Harvard

SEE TWO TARGET

promoted to primary, officially sellout, tho could redeem itself via divestment

see kennedy school (some dubious ppl?)

ink 7 25

After Columbia University deal, Trump Administration puts the screws on Harvard and other prominent universities.

In the wake of Columbia University’s $220 million settlement with the Trump Administration to restore federal funding, the Administration is now putting pressure on other universities around the country to make similar deals. Vox explains why Columbia’s agreement is a troubling blueprint for higher education as more schools face pressure from the Trump Administration to concede not just money but also federal oversight over programs and admissions that erode academic freedom and autonomy. Columbia also adopted the controversial IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ into its antidiscrimination policy, which lists criticism of the Israeli government as ‘antisemitic’ and

Giants peter p:

of the 199 power elite managers

(70 percent) are male. Eighty-four percent are whites of Euro-

pean descent. The 199 power elite managers hold 147 graduate

degrees, including 59 MBAs, 22 JDs, 23 PhDs, and 35 MA/MS

degrees. Almost all have attended elite private colleges, with 28

attending Harvard or Stanford.

People from twenty nations...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13062018/trump-epa-air-pollution-data-clean-water-regulations-public-health-environmental-laws-harvard-study

Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own numbers, two Harvard scientists have calculated that 80,000 more lives will be lost per decade if President Donald Trump's administration fulfills its plans to roll back clean air and water protections.

The researchers, terming their tally "an extremely conservative estimate," also estimated that the repeal of regulations will lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people. Their essay was published Tuesday in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association.

"We felt it was important to take a comprehensive view," said Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician and co-director of the Data Science Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Some people, when looking at one specific repealing of a rule, might not think it's important. We wanted to put some numbers on the whole systematic repeal of rule after rule."

She  and David Cutler, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, drew their calculation from the health risk assessments that the EPA conducted during the Obama administration when determining the impact of rules it proposed. Last week, the Trump administration signaled it plans to overhaul the way that those cost-benefit studies are conducted. The agency is taking commentsfor the next 30 days on its plan, which has the potential to reduce the weight given to human health and climate benefits.

Dominici and Cutler decried creating greater risks to the public's health for the benefit of "a relatively few well-connected companies."

"The effects of the Trump administration's policies seem clear, even through the haze they will create," they wrote.

Pruitt's EPA Challenging the Assessments

The EPA dismissed the article because it was not peer-reviewed but appeared instead in the JAMA Forum, where researchers offer perspectives. "This is not a scientific article, it's a political article," the EPA said in response to InsideClimate News' request for comment.

But Dominici noted that she and Cutler pulled the numbers directly from the EPA risk assessments that had been developed for each of the rules they analyzed. "The EPA numbers themselves all rely on peer-reviewed science," Dominici said.

The EPA numbers, in fact, are being challenged and in some cases scaled back by the Trump administration as it seeks to revoke or replace Obama-era rules. But these moves face numerous legal challenges, and the agency will have to show that it has not acted arbitrarily or capriciously to pass muster in the courts.

It's hard to argue against the ample evidence that if air quality standards are relaxed, the health of those who breathe the air will suffer. The same goes for standards for water, pesticides, toxic waste and so on. Runaway climate change, too, would present a wide range of public health risks.

One Rollback, Majority of Respiratory Illnesses

The largest and most immediate health consequences are likely to come through erosion of air quality, Cutler and Domenici wrote. They included in their calculation the repeal of President Barack Obama's signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, as well as the rollback of vehicle fuel economy standards and Trump's tariffs on solar power components from abroad.

About 90 percent of the increase in respiratory ailments can be attributed to one deregulatory move—the effort to re-open a loopholethat allowed trucks that don't comply with pollution rules to remain on the road, the authors found.

Public health scientists have been raising increasing alarms as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has advanced Trump's deregulatory agenda. They have protestedPruitt's move to bar government-funded scientists from sitting on the agency's Science Advisory Board, and nearly 1,000 scientists signed a letter opposing Pruitt's plan to place restrictions on the EPA's use of science.

Pruitt's 'Secret Science' Plan Targets Health Data

In their JAMA essay, Dominici and Cutler singled out the move to curb agency use of science as one of the most potentially consequential, because Pruitt is targeting epidemiological studies of human subjects. Although Pruitt calls this a move for greater "transparency," Dominici said it would in fact bar EPA consideration of precisely the kinds of studies that formed the basis of the calculations that she and Cutler did.

"They are attacking the science because the science is what is putting the number of deaths where they are," she said. "It's a tactic to discredit the science, so that health impact analysis will not be able to be done any more."

The EPA, which received more than 150,000 public comments in 30 days on its proposal to restrict agency science, has extended the comment periodon that proposal through August.  The agency also has set a July 17 hearing in Washington, D.C., on the plan.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

HEALTH

SCOTT PRUITT

DONALD TRUMP

==

dad bought way into university; prosecuted by chris christie:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-into-harvard

==

http://www.alternet.org/education/story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-harvard

==

Kennedy school:

entine gmo:

Calestous Juma, Harvard University

• Boston Globe: Harvard Professor Failed to Disclose Monsanto Connection in Paper Touting GMOs
• Harvard Crimson: Prof Failed To Disclose Connection to Company in Paper

usrtk

8. David Shaw.According to the New York Times piece, Monsanto provided at least $880,000 in grants to Mississippi State University’s vice president for research and economic development.

The FOIA emails show [43] that Shaw was approached by both Monsanto and Dow Chemical to submit comments to the USDA to approve the former’s Roundup Ready 2 Xtend GMO soybeans and the latter’s Enlist weedkiller. Dow executive Larry Walton sent a June 2015 email [44] to Shaw requesting his support for Enlist. In the message, Walton noted that the Mississippi Agricultural Industry Council, where Walton is president, has provided scholarship funds to Mississippi State students. Shaw agreed to the two requests.

Shaw, Folta and seven other professors were also included in an August 2013 group email [45] from Sachs, the Monsanto outreach executive. Sachs asks the group to lend their academic gravitas on a series of articles touting the benefits of GMOs aimed at the general public. The Monsanto exec even assigned them topics and provided talking points and added that company-hired PR firms would plug the finished articles.

“The key to success is participation by all of you—recognized leaders with the knowledge, reputation and communication experience needed to communicate authoritatively with the target groups,” the email stated.

Shaw and Cornell entomologist and professor Anthony Shelton were tasked with the topic, “sustainable crop systems” and the professors complied. The final co-authored article, “Green Genes: Sustainability Advantages of Herbicide Tolerant and Insect Resistant Crops,” was published [46] by the Genetic Literacy Project, an organization critics [47] have labeled an agrichemical industry front group.

9. Calestous Juma.The Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government professor was also part of theSachs group email. Juma, who is enthusiastically pro-GMO [48], wrote a December 2014 piece [49] titled, “Global Risks of Rejecting Agricultural Biotechnology,” a topic—and a similar headline—Sachs suggested. The piece was also published by the Genetic Literacy Project.   

Citing the FOIA emails, the Boston Globe [50] described how Monsanto connected Juma with a marketing company to promote his paper “as part of Monsanto’s strategy to win over the public and lawmakers.” The international development specialist defended his piece, telling the Boston Globe he was not paid by Monsanto and merely pulled material from his previously published book on the topic.

“It’s not that I was trying to hide anything,” Juma said.

richard wolff 1/1/15 30b no taxes; MA SB propsed 1% (= 20% on INCREASE)  harvard

==

==

This is the second in a three-part series. Read the first story here.

The conservative “secret science” campaign harkens back nearly twenty years.

In late 1996, industry was trying to fight the Environmental Protection Agency’s first efforts to set a fine particle pollution air quality standard of "PM2.5," the abbreviation used for particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter.

Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), an astroturf lobbying group founded by the petrochemical industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch in 1984, warned that the “effects of the new air quality standards on the economy would be devastating,” based in part on economic analyses conducted by the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University – a group also funded by the Koch brothers. The CSE co-founder and president was Koch Industries vice president Rich Fink, a George Mason economist who has sat on the board of the school's public choice center.

CSE, the precursor to the Tea Party groups FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, was then led by C. Boyden Gray, an heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune and GOP kingmaker. In addition to running the tobacco-and-polluter-funded “grassroots” CSE, Gray also managed the Orwellian-sounding “Air Quality Standards Coalition,” an industry coalition coordinated by the National Association of Manufacturers to fight EPA limits on soot and smog pollution.

As industry was not getting much traction with the “it’s going to cost too much” argument, Gray’s group employed street theater as a political tactic.

In January 1997, attendees of a Senate hearing on the proposed EPA rules encountered a group of people wearing white lab coats holding signs saying, “Harvard, release the data!” The supposed scientists in fact came from CSE. In addition, CSE took out ads in the Chicago Tribune attacking the Harvard brand, and writers in the libertarian-industrial network questioned the legitimacy of the studies and demanded the release of the private medical records at their core.

“The unwillingness of the study's authors to allow access to basic data is troubling; such secrecy is incompatible with the modern scientific process,” complained a CSE publication in June 1997.

CSE also found an ideological hook for the economic-damage attacks, spinning pollution limits as an assault on freedom. “Imagine that – a new government regulation that takes away our freedom to celebrate our freedom," said a CSE radio advertisement in the summer of 1997. The ad claimed that the proposed air pollution regulations would ruin Independence Day by outlawing barbecues, lawn mowers, and fireworks.

The outcome of the campaign was threefold: a weakening and delay of ozone and particulate-matter rules; a $50 million taxpayer-funded project to reconfirm the results; and legislation compelling that the data generated by federally funded research be made available to industry and the public.

Fast forward to last year.

“The data in question have not been subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) charged in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Yet Smith’s claim that the studies and the underlying patient data did not undergo independent analysis is false. In fact, in 1997, while Smith was serving his sixth term, Congress appropriated $49.6 million for a major research program into fine particulate matter, including a reanalysis of the Harvard and ACS studies by the Health Effects Institute. Smith voted for the bill.

“When we got the medical records from Harvard, I personally signed a confidentiality agreement, as did the investigators at University of Ottawa. The data was conveyed to a locked room with limited access,” said Health Effects Institute president Dan Greenbaum in an interview.

In 2000, the group issued a 297-page report entitled “Reanalysis of the Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Society Study of Particulate Air Pollution and Mortality.” The explicit goal of that study was “to conduct a rigorous and independent assessment of the findings of the Six Cities and ACS Studies of air pollution and mortality.”

In short, the HEI assessment confirmed the studies’ results. So did a separate HEI analysis of public records from 90 cities known as the National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study.

A charitable interpretation is that this multi-year, multi-million-dollar taxpayer effort advanced epidemiological methodologies. Others might say that polluters knowingly gamed the system by unfairly casting doubt on well-founded science.

The Shelby Amendment

Following these EPA battles, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) drafted the Data Access Act, better known as the Shelby Amendment, in response to his inability to get the underlying medical records from the Harvard Six Cities and American Cancer Society studies.

The Shelby amendment mandated that “all data produced under a [federally funded] award will be made available to the public through the procedures established under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA].” The Office of Management and Budget drafted rules to implement the Shelby amendment that limited the scope to research “used in developing an agency action that has the force and effect of law” and carved out exceptions for confidential data.

Efforts to repeal the Shelby amendment in 1999 led tobacco and oil industry consultant Steve Milloy to coin the term “secret science.” In February, Milloy launched the “Stop Secret Science” sweepstakes, offering a Wall Street Journal subscription to people who sent a comment to OMB on the “secret science” rule. Soon, the Washington Times and the New York Post published “secret science” editorials, and an oil executive attacked the “secret science” of the EPA rules. But the term failed to catch on, perhaps because most politicians couldn’t claim with a straight face that confidential medical records should be made public on industry’s behalf.

The Shelby amendment had little actual impact on the Harvard and ACS studies. The ACS data is not funded by federal or public dollars, and is not subject to the Data Access Act. Essentially all of the non-confidential records and data from the Harvard Six Cities research has been made public, a process that was underway before the passage of the amendment.

Whatever the intent, the Shelby amendment marked an important shift in the balance of power between industry and the public, as corporate researchers could get access to federally funded work without any expectation of a quid pro quo.

Forcing a Document Release

Fifteen years later, Rep. Lamar Smith was ready to go further.

==

more lateral infiltration: harvard observatory partners with smithsonian, soon and baliunus get harvard stamp of approval: huge FF $ to Soon:  aerospace degree (diss refers to atmos?) promoted to astrophysics

Dr. Soon is now employed as astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory (SAO). He is most famous for his work with fellow astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, writing the first paper that attempted to challenge the ‘hockey stick’ graph of temperature records published by Dr Michael Mann.

Key findings:

• $1.3 Million in corporate funding: The FOIA response from the Smithsonian reveals that more than half (over $1.3 million) of Willie Soon’s total funding since 2001 has come from the oil and electric utility industry (coal). Since 2002, every new grant he has received has been from either oil & coal interests or Donors Trust.

• UPDATE FEB. 2013: Willie Soon now gets funding funneled through Donors Trust, the secretive "Dark Money ATM" used by the Kochs and other wealthy elites to obscure their contributions to controversial sources--see the Guardian and Mother Jones. Since 2002, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund have sent $146 million to 102 groups that deny climate science and obstruct policy solutions to global warming.

• Polar bear junk science funding revealed: While Dr. Soon revealed in a 2007 non-peer reviewed Ecological Complexity article on polar bears and Arctic ice that his research was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, neither the corporate funders or Dr. Soon have ever acknowledged the extent, dollar figures or timing of those grants.

• More Koch Funding: The FOIA response fromSmithsonianuncovered an additional grant in 2010 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation of $65,000. UPDATE FEB. 2013: New FOIA results show an additional $55,000 from the Kochs for Willie Soon's work from 2010-2012.

• Southern Company dirty coal funding: The Smithsonian documents also revealed two previously unknown grants totaling $230,000 from the Southern Company, one of the largest coal burning electric utilities in the United States and in world. FEB. 2013 UPDATE: New FOIA results show an additional $120,000 from Southern Company for Willie Soon's work from 2011-2012.

• Additional corporate funders: Other papers written by Dr. Soon and reviewed by Greenpeace researchers show that the American Petroleum Institute has been funding Dr. Soon since the mid-1990s, a period when he also acknowledged funding from Mobil, Texacoand theElectric Power Research Institute (EPRI) a research and lobby shop funded by the electric utilities.

• Attack on IPCC report: Correspondence uncovered in our investigation reveals Dr. Soon coordinating a plan in 2003 to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 1 report–years before the report was released in 2007.

Willie Soon’s Backers:  Big Coal and Big Oil

Since 2001, Willie Soon has received direct funding for his research of $1.033 million from Big Coal and Big Oil interests. In contrast, he received $842,079 from conventional government or university funders in the same period. The last grant he received from a funder with no ties to dirty energy interests was in 2002 (a grant that carried through to 2006). Since then, he has been entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry. 

The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave two grants to Dr. Soon totaling $175,000. The 2005-6 grant for $110,000 from the “Koch Foundation” is titled  "Koch/Mobile [sic] Charitable foundation." This two year grant came from the Charles G. Koch Foundation according to Media Matters Transperancy.

The 2010 grant for $65,000 is titled "Understanding solar variabilityand climate change." Dr. Soon’s acknowledgement in the 2007 polar bear paper published in the Journal of Ecological Complexity says he received funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

American Petroleum Institute (API) gave Dr. Soon multiple grants from 2001 to 2007 totalling nearly $274,000 for research apparently of interest to the oil industry, such as the "Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years." Additional grants of unknown amounts were given to Dr. Soon from 1994-1997.

ExxonMobil Foundation has heavily funded Dr. Soon in at least four grants between 2005 and 2010 totaling $335,000. The titles for these grants range from "project support" to "Exxon-Arctic climate change." It is not known whether ExxonMobil is still funding Dr. Soon, but Exxon did note in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report, 

"…we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in a responsible manner."  

Southern Company is new to the list of known funders of Willie Soon. Our FOIA request to Smithsonian revealed that Southern Company, the giant coal burning utility, gave Dr. Soon two grants: $110,000 in 2005-06 for "Understanding Arctic Climate Change" and $120,000 in 2008-09 for "Solar variability and climate change signals from temperature," areas of research that Southern Company appears to have a keen interest in. This funding and relationship with Southern and EPRI might explain Dr. Soon’s "expertise" in mercury (see below), as the EPA finalizes overdue rules on mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations. Oil burning does not result in mercury emissions, but coal burning does.

Willie Soon regularly teamed with the SAO’s other astrophysicist, Sallie Baliunas, to defend fossil fuels and attack climate science. Some grants were split between them. This denier duo has received $1.153 million from dirty energy interests since 2001.

Dr. Willie Soon's known corporate funding 1994-2012:

(*source documents available below*)

CCF: "Its enemies list has included such diverse groups and individuals as the Alliance of American Insurers; the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons; the American Medical Association (AMA); the Arthritis Foundation; the Consumer Federation of America; New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the Harvard School of Public Health; the Marin Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems; the National Association of High School Principals; the National Safety Council; the National Transportation Safety Board; the Office of Highway Safety for the state of Georgia; Ralph Nader's group, Public Citizen; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)."

==

see stare acsh

Food lobbyist

The April 1973 Harvard's student publications The Present Illness carried a diagram of Stare's industry links. It says he had been director of Continental Can Co. since 1964. It also revealed that Harvard University held $8.737 million worth of shares in the family(?) company. According to this article, Stare also had retainers from Nabisco, Kellogg and Cereal Institute. (See The Present Illness page 18 -21.^[4])

The Kelloggs were eventually persuaded to fund him $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard, and his family associations provided excellent connections to other large organisations in the food processing business willing to provide funds. The Nutrition Foundationis independent of the university (except for the use of the Harvard name) and it published a journal Nutrition Reviews which he edited for 25 years.[1]

A book jointly written with Whelan, Panic in the Pantry, carried the jacket message, "Eat your additives, they're good for you"; that, along with Stare's support for the sugar industry, earned him the sobriquet at Harvard University of "The Sugar King."

==

100 profs ltr divest

"An Open Letter," Harvard Faculty for Divestment, 4-10-14

http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/692?t=7&akid=419.100725.5OtSWr

"Confronting climate change," Harvard University's Office of the President, 4-7-14

http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/693?t=9&akid=419.100725.5OtSWr

==

todd g

front; http://energyfairness.org/2013/10/harvard-president-declines-fossil-fuel-divestment/

The Cascade

Fossilized corporations do their thing while frozen governments produce (oropt [17] out of [18]) hapless and toothless international agreements. By default, initiative must arise elsewhere -- in places where reason and passion have some purchase as well as a tradition, places where new power may be created and deployed.  This counterpower is, in fact, developing.

Given the might and recalcitrance of the usual culpable and complicit institutions, it falls to people’s initiatives and to other kinds of institutions to take up the slack.  This means universities, churches, and other investment pools, now increasingly under pressure from mushrooming campaigns to divest funds from FFCs; and popular movements against coal, oil, fracking, and other dangerous projects -- in particular, at the moment, movements in the U.S., Canada [19], and elsewhere to stop [20] tar sands pipelines.

Those in the growing divestment movement suffer no illusions that universities themselves wield the magnitude of power you find in investment banks or, of course, the FFCs themselves.  They are simply seeking leverage where they can.  The sums of capital held by universities, in particular, are small on the scale of things.  Harvard, the educational institution with the largest endowment (some $32.7 billion [21] at last count), reports that only 3% of its direct holdings are in the top 200 energy outfits.  (The amount of its money held indirectly and opaquely, through private capital pools, and so also possibly invested in FFCs, is unclear.)  Though millions of dollars are at stake, that’s a drop in the bucket for Harvard, whose holdings amount, in turn, to nowhere near a drop in the total market capitalization of those energy giants.

Set against a landscape in which people have lost faith in the principle sectors of power, however, universities still have a certain legitimacy that grants them the potential for leverage. Divestment will make news precisely because such movements are unusual: universities biting the hands of the dogs that feed them, so to speak.

We won’t know how much influence that legitimacy can bring about until the attempts are made.  What we do know, from historical precedent, is that such efforts, even when they start on a small scale, tend to inspire more of the same.  As Robert Kinloch Massie argues in his fine book on South African sanctions,Loosing the Bonds [22], divestment campaigns such as those over apartheid and Big Tobacco [23] (phased out by Harvard in 1990) worked by creating a cascade effect.

With climate change, the stigmatization of the FFCs is already spreading [24] from universities and churches to city and state pension funds.  Eventually, if it works, the cascade changes the atmosphere around private and public investment decisions.  Then those decisions themselves begin to change and such changes become part of a new market calculation for investors and politicians alike.

That’s why it matters so much that some 400 divestment campaigns [25] are currently underway at American colleges and universities. Cascades of influence can move institutions, often in surprising ways.  Every time a divestment demand is put forward, the conversation changes in elite board rooms where investment decisions are made.  Children of FFC executives go home for Christmas and their nagging questions make their parents’ business-as-usual lives less comfortable.  (This dynamic, though seldom credited, undoubtedly played some role in ending the Vietnam War.)

At Harvard, my alma mater, a fierce campaign [26] by courageous and strategic-minded students has spun off a parallel campaign by alumni [27].  They are being asked to withhold contributions to the university and to donate to an escrow fund until Harvard divests from its direct holdings in FFCs and undertakes to divest from its indirect holdings as well.

Is this sort of demand just a gesture of moral purity?  Not necessarily.  Indeed, there may well be an economic payoff for morally motivated divestment and reinvestment.  My fellow alumnus Bevis Longstreth [28], a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a strong case that the policies of the FFCs are shortsighted and risky.  (During the year 2012 alone, the top 200 sank $674 billion into acquiring and developing new energy reserves and working out ways to exploit them.)  Significant parts of the capital they are now investing will likely be “wasted,” since in a climate-change world, large portions of those reserves will have to stay in the ground.

Looked at in the long term, the FFCs may not turn out to be such smart investments after all. Indeed, in the boilerplate language of financial prospectuses, past results are no guarantee of future results; and there are already investment models [29] showing that non-FFC funds deliver better proceeds.

These efforts and arguments have yet to convince Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust that climate change is one of those “extraordinarily rare circumstances” [30] when divestment is justified.  Instead, she proposes “engagement” with the boards of the energy companies, as if sweet reason by itself stood a chance of outtalking sweet crude oil.  She touts Harvard’s teaching and research on climate issues, while neglecting the way those corporations fund disinformation meant to blunt the effect of that teaching and research.  Having declared that the issue is not “political,” she defends Harvard’s investments in the chief funders of propaganda against climate science.  Some rejection of politics!  Meanwhile, for saying no to divestment, President Faust wins the applause [31] of an Alabama coal company front group.

Still, Divest Harvard [26] is undeterred. By conducting referenda, organizing panels and rallies, gathering signatures, and activating alumni, it and like-minded groups are in the process of changing elite conversations about wealth and moral responsibility in the midst of a slow-motion apocalypse.  They are helping ensure that previously unthinkable conversations become thinkable.

Something similar is taking place on many other campuses.  At the same time, writers in influential conservative publications have already begun taking this movement seriously, and the first signs of a changing state of mind are evident.  A report out of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, for example, recently warned [32] against the risks of “stranded assets” (all those fossil fuels already bought and paid for by the FFCs that will never make it out of the ground). The Economist has begun to doubt [33] that oil is such a great investment. The Financial Times heralds [34] the spread of divestment efforts to city governments.

==

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/a-closer-look-at-harvards-choice-on-fossil-fuels/

==

One hundred thirty-six of the 161 core members (84 percent) are male. Eighty-eight percent are whites of European descent (just nineteen are people of color). Fifty-two percent hold graduate degrees—including thirty-seven MBAs, fourteen JDs, twenty-one PhDs, and twelve MA/MS degrees. Almost all have attended private colleges, with close to half attending the same ten universities: Harvard University (25), Oxford University (11), Stanford University (8), Cambridge University (8), University of Chicago (8), University of Cologne (6), Columbia University (5), Cornell University (4), the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (3), and University of California–Berkeley (3). Forty-nine are or were CEOs, eight are or were CFOs; six had prior experience at Morgan Stanley, six at Goldman Sachs, four at Lehman Brothers, four at Swiss Re, seven at Barclays, four at Salomon Brothers, and four at Merrill Lynch. 

Pete Peterson Linked Economists Caught in Austerity Error

by Mary Bottari [1] — April 18, 2013 - 11:59am

• Topics: Economy [2]

• Projects: Real Economy Project [3]

A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.

Reinhart-Rogoff Study Debunked

 Three years ago, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a study [5] that presented empirical evidence from 44 nations over a 200 year time span to demonstrate that countries with a public debt over 90 percent of GDP (the United States is at about 100 percent, Japan at 200 percent) have average growth rates one percent lower than other nations.

Forty-four countries, 200 years, Harvard -- pretty convincing, huh?

Except it was wrong.

When the PERI team finally got a hold of the data used by Reinhart and Rogoff, they uncovered gaping problems [6]. They found that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth." Adjusting for these errors, the Amherst team contends that "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent."

It would all be a Massachusetts "Ivory Tower" kerfluffle if the Reinhart-Rogoff study were not cited by practically everyone in Washington, including Paul Ryan, Simpson-Bowles, and the entire "Fix the Debt" crowd, to justify harmful cuts and a stalemate on stimulus currently condemning millions to mass unemployment.

And it should come as no surprise that the economists have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson.

Study Used to Justify Harmful Cuts and High Unemployment

It is hard to understate the importance of the study. It has been cited [7] around the globe by academics, politicians, and the mainstream media. In the U.S., it is one of Paul Ryan's favorite justifications for his draconian Path to Prosperity [8] budget, for GOP rejection of further stimulus, and the Fix the Debt crowd's frenzied calls for urgent action. President Obama is now on the austerity bandwagon, enacting numerous cuts and proposing new cuts to programs like Social Security in order to achieve a "Grand Bargain" on deficits. As a consequence, mass unemployment is a new normal.

In Europe, "R&R's work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences" for real people, says economist Dean Baker in a piece called "How Much Unemployment Did Reinhart and Rogoff's Arithmetic Mistake Cause?" [9]

Time and time again, economists tried to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results, but to no avail. Now, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin show us why [6]. One mistake, admitted by the authors and gaining the most attention, is an Excel spreadsheet error. Check out the screen shot [10] of the year.

As the authors put it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49... This spreadsheet error... is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category." Belgium, in particular, has 26 years with debt-to-GDP above 90 percent, with an average growth rate of 2.6 percent (though this is only counted as one total point due to the weighting above).

Mother Jones dubbed it "the Excel Error Heard Round the World."

Pete Peterson's Fingerprints

It will come as no surprise that Reinhart and Rogoff have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, [11] a big fan of their work. Peterson has been advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare for decades in order to prevent a debt crisis he warns will spike interest rates and collapse the economy. (Peterson failed to warn of the actual crisis building on Wall Street during his time at the Blackstone Group.)

When Washington Post writer Suzy Khimm pointed out to Peterson [12] that the U.S. built significant deficits during the financial crisis but maintained very low interest rates, Peterson responded that America still needed to be on high alert: "you know [Kenneth] Rogoff and [Carmen] Reinhart -- I've talked to them, and they say [debt crises] are sudden, they're sharp, they're very substantial. The risk is simply too big. At some point, if we lurch from crisis to crisis, then confidence will decline on our economy in general."

As the Center for Media and Democracy detailed in the online report, "The Peterson Pyramid," [13] the Blackstone billionaire turned philanthropist has spent half a billion dollars to promote this chorus of calamity. Through the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Peterson has funded practically every think tank and non-profit that works on deficit- and debt-related issues, including his latest astroturf supergroup, "Fix the Debt," which has set a July 4, 2013 deadline for securing an austerity budget [14].

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as "the most influential female economist in the world," was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics [15] founded, chaired, and funded [16] by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit [17] along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on [18]. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation [19].

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board [20] of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published [21] a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, "A Decade of Debt," where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a "debt burden" stretching into 2017 that "will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come." (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)

heritage hired harvard racist to come up with 6.3 trillion cost of immigration, low iQ  http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/51837416#51837420 same montana PO box as full on skinhead

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

Famous Harvard Professor Gay-Bashes John Maynard Keynes, Suggests People Without Children Do Not Care About Future Generations

May 4, 2013  |

Austerity hawk and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson is known for his love of the media and his enthusiasm for the now-discredited austerity scholarship of fellow Harvard professors Reinhart & Rogoff, who were recently exposed in the homework assignment of a U Mass-Amherst grad student [3]. Not content with this embarrassment, Ferguson has just distinguished himself with a homophobic rant in which he claims that John Maynard Keynes' economic theories are invalid due to his sexuality. He also managed to suggest that anyone who does not have children (this would include, among others, Jesus) does not care about future generations.

Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor broke the story [4] on Saturday:

"Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes' famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of 'poetry' rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.

It gets worse.

Ferguson, who is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die,says it's only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an 'effete' member of society. Apparently, in Ferguson's world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society."

Since the story hit the Internet, commenters have noted that Keynes was actually bi-sexual, and that his wife suffered a miscarriage. But facts apparently matter less than ad hominem attacks to Professor Ferguson.

Niall Ferguson apologized on Twitter [5], calling his remarks "stupid and tactless."

In the past, however, Ferguson has commented on Keynes' sexuality in his scholarly work in a tone that many would consider disparaging, for example, in his book The Pity of War -- see here [6].

Harvard austerity pushers seem to be doing a remarkable job of humiliating themselves publicly in recent weeks. Who is next?

See more stories tagged with:

austerity [7],

Bibliophiles [8],

Bloomsbury Group [9],

British people [10],

california [11],

Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club [12],

carlsbad [13],

Edmund Burke [14],

English people [15],

financial advisor [16],

harvard university [17],

harvard [18],

john maynard keynes [19],

keynesian economics [20],

Niall Ferguson [21],

Professor of History [22],

Quotation [23],

social issues [24],

Tom Kostigen [25],

twitter [26],

author [27],

financial advisors [28]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/famous-harvard-professor-gay-bashes-john-maynard-keynes-suggests-people-without-children-do

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lynn-stuart-parramore

[3] http://www.alternet.org/economy/meet-28-year-old-student-who-exposed-two-harvard-professors-whose-shoddy-research-drove

[4] http://www.fa-mag.com/news/harvard-professor-gay-bashes-keynes-14173.html

[5] https://twitter.com/nfergus

[6] http://books.google.com/books?id=McfJaJ25lscC&pg=PA327&lpg=PA327&dq=keynes+sexuality+pity+of+war&source=bl&ots=-qLGPpbe7A&sig=bbD9ICL-qsw6TO4wD4dWQJfz7_U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q1iFUcanDsu2rgGrnoDQCg&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=keynes%20sexuality%20pity%20of%20war&f=false

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/austerity-0

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bibliophiles

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bloomsbury-group

[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/british-people

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/california

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cambridge-university-moral-sciences-club

[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/carlsbad

[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/edmund-burke

[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/english-people

[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/financial-advisor

[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/harvard-university

[18] http://www.alternet.org/tags/harvard

[19] http://www.alternet.org/tags/john-maynard-keynes

[20] http://www.alternet.org/tags/keynesian-economics

[21] http://www.alternet.org/tags/niall-ferguson

[22] http://www.alternet.org/tags/professor-history

[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/quotation

[24] http://www.alternet.org/tags/social-issues-0

[25] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tom-kostigen

[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/twitter-0

[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/author

[28] http://www.alternet.org/tags/financial-advisors

[29] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

==

law school neutered?

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.

koch $ to bldg: Center for Government and International Studies has made it possible for us to share the privilege of being here. Sid Knafel's vision and leadership have helped not only to build this center,

school of public health had 3 hacks:

Carl Coleman Seltzer (recently deceased (citation needed)) was a Harvard-based physical anthropologist graduate supported by tobacco industry funds for more than forty years. He was promoted by the industry's PR companies as an "independent Harvard professor from the School of Public Health; a heart specialist, who didn't believe that smoking was a serious risk."

He was promoted as an independent consultant to Congress for numereous Congressional inquiries; sent as an independet scientist to genuine scientific health conferences; supplied as a statistician to legitimate biomedical research groups to perform their calculations and prepare their reports; promoted onto the Scientific Advisory group for the US Surgeon-General's annual review of the status of cigarette/smoking research; and sent of media tours around the world to preach the message that there was no evidence linking smoking with heart disease.

Administrators and academics at Harvard University (especially the Harvard School of Public Health and the Peabody Museum) were party to this deception at the highest level. They maintained a veil of secrecy over the university dealings with Seltzer because of their public posture of not accepting tobacco industry funding.

Yet almost all of the money Seltzer earned during these years (more than $2 million) came either indirectly from the tobacco companies and their trade association (by way of lawyers and third-party cut-outs in the university), the Tobacco Institute (TI) or more directly in the form of grants from their fake research organisations the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) and the later Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) and Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR).

Background

Seltzer was born in 1908 and took his PhD in physical anthropology at Harvard in 1933.

Grant study

During the second world war Seltzer remained at Harvard, but assisted in American army office recruitment by conducting thousands of physical measurements of inductees, thus helping create a major database which included smoking and lifestyle information.

This later became the basis for a major health research program after the war known as the 'Grant study'. It was directed by Seltzer's friend Dr Charles McArthur at Harvard, and initially it studied 250 "normal" Harvard students who had first been measured and tested for personality differences in 1938. They were followed up by questionnaires sent out in 1959, and this resulted in a number of papers promoting the idea that personality was genetically predetermined, and that diseases were linked more to genetic variation than to life-style or environmental factors. [1]

Peabody Museum years

For years after the war Seltzer returned to just being a low-level physical anthropologist graduate who worked as a honorary (self-funded) researcher through Peabody Museum on the Harvard campus. He did work on American Indian tribes, helping the government to determine which Indian groups held tribal rights to various national resources, etc. But through his connections at the university and his work on the original data, he was able to extend the follow-up from the Grant study to encompass 922 ex-students.

Smoking and masculinity index

Seltzer's first publication on this subject looked at an index of body measurements which he called "the masculinity index" and related this to smokers and non-smokers. He distinguished physical features which were different between males and females. [2] He found that:

The data show that there is a significant association between the strength of the masculine component and the smoking habits of the subjects.

More specifically, weakness' of the masculine component is significantly more frequent in smokers than in nonsmokers. [and] the degree of weakness of the masculine component from the nonsmokers to the heavier smokers is consistent and progressive.

In other words, the more feminine males smoked, and smoked more heavily the more feminine they were in body build.

This study was noticed by Robert Hockett, the deputy director of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) who realised that, although it reported that healthier masculine males smoked less (which was contrary to all the advertising images), the study could be used to support industry claims that there was not necessarily a causal-connection between smoking and health. Both could be under the influence of a third factor, genetics.

Hockett contacted Seltzer and had a long discussion about future funding which resulted in Seltzer receiving a few thousand dollars to write a major article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine ... with some modifications to the conclusions (as noted by MD magazine). [3]

"Why People Smoke". [4] in the Atlantic Monthly reported the study findings in a different way:

Smokers are consistently larger than the nonsmokers. They are taller, heavier, broader in the shoulders and hips, bigger in the size of chest, leg and hand."

They were also more outgoing, risk-taking, life-fullfilling, etc. Essentially he was now maintaining a position which was the exact opposite of the Science report. In this article he says it is genetic differences (the masculinity component') which determine those who are attracted to smoking -- and these features characteristically matched the promotions of the cigarette companies. Smokers are now more like the cowboys in the 'Marlboro Man' ads, while non-smokers are wimps and nerds.

Correlation vs causation

This came to be known as the constitutional hypothesis which was used by the cigarette companies to explain to the public and politicians why no restrictions on cigarettes were needed. While a statistical link might be show cigarettes are linked to cancer or heart disease, (they said) statistical correlation did not necessarily mean that cigarettes caused the disease. Correlation is not causation became the industry's catch-phrase,

And since both a propensity to smoke and the likelihood of disease were the consequence of genetic predetermination, there was no point in reducing tobacco consumption since it would provide no beneficial effects ... either to the individual or for the community as a whole.

It was a very convincing argument with those politicians who were trying to find a way to protect their state's tobacco farming economy, and it was especially attractive if they needed the generous campaign funds and junkets provided by the tobacco industry.

Tobacco industry support

Clarence Cook Little, the famous cancer researcher who ran the Tobacco Industry Research Council in a way that suited the industry, reported that he had confidence in Seltzer, and that he should be supported and introduced to other dodgy scientists who worked for the industry. [5] Over time he became a central member of the scientific core family of scientists supporting the tobacco industry, while still protesting his independence.

By mid 1962 Seltzer was firmly on the tobacco industry gravy train. [6] He had been linked up with a major research project conducted at Johns Hopkins university by Carolyn Thomas (similar to the Harvard student study). He was also being used to gather intelligence on the biases and research of other scientists for the tobacco industry [7] both for possible recruitment, and to prepare counter-measures.

The tobacco industry had also pulled some strings and arranged for him to be recruited to the advisory board of the Surgeon General's Committee (SRC) preparing the annual report on Smoking and Health. [8] However he had little influence here.

Harvard School of Public Health years

While Seltzer's position at the Peabody Museum meant that he was able to use Harvard University letterhead, it still didn't carry the prestige of being a member of Harvard University's academic staff itself. So in 1962, the industry arranged for Seltzer to meet Professor Frederick J. Stare, a shill for the food and chemical industry, and the Harvard Professor who ran the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health as a private fiefdom [9]

Tobacco activities and covert support

At this time he was recruited by the tobacco industry virtually on a full-time basis, and he eventually transferred to work in Stare's Department of Nutrition (from 1963 until 1977). This gave him more cover and some manufactured scientific status. [10]. It also gave Stare a cut of the proceeds. [11]

Stare was to protect him for many years -- and when serious questions arose in the main university, he arranged for payments to be made as grants directly into the Department coffers, by-passing the normal administrative rules. He also organised a lecturing position for Seltzer at Tufts University (through a close associate) which allowed Seltzer to use the title of "Professor". Seltzer then offered voluntary statistical services to the American Heart Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, and to other genuine research institutes by using his Harvard School of Public Health and Tufts University credentials.

The tobacco industry utilised his manufactured status as an independent "Professor" from the "Harvard School of Public Health" who was an expert on cardiac (heart) diseases and a consultant to the American Heart Foundation ... by having him appear as their witness in Congressional hearings.

Time Magazine on July 7 1970 reported that Carl Seltzer, "from the Harvard School of Public Health, a consultant to the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee in 1964", said this about heart disease in 1969:

"It will be regrettable, if the impact of the prestige of the U. S. Public Health Service led scientists and the public to believe in and accept as firmly established facts which, on the basis of current knowledge, are speculative and lacking in scientific validity.

The situation demands not special pleading but scientific truth, namely, what is reasonably established. And, certainly, it has not been reasonably established that cigarette smoking causes coronary heart disease."

The tobacco industry's PR companies also promoted Seltzer to gullible media organisations in other countries, and the industry sent him around the world, as an expert on smoking and heart-disease [12]. When not on tour, they paid for him to provide statistical services to many legitimate health research groups in the USA looking into the relationship between smoking and health. [[13]] His Harvard credentials were highly attractive to small research groups eagre to boost the prestige of their work.

Over a number of decades, more than $2 million in tobacco money via a secret account was channeled to Seltzer via Stare. The money passed from the companies, to a secret "Special Account #4" held by the Kansas City law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Payments were then made as grants to the Department of Nutrition, where Stare took his cut, and passed the rest to Seltzer.

Yet both Seltzer and Stare publicly denied any links with the tobacco industry [14] and claimed that they never took a penny from the tobacco industry. [15]

As he approached retirementSeltzer began to specialise in overseas trips which were funded and organised by the tobacco industry. They paid a public relations company to shop him around various countries, etting up meetings, interviews and press conferences with print, radio and television program personel. [16] For instance, with his wife Ruth he visited Australia for Philip Morris, then went on to New Zealand. [17] Later he toured Europe.

He was also available for any conference anywhere where the problems of smoking were to be discussed -- both legitimate scientific conferences, and the many fake conferences run secretly by the tobacco industry. Whereever he travelled, he sprouted the message -- "there is no causal connection between smoking and disease. Smoking is not linked to coronary heart disease (CHD)". He tended to avoid questions of any links to lung-cancer, claiming that cancer was not his area of expertise. Later his message was supplemented by the claim that his research showed that giving up smoking had no effect whatsoever on the health of the ex-smokers.

When the US government refused further funding for the famous long-term Framington Heart Study which had proved a causal link between smoking and CHD the tobacco industry secretly put in some supplementary funding. In return, Seltzer found himself on the scientific staff of the study. He was now in a position to review and recalculate twenty years of Framingham's health data on CHD, and, as with the Kaiser Permanente study, he discovered through his re-evaluation of the data, that the original claims about smoking and CHD were wrong. [18] He also promoted the idea that lung cancer, CHD and smoking propensity were all linked with genetically determined Type A personalities.

Many years later, after being forced to retire from the HSPH under the University rules, he returned to work for the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) once again through the Peabody Museum. [19] This time he was paid through grants made to a Museum researcher -- passed on to his 'assistant' (Seltzer). Clearly he was too valuable for the industry to lose. [20] [21]

th frank:

��

And consider the university, the mothership of the professions. For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate. Even the traditional academy, where free inquiry nominally lives, has become a profit center, a place where exorbitant tuition somehow bypasses the adjuncts who do the teaching but makes for lavish executive salaries; where economists pull in fantastic sums for “consulting”; and where the prospect of launching the next hot Internet startup is a gamble that it is worth bending any rule to take.

One of Jack Abramoff’s tricks, you will recall, was to hand intellectuals cash and trips to tropical islands in exchange for such intellectual services as might get the tycoons who owned the sweatshops in those paradises off the regulatory hook. And how different was the Abramoff model of enlightenment from the activities of the Cambridge, Massachusetts consultancy called ��Monitor,” with its prominent Harvard connections? According to the Boston Globe:

The management consulting firm received $250,000 a month from the Libyan government from 2006 to 2008 for a wide range of services, including writing [a] book proposal, bringing prominent academics to Libya to meet Khadafy “to enhance international appreciation of Libya” and trying to generate positive news coverage of the country.

“Trying to generate positive news coverage,” by the way, included placing pro-Qaddafi stories by prominent scholars in The New Republic, the Washington Post, Newsweek International, and the Guardian—a record far more impressive than the Bush administration’s suborning of syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams or Abramoff’s own episodic triumphs on the op-ed page of the Washington Times.

sw

Monitor "helps organizations grow. We work with leading corporations, governments and social sector organizations around the world on the growth issues that are most important to them.

"We partner with client organizations as their integrated resource for growth. The results are impressive: we typically double the rates of growth of our clients’ businesses. How do we do this? Since our founding in 1983 by six entrepreneurs, including Harvard Prof. Michael Porter and Monitor’s current Chairman Mark Fuller, we have invested heavily in developing leading edge ideas, approaches and methods -- and in making them practical for clients to use on their toughest problems and biggest opportunities. We have also invested in learning about how to apply these ideas in client organizations and how best to work with clients to achieve the results they seek." ^[1]

People

Accessed September 2007: ^[2]

Strategy

• Eamonn Kelly
• Chris Meyer
• Michael Porter
• Peter Schwartz
• Tom Copeland

Marketing and Pricing

• Bernie Jaworski
• Tom Nagle
• Jeffrey Rayport

Innovation and Product Development

• Bruce Chew
• Ron Jonash
• Larry Keeley

Organization and Leadership

• Chris Argyris
• Joe Fuller
• Michael Jensen

Economic Development and Security

• Mark Fuller
• Katherine Fulton

Paid Advisors

• Francis Fukuyama
• Richard Perle ^[3]

Contact

Web: http://www.monitor.com

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

• John F. Schoew
• Global Business Network
• Harvey Koh

External resources

• Ed Pilkington, US firm Monitor Group admits mistakes over $3m Gaddafi deal, The Guardian, 4 March 2011.

References

1. ��� About Us, Monitor Group, accessed September 3, 2007.
2. ↑ Thought Leaders, Monitor Group, accessed September 3, 2007.
3. ↑ Laura Rozen, Among Libya's lobbyists, Politico, 21 February 2011

Verita$ critically examines Harvard's historical role and its global impact. The film's director describes Harvard's traditional character in three key words: rich, white, and male. The documentary questions what the real purpose of education should be. Veritas means truth in Latin, and is Harvard's motto. But, in reviewing Harvard's history, the film's title changes the S into a $ sign to highlight Harvard's pursuit of money and power. Using historical footage and interviews with leading American intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Verita$ explores elements of Harvard's unknown history. Few are aware, for example, that Harvard provided students as strikebreakers in the 1912 Bread and Rose strike and in the 1919 Boston police strike. The film also analyzes the role of conservative Harvard scientist s in the early 20th century in promoting American Eugenics and its deep impact in Nazi Germany. Following WW2 and the U.S. rise to world dominance, Harvard became a training ground for the elite and maintained close ties with the U.S. Government, providing crucial dimensions of state ideology, particularly during the Cold War. The anti-war movement, however, challenged Harvard and it subsequently shifted its primary focus from defense management to neoliberal corporate management--exemplified by its central role in the Russian aid scandal of the 1990s. The film also examines Harvard's investment policy and its impact in the Boston community. Director Eun Jung Shin was named Best Documentary Film Director at the 2011 New York International Film Festival. She is from Gwang ju, South Korea, where the 1980 people's uprising was a key event in the overthrow of decades of US-backed military dictatorships. A student activist, she later worked as a TV writer, and from 2000 to 2004 she directed the Gwangju Human Rights Film Festival, which screened documentaries from around the world.

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

Meet the 28-year-old Student Who Exposed Two Harvard Professors Whose Shoddy Research Drove Global Austerity

April 18, 2013  |

The world of economics has just changed, and somebody has some 'splaining to do! Please savor the following twisted tale of bad math, academic folly and pundit hubris.

Since 2010, the names of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous in political and economic circles. These two Harvard economists wrote a paper, “Growth in the Time of Debt” that has been used by everyone from Paul Ryan to Olli Rehn of the European Commission to justify harmful austerity policies. The authors purported to show that once a country's gross debt to GDP ratio crosses the threshold of 90 percent, economic growth slows dramatically. Debt, in other words, seemed very scary and bad.

Their historical data appeared impressive, as did their credentials. Policy-makers and journalists cited the paper to convince the public that instead of focusing on the jobs crisis that was hampering recovery, we should instead focus on deficits. The deficit hawks jumped up and down with excitement.

But something didn’t smell right.

Progressive economists I knew were shocked at what appeared to be the shoddiness of the research and the absurdity of the conclusions. In their paper “A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession [3],” Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson observed that R&R had truncated their sample of British data in a way that skewed their conclusions, eliminating more than a century of data in which British debt loads exploded but economic growth raced ahead (see pages 11-13). The always savvy Marshall Auerback called them out in a blog [4] for New Deal 2.0, which I edited at the time, criticizing the relevance of the cases they had used to justify their conclusions.

But plenty of pundits took their suspect arguments as gospel. The editorial board of the Washington Post declared that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth." The economists cited were Reinhart and Rogoff, whom the WP passed off as speaking for the entire field. A new Washington consensus was born, and the public was hammered with the idea that cutting jobs, stripping away vital public services and letting infrastructure crumble was a good way to get the economy going.  Most any ordinary person on the street would probably intuit that this made no sense, but there was this Academic Research By Esteemed Persons, so the argument was over.

Enter Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the heroes of this story. Herndon, a 28-year-old graduate student, tried to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results as part of a class excercise and couldn’t do it.  He asked R&R to send their data spreadsheet, which had never been made public. This allowed him to see how the data was put together, and Herndon could not believe what he found. Looking at the data with his professors, Ash and Pollin, he found a whole host of problems, including selective exclusion of years of high debt and average growth, a problematic method of weighing countries, and this jaw-dropper: a coding error in the Excel spreadsheet that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

Herndon, Ash, and Pollin write: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49...This spreadsheet error...is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category."

A coding error! Reinhart and Rogoff had been so sloppy in their work that they had not bothered to check their own spreadsheet.

When you fix R&R's problematic methodology and coding errors, you get a very different result that – guess what? – does not support austerity and shows that countries can most certainly cross the phony debt-to-GDP “threshold” and grow.

In their newly released paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff [5]” Herndon, Ash and Pollin show that "when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0:1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower."

Herndon, Ash, and Pollin have set off a firestorm, with those who long suspected that R&R's work was crap shouting hallelujah and defenders scrambling to figure out a way to support deficit hysteria [6] despite the body blow to their theory.

Bottom line: The foundation of the entire global push for austerity and debt reduction in the last several years has been based on a screwup in an Excel spreadsheet and poorly constructed data.

Reinhart and Rogoff are on the defensive. As Mathew O'Brien at The Atlantic put it, "this is the academic's version of the dream where you're naked in public." They have screwed up royally. They have also done a great deal of damage to the world. As Paul Krugman has observed, their replies to their critics have thus far only compounded the confusion. They need to come clean, stop talking like their mistakes are minor, and own up to the enormity of their errors. And a big round of applause goes to the folks at U Mass Amherst for getting to the bottom of this insanity.

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