Quintet
By Judge Mark J. Plawecki
“The President does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
—Harvard Law Grad and Constitutional Law Professor Barack Obama, 2007
Two decades after the University of Michigan’s Fab Five hoopsters began their arresting run at winning nothing, and one since the U.S. Supreme Court’s version (starring one Yale, one Stanford, and three Harvard educated jurists) appointed as president the loser of the 2000 election, the national wreckage from one of these two heralded quintets has clearly emerged. It is therefore time to pay homage to the last and most celebrated pillar of a different pentagonal entity—The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Academic Complex (MICMAC): American Academia.
Though my siblings’ beloved U-M, along with Condor’s own MSU, are part of the Financial 50—the fifty universities with endowments of at least $1 billion—our two state Public Ivies pale in alumni power and influence compared to the central Fab Five of this piece: Harvard (with a $27.6 billion endowment), Yale ($16.7), Princeton ($14.4), Stanford ($13.7), and MIT ($8.3). MIT at first glance appears to be Phillip Tattaglia to Harvard’s Vito Corleone, but the science-centered institution can boast of being No. 1 in Department of Defense awarded research, to the tune of more than $600 million annually.
MIT is hardly alone. More than 350 civilian colleges and universities, conduct Pentagon-funded research. Financial 50’s Harvard, Columbia, Cal-Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins each receive in excess of $100 million every NCAA basketball season. In fact, the DOD is third in overall funding to U.S. civilian universities, behind only the National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation. And in this era of dwindling budget revenues, the Pentagon’s clout allows it to dictate just what type of research it wants done. So much for the idea of independent higher education.
Of course, this does not even factor in the more than 150 exclusively military schools now funded by Joey and Josie Taxpayer. The National War College, School for National Security Executive Education, Defense Acquisition University, and Marine Corps University may not yet be recruiting quarterbacks from Brother Rice like brethren Army, Navy, and Air Force. However, with “only” 778 college football games televised in 2011, many with military sponsorship, there’s an obvious growth market in competing for fans’ attention spans.
Returning to those schools most richly endowed, what is their true purpose? “To perpetuate their own,” argues (Harvard-educated) journalist Chris Hedges. These institutions do a superb job turning out competent systems managers, the main system’s components being that 1) The Market is self-regulating, and 2) the U.S. must police the world, for the good of all. Questioning the system itself is never an option. Questioning its components leaves one a pariah, an outsider, a Ralph Nader. Question the system and one becomes, in the MICMAC structure, a nonperson.
Superb examples of MICMAC’s self-sustenance can be offered by two additional Fab Fives. The previous administration gave us, in (perhaps) reverse seeding importance:
5. Condi Rice (Stanford Professor), the National Security Advisor who testified she forgot, then ignored, repeated urgent warnings from underlings about Al Qaeda’s threat inside the U.S. in Summer 2001. She was later made Secretary of State.
4. Chris Cox (Harvard MBA, JD), the SEC head who allowed investment banks in 2004 to go from traditional 10-1 leverage lending to a calamitous 30-1 because, well, the chief of Goldman Sachs asked him to.
3. Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton), the Secretary of Defense genius who, inspired by Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics theories, privatized the Pentagon so that we may now pay $1 million per soldier, per year, in Afghanistan, mainly to multinational corporations who avoid paying U.S. taxes.
2. Henry Paulsen, (Dartmouth), the Treasury Secretary who first denied, then be(Elmer)fuddledly presided over the U.S. Megabank collapse four years after asking Cox for 30-1 leverage—Yes, folks, it was Hanky who was the Goldman Sachs’ CEO referred to above.
1. George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard MBA), who was described by his first Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill at cabinet meetings as “The blind man in a room of deaf ears,” arguably the most accurate accounting offered in American political annals.
The current one, apparently attempting to do the previously unthinkable—outdo the Bush Team in cluelessness—bequeaths us:
5. Lawrence Summers (Harvard, MIT), the Clinton administration’s champion of derivatives’ nonregulation and repeal of Glass-Steagall who, for his lack of common sense, was recycled by Obama and named National Economic Council Director.
4. Timothy Geithner (Dartmouth), New York Federal Reserve head who steered $62 billion to reckless banks to save even more reckless insurer AIG from its huge losses, then told AIG to “keep quiet” about the taxpayer gift in SEC filings. As punishment, Obama named him Treasury Secretary.
3. Ben Bernanke (Harvard, MIT), hapless Federal Reserve Chairman appointed by Bush, but reappointed by Obama after proving to the world that Wall Street looters must be rewarded at the expense of forgiving taxpayers.
2. Hillary Clinton (Yale JD), the defacto President for Foreign Policy, who finds no bad brutal dictator too unimportant for us to attack, and no good brutal dictator (good defined as “one who does what we want”) too offensive to defend.
1. Barack Obama (Harvard JD), who, in perhaps our most surreal political moment yet, briefly interrupted his NCAA bracket picks to announce his unconstitutional bombing of Libya. He did, to be fair, quickly return to hoops analysis, reassuring all the priorities of his first term.
Hedges ominously warned, in early 2009, not to expect the power elites to save us. “They don’t know how. They don’t even know how to ask the questions.”
And as the Fab Five Supremes, Universities, Bushies, Obamaites, and MICMAC itself demonstrate, the power elite do not even adhere to laws like the rest of us do. Because of these factors, they’ve given the foes of the American Republic a sizeable lead, and it is probably late in the fourth quarter. We the People can only hope to somehow rally and, when a needed time out is called, pray we, unlike Chris Webber, actually have one left.
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Mark J. Plawecki is a District Court Judge in Dearborn Heights. Confessions of a Condor offers a dissenting opinion on the current American status quo.
