Do You Believe the Rich Are the Real Poor and the Poor the Real Rich Due to Gov't Handouts? (Beyond the Foreign Policy Lies: Our Compliant Media and the Truth About American Exceptionalism) and Who's Been Watching The Hen House Anyway? (Happy Birthday, Sweetie!)

Sorry this is such a long essay, but so much has happened since the election (and so much still on the elite's upcoming Congressional agenda!) . . . It could take a while.

Welcome to my neighborhood. (OK, I grew up with these bodies.)

Sunday, Jan 4, 2015

Chain Restaurants Are Killing Us:  Billionaire Bankers, Minimum-Wage Oilers and the Nasty Truth About Fast-Food Nation

This is what we eat, this is where we work, this is what we do to our land:  It's nasty and must be rethought.

Thomas Frank

(Credit: AP/Richard Drew)

Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University, and in the space of about a mile, you will find a McDonald’s, a Cracker Barrel, a Wendy’s, a Chick-fil-A, an Arby’s, a Waffle House, a Bojangles’, a Biscuitville, a Subway, a Taco Bell, and a KFC. 

As you walk down this roaring thoroughfare, you’ll notice that the ground is littered with napkins and bright yellow paper cups. But then again, you aren’t really supposed to be walking along this portion of Hillsborough Road and noticing things like those cups, or that abandoned concrete pedestal for some vanished logo, or the empty Aristocrat Vodka bottle hidden behind that broken Motel 6 sign. 

This is a landscape meant to be viewed through a windshield and with the stereo turned up. In fact, drivers here sometimes seem bewildered by the very presence of pedestrians, which may be the reason I was almost run down twice.

But it wasn’t a car that struck me on Hillsborough Road, it was a vision:   a spontaneous understanding of fast-food efficiency. I was gazing on a simple yellow structure that contained the workings of a Waffle House when it came to me — the meaning of this whole panorama of chain restaurants.

The modular construction, the application of assembly-line techniques to food service, the twin-basket fryers and bulk condiment dispensers, even the clever plastic lids on the coffee cups, with their fold-back sip tabs:   these were all triumphs of human ingenuity. You had to admire them. And yet that intense, concentrated efficiency also demanded a fantastic wastefulness elsewhere — of fuel, of air-conditioning, of land, of landfill. Inside the box was a masterpiece of industrial engineering; outside the box were things and people that existed merely to be used up.

I tried to imagine the great national efforts that had made such lunatic efficiency possible. There were the agricultural subsidies and the irrigation projects and the many highway-construction programs, not to mention the mass media, without which our greatest brands could probably never have been built. Had all these mighty enterprises been undertaken simply to create the amazing but utterly typical landscape of Hillsborough Road? To ensure that certain parties might make tons of money while others made almost nothing at all?
*
I was in Durham on August 29 of 2013 to observe something unusual in this particular industry: a strike. What made it especially unusual is that it was happening in North Carolina, which is both hostile to unions and — as the birthplace of Hardee’s, Bojangles’, and Krispy Kreme — a kind of fast-food Athens.

The action began at a Burger King, a lonely-looking outpost holding down one corner of a bleak intersection. A handful of workers and their supporters gathered there at six in the morning, forming their line on the sidewalk even before the sun rose. After some preliminary small talk, they stirred themselves into action and began to chant:   “Workers’ rights are human rights!” Mustering enthusiasm wasn’t easy at that hour, however, and the chant didn’t take. They tried another, and eventually got themselves pumped up: “We can’t survive on seven twenty-five!”

TV news crews soon showed up, as did two police cruisers. A single silhouetted customer sat by the window inside the beleaguered BK and contemplated the scene. As rush hour began, passing drivers honked to show their support.

Later that morning, the protest moved to a McDonald’s in down-town Durham, then to a Little Caesars located in a strip mall on a busy eight-lane road in Raleigh. The strikers, whose numbers had grown, stood by the curb and waved their signs at motorists while their children played in the mulch under the tiny suburban trees behind them. Drivers of semitrailer trucks blew their horns in solidarity; drivers of pickup trucks yelled insults.

The last stop of the day was a Raleigh KFC. It was nearly four in the afternoon by then, and it was plenty hot. The protesters, now numbering around 150, had rallied at a nearby Baptist church before heading over to vent their displeasure at the Colonel’s jolly empire. And this time they were accompanied by the Reverend William Barber II, leader of North Carolina’s NAACP chapter and the organizer of weekly protests against the far-right state legislature that had led, by that point, to nearly a thousand arrests.

A big man with a slight arthritic stoop, Barber worked the crowd in a resonant bass voice. Standing on the lawn in front of the KFC, he sketched out the basic moral framework of the protest — that no matter how many hours fast-food employees work, they’ll never get anywhere at minimum wage. What they wanted, Barber declared, was the right to enjoy “the fruit of their own labor,” a line he quoted from the state’s Reconstruction-era constitution. And then he lowered the boom. “I stopped by to tell you that the fruit is spoiled. The fruit is spoiled when you can work in Kentucky Fried Chicken and can’t hardly buy the chicken that’s there. The fruit is spoiled when you can work and feed other people and can’t hardly feed your own children.”

It was a day of revolt against the batter-fried god Efficiency and his eleven esoteric herbs and spices, and an air of jubilation hovered over the protesters as they made their way down Tarboro Street back to the church. Residents of the tiny houses along the route stood in their doorways and cheered as the workers passed. And the strikers themselves, back in the church parking lot and filled with the joy of collective action, began to dance.
*
There have been countless news stories on the national wave of fast-food strikes, but what I saw that day in North Carolina wasn’t exactly a strike in the traditional sense of the word. In several other cities, cashiers and fry cooks walked off the job in sufficient numbers to close restaurants down. That didn’t happen in Raleigh-Durham. What I saw that day in 2013 was more protest than work stoppage, and the most visible organization at the rallies was not a union but a community-organizing outfit called Action NC. Very few people, if any, were actually skipping their shifts.

Not surprisingly, then, the workers I met seemed a little unfamiliar with the customary rules of labor agitation. One protester wore a stylish black dress and high heels — as she told me, she hadn’t anticipated how physically demanding picketing could be. The protesters made little effort to dissuade customers from entering the restaurants, and as the day got hotter, some went inside themselves to order cold drinks. Several of the people I interviewed also seemed to assume that they needn’t fear retaliation by management. These were all innocent mistakes, of course — and the kind of confusion you would expect to see in the least unionized state in the Union.

Their grievances, however, were the real thing. Willietta Dukes, dressed in dark clothes and with a crucifix on a cord around her neck, told me about her job at a local burger franchise. She is, to judge by her story, an employee who cares about the restaurant, about keeping it shipshape and getting to know regular customers. But after working for various fast-food franchises for sixteen years and raising two children on minimal pay, she’s now living in her grown son’s spare room and barely staying afloat.

By contrast, Dukes says, managers in the industry boast about the bonuses they receive, and one has even shared a favorite stress-reduction technique:   every day he goes home and climbs into his hot tub. “I don’t even have a home to go to!” Dukes tells me. And though her employers are tightfisted with wages, Dukes says she received a form letter warning her about the dangers of labor unions — sent by FedEx.

Lucia Garcia, who had brought her cheerful six-year-old son to the picket line, told me about working at a suburban McDonald’s, where she has the relative good luck to be paid $7.95 per hour — seventy cents above the minimum wage. But despite this munificence, and the fact that her husband works as well, she and her family have been forced to rely on church food pantries to get by, an ironic state of affairs for someone who works in food service, and an emotionally difficult one as well. “It’s sad for me,” Garcia said, “because sometimes it embarrasses my girls.”
*
Now, everyone knows how poorly fast-food jobs pay. They also know why this is supposed to be okay: fast-food workers are teenagers, they don’t have kids or college degrees, and it’s an entry-level job. Hell, it’s virtually a form of national service, the economic boot camp that has replaced the two years our fathers had to give to the armed forces.

Every one of these soothing shibboleths was contradicted by what I saw in North Carolina. These days, fast-food workers are often adults, they often do have children, and I met at least one college grad among the protesters in Raleigh. Why are things like this? Because a job is a job, and in times as lean as ours, the Golden Arches may be the only game in town, regardless of qualifications and degrees.

What people who repeat these things also don’t know is how much effort has gone into keeping fast-food pay so low, despite the enormous profits raked in by the chains. In fact, the conditions of employment have been engineered almost as carefully as the brands and the burgers —  engineered to achieve the complete interchangeability of workers.

In his classic Fast Food Nation (2001), Eric Schlosser describes the industry’s manic pursuit of standardization. The food arrives at the restaurant mostly frozen; the machines that do the cooking are foolproof; virtually no skills are required. “Jobs that have been ‘de-skilled’ can be filled cheaply,” writes Schlosser. “The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.”

Indeed, these are not really restaurants at all but “food systems,” a term favored by the companies themselves. And naturally these systematizers are militantly anti-union. Schlosser tells of a “flying squad” of McDonald’s executives who roamed the country during the 1960s and 1970s, stamping out pro-labor sentiment. 

The National Restaurant Association, for its part, was a leading opponent of the federal “card check” legislation in 2009, which would have made it easier to form unions, and the industry also supports such private-sector propagandists as Rick Berman, a gifted translator of biz-think into the common sense of the millions.

By and large, Americans love the men who systematized their food. Our culture is awash with celebrations of the heroes who plucked pearls of efficiency from the grease traps of the nation. Think:  the brave entrepreneurs who pioneered the fifteen-cent hamburger. The brave entrepreneurs who gave the fifteen-cent hamburger people a little competition. The brave entrepreneurs who brought fake Mexican food to the heartland, or who figured out a quicker way to bake a pizza or fluff a biscuit or “build” a submarine sandwich. They publish their memoirs. They are saluted by presidential candidates. They run for president themselves.

And then there is the army of slightly less heroic entrepreneurs known as franchisees, people who harness their ambition to a brand and a food system developed by someone else. They may not be Wilber Hardee or Harland Sanders, but they are still risk-taking individualists, tirelessly pushing some cupcake concept or dedicating their lives to the advancement of Hawaiian-style smoothies.  

We love them too. They are our “neighbors,” as an angry commentator on Fox News put it during a segment on the fast-food strike; they are people, said another, who “worked their rear ends off all their life, put up their own risk capital.”

These myths are powerful stuff. They were reiterated by Mitt Romney in 2012, when he extolled the “entrepreneurial spirit” of Jim Liautaud, the founder of Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches. People like Liautaud “don’t look to governments,” the candidate insisted, in a campaign speech in suburban Chicago. “They instead look to themselves and say:   What can I do to make myself better? What things can I do to enhance the prospects for myself and my family?”

But while these practitioners of self-improvement through food systems may not “look to governments,” government sure does look out for them. I refer not only to roads and sewers and small-business loans but also to something much more direct. 

As I discovered in North Carolina, many if not most fast-food workers receive food stamps or some other form of government assistance. When they say, “We can’t survive on seven twenty-five!” they mean it quite literally — they can’t survive on the minimum wage, and neither can you, if you are trying to “enhance the prospects” of your family by feeding them. So government steps in and graciously makes up the difference with our tax dollars, thereby excusing management from paying workers enough to keep them and their families, you know, alive.
*
It’s an honest living,” Willietta Dukes told me the day of the action in North Carolina, by way of explaining why she should be paid more. “I’m a hard worker.”

These were direct statements, made without guile. But despite the legend of the scrappy fast-food entrepreneur, I wonder how many chain-store bosses can truthfully say they make an “honest living.” The managers at the restaurants in Raleigh-Durham declined to talk to me, so it’s difficult to form any kind of judgment about them as individuals.

The fast-food companies themselves, however, are well-known entities. Vast corporations making vast profits, they deal in often unhealthy food and pay their leading executives princely sums. And increasingly, they are the property of the same hard-working bankers who brought you the economic slump that never ends.

Consider Burger King, which (let the shameful record show) I once preferred to certain other ubiquitous burger joints. Today the chain is little more than a shuttlecock for private equity. 

Acquired in 1997 by Diageo, the liquor multinational, it was sold in 2002 to a consortium of financial institutions — including, of course, Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital — which took the company public in 2006. 

It was next acquired by the Brazilian-backed investment firm 3G Capital, then merged with yet another private-equity outfit, only to be taken public again last year. Along the way, this pointless enterprise duly fumbled its position as the Number Two American burger chain. A long and painful fight with employees can only do it good.

Similar stories are everywhere you care to look. Bojangles’, the fried-chicken chain, used to be owned by Falfurrias Capital Partners, which eventually off-loaded it to a private-equity firm called Advent International.

Sun Capital Partners owns Friendly’s, Captain D’s, Johnny Rockets, and Boston Market. Fog Cutter Capital Group owns Fatburger. Consumer Capital Partners owns Smashburger. And then there is Roark Capital — yes, named after Ayn Rand’s individualist architect — which owns Arby’s, Cinnabon, Carvel, and Moe’s Southwest Grill.

Even the franchisees, the moms and pops who run your beloved local chain restaurant, aren’t that mom-and-poppy anymore. Here too the Wall Street folks have seen a good thing — a reliable source of revenue made possible by rock-bottom wages. 

The largest Burger King franchisee, for example, is a publicly traded company in Syracuse, New York, that owns 566 local restaurants; its CEO took home $1.9 million in 2012, counting stock options. Another big BK operator is Strategic Restaurants, which is owned by Cerberus Capital.  

The largest tranche of Pizza Hut franchises is owned by something called Olympus Growth Fund V, which bought it in 2011 from Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity. And let us not overlook the doughty folks at Valor Equity, which owns a string of Little Caesars and Dunkin’ Donuts locations through its Utah subsidiary, Sizzling Platter.

*
At both the corporate and the franchise level, industry officials are keeping their mouths shut about the strike, and for obvious reasons. Acknowledging worker discontent is a no-win situation for enterprises that have invested so much in depicting themselves as enclaves of family-friendly happiness. 

I mean, nothing deflates a carefully constructed brand image like an angry worker standing out front screaming about not being able to vaccinate her six-month-old on said brand’s lousy pay.

However, the industry’s D.C. attack dog, Rick Berman, felt no such compunction, and commenced snarling immediately. On the day of the strike in August 2013, his Employment Policies Institute ran a full-page advertisement in the "Wall Street Journal" featuring a big photo of a Japanese kitchen robot.  

The fast-food protests “aren’t a battle against management,” the ad proclaimed, but a “battle against technology.” Should workers push too hard for super-size wages, shiny automatons might well be deployed in restaurants across the country, making you-know-who totally redundant.

The ad’s implication was that companies employ humans as an act of charity. If those ingrate humans mouth off too much, those noble companies will just go ahead and take the bottom-line steps they’ve magnanimously refrained from taking until now. “Hard work” and an “honest living” actually mean nothing in this world; capital means everything. Look on my technology, ye powerless, and despair!

I thought about that nightmare of automation for quite a while after Berman’s ad ran. It has a grain of truth to it, of course. Journalists have been replaced with bloggers and crowdsourcing. Factory hands have been replaced with robots. University professors are being replaced with adjuncts and MOOCs. What else might the god Efficiency choose to de-skill?

Here’s a suggestion:   the ideological carnival barkers in D.C. As I watched the creaking libertarian apparatus go into action, sending its suit-and-tie spokesmen before the cameras to denounce unions and order fast-food workers to shut up, I wondered how long capital would tolerate its old-fashioned existence. 

In many cases, these people haven’t had an original thought in years. Their main job is to appear concerned on Fox News and collect a six-figure sinecure at some industry-subsidized think tank. To say that they “work hard” for an “honest living” is to bend meaning to the point where its fragile chicken bones snap beneath its rubbery flesh. 

In a sane world, they are the ones who would be most profitably replaced, their space in the CNBC octobox taken by Hatsune Miku–style projections, attractive Republican holograms whose free-market patter could be easily cued up by a back-office worker in Bangalore.
*

Boddie-Noell Enterprises is one of the great fast-food success stories in North Carolina. It was among the first to open a franchise of Hardee’s, a restaurant selling cheap hamburgers after the McDonald’s model, and over the years Boddie-Noell grew to become the biggest Hardee’s franchisee of them all. The company has not been purchased by some faceless private-equity firm, and it is not the sort of outfit that would ever run advertisements threatening to replace its workers with robots.

On the contrary, it is a family-owned business whose slogan is “We Believe in People.” Boddie-Noell feels such concern for its people that the company claims to have a phalanx of “Corporate Chaplains” on call, ready to “offer care to employees with personal and professional life issues.”

Boddie-Noell Enterprises also owns a plantation. In saying this, I am not making a snarky comment about the conditions of fast-food employment. I mean a real plantation outside the town of Nashville, North Carolina, named Rose Hill. Its main house was completed in the 1790s by the ancestors of the Boddie family, and its ups and downs over the decades roughly parallel the vicissitudes of American capitalism itself.

The Boddies lost Rose Hill in the depths of the Depression, that dreadful era for the One Percent, but were able to buy it back in 1979, as their archipelago of cheap hamburger stands grew. Yes, their antebellum paradise was regained through the miraculous intercession of fast-food efficiency, and now the family has converted Rose Hill into a conference center and a favorite venue for elegant plantation-style weddings.

The day after the strike, I drove out to Rose Hill. It was indeed impressive. I approached the plantation by an allée of crêpe-myrtle trees in full flower, and passed through an imposing brick-and-iron gateway bearing the Boddie coat of arms (which does not feature a hamburger couchant on a field of honey-mustard dipping sauce). I drove on, was waved at by a man mowing a lawn, and finally reached the main building, where I had the beautifully landscaped parking area all to myself.

The manor house certainly looked authentic — white and stately, the ceiling of the grandiose, four-columned front porch painted exactly the right shade of blue. I rang the doorbell: nothing. I gazed out over the attractive swimming pool:   nobody. With the exception of the man on the mower, Rose Hill seemed completely depopulated.

I have no doubt that this place swarms with people when conferences are in session or weddings in progress. But seeing it empty in this way triggered another epiphany, a vision of a world in which workers and their troubles had completely disappeared.

Yes, they will persist as smiling faces in company newsletters. Yet the day will come when technology and ideology make them absolutely interchangeable, each bearing a silver tray loaded with deep-fried hors d’oeuvres:   a support staff for the entrepreneurial schemes and romantic fantasies of the ones who can still afford individuality.

(Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include What's The Matter With Kansas, Pity the Billionaire and One Market Under God. He is the founding editor of "The Baffler" magazine.)

More Thomas Frank.

Hope he said "Hi!" to Mac's staff.

(Harper's)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Don't you just love how the radical conservatives (no, not really conservative - at least of anything other than their personal wealth) just love to rail against the lower classes whom they believe to be living off the rest of the population (them, mainly)?

Almost like the people on the bottom getting the 80% of the profits since the crash that the corporations and rich on the top actually got, isn't it?

Some believe the central political issue of our era is the size of the government. They’re wrong. The central issue is whom the government is for.

Consider the new spending bill Congress and the President agreed to a few weeks ago.

It’s not especially large by historic standards. Under the $1.1 trillion measure, government spending doesn’t rise as a percent of the total economy. In fact, if the economy grows as expected, government spending will actually shrink over the next year.

The problem with the legislation is who gets the goodies and who’s stuck with the tab.

For example, it repeals part of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to stop Wall Street from using other peoples’ money to support its gambling addiction, as the Street did before the near-meltdown of 2008.

Dodd-Frank had barred banks from using commercial deposits that belong to you and me and other people, and which are insured by the government, to make the kind of risky bets that got the Street into trouble and forced taxpayers to bail it out.

But Dodd-Frank put a crimp on Wall Street’s profits. So the Street’s lobbyists have been pushing to roll it back.

The new legislation, incorporating language drafted by lobbyists for Wall Street’s biggest bank, Citigroup, does just this.

It reopens the casino. This increases the likelihood you and I and other taxpayers will once again be left holding the bag.

Wall Street isn’t the only big winner from the new legislation. Health insurance companies get to keep their special tax breaks. Tourist destinations like Las Vegas get their travel promotion subsidies.

In a victory for food companies, the legislation even makes federally subsidized school lunches less healthy by allowing companies that provide them to include fewer whole grains. This boosts their profits because junkier food is less expensive to make.

Major defense contractors also win big. They get tens of billions of dollars for the new warplanes, missiles, and submarines they’ve been lobbying for.

Conservatives like to portray government as a welfare machine doling out benefits to the poor, some of whom are too lazy to work.

In reality, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, only about 12 percent of federal spending goes to individuals and families, most of whom are in dire need.

An increasing portion goes to corporate welfare.
In addition to the provisions in the recent spending bill that reward Wall Street, health insurers, the travel industry, food companies, and defense contractors, other corporate goodies have been long baked into the federal budget.

Big agribusiness gets price supports. Hedge-fund and private-equity managers get their own special “carried-interest” tax loophole. The oil and gas industry gets its special tax subsidies.

Big Pharma gets a particularly big benefit:  a prohibition on government using its vast bargaining power under Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate low drug prices.

Why are politicians doing so much for corporate executives and Wall Street insiders? Follow the money. It’s because they’re flooding Washington with money as never before, financing an increasing portion of politicians’ campaigns.

Do you like getting credit for America's actions abroad?

Wait, why wouldn't you/we?

Are we really that fearless?

Why is America in decline and just how far and fast is this going to go?

Cheerful New Year tidings to all, of course.

Anyone who thinks of America and its place in the world clearly and honestly understands, with no shred of doubt after the destructive year gone by, that this nation is now well into its late-imperial phase. As history instructs us, two signs of an imperial power’s decline at this point in its story are blindness and deafness:  It gives up all capacity to see the world as it is and takes no interest in what those dwelling in it have to say. Clear sight and open ears are unbearable, for both bring news that history’s wheel is turning and an era of primacy is passing into the past.

This is where we are as 2014 ends. It is not, I add instantly, where we have to be, only where we happen to be, where we have been led and find ourselves as we look to the year ahead.

A few years ago the words “decline” and “declinist” were much in debate. A declinist was not something a good American was supposed to be. The obfuscating chatterers on the opinion pages and in the magazines could hold these terms up for criticism because there was — apparently, not evidently enough ground to stand on and dismiss the declinist’s point. Recall all this?

Now no one talks about decline, if you have not noticed — not because the triumphalists have won the argument but precisely because they have lost it. In the best American tradition, the topic falls away:  It grows ever more obvious now that our leaders have put themselves and us on the road to decline.

If I can impose on your time a few extra seconds, please read that last sentence carefully once again. Two things in it we need to talk about now:  “Our leaders,” as opposed to us, we the led. “Chosen,” said leaders having made choices and not simply accommodated the inevitable. To have a choice, by definition, means to have an alternative.

Many readers have questioned use of the term “we” in these columns over the past year. “Who is this ‘we’ doing this or that in Ukraine, Syria, across the Pacific or wherever?” they ask. They are right to do so, but only half right in refusing responsibility for America’s conduct abroad. 

It has long been true that this nation’s foreign policy cliques think and act — often the latter while skipping the former — independently of any electorate. But the sharpening of this contradiction is among the significant realities to come to the fore in 2014. We are back in the pre-crisis years of the Vietnam period, in my estimation. A lot goes on people do not like.

I am not a declinist, as noted often in this space. Neither are many readers, if the interactivity and the Twitter accounts are any guide. I see nothing of myself reflected in either the objectives or the execution of American policy, not anywhere on the planet. Possible exceptions include the administration’s opening to Cuba and its “skin in the game” response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

O.K., policy may be made by a sequestered elite and not in our image, but it is nonetheless our responsibility. The goals and strategy are shaped in our names. We pay for the drones. This is why all my “we’s” have to stand.

The column has instructed the columnist in too many ways to count this past year, mostly because of the place readers have generously given it in their conversation.  The thought has come home:  One of the very largest boulders in the way of a re-imagined place for Americans among others is the failure of the political system.

This failure is now complete. At present there is no avenue open to meaningful expression of popular preferences on the foreign policy side. The conclusion is obvious:  Better policy abroad requires better political arrangements at home. This is among our responsibilities, too.

To put this point another way, I see malign intent among the policy people, the military command and the national security “folks,” as Obama memorably referred to the NSA crowd when Edward Snowden was opening the lid on their Strangelovian doings. (Always be careful when this president uses the folksy “folks,” for he is usually trying to put something objectionable over on you. I loved “We tortured some folks.”)

That is at the top. Below I see an accumulating swell of opinion in search of a voice — a voice to insist that there are alternative ways for Americans to go at the 21st century. As noted a while ago, this column is less about policy per se than the broader topic of Americans among others. In this connection, more and more of us understand that there are choices before us and we can — incredible as the thought may seem — make the right ones, the constructive ones.

Step 1:   Recognize that these choices are there to be explored. Forget anyone touting TINA, the neoliberal mantra, “there is no alternative.”

Step 2:   Start on all the obvious things arising out of Step 1.

In my read, we are at work on Step 1. This is why I am not a declinist even as there is no mileage in denying the road to decline we now travel.

Error and failure among our leaders, a gathering resolve in the name of humane good sense among the led. This is among my 2014 recognitions. The exception here is Pope Francis. Rome has very oddly elected a Latin American social democrat to the chair of St. Peter, and in consequence a notable man has emerged among the world’s leaders.

In the late-imperial phase, I find, optimism and pessimism seem to change places. This, too, is a pronounced feature of our moment.

On one hand, you have elites and their messengers in the media who incessantly insist that the course is right and all we have to do is stay it. The task is not to renovate anything but to remain faithful to the cult of the founding fathers. We cannot risk change or lose our nerve, for without us the world would fall into chaos.

This is advertised as optimism but is profoundly pessimistic on the very face of it. The working assumption is that we must always act out of belief, for to venture into thought is beyond our capacities. We did our thinking in the eighteenth century.

So you get, from the euphemism creators — Is there an office in Washington that cranks these out? — things like Operation Inherent Resolve, the bombing campaign against ISIS. The moniker tells us only that the Pentagon is going to keep this stuff going no matter how counterproductive it is.

Think about it: These are the optimists. In this crowd it is always TINA. On consideration the optimists turn out to be a frightened lot — frightened mostly of change and anything new.

On the other hand, there are those who insist that we Americans can do better, far, far better, and that we are capable of re-imagining our place in the community of nations — to everyone else’s benefit but also our own. We should think this through, the line goes, as our predicament belongs to us, not anyone of a previous time. We understand the past and the old beliefs but are not history’s prisoners.

To think anew is a necessity given the vast transformations the world has entered upon — rising aspirations everywhere, new poles of power, the limits of violent resolution now obvious. If we do this it will look like decline only to those too wanting in spirit to understand that we are what we choose to make of ourselves.

Think again: These are the pessimists, gutless wretches one and all. These are the nattering nabobs of negativism, the hysterical hypochondriacs of history. (And I have dreamed for years of my chance to deploy the phrases Bill Safire put into the immortal Spiro Agnew’s mouth.)

During my days as a correspondent I learned to distinguish between strong nations and the merely powerful. A good social fabric and a clear idea of purpose and limits make a nation strong. Think, say, of the Finns or the Norwegians. Or the Koreans, maybe. Germany has aspects of strength. Strength is endogenous, arising from within.

Powerful nations rely on military budgets and economic leverage. The powerful tend not to respect limits and their purpose is often a blur. Attaining and then maintaining power will shred the social fabric. Power is exogenous, like a brittle shell.

Let’s see, then. Germany, again, is powerful in some respects. China is getting there. And you know where we are headed from here.

America’s single greatest vulnerability now is its overweening power. It is because of it that the nation goes blind and deaf.

The torn social fabric, a tragedy in itself, is directly related to the position the fear-ridden leadership insists on claiming abroad. If anyone can state clearly what this nation is doing in the world without indulging in hollowed-out mythology and Disneyesque fairly tales, do step forward. We all want to hear the plan.

When the superpower has to telephone allies to assure them it will not torture their citizens, when  it has to fend off prosecution in international courts for its criminal conduct, when it comes down to depending on everyone else’s fear of retribution to get things done, well, the superpower has reached a bad place.

Among the aspects of our time that continues to astonish is the speed with which events unfold. Maybe nothing that happened in the year now concluding is new — one of our calamities, indeed, is that we have done it all before — but the chaos American policy causes spreads ever more quickly. In the confrontation with Russia, for instance, we have come to the edge of real disaster in a matter of months: There could be war; sooner, there could be an economic crash.

Something else comes at us far faster than would have been guessed even a few years ago. This is the matter of lost opportunity. In its pursuit of chaos, America harms itself as well as others. We are losing out in the world as it now evolves. The example here, noted in previous columns, is the formation of new economic and diplomatic partnerships. South-South and East-East ties proliferate in part because Washington makes South-North and East-West ever less appealing.

It has proven impossible to write about foreign affairs this year without becoming something of a media critic. The logic here should be evident. Few would argue that the American press has performed well on the foreign side since the earliest days of the Cold War. But the deterioration of overseas coverage is something else that has accelerated markedly this year.

I see two reasons for this, and they meet at the horizon.

One, as the late-imperial leadership acts ever more desperately, the long- unhealthy closeness of media to power leaves the former holding the bag. I cannot imagine there are not correspondents feeling betrayed as they are charged with reproducing untenable accounts of events and with leaving so much of the story out.

It is bad out there in medialand, and this is perilous. One understands that journalists have families, mortgages, consumer desires and so on, but I have no sympathy for those tolerating the worst excesses and corruptions.

Two, media have emerged this year as an instrument of aggression. “The information age is actually a media age,” John Pilger, the noted English journalist, said in a remarkable speech delivered in London earlier this month. “We have war by media, censorship by media, demonology by media, retribution by media, diversion by media — a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”

Taking this to the specific, Pilger had this to say on the Ukraine crisis, which has done much to worsen the crisis in the media:

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe since World War II is blacked out. Washington’s secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.

Back in the 1960s, the late and great Herbert Marcuse described ours as “a society without opposition.” In such a society, as he put it, we find “a paralysis of criticism,” which is the fault of a very unprincipled press. “Under these conditions,” he wrote, “our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men.”

My buddy at Down With Tyranny fills us in on what's really been being done to us by the powers-that-pretend-not-to-be in-charge.

Guess Who's Watching The Hen House?

During the election, we talked a bit about how the CIA and other spy agencies worked hard to insert their own operatives into Congress as members, with the object of getting control over oversight of their own agencies. There were some successes (William Hurd in Texas) and some failures (Kevin Strouse and Bobby McKenzie) but electing Members of Congress isn't the only way the National Security State can keep control of their shit. This week, investigative journalist Lee Fang, writing for Republic Report, exposed another: high-paid lobbyists being hired by Intelligence shills to run the oversight committees. How about... Blackwater in charge?

After lobbyist-run SuperPACs and big money efforts dominated the last election, legislators are now appointing lobbyists to literally manage the day-to-day affairs of Congress. For the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees government intelligence operations and agencies, the changing of the guard means a lobbyist for Academi, the defense contractor formerly known as Blackwater, is now in charge.

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), the incoming chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the House reconvenes in January, announced that Jeff Shockey will be the new Staff Director of the committee. As a paid representative of Academi, Shockey and his firm have earned $80,000 this year peddling influence on behalf of Academi.

In previous years, the House Intelligence Committee has investigated Blackwater over secret contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. As Staff Director, the highest position on a committee for a staff member, Shockey will oversee the agencies that do business with his former employer.

Shockey also represents a number of other companies with business before defense agencies: General Dynamics, Koch Industries, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance, Innovative Defense Technologies and Boeing.

The role reversal, for lobbyists to take brief stints in Congress after an election, has become a normalized. In a previous investigation for "The Nation," we found that some corporate firms offer employment contracts with special bonuses for their staff to return to government jobs, ensuring the paycut they receive for passing through the revolving door to become public servants doesn’t have to alter their K Street lifestyle.

Other committees are also hiring lobbyists. Congessman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) replacement as chair of the Oversight Committee, just hired Podesta Group lobbyist Sean McLaughlin as his new Staff Director. McLaughlin’s client list includes the Business Roundtable, a trade association for corporate CEOs of large firms. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) also hired a new chief of staff, Mark Isakowitz, who represents BP.

Essential reading: the comment below on Shockley's background as a longtime crooked Beltway insider going back to when Jerry Lewis was the most corrupt man in Washington and Shockley was one of his top bagmen.

Comment:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said... 

Remember this?

Remember Jeffrey Shockey? He’s the former top aide to Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis, a powerhouse on the House Appropriations Committee. Shockey left the Hill in 1999 to become a lobbyist at a firm called Copeland, Lowery, where he specialized in winning money from Lewis’s committee. Taxpayers for Common Sense has traced at least $150 million in pork that Shockey won for clients of his firm, whose name partners include former California congressman Bill Lowery, another close friend of Lewis.

By 2004, Shockey was earning a cool $1.5 million salary as a lobbyist. The following year, he returned to the Hill to become Lewis’s deputy staff director at the Appropriations Committee. (Since that entailed a steep pay cut, Copeland Lowery cut Shockey a check for $2 million as a departure payment). Now Shockey is under scrutiny by federal investigators and, according to TPMMuckraker, seven of his former lobbying clients “have been served subpoenas in the federal investigation into the ties between Lewis and Lowery.”
----
The party of small government and fiscal responsibility, ho ho ho.~

I hope my baby girl is having a wonderful day.

Happy Birthday, sweetheart!

Victoria Nuland/Vietnam Perception Management? Contras Become Lone Rangers (Fear Rules For Too Long) Blackwater Back! (Robber Barons Fear the Rise of Populism? Surprised?) We’re Been Generating More Qualified Students Than Jobs for Years

European Central Bank's Chief Economist:  Beware the Rise of Populism


Russia Says Ukrainians Pay Blackwater for Training


Afghanistan:  Skulking Away from a Failed War

What a mockery the reality of war makes of the rhetoric that blesses it.

Ten Reasons Why the TPP Must Be Defeated

Sen. Bernie Sanders

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy.

The Victory of ‘Perception Management’

Special Report:  In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered “perception management” to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and accept more U.S. interventionism, but that propaganda structure continues to this day getting the public to buy into endless war, writes Robert Parry.

To understand how the American people find themselves trapped in today’s Orwellian dystopia of endless warfare against an ever-shifting collection of “evil” enemies, you have to think back to the Vietnam War and the shock to the ruling elite caused by an unprecedented popular uprising against that war.

While on the surface Official Washington pretended that the mass protests didn’t change policy, a panicky reality existed behind the scenes, a recognition that a major investment in domestic propaganda would be needed to ensure that future imperial adventures would have the public’s eager support or at least its confused acquiescence.

This commitment to what the insiders called “perception management” began in earnest with the Reagan administration in the 1980s but it would come to be the accepted practice of all subsequent administrations, including the present one of President Barack Obama.

In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others – depending on the U.S. government’s needs.

Thus, you have the current hysteria over Russia’s supposed “aggression” in Ukraine when the crisis was actually provoked by the West, including by U.S. neocons who helped create today’s humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine that they now cynically blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yet, many of these same U.S. foreign policy operatives – outraged over Russia’s limited intervention to protect ethic Russians in eastern Ukraine – are demanding that President Obama launch an air war against the Syrian military as a “humanitarian” intervention there.

In other words, if the Russians act to shield ethnic Russians on their border who are being bombarded by a coup regime in Kiev that was installed with U.S. support, the Russians are the villains blamed for the thousands of civilian deaths, even though the vast majority of the casualties have been inflicted by the Kiev regime from indiscriminate bombing and from dispatching neo-Nazi militias to do the street fighting.

In Ukraine, the exigent circumstances don’t matter, including the violent overthrow of the constitutionally elected president last February. It’s all about white hats for the current Kiev regime and black hats for the ethnic Russians and especially for Putin.

But an entirely different set of standards has applied to Syria where a U.S.-backed rebellion, which included violent Sunni jihadists from the start, wore the white hats and the relatively secular Syrian government, which has responded with excessive violence of its own, wears the black hats. But a problem to that neat dichotomy arose when one of the major Sunni rebel forces, the Islamic State, started seizing Iraqi territory and beheading Westerners.

Faced with those grisly scenes, President Obama authorized bombing the Islamic State forces in both Iraq and Syria, but neocons and other U.S. hardliners have been hectoring Obama to go after their preferred target, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, despite the risk that destroying the Syrian military could open the gates of Damascus to the Islamic State or al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

Lost on the Dark Side

You might think that the American public would begin to rebel against these messy entangling alliances with the 1984-like demonizing of one new “enemy” after another. Not only have these endless wars drained trillions of dollars from the U.S. taxpayers, they have led to the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops and to the tarnishing of America’s image from the attendant evils of war, including a lengthy detour into the “dark side” of torture, assassinations and “collateral” killings of children and other innocents.

But that is where the history of “perception management” comes in, the need to keep the American people compliant and confused. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration was determined to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome,” the revulsion that many Americans felt for warfare after all those years in the blood-soaked jungles of Vietnam and all the lies that clumsily justified the war.

So, the challenge for the U.S. government became:  how to present the actions of “enemies” always in the darkest light while bathing the behavior of the U.S. “side” in a rosy glow. You also had to stage this propaganda theater in an ostensibly “free country” with a supposedly “independent press.”

From documents declassified or leaked over the past several decades, including an unpublished draft chapter of the congressional Iran-Contra investigation, we now know a great deal about how this remarkable project was undertaken and who the key players were.

Perhaps not surprisingly much of the initiative came from the Central Intelligence Agency, which housed the expertise for manipulating target populations through propaganda and disinformation. The only difference this time would be that the American people would be the target population.

For this project, Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William J. Casey sent his top propaganda specialist Walter Raymond Jr. to the National Security Council staff to manage the inter-agency task forces that would brainstorm and coordinate this “public diplomacy” strategy.

Many of the old intelligence operatives, including Casey and Raymond, are now dead, but other influential Washington figures who were deeply involved by these strategies remain, such as neocon stalwart Robert Kagan, whose first major job in Washington was as chief of Reagan’s State Department Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America.

Now a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist at the "Washington Post," Kagan remains an expert in presenting foreign policy initiatives within the “good guy/bad guy” frames that he learned in the 1980s. He is also the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February amid a very effective U.S. propaganda strategy.

During the Reagan years, Kagan worked closely on propaganda schemes with Elliott Abrams, then the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. After getting convicted and then pardoned in the Iran-Contra scandal, Abrams reemerged on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council handling Middle East issues, including the Iraq War, and later “global democracy strategy.” Abrams is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

These and other neocons were among the most diligent students learning the art of “perception management” from the likes of Raymond and Casey, but those propaganda skills have spread much more widely as “public diplomacy” and “information warfare” have now become an integral part of every U.S. foreign policy initiative.

A Propaganda Bureaucracy

Declassified documents now reveal how extensive Reagan’s propaganda project became with inter-agency task forces assigned to develop “themes” that would push American “hot buttons.” Scores of documents came out during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 and hundreds more are now available at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California.

What the documents reveal is that at the start of the Reagan administration, CIA Director Casey faced a daunting challenge in trying to rally public opinion behind aggressive U.S. interventions, especially in Central America. Bitter memories of the Vietnam War were still fresh and many Americans were horrified at the brutality of right-wing regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, where Salvadoran soldiers raped and murdered four American churchwomen in December 1980.

The new leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua also was not viewed with much alarm. After all, Nicaragua was an impoverished country of only about three million people who had just cast off the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.

So, Reagan’s initial strategy of bolstering the Salvadoran and Guatemalan armies required defusing the negative publicity about them and somehow rallying the American people into supporting a covert CIA intervention inside Nicaragua via a counterrevolutionary force known as the Contras led by Somoza’s ex-National Guard officers.

Reagan’s task was made tougher by the fact that the Cold War’s anti-communist arguments had so recently been discredited in Vietnam. As deputy assistant secretary to the Air Force, J. Michael Kelly, put it, “the most critical special operations mission we have … is to persuade the American people that the communists are out to get us.”

At the same time, the White House worked to weed out American reporters who uncovered facts that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration attacked "New York Times" correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime’s massacre of about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as "The Wall Street Journal"’s editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job.

But these were largely ad hoc efforts. A more comprehensive “public diplomacy” operation took shape beginning in 1982 when Raymond, a 30-year veteran of CIA clandestine services, was transferred to the NSC.

A slight, soft-spoken New Yorker who reminded some of a character from a John le Carré spy novel, Raymond was an intelligence officer who “easily fades into the woodwork,” according to one acquaintance. But Raymond would become the sparkplug for this high-powered propaganda network, according to a draft chapter of the Iran-Contra report.

Though the draft chapter didn’t use Raymond’s name in its opening pages, apparently because some of the information came from classified depositions, Raymond’s name was used later in the chapter and the earlier citations matched Raymond’s known role. According to the draft report, the CIA officer who was recruited for the NSC job had served as Director of the Covert Action Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982 and was a “specialist in propaganda and disinformation.”

“The CIA official [Raymond] discussed the transfer with [CIA Director] Casey and NSC Advisor William Clark that he be assigned to the NSC as [Donald] Gregg’s successor [as coordinator of intelligence operations in June 1982] and received approval for his involvement in setting up the public diplomacy program along with his intelligence responsibilities,” the chapter said.

“In the early part of 1983, documents obtained by the Select [Iran-Contra] Committees indicate that the Director of the Intelligence Staff of the NSC [Raymond] successfully recommended the establishment of an inter-governmental network to promote and manage a public diplomacy plan designed to create support for Reagan Administration policies at home and abroad.”

During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for this propaganda structure, saying: “We were not configured effectively to deal with the war of ideas.”

One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade taxpayers’ money from being spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to pressure congressional representatives. Of course, every president and his team had vast resources to make their case in public, but by tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches, testimony and one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers.

But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC Advisor Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. “We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding,” Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan personally welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office for a private meeting, according to records on file at the Reagan library.)

As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim not only at foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan Contras.

At the time, the Contras were earning a gruesome reputation as human rights violators and terrorists. To change this negative perception of the Contras as well as of the U.S.-backed regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, the Reagan administration created a full-blown, clandestine propaganda network.

In January 1983, President Reagan took the first formal step to create this unprecedented peacetime propaganda bureaucracy by signing National Security Decision Directive 77, entitled “Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security.” Reagan deemed it “necessary to strengthen the organization, planning and coordination of the various aspects of public diplomacy of the United States Government.”

Reagan ordered the creation of a special planning group within the National Security Council to direct these “public diplomacy” campaigns. The planning group would be headed by the CIA’s Walter Raymond Jr. and one of its principal arms would be a new Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, housed at the State Department but under the control of the NSC.

CIA Taint

Worried about the legal prohibition barring the CIA from engaging in domestic propaganda, Raymond formally resigned from the CIA in April 1983, so, he said, “there would be no question whatsoever of any contamination of this.” But Raymond continued to act toward the U.S. public much like a CIA officer would in directing a propaganda operation in a hostile foreign country.

Raymond fretted, too, about the legality of Casey’s ongoing involvement. Raymond confided in one memo that it was important “to get [Casey] out of the loop,” but Casey never backed off and Raymond continued to send progress reports to his old boss well into 1986. It was “the kind of thing which [Casey] had a broad catholic interest in,” Raymond shrugged during his Iran-Contra deposition. He then offered the excuse that Casey undertook this apparently illegal interference in domestic politics “not so much in his CIA hat, but in his adviser to the president hat.”

As a result of Reagan’s decision directive, “an elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and governmental action,” the draft Iran-Contra chapter said. “This effort resulted in the creation of the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in the Department of State (S/LPD), headed by Otto Reich,” a right-wing Cuban exile from Miami.

Though Secretary of State George Shultz wanted the office under his control, President Reagan insisted that Reich “report directly to the NSC,” where Raymond oversaw the operations as a special assistant to the President and the NSC’s director of international communications, the chapter said.

“Reich relied heavily on Raymond to secure personnel transfers from other government agencies to beef up the limited resources made available to S/LPD by the Department of State,” the chapter said. “Personnel made available to the new office included intelligence specialists from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army. On one occasion, five intelligence experts from the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were assigned to work with Reich’s fast-growing operation.”

A “public diplomacy strategy paper,” dated May 5, 1983, summed up the administration’s problem. “As far as our Central American policy is concerned, the press perceives that:  the USG [U.S. government] is placing too much emphasis on a military solution, as well as being allied with inept, right-wing governments and groups. … The focus on Nicaragua [is] on the alleged U.S.-backed ‘covert’ war against the Sandinistas. Moreover, the opposition … is widely perceived as being led by former Somozistas.”

The administration’s difficulty with most of these press perceptions was that they were correct. But the strategy paper recommended ways to influence various groups of Americans to “correct” the impressions anyway, removing what another planning document called “perceptional obstacles.”

“Themes will obviously have to be tailored to the target audience,” the strategy paper said.

Casey’s Hand

As the Reagan administration struggled to manage public perceptions, CIA Director Casey kept his personal hand in the effort. On one muggy day in August 1983, Casey convened a meeting of Reagan administration officials and five leading ad executives at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House to come up with ideas for selling Reagan’s Central American policies to the American people..

Earlier that day, a national security aide had warmed the P.R. men to their task with dire predictions that leftist governments would send waves of refugees into the United States and cynically flood America with drugs. The P.R. executives jotted down some thoughts over lunch and then pitched their ideas to the CIA director in the afternoon as he sat hunched behind a desk taking notes.

“Casey was kind of spearheading a recommendation” for better public relations for Reagan’s Central America policies, recalled William I. Greener Jr., one of the ad men. Two top proposals arising from the meeting were for a high-powered communications operation inside the White House and private money for an outreach program to build support for U.S. intervention.

The results from the discussions were summed up in an Aug. 9, 1983, memo written by Raymond who described Casey’s participation in the meeting to brainstorm how “to sell a ‘new product’ – Central America – by generating interest across-the-spectrum.”

In the memo to then-U.S. Information Agency director Charles Wick, Raymond also noted that “via Murdock [sic] may be able to draw down added funds” to support pro-Reagan initiatives. Raymond’s reference to Rupert Murdoch possibly drawing down “added funds” suggests that the right-wing media mogul had been recruited to be part of the covert propaganda operation. During this period, Wick arranged at least two face-to-face meetings between Murdoch and Reagan.

In line with the clandestine nature of the operation, Raymond also suggested routing the “funding via Freedom House or some other structure that has credibility in the political center.” (Freedom House would later emerge as a principal beneficiary of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which was also created under the umbrella of Raymond’s operation.)

As the Reagan administration pushed the envelope on domestic propaganda, Raymond continued to worry about Casey’s involvement. In an Aug. 29, 1983, memo, Raymond recounted a call from Casey pushing his P.R. ideas. Alarmed at a CIA director participating so brazenly in domestic propaganda, Raymond wrote that “I philosophized a bit with Bill Casey (in an effort to get him out of the loop)” but with little success.

Meanwhile, Reich’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America (S/LPD) proved extremely effective in selecting “hot buttons” that would anger Americans about the Sandinistas. He also browbeat news correspondents who produced stories that conflicted with the administration’s “themes.” Reich’s basic M.O. was to dispatch his propaganda teams to lobby news executives to remove or punish out-of-step reporters – with a disturbing degree of success. Reich once bragged that his office “did not give the critics of the policy any quarter in the debate.”

Another part of the office’s job was to plant “white propaganda” in the news media through op-eds secretly financed by the government. In one memo, Jonathan Miller, a senior public diplomacy official, informed White House aide Patrick Buchanan about success placing an anti-Sandinista piece in "The Wall Street Journal"’s friendly pages. “Officially, this office had no role in its preparation,” Miller wrote.

Other times, the administration put out “black propaganda,” outright falsehoods. In 1983, one such theme was designed to anger American Jews by portraying the Sandinistas as anti-Semitic because much of Nicaragua’s small Jewish community fled after the revolution in 1979.

However, the U.S. embassy in Managua investigated the charges and “found no verifiable ground on which to accuse the GRN [the Sandinista government] of anti-Semitism,” according to a July 28, 1983, cable. But the administration kept the cable secret and pushed the “hot button” anyway.

Black Hats/White Hats

Repeatedly, Raymond lectured his subordinates on the chief goal of the operation:  “in the specific case of Nica[ragua], concentrate on gluing black hats on the Sandinistas and white hats on UNO [the Contras’ United Nicaraguan Opposition].” So Reagan’s speechwriters dutifully penned descriptions of Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” and the Contras as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”

As one NSC official told me, the campaign was modeled after CIA covert operations abroad where a political goal is more important than the truth. “They were trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion … using the tools of Walt Raymond’s trade craft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operation shop,” the official admitted.

Another administration official gave a similar description to "The Miami Herald"’s Alfonso Chardy. “If you look at it as a whole, the Office of Public Diplomacy was carrying out a huge psychological operation, the kind the military conduct to influence the population in denied or enemy territory,” that official explained. [For more details, see Parry’s Lost History.]

Another important figure in the pro-Contra propaganda was NSC staffer Oliver North, who spent a great deal of his time on the Nicaraguan public diplomacy operation even though he is better known for arranging secret arms shipments to the Contras and to Iran’s radical Islamic government, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.

The draft Iran-Contra chapter depicted a Byzantine network of contract and private operatives who handled details of the domestic propaganda while concealing the hand of the White House and the CIA. “Richard R. Miller, former head of public affairs at AID, and Francis D. Gomez, former public affairs specialist at the State Department and USIA, were hired by S/LPD through sole-source, no-bid contracts to carry out a variety of activities on behalf of the Reagan administration policies in Central America,” the chapter said.

“Supported by the State Department and White House, Miller and Gomez became the outside managers of [North operative] Spitz Channel’s fundraising and lobbying activities. They also served as the managers of Central American political figures, defectors, Nicaraguan opposition leaders and Sandinista atrocity victims who were made available to the press, the Congress and private groups, to tell the story of the Contra cause.”

Miller and Gomez facilitated transfers of money to Swiss and offshore banks at North’s direction, as they “became the key link between the State Department and the Reagan White House with the private groups and individuals engaged in a myriad of endeavors aimed at influencing the Congress, the media and public opinion,” the chapter said.

The Iran-Contra draft chapter also cited a March 10, 1985, memo from North describing his assistance to CIA Director Casey in timing disclosures of pro-Contra news “aimed at securing Congressional approval for renewed support to the Nicaraguan Resistance Forces.”

The chapter added: “Casey’s involvement in the public diplomacy effort apparently continued throughout the period under investigation by the Committees,” including a 1985 role in pressuring Congress to renew Contra aid and a 1986 hand in further shielding the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America from the oversight of Secretary Shultz.

A Raymond-authored memo to Casey in August 1986 described the shift of the S/LPD office – where Robert Kagan had replaced Reich – to the control of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, which was headed by Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams,who had tapped Kagan for the public diplomacy job.

Even after the Iran-Contra scandal unraveled in 1986-87 and Casey died of brain cancer on May 6, 1987, the Republicans fought to keep secret the remarkable story of the public diplomacy apparatus. As part of a deal to get three moderate Republican senators to join Democrats in signing the Iran-Contra majority report, Democratic leaders agreed to drop the draft chapter detailing the CIA’s domestic propaganda role (although a few references were included in the executive summary). But other Republicans, including Rep. Dick Cheney, still issued a minority report defending broad presidential powers in foreign affairs.

Thus, the American people were spared the chapter’s troubling conclusion:  that a secret propaganda apparatus had existed, run by “one of the CIA’s most senior specialists, sent to the NSC by Bill Casey, to create and coordinate an inter-agency public-diplomacy mechanism [which] did what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might do. [It] attempted to manipulate the media, the Congress and public opinion to support the Reagan administration’s policies.”

Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome

The ultimate success of Reagan’s propaganda strategy was affirmed during the tenure of his successor, George H.W. Bush, when Bush ordered a 100-hour ground war on Feb. 23, 1991, to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait, which had been invaded the previous August.

Though Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had long been signaling a readiness to withdraw – and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had negotiated a withdrawal arrangement that even had the blessings of top U.S. commanders in the field – President Bush insisted on pressing ahead with the ground attack.

Bush’s chief reason was that he – and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney – saw the assault against Iraq’s already decimated forces as an easy victory, one that would demonstrate America’s new military capacity for high-tech warfare and would cap the process begun a decade earlier to erase the Vietnam Syndrome from the minds of average Americans.

Those strategic aspects of Bush’s grand plan for a “new world order” began to emerge after the U.S.-led coalition started pummeling Iraq with air strikes in mid-January 1991. The bombings inflicted severe damage on Iraq’s military and civilian infrastructure and slaughtered a large number of non-combatants, including the incineration of some 400 women and children in a Baghdad bomb shelter on Feb. 13. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Recalling the Slaughter of Innocents.”]

The air war’s damage was so severe that some world leaders looked for a way to end the carnage and arrange Iraq’s departure from Kuwait. Even senior U.S. military field commanders, such as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, looked favorably on proposals for sparing lives.

But Bush was fixated on a ground war. Though secret from the American people at that time, Bush had long determined that a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait would not be allowed. Indeed, Bush was privately fearful that the Iraqis might capitulate before the United States could attack.

At the time, conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the few outsiders who described Bush’s obsession with exorcising the Vietnam Syndrome. On Feb. 25, 1991, they wrote that the Gorbachev initiative brokering Iraq’s surrender of Kuwait “stirred fears” among Bush’s advisers that the Vietnam Syndrome might survive the Gulf War.

“There was considerable relief, therefore, when the President … made clear he was having nothing to do with the deal that would enable Saddam Hussein to bring his troops out of Kuwait with flags flying,” Evans and Novak wrote. “Fear of a peace deal at the Bush White House had less to do with oil, Israel or Iraqi expansionism than with the bitter legacy of a lost war. ‘This is the chance to get rid of the Vietnam Syndrome,’ one senior aide told us.”

In the 1999 book, Shadow, author Bob Woodward confirmed that Bush was adamant about fighting a war, even as the White House pretended it would be satisfied with an unconditional Iraqi withdrawal. “We have to have a war,” Bush told his inner circle of Secretary of State James Baker, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Gen. Colin Powell, according to Woodward.

“Scowcroft was aware that this understanding could never be stated publicly or be permitted to leak out. An American president who declared the necessity of war would probably be thrown out of office. Americans were peacemakers, not warmongers,” Woodward wrote.

The Ground War

However, the “fear of a peace deal” resurfaced in the wake of the U.S.-led bombing campaign. Soviet diplomats met with Iraqi leaders who let it be known that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Kuwait unconditionally.

Learning of Gorbachev’s proposed settlement, Schwarzkopf also saw little reason for U.S. soldiers to die if the Iraqis were prepared to withdraw and leave their heavy weapons behind. There was also the prospect of chemical warfare that the Iraqis might use against advancing American troops. Schwarzkopf saw the possibility of heavy U.S. casualties.

But Gorbachev’s plan was running into trouble with President Bush and his political subordinates who wanted a ground war to crown the U.S. victory. Schwarzkopf reached out to Gen. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to make the case for peace with the President.

On Feb. 21, 1991, the two generals hammered out a cease-fire proposal for presentation to the NSC. The peace deal would give Iraqi forces one week to march out of Kuwait while leaving their armor and heavy equipment behind. Schwarzkopf thought he had Powell’s commitment to pitch the plan at the White House.

But Powell found himself caught in the middle. He wanted to please Bush while still representing the concerns of the field commanders. When Powell arrived at the White House late on the evening of Feb. 21, he found Bush angry about the Soviet peace initiative. Still, according to Woodward’s Shadow, Powell reiterated that he and Schwarzkopf “would rather see the Iraqis walk out than be driven out.”

In My American Journey, Powell expressed sympathy for Bush’s predicament. “The President’s problem was how to say no to Gorbachev without appearing to throw away a chance for peace,” Powell wrote. “I could hear the President’s growing distress in his voice. ‘I don’t want to take this deal,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to stiff Gorbachev, not after he’s come this far with us. We’ve got to find a way out’.”

Powell sought Bush’s attention. “I raised a finger,” Powell wrote. “The President turned to me. ‘Got something, Colin?’,” Bush asked. But Powell did not outline Schwarzkopf’s one-week cease-fire plan. Instead, Powell offered a different idea intended to make the ground offensive inevitable.

“We don’t stiff Gorbachev,” Powell explained. “Let’s put a deadline on Gorby’s proposal. We say, great idea, as long as they’re completely on their way out by, say, noon Saturday,” Feb. 23, less than two days away.

Powell understood that the two-day deadline would not give the Iraqis enough time to act, especially with their command-and-control systems severely damaged by the air war. The plan was a public-relations strategy to guarantee that the White House got its ground war. “If, as I suspect, they don’t move, then the flogging begins,” Powell told a gratified president.

The next day, at 10:30 a.m., a Friday, Bush announced his ultimatum. There would be a Saturday noon deadline for the Iraqi withdrawal, as Powell had recommended. Schwarzkopf and his field commanders in Saudi Arabia watched Bush on television and immediately grasped its meaning.

“We all knew by then which it would be,” Schwarzkopf wrote. “We were marching toward a Sunday morning attack.”

When the Iraqis predictably missed the deadline, American and allied forces launched the ground offensive at 0400 on Feb. 24, Persian Gulf time.

Though Iraqi forces were soon in full retreat, the allies pursued and slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the 100-hour war. U.S. casualties were light, 147 killed in combat and another 236 killed in accidents or from other causes. “Small losses as military statistics go,” wrote Powell, “but a tragedy for each family.”

On Feb. 28, the day the war ended, Bush celebrated the victory. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” the President exulted, speaking to a group at the White House. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

So as not to put a damper on the post-war happy feelings, the U.S. news media decided not to show many of the grisliest photos, such as charred Iraqi soldiers ghoulishly still seated in their burned-out trucks where they had been incinerated while trying to flee. By that point, U.S. journalists knew it wasn’t smart for their careers to present a reality that didn’t make the war look good.

Enduring Legacy

Though Reagan’s creation of a domestic propaganda bureaucracy began more than three decades ago – and Bush’s vanquishing of the Vietnam Syndrome was more than two decades ago – the legacy of those actions continue to reverberate today in how the perceptions of the American people are now routinely managed. That was true during last decade’s Iraq War and this decade’s conflicts in Libya, Syria and Ukraine as well as the economic sanctions against Iran and Russia.

Indeed, while the older generation that pioneered these domestic propaganda techniques has passed from the scene, many of their protégés are still around along with some of the same organizations. The National Endowment for Democracy, which was formed in 1983 at the urgingof CIA Director Casey and under the supervision of Walter Raymond’s NSC operation, is still run by the same neocon, Carl Gershman, and has an even bigger budget, now exceeding $100 million a year.

Gershman and his NED played important behind-the-scenes roles in instigating the Ukraine crisis by financing activists, journalists and other operatives who supported the coup against elected President Yanukovych. The NED-backed Freedom House also beat the propaganda drums. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Shadow Foreign Policy.”]

Two other Reagan-era veterans, Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan, have both provided important intellectual support for continuing U.S. interventionism around the world. Earlier this year, Kagan’s article for "The New Republic," entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” touched such a raw nerve with President Obama that he hosted Kagan at a White House lunch and crafted the presidential commencement speech at West Point to deflect some of Kagan’s criticism of Obama’s hesitancy to use military force.

A "New York Times" article about Kagan’s influence over Obama reported that Kagan’s wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, apparently had a hand in crafting the attack on her ostensible boss, President Obama.

According to the "Times" article, the husband-and-wife team share both a common world view and professional ambitions, Nuland editing Kagan’s articles and Kagan “not permitted to use any official information he overhears or picks up around the house” – a suggestion that Kagan’s thinking at least may be informed by foreign policy secrets passed on by his wife.

Though Nuland wouldn’t comment specifically on Kagan’s attack on President Obama, she indicated that she holds similar views. “But suffice to say,” Nuland said, “that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”

Misguided Media

In the three decades since Reagan’s propaganda machine was launched, the American press corps also has fallen more and more into line with an aggressive U.S. government’s foreign policy strategies. Those of us in the mainstream media who resisted the propaganda pressures mostly saw our careers suffer while those who played along moved steadily up the ranks into positions of more money and more status.

Even after the Iraq War debacle when nearly the entire mainstream media went with the pro-invasion flow, there was almost no accountability for that historic journalistic failure. Indeed, the neocon influence at major newspapers, such as the "Washington Post" and the "New York Times," only has solidified since.

Today’s coverage of the Syrian civil war or the Ukraine crisis is so firmly in line with the State Department’s propaganda “themes” that it would put smiles on the faces of William Casey and Walter Raymond if they were around today to see how seamlessly the “perception management” now works. There’s no need any more to send out “public diplomacy” teams to bully editors and news executives. Everyone is already onboard.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is bigger than ever, but his neocon messaging barely stands out as distinctive, given how the neocons also have gained control of the editorial and foreign-reporting sections of the "Washington Post," the "New York Times? and virtually every other major news outlet. For instance, the demonizing of Russian President Putin is now so total that no honest person could look at those articles and see anything approaching objective or evenhanded journalism. Yet, no one loses a job over this lack of professionalism.

The Reagan administration’s dreams of harnessing private foundations and non-governmental organizations have also come true. The Orwellian circle has been completed with many American “anti-war” groups advocating for “humanitarian” wars in Syria and other countries targeted by U.S. propaganda. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Selling ‘Peace Groups’ on US-Led Wars.”]

Much as Reagan’s “public diplomacy” apparatus once sent around “defectors” to lambaste Nicaragua’s Sandinistas by citing hyped-up human rights violations now the work is done by NGOs with barely perceptible threads back to the U.S. government. Just as Freedom House had “credibility” in the 1980s because of its earlier reputation as a human rights group, now other groups carrying the “human rights” tag, such as Human Rights Watch, are in the forefront of urging U.S. military interventions based on murky or propagandistic claims. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]

At this advanced stage of America’s quiet surrender to “perception management,” it is even hard to envision how one could retrace the many steps that would lead back to the concept of a democratic Republic based on an informed electorate. Many on the American Right remain entranced by the old propaganda theme about the “liberal media” and still embrace Reagan as their beloved icon.

Meanwhile, many liberals can’t break away from their own wistful trust in the New York Times and their empty hope that the media really is “liberal.”

To confront the hard truth is not easy. Indeed, in this case, it can cause despair because there are so few voices to trust and they are easily drowned out by floods of disinformation that can come from any angle – right, left or center. Yet, for the American democratic Republic to reset its goal toward an informed electorate, there is no option other than to build institutions that are determinedly committed to the truth.

More perception management?

Funny how they aren't managing the perceptions of the skilled American workers denied jobs by the importation of cheaper workers and exportation of the good jobs to cheaper-labor venues too well. Of course, it's not anywhere near as important as managing war perceptions.

The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage:  How Guest Workers Lower US Wages

By Hal Salzman, B. Lindsay Lowell and Daniel Kuehn  July 24, 2013

Paul Solman: A battle rages in economic policy circles: Should America make its borders more open to high-tech guest workers, or should we batten the hatches? Even those who oppose totally open immigration often support temporary guest worker visas, known as H-1B work visas, for high-tech.

But some oppose them, arguing that — as in other industries — workers from abroad undercut the wages of those domestic workers who would otherwise do the jobs here in America.

Today we present the case against high-tech guest workers from a trio of academic researchers associated with the Economic Policy Institute.

Hal Salzman is a professor at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development and the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. B. Lindsay Lowell is director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. Daniel Kuehn is an adjunct professor and doctoral candidate in American University’s department of economics.

Thursday, a former guest worker, now Silicon Valley guru, responds.

---

Salzman, Lowell and Kuehn: When Bill Clinton was president, wages for American IT workers were climbing and American students were clamoring to become computer scientists. Fifteen years later, average real IT wages are no higher. It is no coincidence that high-tech industries are now using guest workers to fill two-thirds of new IT jobs.

And now they’re asking Congress to provide them with an even greater supply of guest workers — a supply that by the IT industry’s own estimates would equal 150 percent of the expected number of new IT jobs each and every year going forward. With its passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill, the Senate has complied, putting out a sign for IT jobs that says, “We prefer guest workers.”

The IT industry and its many supporters argue that without this infusion of guest workers it will starve because of the scarcity of domestic native and foreign-born citizens with the right aptitude or interest. Researchers like us, who have the temerity to suggest that the evidence fails to justify importing ever more guest workers, are accused of being anti-immigrant, anti-capitalist, Luddites, or just plain troglodytes who can’t fathom the character of modern technology industries.

For those of us who simply want to get the policy right, however, this is a debate about America’s policies for creating good jobs, strong technology and an innovation-based economy. We welcome immigrants and support an immigration policy that draws the best and the brightest and provides opportunity to newcomers. But policy should not be about targeting government giveaways to a few industries by supplying ever more guest workers when there is an ample domestic supply of qualified graduates and workers.

We’re Already Generating More Qualified Students Than Jobs

Our analysis of the data finds that high-skill guest worker programs supply the preponderance of all new hires for the IT industry. The inflow of guest workers is equal to half of all IT hires each year and fully two-thirds of annual hires of workers younger than 30.

Can it be a coincidence that wages in IT jobs have been stagnant for over a decade? The chart below shows trends for programmer and system analyst jobs; wages for other IT occupations follow similar trends.

(Click on figure for enlargement.)

In the above graph of average salaries and unemployment rates for computer and IT occupations from 1992-2011, wages for IT workers have held steady over the past decade. This table is reproduced from “Guestworkers In The High-Skill U.S. Labor Market: An Analysis of Supply, Employment, and Wage Trends” (2013) by Salzman, Kuehn and Lowell.

At the same time, U.S. colleges are graduating more than twice as many science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates than the number of STEM openings generated by our economy each year. In short, there is little justification to support the escalating numbers of new guest workers called for in the Senate’s S744 legislation. Why then did it pass?

Today’s guest worker programs target an important industry with a substantial hold on the public’s imagination. But guest worker programs should be justified by national interests, not by the shortsighted interests of a particular industry. Proclaiming “shortages” where there is no evidence of them is not only disingenuous, it obscures the likely impact of large-scale guest worker programs, which stand to hurt all STEM grads, but especially minorities who are underrepresented in high-tech, as well as other foreign-born workers who compete most with newcomers. Can anyone argue that prioritizing access to good employment for high-skill domestic workers is not in the national interest?

(Click on figure for enlargement.)

The number of guest workers and STEM green card beneficiaries in the Senate’s legislation exceeds the number of new hires in the IT industry in 2011. Image courtesy of Economic Policy Institute.

Isn’t Ours a Market Economy?

Markets are supposed to reflect demand through the price mechanism. In the case of labor, the “price” is wages. How can it be, then, that if the IT industry is experiencing labor shortages, wage levels in this highly profitable industry are no higher than they were in the last millennium? How can an industry expect to attract the best workers without raising wages? Is there what economists call a “market failure” here?

Or is the hidden truth quite simply that large supplies of guest workers allow many firms to swap out higher-paid, high-skill domestic workers for lower-paid, high-skill guest workers? A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution observes that “it is likely that the extra supply of foreign-born workers does bring downward pressure on the wages of incumbent workers, as research suggests.”

All the evidence suggests the IT labor market is still bound by the usual dynamics of supply and demand. When we look at the trends of the past 20 years, we see that when wages increase, the number of computer science graduates increases. When wages fall, the number of graduates falls. When the supply of guest workers increases, wages stay flat, and too many domestic students must find employment in other fields.

Some commentators argue that this last result is good for the economy:  science and engineering skills are now being used in millions of non-STEM jobs. But an alternative view is that far too many domestic STEM graduates are in jobs that do not fully use their education, which represents a loss of our greatest source of innovators.

Yes, employers claim they have thousands of unfilled job openings, but the evidence is hardly compelling. Only about half of engineering graduates find engineering jobs, down from previous rates of about two-thirds before the current recession began in 2007. At the largest IT jobs website DICE.com, over half of the advertisements are for contract, short-term and part-time jobs — assuming these jobs exist at all. (A recent Making Sen$e story suggested they well may not.) But even if they are available, these are not the types of jobs that U.S. graduates will find attractive, nor are they the types of jobs that will allow these graduates to pay off student loans, much less enter the middle class.

Meanwhile studies by Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School and by Burt Barnow of George Washington University find a decrease in the intensity of firms’ recruitment efforts since the recession and an increase in pickiness about whom they are willing to hire. Again, the inference seems obvious:  the supply of potential workers is already plentiful relative to employer demand. So why are stories about the need for guest workers and the U.S. falling behind in the global high-tech talent search dominating the discussion?

H-1B guest workers are concentrated in computer programmer and system analyst jobs; in fact, they fill 85 percent of them. But most of these are commodity-like production jobs in IT services, doing back office programming for companies. A disproportionate number of H-1Bs provide onshore customer management for offshore programming teams. Ironically, without the visas, much of the programming work couldn’t have been offshored in the first place.

There may be highly innovative guest workers, but most are in jobs far away from the innovation frontier. The Economic Policy Institute’s Ron Hira found that few of the largest H-1B employers could be considered technology innovators, with most generating very low levels of patents. So an often-heard argument for a massive increase in guest workers — that we’ll snag a few key innovators for America — is in reality a high stakes lottery with few winners but, like most lotteries, many losers. Increasing the number of guest workers will not ensure that we admit, among the tens of thousands of guest workers, the few geniuses who could make a decisive contribution relative to American workers.

If Jobs Go Begging, Why Aren’t Computer Students Flocking to High-Tech?

Those on the front lines of IT now tell students that given the industry’s stagnant wages and unstable career tracks, better students should seek jobs elsewhere. An extensive survey of a recent college cohort by the National Center for Educational Statistics corroborates their advice. Only two-thirds of computer science graduates went into IT jobs in 2009. Of those not landing an IT job, half said they found a better job elsewhere. Fully one third reported there were no IT jobs available.

This was also the finding in our analysis of changes in the composition of STEM graduates going into STEM jobs over the past three decades. We found that although the overall supply remained strong, fewer of the highest performing students were going into STEM jobs.

As the lead author of a widely-cited study asserting the need for more STEM graduates, Tony Carnevale of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce said, “If you’re a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it’s crazy to go into STEM.” The best of these students flock to Wall Street and corporate law firms and the rest end up employed in non-STEM jobs which often pay less and underutilize their skills.

Many of the claims about IT worker shortages thus boil down to employer reports about the difficulties they face in hiring. Our fieldwork finds that reports of hiring difficulties often reflect unrealistic expectations and sometimes strategic posturing. Traditionally, during tight labor markets, such as before the dot.com crash, employers will hire good candidates who may not be “perfect,” but the firms will invest in training them.

However, the two recent studies of employer recruiting mentioned above find a decrease in recruitment intensity and little evidence of efforts to address unmet hiring needs. Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School concludes that employers have become willing to wait, hoping for the perfect candidate, believing that unemployment is high and there must be someone who will not require training. Because it is a slow economy, there is less urgency to fill positions quickly and a longer search time is possible.

In Summary

Currently, U.S. colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than find employment in those fields every year — about 200,000 more — while the IT industry fills about two-thirds of its entry-level positions with guest workers.

At the same time, IT wages have stagnated for over a decade. We cannot expect to build a strong STEM workforce and encourage domestic innovation by developing policies that undermine the quality of STEM jobs. Before asking government to intervene in labor markets by handing out more guest worker visas and green cards to STEM graduates, we should ask for audits of shortage claims and workforce impacts as a first step toward developing evidence-based policy on this issue, an issue critical to the nation’s future.

Asking domestic graduates, both native-born and immigrant, to compete with guest workers on wages is not a winning strategy for strengthening U.S. science, technology and innovation.

---

This entry is cross-posted on the Rundown — NewsHour’s blog of news and insight.