Showing posts with label Impeachment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Impeachment. Show all posts

Friday, January 31, 2020

I fell asleep during the Impeachment movie. Did I miss anything?

Like millions of Americans, I watched Impeachment, The Movie. Unfortunately, I fell asleep near the end, and when I woke up, I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.

In my own defense, Impeachment was a very long movie--more than three years, almost as long as Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.  I got up to go to the bathroom during the Mueller investigation, and I never got back on track.

And of course, when a movie is three years long, you gotta have some popcorn. I was smart enough to buy the Value Tub--the one that gives you unlimited refills. It was expensive--$250 plus tax, but I got 127 refills, so it was a pretty good deal.

But the popcorn breaks added to my confusion. I missed parts of the movie when I was making all those trips to the concession counter.

So fill me in. I thought the Mueller investigation concluded that Trump was not guilty of colluding with the Russians, but later in the movie, Hillary Clinton said that he was.

And then Trump was accused of making an illegal phone call to the president of Ukraine. And that had something to do with Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and all the rest of Biden's children. But that was never explained.

But here's the part that really befuddled me.  The impeachment trial in the Senate was triggered by an anonymous whistleblower whose name was never revealed.  And Representative Adam Schiff, the chief prosecutor, claimed he had never met the guy.  Huh? To me, that part of the movie just wasn't believable.

Obviously, the director of the movie, Nancy Pelosi (who played herself in the film), should have cut a lot of the scenes. In my opinion, the movie could have been cut down to about a year and a half.

And there were casting errors.  The guy who played Robert Mueller was obviously miscast. He was supposed to be this bulldog investigator with ironclad integrity, but he came off as some sleepy old guy who was trying to find the remote on his television.

I tell you this--I am not going to watch that movie again. I'm too old to watch three-year movies.

But I'm pumped about the sequel, which comes out next summer--Impeachment: The Empire Strikes Back! This one is about the expulsion of Adam Schiff from the House of Representatives, and Joaquin Phoenix plays Shiff wearing Joker makeup.

I can't wait to see it, and I understand it's only about two months long.


Joaquin Phoenix playing Adam Schiff in Impeachment: The Empire Strikes Back

This essay is also posted at my blog site on American culture: Saints of Flyover Countryflyoversaints.org.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Betsy DeVos' Education Department is a clown car, but no one is laughing

For the last three years, the national political debate has focused on international issues: Russia, Ukraine, and now Syria. But look at what's happening at home. More than 45 million people are indebted by student loans, and more than half of these debtors cannot repay what they borrowed. In effect, they are victims of financial homicide.

Betsy DeVos, President Trump's Education Secretary, is spectacularly indifferent to this crisis, and she has made the crisis worse by her callousness and craven obsequence to the for-profit college industry. Without a doubt, she is guilty of malfeasance and venality. Let's summarize her reprehensible conduct:

Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The Department of Education has flatly refused to administer the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF) competently.  More than three-quarters of a million borrowers were qualified for the  PSLF program by Navient, DOE's contracted loan servicer. But DOE has only approved roughly 1 percent of the applications for loan forgiveness. Apparently, DOE takes the position that 99 percent of the people who believed they were qualified for PSLF loan forgiveness were mistaken.

A federal judge ruled last February that DOE had administered PSLF arbitrarily and capriciously in a lawsuit brought by the American Bar Association. Later, the American Federation of Teachers sued DOE, arguing, like the ABA, that DOE was administering DOE in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.  Has Betsy made amends? No.

Borrower Defense Program.  The federal government has a"borrower defense" process in place for student-loan borrowers to have their student loans forgiven if they can show that their for-profit college defrauded them. A few weeks ago, DOE issued new rules for administering the program. Betsy will allow the for-profit colleges to force students to sign covenants not to sue and waive their right to join class-action lawsuits. DOE's revised rules for processing borrower-defense claims are so onerous that DOE itself estimates that only 3 percent of applicants will get relief.

Student-Loan Bankruptcies.  DOE continues to take the position that distressed student-debtors are ineligible for bankruptcy relief, no matter how desperate the debtor's circumstances.  DOE has a policy in place (perhaps unwritten) that authorizes Educational Credit Management Corporation to assume the right to fight student-bankruptcy cases, and ECMC fights them all.  ECMC, by the way, has accumulated a billion dollars in unrestricted assets--a fat reward for naked brutality.

Betsy DeVos, a multi-millionaire who owns a huge yacht, presides over this clown car of an Education Department, which she has stuffed with cronies from the for-profit college industry. And the taxpayers provide her with a personal security detail that costs almost $8 million a year.

This clown car is not funny. Surely DeVos' maladministration of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, apart from everything else she has done or failed to do, provides ample grounds for impeachment.  I feel sure that if the Democrats voted articles of impeachment against her in the House of Representatives, some Republicans would vote for it.

And, if her reckless and lawless behavior was brought to the U.S. Senate, I think there would be enough bipartisan votes to remove her from office.

 Without question, 45 million student-loan borrowers would be interested in the outcome of any impeachment proceedings, and several million of these people are probably single-issue voters. In other words, millions of college-loan debtors will vote for the presidential candidate in 2020 who promises student-loan debt relief.  That candidate is not the guy who appointed Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education.

Betsy DeVos's Education Department is a clown car.



Thursday, October 3, 2019

America is a two-headed snake and both heads are venomous: Nasty politics will destroy us all

My friend David, a herpetologist, recently returned from a research expedition in India where he discovered a two-headed snake. David identified the snake as a banded krait, a venomous creature common in India and Southeast Asia.  The krait's bite is quite lethal, generally killing the victim in less than eight hours. When a banded krait has two heads, both heads are venomous.

A two-headed snake! How does that work?  Not very well.

David told me that both heads have independent executive powers, although one head usually dominates the other. The two heads sometimes disagree about what direction to take and they often fight with each other for food. Because the two heads don't get along well together, they usually die quite soon if left in the wild.

It seems to me that America has become a two-headed snake. Conservatives dominate in the South, the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain West. Liberals dominate on both coasts and in the large cities--Chicago, Houston, Denver, etc.

At the margins at least, conservatives and liberals hate each other. Liberals are outraged at the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, and some will stop at nothing to overturn the election results. If the Democrats can't impeach him based on the Mueller report, they will try to impeach him for a phone call to Ukraine. If that doesn't work, new justifications will pop into Adam Schiff's head and will continue popping into his head until Trump is out of office.

Meanwhile, legislatures in conservative states are trying to diminish a woman's right to have an abortion, passing laws that may very well be unconstitutional.  And Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has angered so many people with her reckless and heartless administration of the student-loan program that she needs a personal-security detail that costs the taxpayers $21,000 a day.

Our nation's politics are insane, and we are more politically divided now than at any time since the Civil War. Of course, America has seen nasty politics before: the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s, the rising of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and the McCarthy era.  But these demented episodes were short because Americans of goodwill came to their senses. But I see no end to our present political madness.

If Trump is re-elected, his enemies in the Democratic Party will continue to undermine him and plot for new ways to impeach him. If a Democrat is elected and some of the candidates' spending schemes are enacted into law, the nation will quickly go bankrupt and the stock market will plummet so far and so fast that 1929 will look like a Methodist picnic by comparison.

Meanwhile, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are watching our political antics like a bunch of kids eating popcorn during a Three Stooges movie. They can see we are self-destructing, and it must be fun for them to watch.

American politics has become a venomous, two-headed snake. Our elected leaders are so bent on crushing their political enemies that they are willing to wreck the national economy just to harm their foes. And make no mistake: our nasty politics will destroy us all--no matter which venomous head prevails over the other.









Saturday, June 16, 2018

The New York Times lambasts Republicans and Betsy DeVos for catering to for-profit colleges: The Gray Lady overlooks culpable Democrats

In an editorial last month, The New York Times lambasted Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans for protecting the greasy for-profit college industry. "Try as they might," the Times observed, "the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress cannot disguise that they continue to do the bidding of the for-profit industry, which has saddled working-class students--including veterans--with crushing debt while providing useless degrees, or no degrees at all."

Indeed, the Times grumbled, the Department of Education, under DeVos, "has undermined investigations of the [for-profit college] industry by marginalizing or reassigning lawyers and investigators . . ." Major investigations, the Times reported, have been abandoned, including investigations into the activities of DeVry Education Group, Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corporation.

The Times is right of course. Betsy DeVos is the shameless lapdog of the for-profit college crowd, which continues to prey on unsophisticated Americans seeking to get a worthwhile education.  The Times predicts that DeVos' behavior may come back to bite the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, and perhaps there will be repercussions at the ballot box.

But to be fair, servile obsequiousness to the for-profit colleges is bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans have taken campaign contributions from these bandits and both parties have succumbed to the blandishments of the for-profit lobbyists.

In fact, The Nation reported nearly five years ago that two Democratic congressmen were leading an effort to protect for-profit colleges from meaningful regulation.  According to The Nation's reporter Lee Fang, Representative Rob Andrews from New Jersey and Florida congressman Alcee Hastings had taken thousands of dollars from for-profit college executives and for-profit backed political committees.

Andrews is no longer in Congress, but Alcee Hastings is still in office. This is the same Hastings, by the way, who, while sitting as a federal district judge, was charged with bribery, perjury and falsifying documents.  The U.S. Senate impeached him and removed him from his judicial post in 1989.

If the Democrats want to distinguish themselves from their Republican colleagues, they need to speak out forthrightly about the for-profit-college scandal. In my view, the for-profit racketeers cannot be tamed through tougher regulations. The only way to stop these predators from stalking unsuspecting and naive young Americans is to shut the industry down. But the Democrats don't have the courage to speak out against the for-profit mobsters. They seem to hope Americans will overlook their silence about the the for-profit college industry and pin all the blame on the Republicans.

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Florida): Friend of the for-profit college industry


References

Editorial. Predatory Colleges, Freed to Fleece Students. New York Times, May 22, 2018.

Lee Fang. Two House Democrats Lead Effort to Protect For-Profit Colleges, Betraying Students and Vets. The Nation, December 13, 2013.

United States Senate.  The Impeachment Trial of Alcee L. Hastings (1989) U.S. District Judge, Florida.