Corporate control of public sphere

Several emails from John detailed how the training used a classroom setting with a pretext of “teaching” and fostering “discussions” as a way to impart heavy-handed distortions about topics ranging from counterinsurgency, history, anthropological research methods and norms of ethical anthropological practice. 

John wrote that one of the training instructors, a Ph.D. anthropologist who worked mostly with statistical sociological methods as a public relations consultant teaching the class in “Ethnographic Field Methods” – that never touched on the central methods of ethnography – dismissed the ethical complication of HTS ethnography telling the class that, "Consent is implied by the continued participation" of the ‘informant’, and also, by those who join in the discussion without an invitation.”   Not only is this a predatory standard of consent, but it runs counter to the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and US federal research consent guidelines. 

“Though they want to have an anthropologist be the HTT Social Scientist, they are happy to get anyone with what could be remotely considered an ‘advanced’ degree in a social science.  So, although we have five anthropologists, we also have several historians, an economist, an industrial psychologist, etc; and only one for the Iraq group and one (me) for the Afghanistan group has any previous experience in the region of their destination.”

Historians and industrial psychologists often approach the people they study as “objects,” or in ways that are more distant, or are fundamentally different than anthropologists.

“Clearly [HTS] does not give its participants [the] luxury [to] consider whether the orders they comply with consider the ethical obligations to those they interview in the presence of their armed Team Leaders; some of whom have a deep dislike for "the enemy" which includes most Muslims.  And this is why they are hiring economists, historians and others as "social scientists" who, initially, were intended to be cultural anthropologists.”

One choice for the military facing this problem would be to halt a program that necessitates engaging in ethically problematic behaviors; the other choice for the military could be to start training their own “ethnographers” and “anthropologists,” with a different standard of ethical behavior.  According to John Allison, the military appears interested in the second of these two choices; in early December he wrote me that he concluded, “that the military is beginning to do an end run by producing its own anthropologists/social scientist PhDs at West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy and other cooperating institutions; thus marginalizing the criticism.”

t fits with larger institutional moves in which the military (through programs like the Minerva Program, the Intelligence Community Scholars Program and the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program) is trying to bend independent scholarship in ways that will recruit scholars ready  to will tell them what they want to hear or what they already believe.

The counterinsurgency dream is to understand and control the other by shifting COG from the external shooting and threatening with harm by the military, to other means of cooption and control.   The key is that the military still seeks to control local populations, not through hard power, but through soft power.  The problem is found in what one means by ‘become positive’ in your sentence reading ‘the intent toward the Afghan people needs to become positive, not that of forceful occupiers.’  

But even as John was working to keep his hopes for Human Terrain Systems alive, he – who had worked for five years as the Tribal Anthropologist for the Klamath Tribes – was engaging in some serious internal arguments with HTS personnel in which he openly compared the outcomes of HTS enterprises to other disastrous American campaigns.  John wrote to HTS training personnel that this, “is not so different from what the European-Americans did to the Native Americans in the USA.  Now, several generations later, the stories are passed on and are deep in the collective consciousness of those Indian peoples and colors their way of seeing the European-Americans today, having its effect on how they view "government programs", attempts to change their view of work, alcohol & drugs, etc.”

Insofar as Human Terrain seeks to connect hearts and minds, it is doomed to fail for all the dynamics played out in the above training scenario: the voice of anthropological knowledge and moderation was plowed under by the dominant military approach.  If such failures were the rule in the classroom, there is no chance these views could hold sway in the battlefield.

John and a second anthropologist dissenter regularly raised questions about ethical and political issues related to HTS’s mission in class.  In the beginning this was welcomed as normal classroom discourse.  With time these dissenters became increasingly marginalized within the cohort.  Two months into the program John wrote me that the program was, “getting tighter on those who don't buy into the military's version of what HTT should do.  Now, it is becoming highly pressured to begin private lessons with firearms; and the image is that we will actually be soldiers who also do a little intel work as prescribed by the commander.

The notion that you are all ‘taking the seat of a soldier’ on a mission where you may have to kill those you are trying to defeat with soft power is just another way of establishing how HTS social scientists are soldiers.  I can only imagine how nasty the subtle and not so subtle group dynamics with all this can get.”

The class was then told that the mission they were training to support was one in which the military was establishing order in a setting where environmentalist-separatists had taken over.  John explained that in this hypothetical training scenario,

HTT is assigned to produce a ‘Research Plan’ to understand the situation at the IATAN power plant – people’s concerns, desires, etc., and identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.

I began to think back on stories that circulated among the ant-war movement in the 1960s-70s, about concentration camps being developed just for imprisoning such protestors an “problem-causers”. And I wondered who would be working on the Human Terrain Teams to enable the US military’s actions against unruly segments of their own countrymen; perhaps Afghan and Iraqi anthropologists who had specialized in US ethnography?”

After beginning training in the HTS program, I was shocked when I first mentioned that this was my purpose and one of my classmates expressed contempt for that motive and said that he was only there because he didn’t want to see one more US soldier’s life lost; didn’t want to have to take the US flag to the door of an US mother and tell her that her son was killed. And, when I asked about Afghan mothers whose sons were killed by US errors of judgment causing “collateral damage” in their kinetic warfare, he responded that he didn’t ‘… give a fuck about those people. I would just drive through their village in my Humvee and throw money at those mothers.’ This was a Colonel who is a doctoral candidate in a military history program at a military-funded university; a Team Leader. Although this man was more out-spoken than most of his military colleagues, my impression now is that he expressed what almost all of them think and feel.

My experience in the program included both instruction in such things as military culture, military language, military decision-making process, Counter-Insurgency doctrine, and many other topics intended to socialize the trainees into the world as seen by the military.

In addition there were a couple weeks of ‘Introduction to Anthropology’ and three weeks of ‘Ethnographic Method’. The Introduction to Anthropology was cursory and quick. Some important terms were introduced – e.g. ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ – but not taken to enough depth in examples to drive home the deeper implications. Holt, who served on an HTT in Afghanistan and wants to return, is a cultural materialist, and limited his perspective to mostly the etic. He was the dominant voice.  He soon transitioned into a scenario in which he assigned the several class teams to provide a 5-slide PowerPoint presentation (with a maximum of 5 bullet ‘points’ on each slide) to the Commander to advise him on what to do when he has troops on the ground in a village area that he has heard is ‘hostile’, based on HTT research. Of the seven teams, only one dared to suggest that the commander should wait until the HTT had done further field research before launching the assault. This was clearly the Stockholm effect of the Team Leader and others forming the behavior of the Social Scientist.

Until the Center of Gravity of the brains of the US military’s ‘boots on the ground’ is moved to understand the value of a cultural anthropologist’s in-depth research to really helping the US military and civilian assistance to enable a nation such as Afghanistan to achieve self-determined stability and sovereignty, the money spent on HTS will be greatly a waste of US taxpayer money. This includes the need for the military as well as the US Department of State to understand the reasons behind the ethical concerns of anthropologists regarding this program.”

Sycophancy is built into the structure of philanthropy: grantees shape their work to please their benefactors; they are perpetual supplicants for future funding.

For a dozen years, big philanthropy has been funding a massive crusade to remake public education for low-income and minority children in the image of the private sector. If schools were run like businesses competing in the market—so the argument goes—the achievement gap that separates poor and minority students from middle-class and affluent students would disappear. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have taken the lead, but other mega-foundations have joined in to underwrite the self-proclaimed “education reform movement.” Some of them are the Laura and John Arnold, Anschutz, Annie E. Casey, Michael and Susan Dell, William and Flora Hewlett, and Joyce foundations.

Most critiques of big philanthropy’s current role in public education focus on the poor quality of the reforms and their negative effects on schooling—on who controls schools, how classroom time is spent, how learning is measured, and how teachers and principals are evaluated. The harsh criticism is justified. But to examine the effect of big philanthropy’s ed-reform work on democracy and civil society requires a different focus.

In 2009 the Gates Foundation funded the creation of a nonprofit organization to stir up grassroots support for the foundation’s teacher effectiveness reforms. The reforms used students’ scores on standardized tests to evaluate teachers and award bonuses, abolished tenure, and ended seniority as a criterion for salary increases, layoffs, and transfers. Gates paid a philanthropy service group called Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) $3.5 million to set up the new nonprofit. Its staff would target four “sites”—Pittsburgh, Memphis, Hillsborough County (Tampa, Florida), and a consortium of Los Angeles charter schools—where Gates was about to invest $335 million to try out its reforms. RPA’s confidential proposal, which was leaked to the media in 2011, described a potential pitfall for “Teaching First” (the nonprofit’s provisional name):

Big philanthropy’s role in the trigger law began with Green Dot, a charter school company with funding from Gates, Broad, Walton, Annenberg, Wasserman, and other foundations (for a detailed account of events, see Gary Cohn’s excellent exposé, “Public Schools, Private Agendas: Parent Revolution,”

Despite its obviously political agenda, ALEC is a tax-exempt nonprofit. The Gates Foundation gave the group a $376,635 grant in 2011 “to educate and engage its members on efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.” After several exposés of ALEC’s work prompted some corporate members to resign, the Gates Foundation announced in 2012 that it would finish out its grant to ALEC but not undertake future funding (Roll Call, April 9, 2012).

Private foundations have used another tactic to exert influence on the Los Angeles Unified School District: they paid the salaries of more than a dozen senior staffers. According to the Los Angeles Times (December 16, 2009), the privately financed “public” employees worked on such ed-reform projects as new systems to evaluate teachers and collect immense amounts of data on students.

Big philanthropy is overdue for reform. The goal should be to reduce its leverage in civil society and public policymaking while increasing government revenue.

Meanwhile, the public needs more critical, in-depth information. The mainstream media are, for the most part, failing miserably in their watchdog duties. They give big philanthropy excessive deference and little scrutiny. Public television and radio live on big philanthropy’s largess. Collaborative programming with mega-foundations has undermined the credibility of major for-profit news organizations as well as public media, especially on health and education issues.

Early twentieth-century skeptics were rightly suspicious of plutocrats deciding how to improve the human condition and then paying to translate their notions into public policy. Now it’s time for a new progressive era—complete with muckrakers and trust-busters to cast a critical eye on big philanthropy.