Fear the Reaper ... Drones

“The Tragedy of American Science – From Truman to Trump” by Clifford Connor, 2020 
This is a socialist take on the state of science in the U.S.  Conner is a science historian who describes the slow prostitution of science to corporate and military power since the end of WWII.  Anti-communists yap about Lysenko’s political rise way back in the 1930s USSR and for good reason.  They should look at their own conflicts of interest approach which encompasses universities, professors and university presidents, various scientists, captured government agencies, laws, research journals, corporate and private research labs, national science bodies, Astroturf consumer groups and Beltway think tanks.  The dictatorship of money & militarism has encroached in many scientific disciplines, creating bad science for profit.

The Corporate Science Complex

Conner wrote the “People’s History of Science.” Among other things, here he examines how toxic sugar became a ‘benign’ ingredient in so many processed foods, brought to us by modern ‘nutrition science’ and official diet guidelines.  Almost half of all U.S. adults have food-derived health problems – heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.  He takes apart the 'high tech' Green Revolution, which now bankrupts farmers and has privatized and commodified seed, feed, fertilizer and pesticides for agro-profits.  He looks at the science debate about sales-based GMOs and the precautionary principal of ‘do no harm’ – so much so that GMOs cannot be mentioned on a package.  He remembers the lies and ‘doubt industry’ around the medical safety of cigarettes, which is reminiscent of the present lies and pseudo-scientific ‘doubts’ sown by oil & gas companies about global warming.

Conner focuses on the sciency promotion and 'tests' of deadly opioids by Big Pharma to the tune of 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocondone pain pills sold over 6 years.  This is the kind of thing that allows the drug industry to have a 21% profit rate.  The industry also gets help from patent protections enforced by the government against generics, fraudulent research, made-up diseases and a focus on high profit remedies, not ones that will help many but bring in little cash.  The privatization of public research in drugs started in 1980 with the bi-partisan Bayh-Dole act.  This allowed universities to patent discoveries, which invited Big Pharma in the front door - blurring the lines between public and private and turning the universities and their scientists into profit-centers.  As part of this, pay to publish ‘science’ journals flooded the scientific community.

Conner reminds us of the toxic water issues in Flint, Washington D.C. and Newark, ignored by the CDC until there was a crisis.  62 million deaths a year world-wide can be attributed to water, air or soil pollution and the CDC pretended nothing in the U.S. was amiss.  He dissects the oil and gas industry, especially fracking’s earthquakes, water pollution and methane venting that are routinely ignored in official and industry studies.  The Kochtopus-funded denial industry is backed by political convenience, as even Obama bragged about building oil infrastructure and development.  Yet the dangerous nature of carbon production has been known by some U.S. scientists since 1977.  Conner tracks the ‘academic-industrial’ complex, which now features leading academic scientists getting grants from corporations and starting their own private companies, leading to huge conflicts of interest.  The university, following the lead of George Mason U, is now a ‘private-public partnership’ in lockstep with neo-liberal principles. Not to ignore the heavily propagandist ‘sciences’ at Universities like political ‘science’ or economic ‘science.’  Conner takes on the fake academics and intellectuals in Beltway ‘think tanks’ like the Brookings Institution, which pretend to authority while actually being captured by corporate money.  They are now basically corporate or military advocacy and lobbying groups.  The official media and government officials continue to believe they are ‘objective’ intellectuals, not partisan parsers.

These examples of corruption of science and thought bleed into the ignoring of good science on global warming, evolution, vaccines, a single biologic race, chastity’s efficiency, gay conversion therapy, abortion, marijuana, even simple things like mask wearing.  Economic and political forces profit from taking bogus irrational stances against real scientific facts.  They are helped by the prostitution of science to money and weapons, as well as the anti-scientific cultural atmosphere engendered by religion and politicians, especially in the GOP.

Dr. Strangelove - Curtis LeMay, Kissinger, Ed Teller, Von Braun

The Military-Industrial Complex Again

R&D for the military composes more than half of all money spent on R&D in the U.S. Military spending and R&D are not just a vile waste of scientific talent, it is also the world’s worst jobs program and a non-cyclic Keynesian economic pump essential to U.S. capitalism.  This is why this technology of death never produces a ‘peace dividend.’  Conner digs into the 1600 Nazi scientists recruited by the U.S. and laundered through “Operation Paperclip” (yes…) to head U.S. programs like rocketry, where former Nazi Werner Von Braun became the first head of NASA.  Other Nazis and some Japanese fascists led U.S. programs in chemical and biologic warfare, in torture, while doing other military ‘medical’ experiments. Many of these scientists had ties to fascist slave labor or death experiments in WWII.  This was only exposed years later.

Conner looks at the U.S. “Atoms For Peace” program which is intimately tied to nuclear arms escalation and proliferation - they are not two separate things. Nuclear energy is not clean, not profitable without government support and not cheap if you take into account the radiation dangers, as proved at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the build-up of nuclear waste across the U.S. Conner reminds us of how the RAND Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) shaped much of U.S. science.  RAND’s criminal tactics advocated dropping 7.662 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, as well as torture and assassination.  As part of RAND’s game theory, John Nash’s ‘beautiful mind’ created a zero-sum game for RAND that privileged betrayal and misanthropy. Conner even gets in a dig at RAND’s ‘mathematical idolatry’ that replaced verified experimental results.  This point relates to the issue of mainstream cosmology’s almost exclusive reliance on math as well.

Military science has produced Reaper drones, ICBMs, cluster and anti-personnel munitions, napalm, neutron bombs,Cruise and Tomahawk missiles, ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, fake smart bombs and intergalactic Star Wars / Space Force plans.  It has unleashed the Stuxnet worm virus and is leading to Terminator-like ‘super soldiers’ with exo-skeletons, brain microchips, combat drugs and a Skynet of technological artificial intelligence powered by high-speed quantum computers.  Micro-assassin ‘fly-bots’ are in the works designed as if they were tiny flies, to kill or explode a target.  Facial recognition and a matrix of satellites make it possible.  CIA psychologists collaborate with torture in Guantanamo and other black sites, while other celebrated scientists design ‘no touch’ torture.  Not to mention the CIA’s MKUltra program experiments, which were notorious for their failure and violence.  All brought to you by corrupted scientists paid the big bucks.

Conner ends with a section on socialist solutions to the perversions of science, including full public funding and control of key research; regulations with teeth of private research; and the elimination of the military-industrial complex.  He also advocates nationalization of many basic industries like pharma, health care, fossil fuels, banking and insurance.  The basic question in a capitalist society becomes “Should science be ‘for the people’ or for corporate profits and the military?”  The answer is already in…in this detailed book.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Peoples’ History of Science”(Conner); “McMindfulness,” “Big Bang,” “Pandemic”(Zizek); “Lost Connections,” “The Happiness Industry,” “The 5^th Risk”(Lewis); “A Redder Shade of Green – Intersections of Science and Socialism,” “Collapse,” “Astrology,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “New Dark Age,” “There is Only One Race,” “The Marijuana Manifesto”(Ventura); “Bit Tyrants,” “Civilization Critical,” “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 24, 2020