Biden says white supremacy is the nation' s biggest threat. Where are those white supremacist rascals?

President Biden spoke at Howard University‘s commencement ceremony a few days ago, where he told his audience that "white supremacy" is the nation’s biggest threat. I’m not buying it.

I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is a majority-Black city. Our mayor is African American. Our police chief is African American. Our school superintendent is African American, and African Americans are well-represented on the municipal council and the school board.

 Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge has an African American president. The LSU law school recently appointed an African American woman with impeccable academic credentials as its new Dean.

Are there white supremacists in Baton Rouge? Probably, but they keep well hidden. If President Biden knows where they are, I wish he would point them out to me.

Everyone agrees that the United States has a shameful racist past. As late as 1955, an African American boy was lynched in Mississippi by a racist mob. Even today, I’m sure there are pockets of virulent racism throughout the United States.

Nevertheless, the nation has come a long way since the Supreme Court desegregated public schools in 1954. The nation elected its first African American president in 2008, and our current vice president is a Black woman.

I was deeply offended by President Biden’s remarks, which can fairly be described as race-baiting. It certainly was not a helpful thing to say to a mostly Black audience.

President Biden’s shameful speech reminds me of a passage from Solzhenitsyn’s novel, Cancer Ward. The trouble with Stalinist Socialism, one character observed, is that you can never hate enough. You can never say I’ve hated enough. From now on, I’m going to love.

Just as the soulless bureaucrats of Stalinist Russia constantly searched for more people to vilify, more people to denounce, and more people to ostracize, Biden constantly searches for more ways to divide Americans rather than unite us. He is like the wealthy planters in the Reconstruction South, who pitted poor Whites against poor Blacks and, thus, kept both groups from prospering.

But perhaps I am giving President Biden too much credit. We all know the President simply reads what is put in front of him when he makes a speech. Perhaps it is President Biden’s speech writers who are the hate mongers, and not the President himself.

Mildred and Richard Loving

Get smart before you go to college because you might not get smarter while you're there

 I had a stroke last month, and I spent three weeks at a rehab center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. During my time there, I was treated by several gifted occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech therapists.

All my therapists were young women in their twenties. Every day I was inspired by these therapists’ competence, energy, and optimistic spirit.

Why did these women choose therapy as their occupation instead of gender studies or sociology? Why were they spending their days teaching elderly people how to walk and feed themselves instead of working as a government bureaucrat?

This is what I learned. The women who choose to become physical therapists and occupational therapists selected their vocation early, and they planned their college studies to reach a specific goal.

One young woman, I’ll call her Laura, told me she was awarded a state scholarship for her undergraduate studies, which she received based on her high school GPA and her score on the ACT exam. This scholarship award was good for four years, but she managed to graduate in three years, which allowed her to use her scholarship money for the first year of her graduate studies. she finished college with no debt.

Laura had to take out loans to finance her master's degree program in physical therapy, but she lived frugally and only borrowed $22,000. When the COVID crisis hit, the Department of Education put a hold on student debt collection. Unlike most student debtors, Laura kept on making monthly payments during the whole time of the COVID moratorium. She told me she reduced the amount of her debt from $22,000 to $17,000 during this time.

Unfortunately, I might say tragically, millions of college students do not pursue their vocational goals with the same discipline and clear-mindedness that Laura displayed. They see college as a time to party, to drink, and to engage in casual sex. They see student loans as a way to live a lifestyle they could not afford with their parents’ limited financial resources. They choose their academic majors carelessly. Perhaps they major in sociology because they heard it is an easy major. Maybe they choose a major like gender studies or ethnic studies in order to nurture a sense of victimhood.

When these hapless fools graduate from college, they learn that there are no jobs for people who graduated in the humanities or the social sciences. They realize they have no job skills at all. They can’t solve problems, they can’t write coherently, and they lack the people skills to be successful in the workplace.

Thank God there are still young people like Laura, who understand they have a responsibility to become productive citizens, and they have a desire to do something useful with their lives, even even if the job involves the unglamorous work of teaching an old man to walk, talk, and feed himself.

Not everyone can major in gender studies.

Why are universities opening campuses in Washington, DC? Bedause that’s where the money is

 Someone asked Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is," he replied.

If you were to ask the elite universities why they are opening campuses in Washington, DC, you would get a similar answer: Because that’s where the money is.

As reported in a recent issue of Inside Higher Ed, more than 40 American universities have opened campuses in the nation’s capital. For example, UCLA established a branch campus in DC at the cost of $50 million. It celebrated the event by flying the UCLA marching band to Washington, which must’ve cost the University a few additional bucks.

Carol Folt, UCLA‘s president, described the new outpost as the “Trojan Embassy,“ as if the university is a nation unto itself. So many universities have placed campuses near Dupont Circle in Washington, that the area has been described as “a kind of Embassy Row for non-local higher Ed institutions "

Why are so many universities setting up shop hundreds of miles from their flagship campuses? College leaders articulate all kinds of high-minded motivations. Some told Inside Higher Ed that their institutions “are increasingly looking to establish or fortify bases for developing relationships with policymakers and grant writing government offices. UCLA’s president said she hopes the new campus will help UCLA “play a larger role in shaping federal policy “on a wide range of issues.

Another higher education spokesperson explained the universities’ presence in DC this way: “Between what’s going on in the political realm and what’s going on in the grant making world, it is becoming more competitive to get this federal funding, and these are huge parts of these campuses’ revenue streams…. They believe if they’re only planted in one spot, they’ll have less of a voice "

Or, as Willie Sutton might’ve put it, the universities are in Washington, DC, because that’s where the money is. Like crack addicts, American colleges are hooked on federal money, and they want to be closer to their supplier. Or, to use another analogy, the universities have become a bunch of hookers lined up on Pennsylvania Avenue—whores who will turn any trick for cash.

The colleges will say that their District of Columbia presence benefits students. In Washington, higher education leaders argue' students can learn the art of politics, policymaking, and grant writing.

I disagree. Washington, Like most American metropolises, is an increasingly dangerous place to live. Why would any student want to take out student loans to live in an expensive, crime-ridden city teaming with venal lobbyists, sociopathic politicians, and unelected bureaucrats who believe they have the divine right to tell Americans living in flyover country how to live their lives.

Moreover, a college education becomes more expensive with each passing year. Why should students pay for branch campuses in Washington, DC, which mainly exist to feed college leaders’ pathological hubris and grandiosity?

I’m bored: Let's go to war with Russia

Peter, Paul and Mary, the iconic folk singers from the 1960s, sang several songs protesting the war in Vietnam. “Where have all the young men gone?” they sang. “Gone for soldiers, every one.” And then the refrain: “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

Apparently, the answer to that question is not yet because our government is resolutely pushing the United States toward war with Russia.

So far, Ukraine is doing the fighting and dying in its year-long conflict with Russia, sustained by American weapons, technology and military expertise. Ukraine appears to be holding its own, but it would be a mistake to believe that Russia will simply give up and abandon its imperialistic ambitions to annex a portion of its western neighbor. Certainly, in my opinion, Russia will never surrender Crimea.

The American mainline media is fond of describing Russia as a regional power with an incompetent military and unstable leadership. I’m not sure that’s true.

Napoleon thought he had defeated Russia when he captured Moscow in 1812. In Napoleon’s mind, all that was left to do was wait for Russia’s military leaders to admit they had been beaten and formally surrender.

But the Russians never showed up to surrender. Instead, winter set in, and a cataclysmic fire burned down most of Moscow.

Rather than spend the winter in a burned out city, Napoleon decided to march his troops back to France. That’s when the Cossacks showed up. Russian cavalry harassed the French army on its long retreat and Napoleon lost ninety percent of his troops before he reached safety.

During World War II, Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941 and drove the Russians back across a broad front. The Nazis made it to the outskirts of Moscow but they never captured the city. The Germans besieged Leningrad for 900 days but the Russians refused to surrender, although one million Leningrad civilians died from starvation during the siege.

Are there any lessons to be learned from history? I think there are. Russia may appear to be on the verge of defeat in its war with Ukraine, but that’s what Napoleon and Hitler believed when they picked a fight with Russia.

But what do I know about military strategy and geopolitical affairs? After all, I’m just a retired professor who lives smack dab in the middle of flyover country.

That’s a fair point. On the other hand, what do the bozos in Washington know about military strategy or the tangled history that connects Ukraine and Russia? Apparently, not much.

The witless diplomats and policy wonks who are recklessly pushing our country into war with a nuclear power probably think it’s fun to muck around in eastern European affairs. Who knows? They might get a lucrative book contract out of this fracas or a teaching gig at Harvard.

But what is their goal? Is it to weaken Russia or is it to weaken the United States?

I, for one, do not favor baiting the Russian bear. I do not want my children or grandchildren to suffer or die because some fools in Washington have no idea what the Russians are capable of.

Things fall apart: American civilization is collapsing and it's time to start paying attention

“Things fall apart," William Butler Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," perhaps his most famous poem."The center cannot hold.”

Like many prophecies, Yeats's prediction took a long time to be realized. Now, a little more than a century after Yeats penned those words, his prophecy is finally coming true.

America, the greatest civilization in the history of mankind, is falling apart. The nation that sent 9 million men to Europe and the South Pacific during World War II and sacrificed 300,000 is crumbling. The country that accepted to its bosom the refugees from the Irish potato famine and found homes for the Vietnamese who fled the war in Southeast Asia is about to collapse.

Who would’ve thought that the United States, which conquered the Nazis in World War II, would sneak out of Afghanistan in the dead of night without bothering to tell its allies? Who would’ve thought that a nation dedicated to law and justice would allow criminals, terrorists, human traffickers, and fentanyl to flow across our southern border unmolested?

Our cities have become playgrounds for crime. Citizens who defend themselves against robbers and murderers get arrested while thugs with long criminal records roam the streets. The flagship retail stores of San Francisco are closing because shoplifting has become so rampant that a business cannot survive in one of America's greatest and most beautiful cities.

College presidents once boasted that American higher education is the envy of the world. Young people from across the globe came to the United States to study at our elite universities. Now our colleges have become insane asylums where students and professors spew racist nonsense, and greet reasoned dialogue with catcalls and profanity.

Our secondary schools have forgotten how to teach students to read, write, master grammar, and behave in a civil manner. Suppose young people who graduate from our derelict high schools wish to attend college. In that case, they must borrow extravagant amounts of money to study at institutions where the professors know nothing and have nothing to say.

In our elementary schools, so-called education experts believe it is beneficial to introduce small children to sexual perversion. Parents, who only want the best for their children, are denounced by the teacher's unions as terrorists.

A dysfunctional civilization can last a long time but cannot last forever. A nation that renounces its duty to maintain a safe and orderly society will eventually fall apart.

Like jackals stalking a wounded wildebeest, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran wait to feast on the carrion of a rotting America.

The economy is on the verge of collapse in flyover country, where ordinary Americans strive to live decently and raise their families. If you drive through the rural heartland, the small towns look like the villages of East Africa.

Virtually every American politician is a corporate lackey. Our president is noncompos mentis--the whole world knows that. No one thinks our vice president is capable of assuming presidential duties.

Meanwhile, the financial titans on Wall Street, the media elites, and the grifters who run our universities are getting rich and gloating over their pension plans and their hedge fund profits.

The ultra-wealthy don’t care about what happens to their less fortunate fellow Americans. They abandoned their civic commitments when they banked their first million dollars. They’ve placed their riches in gold and other safe assets. Many have at least one elegant bug-out shelter, perhaps in Costa Rica or Montana.

Armed guards protect the super-rich in their private fortresses. The scamps who accumulated obscene wealth will sip fine California wine and sigh sympathetically about the people on Social Security who starve to death after the economy craters, which it soon will.

But perhaps no one will escape the apocalypse. Marie Antoinette believed she was secure at Versailles and then lost her head. The czar thought his family was well protected by an elite corps of soldiers who had sworn to protect his wife and children. And then the Bolsheviks showed up, and we know what happened.

Watch for the deluge, for the center cannot hold.

Be grateful if you live in a temperate climate where you can grow a vegetable garden both summer and winter. Be grateful if you have basic survival skills. Be thankful if you live near water.

Cling to your family if you have a family. When the apocalypse comes, all you will have are your personal resources and your loved ones.

Surgeon General to fight “epidemic of loneliness”: I’m from the government and I’m here to help

Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s Surgeon General, issued an advisory a few days ago,alerting the nation to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Dr. Murphy’s report, about half of adult Americans experience loneliness, and the Surgeon General warned that loneliness can contribute to depression, high blood pressure, dementia, and other serious medical conditions.

Dr. Murphy announced a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connections Across Society." He called for more research on loneliness, and he pledged to enact pro-connection public policies and to cultivate a culture of connection in American life.

A few years ago, Americans would have greeted the Surgeon General’s advisory with derisive hoots and catcalls. Who believes the federal government can do anything to make Americans feel less lonely? What is Dr. Murthy proposing, Americans might once have asked: A government-run dating service?

Today, however, Dr. Murthy ‘s advisory is taken seriously. Maybe a few billion dollars in federally funded research at the nation’s elite universities will reveal how the nation can conquer loneliness After all, who knows more about loneliness than a university professor?

Perhaps federal money can banish loneliness from our daily lives, but I am skeptical. Americans once looked to their churches, their families, and social clubs for social connecutiveness. Unfortunately, many Americans have turned their backs on these institutions. Do we really think the federal government can provide the social connections that our religious faith, our families and our bowling leagues offer?

Besides, a little loneliness may not be such a bad thing. Throughout history, loneliness has inspired great art, great literature, and great music. Edward Hopper’s famous painting, “Nighththawks,” for example,masterfully captures the anomie and isolation of early 20th century urban life. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has spoken to generations of American adolescents because it is an almost perfect expression of youthful isolation.

Country music, perhaps America’s most original art form, speaks to millions of Americans because it expresses the loneliness that most of us feel from time to time. Roy Orbison's “Only the Lonely,” Johnny Cash’s “ I still Miss Someone,” and Merle Haggard’s “Looking for a Place to Fall Apart” are so powerful because they express one of the most basic of human emotions, which is loneliness.

In my view, the Surgeon General’s assault on the epidemic of loneliness will not make us less lonely. It will just make our loneliness more banal.

Racially segregated college graduation ceremonies: Are we nuts?

In one of its early school desegregation decisions, the United States Supreme Court expressed the hope that the day would come when there would not be black schools and white schools, but just schools. Now, nearly 70 years after the Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, America is drifting back toward racial segregation.

In recent years, colleges have begun sponsoring segregated graduation ceremonies for favored racial groups. At least one school even has a special graduation ceremony for LGBTQ students.

Of course, the colleges don’t describe these ceremonies as segregated. Rather, in the spirit of the Nazi propagandists, these racially exclusive ceremonies are called affinity events.

Of course, minority students can attend the general graduation ceremonies that are open to everyone, but only the favored groups get their own special graduation celebration.

When I was a child, the movie theater in my hometown was racially segregated. African-Americans could only attend the movies on Sunday evenings. I still remember groups of Black kids walking across the railroad tracks from the north side of town to watch movies that I could see on any day of the week. Could these racially segregated movie nights be properly labeled as affinity events?

Of course, woke academics would say there is a big difference 

between racial segregation in the 1950s and today’s racially segregated graduation ceremonies. But I am not so sure.

Once a university begins offering benefits and privileges to students based on race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, where does it stop? ? How different is a racially exclusive graduation ceremony from a whites-only fraternity or sorority?

A college education has become very expensive. It can cost a quarter of a million dollars to get a degree from an elite university. How do you suppose students in non-favored groups feel about their tuition money being used to subsidize race-based graduation ceremonies for students in favored racial groups?

It is the mission of the universities to prepare their students to thrive in a racially and culturally diverse society. Holding special graduation ceremonies based on race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is contrary to that mission.

ReplyForward

Intimations of Mortality: The Tulsa Edition

 Last month I was in Tulsa dealing with a stressful family crisis. On April 16, I experienced the first of a series of minor strokes that culminated in a major stroke that paralyzed the left side of my body.  I experienced my third mini-stroke at night while in a Tulsa hospital. I believed I would die and was surprised to realize that I was not afraid.

I was terrified of death when I was a child. My father spent most of the Second World War in a Japanese concentration camp. I was born three years after he was liberated. I know now that my father suffered from severe PTSD. As a four-year-old, I found the only way I could engage him was to ask him about his war experiences.

Unfortunately, my father told me more than I could absorb as a child. He told me about American prisoners who committed suicide because they were weak. He told me about prisoners who were executed. He told me about the day he was being transported in a prison ship that was bombed by American Navy pilots, who did not know that the ship contained American prisoners.

I remember my father telling me about the men who could not swim who were standing on the deck of the sinking ship, begging other prisoners to save them. But the prisoners who could swim were too enfeebled by captivity to help their comrades, and the men who couldn’t swim were drowned. 

My father's stories terrified me. He had survived the Japanese concentration camps because he was strong. I was just a child. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to live through the kind of horror he experienced. I would be one of the weak prisoners who would die.

I grew up in a small Oklahoma town. Many of my childhood friends belonged to religious groups that believed anyone who was not a member of their particular denomination was going to burn in hell for eternity.  

I was a gullible kid, and my childhood buddies were sincere in their efforts to proselytize me. Nevertheless, I never figured out which denomination was God's chosen Church. Was it the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Nazarenes, or the Church of Christ? I never figured that out but I was terrified of dying and going to hell. I did not shake off that fear until I was an adult.

Elie Wiesel was put in a Nazi concentration camp as a child during World War II. In his memoir of that experience, he said he was introduced to death at an age when children should know nothing about death except what they read in story books. Weisel was right. Children should be protected from the terrors of life, real or imagined. They will learn soon enough when they are older.

Now I’m 74 years old and recovering from a stroke. Death is near. Maybe I will live five or six more years, or maybe I will die tomorrow. 

I believe in God. He is not powerful enough to protect us from famine, plague, or disease. He could not stop Hitler or Stalin.  Nevertheless, God has filled the earth with beauty and sprinkled it with people who love their families and their fellow humans and are capable of great sacrifice in the service of others. 

When I die, I wish to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the banks of the upper Colorado river in West  Texas. I have sinned and suffered a great deal, but God has blessed me with a lovely wife and family. I live ln one of America's most beautiful states. I have known the goodness of God in the land of the living. I am grateful.

Who dismantled our baloney meters? Biological males excel in women’s collegiate sports

J. Budziszewski, a natural law scholar at the University of Texas, wrote a book titled Written on the Heart, in which he argues that all human beings know the difference between right and wrong. Budziszewski calls this capacity to recognize good and evil  our baloney meters. We know the difference between elemental truth and baloney without being taught. We know that murder is wrong without reading the Ten Commandments. We know child molestation is evil without consulting a psychology article.

Unfortunately, our universities believe that it is their job to dismantle our baloney meters, causing college students to be confused about right and wrong and about reality itself. For example, American universities now permit biological males to compete in women’s collegiate athletic contests. Thus a person with testicles and shoulders broader than Joy Behar’s ass (Greg Gutfeld’s phrase) can collect a trophy for winning a women’s swimming meet. That’s baloney.

Several state legislatures have passed laws banning biological males from competing in women’s sports. President Joe Biden’s handlers, channeling their inner Joseph Goebbels, introduced a federal regulation that permits  biological males to participate in girls’ athletic competition in colleges and schools. More baloney.

What happens to a nation that cannot distinguish between right and wrong? What happens to a society that refuses to recognize basic biology? What happens to a people who allow universities to dismantle our youths’ baloney meters?

America is devolving into an Orwellian society. If we continue down this path, our nation will resemble Russia during the Stalin era or Germany when the Nazis were in power.  Hitler, after all, wanted to create a new national church that would replace the Bible with Mein Kampf.  Now that’s baloney!

We must repair our baloney meters. We must denounce societal forces that distort basic principles of reality and our innate sense of what is right and wrong.  We must stop universities from forcing college students to take out burdensome loans to pay for educational experiences that are intentionally designed to leave them confused, alienated, and morally adrift.

Reality sucks in flyover country

I don’t give a shit about the media elites, the coastal elites, the influencers, the financial moguls, and the assholes, who inhabit Hollywood and our universities. I live in a different world, a world as different from the world of Nancy Pelosi and Don Lemon as Mongolia differs from France. 

I am in a Louisiana rehab hospital recovering from a stroke. Over the past two weeks, I have met the people who do the real work in the United States: the first responders, the nurses, the emergency room staffers, the occupational therapists, the physical therapists, and the medical technicians.

Today, I met an occupational therapy assistant, whose story I would like to share. Laura is in her early 20s and works two jobs. She recently married a man who is a fire department dispatcher and also works as a photographer on the side. They want to have children but they can’t afford the added expense. They are burdened by credit card debt, including the loan that Laura’s husband took out to buy an engagement ring.

In spite of the fact that they’re working four jobs, Laura and her husband barely making ends meet. The payments they make on their credit cards barely cover the interest, so their credit card debt is not going down. In addition, Laura has student loans, which she has not had to pay due to the Covid crisis. If she is required to resume making monthly loan payments, her family’s frugal budget will be completely wrecked.

I gave Laura a little advice. She and her husband have equity in their home, told her that she and her husband should take out a home equity loan and pay off their credit card debt. I warned her, however, that they must have the discipline not to use their credit cards again or their debt will continue creeping up.

I could give Laura no guidance about her student loans because no one knows what federal policy will be.Will students’ loans be forgiven? Will students be forced to resume making monthly payments in a few months? Will the Biden administration‘s new income based repayment plan be good for Laura and her family?

Something is wrong when a young couple working four jobs in high-demand fields can’t make ends meet. Why are we focusing on transgender athletes instead of people like Laura—people living in flyover country in an economy that does not allow them to prosper? Why are we sending weapons and ammunition to Ukraine instead of strengthening our education system, which is near collapse?

It is clear to me now that flyover country is a colony that is being exploited by the coastal elites. The powerful are thriving while the people who do the real work in this country are sinking into poverty. The people dwelling in the heartland are decent people. They are not homophobes, transphobes, or white nationalists. They simply want to reap the benefits of hard work and maintain the lifestyle that their parents enjoyed. 

 What a tragedy that the media elites, the universities, the legal system, and the federal government despise the people who love our country and want to make it better. The smug oligarchs who are prospering now may believe that the status quo will last forever. But it won’t last forever.

They should remember that the Russian nobility were wiped out by the bolsheviks at the end of the first world war, and that the German middle class was obliterated by political violence, inflation, racist hysteria, and finally the Nazis.

Turning adults into infants: Going to college in the era of wokeness

 Early this month, Students at American University petitioned college leaders to place Narcan--an antidote for drug overdoses--in university dormitories. Why? Because an AU student was hospitalized recently from drug poisoning. 

“To wait to implement Narcan at AU is unethical and deadly," the petition argued. "Students will continue to use substances during college, and it is in the interest of their health to prepare for action."

At the University of Houston, a student committed suicide by jumping from an upper floor of a classroom building--the third student to die that way. The solution, student advocates suggested, was to modify the structure with "anti-suicidal infrastructure," such as bars or nets.

According to recent studies, many college students suffer from "food insecurity." They're not hungry, but they're worried about food. 

What to do? Open food pantries where students can pick up free food. Without free food, students might have to switch to cheaper cellphone plans. The horror!

College students have problems. Indeed, they've always had problems. Many are depressed and impoverished, and quite a few experiment with alcohol and illegal drugs.

Whose job is it to deal with college students' daily challenges? University leaders declare that it is their job. They promise to cheerfully deal with all student problems if only they can get enough federal money to hire more well-paid administrators to focus on the crisis of the hour.

I'm okay with that. But here's the thing. College administrators have become so focused on their students' social problems that they've forgotten their core mission: to ensure that students get a solid education that will prepare them to be mature adults who can function in the real world.

As we have seen recently, law students at Stanford University shouted down a federal appellate judge who had been invited to speak on campus. At San Francisco State University, Riley Gaines, an invited speaker who argued that men shouldn't compete in women's varsity sports, was assaulted with threats and obscenities and had to be escorted out of the speaking venue by the police.

Colleges have been converted from learning institutions to nursies for pampered adults who behave like infants. Our universities like this state of affairs because their students have become so stupid that they're willing to take out student loans to be treated like babies.

Riley Gaines was shouted down at San Francisco State University.

Froma Harrop Has Spoken: The Democrats Will Show Kamala Harris the Exit Door

 Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop is a faithful spear carrier for the Democratic Party. It was Harrop who publicly suggested that Bernie Sanders was a racist ("racist lite")when he was battling Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries in 2016.  Harrop's views seldom depart from those of the Democratic Party's insiders.

Thus, I was startled to read Harrop's scathing criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris in a recent op-ed essay. Harris, Harrop wrote, has a "record of problematic conduct" and gaffes "and doesn't understand that California swagger married to identity politics is not universally loved by American voters."

Harrop professes to be mystified by Biden's choice of Harris as vice president. "Why Biden made her his running mate floors me to this day." 

Harrop even goes so far as to challenge Harris's status as a member of an oppressed minority. "Harris'[s] mother was a medical researcher from India and her father a Jamaica-born professor of economics at Stanford," Harrop observed. "She was hardly a disadvantaged victim of Jim Crow." Ouch!

In my mind, Froma Harrop's flaming denunciation of Kamala Harris is a clear signal that the Democrats are dumping Harris before the 2024 presidential race. I certainly hope so.

Perhaps President Biden could find a quiet post for Kamala to get her off the national stage. She'd make a great U.S. Ambassador to Chad.

69,000 students filed Borrower-Defense Claims Against the Universtiy of Phoenix: Zero Have Been Approved

 Recently, someone filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Education. How many Borrower Defense claims have students filed against the University of Phoenix (UP), the requester asked, and how were these claims resolved?

DOE's FOIA Service Center zipped back a reply, and the response is interesting. More than 69,000 UP students filed Borrower Defense claims against the for-profit school over the past seven years.  Almost 20,000 of these claims were denied, and ZERO have been approved.

Borrower Defense claims are complaints filed by students with DOE claiming that their college misled them in some way about the education the college provided. For example, the college might give false information about:

[T]he transferability of credits, job placement rates, completion and withdrawal rates, graduates' future earning potential, career services, the cost of attendance, the amount of federal student aid, and accreditation status . . . .

If DOE concludes that a student's complaint is valid, it will cancel that student's federal college loans. 

President Biden's DOE has been receptive to Borrower Defense claims and has canceled almost $14 billion in student debts owed by 890,000 people who attended for-profit colleges. 

In Sweet v. Cardona, DOE settled a class action suit by granting debt relief to 200,000 students who attended more than 150 for-profit colleges. The cost of the settlement was $6 billion. 

Several famous for-profit schools were named in that settlement, including DeVry University, Grand Canyon University, and Walden University. The University of Phoenix was omitted. Why?

Perhaps because UP is owned by Apollo Global Management and the Vistria Group, two private equity firms with important political connections. 

Marty Nesbitt is the co-CEO of Vistria. He is a close personal friend of President Obama and served as treasurer for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Currently, he is the chair of the Obama Foundation, which is in charge of planning the Obama Presidential Center. 

Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management, significantly contributes to both Democratic and Republican politicians. According to a 2021 article, Apollo has made $16 million in political contributions since 1990 and spent $34 million on lobbyists since 1998 (citing OpenSecrets.org).

On the other hand, perhaps the University of Phoenix has never misled anyone or misrepresented anything over the past seven years.  That would explain why 69,000 students or former students filed Borrower Defense claims against UP since 2016, and none have been declared valid by DOE.

Marty Nesbitt, co-CEO of the Vistria Group

Three quarters of a million student borrowers have filed "borrower defense" claims against colleges: They want their student loans canceled

 Dahn Shaulis posted a provocative commentary yesterday on Higher Education Inquirer. He reported on the recent settlement of Sweet v. Cardona, a class-action lawsuit accusing the U.S. Department of Education of mishandling borrower defense claims. 

In essence, the plaintiffs claimed they took out federal student loans to attend schools that misrepresented their offerings or violated various state laws.  As Shaulis pointed out, nearly all the schools affected by the lawsuit are for-profit colleges.

Under the settlement terms, DOE will cancel federal student-loan debt owed by 200,000 borrowers. The cost: about $6 billion. This is in addition to the $ 7.9 billion in loan relief to 690,000 students under the terms of earlier borrower-defense settlements.

Fourteen billion dollars in canceled loans owed by 890,000 students: that's a lot of misconduct. Which schools have been named by students filing borrower defense claims?

DOE attached an appendix to its announcement of the Sweet litigation listing more than 150 schools. The list of accused malefactors--almost all for-profit institutions--includes a for-profit law school and a for-profit Caribbean medical school.

As we might expect, the word has gotten out among student borrowers that President Biden's DOE is much more receptive to borrower defense claims than President Trump's callous crew.  As Mr. Shaulis reported, there are now 750,000 pending borrower defense claims, and they keep rolling in at the rate of 16,000 a month.

I'm all in favor of DOE's generosity toward students who took out federal loans to attend for-profit institutions and didn't get their money's worth. I have no sympathy for the for-profit colleges, many of which are owned by private equity funds that don't give a flip about the quality of education their institutions deliver.

Nevertheless, it is not feasible for DOE to continue entering into large borrower-defense settlements unless it cracks down on the chief offender--the for-profit college industry.

Basically, DOE is behaving like a wealthy parent who repeatedly pays the damages for a profligate son's mayhem without demanding that the kid stop misbehaving.  

Biden Administration's Proposed Income-Driven Repayment Plan for Student Debtors is a Disaster

 Everything Everywhere, All at Once. That's a good description of the Department of Education's handling of the federal student-loan program. From every perspective and by any measure, the program is a disaster.

Even before COVID, the program was in crisis. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos admitted in a 2018 speech that only one out of four borrowers were paying down the principal and interest on their loans. And she reported that about 20 percent of borrowers were either delinquent on their loans or in default.

But why dwell on evil tidings?  Shortly after Betsy resigned from the Trump administration, her speech was removed from the web. 

Then came the COVID pandemic, and the feds paused all student-loan debt collection. Thus, 43 million college borrowers stopped making monthly loan payments without penalty and without accruing interest. This pause has now lasted three years.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the cost of the loan repayment pause was $155 billion as of December of last year. And that cost continues going up as each day goes by.

To add fuel to the flames--the Biden Administration is rolling out a modified income-based repayment plan, which is about as close as one can get to free money.

Under the new plan, undergraduate borrowers will only pay 5 percent of their discretionary annual income on their student loans, which is generously defined as the amount over 225 percent of the federal poverty-level guidelines.

For example, college graduates in three-member households will only pay 5 percent of their annual income over $55,935. Thus, grads making $50,000 a year will make monthly payments of zero, regardless of how much they borrowed!

Our scatter-brained Department of Education estimates this plan will cost the taxpayers $138 billion over ten years--chicken feed!

However, the Penn Wharton Budget Model projects the cost to be more than double DOE's estimate--$333 billion to $361 billion.

Why are the estimates so different? Because Penn Wharton reasonably predicts that more borrowers will sign up for this new easy-peasy repayment plan. 

Currently, about a third of eligible student debtors participate in an income-based repayment plan.  Penn Wharton estimates that 70 to 75 percent of student borrowers will sign up for the new program because most borrowers will only be required to make token payments (or no payments) on their student loans. 

Penn Wharton also predicts that students will take out bigger loans when they realize the new income-based repayment plan is breathtakingly generous.  If that happens, the cost of the program will be even higher.

In short, the Department of Education's new income-based repayment plan is nutso.  It will encourage students to take out ever-larger student loans, which, in turn, will prompt colleges and universities to keep raising the cost of tuition.

DOE's revised income-based repayment plan is nutso.

Young professors should think about their retirement before taking their first job

 The academic job market is terrible right now--especially for people with newly minted PhDs in the humanities or social sciences. A person who graduates with a doctorate in those fields might be tempted to take the first job offer rather than wait for an offer from a more prestigious university or one that pays a higher salary--an offer that might never come.

That could be a big mistake. Before taking any academic job, young profs must investigate the university's retirement plan. Why? Because retirement programs at universities differ widely from state to state.

Here are two cautions for academicians looking for that first tenure-track job:

First, look at the retirement programs at the colleges you are considering. Some states have better retirement plans for public-college professors than others. 

Some states do not participate in Social Security, and public employees in those states will not get a Social Security check when they retire.  Louisiana is one of those states, along with Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, and several others that do not have universal coverage for all their public employees.

That may not mean much to young scholars in their twenties or thirties, but it will mean a lot to them when they celebrate their 65th birthday.

You may think this is not a big problem because you plan to accumulate Social Security credits when you work in states that participate in Social Security (most of them). You will get a Social Security check based on those credits. 

You should know, however, that you will be penalized for being in a non-Social Security retirement program, which will reduce your Social Security benefits.

The rules are complicated, so do your own research. However, if you spend your entire career at a public university in Louisiana, you will get nothing from the Social Security Administration when you retire.

Second, professors at the beginning of their careers should carefully consider whether they want to join their public university's defined-benefit plan or select an optional retirement plan (offered by companies like VALIC and TIAA-CREF) that builds retirement income by investing in mutual funds.

You may think the stock market will produce more income for you than a defined-benefit plan, but who knows? Sometimes the stock market is up, and sometimes it is down. Where will the markets be when you plan to retire?

Make your own decision, but you will be asked to decide when you start work, and that decision is likely irreversible.

This is my experience. I have a defined-benefits pension from my Texas years and retirement income from my optional retirement plan based on the years I worked in Louisiana.  

You know what? I like the Texas defined-benefit plan better than the Louisiana ORP.

What do you mean I'm not in the Social Security program?

Are we out of our minds? LSU's women's basketball coach makes $2.5 million and has 171 pairs of shoes

 General Motors found a cash cow when it created GMAC, its lucrative auto financing arm. People said that GM evolved from being a car maker with a finance company to a financial institution that also made automobiles.

We might say something similar about the nation's public universities. Once, they were educational institutions that offered varsity sports. Now they are becoming sports franchises that educate students as a side business.

Look at Louisiana State University, the Pelican State's flagship public university. According to Tiger Rag, "the Bible of LSU Sports," LSU's football program spent $25 million in salaries and wages last year and lost almost $14 million in Fiscal Year 2022.  

LSU's head football coach Brian Kelly makes about $6.5 million annually. Ed Orgeron, who took LSU to a national championship, was bought out in 2021, costing LSU's athletic program $17 million.

Kim Mulkey, LSU's women's basketball coach, makes $2.5 million a year and owns 171 pairs of shoes. She also has a gig endorsing Gordon McKernan, a personal injury lawyer. Her likeness appears on billboards all over Baton Rouge. 

Speaking of Gordon McKernan, perhaps Baton Rouge's leading personal injury attorney, he estimates that he gave between $750,000 and $1,000,000 to NIL (short for "Names, Images, and Likeness,") an outfit that helps college athletes sell their "brand" by marketing themselves for cash.

How much money do LSU football players get for selling their brands? According to Tiger Rag, LSU's 85 scholarship football players are worth an average of $479,000!

And then there is the sports betting revenue. LSU proudly announced that it was the first university in the Southeastern Conference to sign a contract with a gaming company. Sports betting is now advertised in Tiger Stadium (along with the Louisiana Lottery). 

LSU's spin doctors emphasize that much of the money that pours into LSU athletics comes from its athletic foundation, which is a separate entity from the university. This is true, but does it make sense for wealthy individuals and corporations to get tax breaks for supporting university sports? 

LSU's Tiger Athletic Foundation generated $41 million in revenue in 2021, mostly from donations from wealthy individuals and businesses. And LSU is the only school in the SEC that gets more donations for athletics than it does for academics.

Of course, everyone in Louisiana loves sports. I get pumped when the LSU Tigers play one of their arch-rivals during the SEC football season.  But who can afford a ticket to a ballgame, much less the eight-dollar beer sold in the stadium?

I wonder whether Louisianians are focused on the right things--the future of our youth, for example.

Louisiana's public universities rank next to last in terms of return on investments for students enrolled in them. According to U.S. News, Louisiana ranks #48 in education. The state is the nation's second poorest, with a poverty rate of almost 18 percent. 

Some Louisianians are doing fine. LSU football players get paid to endorse Hooters and a personal injury lawyer.  The athletic coaches are getting rich, and even some assistant coaches make more than a million dollars a year.

Yet our state's public schools are the third worst in the US, and our coastline loses the equivalent of a football field every ninety minutes.

Maybe Louisians should rethink their priorities. In the meantime, Go Tigers!!

Kim Mulkey, you look fabulous!