As universities are transformed into self-managed corporations, education is being treated less like a public benefit and more as a marketable commodity.
While this is stating the bleeding obvious in terms of limiting working class access to education, there is a more insidious move inside universities. Research programs are increasingly designed according to the allocation of tax-deductible corporate research grants.
Large firms that already benefit from tax breaks, government contracts and the migration of people from the public to the private sector are now able to shape university research in ways that will then (again) benefit the corporate world.
A case in point is the recent announcement that Lockheed Martin will open a $13 million research facility, the Science Technology Engineering Leadership and Research Laboratory (STELaR Lab) within the district of RMIT and Melbourne universities.
This latest move by Lockheed Martin is a further step in the takeover of our institutions by the largest, meanest and dirtiest corporations in the world.
Lockheed Martin is the largest aerospace and military company in the world. It will be further aided by the federal government’s Next Generation Technology Fund, which plans to outlay more than $1.3 billion over the next decade to increase the country’s military capacity.
The CEO of its Australian arm, Raydon Gates, said in an August press release: “The STELaR Lab further reinforces our position as an industry leader in defence and technology, and we are proud of our ability to bring best practice and leading edge concepts to Australia to support growth and innovation”.
Within the aerospace and technology industries, there is no prevaricating that this is about increasing the company’s market share in Australia.
Gates knows what he’s talking about. His 37 years in the Australian Navy included commanding guided missile frigates and, as a rear admiral, heading the Australian Defence College. He moved to Washington when appointed defence attaché and head of the Australian Defence Staff before “retiring” and joining Lockheed Martin in 2011.
Forty years of knowledge and networks obtained in the public sector have now been transferred to Lockheed Martin.
This is another disturbing trend in modern capitalism: career public servants and politicians selling their services to the corporate sector, specifically in defence. (Former defence minister Peter Reith famously left politics to become an adviser to Tenix, at the time Australia’s largest arms company, subsequently sold to BAE Systems.)
Gates is not alone on the board of Lockheed Martin Australia; he is joined by former Royal Australian Navy vice admiral Chris Ritchie, who oversaw the purchase of many Lockheed Martin weapons systems. Also on the board is career mandarin Allan Hawke, who, after being sacked as secretary for defence in 2002, went on to become a consultant to government and industry – most recently as commissioner of the “independent” report favourable to gas fracking in the NT.
Together, these three men have access to all levels of defence and government officials in Australia. But the icing on the cake for Lockheed Martin was surely this year’s announcement that former minister for defence and ambassador to the US, Kim Beazley, had also joined the board.
Prior to taking on the defence portfolio, Beazley was special minister of state. He oversaw the floating of the dollar and deregulation of the financial and telecommunications industries, and sold Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, among other state assets.
After becoming defence minister, his love of whizz-bang weaponry earned him the moniker “Bomber Beazley”. He continued the economic restructuring within the military and became the voice of arms companies with his policy paper “Defence policy’s contribution to industrial development”.
You don’t have to be too cynical to ask questions. Just how long have these men actually been working for Lockheed Martin? What influence did Beazley and his mates have in securing the $18 billion F-35 stealth fighter contract for Lockheed? And how much of a role did they play in securing this latest investment, which will pay significant dividends to the company and attract substantial public funding in the years to come?
The “partnering” of corporate giants with Australian universities and the use of government funds to subsidise the research is not new. Similar market-driven influence exists in many fields, such as geology, where mining interests have had a significant role in curriculum development.
RMIT is world renowned for its aerospace and drone research. This latest move by Lockheed Martin to buy the knowledge and networks gained by some of the most senior public servants, military commanders and politicians and open a research centre that will determine the shape of research in public universities is a further step in the takeover of our institutions by the largest, meanest and dirtiest corporations in the world.
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DIRECT ACTION CAMP
HOSTED BY THE DISARM COLLECTIVE
<div>
The Disarm Collective are organising a protest convergence at Pine Gap to assert a call for peace instead of continuing to facilitate the US war machine. A camp will be located on Arrernte country near the Pine Gap facility. Some infrastructure will be provided including food, water, toilets and some shelter. The protest is organised as a non-hierarchical, grassroots and decentralised campaign.
To get involved or for more information:
<a href="http://www.disarm.net.au">www.disarm.net.au</a> 
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheDisarmCollective/?fref=ts">Disarm Collective Facebook </a> 
email: <a href="mailto:closepinegap@gmail.com">closepinegap@gmail.com</a>
</div>

Jacob Grech

A military bonanza at the expense of education

As 2015 comes to a close, a war rages across the Earth.
Hospitals are bombed, villages are destroyed by air strikes, people are murdered by drone attacks, and thousands upon thousands of refugees are forced to leave their homes, from Pakistan to Somalia, creating one of the largest refugee crises ever seen.
Yet little is said or understood about Australia’s role in all of this.
Pine Gap, 16 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs on Arrernte land, has for nearly 50 years been central to military operations across Asia and the Middle East. It has been the eyes and ears of the US military since it went on line in 1969 and subsequently expanded to become the Asia-Pacific home base for US president Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars project.
More recently it has become the empire’s pointing finger, providing targeting information for the drone attacks that have killed thousands of people in the last six years.
‘Sniff, collect, know, process and exploit’
Back in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, Pine Gap was developed to monitor Soviet military communications and provide “early warning” on missile launches and tests. The Australian government argued, and continues to argue, that Pine Gap’s role is to monitor compliance with a range of arms control treaties.
For a while, that was probably its primary function. But as communications became more and more reliant on satellites, Pine Gap’s role kept pace with technology. Mission creep has led to it playing a major part in the NSA doctrine on communications data, the mantra of which states: “Sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all”.
Pine Gap’s 34 satellite dishes enable it to sniff out communications from every possible wireless source in an arc from the East Africa to China. It is a part of the Five Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) spying network that has existed under various acronyms since the original BRUSA (Britain-USA) pact of World War II.
It manipulates data – not just from its own area of responsibility, but from every one of the ground stations operated by Five Eyes partners in more than a dozen countries around the world. “Sniff it all” alludes to former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s koan about “known unknowns and unknown unknowns”.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden also revealed that the installation plays a crucial role in that organisation’s Operation Xkeyscore, which he says can monitor anyone anywhere connected to communications equipment – it is not limited to Five Eyes partners.
All information is treated as significant until proven not to be: from military communications in Iraq through to your phone call to Mum this week about plans for Christmas dinner. The data are collected, analysed and processed before ultimately being “exploited” – either by providing targeting information for a ground, air or drone attack, intelligence on competing telemetry or insurgents and activists around the world, or commercial information on countries and corporations that would give Pine Gap’s corporate management an edge in business.
Because Pine Gap, much like the wars it takes part in, is ultimately about business.
War is a racket
Without doubt, this is a military installation. But of the 700 US citizens working directly on Pine Gap operations, only 106 are military: 40 from the navy, 30 each from the air force and army and six from the marines. Fifty US government civilians from the National Reconnaissance Office (who have overall charge of the facility), National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency bring the US government total to about 150.
The rest are employed by the largest military corporations in the world – Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics – along with niche companies that work exclusively for the CIA and NRO, such as Leidos, Scitor and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). There are also about 80 Australian military and contractor personnel, bringing the total Pine Gap workforce up to around 800 (the exact figures are unavailable).
The US employees of Pine Gap, along with their military counterparts, do not pay tax in Australia (or the US) or pass through customs. Under the Australian-US Status of Forces Agreement, they cannot be held accountable for breaches of Australian law. As Arrernte elder Chris Tomlin put it, “It’s not only Black Australia that has a sovereignty issue”.
These commercial operators run everything from the kitchens to the actual satellites. They’re there for one reason only: to make a profit. Nobody in the Australian or US governments or military establishments seem to have any problem with the moral hazard at the heart of this set-up: companies that profit from war collect and analyse the data that aer used to trigger conflict.
And profiting they are. Raytheon CEO Tom Kennedy recently told a Credit Suisse conference that the company is “seeing a significant uptick for defence solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East”.
Lockheed Martin VP Bruce Tanner told the same conference that recent developments would provide “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theatre”. He highlighted the need for the company’s new F22 and F35 jets.
A look at these companies’ share price rises immediately following the Paris attacks highlights the profits they make even from the expectation of war.
Shut it down
The Australian left has always opposed the existence of Pine Gap, particularly after US whistleblower Christopher Boyce exposed the fact that one of the reasons behind the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government in 1975 was its desire to close the facility. Since that time, many protests have taken place at its gates, starting with the Women’s Peace Camp in 1983 and then every decade or so until the most recent in 2003, in response to its role in the invasion of Iraq.
Chris Tomlins wrote this week from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra:
“The Arrernte people have been the custodians and peaceful protectors of their country for thousands of years. Our sovereignty is contained in our songlines, stories and dances, which have been handed down over thousands of years.
“As the lawful custodians we are responsible for what occurs on our land and the harm it brings to the rest of the world. The activity of the facility at Pine Gap has implicated us in criminal military actions, which threatens the dignity of all people, implicates us in war crimes and generates instability and conflict around the globe as a consequence of US imperialism.”
To extend Tomlin’s admission: as Australians we are all implicated. While Pine Gap is undoubtedly a United States military base in all but name, the Australian government claims to be involved in all aspects of its operation. Whether this is true or not is a moot point. The fact is that we are a part of a globalised military industrial capitalist system, and the Australian government is every bit as culpable in Pine Gap’s operations as its US counterpart.
The Australian peace movement, alongside Arrernte elders, has called another mass convergence at the gates of Pine Gap from 25 September 2016 to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the original Pine Gap Agreement.

Pine Gap and the enemy within

“It could’ve happened to anyone, nothing special about me.” That’s what sticks in my head most of all from Gerry Conlon, who died in Belfast on 21 June after a short but intense fight with cancer – and a long and intense fight with the British justice system after he was framed, then imprisoned for more than a decade, by the British state.
It could have been anyone. Gerry was a 20-year-old knock-about who wasn’t really into politics – aside from the day-to-day politics of growing up in the Falls Road area of West Belfast in the 1970s. He had been a member of Fianna Éireann (a youth organisation associated with the IRA), but was thrown out because of his predilection for petty crime. He moved to London “to get away from all that shit” and hung out getting stoned with the hippie crowd.
In 1974, while visiting family in Belfast, Gerry was dragged out of his bed by soldiers and taken by military plane to England, where he was tortured: “And I mean tortured. To be held naked. To have Alsatian dogs set upon you. To be taken naked to country lanes, hooded, handcuffed. To have the hood taken off and told to open your mouth. And when I shook my head, they hit me in the head with a revolver. And when I went ‘Oh’, they stuck the gun in my mouth, put the hammer back and pulled the trigger. This is what they did. This is what they were allowed to do.”
After being told by police that they would kill his mother, he confessed to taking part in the bombings of two pubs in Guildford near London, which were popular with British servicemen from the nearby Pirbright Barracks. Four soldiers and one civilian were killed in these explosions. Sixty-five people were injured. Along with Paul Hill, Carole Richardson and Paddy Armstrong, known as the Guildford Four, he spent the next 15 years inside.
Later in 1974, his father Giuseppe was also arrested, along with others who became known as the Maguire Seven, on fabricated charges of handling the explosives used by the Guildford Four. Sentenced to 12 years, prison life played havoc with his existing lung condition; he served only six before dying inside at age 58.
Baron Donaldson of Lymington, the judge who presided over both trials, expressed disappointment that the Guildford Four had not been charged with treason – a charge that allowed for the death penalty. The same disappointment was aired by Baron Bridge of Harwich, who presided over the trial of the similarly fitted-up Birmingham Six.
In 1989 the Guildford Four were granted an appeal after paperwork from the original trial was found to have been heavily edited. Presiding over the appeal, Chief Justice Lord Lane found that the police notes were “fabrication by the police from start to finish, invented by some fertile constabulary mind” or a “contemporaneous manuscript note … reduced into typewritten form [and] then amended here and there in order to improve it; and, finally … reconverted into manuscript by the various Surrey officers involved so that it could be produced as a contemporaneous note”.
It took until 2005 – 16 years after the charges were quashed – for the British government to apologise to the families of those imprisoned. No police officer, government official or judge was convicted of any wrongdoing in the cases of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven or the Birmingham Six (who were exonerated in 1991).
After his release from prison, Gerry suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and drug and alcohol problems. But he kept fighting. He and Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six were members of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation and worked ceaselessly towards uncovering the many crimes of the British justice system.
At an event supporting Chelsea Manning in Dublin last year, he pointed out that one of the most insidious sides to the whole saga was that in 1994, after a royal commission into the Birmingham Six trial, British director of public prosecutions Barbara Mills put a 75-year public immunity interest order on the case – the only criminal cases in British history to receive this. This was, in Gerry’s words, “to protect the people who made their names on it”.
Gerry went on to name names, however. And they should be named here: “Michael Havers, the prosecutor who prosecuted us, who withheld evidence … Thatcher made him attorney general and then lord chancellor; Peter Imbert, the policeman who was the negotiator … he was a run-of-the-mill detective sergeant, he organised the perjury and they made him head of the Metropolitan Police, Thatcher knighted him and Blair made him a lord; and Donaldson, the judge who tried me and then three months later tried my father and as soon as the jury was sworn in said to the jury, ‘You’re going to hear the name Conlon through this trial, because that man over there is Giuseppe Conlon, the father of the Guildford pub bomber who I sentenced to life plus 30 years three months ago’.”
“This was not a miscarriage of justice; this was something else,” said Gerry. “This was deliberate policy of the British government.” When he and Paddy Armstrong were in Australia a few years ago, he said: “It’s still happening now.” The IRA campaigns of the mid-’70s were used as a pretext to launch a “war on terror” in much the same way the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks were used more recently.
Today such policy continues in the prosecution of people, such as the Barwon 13 in Melbourne, for thought crimes, in the abomination of Guantánamo Bay and in the targeting of whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
It is a push to instil fear and terror into those of us fighting the system – and it needs to be fought. As Gerry said, “It could’ve been anyone.”

A military bonanza at the expense of education

Pine Gap and the enemy within

Gerry Conlon: ‘It could’ve happened to anyone’

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