The Massachusetts Spy: 2024

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Heard Off Campus: Power to the Rich White Men, Right On!

By Business Editor Samuel Insull with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

What's the matter with American higher education?

If you said it's that students are forced to borrow $360,000 that they will never be able to pay back to be taught by unwashed graduate students (also known as the Harvard Plan), you're wrong!

The real problem, according to the very wise suck-ups at New York Times Dealbook, is that rich white men don't have enough power over it.

This may come as a shock to anyone who has observed the death grip that such men have over the ruling bodies and fiscs of America's great and not so great universities, not to mention the destruction of formerly respectable state schools like the University of Florida at the hands of intolerant white men like Ron “These Go-Go Boots are Made for Walking” DeSantis (remember him?).

The great non-white non-rich and half-female unwashed need to get schooled:

Yes, the problem is that rich white male finaglers don't have enough power over what happens on college campuses. Tell us more, Andy:

Many business leaders have told me they are deeply concerned about incidents of harassment against Jewish students that have taken place at and around universities like Columbia and appear to be increasing.

Inside corner offices, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about the most blatant examples, like antisemitic signs and chants or the assault of an Israeli student. But there has been little action from corporations, which have a synergistic relationship with the schools where they recruit employees.

Some executives are privately pondering what they can do. The most common course of action so far has been to pull back on individual donations. The New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for example, said this week that he was “no longer comfortable supporting Columbia University.”

And there is nothing more concerning to the editors of Dealbook than the comfort of Robert Kraft, although left to his own devices he appears generally to be able to find some modest comfort in the happy ending spas found in the strip malls clinging to the swamplands west of Palm Beach.

These concerns were shared privately (which is to say publicly on condition of anonymity) with New York Times reporters on the very same day that The Times reported that Columbia had in fact, without busting heads or arresting peaceful protestors, taken action against anti-Semitic hate speech on its campus:

But don't confuse plutocrats with the facts when they're swinging their great big Master of the Universe dicks around. Not content with cutting off donations or organizing to drive out university presidents who dare to disagree with them (see, e.g., Harvard and Penn), they are conniving new ways to impose their views on people like students and faculty who have some nutty idea that there ought to some freedom of thought on college campuses, regardless of which finagler's name is carved over the door:

But businesses have other levers that affect universities, and some of those levers would undoubtedly put more pressure on universities to take action against antisemitism.

Here’s one out-of-the-box thought experiment: Most businesses scrutinize their vendors quite carefully and maintain approved lists of vendors whose policies align with their own. Companies could scrutinize universities, a main source of their talent, as they would any other vendor. They could tell universities that they won’t hire their students unless the schools take decisive action to stem antisemitism....

To be clear, companies would need to define antisemitism and the satisfactory actions to mitigate it — currently both topics of fierce debate.

Thanks, Andy, for the clarification. And of course if it's one thing that billionaire plutocrats are known for, it's carefully listening to all sides before taking a nuanced approach that reflects the complexities of a fraught situation. Like Elno.

In other words, these immensely powerful creeps could punish the innocent – students graduating with a mountain of debt and looking for work – because of supposed delicts on the part of administrators at the schools from which they graduated. That sounds fair – to Andy.

But the stupid idea that some big-buck douchebag whispered into Andy Sorkin's ear during a quiet cocktail at Manhatta got us to thinking about other uses of economic leverage to get universities to do what they should.

Consider the news from Emory University in Atlanta as reported in The Emory Wheel (as usual, the most reliable college news can be found in the student newspaper, Harvard excepted):

Heavily armed police on campus: what could go wrong?

A young woman cried into a cell phone camera as a police officer dragged her off of Emory University’s Quadrangle around 10:15 a.m. this morning, stating her birthday and her mother’s phone number. Ten minutes later, a young man yelled as another officer walked him off the Quad in handcuffs, shouting that the restraints were too tight and were cutting off his circulation. The officer looped an arm under the protestor’s leg and lifted him, carrying him away as the protestor yelled for help.

The two individuals were among several protestors detained during a demonstration this morning. Protestors gathered on the Quad at 7:30 a.m., erecting around 20 tents in an “encampment for Gaza.” They listened as demonstrators took turns stepping to the front of the group to share speeches through a megaphone, cheering for each other as they declared support for Gaza in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Within three hours, Georgia State Patrol, Atlanta Police Department (APD) and Emory Police Department (EPD) officers walked along the sidewalk before turning onto the Quad and closing in on the protestors.

Screams broke out as the protestors attempted to run away and officers began tackling some of the individuals. Less than a minute after the altercation began, officers released irritant gas on the protestors. Officers tased at least one of the protestors.

An officer outside of the Administration Building told detained protesters they were being taken to DeKalb County Jail. Multiple members of police declined to confirm this information to Emory Wheel reporters.

Police officers had gas masks and used non-lethal ammunition. Officers also tackled protestors and used zip ties to arrest individuals on the Quad.

In short, a peaceful protest that had begun three hours earlier and not interfered with the operations of the university led the Emory administrators to treat paying students like John Lewis in Selma.

Now Emory is a perfectly OK B+ university with pretensions to Ivy League greatness. It competes for the best and the brightest. If I were the parent of little Ethan or Sophia, I'd have a few questions of my own for Emory officials before dropping off a $90K kiss and my pride and joy:

1. Under what circumstances could my child be arrested for peaceful protest?

2. Under what circumstances could my child be suspended or expelled for peaceful protest?

3. If my child is expelled or suspended for peaceful protest, will I receive a tuition refund for the semester?

4. Under what circumstances will your university use police forces to arrest peaceful protesters?

5. How do you vet officers on your campus police force to make sure they have not used excessive force in the past or otherwise committed misconduct?

6. Who decides whether to call in outside police forces?

7. How do you confirm that the members of outside police forces you call onto campus have not been found to have used excessive force or otherwise committed misconduct?

8. Are any officers on campus armed? If so, how do you confirm that they have had appropriate training in the use and abuse of deadly force?

9. Who supervises the campus police? Who supervises the actions of outside police forces you call into your campus?

If the people who pay the bills don't like the answers they're getting from university functionaries, they are free to direct their tuition payments elsewhere. It's not like Emory has a unique position at the zenith of the American collegiate firmament. Far from it.

That's the beauty of the free market, amirite, Andy?

Of course the universities siccing armed police on their students already have an economic incentive to call off the dogs: the students they brutalize today are the ones that universities will be schnorring from for decades after graduation. You'd think any university bigwig would remember this before calling in the 5-0.

And yet they don't. Maybe, just maybe, the grandiose overpaid bureaucrats who run America's universities aren't – very smart?

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

In search of anti-Semitism on Morningside Heights

By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with
Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

We, like most media outlets, spent an inordinate amount of time and energy covering the trials and tribulations of a well-known university located in the Boston area. Perhaps too much time.

You'd think that the only great university in our country was located on the banks of the Charles, upstream (not across) from Boston University.

You'd be wrong.

South of here, there's another academic titan ruling over New York City from its perch on Morningside Heights. It boasts that it owns New York. Its graduates and faculty have made immense contributions to law, medicine, philosophy, economics, physics, engineering, literature, and Hungarian pastries.

Of course, like any great university, it has graduated its fair share of a**holes like Roy Cohn and Norman Podhoretz. But is it fair to judge any university by its worst graduates and faculty? Asking for Alan Dershowitz and Henry Kissinger.

We speak of course of Columbia University in the City of New York. There's no problem too difficult, no intellectual task too complex or recondite for its great minds to resolve just by the application of the sheer force of their intellects.

Apparently, not so much:

The victor of D-Day could have handled it.

A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.

Giving up already fellas? What would former Columbia President Dwight Eisenhower say? In the spring of 1944, did he say “I can't decide whether to invade France through Normandy or across the Pas-de-Calais, so let's call the whole thing off?”

Note to those of you who did not study Modern History at Columbia: he did not.

What would Chancellor Kent say?

We actually know the answer to this one. We were graduated from one of Columbia's brightest lights, its law school. Early in our first year, we learned one thing we've clung tightly to ever since. When a student asked for a definition of a vague term (it might have been something like “due process”), the response from the podium was immediate and thunderous:

“Why do you ask?”

The eminent professor didn't mean that the young whippersnapper shouldn't have asked the question. He meant that the answer to a question depends on the purpose for which it is propounded. The question of what process is due depends on its context: what may be due process in the context of contesting a parking ticket is unlikely to suffice in a capital case (but thanks to our Republican bent Supreme Court and white power states, it usually does).

We wonder if that isn't true of anti-Semitism.

Was something anti-Semitic?

Why do you ask?

Is it to kick someone off campus? ban their books? arrest them for yelling at you in the library? criticize them for something stupid they wrote? take away their teaching positions for asserting that Israel has no right to exist? monitor broadly online content to determine particular threats? defend the corrupt war criminal currently acting as Israel's Prime Minister? defend the right of your yeshiva bochers to duck military service in the IDF?

We suspect the answer to each of these questions is different.

When the question is asked to determine if an extremist group blathering on social media is worthy of closer attention, the definition should be pretty wide, like the IHRA definition which encompasses a number of rhetorical devices used to criticize Israel including applying a “double standard” that the speaker does not use for other countries. We thought that holding Israel to a standard higher than the Moabites, the Canaanites, and other heathen was almost the whole point of Torah, but no matter.

As Kenneth Stern explained,

the 2016 IHRA definition...was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.

So who cares what this Stern guy thinks anyway?

Oh. That's different.

No wonder that Columbia's brightest minds are having difficulty:

“I get letters from parents every single day, just regular people, students,” one of the co-chairs, Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of the journalism school, said in an interview. He said that many of them ask: “‘Why aren’t you listening? Why aren’t you doing anything?’”

The professors argue that their 15-member task force does not need to define antisemitism, because they don’t see it as their task to label things as antisemitic or not. Rather, they want to hear why Jewish students and faculty are upset and see if there are practical solutions that can be found to help them feel more comfortable.

But don't you need some definition when the question is under what circumstances Jewish members of the Columbia community deserve protection from words or deeds that frighten or disquiet them? (Or, for that matter, members of its Islamic and Palestinian communities.)

Let's see if we can help Nick, who despite his fine Harvard College education, seems at sea. Can you decide whether the following statements are anti-Semitic?

How about the frequent Palestinian chant of “From the river to the sea,” which carries with it the belief that only the Palestinian people have the exclusive and indisputable right to live in what is now Israel, leaving no place for Israelis or a Jewish homeland?

That sounds pretty anti-Semitic to us.

Of course, that's the position of the Netanyahu government:

The Netanyahu government’s guiding principle [is] that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and [to] the one-state reality it is implementing on the ground.

That's different then.

How about the Palestinian position that all Israelis, even women and children, are legitimate targets for terrorist activity, because “there are no civilians in Israel?"”

That's certainly repulsive and anti-Semitic by any measure. Sadly, it happens to correspond to the expressed but later disavowed views of the President of Israel, not to mention other even more charming senior officials in the Netanyahu government:

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history.

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,” said Herzog.

He later claimed that he also said nice things about protecting innocent Gazans, should any be found. Whether Israel's subsequent treatment of the civilian population of Gaza conforms to his remarks we will leave to the reader.

One last poser: is it anti-Semitic to demand that Israel be ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population? (Hint: yes.) See how it sounds the other way around:

Israel’s Minister of Finance and settler leader Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israel’s Channel 12 that he was supportive of what he called “voluntary emigration” of Gazans out of Gaza. “All we need,” he said, “is to find countries willing to take them in.” Or in the words of Smotrich’s ideological forebear, Meir Kahane, “they must go.”

It doesn't sound too good.

Where does that leave the tender Hebraic flowers cowering in front of Low Library? Surely every student has a right to be protected from harassment, verbal or otherwise, targeted at them that embodies hate speech based on religion or ethnicity. And no student should be held as a captive audience for anti-Semitism or Islamaphobia expressed in class or section by someone who is paid by Columbia to teach.

Your Stats sectionman shouldn't lose his job because on their blog they posted comments to the effect that Israel has no right to exist, even though that makes you feel bad. Be assured that if Columbia fired every faculty member and instructor who said dumb s***, the University would be a ghost town.

And if you're thinking of culling library books that contain ideas that you think are anti-Semitic, just stop. Burning books never works out for the Jews. You have to trust us on this.

Jay Michelson in the Forward exposed the error behind calling all speech that causes discomfort to a Jewish supporter of Israel anti-Semitic:

Who said Israel should be held to a higher standard?

This conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is far greater than a few articles. As reported in the Forward, after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria to define a much broader swath of anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic; anti-Zionist protests account for 1,317 of the 3,000-odd “antisemitic” incidents the organization tracked in the three months after Oct. 7. As Forward reporter Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization has focused on in previous years.”

The extremism of some left-wing responses to the war is indeed troubling. I agree...that “a disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not … share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.”

We are disconcerted too. We think a lot of supposed anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism. But we don't think our view gives us or anyone else the right to dictate what can be painted on a protest sign along College Walk or expressed out of class by Columbia faculty. Or Barnard, for that matter.

We hope that helps Nick and his fellow intellectual titans as they grapple with how to protect all members of the Columbia community.

All of its members have a right to be free of targeted harassment, hate speech, or discrimination. None have the right to be protected from exposure to ideas that make them feel bad.

And that's why you ask “what is anti-Semitism?”

Of course, this nuanced approach is the one expressed by former Harvard President Claudine Gay before Congress.

It turned out badly for her. We'd submit that each time a thoughtful fair-minded scholar is forced out of her job for making a nuanced statement, it's not good for the Jews either.

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Good and Dead: No Labels, no weapons of mass destruction, no public option, and now no more

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss with Connecticut Correspondent Dink Stover in New Haven

Former Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud – Conn.) finally made a contribution to American political life.

He died.

To his dying day he was a force for bad, whether by shilling for a bloody gruesome war of lies in Iraq, blocking public option health care to protect the profits of the useless private insurance industry, or, at the end, working to destroy what's left of American democracy by shilling for a preposterous “No Labels” vanity bomb candidate to ensure the election of the Tangerine-Faced Rap(c)ist.

Thank you, Joe Lieberman...

None of that mattered to the usual suspects who couldn't wait to salute Lieberman the brightest light of bipartisan “moderation.” That supposedly sterling quality revealed itself on any number of occasions. Including 2008, when, despite his long career in Democratic politics, he endorsed John McCain and Sarah Palin over Barack Obama, due in part to McCain's and Lieberman's shared love of starting pointless foreign wars and impugning the patriotism, character, and intellect of anyone who thought otherwise.

He would have toiled away in relative obscurity as a Senator from Connecticut (that's south of here) had not Bill Clinton enlisted twentysomething White House intern Monica Lewinsky in a bit of West Wing rocket-polishing. Lieberman led the tut-tutting. When Al Gore won the 2000 nomination, he decided to put Lieberman on the ticket to cleanse the Clinton stain.

Lieberman was hardly an adornment to the ticket, losing a debate to, wait for it, Dick Cheney. After his ticket won the popular vote but lost Florida by 487 votes in the initial count, Lieberman's whiny equivocating undermined Democratic efforts to take a hard line against George Bush's election thievery. Nonetheless, Lieberman had the temerity to claim at his obituary interview in 2023 that the Supreme Court's awarding of the election to Bush was a travesty of justice.

Gee, was there any other time that this pillar of principle might have spoken out? Like during the recount itself when he insisted that illegal ballots should be counted if they came from soldiers? Or in the aftermath of the Court's law-free decision?

Fortunately (for him, not for the country), he was able to resume his Senate seat just in time to play a huge role in the Republican campaign to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, thereby wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives and crippling thousands more for no purpose whatsoever.

During those sorry years, Lieberman's droning voice was an inescapable presence on the Sunday gabfests, where he could be counted on to slap a bipartisan veneer on insane Republican talking points.

Lieberman got a free pass until he colluded with George Bush and Dick Cheney in their mendacious effort to start a war with Iraq on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction (Iraq had none) and links to 9/11 terrorists (also none).

He supported the pointless, gruesome, lie-based Iraq War from the get-go. His support never wavered, even when the dimensions of the catastrophe, including the massive human rights abuses, were clear to even the meanest intelligence. In 2006, he declared that the US was on the road to success as the war raged; in 2008, he supported keeping more U.S. troops mired in Iraq longer (the infamous “surge”), a squandering of American blood and treasure that did nothing other than ensure that responsibility for ending the disastrous escapade would fall to Barack Obama. G. Mitchell, So Wrong for So Long 153, 217.

He even decided that he could ride the Iraq debacle into the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004. After Democrats told Bombs Away Joe to sod off, and then refused to renominate him for his Senate seat in 2006, Joe nursed a grudge against Democrats that never went away.

...or should we say todah rabah?

After supporting McCain and Palin in 2008, he turned to undercutting Obama's bold health care plan. As the crucial 60th vote for Senate approval of Obamacare, Lieberman refused to vote for a health care plan that would go on to save thousands of lives and provide coverage to millions who had formerly been uninsured unless it was sabotaged to protect the profits of useless private insurance companies.

By opposing the “public option” that would have allowed consumers to buy health care from a public non-profit cooperative, Lieberman stoutly defended the interests of health insurers (many headquartered by remarkable coincidence in Connecticut) over the public interest in getting the best coverage at the lowest cost. If private companies were so wonderfully efficient, why would they fear competition from a nonprofit competitor, you may ask? He even sank Harry Reid's watered down compromise limiting the nonprofit option to those 55 and over.

Thanks to Joe, millions of Americans today are overpaying for health insurance to protect the profits of the health insurance oligopoly. Another todah rabah!

He continued his crusade against everything right and decent in American politics until his last breath. With the connivance of his weird angry hard-right pollster and shill, Mark “Lumpy” Penn '75, he campaigned recently for a “No Labels” candidate who would run against Trump and Biden and lose to Trump. Even though every decent human being turned him down (although indecent heroin-addled lunatic Bobby Kennedy Jr. '76 thought he'd try to ensure Trump's re-election with his own vanity bomb campaign), Lieberman kept at it:

At almost every major turn, Lieberman served as the group’s chief public defender. He was also a private force in No Labels’ presidential recruitment push. He insisted repeatedly in interviews, as recently as last week, that the nation is craving an alternative to Trump and President Joe Biden. “This is the moment for a bipartisan unity ticket,” Lieberman told Bloomberg Television last Thursday. “Now, we’ve just got to find a strong bipartisan ticket to recommend to the No Labels delegates in the next couple of weeks. That’s not easy.”

Look at it this way, Joe: it won't be any harder just because you're dead.

But we can't leave old Joe to his eternal reward without noting one attribute that he always attached to himself which appeared prominently in his obituaries:

He supported Israel and called himself an “observant” Jew but not an Orthodox one because he did not follow strict Orthodox practices. His family kept a kosher home and attended Sabbath services. To avoid conveyances on a Sabbath, he once walked across town to the Capitol to block a Republican filibuster after attending services in Georgetown.

Many Democrats criticized Mr. Lieberman’s support for the war in Iraq, but admirers said his strengths with voters lay in his rectitude, his religious faith and his willingness to compromise.

If you want to be an Orthodox Jew, be our guest if it's meaningful to you, although don't preen about how you observe some of the Sabbath commandments but not the one about abstaining from work, even if that work is only conniving in the Senate or preparing for your 900th appearance on Meet the Press.

More fundamentally, strict observance of 613 mitzvot doesn't excuse you from your duty as Jew of tikkun olam: to heal and repair this world. That's why no one who really follows the Tanakh could support the brutal death of hundreds of thousands for no reason in Iraq, protect the profits of insurance companies over the lives of those in need of health care, or connive to ensure the election of a depraved corrupt bigoted criminal whose every thought, word, and deed contravenes Jewish ethical teaching.

If you have any doubt as to Lieberman's devotion to everything appalling and rotten in American politics over the last thirty years, we can set your mind at ease. The Republican apparatchik who has captured the hearts and minds of his editors and owners at The New York Times had this to say about Lieberman:

He must have said other stupid things too in the course of his two-minute read, but those two minutes were too precious to us to waste.

Anyway it's not our job to shill for Bretbug. That's what Gail Collins is for.

A lot of the fawning obits for this guy glossed over his terrible policy positions and his efforts to destroy the Democratic Party by referring to him as a mensch. Examples of his menschlichkeit are somewhat harder to come by. A mensch fights for the right things, like justice here and peace around the world. A mensch certainly doesn't do anything that helps a corrupt subversive indicted Russian-owned racist and sex offender return to power. As far as we can tell, the only thing Joe Lieberman ever fought for was Joe Lieberman.

The more accurate term to describe such an individual is a schmuck.

At best.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Don't be stupid - it's not the stupidity

By Political Editor David Bloviator with
Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk in Palm Beach

Now we know whom the two parties will nominate for President this year.

On the Democratic side, it's the friendly moderate seasoned incumbent, bringing a solid record of achievement and legislative success, not to mention economic growth and low unemployment.

On the Republican side, it's an adjudicated rapist and confessed sex offender who is currently under indictment for 91 count 'em 91 felonies and tried to overthrow democracy after he lost the 2020 election.

No contest, amirite?

Um....

Source: The Hill.

With the differences between the candidates so stark, what can account for Trump's hold on almost 45% of the American electorate?

One leading hypothesis is appealing in its simplicity: Trump voters are stupid. The more elegant expression of the case goes something like this:

Throughout US history the most successful con men have all relied on three characteristics of their marks—gullibility, absurdity, and believability—from...Charles Ponzi to Bernard Madoff to Donald J. Trump. Ironically, when the “jig is up” and even months or years later...most of the other marks who have been deceived tend to excuse the fraudster rationalizing his behavior....

The simpler expression can be found by anyone still on Twitter:

The stupidity theory passes the test of Occam's Razor. But theories need to be more than simple. They need to be not falsified.

For adherents of the stupidity explanation, the facts are fatal.

First, there are plenty of Trump supporters with college degrees and beyond:

Some argue that the a college degree is no guarantee of intelligence, and we have a lot of sympathy for that view:

Perhaps Trump’s resurgence among college-educated voters says less about those voters or Donald Trump than it says about what college education has become in the United States: factories for turning out employment-ready adults with economically efficient money-making skills and an adolescent winner-take-all mindset rather than thoughtful, self-aware human beings who understand that their greatest responsibility is to support the communities that not only made their education possible but also a civil society itself.

More cynically put, kids don’t go to college to become better thinkers; they go to get a piece of paper that tells employers they’re smart.

Well, OK. But you have to admit that some of Trump's rabid supporters are intelligent and highly-educated (they're just evil).

Consider the pride of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Cancun Ted Cruz. He was smart enough to flee Texas when the lights went out. And his former Harvard Law professors remember him as smart, although Laurence Tribe boasted that he only gave Cruz an A on his Con Law final when Cruz expected an A+.

Equally loathsome Trump taint polishers and insurrectionists like Senators J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley graduated from Harvard and Yale Law Schools. Stupid? Seems unlikely.

Another fatal falsification of the stupidity hypothesis:

The poll results vary dramatically by race and gender. Biden runs 10-12 points stronger with women compared to men. The differences by race are even starker. A recent NBC News survey, supposedly calling out the decline in Biden's Black support, said Biden beats Trump with Black voters 75-16, or about 40 points better than the all-in results.

Are Black people 40 points smarter than white people? Ten, maybe, but 40%?

So the stupidity explanation seems to fall. Our Wonderful Republican Allies have a variant on the stupid theme, which is that Trump voters have had their brains consumed by the Tangerine-Faced Rac(p)ist and exist in a zombie-like state of loyalty to the cult:

Trump is attempting to rebrand Jan 6 insurrectionists as "patriots" & the day of the attack as a new Patriot’s Day. They're not heroes, they're thugs with a blind allegiance to one man. Why’s he doing it? To take heat off his own legal troubles and criminality. We won't let him. pic.twitter.com/NKpjEGDu7h
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 19, 2024

Blind allegiance? The former Republican hacks now doing business at The Lincoln Project use this cult argument to claim a radical discontinuity between the Grand Old Party they supported, which boasted great beloved Republicans like Spiro T. Agnew, Strom Thurmond, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Jesse Helms, and Dick Cheney. And Rudy Giuliani.

The stupidity explanation innocently and the cult explanation mendaciously cover up the truth: Trump's followers like him because they share his unjustified white-supremacist male grievance and his willingness to use violence and subversion to protect white privilege:

Trump’s power as the boss of the Republican political crime organization has grown. The loyalty of his MAGA followers has certainly not weakened, and may have increased. Tens of millions of Americans have eagerly embraced Trump's criminal gang, and many millions more are, at the very least, willing to tolerate it and indulge it.

That's why the Republican messaging “Are you better off than you were four years ago?"” which sounds insane to anyone who actually remembers the catastrophic COVID winter and spring of 2020 plays to Trump's base.

They are always better off when they see that an angry old white man who shares their values is in the White House, spewing hate and violence and siccing armed troops on unarmed Black protesters, right up until the moment when they have to be put on ventilators.

The Republican song hasn't really changed in over fifty years. It goes like this:

Didn't need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee the old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Mainstream Republicans have a few loose screws, doors, panels, windows, etc. etc.

By Financial Editor Samuel Insull with
Aviation Correspondent Douglas Corrigan

Like omens, pieces of Boeing planes keep dropping out of the sky. A door plug out West. Another 737 Max left its wheel in San Francisco. Then an exterior body panel fell off somewhere over Oregon.

And let's not forget the 346 innocents who died because Boeing didn't want to tell pilots about the changes they had snuck into the 737 Max autopilots.

Sounds like some planes and some people have a few screws loose.

How'd that happen?

As we've mentioned before, it's due to the usual suspects: rich white men and Republicans.

The story of how Boeing's culture of profits-first and safety last led to the catastrophic 737 Max 8 disasters has been well told elsewhere by the great James Surowiecki elsewhere so we don't see the value in plagiarizing him further here

Doors closed. Wheels on. Those were the days!

Oh, OK just one quote:

Boeing migrated away from an engineering-centric culture in order to boost profits and shareholder value.

Actually some of the sordid details are worth mentioning. They start, as with much corporate malfeasance, in the boardroom:

During a series of meetings in 2010 and 2011, Boeing’s board discussed how the company should respond to the threat of a new, more fuel-efficient line of Airbus jets, ... The board talked about how it would be faster and cheaper to revamp an older version of a Boeing jet.

The plan to revamp an older 737 jet included larger engines mounted farther up on the wings, which altered the plane’s balance. Boeing engineers designed the [lethal] MCAS software to compensate for this imbalance. In both crashes, investigators believe an instrument called an angle-of-attack sensor fed the MCAS software bad data, causing it [to] push the planes’ noses downward.....

One challenge for board members is a lack of technical expertise. [One] Boeing director ...doesn’t remember anyone in that group questioning whether a reconfiguration of the 737 with larger engines would create trade-offs that would affect safety.

“The board doesn’t have any tools to oversee [safety],” [the director] said....Some corporate boards, such as JetBlue and Dow Chemical, mandate safety oversight in their bylaws, seeing it as a part of their duty to manage risks. Boeing’s corporate governance principles do not mention the word “safety,” and its board does not include any experts in airplane safety.

Who was worthy (and spineless and ignorant) enough to serve as a Boeing director?

Wait for it...

Photo: Washington Post

Note she wasn't around for the fatal crashes, but as for the recent safety lapses....

We'll get back to her, as soon as we find out where she is.

The investigation into the door plug debacle has revealed the surprising tidbit that the company that actually duct-tapes the plane's body together is not Boeing itself, but something called Spirit AeroSystems.

Who they? It turns out they're a separate company that used to be part of Boeing until it was spun out in 2005. It seemed like a great idea at the time, according to Forbes:

Oh.

Why in the name of Wilbur and Orville Wright would you separate the building of the plane from the company that is supposed to build planes? The original idea was to unload some prairie factories it no longer wanted onto a private equity consortium, while retaining the option to buy what the factories made.

But the hard-eyed money men (apologies to Russell Baker) at Boeing realized that spinning out the enterprises that actually bolted together the planes could have a number of good effects, including unloading the expenses and bother of negotiating with a unionized work force off its financials and onto someone else's.

As for safety, well:

The underlying cause of problems on Boeing’s production lines are not clear, but analysts and some former employees point to pressure to meet delivery schedules and, more recently, workforce turnover during the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the years, former company employees have come forward with concerns about what they viewed as sloppy work at Boeing’s plants. The Senate Commerce Committee documented many of those issues ...based on the accounts of seven whistleblowers. The whistleblowers included Ed Pierson, a former manager at the 737 factory, who alleged an unusual number of quality control problems at a plant under “relentless schedule pressure.”

It's not surprising given that Boeing accounts for 64% of Spirit's revenue. When one customer who represents almost two-thirds of your revenue says jump you say how high. And when it says you need to work faster you say, “Thank you sir may I have another.” You don't say you need more time to attach the bolts to the door.

Although its 10-K is a little squirrely on the details, it appears that Spirit supplies the fuselages for a fixed price. Therefore, if it has to spend more on say safety (like making sure the doors stay on), that's Spirit's problem, not Boeing's. Nice for Boeing's profits, but less nice for passengers who didn't want to fly to San Francisco in a convertible. Maybe that's why Spirit has lost over $1.6 billion in the last three years (losses that don't appear on Boeing's income statement of course).

In the wake of recent developments and stuff falling off the planes, Boeing and Spirit have talked about merging the two companies, which would have the salutary effect of making Boeing financially responsible for its planes. Salutary unless you are a Boeing honcho whose lavish compensation is tied to profitability and stock performance.

But delegating the real work of bolting together the planes to a subordinate nominally separate company might be good for transferring losses of out of Boeing, but sadly for Nikki Haley and Boeing management, it doesn't insulate Boeing from having to deal with its woke deep-state out-of-control regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA is now telling us that Boeing has flunked 1/3 of its safety procedures audits:

George W. Bush thought that 66% on an exam was good enough for him at Yale and thereafter, but when it comes to the lives of passengers, the FAA says maybe not.

The FAA wasn't always so rigorous in its oversight of Boeing, according to The Washington Post:

The 2018 and 2019 [fatal 737 Max] crashes...raised questions about how the agency had reviewed the design of the Max, an updated version of Boeing’s popular 737. Investigators found that regulators had failed to understand the risks posed by an automated system that pushed the noses of the planes down before they crashed, in part because Boeing employees had sought to minimize its significance. The FAA relies heavily on Boeing employees to carry out safety work on its behalf, but in some cases those workers have reported feeling pressured by the company to rush their work.

The last time you were pulled over by cops and you told them you weren't drunk, did they rely on your self-certification?

Before regulation took away our freedoms.

The FAA's what-me-worry attitude didn't come out of nowhere. And here we get back to our friend and Boeing director Nikki Haley. For over half a century, it has been a fundamental tenet of Republican dogma that regulation is bad, bad, bad and we should let the free market regulate itself. Of course, those who died in air crashes don't get to vote.

The Republican Party's ideological arm (one of them at least), the CATO Institute has only 17,392 examples of the derogatory term “administrative state” on its website. Spoiler alert: they hate it. Matthew Continetti, better known as Billy Kristol's son-in-law, who holds a sinecure at AEI, another fake “think tank” admitted the through line from St. Ronald of Bitburg to the Tangerine-Faced (but regulation-hating) Fascist:

Any conservative president would have embraced [tax cuts for the rich], deregulation, and originalist judges.

And the authors of 2025 Project, the neo-Fascist blueprint for the forthcoming Trump dictatorship, admit that dismantling the regulatory system (of which the FAA is a part) lies at the core of their mission:

Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.... Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.

Letting Lara Trump fire FAA aerospace engineers? The wheels would never fly off of that.

And how would Nikki Haley have reined in the power-mad administrative state?

Haley, meanwhile, has said she would limit federal government officials to five years in the same job. On its face, this is even more sweeping than Trump’s plan, since it would apply to the entire federal bureaucracy — the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell argued that it would “destroy the basic machinery of government.”

You wouldn't want her company Boeing regulated by anyone with extensive experience and institutional memory, would you?

The decades of Republican hostility to and undermining of regulation in the public interest set the stage for the collapse of oversight at Boeing, whose consequences can be found scattered all over the back yards of Oregon.

And if Trump is elected in 2024, the best advice we have is: stay on the ground and stay alive.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Who will save us from this bent Supreme Court?

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Another week, and another set of fresh outrages from our Republican-bent Supreme Court.

In their ceaseless effort to re-elect whatever Republican is running for President to ensure that the Court will continue to be packed by bent extremist Republicans like Sulky Sam Alito and Brett “It just wants some fresh air” Kavanaugh, the Court produced two terrible decisions relating to the Tangerine-Faced Defendant's effort to seize power and avoid justice until he is able to fire his prosecutors.

Arguably the worst decision was contained in a one-page order setting down the TFG's appeal of his crapcan total immunity argument for April 25. The Court knows full well that the immunity claim is ridiculous and must eventually fail, but its goal is to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn't take place before the election.

Let's look at the record.

Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump's preposterous immunity claims in a careful opinion issued on December 1, 2023. To expedite consideration of any appeal, Special Counsel Jack Smith urged the Supreme Court to decide the matter directly, bypassing the D.C. Circuit.

On December 22, the Supreme Court denied the request without explanation.

This not just in: the Supreme Court is bent

The D.C. Circuit duly heard the appeal on an expedited basis on January 9, 2024 and issued its opinion knocking down Trump's frivolous arguments seriatim on February 6, 2024.

Some pundits thought that the Supreme Court's December denial suggested that they might just let the D.C. Circuit decision stand.

Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

After sitting on the petition for Supreme Court review (which your mansplaining law school ex-boyfriend called “cert.”) for over two weeks, the Court on February 28 in its wisdom granted cert., blocked further proceedings, and set a hearing date almost two months in the future.

Funny they didn't take nearly that long to award the 2000 election to Republican George Bush. It took them four days.

This time, though, no one expects a decision until mid- to late-June at the least. So four days to hand the 2000 election to the Republican, and four months before they will let a Republican stand trial for his insurrection.

Are you beginning to think this game isn't on the level?

And who knows how this Court will f*** up the obvious conclusion? It could even say that there may be limited “official acts” immunity, pull some ad hoc standards out of Alito's blowhole, and demand that Judge Chutkin decide count-by-count whether the charged acts are “official ” before trial.

Even if they follow the law and uphold the D.C. Circuit, if the decision doesn't come down until the end of June, it may difficult if not impossible to hold a trial before the election. Which is what the six bent Republican Justices want.

It might even lead to trying and convicting the President-elect on insurrection charges in November, before the Electoral College and the Congress meet. Then what?

Which brings us to the second pro-Trump opinion they issued in February: overturning Colorado's decision to bar the Former Insurrectionist-in-Chief from the ballot, contrary to the plain text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which had been passed after the Civil War to prevent insurrectionists from holding federal office. Like the Presidency.

While all Justices, including the three unbent ones (and we'll get back to them), overturned Colorado's decision on the grounds that one state can't set standards that would affect a national election (unless they are intended to disenfranchise minority voters or put third-party spoiler candidates on the ballot like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein, which is OK, apparently), the Republican majority went well beyond what was needed to decide the case to pronounce that Section 3 a dead letter in the absence of legislation.

The unbent concurrence had some fun with this:

“If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” Dobbs ... (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). That fundamental principle of judicial restraint is practically as old as our Republic. This Court is authorized “to say what the law is” only because “[t]hose who apply [a] rule to particular cases . . . must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.” Marbury v. Madison....

Today, the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future.

This modest jape at the expense of John Roberts '76, which would have gone unnoticed by 99% of the public, provoked a hissy fit from Handmaid Amy Comey Barrett:

In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

Speaking of Courts settling politically charged issues without stridency, here's just a few highlights from the opinion she joined in Dobbs, which took away the reproductive freedom that 170,000,000 American women had enjoyed for over half a century:

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” [the opinion] said. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. ...Abortion destroys what those decisions call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an ‘unborn human being,...”

Imagine what Alito would have written if he wanted to be strident.

But our point isn't that Amy Coney Barrett is a prissy hypocrite.

Our point is the one that dissenters on the Court have been making throughout this century: this Republican-bent Supreme Court is not a judicial institution but an illegitimate House of Lords, legislating according to its own terrible political preferences.

The question is what to do about it.

Despite their grandiose behavior, the Supreme Court can be brought into line easily in one of three ways: (1) enlarging the Court with some new seats, (2) enforcing term limits for Justices (although probably not the bent six Republicans already there), or (3) limiting its power to f*** things up by for example taking away their ability to enjoin federal action prior to judgment or to void certain types of legislation (like voting rights).

We don't have space here to deal with the usual whines about these fixes, which run along the lines of how dare Congress politicize the Court. But it's the Court that politicized itself and it's the job of the branches who were in fact elected by somebody to bring it back into line.

Then there's the argument that if a Democratic Administration can add seats and limit jurisdiction, a later Republican Congress could do the same thing. Of course they could and they will if they have to whether or not we beat them to the punch. In the long term, the rehabilitation of the Supreme Court into an institution devoted to justice and not reactionary Cathlolic extremism depends upon the will of the American people to make it so and keep it. No one is coming to save us.

Some brave souls have already advocated for some or all of these things, like our very own Sen. Ed Markey. And some legal academics have weighed in as well, like Penn's Kermit Roosevelt, a surname not normally associated with treason.

But imagine if the pressure to fix the impossibly broken Court came from inside the building. Three eminent justices in their dissent to Dobbs said:

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law

That's a plain statement of the illegitimacy of the current Supreme Court. Why shouldn't the three Justices who said it (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan,and Stephen Breyer) take the obvious next step and say publicly to the political branches that it is their job to fix it?

The Supreme Court is out of control

There's no good reason why they shouldn't speak in some public forum (hell, we bet Breyer could wangle a slot at Harvard Commencement) and do what George Marshall did 75 years ago: demand urgent political action.

Their action will be seen by the usual suspects as some sort of bad faith undermining of the Court as a national treasure of dispassionate justice. But the Court lost that reputation almost 25 years ago:

this highly politicized matter....runs the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the Court itself. That confidence is a public treasure.

Bush v. Gore, 591 U.S. 38, 157 (2000).

What's the point of pretending the Court is acting as a court when it indisputably is not, according to the unbent Justices who sit on it?

We'd argue that the maintaining the false pretense is itself dangerous because it helps perpetuate the injustice and corruption of the six Republican wardheelers in robes.

Imagine how powerful the effect would be of three past and present Justices admitting that the current Court is not only strutting down First Street NE naked, its pubes flying into Coke cans all over Capitol Hill, but that the time has come for the President and the Congress to fix the ongoing coup against democracy with appropriate legislation.

Indeed, the time came in 2000.

Pretending since then that nothing is wrong has led us to observe helplessly the plight of 26,000 pregnant rape victims in Texas and the outrageous stacking of the criminal justice system deck in favor of a corrupt Russian-owned insurrectionist criminal defendant.

The supposed treasure of the Supreme Court's commitment to the rule of law was looted years ago and the Nazis have loaded it onto a plane to Berlin. It would be great if Stephen Breyer could like his contemporary Indiana Jones rise to the occasion and crack the whip.