Dear Commons Community,

Former President George H.W. Bush is highly critical of  Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, members of his son’s administration in a new biography by John Meachem.  As reported by Reuters:

“In “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush,” author Jon Meacham quotes Bush as saying that Cheney and Rumsfeld were too hawkish and that their harsh stance damaged the reputation of the United States, the Fox cable news network said.

Speaking of Cheney, who was vice president under President George W. Bush, the senior Bush said: “I don’t know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” according to the report.

Cheney served as defense secretary during George H.W. Bush’s 1989-1993 presidency.

“The reaction (to Sept. 11), what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East,” Bush told Meacham in the book to be published next Tuesday.

Bush believes Cheney acted too independently of his son by creating a national security team in his own office, and may have been influenced to become more conservative by his wife and daughter, Lynne and Liz Cheney, the report cites the biography as saying.

On Rumsfeld, secretary of defense for most of the two terms served by his son, Bush is even more critical. He is quoted as saying: “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the President,” referring to his son.

“I’ve never been that close to him anyway. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that. Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow,” he was quoted as saying in the biography.

Fox News quoted Cheney as denying his family had influenced his views, saying: “It’s his view, perhaps, of what happened, but my family was not conspiring to somehow turn me into a tougher, more hardnosed individual. I got there all by myself.”

Rumsfeld declined to comment on the book, Fox News said.”

We can thank the elder Bush for his candidness. Along with Donald Trump who has been highly critical of the younger Bush’s presidency, the Republican Party has a real problem with how to spin these swipes from within their own ranks.

Tony

NOTE:  After I made this posting, the New York Times also reported on the new biography of George H.W. Bush and his comments about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.  

Dear Commons Community,

Close to fifty professors from the City University of New York were arrested today while demanding a contract that will help CUNY retain excellent professors, ensuring a quality education for the 500,000 CUNY students across the city. They blocked the doors to the midtown office building housing CUNY’s central administration and refused to move until the university management made a fair offer to resolve their long-expired union contract. CUNY negotiators, responding to the union’s increasing pressure, made an economic offer at a bargaining session earlier in the day. The union’s initial response was that the proposal is completely inadequate and will further endanger academic quality at CUNY.

Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of CUNY faculty and staff, joined the blockade with her colleagues. Before the action, she addressed the protesters and a legal rally of 800 other union members.

“Working people, people of color, the poor of New York City—these are our students,” she said. “Professors and academic staff are essential for a first-rate education, and CUNY needs to offer a contract that allows the University to retain outstanding faculty and staff. CUNY’s offer fails the half-million low- and middle-income New Yorkers who rely on CUNY for a college education. The offer fails to keep up with inflation or to make other improvements CUNY students urgently need. Without real progress toward competitive salaries, CUNY will be unable to attract and keep the faculty and staff our students deserve. We took a stand today for educational justice for the working people of New York.”

Five years have passed since the PSC-CUNY contract expired, and salary rates at CUNY haven’t increased in six years. Over that time, CUNY’s pay has become uncompetitive with comparable colleges and universities in the region. CUNY academic departments are reporting problems attracting and keeping faculty; and professors and advisors are less able to give students the attention they need.

The union, fed up with CUNY management’s stalling and the lack of State support for the contract, has announced plans for a strike authorization vote and intensified its campaign with actions like a recent rally outside the CUNY chancellor’s home and today’s civil disobedience.

“The future of our students’ education is at stake in this contract. Our action today is part of a long struggle for racial and educational justice. We will not move without an offer that will sustain quality at CUNY and pay us fairly for the important work we do,” said Bowen.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial today provides commentary on the rejection of a broad equal rights ordinance on Tuesday by Houston voters.  Here is the editorial:

“Sometime in the near future, a transgender teenager in Texas will attempt suicide — and maybe succeed — because vilifying people for their gender identity remains politically acceptable in America.

The hateful rhetoric of leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is the latest, ugliest example. Mr. Patrick was ebullient on Tuesday night after it became clear that Houston voters had decidedly rejected a broad equal rights ordinance that opponents maliciously and misleadingly characterized as a boon for cross-dressing sex offenders.

“It was about protecting our grandmoms and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters and our granddaughters,” Mr. Patrick said as he thanked a crowd of joyful supporters who nodded and cried “Amen!”

The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO, which the City Council passed 18 months ago, established sensible protections from discrimination for 15 classes of people. It would have given people with disabilities, like Mr. Abbott, a paraplegic, a mechanism to fight employment or housing discrimination. It would have given veterans, pregnant women and senior citizens a valuable layer of protection and prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin. But it was its inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity that turned a sensible initiative into a nasty national controversy.

Opponents of the law, led by Jared Woodfill, a Houston lawyer and a Texas Republican Party leader, started a well-funded campaign that equated supporting it with allowing men to use women’s public restrooms for deviant purposes. Their fearmongering, blasted on yard signs, bellowed from church pulpits and dramatized in a television ad, suggested that sexual deviants were waiting for the ordinance to kick in to sneak up on unsuspecting women in bathroom stalls.

This is completely unfounded. There are no documented cases of peeping Toms or rapists taking advantage of anti-discrimination ordinances that have extended legal protections to transgender Americans in recent years. San Antonio passed a similar ordinance in 2013 that expanded civil rights without driving up criminal assaults. And of course, no one expects that Houston perverts, after Tuesday’s lamentable result, will now drive down to San Antonio to corner women in restroom stalls.

This too shall pass. The short sighted vote in Huston is indeed the result of an appeal to irrational fear. The people of Houston did not…

While the defeat of HERO is a painful setback, it is encouraging that the broader quest for equality for gay and transgender Americans is advancing steadily. On Monday, the Department of Education backed a transgender student in Illinois who is fighting for the right to use restrooms and locker rooms on campus like any other female student. It was the federal government’s latest action in a civil rights movement that is redefining how the nation views, and treats, transgender Americans.

When that movement achieves irreversible momentum — and it is a matter of when, not whether — people like Mr. Woodfill, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Patrick will be remembered as latter-day Jim Crow elders. Their demagogy is egregious because it preys on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

As opponents of the ordinance celebrate their victory this week, transgender people across the country are understandably reeling. They should take comfort in knowing that history will not be kind to the haters who won on Tuesday. In time, the bigots are destined to lose.”

Amen!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Eduardo Porto, in a New York Times piece today, examines the poor performance of American students on the PISA tests and raises the question whether it is the education system or our society that is to blame.  Here is an excerpt:

“American schools may not be as bad as we have been led to believe.

Ah, but here’s the bad news: The rest of American society is failing its disadvantaged citizens even more than we realize. The question is, Should educators be responsible for fixing this?

The perennial debate about the state of public education starts with a single, seemingly unassailable fact. American students sorely lag their peers in other rich nations and even measure up poorly compared with students in some less advanced countries.

Americans scored more than halfway down from the top in the last round of the so-called PISA standardized tests in math, administered in 2012 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 15-year-olds in about 60 countries. They scored about a third of the way down in reading and almost halfway down in science.

The lackluster performance has reinforced a belief that American public education — the principals and teachers, the methods and procedures — is just not up to scratch. There must be something wrong when the system in the United States falls short where many others succeed.

But is the criticism fair? Are American schools failing because they are not good at their job? Perhaps their job is simply tougher.

In a report released last week, Martin Carnoy from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, Emma García from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and Tatiana Khavenson from the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, suggest that socioeconomic deficits impose a particularly heavy burden on American schools.

“Once we adjust for social status, we are doing much better than we think,” Professor Carnoy told me. “We underrate our progress.”

The researchers started by comparing test scores in the United States with those in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Finland, South Korea, Poland and Ireland. On average, students in all those countries do better than American children.”

Porto goes on to comment and provides a counter point:

“This line of thought may let American schools off the hook too easily. Equalizing opportunity is, in fact, one of the core purposes of education. And schools in countries poorer than the United States seem to do a better job.

“There is no way you can blame socioeconomic status for the performance of the United States,” said Andreas Schleicher, the O.E.C.D.’s top educational expert, who runs the organization’s PISA tests. “When you look at all dimensions of social background, the United States does not suffer a particular disadvantage.”

In sum, Mr. Porto provides a fair examination of the issue.  The entire article and the referenced material are worth a close look.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

While the U.S. Department of Education pursues student borrowers mercilessly, it is in no rush to collect on an unpaid $22 million debt owed by student loan contractor Navient Corp. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“For at least the third time this year, the department has pushed back a deadline for Navient to appeal a 2013 ruling mandating that it repay the federal government about $22 million in alleged overpayments it received in the early 2000s.

The Education Department’s inspector general recommended recouping the funds in 2009, as part of the department’s crackdown on student loan companies that were improperly profiting off a program Congress had killed years earlier. However, it took department officials four years to concur.

At the start of 2015, the deadline for appeal was March 31, Navient’s securities filings show. The latest extension, granted sometime between July 1 and Sept. 30, pushed the deadline back to Nov. 12, meaning Navient can continue to delay payment.

The Education Department pays Navient, which maintains it has done nothing wrong, more than $100 million each year for collecting student loan borrowers’ monthly payments.

The department’s delay in collecting the money from Navient contrasts sharply with its draconian attitude towards struggling borrowers seeking to discharge their debts in bankruptcy. Lawyers are expected to challenge borrowers’ pleas for debt forgiveness if they spend any money on “nonessential” items such as gym memberships or manicures, Deputy Assistant Secretary Lynn Mahaffie told the student loan industry in a July 7 letter.

“It’s remarkable that the Education Department is willing to fight for pocket change when it comes to student loan debtors in bankruptcy, but when it comes to its favored contractors it seems that they have no interest in recouping millions of dollars,” said Chris Hicks, who leads the Debt-Free Future campaign at the advocacy group Jobs With Justice.

The department’s leniency toward Navient comes as Education Secretary Arne Duncan battles accusations that his department is too cozy with its loan contractors. Borrower advocates, government investigators and some Democratic lawmakers, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have repeatedly criticized Duncan and his department for lax oversight of student loan companies, including Navient. Duncan said last month that he plans to leave office by December.

“The department is merciless in its treatment of individuals when it comes to recovering federal funds. It’s sad to see that they show nothing like that same zeal when it comes to corporate waste, fraud and abuse,” said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Friday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

“The candidate who I believe can fundamentally address income inequality effectively, the candidate who has the right vision and the right experience and the ability to get the job done, is Hillary Clinton,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’ve seen her vision and platform develop over five months. I’m extremely pleased with what she’s put on the table.”

De Blasio’s endorsement of Clinton, the former secretary of state, was long-awaited. Though he’s been openly supportive of her campaign, he had said that he wanted to hear more of her vision before officially signing on. 

“Democrats all over the country are looking to her for leadership,” de Blasio said in June, according to the New York Times.

De Blasio managed Clinton’s campaign during her 2000 Senate bid, when she ran as a candidate from New York, and he was expected to endorse Clinton for president this year as a matter of course.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Alessandra Stanley, a New York Times reporter, has an op-ed in today’s paper, reviewing the new philanthropic style of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg and others are all referred to for their philanthropic activity, some of which leaves a lot to be desired. For example:

“idealistic tech leaders find themselves giving back to a world that complains that they took too much in the first place. The skepticism is all the more wounding…

Academics and relief workers have been grumbling for a while about so-called philanthrocapitalists who try to micromanage their giving. The writer David Rieff questions the tech-centric approach to fighting global poverty of the Gates Foundation in a new book, “The Reproach of Hunger.” In “The Prize,” the journalist Dale Russakoff looks at what went wrong with Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark to resurrect its schools.

And the transformative power of Silicon Valley is slapped down by one of its own in “Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology,” written by a Microsoft apostate, Kentaro Toyama.

Rob Reich, a political-science professor at Stanford who is also a co-director of the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, notes that the tax deduction that comes with a billionaire’s grant to charter schools is essentially money that won’t be spent on public schools, calling Silicon Valley largess “an exercise of power that is unaccountable, nontransparent and tax-subsidized.”

While tech titans champion efforts to strengthen the social safety net for the most disadvantaged, many express less concern for the stagnating middle class. Alec Ross, who was an innovation adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was secretary of state and is the author of “The Industries of the Future,” notes that entrepreneurs privately complain about workers, skilled and unskilled, who haven’t kept pace with the new tech-based economy.

“You hear derision for the working- and middle-class people who think that their education ends at the age of 22,” Mr. Ross said. “People who want their work to stay the same without doing anything to improve themselves.

Nor is there much talk in these circles about taxing the rich to even the playing field. A few tech billionaires like Reed Hastings, a Netflix founder, have said they support raising taxes on the wealthy. There are many more who don’t publicly oppose a tax increase but feel they are paying plenty already. There is also a libertarian streak in parts of Silicon Valley that allows some to believe they can spend their tax dollars better than the government ever will.

Marc Benioff (net worth: $4.1 billion), a native San Franciscan who founded Salesforce, has personally given $250 million to the San Francisco children’s hospital that bears his name. His company also lavishes grants, employee time and its cloud computing products on many nonprofits, including San Francisco’s troubled public schools — and Mr. Benioff, unlike many reform-minded tech benefactors, lets the principals decide how to spend his money.

That’s a lesson that Mr. Zuckerberg learned as well. Last year, he and his wife, Priscilla Chin, quietly announced another $120 million donation to underserved public schools in the Bay Area. They haven’t given up on spreading their own vision for education, however: In October, they announced that next year they would open a free private school, “The Primary School,” for poor students in East Palo Alto, a struggling neighborhood a few miles away from Facebook headquarters.”

This op-ed has many pearls of wisdom and is wealth worth a read for those interested in lessons learned and in some cases not learned in the world of Silicon Valley philanthropy.

Tony