Univ of Chicago

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promoted to primary on econ, hackademics

chicago pile one squash ct fermi graphite cadmium M@M atomic bomb 1942

  capt 917

mcgill buchanan pinochet

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10 25

velshi fasc author TO 40 academics fired (diff fields wapo AA woman?) much worse than maccarthy

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fox bs

e president of the Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Chicago wants repercussions for a faculty member who was arrested for suspected violent crimes on Oct. 3 at an anti-ICE rally.

"Professor Eman Abdelhadi’s history of inflammatory and anti-American rhetoric is deeply concerning. Students deserve a safe and open campus environment where they can express their views without fear of intimidation or retaliation from faculty," Tyler Shasteen told Fox News Digital.

Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the school's Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested on Oct. 3 and charged with two felony counts of aggravated battery to a government employee and two misdemeanor counts of resisting/obstructing peace stemming from a rally outside the Broadview, Illinois ICE facility.

A mugshot of Eman Adbelhadi from Oct. 3, 2025. (Cook County Sheriff's Office)

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONDEMNS VIOLENCE BUT DODGES QUESTIONS ABOUT PROFESSOR ARRESTED IN ANTI-ICE RIOTS

Rallies, some of which have turned violent, have been ongoing there for weeks.

"Professor Abdelhadi’s statements, which clearly endorse violence, are unacceptable and undermine the safety and well-being of our community," said Shasteen. "I call on the University of Chicago to review her position and ensure accountability for any actions that violate university policy or the law."

Last week, the school condemned violence, but has resisted answering questions about whether Abdhelhadi has been disciplined.

Abdelhadi has been largely silent, too. However, she thanked her supporters on Bluesky early last week.

"Thank you so much everyone for the messages of love and support," she said on the platform. "I feel fortified by your presence in my life and in the world. I keep thinking about all our neighbors and siblings—hundreds in Chicago alone—who’ve been detained into the unknown of horrendous facilities. We owe them resistance."

Police clash with demonstrators during a protest outside an immigrant processing and detention center on Oct. 03, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. The site has been the target of frequent protests as federal law enforcement agents continue Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area, an operation designed to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants living in the area. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FAR-LEFT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH VIOLENT FELONIES DURING ANTI-ICE RIOTS IN BROADVIEW

Just a day before her arrest, she accused ICE of "terrorizing our communities" on a far-left podcast.

"I mean, in Broadview, ICE has been setting up shop in our backyard. Just brazenly taking up community resources to terrorize this very same community," she said.

She also put out a call for resistance, and lambasted those who she believes aren't taking extreme enough action.

"At this point, you are either on the side of protecting our neighbors and protecting our community, or you’re on the side of this administration. There is no neutral ground in this moment. There’s no center left. You’re either resisting or you’re complicit," she said.

At the Socialism 2025 conference earlier this year, she also slammed her employer.

"F--- the University of Chicago, it’s evil, you know it’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space? I kind of had a little bit of disdain for people who spent their time doing that," she said on a panel during the far-left gathering.

A demonstrator is detained as people protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview facility in Chicago, Ill., Oct. 3, 2025. (Jim Vondruska/Reuters)

LICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP](//www.foxnews.com/apps-products?pid=AppArticleLink)

"Turns out, I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago. I work at a place that is a landlord, a healthcare provider, a police force, f--- that s---, but, they are, and a place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize… actually, this is where I need to build power. That’s possible structural leverage," she said.

The University of Chicago and Abdelhadi did not return comment requests.

Peter D'Abrosca joined Fox News Digital in 2025. Previously, he was a politics reporter at The Tennessee Star.

Follow Peter on X at @pmd_reports. Send story tips to peter.dabrosca@fox.com.

Related Topics

• U.S.
• Campus Radicals
• College
• Antifa
• Turning Point USA

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AN 9 24

alternet-no lnx

Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push

In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.

As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37

Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.

The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.

Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:

“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.

“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38

Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.

Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.

Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:

“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39

The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”

For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”

“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40

This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.

If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.

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11 23

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Students at six universities filed legal complaints on Monday accusing their colleges of breaking a little-known law by investing in planet-heating fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.

Campus organizers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Pomona College, Washington University in St Louis and Pennsylvania State University wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states to ask officials to scrutinize their universities’ investments. Each filing elicited signatures of support from dozens of faculty and staff members, alumni and local, national and international climate-focused groups.

The students argue that by investing in coal, oil and gas, the schools are violating their obligations as non-profit organizations to prioritize the public interest.

“Fossil fuel companies have long engaged in a well-documented campaign to undermine climate science and distort public debate about how to deal with the climate crisis – including through efforts targeting Penn scientists and researchers,” University of Pennsylvania students wrote in their filing. “The industry’s spread of scientific misinformation undermines the work of Penn faculty and students who are researching and designing solutions for a sustainable future.”

The filings estimate that each of the schools has tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars invested in fossil fuels.....

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/354365

no lnx many

Challenging SJP Chicago’s lies

The Horowitz Center’s leaflets expose Jew-hatred and toxic radicalism. Op-ed.

03.06.22 07:00

Antisemitism

SJP

Dr. Richard L. Cravatts

[SJP protest

William Stadtwald Demchick]

In yet another revealing example of its hypocrisy and obtuseness when assessing the consequences of its own behavior, the University of Chicago’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was again whining about being victimized by ideological opponents.

What was SJP’s complaint this time? In a letter to the editor in the university’s newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, SJP expressed its displeasure with the fact that on May 23rd, “the David Horowitz Freedom Center plastered more than 5,000 leaflets on and around campus demonizing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students.”

Employing its tired tactic of whining that any effort by SJP’s critics is motivated by a desire to shut down any support of Palestinian self-determination, the letter preposterously suggested that the leaflets were posted on campus solely “in order to muzzle and disparage pro-Palestinian activism . . . .”

More absurdly, SJP claimed that the Horowitz Center's “work aims to censor and misrepresent our academic production and to create an environment of surveillance and fear surrounding scholarship about Palestine.”

One could make many claims about its role on the 200 or so campuses where SJP has chapters, but few would ever suggest that the toxic radicalism of the group—and the resulting effect it has on their respective campuses—amounts to “scholarship” or “academic production.” Perhaps SJP believes that by bringing perennially Jew-hating radicals like Rashid Khalidi to speak on the Chicago campus, one of the events included in the leaflet, they are promoting scholarship, but that is not the case.

When guest speakers accuse Israel of being the new incarnation of the Third Reich and when they malign and slander the Jewish state with accusations lacking any basis in fact or history, this is not, despite SJP’s contention, an example of “scholarship about Palestine”; rather, it is hatred disguised as debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

When Khalidi spoke, for example, according to the Horowitz leaflet, he “demonized Israel, accusing the Jewish state of ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘occupation,’ and claiming falsely that Israel attempts to terrify the Palestinians to achieve dominance rather than to ensure the nation's safety: ‘I don't think it's security [for Israel that] fully describes accurately what is at stake here. What is at stake is actually dominance and hegemony when Israeli soldiers are kicking down doors and scaring children in the night . . . .’”

What is most revealing in SJP’s baleful letter to the editor is its inability to see how its complaint about the corrosive effect of the leaflet on the University’s community mirrors exactly the effect SJP has had for a decade or more on the campuses that have experienced the hostility and aggression of their pro-Palestinian activism. The leaflets, SJP suggested in its letter. “go so far as to incite hostility and hate against and within our community. They inhibit our capacity to work and study, to commune, to feel safe.”

It is not clear what SJP means when they refer to “our community,” but that community clearly does not include U Chicago’s Jewish students, who, like Jewish students and other supporters of Israel at other campuses around the country, have been ideologically assaulted by SJP in an unrelenting campaign of lies, slanders, and distortions of history and fact, boycott resolutions, and accusations against Israel of racism and apartheid as part of SJP’s campaign to malign and destroy the Jewish state. The group clearly could not care less whether Jewish students have a “capacity to work and study, to commune, to feel safe.”

In fact, as has been documented by the AMCHA Initiative and others who track anti-Semitism on campuses, BDS activity on a campus—and especially when orchestrated by SJP or other anti-Israel groups—frequently creates a hostile climate for Jewish students and often manifests itself as raw anti-Semitism. As one AMCHA report noted, “the consideration of anti-Israel divestment resolutions in student government or by the student body was strongly linked to a surge in anti-Semitic activity,” and campuses that have an SJP chapter have witnessed a higher incidence of anti-Semitic speech and expression as a direct result of its radicalism and activism.

In November 2021, for example, as the leaflet outlined, “SJP at U. Chicago published an art zine titled ‘Cheers to Intifada.’ The zine promoted terrorism against Israel and contained violent imagery including a graphic of two lit Molotov cocktails raised in a toast . . .The zine was also rife with anti-Semitism including an image of a pig wearing a policeman's hat with a Jewish star on it. Poems in the publication promoted ancient blood libel tropes against Jews such as one describing a Jewish teenager who held Palestinians captive and had ‘animalistic lust yearning to rape bodies.’

SJP may consider this type of perverse, anti-Semitic, and genocidal propaganda to be “academic production” and “scholarship about Palestine,” but in a sane world, it represents a poisonous and hateful ideology in which fellow Jewish students are the enemies of good, are racists, support an apartheid state, deserve to be victims of an intifada which has as its objective to murder Jews wherever they are in the name of Palestinian self-determination. On no university campus, and certainly not at an institution with the reputation and quality as the University of Chicago, would this type of banal radicalism pass for scholarship, let alone acceptable academic discourse.

As they have on other campuses, SJP Chicago has also worked aggressively to promote BDS resolutions and to push a statement of solidarity for the Palestinian cause through its student government. “In June 2021,” the leaflet noted, “SJP published a lengthy statement calling on the College Council to ‘vote “NO” on the resolution to retract [the University Student Government's] statement of solidarity and support for Palestine.’ SJP's statement promoted Jew hatred and demonized Israel, calling campus supporters of the Jewish state ‘student body apartheid apologists,’ and denying Israel's self-determination by calling for the ‘abolition of a violent political state [of Israel].’”

In April, at the behest of SJP, The Chicago Maroon, retracted an op-ed written by two students, “We Must Condemn the SJP’s Online Anti-Semitism,” who questioned SJP’s tactics and ideology.

On January 26th, as the op-ed by Melody Dias and Benjamin ZeBrack noted, SJP had posted on its Instagram page the shocking admonition, “DON’T TAKE SH*TTY ZIONIST CLASSES.” Students were asked to “Support the Palestinian movement for liberation by boycotting classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows.” According to the SJP post, any students who enrolled in these classes would be “participating in a propaganda campaign that creates complicity in the continuation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” and that, in its view, “Israeli-centered classes are designed to obscure Palestinian perspectives.”

Characteristic of their reaction to anyone who answers back to their corrosive activism, SJP was incensed that anyone had the gall to question their tactics and motives. Another post on the SJP Instagram account in response to the Dias-ZeBrack op-ed expressed the defective view often held by anti-Semites that “To frame this call as ‘anti-Jewish’ not only perpetuates the dangerous (and wholly false) conflation of Jewishness and Zionism, but also deliberately diverts attention from the ongoing ethnic cleansing that the israeli [sic] colony has been inflicting on Palestinian lands and peoples from its inception to the present.”

The widely-adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, as many know, stipulates that, in many instances, attacks on Zionism can be considered anti-Semitic, particularly when those attacks are attempts to deny Jewish self-determination or when Zionism is classified as a racist, oppressive endeavor, so despite SJP’s claim that the claim is both dangerous and wholly false, experts in these matters—and not biased, anti-Semitic ideologues—have determined that there is support for Dias and LeBrack’s views.

Nevertheless, SJP demanded of the Maroon’s editors, “in response to these offenses,” the “Immediate deletion of the article,” a “public apology issued by the Maroon to SJP UChicago and to Palestinian students for the dissemination of misinformation and the disregard of journalistic integrity and factual reporting,” and, most ominously, “a public recommitment to ensuring that all columns and articles abide by expected standards of accuracy and truth, particularly those written by Zionist authors or on behalf of Zionist organizations.” [Emphasis added.] In other words, SJP requested a separate standard of exclusionary journalistic ethics and practice when Israel, Zionism, and Jews are involved.

Astoundingly, in response to SJP’s absurd demands, twofecklesseditors, Kelly Hui and Elizabeth Winkler, not only deleted the offending op-ed but published a craven, apologetic editorial of their own in which they dissected the op-ed for its perceived factual inaccuracies and justified their decision by claiming that it was the op-ed written by the pro-Israel supporters which could be the source of campus enmity, not the original action of SJP in calling for a boycott of courses about Israel.

“We condemn the pitting of Jewish and Palestinian students against one another,” they wrote, “and we deeply regret the extent to which the op-ed’s factual inaccuracies—which we should not have published—perpetuated such a harmful dynamic.” Of course, in addition to the editors’ outrageously inappropriate action in removing an opinion piece from The Chicago Maroon, written as a response to a campaign of demonization and delegitimization of Israel and Zionism by the chronically toxic activists of SJP, they compounded the offense by suggesting that sections of the op-ed contribute to “pitting of Jewish and Palestinian students against one another.” No, actually, it was SJP’s poisonous attacks on anything Zionist on campus and its initial call for “shitty” Zionist courses to be boycotted that pit pro-Israel students against pro-Palestinians, not op-eds that correct misinformation or defend Israel.

Only on university campuses where perceived victims can attack their alleged oppressors with any calumny, untruth, slander, and allegation they choose—without repercussions—could a group like Students for Justice in Palestine continue to operate with impunity, attacking Jewish students and other supporters of Israel with impunity and creating a hostile campus climate in their radical wake as it does.

But SJP at Chicago clearly does not fully understand the notion of academic free speech: that the same opportunity they have to spout their hateful rhetoric and promote their toxic ideology is also enjoyed by the group’s ideological opponents.

When pro-Israel students, guest speakers, events, courses, or even leaflets distributed around campus seek to expose SJP’s true nature—with facts and examples as opposed to lies and narratives—SJP may be inconvenienced by having to finally defend its views in a robust and equitable marketplace of ideas, not its own echo chamber where its lies are never challenged and its toxic Jew-hatred is never named for what it is.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D.,is a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and the author of Jew-Hatred Rising: The Perversities of the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

==

WHO 3%

Discussion

What motivates experts and non-experts alike to pursue a position on climate change contrary to scientific consensus? The role of conservative politics, conservative think tanks, and industry efforts that make up the CCCM is well documented; however, our findings reveal other similarities among contrarians worthy of consideration.

In particular, the data reveal that most individuals in our data are aged sixty-five or older. This age group, at least in the United States, is also the most likely age group to disagree with the climate consensus; conversely,80 per cent of expert Earth scientists who agree with the consensus on AGW are under the age of sixty-five (Pew Research Center 2015). Although many individuals in our sample were non-experts, the experts were also aged 65 or older on average, with an average birth year of 1944. [1964 GOLDWATER, DIVISIONS ON VIET NAM ETC IE ORIG CTR-CULTURE] While we expect contrarian experts to hold views different from most of the scientific community, this age distinction suggests there may be other reasons that led these individuals to align with contrarian efforts. Individuals' experiences, for example, may impact their views of science and government. As a result, this may help explain why both experts and non-experts alike participate in a movement that hinders climate change mitigation efforts.

Behavioral research suggests that experiences during individuals' formative years (that is, teens and twenties) are the most important; collective memory association determines how individuals may apply past experiences to later behavior (Goffman :{Reference Goffman:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1974; Gongaware :{Reference Gongaware:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2011; Mannheim :{Reference Mannheim and Kecskemeti:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1952 [1928]; Schuman and Scott :{Reference Schuman and Scott:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1989). In theory, the memories of contrarians aged sixty-five and older would, then, have been defined by events of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This period not only marked significant changes to the study of science, as well as the rise in scientific and technological advances, but also saw an increase in institutional deceit (Atkin and House :{Reference Atkin and House:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1981; Miller :{Reference Miller:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1983; Piller :{Reference Piller:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1991).:{Footnote:(style="background-color:#ffffff;;box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:^13 Relative to events of this period, trust in government declined among the US public in the mid-1960s; trust in science  [WHY? A H BOMB? NAPALM?] also declined, particularly among conservatives, in the 1970s (Gauchat :{Reference Gauchat:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2012; Pew Research Center 2020). Relative to contrarians in our data, these events happened during the time when most received their degrees.

While one might assume that many contrarians in our sample would have higher trust in science because of their scientific degrees, prior research has found this not necessarily to be the case. Specifically, while higher education has a “positive” effect on the views of climate change for Democrats/liberals, educational attainment has a “weaker or negative” effect on the views of Republicans/conservatives (McCright and Dunlap :{Reference McCright and Dunlap:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2011a, 175, emphasis in original). As a result, and considering the conservative nature of contrarian efforts, we believe this period may have led to unique views on government and science—specifically, government intervention into scientific matters. In other words, despite older contrarians' scientific knowledge and/or education, their subjective concern about government intervention in science may surpass objectivity regarding mainstream consensus, especially considering the pervasiveness of neoliberalism during this period.[TWO FREDS OZONE SST?]

Neoliberalism emerged as a driving force to oppose government oversight and regulation, largely related to backlash from Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and subsequent expansion of the federal government. While tenets ofneoliberalism (that is, a laissez-faire approach to the market with a heavy emphasis on deregulation and free trade) would become central to CCCM objectives, the ideology pervaded academic circles far earlier (McCright and Dunlap :{Reference McCright and Dunlap:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2011a; Oreskes and Conway :{Reference Oreskes and Conway:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2010). In fact, while the ideology is most notably associated with the creation of the Chicago School of economics, it was not unique to just Chicago. Neoliberalism was transnational in nature, permeating into other academic and political circles with the help of several institutions established solely to push this ideology (Mirowski and Plehwe :{Reference Mirowski and Plehwe:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2009). As a result,by the 1950s, there was “an all-out assault on virtually every aspect of Keynesian economics” led, most notably, by Milton Friedman (Yergin and Stanislaw :{Reference Yergin, Stanislaw, Yergin and Stanislaw:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1998, para. 8). By the 1960s and 1970s, neoliberalism was a prominent theory within economics and other disciplines. As a result, much like collective memories pertinent to older contrarians' formative years, it is reasonable to believe that neoliberal ideology would have impacted contrarians' attitudes toward science and government prior to the emergence of the CCCM.:{Footnote:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:^14

...Perhaps one of the most interesting findings to come from this research is the cohesion among climate change contrarians when it comes to their age and the period in which their degrees were obtained. Although there are some individuals who are younger in age and/or were educated later, it is clear that a majority of contrarians are from a particular era.In addition, closer examination finds that distrust in both science and the government were growing at the same time that neoliberalism was gaining in prominence—not just as an economic theory, but because of a concerted effort to shape the political narrative regarding government involvement in the market. As a result, neoliberal thinking prevailed during most climate change contrarians' formative years. Among experts and non-experts alike, individuals who subscribed to tenets of neoliberalism during their formative years, we hypothesize, are now dedicated to efforts that push a laissez-faire approach. As a result, they may reject a mainstream consensus on issues like climate change even when most evidence points otherwise.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/study-finds-people-who-watched-sean-hannity-were-more-likely-to-die-from-covid-19/

no lnx many

Study finds people who watched Sean Hannity were more likely to die from COVID-19

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon April 22, 2020

A new study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that “greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”

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Fox News host Sean Hannity has been heavily criticized for echoing President Donald Trump’s initial attempts to downplay the threat posed by the new coronavirus. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, his colleague at the right-leaning network who has framed the issue in more nationalistic terms, has been credited with convincing the president to take the pandemic seriously.

“Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” the researchers wrote in the working paper.

The two hosts diverged greatly on the issue in February. While Hannity expressed optimism that “zero people in the United States have died from the coronavirus,” Carlson warned viewers that the virus could kill 1 million people across the country.

The researchers commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 Fox News viewers, which found that Carlson’s viewers were more likely to change their behavior earlier than Hannity’s viewers.

“We find that Hannity’s viewers on average changed their behavior in response to the coronavirus five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior three days earlier than other Fox News viewers,” the paper said.

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The researchers then compared the death rate in counties that favored either host, finding “approximately 30% more COVID-19 cases” in areas that preferred Hannity than those that watched Carlson.

“Already by mid-March, we see a statistically significant difference — that there are greater case loads in places that favor Hannity over Tucker,” researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott told The Chicago Tribune. “Then weeks later, we see a similar trajectory increase for deaths.”

After Hannity’s “shift in tone,” however, “the diverging trajectories . . . began to revert,” the study said.

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The researchers argued that their findings were consistent with “misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data.”

Polls have similarly found that Fox News viewers as a whole are far more likely to believe the threat of the virus is exaggerated. Another poll showed that Republicans, in general, were less likely to change their behavior in response to the threat than Democrats.

The attempts by certain Fox News opinion hosts to downplay the virus early in the outbreak came in stark contrast to steps the network’s executives and owners took to protect themselves against the virus.

“The selective cherry-picked clips of Sean Hannity’s coverage used in this study are not only reckless and irresponsible, but down right factually wrong,” a spokesperson for Fox News said in a statement. “As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered Covid-19 since the early days of the story. The ‘study’ almost completely ignores his coverage and repeated, specific warnings and concerns from January 27-February 26 including an early interview with Dr. Fauci in January. This is a reckless disregard for the truth.”

Hannity likewise defended his coverage of the virus in an interview with Newsweek earlier this month, arguing that his January interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, showed that his viewers were getting accurate information.

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“Go to my web site, and you’ll see irrefutable evidence that I have taken this seriously way before most in the media did. I warned in January that it was dangerous because it was highly contagious, but some people were asymptomatic, so it would spread quickly,” he said, though he also argued months later that the flu was “much more dangerous” than the new coronavirus and compared the associated death rate to the murder rate in Chicago.

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Hannity’s comments came in response to a letter from 74 journalism professors to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and CEO Lachlan Murdoch calling on the network to stop spreading “misinformation” about the virus.

“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers — and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” the letter said. “. . . Inexcusably, Fox News has violated elementary canons of journalism. In so doing, it has contributed to the spread of a grave pandemic. Urgently, therefore, in the name of both good journalism and public health, we call upon you to help protect the lives of all Americans — including your elderly viewers — by ensuring that the information you deliver is based on scientific facts.”

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Chicagonomics

Professor Lanny Ebenstein talked about his book, Chicagonomics: The Evolution of Chicago Free Market Economics. He was interviewed at FreedomFest, one of the largest libertarian conferences in the country.

? oct 7

https://www.c-span.org/video/?431251-10/chicagonomics

https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers

If  THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UP approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, 

credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.

A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal.Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers.But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose.Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be.But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor atGeorge Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.

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great books?

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cf powell memo; 2 1st big beachheads uchic and GMU?

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/bernie-sanders-right-wing-ideology-rules-our-economy

For over 40 years, In These Times has published incisive reporting and analysis on one of the defining issues of our time: the crisis of inequality. Our new book, The Age of Inequality: Corporate America’s War on Working People, brings together In These Times’ best writing on the topic from leading thinkers and journalists. In this selection, originally published in 2009, Bernie Sanders writes about the intellectual failures, and simultaneous political success, of the “Chicago School’s” greatest avatar, Milton Friedman.

“THE FAILED PROPHET” (2009)

THE LATE MILTON FRIEDMANWAS A PROVOCATIVE TEACHER AT MY ALMA MATER, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. He got his students involved with their studies. He was a gifted writer and communicator. And he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to economics.

But Friedman was more than an academic. He was an advocate for, and popularizer of, a radical right-wing economic ideology.

In today’s political and social reality, the University of Chicago’s estab­lishment of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute (in the building that until now has housed the renowned Chicago Theological Seminary) will not be perceived as simply a sign of appreciation for a prominent former faculty member. Instead, by founding such an institution, the university signals that it isaligning itself with a reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest, and most powerful people and institutions in this country.Friedman’s ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the University of Chicago should be seeking to advance.

Those who defend the Milton Friedman Institute will assure us that it will encourage a free and open exchange of ideas. That may very well be true. But if the goal of the institute is simply to do nonideological research, there are a lot of names that one could come up with other than that of the most polemical and ideological economist of his time.

My suspicions only deepen when I read on the University of Chicago website that donors who contribute more than $1 million to the project will have a special relationship with the institute as members of a Milton Friedman Society and will be expected to facilitate the institution’s “connec­tions to leaders in business and government.”

I work in Washington, D.C., and I know about the power that big money has over process. When the insurance companies and the drug companies and the oil companies and the banks and the military-industrial complex make contributions to political campaigns, we usually know exactly what it is they want in return.

The timing of this project is a little ironic. Friedman earned his bread by denouncing government at virtually every turn. He, like his acolyte, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, believed that a largely unregulated free market constituted the most superior form of economic organization imaginable. Well, the tune of the right-wing free marketeers has changed a bit in the last few months.

My colleagues in the Senate and I are now picking up the pieces of a banking system brought to the edge of collapse by this theory of deregulation and by the insatiable greed of a small number of wealthy financiers playing in the market and engaging in incredibly risky—if not illegal—behavior.

In the rush to bail out Wall Street, we saw President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the people in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—folks who loved Friedman’s ideas and who, no doubt, would be prepared to financially support a Milton Friedman Institute—reverse their longstanding rhetorical opposition to government intervention.

Instead, they demanded that we come to the rescue of the financial firms that had lined up in front of Congress for their emergency welfare checks.

For years, all of these people, including the president of the United States, have been telling us that government should not be involved in ensuring health care for all Americans as a right of citizenship. (“What a terrible idea!”) They have been telling us that the government should not be involved in making quality education affordable to all people; that the government should not be empowered to ensure that we reverse green­house gas emissions; that the government should not regulate pollution that contaminates our air and water and land; and that the government should not provide a strong safety net for our children, for our seniors, or for the disabled.

But the issue here is not just economic policy. It goes deeper than that. It touches on the core of who we are as a society and as a people. Are we as human beings supposed to turn around and not see the suffering that so many of our brothers and sisters are experiencing? Are we content to be living in a nation where, thanks in part to the Friedmanite ideology, the richest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 90 percent and the top one-tenth percent owns more than the bottom 50 percent?Well, it turns out that when the shoe is pinching their foot, they have become the strongest believers in government intervention—especially if working people and the middle class are bailing them out.

With all due respect to the late Milton Friedman, his economic program is nothing more than a wish list for the greediest, the most monied inter­ests in our society. At the same time that this ideology is supported by the rich and powerful—except when they’re lining up in Washington for their welfare checks—this same ideology is almost unanimously opposed by working families and middle-class people across this country.

What would some of the items on Friedman’s wish list be? First of all, the Friedmanites would be supportive of the concept of a culture of greed. They want people making billions of dollars on the covers of Time and Newsweekbecause these people are supposed to be our national heroes. We are not supposed to recognize a teacher who makes $40,000 a year opening up the minds of young people. We are not supposed to recognize a childcare worker who makes $18,000 a year giving poor children an opportunity to grow intellectually and emotionally. Those jobs are not considered import­ant work.

But if you’re a billionaire on Wall Street creating exotic financial instru­ments that end up being worth nothing, you are considered a hero. The fact that this culture of greed has permeated our political culture means that corporate CEOs can now earn more than 400 times what their workers earn without fearing a political backlash.

Now we have a case study for what happens when the ideology of Milton Friedman becomes the operating ideology of the government. Under Bush, the median family income has declined by thousands of dollars. Millions of Americans have entered the ranks of the poor. Some 7 million have lost their health insurance. Some 3 million have lost their pensions. And the gap between the very rich and everybody else has grown much wider.

Our country is due for a transformation. We have endured years of right-wing ideology, and we are eager to move in a different direction. I believe that we will see a major reordering of social and economic priorities and that this last general election represented a repudiation of right-wing economic arguments.

In the Bush era—a period in which some of Friedman’s greatest admirers managed the U.S. economy—the top 400 families in this country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion.

Yet we have children in this country who have no health care, children who are undernourished, and children who sleep out on the streets. From an economic perspective, from a moral perspective, and from a philosophical perspective, the ideology of Milton Friedman is dead wrong.

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chomsky says adam smith definitive schol version has famous paen to mkt in W of N but deletes the following section where it reduces us to serfs. booktv 2013 cambridge talk

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http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=380&name=University-of-Chicago

Its weed killer atrazine is one of the most popular herbicides in the United States, with 76 million pounds applied each year. But the herbicide’s tendency to drift off targeted sites led to a ban by Germany in 1991, and following a 2004 vote, by the 27 member countries of the European Union.

Syngenta’s attorney on the case, Kurt Reeg, declined to comment for this story.

A videotaped deposition  of University of Chicago Professor Don Coursey, played in court, demonstrated Syngenta’s use of seemingly independent experts to make its case, typically without disclosing payments to them. Their work downplays the risks of pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural agents to human health, and warns of grave economic consequences if farmers ceased using the chemicals.

Syngenta had hired Coursey through PR agency Jayne Thompson & Associates to write about the economic losses that would be created by an atrazine ban. He estimated that an atrazine ban would eliminate 21,000 to 48,000 jobs and create an economic loss for U.S. corn production of $2.3 to $5 billion.

Over the course of questioning, however, Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who is representing the water companies, raised doubts about the validity of those assumptions and the integrity of the analysis.

Coursey admitted his reports were based on an atrazine ban, something not sought in Tillery’s lawsuit. He also admitted he had not read the legal complaint and was ordered by Syngenta and the PR agency to analyze the cost of an atrazine ban.

For his expert opinion, Coursey was able to supplement his university salary handsomely. In his deposition, Coursey said that Syngenta’s PR firm paid him $500 an hour and gave him $50 an hour for a research assistant over three to four years. His reports relied on data supplied by Syngenta, he said, adding that he had an office at the public relations firm. He submitted his work to both Jayne Thompson and Syngenta for editing.

Coursey said the PR agency also paid him $500 an hour to meet with newspaper editors and radio talk show hosts, and to make a presentation to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Just the same, Syngenta initially refused to honor a subpoena for Coursey to testify in the trial or turn over documents, and relented only after judicial intervention.

Coursey did not respond to requests for an interview.

In a memo released in April as part of the discovery process, the PR firm proposed planting stories with newspapers critical of the Madison County courts and suggesting the lawsuit could be characterized as an attack on family farmers. The memo suggested castigating the Madison County judicial system as a “judicial hellhole” and the source of “jackpot justice.”

As the hearing continued, Tillery told the judge that realtors in some areas served by the plaintiffs had been informed property values would decline if this lawsuit proceeds.

John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy 's Friends

University of Chicago

The Center is a program of the University 1 vote to keep. [ (1 rating)](http://www.politicalfriendster.com/rateConnection.php?id1=1211&id2=380) More about this connection...

Leo Strauss

The Center is transcribing Strauss's lectures for publication

see chicago boys, includes dictators cf palast book

includes Korry? chile p90-  ITT, pepsi?

"Dr. Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Overview & history

In the early half of the 20th century, petrochemical giants organized a coup on the medical research facilities, hospitals and universities. The Rockefeller family sponsored research and donated sums to universities and medical schools which had drug based research. They further extended this policy to foreign universities and medical schools where research was drug based through their "International Education Board". Establishments and research which were were not drug based were refused funding and soon dissolved in favor of the lucrative pharmaceutical industry. ^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-1)

The Rockefeller Foundation was originally set up in 1904 as the General Education Fund. The RF was later formed in 1910 and issued a charter in 1913 with the help of Rockefeller millions. Subsequently, the foundation placed it's own "nominees" in federal health agencies and set the stage for the "reeducation" of the public. ^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-2) See also Rockefeller Foundation.

The Baptists established a School of Divinity within the university. The school remained a mainstay throughout the Jim Crow era, as Baptists provided absolution for leaders enforcing segregation laws and laymen committing violence against African Americans.

In 1942, faculty ignited the world's first anthropogenically initiated nuclear reaction under the bleachers in the football field, sparking the nuclear age. The university also provided enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project and for the two atomic bombs used against Japanese civilians. ^{[4]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-3)

Since the 1940s, the university has become an academic powerhouse. It has accumulated more nobel laureates than any other American institution. Its physics, mathematics, sociology and economics departments are particularly influential. Several leading conservative economists of the 20th century; including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Richard Posner have taught or teach there. Current faculty includes John Mearshimer, Mark Hansen (Political Science); Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Stephen Levitt, Robert Fogel (Economics),Richard Posner (Law), James Redfield (Classics), JM Coetzee and David Bevington (English).

...

Alumni & former/current faculty

• Janet Ashcroft
• John David Ashcroft
• Saul Bellow
• Allan Bloom
• Robert H. Bork
• John H. Bryan
• Ahmed Chalabi
• Owen Chamberlain
• Jon S. Corzine
• Kenneth W. Dam
• Frank Easterbrook
• Gary Edson
• Richard Epstein
• Enrico Fermi
• William Galston
• Hillel Fradkin
• **Milton Friedman**
• **Friedrich Hayek**
• Seymour Hersh
• James C. Ho
• **Samuel P. Huntington**
• Fred C. Ikle
• Harry V. Jaffa
• Leon Kass
• Rashid Khalidi
• Zalmay Khalilzad
• Paul Kozemchak (DARPA)
• Andrew Marshall
• Michael H. Mobbs
• Carol Moseley-Braun
• Ralph Neas
• Talat Othman
• Peter G. Peterson
• Richard A. Posner
• David Rockefeller
• Gary J. Schmitt
• George P. Shultz
• Abram Shulsky
• Henry D. Sokolski
• **Leo Strauss**
• James Q. Wilson
• Albert Wohlstetter
• Paul Dundes Wolfowitz
• Adam Wolfson, Editor, The Public Interest

Board of trustees

• Andrew M. Alper, Charles A. Lewis, David G. Booth, Peter W. May, Thomas A. Cole, Joseph Neubauer, E. David :{Coolidge :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:III, Emily Nicklin, James S. Crown, Harvey B. Plotnick, Katharine P. Darrow, Michael P. Polsky, Erroll B. Davis, Jr., Thomas J. Pritzker, Craig J. Duchossois, George A. Ranney, Jr., James S. Frank, Thomas A. Reynolds III, Jack W. Fuller, John W. Rogers, Jr., Timothy M. George, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Rodney L. Goldstein, David M. Rubenstein, Mary Louise Gorno, Steve G. Stevanovich, Kathryn C. Gould, Richard P. Strubel, Sanford J. Grossman, Mary A. Tolan, King W. Harris, Byron D. Trott, Kenneth M. Jacobs, Marshall I. Wais, Jr., Karen L. Katen, Gregory Westin Wendt, Dennis J. Keller, Jon Winkelried, Steven A. Kersten, Paula Wolff, James M. Kilts, Jr., Paul G. Yovovich, Michael J. Klingensmith, Francis T.F. Yuen, Michael L. Klowden, Robert J. Zimmer, Robert W. Lane ^{[8]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-7)

 ==

see Becker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys

The Chicago Boys (c. 1970s) were a group of young male, mostly Chilean economists, the majority of whom trained at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, or at its affiliate in the economics department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Upon their return to Latin America they adopted positions in numerous CIA-backed right-wing South American governments as economic advisors, many of them reaching high positions.^[1]

• 1 History
• 2 Key Chicago Boys
  • 2.1 Chile
  • 2.2 Elsewhere in Latin America

• 3 See also
• 4 Notes
• 5 References
• 6 Further reading
• 7 External links

History

The term Chicago Boys has been used at least as early as the 1980s^[2] to describe Latin American economists who studied or identified with the neoliberal economic theories then taught at the University of Chicago, even though some of them earned degrees at Harvard or MIT (see below). "Chicago boys generally advocated widespread deregulation, privatization, and other free market policies for closely controlled economies. They rose to fame as leaders of the early reforms initiated in Chile during the rule of General Augusto Pinochet."^[2] Milton and Rose Friedman used the term Chicago Boys in their memoir: "In 1975, when inflation still raged and a world recession triggered a depression in Chile, General Pinochet turned to the "Chicago Boys" ... and appointed several of them to powerful positions in the government.^[3]

The training program was the result of a "Chile Project" organized in the 1950s by the U.S. State Department, through the Point Four program, the first US program for international economic development. It was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundationaimed at influencing Chilean economic thinking. The University of Chicago’s Department of Economics set up scholarship programs with Chile’s Catholic University. About one hundred select students between 1957 and 1970 received training, first in an apprenticeship program in Chile and then in post-graduate work in Chicago.

The project was uneventful until the early 1970s. The Chicago Boys' ideas remained on the fringes of Chilean economic and political thought, even after a group of them prepared a 189-page “Program for Economic Development” called El ladrillo ("the brick").^[4] It was presented 1969 as part of Jorge Alessandri's (unsuccessful) presidential candidacy. Alessandri rejected El ladrillo, but it was revisited after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état on 11 September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power, and it became the basis of the new regime's economic policy.

Even though the "Chile Project" ended, the training connection between Chile and the University of Chicago continues. One of the numerous networking organizations for alumni, including the Chicago Boys, is the "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business" (LATAM).

The term continues to be used in popular culture, business magazines (see external links).

Key Chicago Boys

Chile

Some of the more than 100 Chilean "Chicago Boys" are or were:

• Jorge Cauas Minister of Finance (1975–1977)
• Sergio de Castro Minister of Finance (1977–1982)
• Carlos Massad Comisión Económica para América Latina(Cepal) (1974-1992), World Bank (1978-1981), Central Bank of Chile 1996-2003
• Ernesto Fontaine Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Administration Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,returned to Chile financed by the Inter American Development Bank in 1976, chief of the "external financing unit" of the Organization of American States (OAS)where he organized a Technical Assistance Program which trained teams of public officials in Project Preparation and Social Evaluation,^[5] World Bank consultant, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) died 1/20/2014 of lung cancer
• Pablo Barahona (Minister of Economy, 1976–1979)
• José Piñera (Minister of Labor and Pensions, 1978–1980, Minister of Mining, 1980–1981) (although his PhD is from Harvard)
• Hernán Büchi Minister of Finance, 1985–1989, MBA at Columbia University
• Alvaro Bardón (Minister of Economy, 1982–1983)
• Juan Carlos Méndez (Budget Director, 1975–1981)
• Emilio Sanfuentes (Economic advisor to Central Bank)
• Sergio de la Cuadra (Minister of Finance, 1982–1983)
• Francisco RosendeResearch Manager, Central Bank of Chile (1985 and 1990, Antitrust Commission (1999 and 2001), Dean and professor of economics, Faculty of Business and Economy of PUC since 1995.^[6]
• Miguel Kast Minister of Planning (1978–1980), Labor Minister (1980-82), Governor of the Central Bank of Chile (1982–83).
• Martín Costabal (Budget Director, 1987–1989)
• Juan Ariztía Matte (Private Pension System Superintendent, 1980–1990)
• Maria Teresa Infante (Minister of Labor 1988–1990)
• Camilo Carrasco Alfonso (General Manager of Central Bank, 1994-2005)
• Joaquín Lavín (Minister of Education, 2010–2011, Minister of Planning 2011–present)
• Cristián Larroulet Vignau Chief of Staff of the Finance Minister, member of National Commission for Privatization, Head of Antitrust Commission, Minister of General Secretariat to the Presidency [SEGPRES], 2010–present), Executive Director at Libertad y Desarrollo, a private think tank, Dean and professor of economics, Faculty of Business and Economy at Universidad Del Desarrollo (UDD) Santiago, Chile, member of Board of several public enterprises, member of the Mount Pelerin Society.^[7]
• Juan Andrés Fontaine (Minister of Economy, 2010–2011)
• Francisco Perez Mackenna Chief Executive Officer of Quinenco since 1998, one of Chile’s largest conglomerates, assets of over US$33.1 billion, industrial and financial services companies. Director of many Quinenco group companies, including Banco de Chile, Madeco, CCU, Inversiones y Rentas, LQIF, ECUSA, CCU Argentina and Banchile Corretores de Bolsa, and Advisor to the Board of Vina San Pedro Tarapaca.1991-1998, CEO of CCU. Universidad Catolica de Chile, major in Business Administration. MBA from University of Chicago.^[8]
• Jose de Gregorio Governor of the Central Bank of Chile since 2007. Vice-Governor from 12/2003-12/2007, member of the Bank's Board from 6/2001. 2000- 2001 “tri-minister” of Economy, Mining and Energy. 1997-2000 professor at the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica. Before 1997 Coordinator of Economic Policy at Ministry of Finance and economist research department International Monetary Fund, degree in civil engineering and master’s degree in engineering from University of Chile (1984), PhD in Economics from MIT 1990.

Elsewhere in Latin America:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Although the largest and most influential group of so-called Chicago Boys was Chilean in origin, there were many Latin American graduates from the University of Chicago around the same period. These economists continued to shape the economies of their respective countries, and include people likeMexico's Francisco Gil Díaz, Fernando Sanchez Ugarte, Carlos Isoard y Viesca, Argentina's Domingo Cavallo, Adolfo Diz, Roque Fernández, Carlos Alfredo Rodríguez, Fernando de Santibañez and Ricardo Lopez Murphy, as well as others in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay,Costa Rica, and Panama.

See also:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• Miracle of Chile
• Berkeley Mafia
• Jeffrey Sachs
• John Perkins
• Augusto Pinochet
• Universidad del Desarrollo
• The Shock Doctrine

Notes:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;display:inline !important"):}:References:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

1. ^ Naomi Klein, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys#cite_ref-GaryBecker_2-1) Gary S. Becker (1997-10-30). "What Latin America Owes to the "Chicago Boys:{":(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Hoover Digest. Stanford University. Retrieved 2012-11-14.
3. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Two Lucky People: Memoirs. Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman. University of Chicago Press, 1998. p. 398.
4. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ El Ladrillo. Bases de la política económica del gobierno militar chileno.Santiago: CEP 2nd edition1992
5. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group)Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.
6. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group)Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.
7. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group) Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.
8. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;-webkit-user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group)Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.

Further reading:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• Valdés, Juan Gabriel (1995), Pinochet's Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-45146-9
• Constable, Pamela, and Arturo Valenzuela (1991), A Nation Of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet, New York, W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393309850
• Fontaine Aldunate, Arturo (1988), "Los Economistas y el Presidente Pinochet", Zig Zag

External links:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• PBS Video clip – Chicago Boys and Pinochet
• Is Chile a Neoliberal Success? analysis of Chicago Boys' policies in Dollars & Sense magazine 2004
• Forbes Magazine article 2010-3-17
• Audio clip – 'Chicago Boys' Leave Lasting Legacy on Chile's Economy, National Public Radio

==

hydr

Strauss assisted in leaving Germ by Schmitt (sp) atty helped get rid of Weimar

von Hayek, Mt Perlin Soc --> heritage, Manhatt, Pacific 

U Chic big infl, since 69 all Nobels to Free traders (krugman?)

vulture pic: U Chic graD BIZ school Latin Am seminar led by Arnold Harberger (adviser Pinochet? milton 

friedman Prof Black math whiz (Thales praised for making money crooked?) 271 wolfie aND 

pearle studied w/ leo strauss; goldmaN SACHs FELL for blacked model:securities that were 

"derived' from movements of other securities (a hedge?) grew to 83Trillion $ by 2008 273 

but aLL  assumes mkts are rational and wise (that info is avaialble?)

ari and adam smith warned us about "rent' seeking and reaping what we do not sow (w/ other 

ppl $?) 274  Robt  Rubin came from GS to clinton admin.  sandy weill chr of citigroup, 4 

mos after glass-stegall gone, rubin joined cit as co-chr? 323

palast bdmcbuy

Madhouse

It's been twenty-five years since I sat with Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys as they

planned our new world. The Chicago Boys' grouping, officially called the "Latin

American Finance Workshop," was directed by Professor Arnold Harbergerj

Friedman's

was the "Money and Banking Workshop." I worked my way in with both of them-even

then I was undercover, operating for the electrical and steelworkers' union leaders Frank

Rosen and Eddie Sadlowski. Frank told me, "Keep your mouth shut, put away the

childish Mao buttons, put on a suit and find out what these guys are up to."

I wouldn't call Milton Friedman a midget, but what sticks in my mind is that his feet

didn't touch the floor from the built-up in which he presided.

:{In those years, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was a hot topic. The nation was controlled by

whites, 5 percent of the population, who kept the 95 percent Black population in virtual

slavery, without hope and certainly without the right to vote. Professor Friedman opined

from his high chair, "Why are people attacking the only democracy in Africa?}:" And I

remember that, at time, the professor was driven around in a black limousine by a Black

chauffeur.

So, while the other students-the budding bankers and dictators-in-training-are drooling in

admiration, I'm reporting back to the unions, "This Friedman is one sick puppy. And no

one's going to buy this self-serving 'laissez faire' free market mumbo jumbo from some

ultra-right wing-nut."

But now, two decades later, Bush and Clinton and Putin and Wolfensohn open their

mouths and out comes Milton Friedman. And everywhere I turn, the guys running the

show are wearing their Golden Straitjackets and grinning and groping and agreeing with

each other. And all I can think of is something another professor of mine, Allen Ginsberg,

once said: The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse

1965: Former RAND Analyst Gathers Young, Nascent Neoconservatives

Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, gathers a cadre of fiery young intellectuals around him, many of whom are working and associating with the magazine publisher Irving Kristol (see 1965). Wohlstetter’s group includes Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter, himself a protege of the Machiavellian academic Leo Strauss, is often considered the “intellectual godfather” of modern neoconservatism. 

Formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter wielded a powerful influence on the US’s foreign policy during the heyday of the Cold War. Wohlstetter, who is believed to be one of several analysts who became a model for director Stanley Kubrick’s title character in the 1968 filmDr. Strangelove, added dramatic phrases like “fail-safe” and “second strike” capability to the US nuclear lexicon, and pushed to increase the US’s military might over what he saw as the imminent and lethal threat of Soviet nuclear strikes and the Soviet Union’s plans for global hegemony. He was such a powerful figure in his hundreds of briefings that he projected far more certainty than his facts actually supported. Though his facts and statistics were often completely wrong, he was so relentless and strident that his ideas gained more credence than they may have warranted. 

By 1965, he is known in some circles as a “mad genius” who is now collecting and molding young minds to follow in his footsteps. Author Craig Unger writes in 2007, “To join Team Wohlstetter, apparently, one had to embrace unquestioningly his worldviews, which eschewed old-fashioned intelligence as a basis for assessing the enemy’s intentions and military capabilities in favor of elaborate statistical models, probabilities, reasoning, systems analysis, and game theory developed at RAND.”

An analyst with the Federation of Atomic Scientists will write in November 2003: “This methodology exploited to the hilt the iron law of zero margin for error.… Even a small probability of vulnerability, or a potential future vulnerability, could be presented as a virtual state of emergency.” Or as one-time Wohlstetter acolyte Jude Wanninski will later put it, “[I]f you look down the road and see a war with, say, China, twenty years off, go to war now.” Unger will observe, “It was a principle his acolytes would pursue for decades to come—with disastrous results.”

[The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America\'s Future (New York City: Scribner, 2007)., 42-46.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Unger, 2007, pp. 42-46]

Entity Tags: University of Chicago, Stanley Kubrick, Richard Perle, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, RAND Corporation, Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Kristol, Federation of Atomic Scientists, Craig Unger, Jude Wanninski

Category Tags: Albert Wohlstetter, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, US Policy Towards Soviet Union

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=neoconinfluence&neoconinfluence_prominent_neoconservatives=neoconinfluence_zalmay_khalilzad

THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE LEGAL MOVEMENT: THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE LAW, by Steven M. Teles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 385pp.  Cloth. $35.00/£19.95.  ISBN: 9780691122083.

Reviewed by Roy B. Flemming, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University.  Email: roy [at] politics.tamu.edu.

Sure, it was a coincidence but the timing could not have been better.  The morning before I sat down to write this review, I received a solicitation letter from the Federalist Society asking me for a donation.  The letter signed by Eugene B. Meyer, the organization’s president, pointedly quoted Steven Teles’ comment from his book that the “Federalist Society represents, without a doubt, the most vigorous, durable, and well-ordered organization to emerge from . . . modern conservatism’s political strategy.”

When Teles set out to document the stumbles, turning points, and successes of the conservative counter-mobilization against legal liberalism, his “first real breakthrough” came after Meyer let him loose to rummage through the Society’s internal documents. Other entrepreneurs in the conservative legal movement like Henry Manne, William “Chip” Mellor, and Clint Bolickfully cooperated with Teles, answering his questions and providing him with background documents.  Equally important, pivotal financial patrons of the movement, like the Olin Foundation, followed suit.  Finally, Teles decided to organize his research around the themes of strategy and entrepreneurship which he credits to conversations with Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. No published study about the conservative legal movement of which I am aware can compete with the information, detail, perspectives, and stories that Teles has packed into his book.

Teles’ major stories pivot around the formation and evolution of the Federalist Society, the emergence and institutionalization of law and economics as part of law school curriculums, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Institute for Justice.  Nested within these narratives are vignettes of other players and organizations that illustrate how patrons and entrepreneurs learned from their mistakes and redirected their strategies.  Teles quickly alerts his readers that he not concerned with organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice that have been involved in religious or social conservative litigation.  Nor is he interested in the thicket of conservative think tanks that sprouted up during the past three decades or in the proliferation of litigating groups with traditional pro-business agendas or interests in tort reform.  The price of Teles’ tight focus, however, is easily off-set by the many benefits generated by his in-depth discussions.

The idea for a conservative legal counter-mobilization first surfaced in Lewis Powell’s  confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 shortly before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.  (Powell’s memo can be found at [*633] www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/print/sources_document13.html).

Entitled “Attack of [sic] the American Free Enterprise System,” Powell argued America’s economic system was under “broad attack.”  The “most disquieting” attacks were not those made by the usual left-wing or socialist suspects but those from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”  Powell urged the Chamber to confront the criticism especially in universities and colleges (including a “balancing of faculties”) and redirect the public agenda by creating incentives for “independent scholars who believe in the system” to publish more often and more widely.  In a very real sense, Powell’s ideas foreshadowed Manne’s campaign to create law and economics centers in law schools and the Olin Foundation’s initiatives aimed at the elite schoolsas well as the network of conservative faculty and students created by the Federalist Society.

In a section called a “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts,” Powell cautioned that liberal and far left groups had been “far more astute” in recognizing the “judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.”  This could be a “vast area of opportunity” for the Chamber and the soon-to-be associate justice recommended that it hire “highly competent” staff attorneys to file amicus briefs in the Supreme Court or under special circumstances retain “lawyers of national standing and reputation” to participate in Chamber-sponsored law suits.  The American Civil Liberties Union, civil rights groups, and liberal public interest law outfits like those created by Ralph Nader, offered off-the-shelf templates that conservatives could use to organize their counter-mobilization.  As Teles explains, Powell implied that the fundamental problem was an imbalance in the interests appearing in courtrooms and that it could be righted by recruiting pro-business if not conservative “repeat players” and by a revival of “judicial restraint” on the bench.

Things did not play out as simply as Powell intimated.  Following the formation of the Pacific Legal Foundation in 1973 with the support from the California Chamber of Commerce, several other regional foundations were soon created under the auspices of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI).  This network was organized geographically, not functionally, and held together by interlocking directorships.  The result was “organizational turmoil” because as one insider told Teles “NLCPI had all the structural flaws of the Articles of Confederation” (p.63).  Equally telling, the emphasis on filing amicus briefs displaced coherent litigation strategies and put the foundations on fund-raising treadmills. Most damning of all for Powell’s business-led strategy were unexpected tensions between business interests and conservative ideology.  As Adam Smith cautioned long ago, business interests are not synonymous with the public interest however it is defined.

Teles’ cameo study of the Mountain States Legal Foundation illustrates the point.  With reliable funding from Joseph Coors, a long-time patron of right-wing causes, effective leadership in the early years by James Watts who later became President Reagan’s Interior [*634] Secretary, and a shared sense of grievance arising from the “Sagebrush Rebellion” in the Western states over the control of federal lands, the Mountain States Legal Foundation had several built-in advantages.  Nevertheless it faltered because its business allies expected returns on their “investments” and the foundation often filed amicus briefs in response to particular contributions or to encourage new ones. Matters came to a head when the foundation challenged on First Amendment grounds Denver’s grant of an exclusive cable television franchise to a local businessman, a grant widely supported by the Mile High City’s business community.  As an insider explained to Teles, the foundation’s suit “gored very powerful interests there, well connected to the Republican Party . . . Joe Coors resigned from our board [saying] . . . ’I founded MSLF . . . to take on the Sierra Club, not to do this sort of thing’” (p.65).

Soul-searching about the strategy behind the first generation of public interest firms began in the late 1970s whenMichael Horowitz (subsequently chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget during the first Reagan administration) submitted a highly critical report to the Scaife Foundation.  The Horowitz Report redefined the goals of the legal counter-mobilization. Litigation alone could not dislodge legal liberalism.  Ties to business interests tethered conservative public interest firms and held them back from taking the moral high ground. Amicus briefs were “pufferies intended for naïve audiences of donors and not truly doing meaningful work” (p.71).  The aversion to basing organizations in Washington, D.C. had to be jettisoned in order to confront liberalism on its own turf.  Most important of all, the movement needed to redefine itself along clear, consistent libertarian lines with long-term strategies that would appeal to underdogs caught up in unresponsive legal institutions like black beauticians struggling under state regulations or lower middle class whites whose houses were threatened by eminent domain.  Conservatives had to become idealistic “good guys” limiting government and empowering civil society. 

The Horowitz Report doused cold water on patron enthusiasm for funding conservative public interest law firms but in time the foundations used the report to restructure how these firms operated  Two of these second generation firms are the subject of a separate chapter in which Teles compares the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), best known for its battles against affirmative action policies at the University of Texas and University of Michigan, and the Institute for Justice (IJ) whose fame soared after it turned defeat in KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON into a public policy success.  While the two firms differ significantly in many ways, they share important similarities.  For one thing, judicial activism no longer is a dirty word.  Instead both firms see judicial activism as a means of reviving old rights to protect the conservative goal of limited government; property rights and eminent domain offer just one example.  Clint Bolick (2007), co-founder of the Institute for Justice, recently argued in favor of judicial activism in a new book published by the libertarian Cato Institute.  The firms, seeing the value in an activist bench, are accordingly more strategic in the cases they select and [*635] keep a steady eye on whether a case has the potential to change the public policy agenda or the law.

Horowitz, like Powell, stressed that a “key site” to contest legal liberalism was the university.  In three chapters, Teles traces the winding, upward path of the law and economics movement and the seemingly inexorable growth of the Federalist Society.  The law and economics story has two parts.  The first deals with constructing the “mother ship” at the University of Chicago and the travails of Henry Manne to build law and economic centers at other universities and his final success at George Mason University.

Chicago legitimized law and economics.  The JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS, the sub-field’s first journal, started there and was later edited by Ronald Coase who won a Nobel Prize for his work.  Chicago’s highly influential Anti-Trust Project provided fellowships supported by the Volker Fund, attracted law professors like Robert Bork, and revolutionized the field. Richard Posner with impeccable establishment credentials (Harvard Law and former Supreme Court clerk for Justice William Brennan) wrote ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LAW (published in 1973 and now in its seventh edition) in which he challenged myriad shibboleths in traditional legal research.  In the meantime, Manne spread the gospelby pushing for new centers at other universities, aggressively marketed law and economics with help from theLiberty Fundby holding regular conferences that identified ambitious scholars and brought them into the conservative fold, and through the Economics Institute for Federal Judgesintroduced numerous judges to the fundamentals of micro-economics. 

The second part of the story focuses on the Olin Foundation’s strategic deployment of its largesse aimed directly at faculty and students in elite law schools (most of Manne’s centers were at lesser-ranked schools) which solidified the stature of the law and economics sub-field and raised its status as a distinctive alternative to traditional and contemporary legal scholarship.  Law and economics was not Olin’s first choice, however.  As an official explained to Teles: “I would have preferred to do something in constitutional law but . . . [i]f you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand . . . Law and economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government.  That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral but it isn’t in fact” (p.189).  Olin’s gamble on law and economics paid off handsomely in ways that Lewis Powell would have applauded.  At Harvard, Olin’s support for law and economics provided money, academic panache, and camouflage for Harvard’s president who wanted to stymie the critical legal studies movement and mollify angry alumni in corporate law firms upset by the havoc they felt the “crits” were creating within the profession.  Law and economics raised the research bar for hiring and tenure decisions and offered alternatives to law schools that altered the balance of power in their faculties.

The Federalist Society rang repeated alarms within the legal profession that Harvard Law was “out of control” and [*636] from its beginning the Society has been concerned generally about the placement of conservatives in law schools and out of them.  Teles maintains in his chapter on the Society, however, that over the course of its twenty-five year history the Federalist Society has carved out an influential niche for itself bylimitingits attention to creating and fostering complex networks of lawyers, faculty, law students, and foundation patrons that are held together by an emphasis on serious debate and discourse over ideas that challenge legal liberalism while avoiding right-wing factionalism.  Eschewing the establishment of an in-house litigation center early on, the Society also decided not turn itself into a conservative clone of the American Bar Association despite earlier feelings that perhaps it should and despite its persistent criticisms of the ABA.  These strategic choices (there were others at critical moments) were made by a stable, self-perpetuating cadre of long-serving leaders, including Eugene Meyer, who were present at the Society’s founding and are aligned with foundation executives and senior figures from the legal community. 

Teles neither constructs a theory of the rise of the conservative legal movement nor tests one.  Conceptual references are employed at various times but largely to locate the study within the existing literature.  This by no means diminishes Teles’ accomplishment.  Each of his multiple interlocking stories of the pas de troisbetween different conservative entrepreneurs, their patrons and financiers, and the institutions they either created or tried to change took place over several years and demanded clear precise detailing, which they duly received.  Teles’ book is an important reference and the chief departure point for anybody seriously wanting to understand one of the most important transformations in contemporary legal history and politics.

REFERENCES:

Bolick, Clint. 2007. DAVID’S HAMMER: THE CASE FOR AN ACTIVIST JUDICIARY. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.

Posner, Richard. 1973. ECONOMICS OF LAW.  Boston: Little Brown and Company.

CASE REFERENCE:

KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, 545 U.S. 469 (2005)

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Roy B. Flemming.

http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/teles0708.htm