strikes in general have one straightforward aim: to demonstrate the power of workers, and thus the necessity of meeting their demands, by depriving the economy of their labor. The International Longshoremen’s Association gained an initial victory in securing a 62% wage increase over six years for its workers. Other issues, like automation, will continue to be negotiated, with a January 2025 deadline.

It seems, however, that the more a strike affects the economy, i.e., the more effective it is, the harder corporate media try to smear workers as selfish and destructive. To understand where media loyalties lie, one only needs to look at the experts they seek for quotes.

Big banking, big shipping, big banana

Washington Post (10/1/24): “The effects are expected to ripple through the country, costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars a day and getting worse each day the longshoremen remain off the job.”

When media report on high finance or business dealings, readers will rarely if ever find a quote from a union leader, much less a rank-and-file worker, in the news reports. However, when dockworkers initiate a labor action, it seems the first call a reporter makes is to a Manhattan office tower.

Stifel is an investment bank that manages $444 billion worth of assets. It’s perhaps best known for tricking five Wisconsin school districts into losing over $200 million in bum mortgage investments ahead of the 2008 financial crisis (Reuters, 12/8/16).

Lately, the phones at the bank’s offices have been overwhelmed with reporters seeking comment on the East Coast port strike. Analysts at Stifel have been quoted a total of four times in the Washington Post (10/1/24, 10/1/24) and New York Times (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Post (9/28/24), presumably trying to prevent accusations of favoring finance over accounting, also sought comment from a chief economist at Ernst & Young.

If, when it comes to the economy, you prioritize banana availability above all other considerations, then corporate media has you covered. The Post (9/30/24) spoke to the Big-Ag lobbying and insurance group the American Farm Bureau Federation, who warned that 75% of the nation’s banana supply was at stake. Not to be outdone, the Times (10/1/24) tracked down their own source for the banana angle, Daniel Barabino, COO at the Bronx’s Top Banana, who warned a two-week strike would hit “all the banana importers.”

Later reporting by the Baltimore Banner (10/3/24) revealed that banana heavyweights Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita operate their own ships and are outside the trade group that represents management in bargaining, and thus their ships were still being unloaded. In other words, initial forecasts of banana scarcity were greatly overstated.

Naturally, logistics executives were well-represented in the news pages. The New York Times quoted the directors of two ports (9/24/24), as well as four members of management at different logistics firms (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Washington Post quoted at least seven logistics executives in their coverage (9/18/24, 9/28/24, 9/30/24, 9/30/24), not to mention numerous importers and business owners.

Missing workers

The New York Times (10/1/24) ran an article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for wine importers—but no article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for dockworkers.

Union leaders were not totally silenced. Since September 24, four ILA leaders have been quoted by the New York Times (9/24/24, 9/26/24, 9/29/24, 10/1/24). For those keeping track, that is two fewer than the six wine importers the Times has quoted in coverage of the port strike (9/30/24, 10/1/24).

The number of rank-and-file dockworkers quoted by the Times is zero. To be fair, it seems that the union has instructed picketers to not talk to reporters, an understandable measure for message discipline.

However, in the lead-up to the strike, the Times found time to talk to Christmas tree, clothing and mango importers (9/24/24, 9/30/24). These people were understandably concerned for their livelihoods. However, by failing to interview even one dockworker or any of their families, the Times is showing their readers a picture where only the business owners are concerned for the economy, for their families, for the holiday season.

Will longshoremen have enough time to spend with their families or have enough money for gifts this Christmas? Readers of the Times have no idea.

Instead, Times coverage (10/3/24) has focused on Harold Daggett, the union’s president, and his “autocratic” style and “generous salary.” When the only union member profiled by the Times is depicted as rich, corrupt and incompetent, it encourages a dismissal of the union’s struggle as a whole.

Even once the strike ended, the Times (10/3/24) just couldn’t find a worker to quote. Instead, the piece extensively quoted the chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group, a corporate consulting firm, who was unhappy that the strike had been settled:

I cannot recall an episode that had so little effect on the economy, led to such a short strike and resulted in such a huge increase in earnings for workers who are already making over $100,000 a year…. We tend to shrug off the costs, but it does affect our ability to build things and export them.

During the UAW strike, Sarah Lazare noted that the Anderson Economic Group was used by media to decry labor’s threat to “the economy” without mentioning their auto-industry clients (American Prospect, 8/23/23). The firm was also cited on the danger posed by the UPS strike (FAIR.org, 9/26/23). It’s a group you would naturally turn to if your were looking for a quote decrying labor getting a larger slice of the economic pie.

Loud on wages, silent on profits

Corporate media coverage of longshoremen’s wages has emphasized that some union members make around $160,000 (Washington Post, 10/1/24). One story even reported that salaries for New York and New Jersey longshoremen range to “over $450,000” (Washington Post, 9/28/24).

Per the report that the Post seems to be referencing (they don’t bother to give a citation), the Port of New York and New Jersey elects to pay certain workers “special compensation packages,” which are not governed by the collective bargaining agreement. In other words, the Post is using some exceptional cases in the Port of New Jersey and New York, unconnected to the contract that’s up for negotiation, to suggest that some people are being paid nearly half a million dollars to load freight. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the 45,000 dockworkers whose salaries are governed by the collective bargaining agreement are maligned.

The starting wage rate for a dockworker is just $20 an hour. Given that the top wage (after six years of service) under the current contract is $39, a 40-hour-per-week salary would net a senior worker just over $80,000. To earn in the hundreds of thousands, overtime is clearly needed. However, the New York Times (10/1/24) reports merely that dockworkers “say they have to put in long workweeks to earn that much,” with no elaboration on whether or not that is true.

When nearly every story on the port strike mentions that dockworkers make up to $100,000 or $200,000, the object is clear: Media want readers to question if these “workers without a college degree” (New York Times, 10/1/24) really deserve a salary commensurate with the 10.5 million Americans in management occupations.

These ports are up and down the East Coast, including in high-cost-of-living metro areas like New York and Boston. Labor unions are one of the few paths to middle-class security available to most American workers. Yet it is standard practice for labor coverage in corporate media to suggest that workers fighting for their share is tantamount to greediness.

Soaring profits for shipping companies is an important business story (Economist, 6/27/24)—until it comes time for those companies to renegotiate labor contracts.

Shipping company profits, on the other hand, are rarely reported. When shippers’ high profits are mentioned, they’re often not presented as a fact, but as something that is “argued” by workers (e.g., Washington Post, 10/1/24).

However, outside of strike coverage, the shipping industry seems to be quite healthy. “Boom Times Are Back for Container Shipping,” according to a recent Economist headline (6/27/24). The windfall profits of the pandemic era, over $400 billion, are believed to be larger than the sum total of profits since containerization was implemented in 1957 (CNN, 9/26/24). Indeed, some of the pandemic-era inflation that has eroded dockworkers’ real wages may be due to the outsized pricing power of the oligopolistic shipping industry (Bloomberg, 1/18/22; The Hill, 2/2/22).

Why was there little mention of these profits in strike coverage? Readers are encouraged to view longshoremen as greedy and unreasonable, which is less sustainable when worker demands are juxtaposed with record profits. The easiest way to avoid that juxtaposition is to omit profits from the conversation. (In the same way, it’s easier to hate professional athletes for their multi-million dollar salaries when you ignore the billions they are making for the team owners.)

Frightening readers to management’s side

New York Times (10/1/24) warned of “cascading effects — such as layoffs — at American firms, including in the auto industry.”

The economic effects of the strike have been much-bandied. The cost to the US economy, depending on your source, could amount to $3.78 billion per week (Washington Post, 10/1/24), $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion per week (New York Times, 10/1/24) or a whopping $5 billion per day, according to the brain trust at J.P. Morgan (New York Times, 9/30/24).

While these numbers are supposed to frighten the reader into siding with management, what they are really doing is demonstrating the importance of labor being paid well and treated well. The fact that dockworkers’ labor is necessary to facilitate up to $5 billion in commerce every day is evidence that their labor is of the utmost importance, and an argument for their being compensated as such.

Besides serving up run-of-the-mill worker bashing, the Washington Post  (9/29/24, 10/1/24, 10/1/24) has taken the strike as an opportunity to raise the specter of pandemic-era inflation and price hikes. The Post (9/28/24) quoted Ernst & Young chief economist Greg Daco: “A work stoppage could slow progress on bringing inflation under control.” Never mind the fact that inflation has already been tamed (Politico, 9/11/24).

Other outlets have a more staid forecast, with the New York Times (10/1/24) noting that “a rapid acceleration in inflation” is unlikely.

Framing a strike as potentially strangling the economy (with little mention of the hardship striking workers would no doubt face) serves to help the reader, whose economic situation is almost certainly closer to the workers, identify instead with the multibillion-dollar logistics companies.

It’s not that workers are seeking to destroy the economy. However, it is up to the workers to look out for their own interests as labor share continues to decrease, especially in the face of automation (Marketplace, 4/12/24). Most Americans are sympathetic to unions and union members, but when it comes to labor actions, media try demonization above all else.

False choice

This Washington Post article (10/2/24) closes with a warning to President Joe Biden against “an approach to industry highly deferential to labor unions.”

Corporate media attempted to use the economic chaos apparently on the horizon to paint a less-than-rosy picture for the incumbent Democrats. With the presidential election a month away, the strike has been posed as a tough choice for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris between supporting unions and averting economic destruction. The Washington Post (10/2/24) reported that

Biden told reporters Tuesday that he would not use a federal labor law to force the longshoremen back to work…. But whether—or for how long—the president will stick to this posture has become a source of speculation in Washington, as Democrats try to project economic stability ahead of the November election.

Elsewhere, the Post (9/30/24) noted that some economic forecasters “assume that, with the election just weeks away, Biden will intervene in the labor dispute to head off more serious economic costs.” The New York Times (10/1/24) took a similar tone:

The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, to force an end to a port shutdown…. But some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy.

The Times failed to actually cite any of these labor experts who said President Biden might use the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial law that began the slow demise of organized labor since 1947. However, this framing supports the idea that a strike is effectively a hostage situation, with the workers putting a gun to the head of the economy, and the government must choose one of those two sides. Left out of the equation are the corporations, who have the power to end the strike immediately by sharing some of their inflated profits with their workers.

It should not be surprising that corporate media redirect readers’ anger towards workers. US news outlets have a habit of omitting wealth and income inequality from their coverage, and coverage of labor actions is no exception.

(WHITE) Working-Class Men Are Not Okay

(WHITE) Working-class American men are getting lonelier and sicker and their lives are shortening. It’s not just a sad state of affairs. It’s a full-blown crisis that demands policy solutions.

By Ryan Zickgraf

October 5, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Sometimes I think about the fifty-year-old man living in my mom’s garage.

Todd is an affable giant, his red beard and long hair giving him the air of a medieval Viking. But his life is far from a fairy tale. Since his divorce years ago, he’s floated between housing situations and minimum-wage jobs. At present, he cooks at a charming but dumpy diner that serves a local central Illinois delicacy known as the “horseshoe.” Because he only nets minimum wage, he has difficulty paying off debt and making ends meet as the cost of living increases. He doesn’t have health insurance, and his nagging physical ailments are worsening.

My brother, his former boss, took him in as an emergency measure to keep him off the streets. A year later, he’s still sleeping on a couch in the garage with little hope of a more independent arrangement.

Stories like Todd’s of life at the margins aren’t uncommon. Last month, the American Institute for Boys and Men published a study examining the state of working-class men in America, and its findings are bleak. The report offers a troubling snapshot of the issues afflicting them, including stagnant wages, dwindling job prospects, declining health, and shortened lifespans.

A wide swath of American men continue to thrive on the top perches of society. The C-suites are full of them. They’re wealthy, have access to capital and power, are relatively healthy and receive quality healthcare, are more likely than working-class men to be married with stable families, and have robust social networks. But what this study and others like it make increasingly evident is that the number of men at the bottom tier of society is growing, and life at the bottom is getting worse.
Who’s Working Class?

According to the American Institute for Boys and Men, Todd is among the 64 percent of American men considered working class. Like many in social sciences, the researchers use the four-year college degree to measure class disparities. That metric may not be perfectly accurate, as plenty of college-educated people work for their wages under bosses and managers, not always for high pay or in excellent conditions. Nevertheless, the education metric remains useful in forming a general impression, telling a straightforward if simplified story of the divide between the haves and have-nots in postindustrial America.

Using the college degree metric, the working class is less white and female than the rest of the population. Slightly more than half of the working class is white, compared to 64 percent of the college-educated and professional-managerial class. Among racial groups, Latino and black men of prime working age (twenty-five to fifty-four) are more likely to be working class, at 81 percent and 77 percent, respectively, compared to 59 percent of white men and 35 percent of Asian men.

Meanwhile, the educational attainment rates of men and women have nearly reversed over the last four decades. In the 1980s, women were likelier to be without a college degree. As of 2022, 64 percent of men have no college degree, compared with 57 percent of women.

College education may not be identical to class position, but it sure tells us a lot about it. The weekly earnings of college-educated men are now nearly double those of non-college-educated men: $1,553 to $852, barely a fraction higher than working-class wages in 1979 when adjusted for inflation. For women, the disparity is similar: $667 to $1,194. A gender pay gap still exists at all ranks. But the most striking wage gap in America is the education wage gap.
Sick, Alone, Dying

Working-class men don’t just earn less; they live less. Their average lifespan is shorter than those of both women of their own class position and men of a higher class. Women still outlive men at the top of the class hierarchy, but the disparity is far wider at the bottom. One of the most startling outcomes of the study is the finding that working-class men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four are roughly seven times more likely to die than college-educated women of the same age.

Their shortened lifespans owe in part to what researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the authors of the 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, labeled “deaths of despair,” which include drug poisoning, alcoholism, and suicide. Working-class men are also more than twice as likely to die at work as all the other groups combined, a risk exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are at higher risk of several of the fifteen leading causes of death, including cardiovascular disease and cancer — and they are four times less likely to have health insurance.

For working-class men, the problem isn’t just dying younger but also experiencing a lower quality of life. The primary issue is loneliness and isolation. According to the study, working-class men are marrying less, having fewer kids, and less likely to have close friends than their college-educated peers. They’re dropping out of social obligations and even work itself. Work participation keeps shrinking, with black men seeing a steady decline from 79 percent employment in 1979 to 74 percent in 2023. White working-class men have seen the most significant drop over the last forty years, with their employment rate dropping from 91 percent to 82 percent. Over half of unemployed working-class men say they aren’t working due to illness or disability, compared to 18 percent of college-educated men.

Richard V. Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which conducted the study, concludes that these problems have reached full-blown crisis levels. He writes, “America is losing too many men. Not on the battlefield but in our hospitals and our homes.”

What can be done? The recent boomlet of working-class sector jobs under the Joe Biden administration was a positive step, but wages are now trending in the wrong direction.

Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has sufficient policy plans to address the interlocking crises of working-class men. On the one hand, you have Trump, who likes to pander to working men but whose policies disproportionately benefit the rich. Then there’s Harris, who appears to have backed away from the ambitious programs of Bidenomics in favor of nibbling at the edges, touting instead a slew of tax credits for “entrepreneurs.”

In the meantime, for people like Todd, America’s class divide is beginning to look like an unbridgeable chasm.

Industrial Policy Without Nationalism

Can we expand the state’s role in the economy while diminishing its capacity for war?

By J.W. Mason

October 2, 2024

Source: Dissent




In the first two years after Biden’s election, there was considerable enthusiasm on the left for the administration’s embrace of a larger, more active economic role for the federal government. I was among those who saw both the ambitions of the Build Back Better bill and the self-conscious embrace of industrial policy as an unexpectedly sharp break with the economic policy consensus of the past thirty years.

Biden squandered that early promise with his embrace of Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza. His legacy will be the piles of shattered buildings and children’s corpses that he, with aides like Antony Blinken, did so much to create.

The administration has also struck a Trumpian note on immigration, promising to “shut down the border” to desperate asylum seekers. And internationally, it is committed to a Manichean view of the world where the United States is locked into a perpetual struggle for dominance with rivals like Russia and China.

Can industrial policy be salvaged from this wreckage? I am not sure.

There are really two questions here. First, is there an inherent connection between industrial policy and economic nationalism, because support for one country’s industries must come at the cost of its trade partners? And second, is it possible in practice to pursue industrial policy without militarism? Or does it require the support of the national security establishment, the only powerful constituency that favors a bigger and more active government?

Much of the conversation around industrial policy assumes that one country’s gain must be another’s loss. U.S. officials insist on the need to outcompete China in key markets and constantly complain about how “unfair” Chinese support for its manufacturers disadvantages U.S. producers. European officials make similar complaints about the United States.

This zero-sum view of trade policy is shared by an influential strand of thought on the left, most associated with Robert Brenner and his followers. In their view, the world economy faces a permanent condition of overcapacity, in which industrial investment in one country simply depresses production and profits elsewhere. In the uncompromising words of Dylan Riley, “the present period does not hold out even the hope of growth,” allowing only for “a politics of zero-sum redistribution.” Development, in this context, simply means the displacement of manufacturing in the rich countries by lower-cost competitors.

I don’t know if anyone in the Biden administration has read Brenner or been influenced by him. But there is certainly a similarity in language. The same complaints that Chinese investment is exacerbating global overcapacity in manufacturing could come almost verbatim from the State Department or the pages of New Left Review. More broadly, there is a shared sense that China’s desire to industrialize is fundamentally illegitimate. The problem, Brenner complains, is that China and other developing countries have sought to “export goods that were already being produced” instead of respecting the existing “world division of labor along Smithian lines” and focusing on exports complementary to what was already being produced in the North.

Fortunately, we can be fairly confident that this understanding of world trade is wrong.

The zero-sum vision sees trade flows as driven by relative prices, with lower-cost producers beating out higher-cost ones for a fixed pool of demand. But as Keynesian economists have long understood, the most important factor in trade flows is changes in incomes, not prices. Far from being fixed, demand is the most dynamic element in the system.

A country experiencing an economic boom—perhaps from an upsurge in investment—will see a rapid rise in both production and demand. Some of the additional spending will fall on imports; countries that grow faster therefore tend to develop trade deficits while countries that grow slowly tend to develop trade surpluses. (It is true that some countries manage to combine rapid growth with trade surpluses, while others must throttle back demand to avoid deficits. But as the British economist A.P. Thirlwall argued, this is mainly a function of what kinds of goods they produce, rather than relative prices.)

We can see this dynamic clearly in the United States, where the trade deficit consistently falls in recessions and widens when growth resumes. It was even more stark, though less immediately obvious, in Europe in the 2000s. During the first decade of the euro, Germany developed large surpluses with other European countries, which were widely attributed to superior competitiveness thanks to wage restraint and faster productivity growth. But this was wrong. While German surpluses with the rest of the European Union rose from 2 percent to 3 percent of German GDP during the 2000s, there was no change in the fraction of income being spent in the rest of the bloc on German exports. Meanwhile, the share of German income spent on EU imports actually rose.

If Germans were buying more from the rest of the European Union, and non-German Europeans were buying the same amount from Germany, how could it be that the German trade surplus with Europe increased? The answer is that total expenditure was rising much faster in the rest of Europe. German surpluses were the result of austerity and stagnation within the country, not competitiveness. If Germany had adopted a program to boost green investment during the 2000s, its trade surpluses would have been smaller, not larger. The same thing happened in reverse after the crisis: the countries of Southern Europe rapidly closed their large trade deficits without any improvement in export performance, as deep falls in income and expenditure squeezed their imports.

Europe’s trade imbalances of a decade ago might seem far afield from current debates over industrial policy. But they illustrate a critical point. When a country adopts policies to boost investment spending, that creates new demand in its economy. And the additional imports drawn in by this demand are likely to outweigh whatever advantages it gains in the particular sector where investment is subsidized. Measures like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or CHIPS and Science Act may eventually boost U.S. net exports in the specific sectors they target. But they also raise demand for everything else. This is why a zero-sum view of industrial policy is wrong. If the United States successfully boosts investment in, say, wind turbine production, it will probably boost net exports of turbines. But it will also raise imports of other things—not just inputs for turbines, but all the goods purchased by everyone whose income is raised by the new spending. For most U.S. trade partners, the rise in overall demand will matter much more than greater U.S. competitiveness in a few targeted sectors.

China might look like an exception to this pattern. It has combined an investment boom with persistent trade surpluses, thanks to the very rapid qualitative upgrading of its manufacturing base. For most lower- and middle-income countries, rapid income growth leads to a disproportionate rise in demand for more advanced manufactures they can’t make themselves. This has been much less true of China. As economists like Dani Rodrik have shown, what is exceptional about China is the range and sophistication of the goods it produces relative to its income level. This is why it’s been able to maintain trade surpluses while growing rapidly.

While Biden administration officials and their allies like to attribute China’s success to wage repression, the reality is close to the opposite. As scholars of inequality like Branko Milanovic and Thomas Piketty have documented, what stands out about China’s growth is how widely the gains have been shared. Twenty-first-century China, unlike the United States or Western Europe, has seen substantial income growth even for those at the bottom of the income distribution.

More important for the present argument, China has not just added an enormous amount of manufacturing capacity; it has also been an enormous source of demand. This is the critical point missed by those who see a zero-sum competition for markets. Consider automobiles. Already by 2010 China was the world’s largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as many vehicles as the United States, a position it has held ever since. Yet this surge in auto production was accompanied by an even larger surge in auto consumption, so that China remained a net importer of automobiles until 2022. The tremendous growth of China’s auto industry did not come at the expense of production elsewhere; there were simply more cars being made and sold.

All this applies even more for the green industries that are the focus of today’s industrial policy debate. There has been a huge rise in production—especially but not only in China—but there has been an equally huge growth in expenditure. Globally, solar power generation increased by a factor of 100 over the past fifteen years, wind power by a factor of ten. And there is no sign of this growth slowing. To speak of excess capacity in this sector is bizarre. In a recent speech, Treasury Under Secretary Jay Shambaugh complained that China plans to produce more lithium-ion batteries and solar modules than are required to hit net-zero emissions targets. But if the necessary technologies come online fast enough, there’s no reason we can’t do better. Is Shambaugh worried the world will decarbonize too fast?

Even in narrow economic terms, there are positive spillovers from China’s big push into green technology. China may gain a larger share of the market for batteries or solar panels—though again, it’s important to stress that this market is anything but fixed in size—but the investment spending in that sector will create demand elsewhere, to the benefit of countries that export to China. Technological improvements are also likely to spread rapidly. One recent National Bureau of Economic Research study of industrial policy in semiconductors found that when governments adopt policies to support their own industry, they are able to significantly raise productivity—but thanks to the international character of chip production, the gains are almost as large for the countries they trade with. Ironically, as Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie observe, the United States stands to lose out on exactly these benefits thanks to the Biden administration’s hostility to investment by Chinese firms.

None of this is to say that other countries face no disruptions or challenges from China’s growth, or from policies to support particular industries in the United States or elsewhere. The point is that these disruptions can be managed. Lost demand in one sector can be offset by increased demand somewhere else. Subsidies in one country can be matched by subsidies in another. Indeed, in the absence of any global authority to coordinate green investment, a subsidy race may be the best way to hasten decarbonization.

As a matter of economics, then, there is no reason that industrial policy has to involve us-against-them nationalism or heightened conflict between the United States and China. As a matter of politics, unfortunately, the link may be tighter.

They are certainly linked in the rhetoric of the Biden administration. Virtually every initiative, it now seems, is justified by the need to meet the threat of foreign rivals. A central goal of the CHIPS Act is to not only reduce U.S. reliance on Chinese imports but to cut China off from technologies where the United States still has the lead. Meanwhile arms deliveries to Ukraine are sold as a form of stimulus. This bellicose posture is deeply written in the DNA of Bidenomics: before becoming Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan ran a think tank whose vision of “foreign policy for the middle class” was “Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China.” Thea Riofrancos calls this mindset the “security-sustainability nexus.” Is its current dominance in U.S. politics a contingent outcome—the result, perhaps, of the particular people who ended up in top positions in the Biden administration? And if so, can we imagine a U.S. industrial policy where the China hawks are not in the driver’s seat?

In a recent paper, Benjamin Braun and Daniela Gabor argue that it is “the salience of geopolitical competition” with China that has allowed the United States to go as far with industrial policy as it has. In the absence of much more popular pressure and a broader political realignment, they suggest, the only way that “green planners” can overcome the deep-seated resistance to bigger government is through an alliance with the “geopolitical hawks.”

Many of us have pointed to the economic mobilization of the Second World War as a model for a quick decarbonization of the U.S. economy through public investment. It’s an appealing example, since it combines both the most rapid expansion and redirection of economic activity in U.S. history and the closest the country has ever come to a planned economy. But given the already dangerous entanglement of industrial policy with war and empire, it’s a model we may not want to invoke.

On the other hand, the climate crisis is urgent. And the arguments that it calls for a more direct public role in steering investment are as strong as ever. It’s safe to say that neither the historic boom in new factory construction nor the rapid growth in solar energy (which accounts for the majority of new electrical generating capacity added in 2024) would have happened without the IRA. It’s easy to see how climate advocates could be tempted to strike a Faustian bargain with the national security state, if that’s the only way to get these measures passed.

Personally, I would like to avoid this particular deal with the devil. I believe we should oppose any policy aimed at strengthening the United States vis-à-vis China and reject the idea that U.S. military supremacy is in the interest of humanity. An all-out war between the United States and China (or Russia) would be perhaps the one outcome worse for humanity than uncontrolled climate change. Even if the new Cold War can be kept to a simmer—and that’s not something to take for granted—the green side of industrial policy is likely to lose ground whenever it conflicts with national security goals, as we’ve recently seen with Biden’s tariffs on Chinese solar cells, batteries, and electric vehicles. The Democratic pollster David Shor recently tweeted that he “would much rather live in a world where we see a 4 degree rise in temperature than live in a world where China is a global hegemon.” Administration officials would not, presumably, spell it out so baldly, but it’s safe to say that many of them feel the same way.

Adam Tooze has observed that historically socialists often favored balanced budgets—because they expected, not without reason, that the main beneficiary of laxer fiscal rules would be the military. The big question about industrial policy today is whether that logic still applies, or whether an expansion of the state’s role in the economic realm can be combined with a diminution of its capacity for war.


J.W. Masonn is associate professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY, and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His book Money and Things, with Arjun Jayadev, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Student Protests and the Corporatisation and Militarisation of Higher Education

By Henry A. Giroux

October 4, 2024

Source: Development Education Review


“UT Austin, where Texas state troopers are barring students from accessing the other side of the campus.” (@balagonline, Twitter)

The long-simmering crisis over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has reached a breaking point. Campus protests in solidarity with Gaza have erupted across North America, spanning at least 45 US states, Canada, and Mexico. Similar demonstrations have surged across Europe, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, expressions of moral outrage and solidarity have erupted in states across Central and South America, such as Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Cuba, as well as in Asia (including India, Indonesia, and Japan), the Middle East (including Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Yemen), Africa (including Tunisia), Australia, New Zealand and beyond. Many faculties have protested alongside their students, and on 8 May 2024 a group of professors at The New School in New York City erected the US’s first faculty encampment in solidarity with Gaza, signaling the growing momentum of the movement.

Meanwhile ‘Hands Off Rafah’ rallies have drawn thousands into the streets, while a global day of mass protest took place on 11 May (Aljazeera, 2024). No longer ripped from history, decontextualised, banished from public discourse, and relegated to the sphere of silent questions and neglected connections, the horrors Palestinians have faced and are facing are writ large in all their brutality (Lyamlahy, 2019). Politics, collective agency and mass student resistance are being reimagined as supposedly democratic societies across the globe embrace fascist responses to mass resistance. In the midst of the current protest movement, the historical, political, economic and cultural framing mechanisms that connect the current repression on campuses and the struggle for Palestinian rights have become more visible. What has also become more visible is the long history of the politics of disposability, a rising culture of violence against those considered other, and the transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporate power.

What must be extremely threatening to the far right and corporate media alike is that student protesters and their allies are clear about the connections between the issues of academic freedom, police violence, colonialism and human rights that they are raising – they are refusing to let these issues be separated in a fragmented, isolated, ahistorical and induvial fashion. In the manner of German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, the student protests are blasting ‘open the continuum of history’, rethinking it with fire (Clowes Huneke, 2022). While the issues of academic freedom, Palestinian rights, and the scourge of militarism and war are crucial issues for the students, they are not disconnected from the blight of neoliberalism and racialised state violence as fundamental elements of oppression (Hylton, 2024). Hence, what the protests signify in the broader sense are new insights, new framing mechanisms, and a critical interrogation of history in order to avoid the protests and their call for a radical democracy from being spectacularised, depoliticised and torn from the history.

With the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, students are courageously protesting the indiscriminate and massive killing of women, children and civilians by the Israeli government – with more than 35,000 killed thus far (Middle East Monitor, 2024). The student protests have called for a permanent ceasefire, recognition of a secure state for the Palestinian people, and for universities to disinvest from industries that produce weapons of war, particularly for Israel. The protests have struck a nerve and awakened the need for rethinking the role of higher education in a time of tyranny and war. University administrators, liberal and far fight politicians, the corporate media, and right-wing billionaires have responded by disingenuously condemning the protests as ‘antisemitic, claiming that the protests are the work of “outside agitators”’, and those in charge have supressed student resistance with militarised force (Zirin, 2024). This is generally the same group that challenges the claim that fascism poses a serious threat to America. As Alberto Toscano argues, what unites politicians from both political parties, cold war ideologues, and billionaires is an affirmation of ‘America’s commitment to Israeli impunity in the face of protest and public opinion, largely through bad-faith accusations of antisemitism exploited by far-right politicians’ (Toscano, 2024).

The charge of rampant antisemitism on campuses today has been challenged by a number of accounts, stating that the incidents of threatening behaviour towards Jewish students are relatively isolated and ‘more likely to appear at parallel protests by non-students outside the campus’ (McGreal, 2024). Furthermore, accounts from Northeastern University allege that during demonstrations pro-Israel demonstrators shouted, ‘virulent antisemitic slurs, including “kill the Jews”’ (Olmstead, 2024). Meanwhile, at the University of California at Los Angeles, masked pro-Israeli nationalists attacked pro-Palestinian encampments, wielding metal poles and striking protesters with wooden planks, and other objects (Swaine et al., 2024). Shockingly, the police stood by for close to three hours, passively observing as the assault escalated into violence. Regrettably, these attacks by pro-Israel nationalists seldom receive attention in the mainstream press.

While it appears that the charge of antisemitism has been weaponised, any violence against Jewish students and Muslim students is unacceptable and cannot be justified in the name of free speech (Benedict, 2024). Frederick Lawrence, the former Brandeis President, rightly argues that while safety is essential for campuses, particularly in protecting students, its fundamental goal is to protect free expression, and that security involving police should be a last resort. He adds, ‘provoking people, challenging people, asking difficult questions, making people uncomfortable, that’s part of the price of living in a democracy, if you will… You are not entitled to be intellectually safe. You are entitled to be physically safe’ (Goodman, 2024).

The claim of rampant antisemitism on campuses appears in many instances to be largely exaggerated and used for political purposes (Solomon, 2024; Perlstein, 2024). In fact, it appears to be part of the usual self-righteous, smug, and repressive strategy of diversion and blame. But there are deeper forces at work in the ideological and militarised responses by most of the universities where the campus protests are taking place. University presidents under pressure from powerful far-right politicians and billionaires are increasingly relying upon the police to deal with acts of civil disobedience by student protesters who have set up campus tents in opposition to ‘the U.S.-backed Israeli military offensive in Gaza’ (Dickinson, 2024). As of 8 May 2024, over 2,400 students have been arrested by police (O’Kruk, Boschma, and Robinson, 2024). Students as well as faculty have been assaulted by the police, zip-tied, hauled into buses, and criminally charged for standing up for their beliefs.

As Tim Dickinson points out in Rolling Stone, it is alarming to see ‘rooftop snipers and militarized police subduing protesters’ (Ibid). He further notes:

“The behavior of law enforcement has – once again – shined a stark spotlight on police brutality and disregard for First Amendment rights protecting freedom of assembly, speech, and the press. As cops have gone ham on protesters, and engaged in dubious mass-arrests, they’ve also roughed up journalists and even smashed college professors to the ground” (Ibid).

This type of indiscriminate violence against peacefully protesting students and faculty echoes what one would expect in outright fascist regimes. Historian Rick Perlstein astutely observes that military-like responses to campus protests today would have been unimaginable in the 1960s. He highlights some of the most egregious abuses against faculty members, underscoring their significance. He writes:

“At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream ‘What are you doing?’ at cops being taken down with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended by her university for her trouble). At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old professor, a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was ‘lucky to be alive’ after absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp” (Perlstein, 2024).

These violent arrests serve as a stark reminder of the authoritarian undercurrents tying together the unrest on campuses and the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. These events compel us to recognise the broader political forces at play, bridging local acts of violence with global conflicts, urging for a deeper understanding and active engagement to address both the symptoms and root causes of such violence. Much of the response to the protests is an attempt to punish students for addressing what one might call one of the crucial moral and political issues of our time: freedom for Palestinians to determine their own political fate. At the same time, the repression signals to students that when free speech begins to hold power accountable, there are severe consequences, extending from suspensions, expulsions, loss of future job opportunities and even to potential arrest.

In this case, it becomes clear that the basic values often attributed to higher education as a social good – extending from teaching students how to be critical, informed, socially responsible, compassionate and engaged citizens – are viewed with disdain and subordinated to the repressive values and notions of learning aligned with the corporate university. These include viewing the world through a normalised template of market values, embracing a cutthroat notion of competitiveness, defining the worth of a degree through commercial interests, disdaining any mode of learning not tied to future financial gain, and disregarding connections between knowledge from larger social issues. This is a pedagogy of capitalist cloning buttressed by the threat of state terrorism.

In light of the student protests and the repressive response, the university’s reactionary neoliberal values and the pedagogical practices that enforce them have revealed the hollowness of the university’s claim to free speech and academic freedom. The protests also underscore the extent to which higher education has been corporatised and militarised. It is important not to forget, as the South African Nobel prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee points out, that powerful corporate elites have little regard for higher education as a critical institution and public good and ‘reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies who want to turn universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy’ (Coetzee, 2013). Moreover, this attack on higher education is not only ideological but also, as we see with the campus protests, relies on the repressive militaristic institutions of the punishing state. What is often missed in progressive analyses of the protest movements is the interconnection between the corporatisation of higher education and the current efforts to militarise it through outright suppression by the police and other forces of state repression.

There is a long history of increasing neoliberal influence on higher education, its alliance with the military-industrial complex, and its willingness to accept vast amounts of financial support from corporations serving defence industries. In fact, as I noted in 2007 when I published The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, former President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous critique of the military-industrial complex originally included the term ‘military-industrial-academic complex’ – the latter term he was persuaded to drop before his Farewell Address to the Nation on 17 January 1961 (Giroux, 2007). Since Eisenhower’s speech, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the US has become increasingly militarised and policed. On the domestic front, police violence has escalated dramatically, especially with the relentless killing of Black and Brown people, the most notorious and public examples including the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. At the same time, higher education has increasingly aligned itself with the national security state, becoming a site of commerce, research for the Pentagon and a training ground for staffing innumerable intelligence agencies.

Since the 1970s, a form of predatory neoliberal capitalism has waged war on the welfare state, public sphere and the common good. The new mode of governance argues that the market should govern the economy and all aspects of society. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates untrammeled self-interest, unchecked individualism, deregulation, and privatisation as the governing principles of society. Under neoliberalism, everything is for sale, and the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism. We live in an age when economic activity is divorced from social costs, while policies that produce racial cleansing, militarism, and staggering levels of inequality have become the organising features of everyday life. Largely defined as a workstation for training global workers and increasingly in need of funding, higher education, as John Armitage writes in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, easily assumed the role of a ‘hypermodern militarized knowledge factory’ (Armitage, 2005: 221). As public schools increasingly model themselves after prisons, becoming shooting galleries due to the prevalence of guns and military weapons in the US, higher education further boosted its unholy alliance with the defence and intelligence industries, which largely served dominant state, military and corporate interests.

Under an austerity-driven neoliberal project, education has defaulted on its willingness to cultivate critical citizens essential for a democratic public sphere. In a broader perspective, education is increasingly seen as a target for suppression, not only by the far right but also by both political parties. Their aim is to reduce it to a mere appendage of the corporate and defence industries while imposing pedagogies of repression and conformity. The current assault on higher education exemplifies how market values erode the public good and destroy any viable sense of higher education as a democratic public sphere. Operated as a business, higher education prioritises profits over fostering an education that nurtures an informed and creative citizenry, forsakes democracy as a guiding principle, and reshapes higher education through what Wendy Brown in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, describes as ‘vulgar forms of marketization’ (Brown, 2016).

Defunded and corporatised, many institutions of higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business the business of education. This transformation has corrupted their mission, making them all the more susceptible to aligning themselves with anti-democratic forces of militarisation. Actions by universities to stifle student protests and employ oppressive elements of the national security state must be understood against this backdrop. Viewed as guardians of the market, as vehicles to produce compliant workers for the neoliberal order, these institutions transform into right-wing indoctrination centres, they establish such educational institutions that play a formidable role in the ongoing militarisation of US society. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, in the face of campus protests, school administrators were all too willing to stifle dissent and employ the police to shut down peaceful protests. The merging of neoliberalism, militarism, and a politics of indoctrination poses a dire threat to higher education, academic freedom and democracy itself.

What must not be forgotten is that the campus protests signify more than a struggle for Palestinian rights and freedom; they also represent a fight to reclaim higher education as a site of democratisation, a public good, and a crucial civic institution where student voices can be heard, and where the dynamics of critical thinking, dialogue, informed judgment and dissent can take place without fear of repression. Solidarity encampments globally also serve as poignant reminders of the pervasive influence of authoritarianism, prompting a critical examination of the multifaceted crises that imperil our world. These encampments not only symbolise unity in the face of oppression but also signify a collective awakening to the interconnected web of violence perpetuated by entrenched authoritarian systems, which are inexorably ‘bringing our world to a breaking point’ (Toscano, 2024).

It is worth remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words composed in 1963 in which he stated: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly’ (King, Jr., 1963). In the spirit of King’s impassioned words, higher education offers a crucial civic space for dialogue, critique, historical memory, the affirmation of mutuality and social responsibility. It is a space where the death of those deemed disposable can be both made visible and challenged, where the stories of the ungrievable can be told, and where politics and pedagogy converge to form a practice of moral witnessing and empowerment. Indeed, student protesters on numerous campuses worldwide have pushed colleges to consider divesting from Israel and companies that support the war in Gaza (Thakker, 2024). Colleges such as Trinity College in Dublin, Brown University and University of California, Riverside in the US have either moved towards divestment or are actively contemplating it (Kwai and O’Loughlin, 2024). These actions stem from the persistent actions and bravery of students and faculty who have put their bodies on the line in order to gain a measure of justice from the university. As crucial as these gains are, the fight for Palestinian freedom cannot be separated from the challenge of building a multiracial working-class movement struggling against neoliberal capitalism, confronting the militarisation of higher education, and beating back an emerging fascist politics both at home and abroad.
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Henry A. Giroux

Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news