Universities For Sale

This is Richard R.J. Eskow for the Zero Hour, continuing our readings series, where I read something from a book, usually a classic book, but not always, and then talk about it a little bit. And in this case, what I would love to talk about is a paragraph or so. from John Kenneth Galbraith's influential, extremely influential, 1958 book, The Affluent Society, Galbraith, of course, a prominent economist as well as a leading popularizer of ideas, writer and thinker, John Kenneth Galbraith, a great force at that period in history. The 1950s was perceived at least by white elites as a period of great prosperity and it was John Kenneth Galbraith who either invented or popularized the term the conventional wisdom which was in one of the chapter titles of this book and this reading that I wanted to give you today comes from John Kenneth Galbraith's section on the conventional wisdom. And here's what he says, and I think it's very germane to the democratic debates. It's very germane to election years, but it's also very germane to our politics in general. But let me read it, and we'll see if you agree with me or not. I'll start now. Quote, just as truth, just as truth ultimately serves to create a consensus, so in the short run does acceptability. Ideas come to be organized around what the community as a whole or particular audiences find acceptable. Now, I could stop right here. In fact, I just did and talk a little bit about what this means. So, for example, it's acceptable in some circles to say things about what the Russians did or didn't do to interfere with the 2016 election that might or might not be true. Democrats appear to be much more devoted to the truth than Republicans who have widely embraced falsehoods and fake news. But there's a pretty healthy element of fake news that gets around or false stories that gets circulated. among liberals. And sometimes people even know they might not be true, but they've become acceptable. And from acceptable, they turn into conventional wisdom, conventional wisdom that anybody you disagree with because they're further left is Vladimir Putin's puppet or whatever. So really, this idea of acceptability can bring in some extreme ideas. And if you're upset that, I picked an example from the left, well, I kind of did that deliberately because we need to look at ourselves to understand how these engines of thought can...

form at E-Works. Okay, let me go on. Ideas come to be organized around what the community as a whole or particular audiences find acceptable. And as the laboratory worker devotes himself to discovering scientific verities, so the ghostwriter and the public relations man concern themselves with identifying the acceptable. In other words, you manipulate public and media. opinion by praying on what people already think is true and what people are comfortable thinking is true. That's important too. If their clients are rewarded with applause, these artisans are deemed qualified in their craft. If not, they have failed. Well, to use my example, MSNBC's ratings have gone way up, so it's working. And of course, Donald Trump is president, so the more extreme you get, apparently, the better it works under some conditions. Quote, by sampling audience reaction in it. in advance or by pre-testing speeches, articles and other communications. The risk of failure can now be greatly minimized. Now that was, of course, a big news story in the 1950s. Now, it seems the power of the focus group isn't quite what it was, but it was then. Quote, numerous factors contribute to the acceptability of ideas. To a very large extent, of course, we associate... truth with convenience with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life that also fits the 2016 narrative right because it allows some people to not think about things that make them uncomfortable what they might have done wrong their assumptions about what constitutes an electable candidate or a good agenda, and so on. Quote, we also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem. Ibid, as they say, see above, certainly protects self-esteem in this case. And he goes on to say, speakers before the United States Chamber of Commerce rarely does denigrate the businessman as an economic force. those who appear before the AFL-CIO, like trade union movements, etc. And he says, quote, but perhaps most important of all, people approve most of what they best understand. In other words, don't challenge people with new information if you want to persuade them. And I guess I'll conclude with this comment that that's what it's incumbent on the rest of us to do. We need to move society forward. That means giving people new information. but figuring out how to make them comfortable with it, how to make them accept it, embrace it, how to help everyone become fellow marchers on the road to progress. So again, the reading was John Kenneth Galbraith, the Affluent Society. Thanks for listening.

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the Weak Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Thank you. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the program. In the last hour, I talked a lot about AI and about apocalypse. But if the apocalypse were coming, would we even know it? The entire news media ecosystem or ecosystem is being captured by a handful of billionaires. In fact, it may be... on the verge of being captured by one billionaire family, the family of ultra right-wing fanatic Larry Ellison and his progeny. Of course, the Ellison family acquired CBS News with embarrassing, hilariously, if you can see the dark humor of it, hilariously embarrassing results for the CBS Newsroom. Otherwise, shameful and disgraceful for any nation that proclaims itself a democracy to have such an undemocratic control, tight-fisted control over news. But it's become a sort of... Pravda of the Epstein class now. And it's not ending there because we now learn that the challenge of and race to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, which was down to Netflix and the Ellison crime family, is. appears to be over. Netflix is backed out. Looks like the Ellisons will acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, which among other things includes CNN. So that would mean that CBS News and CNN would now be in control of these fanatical right-wing ideologues. So if we're racing toward apocalypse with AI-driven nuclear weapons or anything else, Better look out for other ways to hear about it. We'll be right back.

Hello, everybody. This is Richard R.J. Eskow from the Zero Hour. You know, there are a lot of myths out there about Social Security, and they're out there for a reason to make you think it's a good idea to slash the benefits you've already earned. Here's the truth. Social Security has its own special source of revenue. Politicians who say it's driving up the deficit are lying. Social Security can't drive up the deficit because it doesn't contribute to the deficit. In fact, it's forbidden by law from contributing to the overall deficit, and it's currently holding more than $2.7 trillion in surplus. That's hardly a deficit. Learn more about Social Security and how you can help expand this vital program at social security works.org.

And we're back on the zero hour. I, as always, in your host, Richard R.J. Eskowen, as always, I'm delighted to be talking with my good friend, Professor Richard Wolfe, about news stories and other forces at work in our world that are not always equally delightful. But with that, Richard Wolfe, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much, Richard. I'm very glad to be here. Well, we've been talking, we both have been thinking independently and now together about our university system in the United States of America and the outsized role that billionaires play in the university system. I know as a longtime professor and as an economist, this has been something on your mind for quite a long time. From my perspective, it's also been on my mind, particularly, I would say going back to. I was involved in the campaign to obtain a free higher education, public higher education in this country, as well as to cancel student debt for those who need it. And first of all, just as background on that, before we bring it up to date, a reminder that the largest university endowments. the top 10 largest university endowments, for that matter, in the United States, Harvard University, 53 billion, University of Texas system, 41 billion, Yale, 40 billion, Stanford University, Stanford 36 billion, and so on. If I take all of these, you know, eyeballing it, it comes out to about 200, 300 billion, take or leave it, of which, if we assume, and it's... It's not necessarily a valid assumption, but if we assume this income just in terms of federal taxes, we're taxed at the highest marginal tax rate, that's more than $100 billion that the American government, the American people have spent to subsidize in tax breaks, to subsidize billionaire contributions to major universities for which they get gymnasiums or science buildings named after themselves and for which they also get an outsized influence on the curriculum and even on free speech, as we saw during the first year of the Gaza genocide when billionaires like Bill Ackman used their influence to force brutal suppression of anti-genocides. speech on campus and so on. And now it's back in the news because Jeffrey Epstein, the Epstein scandal continues to spread. And one of the people who cozied up to Epstein, even after his conviction, his first conviction, was the president of Bard College, Leon Boste. And that scandal does not appear to be going away. In fact, I see a headline from just the other day, Epstein leveraged relationship with Botstein to draw on multiple women, describes how an Eastern European musician and her sister were brought in or enticed with to come to Epstein's wherever he was because of their, his relationship with the president of Bard, who also is a musician himself, and they were both later allegedly.

victimized. BART is now hiring a top law firm to investigate links between Botstein, its president, and Epstein. They've canceled a major gala, which I believe it was $250,000 at table. They don't do that unless things are looking bad. And these two stories intersect for me, not only because in a sense, in deferred tax, in tax breaks, rather, you know, the public is on the hope for this, but because it gives Bad people, I would say. Many of these people, I would just simply characterize as not good people. Enormous access and influence over academia and Epstein may be the worst of the worst, but that was common knowledge while he continued to enjoy this close relationship with Leon Botstein. Now, from your perspective, what's your take on all of this? Well, I want to begin by noting that While I'm no expert on Epstein, I do know that he gave money to Harvard and MIT and quite a few other universities. It seems to have been part of a campaign to, how shall I put it, improve his image after he was arrested and had to serve that sentence for solicitation of underage prostitution and so forth. And innocent underage girls, too. I mean, yeah, but yeah, go ahead. And I remember because I'm not that prostitutes aren't innocent. I have to add that. I'm sorry, go ahead. The, because I went to Harvard, I paid a bit more attention to the Harvard and I was struck that whereas others. returned money to Epstein in order to show that they were regretful or didn't want the association. Harvard gave what I thought was one of the more ingenuous, disingenuous comments I'd ever heard of, that they had already spent the money. even though it was a tiny fraction of what Harvard takes in in a year, let alone it's $51 billion endowment. It was so eager not to atone for what it was complicit in that it had to dismiss it by saying they wouldn't return whatever the amount was. But I think it raises really a number of questions. Universities and all of us are heavily impacted by this business of rich people giving money to universities. We should have never allowed this in the first place. It's not common in many other countries, so it's not as though this is some universal procedure that is allowed everywhere. But let me explain.

In recent years, the Koch brothers became famous because they gave money to colleges and universities all over the United States. But it was a quid pro quo. They got influence on the economics department. They even got influence on vetoing appointments of individuals to be professors. So there's an obvious intrusion of a private... individual with a private agenda using their money to shape the educational experience of hundreds or thousands of young people. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Let me give you some example from my own experience. I've been a professor in American universities for every one of the last 50 years, including the present. Right now, the institution where I teach, the new school university in New York City, is fighting for its life, and many of us who are faculty there, are not at all clear that it will exist a year from now. Our courses have been suspended or not simply canceled, and when we ask, the basic explanation is money. We had, our leaders have not fundraised enough or words to that effect to keep the, so that the literal existence of the university is at stake. Then there are universities, I'm thinking here in New York City of Long Island University, which is closing whole sections of the university because it can't raise money for them. So what you can take as a student is not being shaped by what a civilization needs to reproduce itself or what would meet the needs of our younger generation. We are deciding questions of what's available as part of a curriculum based on who is giving whom, how much money. But really. no deliberative body, no democratic institution representing the people deciding if savings have to be achieved, where would they best be? None of that. I could spend an hour telling you of universities where I've been a professor in which I was told we could not hire people in my department because of the money spent on the gymnasium. or the money spent on the football field or whatever it might have been. And I'm not here interested in arguing the merits of one or the other expenditure. I understand decisions have to be made. But who is making them in the light of what? Money was being given for the gymnasium because the donor wanted his name on that gymnasium, which he got. And getting his name on the economics department apparently didn't appeal to him. So we didn't get, all right, but you're now allowing the, and writ large, imagine how many colleges and universities are making how many decisions utterly outside of any democratic procedure at all. Outside of, by the way, any educational.

Oh, sure, the deans and the president is concerned about education. But, you know, you don't look to gift horse in the mouth. If a donor says, I'll give you for this, you take it. And then, you know, you'll find other money versus, yeah, but you never find the same amount of money, and it's never under the same conditions. So basically, it's more or less allowing the private capitalist sector. to shape the, and that's what we have. We have the best education money can buy. And the elite schools are the ones that have so much money that even after they collect billions, and by the way, the fundraising programs of places like Harvard and Stanford and Yale are calculated now in the billions. Yes, I just listed some of them. No, I mean, but their annual fund drive. I see, yeah, per year, yeah. Two billion more or three billion. So we're talking about these mammoth institutions. They are the ones who say proudly to their patrons, to their donors and others. We are so rich that even if the donors only give us for polymer research or something else like that. We can still have a program in ancient Aramaic or in the Russian language or things where nobody gives money because we are the rich. You know what they're telling us? That if you're not rich enough to go to one of these schools, you're just not going to have a very good education. It's going to be more and more dependent on what? can be fund raised for. So you cut that one last one. Sure. Every donor gift allows the donor to deduct the size of the gift from his or her income tax. So when you read- That's my point. Yes. Go ahead. Let you read about Ackman or any of the others that give huge sums. What you may not understand is number one, they can take the value of that gift off of their income tax. But it's better than that. If they have appreciated value, in other words, they have a stock that they purchased 20 years ago for $10 and is worth $100 now. So the capital gain on it is $90. When they give that stock to Harvard or Yale or Stanford, the value of their gift is the value at the time it is given. It's the $100. It didn't cost Ackman 100. It cost him 10.

So the deduction of 100 means that he is getting back in a tax cut now more money than he invested in that stock 10 years ago. This is beyond words. It means that every American listening to this program or watching our conversation is paying for this boondoggle because your government has less money. much less money because these gifts are the way we fund education. And that then justifies Mr. Trump, for example, to close down the Department of Education on the grounds that there isn't the tax revenue to fund it. Wow. Let me provide you with some numbers. As I say, I got interested in exactly, and thank you for adding the piece about how they actually make it in a way a huge profit generator as well by capitalizing on this loophole. Total U.S. higher. Education endowments as of 2025 were estimated at $944.3 billion. So let's round up. A trillion dollars. A trillion dollars in assets, in endowment assets represents, you know, of course they've been earning money on it. They've been investing this money. But we can assume that several hundred be at least a couple hundred billion dollars in that somewhere it was lost revenue by lost from the U.S. government or what they call tax expenditure, right? Am I right so far? So you could do a lot with $200 billion nowadays. Meanwhile, we have entire. departments of the U.S. government that run on less than that. We have, we keep saying we meaning our politicians is that we can't afford certain necessities of life for lower income people. I could go on and on. But the point is this, we have, the one other point I want to make is that what you describe, this outside influence of the extremely wealthy and the financial advantage, It's all they also use their university influence. I just want to underscore in a highly, highly ideological way. It's not just that there are people who have gathered a lot of money under the capitalist system. It's people who fervently believe in an extreme, uh, extremist vision of, uh, an anti-government world where they're free to pursue rapaciousness with no interference and workers can't unionize, social safety net is shredded. And we'll be right back after this with economist and historian Richard Wolfe. I'm Richard R.J. Askew and you're listening to The Zero Hour.

You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash weactradio, D.C. I had a sore in my mouth that just wouldn't go away. And after a couple of weeks, I went to my doctor. A sore, lump, or thick patch in your mouth or throat could be a symptom of oral cancer. My doctor told me I was smart to come in. He said that oral cancer is more common in African American men than in any other group in the U.S. It turns out I did have oral cancer. But it was called early and my treatment was successful. I'm glad I got it checked. That probably saved my life. If you're an African-American man, you need to know about oral cancer. Visit a doctor or dentist if you see changes in your mouth that don't go away after two weeks. It's important to get an oral cancer exam, because if you do have cancer, the earlier it's caught, the better. A message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health.

Hello, everybody. This is Richard R.J. Eskow from the Zero Hour. You know, there are a lot of myths out there about Social Security, and they're out there for a reason to make you think it's a good idea to slash the benefits you've already earned. Here are the facts. Social Security is not just for seniors. If you get hurt today and can't work, Social Security is there to help you. It already helps almost 9 million workers stay out of poverty. It's providing a lifeboat for over 4 million children. In fact, almost a third of Social Security's beneficiaries are receiving disability or survivor benefits. Learn more about Social Security and how you can help expand this vital program at social security works.org. Do you like being lied to? How about having your hard-earned money stolen from you? What am I talking about? Social Security. How many of you have heard that Social Security is not going to be there for you? Well, guess what? It is going to be there for you. And not only that, we can afford to expand benefits for everyone. The billionaires on Wall Street want to steal our money. That's the con. Convince you that you're not going to get anything so that you're willing to accept less than your owed. But the only way that can happen is if we're not paying attention. It's time to wake up and fight back. The first step is to arm yourself with the facts. Read this book. Social Security Works. Why Social Security isn't going broke and how expanding it will help us all. By Nancy Sam Altman and Eric Kingston. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont says, Social Security Works puts expanding Social Security front and center on the national agenda where it belongs. Everyone who has a stake in the debate should read this book. And Terry O'Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, says a must read for everyone who cares about economic justice for women. This is a book that every American should read. So find it at your local library or get a special discount for the zero-hour listeners at social security works.org slash book. That's social security works.org slash book. And remember, social security works.

we are back on the zero hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Eskow, and we now rejoin economist Richard Wolfe. The Koch brothers are a perfect example. Their philosophy was considered extreme and marginal when one of the Koch brothers started printing broadsides at Berkeley in 1971. Now it's a dominant, it's almost the operating assumption. of a lot of economics and politics in this country, because of this money they've spent. They're not only force-feeding their ideology onto students, but as you say, they're preventing students from being exposed to a whole universe of other ideas, historical events, literature, things that could enrich the students' lives and produce. new ideas in the future and closing thought. And they're also, as you say, restricting the possibility of decent education. to the people wealthy enough or trained enough for both to get into these elite school, so-called elite schools, when some of our best minds may be languishing in public schools because we as a society didn't spend that two or three hundred billion giving them the education they deserve. Absolutely. I mean, let me go further. I've had... In my many years experience in the American university system, I have sat in a room with the fundraisers of this or that university, hearing them discuss strategic approaches to fundraising, and countless times hearing them explain the need to bring members of the admissions department into these conversations. Because the admissions department should understand that if you bring into the university, young people who have already shown in high school, for example, that they are demonstrator types, you're just asking for trouble from your donors. And so these are the people charged with raising money. They want the admissions officers to understand, you're making our job harder. We just came back from this big city in the United States where we had a meeting and we were told by six people in the room that they were not going to give to our college because we seem to be a place that assembled young people who want to make trouble rather than...

hunker down to their studies. Well, you know, this is insidious what's going on. Think of all the colleges that don't need to have a meeting where the people in charge with fundraising don't have to be told what I just said, who understand perfectly well. When it comes to admitting students, but also when it comes to hiring faculty, you want to keep an eye out on the implications for your fundraising. You know, this is very ugly business. Corporations love it because they want to have their special places. And in case people don't know, one of the things I discovered at Yale many years ago when I was getting my PhD at Yale was that my friends were working in the chemistry lab, the physics lab, and they would tell me that sitting next to them, was a representative of a large pharmaceutical company. And I said, what are you talking about? And they explained to me, and I did the research, and I found it, and by the way, I won't, but I could name the big pharmaceutical, it's a company whose name everybody knows. They want their scientists to be working right next to university scientists, so they are up on the latest that can be used by them to promote their drugs, to promote their research, to get in on it early on. Well, it turns out that these then cultivate cozy relationships. And the pharmaceutical will then pick off a professor, give him or her their own laboratory somewhere else, better funded. A young graduate student begins to understand that his or her future as a... researcher in pharmacology will be financially helped if he chooses a doctoral dissertation in this area. He has learned they're interested because then they'll hire him right out of the graduate school because basically he'll just continue what he's been doing anyway to make them the next blockbuster drug. I mean, I could do this for every industry. It is very ugly. It is a process in which you have transformed your educational system from...

a place to develop your civilization to a vocational high school extension. And let me translate what you just said into the political sphere, the so-called centrist, meaning neoliberal consensus billionaire-funded view of both politics and education, because the billionaires fund both. We go into a whole discourse about that. One of my pet peeves, many, I should add, is when Democratic Party platforms or Democratic politicians or Republican Party platforms, Republican politicians talk about, and I quote, training workers for the jobs of the future. This is, wait a minute, that's not a college or university's job. That's a Human Resources Training Department's job. J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest criminal enterprise in human history, I can and have proved that with facts and figures, funded the entire MBA program at Syracuse University, designing it very proudly the university announced. And J.P. Morgan Chase announced that Stu Drogh were going to spend their... internship summers working at j p morgan chase and they're going to be learning the kinds of skills that that j p morgan chase needs uh from its new employees which is what double accounting for criminal activity i don't know exactly but uh but no you look why does j p morgan chase get a tax break which again is expenditure from the public's coffers, why does it get to use a university's resources if it wants to train people who've gotten a decent education in how to do whatever the hell they do to, you know, and their their big RICO enterprise over there. Train them. I mean, go ahead. Knock yourselves out. That's what business is for. That's an operating expense. Have at it. But to me, this is just another area where we shouldn't be talking about training workers for the jobs of the future. We should be talking about training people for the citizenship of the future, for the humanity of the future, for the... you know, stewardship of the future. But, you know, this to me is, to me, it's the same ideology that pervades, you know, the kind of censorship and academic control. You're describing it. Well, you know, it's even worse because all of these banks, for example, who do it in the way you described or the pharmaceuticals, they discovered long ago. that if you give a contribution, if you're, I'll take a hypothetical, if you're J.P. Morgan Chase, and you give a contribution of, let's say, $20 million to Syracuse University for this program, and you get, I don't know, 30 employees.

It turns out it would have cost you more than $20 million to train those 30 over a six-month period while they were living in New York, had to pay them a salary or whatever it was. But the difference is if you had had to pay them $20 million. You would have been out 20 million. But by giving Syracuse University, 20 million to do it, Syracuse is very, very happy, probably can do it for a little less and keep some of the money for itself. Meanwhile, J.P. Morganton deducted from its income tax because it contributed to a universe. I mean, this is a scam six ways to Sunday, and the end result is all kinds. of money that could have gone to the government to fund, let's say, public education in the United States isn't available for public education because it has been hustle. And remember, the bank like J.P. Morgan was involved in supporting the legislation that enables them to do every one of these hustles. They're the ones that are there with high-paid lobbyists. manipulating the tax law so that they can do this or they can do a little of that or then on and on and on it my experience at Harvard Stanford and Yale was one example of this after another I never found the end of it I found it to be very widespread, very large, but I know that it is more widespread and larger than I ever encountered in my own life. And I'm not even going through the situations where the personal wealth of individuals played a role. The personal wealth that allows somebody to get a job in a... and a faculty of a university by promising, if I will give your college $3 million if you hire my son or my daughter or my cousin, all the time. And the... I've been in on these experiences. You sit in a faculty room with 20 faculty, and the question is, do we hire so-and-so? And we all vote. And then it turns out that some of us were voting, knowing that the administration had been approached. to be given millions of dollars if this person was voted in. And some of our colleagues knew it and voted him in. And others of our colleagues who didn't find him qualified didn't vote for him.

But we didn't know that the money, oh, I mean, it destroys the trust in a department. It destroys relationships, some of which have been there for years. It is destructive on a level to the quality of education that ought to frighten human beings. And yet it's an every single day occurrence across. the spectrum, northeast, south, and west, private, public, although the public schools have less of this than the private in general. But it happens in public institutions as well. And I guess if that doesn't terrify people enough, just I feel compelled to add the quota that because I helped, I was honored to sort of like advise and support and cheer on students. a couple of protest movements, you have a situation like Columbia, where the billionaire donors are saying, crack down on these students, docks them, reveal their personal information for protesting a genocide in Gaza. Then you have the experience of the media misrepresenting what the students stand for and providing misinformation on the genocide itself. Also, very much in bed with these billionaires. And when the police come in and beat up the students and throw them down the stairs and everything else that they did, particularly in the Columbia, you know, horror show, it was overlooked, but I, you know, I dug this fact up for a story I reported during Accompio Wall Street that a lot of New York City police officers moonlight. For the Wall Street banks, this is permissible under city policy. And a lot of those officers, a significant portion of their income comes from acting as a security in their off hours to Wall Street banks. They have this like sort of enclosed system. And those brave students who dare defy it were up against administrators, the media. the police, their own faculty in some cases, and that's a system where we have to resist, I think. But I'll give you the last word. The last word. One of the schools I attended, I had a good friend. And he was connected to the business school and it's called the management. Sounds better than business. And they had a habit of bringing all the time. They had special seminars where they would bring CEOs of companies together with CEOs of big media outfits. So they would get to know each other better. All under the heading of the Kay Ivey League or whatever it was. These were opportunities to get their signals straight, to have them talk to each other about what was important for the other in each of their way. In other words, it's strategy sessions for doing the very thing, you said. That's why it wasn't difficult for billionaires to call up administrators of universities or high officials in media companies and explain. They were just...

taking the next step in a process that had been done in the most genteel manner, in a lovely conference room in some Kay Ivey League campus over lovely hors d'oeuvres, etc. In other words, it's an integrated normal process, that it corrupts education, that it twists it into forms that are undemocratic and also unresponsive to the most basic ideas of what education should be is of no concern. It all ends up making education to be done, if I may say so, in a quote-unquote business-like manner, and by which they mean quite literally, there's a CEO at the top. CEO in the business is the king. What he says goes, he can fire everybody beneath him, etc., etc., etc. And that becomes how the administration of the university works. It runs in a business-like manner. And in case there's any misunderstanding at its highest level, it hires the businessmen who think it cute for a year or two or five or ten. to do something at their alma mater, like what they're doing at their corporate headquarters. It is as incestuous and as sick as it sounds. And the students, instead of being the constituents of the university, as they should be, are the product. That's right. So with that, Richard Wolfe, as always, great talking with you. If people are interested, I'm sure both of us can come up with a lot of policy fixes for this crap. But in the meantime, you get the picture. And as always, Richard Wolfe, I enjoyed our conversation and look forward to the next one. Same here. Same here. And we'll be right back after this. I'm Richard R.J. Escal, and this is The Zero Hour.

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back on the zero hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. S. Gow. I used to do a little speech or a bit about the seven forbidden words on American mainstream media or political platforms, policy platforms here in Washington, D.C. There's a play on George Carlin's seven dirty words you can't say. on radio, but my forbidden words were empire. That was the first one. If you say anything in a policy forum or in a news interview about empire, you're immediately branded as a lefty radical capitalism, and certainly not, you can't say late stage capitalism, revolution, movement. compassion, solidarity, or social, dash anything, except social security. And that's only in the context of why it needs to be cut. Now it looks like my seven forbidden words of mainstream media and politics are being edited down a little bit. I was rather surprised to see a New York Times headline Friday morning Trump's foreign policy colon resurrecting empire. And this isn't even in a news. piece. This is a news, I'm sorry, an opinion piece. It's a news analysis piece. It's a subheading President Trump's approach is a revival of the mission of empire, acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples. All very well and good, all true, except the entire article is based on the flawed and false premise that we weren't. an empire before, under Biden and every president before him, do we really think that the people in Honduras have been free to choose their leaders without American influence or in other countries around the world? Come on now, but at least we could use better language to describe what is being done. I'll be right back.

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