Is the UC a University, or Just Another Nuclear Weapons Firm?

UC Regents and Top Administrators Have Numerous Connections to the Nuclear-Military-Industrial Complex, Some Profitable, Many Unknown


S. Robert Foley, Robert C. Dynes and Richard Blum, three of the most powerful men in the University of California, each of whom have extensive connections to military-industrial firms and the US nuclear weapons complex. All three came into the university’s highest circle of power quite recently, during a time flagging morale at the UC’s nuclear weapons labs, and all three have since helped to shore up the university as a major military-industrial corporation in its own right. Each has sought to keep their ties, financial and otherwise, with some of the firms and institutions they worked with prior to joining UC.

In May of 2005 a group of students calling themselves the Coalition to Demilitarize the University of California gathered at the UC Regents’ meeting in San Francisco. Urging the governing Board of their university to cut ties with the two nuclear weapons labs it operates for the federal government the students were met with a deaf ear. Some of the Regents read newspapers during the public comment period while others chatted or snoozed, and several even exited the room altogether. Few on the board paid the students any attention, that is, until one student charged a member of the board with a conflict of interest.

Reading from a prepared statement, the UC Santa Cruz student described Regent Richard Blum’s business dealings with the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab: “In July of 2000 URS Corporation was awarded a contract for design and construction services at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. This five-year contract (with a five option-year extension) will enrich URS by $25 million per year. Given Regent Richard Blum’s position on the UC Board of Regents, the public body that manages the Laboratory, and his position as Vice Chairman of the URS Corporation, a business that stands to profit from its work at the Laboratory, is this not a conflict of interests?”

The press took note, as did the Regents. Even after deciding – through some sort of legal acrobatics – that this was not a conflict of interests, UC Regent Richard C. Blum divested himself of URS stock in November of 2005 and resigned from his position as Vice Chairman of the company. All seemed well in the house of UC.

As journalist Peter Byrne’s latest investigations into Blum and his wife Senator Diane Feinstein have shown, however, Blum’s war profiteering hasn’t been solely confined to URS. Perini Corporation, an engineering giant feeding from the Iraq “reconstruction” trough has been another company controlled through Blum Capital Partners, Blum’s main investment vehicle. Equally, Blum’s various conflicts stemming from his connections to URS and position as a Regent were not limited to UC’s Los Alamos lab. The company held a contract worth $150 million for construction management services at UCLA’s Santa Monica Medical Center. URS also profited smartly off a July 2005 contract to provide management services for a major construction and engineering project at UC Berkeley.

But Blum hasn’t been the only person within the UC’s upper-echelons linked to URS Corp’s extensive university and military-industrial business. S. Robert Foley, the university’s Vice President for Laboratory Management – the man charged with overseeing UC’s nuclear weapons labs – was also a stockholder and director of URS Corporation prior to joining the UC’s office of the President (UCOP).

Elected to URS Corporation’s board of directors in 1994, a company press release described Foley as having a “distinguished career in both government and private enterprise.” The press release continues that, “Most recently, he was vice president of Commercial Marketing and Planning for Raytheon Co. Previously, he was vice chairman of ICF Kaiser Engineers, and assistant secretary for Defense Programs with the United States Department of Energy.” In other words URS brought in a Defense Department insider with strong experience and considerable wealth already built up from work in the arms industry. Foley had a long career in the nuclear weapons complex working under the Navy and Energy Department. He even headed up a blue ribbon commission to oversee nuclear weapons pit manufacturing and certification at Los Alamos Lab – the program being run by the UC-Bechtel team to produce plutonium bomb pits for the United States’ new nuclear weapon design, the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Upon leaving these public sector roles (actually largely overlapping with them) he assumed multiple for-profit positions dealing still with nuclear weapons and the arms industry, culminating in his election to the URS board or directors where he was handed over 9000 shares of the company’s stock.

Foley and Blum served alongside one another on URS Corporation’s board for the better part of a decade. During this time URS grew at an enormous rate through securing an increasing number of lucrative defense contracts, no doubt through both men’s extensive connections (Blum’s political and business oriented links and Foley’s military and business ties). One of the biggest deals during Foley and Blum’s tenure at URS involved the company’s acquisition of EG&G Technical Services from the Carlyle Group, a massive private equity firm with deep investments in the defense industry. The purchase was a logical investment for a company gearing itself up for increasingly large proportions of military related work, including nuclear weapons design and testing: EG&G was literally founded upon several technical products used to develop the first atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project. Today the EG&G division of URS produces a dizzying array of products and services for the military, from base/installation management services to engineering and logistics support for the Navy's Virginia Class Fast Attack Nuclear Submarine Systems.

In 2000 URS won its contract from UC’s Los Alamos to provide design and engineering services at the nuclear weapons lab. Foley and Blum pocketed the profits. Two years later Blum took up a seat on the UC Board of Regents. Three years later Foley accepted his new position: Vice President of the University of California for Laboratory Management. Both came directly over from URS, in a sense. Foley last appeared as a director and signatory for URS Corporation’s SEC filings in September of 2003. In October he was appointed UC Vice President. He cashed out of his URS stock only weeks prior reaping a hefty profit. The press release put out by the Regents upon his appointment as VP failed to mention Foley’s time and role at URS. Instead, UC’s spin on Foley’s new job focused on his career as a commander in the Navy and his work as an architect of the US nuclear weapons complex under President’s Reagan and George W. Bush. Nor did the press release mention the numerous corporate boards Foley sits upon: KEI Pearson, an analytical and instructional services firm focused on military sectors; Frequency Electronics, a components producer for missiles, military satellites and un-manned aerial vehicles; RSI Inc., producer and distributor of military electronics systems, and; Sage Laboratories, part of Filtronic plc, a major British electronics firm that producing semiconductors for the defense industry.

In fact, the number of corporations that Foley has had a hand in directing or has invested in is rather staggering. Foley has signed off on Securities and Exchange Commission forms for more than 15 corporations, most of which concentrate on arms manufacturing or services for the DoD and its prime contractors. None of this was mentioned, at least not to the public, students or university faculty when the Regents appointed him as Vice President for Lab Management.

Foley and Blum’s relationship prior to their time on the URS board remains unknown. Did Blum recruit Foley to URS’s board? Did Blum recruit Foley from URS to his present job as UC VP for lab management? How was it that both men ended up joining the board of Regents directly from URS Corp? What role did both these men have in building up URS as one of the largest military-industrial contractors with a presence in the nuclear weapons complex? And specific questions about each man’s knowledge and role in securing the Los Alamos contract remain unanswered. In 2005 Regent Blum simply dismissed any knowledge of the deal claiming that it was far to small and marginal for him to take interest in.

What is clear, however, is that a larger state of affairs is operating in the UC, one that is empowering and promoting administrators with direct ties to military-industrial corporations, especially those with ties and allegiances to the nuclear weapons complex. When the weapons labs were rocked with repeated management scandals the Regents selected Robert Dynes as President of the UC. Among the reasons for appointing Dynes was the fact that his background as a physicist with strong ties to the nuclear weapons labs bolstered the UC’s claim to retain Los Alamos, which at the time was up for bid by the Department of Energy. The Board essentially selected a university president based primarily on their desire to retain their management contract for Los Alamos. A team headed by the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin was competing hard for the contract, hoping to take over lab which has always been run by UC.

In response to this challenge the Regents selected a UC president who according to one UC press release, “is intimately familiar with the three national laboratories UC manages for the federal government. He is vice chair of the University of California President's Council on the National Laboratories and a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Oversight Board. In addition, he has had a 25-year association with the national laboratories as an adviser and consultant to the physics research and weapons programs.” In other words he was a slam dunk choice for Blum and the rest of the Regents. The Regents selected a “weaponeer” to run the university. Four months later they recruited a retired Navy Admiral over from URS Corporation to oversee their most treasured subsidiaries, the nuclear weapons labs. How much more of this story are we missing?

Yesterday was my first Mardi Gras. I had mixed feelings about coming down here during what turned out to be a massive street party signaling the comeback of the city’s tourism industry. Is it ethical to come to New Orleans and have fun right now? Should I spend money here – and if so, where? Are the parades and parties good for the city, or just certain segments of the city? Is is okay to drink and have a good time while there remain hundreds of thousands of survivors still struggling to come back home?

The common sense wisdom is that New Orleans is the #1 city for hospitality. It’s economy is based off events like Mardi Gras, therefore the more the celebrations pick up and resemble the 1 million plus attendee galas that went down every year before Katrina, the better off the city as a whole will be. But this assumes that the money flowing in from tourists makes its way to everyone, hoteliers and bar owners as well as their working class employees. Is there a substantial amount of “trickle down” to the people who cook and clean? Do working class New Orleanians get anything out of the commercialization of the Carnival? The holiday certainly has cultural significance to the city's poor and working class peoples, but how does it translate into power and politics?

My friend Sam “Action” Jackson picked me up early yesterday morning and we headed to the uptown corner of Claiborne and Jackson Street to catch the Zulu parade. Zulu is the only parade that begins on the back of town side of St. Charles. It was founded in 1909 by members of a benevolent society – an organization of blacks that offered insurance and mutual aid to African Americans during an era when most companies denied them coverage – and eventually incorporated itself into the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The parade has forever been the black parade. Its symbolic importance in the whole of Mardi Gras is revealed on Lundi Gras, the day before Fat Tuesday when the King of Rex (the official king of Mardi Gras) enters the city, meets the mayor and declairs the next day to be a day of celebration and no work. The Mayor must concur, and the King of Zulu, almost as though he were the representative of black New Orleans also takes the stage to concur (of course this doesn't mean that works stops in the city, just that the only people working are those cooking up the food and cleaning up the mess). On Mardi Gras day the two major parades are Rex and Zulu.

Sam and I stood on the corner of Jackson and Claiborne catching beads and other “throws” from Zulu. The crowd was jubilant. After this we headed back downtown underneath the Claiborne bridge to catch up with the parade as it neared its terminus. What makes Zulu amazing is that it winds up along Claiborne Ave. where the Mardi Gras Indians march and where thousands upon thousands gather for what is easily the most happening party during the entire two weeks of Mardi Gras celebrations. Under the I-10 free way on Mardi Gras day black New Orleans gathers like nothing else on earth. Sam and I wandered around, he occasionally meeting up with an old friend, and I shadowing one of the Mardi Gras Indians, big Chief Allison Tootie Montana’s son (Montana died on June 27, 2005 while addressing the city council about police brutality and the rights and importance of Mardi Gras Indians). At one point Sam and I spotted Mayor Ray Nagin. Not to let him off the hook Sam walked right up to Nagin, gave him a pat on the back, shook his hand and whispered in his ear, "so when are you going to reopen the public housing?" The Mayor just smiled back.

The Indians are amazing for reasons that are indescribable. They gather under the shade of the freeway and walk up and down Claiborne Ave. When two Chiefs confront one another they face off in symbolic battle. Yesterday even saw an actual brawl between several of them, something that according to Sam and others hasn’t happened in many, many years. The Indians are followed by men and women who give them water, adjust their headdresses and feathers and help to carry things when the going gets tough. Others beat tambourines and drums producing beats to which the Indians and all of us dance and clap to. The whole tradition harkens back to the links between black slaves and the regions native Americans who were at times united in their struggles against the planter elites and racist white society.

The celebrations along Claiborne Ave. are those of New Orleans’ black community. Uptown and downtown residents congregate here to experience and take part in the Zulu parade and Indian struts. I was shocked by the near total absence of whites, especially locals. White New Orleanians tent to stay planted along the parade routes down around St. Charles Ave. and the lower portions of Canal Street. Very few attend the celebrations along Claiborne. Although the official segregation that used to deform Mardi Gras is long gone, the mores and comfort of people still seem to hold them back from intermixing and experiencing one another’s music, food and dance.

One thing that amazed me during the last few days was the level of entrepreneurship and autonomous economic activity going on. Along Washington Avenue near the St. Charles parade route I saw dozens of men setting up parking lots in the driveways of their houses and empty lots nearby. I asked several of them about it and they informed me that it was just another way of earning some money during Mardi Gras and that it’s done during other celebrations also. Depending on the lots proximity to the parade route these men will charge anywhere from $5-20 for a spot. Another example of small time business was the food vendors along Orleans Avenue and Claiborne. Families set up big pots of gumbo and red beans and grilled meat to serve during the day. $2 for a beer, $5 for a big cup of gumbo or a sandwich, many of those selling food cooked it in a friend or family members kitchen down the street. A few people selling the food set up on the lawn of the Lafitte projects – closed down since Katrina. According to Sam, the Lafitte residents always came out for Mardi Gras to sell or give out food and drink, and perhaps a few of these people yesterday were displaced residents come back to make some money on their doorstep.

After a few hours of following the Indians around dancing on Claiborne I went home and took a nap. Afterwards I headed down to Frenchman street where the punks, bohemians and other locals were gathering. There were drum circles blocking the road and crowds of characters pouring out of the bars. Someone was selling nitrous hits and the crowd was sucking them down leaving the sidewalks littered with little black balloons.

The buzz about the city is that this year was big and that New Orleans really is back now. Yesterday did show that the tourism industry can throw a big-ass party once again, but for me it showed that the Katrina Diaspora are still working hard to secure their comeback. The party under Claiborne bridge was a good sign as was the street vending and parking lot gigs, two sorts of jobs out of many that represent the unofficial economy of the city – an economy that is terribly important for the Katrina Diaspora who are working hard to raise the funds necessary to secure a right of return for themselves and their communities. Perhaps some of the money made on Bourbon Street and Canal even trickled down to the people who make the party happen?

We’ve Got a Movement, Now What?

The day after the strike I awakened to the sound of birds and the heat of the sun. I stepped outside and felt the rays of light pouring down on my face and the heat reminded me of that highway where we all sat down in defiance, anger and hope that some sort of new politics and power can be built here and now and that our resistance can be more than symbolic. The heat and sunlight reminded me of all those terrific speeches and chants that are still ringing in my ears. The day after the strike felt to me like the first day of Spring. I’m told that this day is actually March 21st, but remain convinced that for Santa Barbara our springtime has come. Four times a year I feel the change of season. It usually hits me suddenly in one day. In the autumn the days get darker and colder and then one day it’s just dark and cold – Winter. The day after the strike the air was different and the sun was brighter. I felt this literally and I think it’s also figuratively true for antiwar politics on this campus. The days have been getting brighter, and now it’s time to bloom.

There can be no doubt about it; something is afoot here at UCSB. On the 15th we converged for a rally, march and act of disruptive affirmation that was heard far and wide. We have an antiwar movement. We have a community of people who are willing to mobilize and even put their bodies on the line not only to speak truth to power, but to meet the antidemocratic power or the US State and transnational corporations with the power of the people. We have a community willing to do what it can to disobey the regime and the system and to withdraw our complicity. We did just such a thing by nonviolently striking against the perverse “business as usual” that makes this war and so many other forms of exploitation and oppression that infuse daily life possible.

But what now?

Our energy and commitment has attracted considerable attention from many local and national antiwar organizers, organizations and political parties. Our call to strike – to actually withdraw material support and obedience from the political authorities and economic interests that make war and exploitation possible – has attracted much attention because it is precisely what it will take to stop the war. It is an electrifying concept to many because it is democracy in action. It allows all of us to be agents of change. It transformed many of us in ways too difficult to describe. There is a deep and profound desire toward this type of politics and we can help to build it by acting here and now.

In order to build upon this and spread the kind of grassroots action we’ve sparked it’s important that we stay true to what we’ve tapped into. I feel that the strike was powerful because it was an action founded upon principled beliefs, shaped by many diverse standpoints, open and anti-elitist, and rooted in the knowledge, desire and needs of our locality. It also succeeded because we all made it happen collectively. It wasn’t the outcome of a few smart organizers or a couple brilliant speakers. Rather, it was the outcome of repressed emotion and irresistible knowledge possessed by everyone who helped us take that road. It’s an understanding that history is made when we actually do something collectively!

I point these things out because our strike was quite unlike much of the antiwar organizing happening in our nation right now. It doesn’t have to be this way though. Much of the antiwar movement is orchestrated by organizers and groups that look upward at the powers that be in Congress, and that purposefully shape their messaging to appeal to some abstract notion of the “mainstream,” or to the corporate mass media. Indeed, the obsession with what the corporate media will say about us is a dysfunction approaching self-destructive pathology amongst activists. Much antiwar organizing attempts to periodically draw protestors to huge rallies in centralized locations on days that are coordinated across the country – usually on the weekends so as not to disrupt business and guarantee larger attendance. Much of it puts celebrities or “experts” forward as the best spokespersons for the movement. Much of it assumes that the most important thing is to critique the crimes and lies of the Bush administration inside out. Very little of it foregrounds the work of antiracist, immigrants’ rights, social justice, environmental, queer, and womens’ rights movements as not just “allies,” but as the radical inspiration, the heart and soul of the struggle against oppression in all its forms from which the antiwar movement is nourished. When the antiwar movement eclipses these other movements and fails to be fundamentally shaped and constituted by them, it can only submit a cosmetic fix to an ill-identified problem, and it can accomplish nothing of the structural and systematic social change that the mass of humanity desperately wants.

As I see it, the success of our strike was due to the fact that so far we have been creatively spontaneous, anti-elitist, practical and localized, disruptive, and critically self-reflexive.

In truth the creative spontaneity of our strike was the outcome of a dissatisfaction many of us have had with the typical antiwar rally. Usually people are urged to gather so that they can then listen to a number of big name speakers tell them at length about the issues. Speakers typically dwell on abstract problems and political issues that are not concretely connected to the everyday lives of those listening. Sometimes the speakers dwell entirely on the problem, offering few solutions other than signing a postcard or giving money to the organization that put the rally together. People come and leave, and they are not left with a sense of participation that amounts to much more than having been a body in a crowd that will invariably be undercounted by the corporate media, if it is reported on at all.

Our strike rally allowed anyone to approach the mic and talk about the war in any terms they wanted. That most of them spoke of their personal experiences, their friends and relatives serving in Iraq, their own reasons for opposition, and how other things they care about (the environment, Darfur, educational policy) are connected to the war was no coincidence. That the crowd connected with them with such passion is due entirely to this personal-political resonance. Our creativity also allowed us to take the freeway. Had we over-planned we could probably not have acted in unison like that. We resisted that urge to play chess master and instead allowed every “pawn” to jump from the board and make its own move. All of this is related to our anti-elitism. By resisting the urge to allow experts and celebrities to tell us what’s important and what to do we created an atmosphere where learning and transforming was much more about participation and cooperation, not passive listening. Doing so helps us understand that we can make change and that we don’t necessarily need to look upon leaders (both movement leaders but also political leaders) to make it for us.

By practical and localized I mean to say that we acted in a way that had an effect on the war, and that this was appropriate to our locality. The student strike makes sense to students as a means of protest and disruption of business as usual. UCSB is a reasonable target for our efforts because it is the largest institution that students are all directly connected to that provides material and intellectual support to those prolonging this war of aggression. The flaws with trying to organize in the opposite direction, e.g. following calls from centralized organizations to carry out generic actions across the nation is that they are often insensitive to the needs and realities of what’s happening within a particular community. Mass actions coordinated across places are possible and important, but by no means the default sort of activism we should work toward. We should be especially critical of calls put out in a vertical manner, from centralized organizations in D.C. or San Francisco and sent down the food chain of activism to the grassroots. Coordinated actions must be carried our laterally from peer-to-peer if they are to be of any real consequence.

By disruptive I mean that we did something that instrumentally had an impact on UCSB’s material/intellectual contribution to the war, and also that we disrupted the business as usual which allows students and others to go about their daily lives without ever having to think about the war and their connection to it. In terms of measuring the impact of our strike I would estimate that the legitimacy lost to those who rule over our university and country was tiny, and that the actual impact our road occupation had on UCSB’s material/intellectual contribution to the war was very, very small. But it was a very, very small step in the right direction toward collective action that channels our anger and opposition in ways that chip away at the highly complex social division of labor, a chain of work, consumption and obedience that is the war effort. Its smallness was by no means an indication of its futility, but rather its powerful truth because the truth is that we can only contribute what we can based upon our social position. We can only oppose the war through our position’s specific links and what is needed of us to keep the war going. For students this means keep going to class, be a good consumer, don’t ask questions, let the UC take in military research contracts, ignore the nuclear weapons labs, let the armed forces recruit on our campus, and don’t forget to smile. There is no national or global position we can leap into by disembodying ourselves. Believing that there is has led many to waste considerable time and resources on traveling to Washington D.C. or some capitol city on a weekend to take part in a rally that beyond its symbolic significance is pretty ineffective. If latched onto by localities across the nation the strike model could result in the sort of localized movement necessary to stop the war through mobilizations that withdraw real support and challenge authority. Localizing the effort also builds long-term capacity to keep moving forward and changing society for the better.

We’ve also been critically self-reflexive. We’ve been willing to criticize ourselves and others in a positive way. We’ve tried to understand the concerns of our friends and fellow organizers and to shape our plans accordingly. We are, however, just now entering the phase of this reflection (this letter itself being a reflection) and so we have much to learn about ourselves and each other in the coming months.

From here on I feel that we should try to stay true to all of this. A big mistake we could make would be to untether our activity from the local institutions and structures that we actually have the power to intervene in and change. Long time antiwar organizer and social movement theorist Andrew Lichterman has written recently that:

“Issues like imperial wars, the U.S. military budget, or a global economy that increasingly forces development choices on cities and entire countries that benefit only a fraction of their population would seem to require work focused at the national and international level. The foundation for our work, however– the construction of the social power that allows anything more than superficial, ephemeral victories at that scale– still must be built from the bottom. The hard conversations, the difficult process of building trust and working alliances that last, most often take place around concrete struggles over whether and why we should reject a new military base or factory and the high-paying jobs that come with it, over whether a city or region should try to swim against a tide that will raise high the boats of those fortunate few who work for or sell to global corporations, while casting the rest of us adrift.”

What this means for UCSB students and our friends in the greater Santa Barbara community is impossible to spell out before we take action, but we’ll never know unless the actions we take are informed by our locality’s position in the militaristic and imperial order of things beyond our immediate reach and vision. Our action must be informed by our particular relation to this larger chain of oppression and exploitation in order for it to be effective. And it’s got to be more than symbolic. It will have to costs each of us something, but in the process we will gain more than we could ever know.

Students at UCSB who want to build a powerful campus antiwar movement must look first and foremost at the university they attend when addressing the war. As the largest military industrial contractor in the region with a “military sciences” department, and a pair of nuclear weapons labs UCSB plays no small part in the killing. With a missile factory just a mile north of campus and a cluster of military-industrial corporations in and around Goleta and Santa Barbara students must start asking hard questions about this sort of economic base: what are these missiles made for? Who benefits from weapons research and manufacturing in our community? Is it ethical to build weapons that go toward illegal and immoral wars of aggression? Is all of this really for “defense”? What is Vandenberg Air Force Base? In a region dominated by a dysfunctional car culture that just voted down measure D (a bill that would have allocated funding to public transport and green transport infrastructure) students and others should ask hard questions about our community’s oil consumption, something that no one doubts is connected to the war. How can Santa Barbara be more than a pretty place, but also a sustainable place that does not rely on environmental devastation and war in other parts of the world to fuel its highways? Why is there a branch office of the corporation that manufactures depleted uranium ammunition for the US military on State Street in downtown Santa Barbara? And in very general terms, why is Santa Barbara so terribly wealthy? Why is it such a bubble of privilege and pleasure for many of its residents and the students who move here? Why at the same time is there poverty and inequity in our backyard? How can we change this?