African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article today examining the Charlottesville, Virginia schools.  Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror many school districts across the country in areas such as gifted programs and school discipline that can undercut the effort to prepare equitably students for college.

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.  The article covers well its Conferate past:

“Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day…

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

Venable has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.”

The article goes on to comment on other disparities in the school system and concludes with a quote from , a black high school student:

Zyahna’s [black student] achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

An important article worth a read to understand where we have come in this country regarding school segregation and how far we have to go in many districts including here in New York City.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced yesterday that it is creating a new college dedicated to developing and considering the implications of artificial intelligence. It is planning to raise $1 billion for the initial start-up.  As reported in the New York Times:

“Every major university is wrestling with how to adapt to the technology wave of artificial intelligence — how to prepare students not only to harness the powerful tools of A.I., but also to thoughtfully weigh its ethical and social implications. A.I. courses, conferences and joint majors have proliferated in the last few years.

But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking a particularly ambitious step, creating a new college backed by a planned investment of $1 billion. Two-thirds of the funds have already been raised, M.I.T. said, in announcing the initiative on Monday.

The linchpin gift of $350 million came from Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, the big private equity firm. The college, called the M.I.T. Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will create 50 new faculty positions and many more fellowships for graduate students.

It is scheduled to begin in the fall semester next year, housed in other buildings before moving into its own new space in 2022.”

Incredible move and investment by M.I.T.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

CNN reported yesterday that the 2018 federal deficit hit its highest level in the last six years.

The deficit jumped 17 percent (or by $113 billion) to $779 billion at the end of Trump’s first year in office according to final figures released Monday by the Treasury Department. The deficit is mostly due to the corporate tax cut that slashed rates from 35 percent to 21 percent, choking revenue for spending, which climbed 3 percent according to CNN.

The U.S. government’s $523 billion in interest payments to service its debt in 2018 — the highest ever — was more than the entire economic output of Belgium this year, Bloomberg reported.

Corporate tax collections in the U.S. fell 22 percent, or $76 billion, in the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.

The total federal debt — which combines annual deficits — was 78 percent of the nation’s entire gross domestic product in June. It hasn’t been that large a percentage since World War II.

Trump promised the tax cuts would pay for themselves by boosting business, which would produce more taxes. But that hasn’t yet happened. The Trump administration estimates that the deficit will increase to $1.09 trillion in the next fiscal year.

The federal government usually increases spending — and deficits — to boost a faltering economy — such as during the 2008 recession triggered by the subprime mortgage and banking crisis. But the economy was already in a strong recovery when Trump moved into the White House, and he still boosted the deficit.

“By cutting taxes in 2017 when the economy was already quite strong, Congress and the administration not only missed a golden opportunity to begin to address the fiscal problem, they actually made the problem worse,” William Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News.

The GOP had traditionally been the party that battled for a balanced federal budget.

Our children and grandchildren will be paying for Trump’s tax cut for decades to come.

Tony

 

Dear Commons Community,

This morning it was announced that Sears was filing for bankruptcy. It is a sad ending for a venerable American enterprise.  Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect and a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, analyzes the Sears story and puts the blame on a vulture hedge fund. Below is Kuttner’s sad analysis.

Tony

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Sears Didn’t Die.  Vulture Capitalists Killed It!

by Robert Kuttner

If you’ve been following the impending bankruptcy of America’s iconic retailer as covered by print, broadcast and digital media, you’ve probably encountered lots of nostalgia and sad clucking about how dinosaurs like Sears can’t compete in the age of Amazon and specialty retail.

But most of the coverage has failed to stress the deeper story. Namely, Sears is a prime example of how hedge funds and private equity companies take over retailers, encumber them with debt in order to pay themselves massive windfall profits, and then leave the retailer without adequate operating capital to compete.

Part of the strategy is to sell off valuable real estate, the better to enrich the hedge fund, and stick the retail company with costly rental payments to occupy the space that it once owned.

In the case of Sears, the culprit is a hedge-fund operator named Edward Lampert, once a senior merger guy at Goldman Sachs. In 2005, Lampert merged Sears with Kmart, loaded both up with debt, and used some of the debt on stock buybacks to pump up the share price and enrich shareholders, notably himself and his hedge fund.

In a decade, 175,000 people at Sears/Kmart lost their jobs and revenue was cut in half. Various pieces of Sears were sold off. Lampert did just fine.

Lampert’s hedge fund also became a prime a lender to Sears, making money off of commissions and interest charges as well as being a prime shareholder. The strategy ensures that the fund and its beneficiaries (including Lampert himself) get rich, even if they run Sears into the ground. For the most part, the nostalgia coverage of the demise of Sears has missed this.

If you look hard, you can find an excellent 2017 piece from The New York Times by Julie Creswell, “The Incredible Shrinking Sears,” on Lampert’s role.  Another writer who regularly covers how hedge funds and private equity have pillaged American retailing is David Dayen.

The story goes far beyond Sears. Last year, about 20 retail chains went into bankruptcy. In most cases, the culprit was a hedge fund or private equity owner. (These two business models were once rather different, but are increasingly converging.)

This entire business model is one of the most extreme examples of how financial engineering is destroying potentially viable parts of the real economy.

I’ve written about how private equity and hedge funds are destroying independent daily newspapers, using the same acquire, strip and flip strategy. A book that tells the larger story in vivid detail is “Private Equity at Work,” by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt. But in general, this backstory is missing from the news coverage whenever another retailer bites the dust.

This entire business model is one of the most extreme examples of how financial engineering is destroying potentially viable parts of the real economy.

The tactic of loading up a company with debt and then paying yourself exorbitant fees and dividends and manipulating the share price at the expense of the company ought to be illegal. It’s a plain conflict of interest. Likewise being both creditor and shareholder.

Ditto the use of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to profit yet again by picking over the remains. A hedge fund operator who drives a company into the ground by stripping assets for his own profit should not be permitted by bankruptcy court to keep control of the company. But that practice is the norm. Lampert will step down as CEO but remain chairman with a controlling ownership stake of what’s left of Sears.

It’s astonishing how little attention this maneuver has gotten, and how scarce are the demands for fundamental reform. One reason may be that Wall Street Democrats as well as Wall Street Republicans are leading players in this parasitic industry, and few politicians of either party have taken them on.

It was insider conflicts of interest at the expense of consumers, workers and investors that inspired the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment banking from commercial banking. If we ever resume the task of draining the true financial swamp, we need a Glass-Steagall for hedge funds, private equity operators and bona fide businesses.

There are many things wrong with American capitalism. One of the most flagrant, and least appreciated, is the perverse role of hedge funds.

Sears, in its glory days, was the opposite of financial engineering. It was run by real people, and it sold real stuff, to real people. To make the American economy great again, get rid of the financial engineers and make America real again.

Dear Commons Community,

Last night on CBS’s 60 Minutes, President Donald Trump gave an interview to Lesley Stahl and commented on a number of issues. It was interesting and at times tense.   Below are six interesting exchanges during the interview courtesy of The Huffington Report.  A video and full transcript of the interview are available here.

Tony

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1. He denied mocking Christine Blasey Ford at one of his rallies: “I didn’t really make fun of her.”

Earlier this month, Trump openly mocked Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony and the broader #MeToo movement against sexual assault during his rally in Southaven, Mississippi. 

Blasey, 51, gave an emotional testimony in September, recalling the details of the night she claims now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly held her down and tried to forcibly remove her clothes at a gathering in the 1980s. She is one of three women who have publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.

“Had I not made that speech, we would not have won,” Trump said when Stahl said he mimicked Ford during the rally. “I was just saying she didn’t seem to know anything.”

“I didn’t really make fun of her,” he added, saying he believes that Ford was “treated with great respect” in the aftermath of the hearing.

Later, when pressed more by Stahl about whether he believes he treated Ford with respect, Trump said: “W―you know what? I’m not gonna get into it because we won. It doesn’t matter. We won.”

2. Trump refused to say humans were causing climate change and said scientists had a “political agenda.”

Stahl specifically asked the president if he still believed climate change was a hoax (he said no), but Trump refused to agree with a majority of scientists who say humans are directly causing the phenomenon.

“I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again. I don’t think it’s a hoax,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this. I don’t wanna give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t wanna lose millions and millions of jobs. I don’t wanna be put at a disadvantage.”

The president’s comments come on the heels of the devastating Hurricane Michael and a new report from the United Nations’ climate change body that predicted dire consequences unless the planet dramatically scaled back greenhouse emissions.

Trump, firing back at Stahl’s question if he had listened to his own climate researchers, said that scientists were politically motivated.

“You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda,” he said.

3. Trump has ‘trust’ in Kim Jong Un.

Trump said he gets along well with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“I trust him,” Trump said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t be proven wrong.”

Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met in Singapore in June. After the summit, the White House said the North had made firm pledges to rid itself of its nuclear weapons. The joint statement released after the event, however, was vague at best and provided no clear pathway for Kim to do so.

The president has previously tweeted that he was “confident” the North Korean leader would “honor the contract we signed &, even more importantly, our handshake,” referring to North Korea’s process of denuclearization.

Stahl told Trump: “Well, remember what Reagan said. ‘Trust, but verify.’”

“Sure. I know. It’s― it’s very true. “Trump replied, “but the fact is, I do trust him. But we’ll see what happens.”

4. Trump said there could potentially be a “severe punishment” for Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of Khashoggi’s disappearance 

Although Trump often calls the media the “enemy of the people,” he didn’t shy away from noting the severity of the disappearance and possible death of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

The Saudi reporter and columnist for The Washington Post has not been seen since entering the Saudi consulate in Turkey earlier this month. He was a known critic of Saudi policies, and Turkish authorities claim he was killed inside the building.

“There’s a lot at stake, there’s a lot at stake and maybe especially so because this man was a reporter,” Trump said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it, and there will be severe punishment.”

Trump said “nobody knows yet” if Khashoggi was murdered on the instruction of Saudi authorities, adding that the incident was “being investigated” and “being looked at very, very strongly.”

“As of this moment, they deny it, and they deny it vehemently,” he said. “Could it be them? Yes.”

5. A potential Mattis departure.

Trump said Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is “sort of a Democrat” who could be leaving his post relatively soon.

Mattis, a former Marine Corps general, hasn’t told Trump he plans to leave the administration. However, Trump said it “could be that he is.”

“I have a very good relationship with him,” Trump said. “I think he’s sort of a Democrat if you want to know the truth. But Gen. Mattis is a good guy. We get along very well. He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody leaves. People leave. That’s Washington.”

6. He refused to pledge that he would not shut down special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

Stahl pressed Trump repeatedly about his stance on the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into the last presidential election, asking if he would “pledge” not to shut it down. Trump refused several times to answer.

“I don’t pledge anything,” he said. “But I will tell you, I have no intention of doing that. I think it’s a very unfair investigation because there was no collusion of any kind.”

When the host asked once more, Trump again fired back, saying: “There is no collusion. I don’t wanna pledge. Why should I pledge to you? If I pledge, I’ll pledge. I don’t have to pledge to you.”

He later cast doubt on any claims that he had colluded with Russia during the election, calling the idea “ridiculous.”

32 people have been indicted in Mueller’s probe so far, including several high-profile members of the Trump campaign.

Dear Commons Community,

Confidential documents reviewed by the New York Times indicate that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, probably paid little or no income tax from 2009 to 2016.  As reported:

“Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million.

And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes, according to confidential financial documents reviewed by The New York Times.

His low tax bills are the result of a common tax-minimizing maneuver that, year after year, generated millions of dollars in losses for Mr. Kushner, according to the documents. But the losses were only on paper — Mr. Kushner and his company did not appear to actually lose any money. The losses were driven by depreciation, a tax benefit that lets real estate investors deduct a portion of the cost of their buildings from their taxable income every year.

In 2015, for example, Mr. Kushner took home $1.7 million in salary and investment gains. But those earnings were swamped by $8.3 million of losses, largely because of “significant depreciation” that Mr. Kushner and his company took on their real estate, according to the documents reviewed by The Times.

Nothing in the documents suggests Mr. Kushner or his company broke the law. A spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s lawyer said that Mr. Kushner “paid all taxes due.”

In theory, the depreciation provision is supposed to shield real estate developers from having their investments whittled away by wear and tear on their buildings.

In practice, though, the allowance often represents a lucrative giveaway to developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner.”

Like son-in-law like father-in-law – maybe?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A lawsuit accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants goes to trial tomorrow. The case is widely seen as a referendum on affirmative action in college admissions. The New York Times has a review of the issues in an article this morning (see full text below).  The case accuses Harvard of setting a quota on Asian-American students accepted to the university and holding them to a higher standard than applicants of other races. It flips the strategy used in past challenges to race-conscious admissions: Instead of arguing that the school disadvantages whites, the plaintiffs say that Harvard is admitting minority groups and white students over another minority, Asian-Americans.

This case will be watched closely by the entire higher education community especially at highly selective colleges and will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tony

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What’s at Stake in the Harvard Lawsuit?

By Anemona Hartocollis

Oct. 13, 2018

At a time of deepening racial and political divisions among Americans, a trial widely perceived to be a referendum on affirmative action will begin on Monday in Boston, bringing into a courtroom decades of fierce disputes over whether Harvard University and other elite institutions use racial balancing to shape their classes.

The case accuses Harvard of setting a quota on Asian-American students accepted to the university and holding them to a higher standard than applicants of other races. It flips the strategy used in past challenges to race-conscious admissions: Instead of arguing that the school disadvantages whites, the plaintiffs say that Harvard is admitting minority groups and white students over another minority, Asian-Americans.

Asian-Americans are divided on the case, with some saying they are being unfairly used as a wedge in a brazen attempt to abolish affirmative action. But it is not yet clear whether the case will make new law — perhaps banning the consideration of race in college admissions — or will narrowly affect only Harvard. Legal experts say at the very least, the case will expose the sometimes arcane admissions practices of one of the most selective institutions in the world.

At most, it could make its way to a newly more conservative Supreme Court and change the face of college admissions.

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“I definitely think that this will affect the fate of affirmative action and therefore racial diversity in universities across the country,” said Nicole Gon Ochi, a lawyer for Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Los Angeles. “It’s about much more than a few elite universities like Harvard.”

The case is particularly resonant, experts say, because Harvard’s “holistic” admissions policy, which considers race as one factor among many, has been held up as a model by the Supreme Court since a landmark affirmative action case in 1978, and is effectively the law of the land. Harvard says that it does not discriminate, but considers each student individually to build a class of diverse backgrounds, races, talents and ideas.

The trial will unfold as millions of high school students are figuring out how to define themselves in their college applications. It comes as heated political campaigns fought over racial and economic fault lines culminate in midterm elections.

And it comes as the Trump administration continues to tip its hand toward the plaintiffs. The Justice Department has filed a statement of interest in the case. It has opened its own inquiries into complaints of discrimination against Asian-Americans, at Harvard and at Yale. And in July, the Education and Justice Departments withdrew Obama-era guidelines that encouraged the consideration of race in college admissions.

The rest of the Ivy League has closed ranks behind Harvard, filing a joint amicus brief, and universities across the nation are watching intently for a ruling with wide-ranging impacts.

The lawsuit says that Harvard holds the proportions of each race in its classes roughly constant and manipulates a vague “personal” admissions rating to downgrade applications from Asian-Americans. By doing this, the suit says, Harvard is violating federal civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination by universities that receive federal funds

Harvard says there is no evidence that the 40-member admissions committee has engaged in any orchestrated scheme to limit the admission of Asian-Americans. But it says that eliminating the consideration of race would cut the number of African-American, Hispanic and other underrepresented minorities by nearly half.

The lawsuit was filed in 2014 but has been generations in the making.

Suspicions that Harvard and other top colleges were imposing informal quotas on Asian-Americans to combat their quickly growing presence among the academic elite date back to at least the 1980s. In 1988, the Office for Civil Rights of the federal Education Department opened an investigation but cleared Harvard of racial discrimination.

Many remained wary. The Education Department looked into a new admissions complaint about Asian-Americans in 2012, ultimately deciding not to investigate, according to court documents. The same year, Ron Unz, a conservative activist and Harvard graduate, published a lengthy dissection of Harvard admissions, suggesting that the university was keeping down the number of Asian-American students. The essay helped rekindle public debate on the issue.

Harvard appears to have taken the criticism seriously. Around that time, an internal research group at the university conducted a study of admissions, asking, “Does the admissions process disadvantage Asians?” It found that being Asian-American decreased the chances of admission.

Much of the plaintiffs’ case echoes the findings.

Harvard says the internal study was preliminary and incomplete, and that the plaintiffs have cherry-picked data, used innuendo and taken documents out of context to arrive at their conclusions.

Past Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action limited the use of race in college admissions without banning it outright. The court has said that an applicant’s race can be used as a “plus factor” or “a factor of a factor of a factor,” terms that are purposefully ambiguous.

“The Supreme Court has been vague about what is O.K.,” William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. “It seems like they say it’s O.K. as long as it’s not too much or too blatant. And then the other problem is that the schools have been very secretive about exactly what they do. Which means we don’t know what the law exactly is, and we don’t know whether anybody is obeying.”

Legal experts say the Harvard case could be a fact-based trial, specific to one university. But if it is appealed, the Supreme Court could have a chance to revisit the law on affirmative action. That is the game plan of the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, a group formed by a conservative activist against affirmative action, Edward Blum. Mr. Blum has recruited for the group nearly two-dozen Asian-American students who were rejected by Harvard.

“It’s important to recognize that the fate of affirmative action doctrine and Harvard don’t necessarily go in the same direction,” Professor Baude said. “Affirmative action could stay the same even if Harvard loses. The challengers have both goals. They both think that what’s happening at Harvard is wrong, and they think the whole regime is wrong, and they’d like to use this case to prove it.”

S.F.F.A. has other irons in the fire. It has also filed a complaint challenging race-conscious admissions, but not focusing on Asian-Americans, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is scheduled for trial in the spring, and is also intended to land in higher courts.

Mr. Blum was the architect of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the last major affirmative action case to go to the Supreme Court, which he lost in 2016. But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s dissent in the case, in which a white woman said she was denied admission because of her race, hinted that discrimination against Asian-American students could be fertile ground for litigation.

Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said affirmative action could be vulnerable if the lawsuit goes to the Supreme Court and the newly appointed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh follows the lead of the chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr..

“On this issue, John Roberts has written that the only way to stop discriminating on race is to stop discriminating on race,” Mr. Shapiro said. “So he has made up his mind that racial preferences are improper in any way.”

Harvard’s newly installed president, Lawrence Bacow, issued an email this past week saying he was confident the university would prevail, and pleaded for civility and the long view.

“Reasonable people may have different views,” Mr. Bacow said. “I would hope all of us recognize, however, that we are members of one community — and will continue to be so long after this trial is in the rearview mirror.”

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times opinion columnist, Bret Stephens, is warning Democrats in his column (see below) this morning that they are playing into Trumps’s hands and jeopardizing the midterm elections.  He is alerting them that Republicans are gaining rapidly in a number of battleground congressional districts. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not during a midterm when the opposition party almost always gains seats. Not after 21 months of Trumpian chaos. Not after a year of #MeToo. Not after Christine Blasey Ford’s emotional testimony and Brett Kavanaugh’s angry retort. And yet it is. Predictably. Once again, American liberalism has pierced its own tongue and is in danger of turning over the House of Representatives to the Republicans.  The Senate is already considered lost or a long shot at best to be recaptured by Democrats. Here is an excerpt:

“[American liberalism] pierced its tongue on CNN this week, when Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” And when former Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday, “When they go low, we kick ’em.”

It pierced its tongue last week when New York’s Representative Jerrold Nadler pledged to use a Democratic House majority to open an investigation into Kavanaugh’s alleged perjury and the “whitewash” investigation by the F.B.I. A party that can’t change its mind and won’t change the subject meets the classic definition of a fanatic.”

Staples concludes:  “In 2018, Democrats had a chance to become that party. Once again, they’re flubbing it.”

Staples column reminds me of June 2016 during the presidential election when Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren visited Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in downtown Brooklyn and warned the staffers not to “screw thing up.”  They did and we ended up with Trump.  I hope the Democrats can turn the rising tide of the opposition in time for November.

Tony

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Liberalism Pierces Its Tongue, Again

By Bret Stephens

Oct. 12, 2018

Michael Kelly, the legendary journalist who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, once wrote that the “animating impulse” of modern liberalism was to “marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible.”

“If it were a person,” he added, “it would pierce its tongue.”

I thought of that line while reading a tweet from Nate Cohn, The Times’s polling guru: “Take everything together, and, on balance, it’s been a good 10 days of state/cd polling for the GOP in a lot of important battlegrounds.”

The “cd” refers to congressional districts, where Republicans now have at least a fighting chance of holding on to a majority despite the widely anticipated blue wave. Even better are Republican chances of holding the Senate. On Sept. 30, RealClearPolitics gave the G.O.P. a lock on 47 seats, with 9 tossups. Now it’s 50 and 6, with races in Tennessee, Texas, and North Dakota increasingly leaning right. Donald Trump’s approval rating is also up from a month ago.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not during a midterm when the opposition party almost always gains seats. Not after 21 months of Trumpian chaos. Not after a year of #MeToo. Not after Christine Blasey Ford’s emotional testimony and Brett Kavanaugh’s angry retort.

And yet it is. Predictably. Once again, American liberalism has pierced its own tongue.

It pierced its tongue on CNN this week, when Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” And when former Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday, “When they go low, we kick ’em.”

It pierced its tongue last week when New York’s Representative Jerrold Nadler pledged to use a Democratic House majority to open an investigation into Kavanaugh’s alleged perjury and the “whitewash” investigation by the F.B.I. A party that can’t change its mind and won’t change the subject meets the classic definition of a fanatic.

It pierced its tongue last month when Cory Booker and Kamala Harris turned Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing into audition tapes for their presidential bids, complete with “I am Spartacus” histrionics and bald misrepresentations about Kavanaugh’s views on racial profiling and contraception.

It pierced its tongue when Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chose to make Kavanaugh’s confirmation the year’s decisive political test, rather than run a broad referendum on Trump’s inglorious tenure. As I wrote in July, the political strategy was guaranteed to hurt red-state Democrats, as they were put “to the choice of looking like political sellouts if they vote for Kavanaugh, or moral cowards if they don’t.”

It pierced its tongue when The New Yorker violated normal journalistic standards by reporting Deborah Ramirez’s uncorroborated allegation against Kavanaugh, and much of the rest of the media gave credence Julie Swetnick’s lurid one. The pile-on wound up doing more to stiffen Republican spines against an apparent witch hunt than it did to weaken their resolve in the face of Blasey’s powerful accusation.

It pierced its tongue when Susan Collins and other female Republicans who supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation were denounced as “gender traitors” in an eye-opening op-ed in this newspaper. Approximately 30 million women voted for Trump in 2016, and many of them (along with at least a few Clinton supporters) surely felt just as Collins did. Are they all “traitors,” too?

There’s more. Maxine Waters urging protesters to hound Republicans out of restaurants and pursue them at department stores and gas stations. A #MeToo movement that moved all-too swiftly from righteous indignation against undoubted predators like Harvey Weinstein to a vendetta culture based on rumors and whisper networks based on self-censorship. Twitter mobs getting people fired and speakers canceled.

Much of this is now making its way into the G.O.P.’s ad campaign for the midterms. That’s natural because the left has given Republicans so much material to work with.

Much of this also merely echoes the uncivil politics that have been practiced by Trump and his followers from the moment he started campaigning for the presidency. But if the most liberals can say for their political tactics is that they aren’t as bad as Trump’s, they are indicting themselves twice — for imitating the wrong model, and for doing it worse.

I write all this as someone who is on record hoping Republicans get pummeled in the midterms — a fitting electoral rebuke for their slavish devotion to an unfit president and their casual abandonment of long-held conservative principles. America desperately needs a party that stands for sanity and moderation, not extremism and demagoguery.

In 2018, Democrats had a chance to become that party. Once again, they’re flubbing it. It’s a pity both sides can’t lose, but maybe a midterm disappointment might teach liberals that they won’t beat Trump in 2020 by out-clowning him.”

Dear Commons Community,

New York City and the public school teachers have reached a tentative deal on a new union contract that includes raises of 2 percent in 2019, 2.5 percent in 2020 and 3 percent in 2021.  The agreement announced yesterday between the City and the United Federation of Teachers also includes extra pay for positions that are hard to staff.

Under the deal, up to 180 schools that have struggled to retain teachers will be able to pay $5,000 to $8,000 extra for teachers in hard-to-staff positions.  This is a significant new provision of the contract and the first time that there will a differential pay scale for some teachers.

The contract also includes plans for a new screening test to determine whether prospective teachers are psychologically suitable.

The contract covers 129,000 workers. They include 79,000 teachers plus guidance counselors, social workers, paraprofessionals and school psychologists.

Before finalized, the contract has to be ratified by the rank and file UFT membership.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump responded to falling stock prices yesterday by throwing barbs at the Federal Reserve, which he has described as “crazy,” “loco,” “going wild” and “out of control” for slowly and wisely raising interest rates against the backdrop of a booming economy.  Trump shows again that he enjoys finding fault with others whenever something displeases him.  As reported by the New York Times:

“No other modern president has publicly attacked the Fed with such venom or frequency. Indeed, some scholars said the only close historical parallel was with President Andrew Jackson, who campaigned successfully in the 1830s to close the Fed’s predecessor, the Second Bank of the United States.

Mr. Trump’s pointed remarks reflect the high political stakes less than a month before midterm elections that have been cast by his political opponents as a referendum on his presidency. Mr. Trump has been riding the economy hard, bragging about job creation, tax cuts and reduced federal regulation, and claiming credit for the rise of the stock market. Now that the market has lost 5 percent of its value in the last week, Mr. Trump is insisting someone else is to blame.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index closed at 2,728.37 on Thursday, down 2.06 percent.

In fact, despite the stock market’s plunge, the American economy continues to grow, which is what is prompting the Fed to raise interest rates and drawing the president’s ire. The Fed’s chairman, Jerome H. Powell, has said that the economy is in a “particularly bright moment” and that he sees no clouds on the horizon.

The stock market sell-off instead appears to reflect the movement of money into bonds, a normal consequence of higher interest rates since those securities pay more as rates rise; concern about the health of the global economy; and hesitations about the value of tech stocks.

But after hitching his political fortunes to the rise of the stock market, Mr. Trump is now looking to decouple himself from its fall. Republicans are instead emphasizing continued economic growth and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969.”

Time to fly the crying “Baby Trump” balloon over Wall Street!

Tony