Miles Horner
11/15/23
Settler and Native Ecologies of Power
Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees and Settler-Colonialism as a Structure
This Saturday, November 18th, 2023, WesDivest organized a die-in, a disruption-based form of protest, to protest the current state of the board of directors at Wesleyan. Eight of the board members, John B. Frank, Marc Casper, John M. Shapiro, Scott Gottleib, Andy Fairbanks, Adam Bird, Ellen West, and Robert B. Purhzan, all have deep business or personal connections to companies facilitating and profiting off of the death of genocides worldwide. Through their positions as facilitators of the networks of global capitalism, we can see how settler colonialism and American capitalism continue to rely on the displacement, elimination, and extraction of people and land. Settler colonialism is still happening, and resistance to it is essential for there to be a shift in thinking and practice. This harkens back to Nick Estes, and his discussion of settler temporality. A linear conception of time focuses on injustices past; focusing only on healing harm does nothing to prevent harm in the future.
Adam Bird is a facilitator of this genocide through his position as a senior partner at McKinsey and Company, a multinational advising firm that has its fingers in literally every single multinational corporation worldwide. They’ve advised numerous presidents throughout their 100-year history, and advertise that they regularly advise 18 of the top 20 defense companies in the world.
Andy Fairbanks, from 1997-2011, was the head of human capital relations in the Department of Defense. IBM has regularly outfitted and re-outfitted the US military with IT technology, most notably starting in 2002 (when Fairbanks was the head of relations with the Dept. of Defense). This $100m contract is most notable for the “Development of a financial management enterprise architecture … [key in the process of restructuring] the (Department of Defense) in an efficient, businesslike manner." (Dov S. Zakhiem, Under Secretary of the Dept. of Defense, 2002). The restructuring of the US military as a business enterprise in the early 2000s is one of the reasons we have the profit machine we do today, and Fairbanks is directly responsible for that restructuring.
Scott Gottlieb was Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner and was on his campaign, transition team, and has remained in contact with the former president even after his resignation in 2019. Why someone with such deep connections to the most reprehensible figure in American politics (and to one of the most influential conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute) is on the board of directors for an extremely liberal university truly baffles me.
Ellen West is the Vice president of investor relations at Google which recently brokered a $1.2 billion contract with the state of Israel to retrofit their defense + surveillance systems with new AI technology. As the VP of investor relations, there is no way that West didn’t sign off on or help land this contract, and therefore is a facilitator of the occupation and of the genocide occurring right now.
John M. Shapiro is the former head of the American Jewish Committee (an organization that has been involved in the facilitation of diplomatic and permanence relations for Israel since its inception in 1948) and the Israel Policy Forum, another pro-Israel organization that has advised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations on their Israel policy. He does this while simultaneously being the head of an investment firm that has nearly 40% of its shares invested in Lockheed Martin. To not only advise world leaders on policies that are complicit in Palestinian erasure and that have directly created the war on terror but also directly profit off those policies in the most destructive manner possible is truly reprehensible.
Robert A. Pruzan is a founding partner at Centerview Partners - a legal firm that helps manage large-scale mergers and acquisitions for multinational corporations. Recently, they helped General Electric, a company deeply intertwined with Israel, seal a $200bn deal, and they helped Exxon, another company deeply intertwined with Israel seal a $50bn deal. As a facilitator of these deals, Purhzan is intertwined with the structure of capitalism and settler colonialism, and every day profits off of the destruction and death of lives worldwide.
Finally, the most objectionable member of the board, John B. Frank, is the vice chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. This company has owned all energy, waste, and water operations in Israel since 2015. The better Israel does, the better they do. This already would be enough to warrant a call for his resignation, but the fact that he is on the Chevron Board of Directors, the second biggest fossil fuel company in the world, really seals the deal. Chevron is also one of the primary drivers of climate change, and every day he sits on the board of directors is another day that he could choose to push for divestment and a clean energy transition, yet every day he doesn’t is another day he is complicit in the destruction of the world for profit.
However, Marc N. Casper, the CEO and President of Thermo-Fischer Scientific, is perhaps even worse. Thermo-Fischer Scientific is one of the biggest biotechnology and biomedical companies in the world, with $44bn in revenue every year. Their products already outfit all of our science centers, and Casper was the chair of the board when the new science center was approved for construction. Thermo-Fischer Scientific recently received mass criticism for its role in helping the Chinese health ministry develop, produce, and outfit Chinese police with a Huaxia PCR amplification test that identified the genotype Uyhgur Muslims. Thermo-Fischer Scientific then proceeded to produce and provide the Chinese government with these tests throughout 2019-2022. Even when the sale of them was banned by the US government in 2019, their tests still appeared in China in 2021. Casper, additionally, is personal friends with Jinping and has bragged to the board that Jinping has been to his house. Casper is partially responsible for and a direct profiteer of that genocide, and there’s no way he can deny it.
Through analyzing these individuals, we can see how the system of settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. As J. Kēhaulani Kauanui says in her 2016 article, “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity, “Taking settler colonialism as a structure seriously allows US scholars, for example, to challenge the normalization of dispossession as a “done deal” relegated to the past rather than ongoing.” These people are presently involved in the creation and proliferation of this structure of settler colonialism. Whether responsible for on-the-ground extraction/destruction like Chevron, IBM, or Alphabet, or responsible for facilitating and creating these business opportunities like Centerview Partners or Mckinsey and Company, or responsible for providing the legal framework for these transactions like the American Jewish Committee, these people are the structure of settler colonialism. As students in opposition to these practices, resistance is necessary. Taking inspiration from previous resistance movements like DAPL, a die-in forces these people to confront their position as facilitators of this genocide. #noDAPL die-ins, which required immense dedication, resistance, and endurance from thousands of activists worldwide, imagined a future outside of the system of capitalism. There was free food, free healthcare, legal aid, and a strong sense of community afforded to all who were willing to imagine a world outside settler colonialism. Imagining a world where an ecologically and culturally devastating project like this would never be considered is what it takes to resist a system as large as settler colonialism. Even though resistance like this can feel ineffective in the face of such entrenched institutions, that resistance is powerful. Creating a tradition of resistance, being influenced by its previous forms, and continuing the ideals of those who came before you is necessary for change to happen. It’s about using these resistance practices so they can influence our attitudes so that we can recognize injustice and the best path of resistance when opportunities arise in the future. Northrup Gunman, Oaktree Capital Management, IBM, Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin stock are all up since October 7th.
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