Duke and Tobias

Getting to the truth about what social relations are really like in this country is sometimes a matter of connecting the dots. Don’t expect the corporate media to do it for you.

Here’s a case in point. As we point out elsewhere in this paper (see page 3 article on a Durham, N.C., protest against “rape culture”), there is great anger and distress among women, young African-American women in particular, over the sexual violence that is perpetrated daily against them. The protest we report on marched past a frat house used by the Duke University lacrosse team, which had hired an exotic dancer for a party and then, according to the young woman, sexually abused her.

After enormous pressure from the mostly male, white establishment in this country, the district attorney dropped the rape charges against the students. Tabloid papers like the Murdoch-owned New York Post had a field day, running the woman’s photo large on its front page with an accusing headline. Right-wing talk shows also ran with the story, lamenting how the fine young athletes (all white) of Duke had been maligned by the woman (African American).

Not long after, the news broke that Randall L. Tobias, the top foreign aid adviser in the State Department, who had been nominated to his cushy job by President Bush, was named publicly as a regular customer of an escort service that is being charged with providing prostitutes to elite clients. Tobias then resigned. It’s likely that the Bush administration, already on the defensive over so many horrible crimes like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, didn’t want any more bad news that could alienate its supposedly “family values” base.

The owner of the escort service, Deborah Palfrey, had announced after being hauled into court that she would post online names and phone numbers from her large client list. “The tentacles of this matter reach far, wide and high into the echelons of power in the United States,” she wrote in a court filing last month. This caused panic in official Washington. She named former Clinton adviser Dick Morris as one of her regular customers, along with an “adviser to the Pentagon” and Tobias. (New York Times, April 29)

Now is the time to connect the dots, since none of the commercial media are doing so.

Tobias, besides being a former chair and CEO of both the giant pharmaceutical Eli Lilly Co. and AT&T International, and besides also being a former administrator of the Agency for International Development, which is notorious for its CIA-connected work abroad, was—have you guessed?—chairman of the board of Duke University from 1997 to 2000.

All this speaks to the fact that Corporate America and its political henchmen are the main purveyors of the violence against women that was being protested in Durham. The lacrosse students were just imitating the rich and powerful when they hired a young woman of color to dance for them and then demanded more for their money. Their cynicism, racism and contempt for women comes from this vicious economic system and its elites, who think anything and anyone can be bought for their pleasure.

The passion and disgust this is arousing among those they have abused and exploited will be their undoing.